by Lucy Taylor
Nor could he explain why, week after week, he avoided having sex with Beth – that the encounters he’d had following Myriam had been so frustrating in their departure from what he sought that he didn’t want to risk adding Beth to his list of bitter disappointments or, worse, using her as a momentary distraction from what he perceived as an unutterable and never-ending grief.
“Do you want me to leave?” he asked her when they lay in bed one night.
“Is that what you want to do?”
He thought about that, really let the idea sink into him. If he ever wanted to walk out on his marriage, this was the time. If he had lost Myriam and all she represented, he could still go back to the solace of addictive sex and drugs, immerse himself in the quest for debaucheries that would bring only deeper and darker oblivion.
But what he said was, “No, I don’t want to leave. Unless you’d rather I did.”
She was silent a few moments. Then: “I want you to stay. But at the same time, I love you. And if what you found with that woman Myriam, what you tried to tell me about on the phone that day when I wouldn’t listen, if you need to go and look for that, then I’d be wrong to try to stop you. It would be more than wrong, I think it would be evil.”
A great swelling of relief passed through Nicholas. Relief and gratitude that seemed to thaw his loins and melt some of the ice from his heart. He was free to leave her if he wanted to, to look for what he’d lost. That meant that he was also free to stay. Desire, faint but hopeful, stirred in him.
He wrapped Beth in his arms and pulled her to him. She felt warm and welcoming and her body shaped itself to his in the old familiar ways, yet even with some trepidation, there was nothing timid or hesitant about his lovemaking. He forced her legs apart and mounted her. She arched her hips and guided him inside.
You’re free to go, if that’s what you need to do.
He loved her more then than he ever had loved anyone. A sense of lightness and freedom washed over him, a lifting of bonds. He thrust into her and she moaned his name. “Nicholas, Nicholas, Nicholas.”
But for the briefest, most ecstatic of instants, he had forgotten who that was.
PLAGUE LOVERS
Lucy Taylor
WORD SPREAD QUICKLY in the tiny, plague-ravaged town – the Flagellants were coming!
Gabrielle, sequestered in the house with her father and her dying mother, heard the news shouted out in the street beneath her window. She felt her blood quicken at the thought of witnessing such a spectacle – a band of penitents whose submission to the Lord was made manifest in deprivation and self-wounding. Despite her fear of mingling with the plague-infested crowds, she felt compelled to see them.
Snatching up her shawl and wrapping it around her thin shoulders, she crept down the wooden stairs, hoping that her father, exhausted by his day and night vigil at her mother’s deathbed, would be dozing. She didn’t want to have to speak to him, or witness the reproach and anguish in his eyes as she hurried past without so much as gazing at her mother.
Her father’s back was turned to her, his head lowered into his big hands. Gabrielle took a breath and tiptoed toward the door.
All I want, she thought, is to get out of here. Get away from the death and dying.
The plague, or the Great Pestilence as some were calling it, had arrived in early summer. Word of a terrible illness sweeping the port cities of Pisa and Genoa had reached the town a year earlier, but here in this secluded Tuscan valley the villagers had felt secure and safe in their relative isolation. With spring, however, the plague had reached Orvieto, where a spiritual revival that added fifty new religious dates to the municipal calendar had failed to spare the city from devastation. Now death was everywhere – evidenced in the rattling of the carts that carried bodies for burial outside the village, the cloying, rotten-flowers scent of sickness that permeated the air, the moaning of the sick, the wailing of the bereaved.
Gabrielle had heard that, according to the priests, who divined such things by studying the book of Revelations, a third of the world had died.
And the plague had not yet run its course.
An idea, borne of terror and desperation, had been nudging its way into the back of her mind. Many people had already fled the town to take refuge in the countryside. No one really knew what caused the sickness, but escaping the “pestilential atmosphere” of more populated areas was thought to help. It was said the air was cleaner in the country, the food less apt to be contaminated.
When she was almost at the door, her father looked up.
“Where are you going?”
“Don’t you hear the drumming? The Flagellants are on their way to the cathedral.”
“Hah,” her father snorted. “The Brethren of the Cross they call themselves. I call them the brethren of lunacy. Why expose yourself to the crowds to see a troop of madmen beat each other bloody?”
Her mother moaned and went into a coughing fit. Blood foamed around her mouth. Gabrielle’s father dampened a cloth in a bowl of water and wiped her face. “There, there, my love,” he whispered. “I’m here with you. I’m here.”
The tiny woman, little more than bone and gristle, reached up and stroked her husband’s face, a gesture rich with the tenderness and caring of devoted lovers after a long and passionate night. Gabrielle felt that she witnessing something private and precious between her parents, something she could never hope to exprience herself.
“She hasn’t long,” her father said. “Can’t you just sit with her?”
She shook her head. “I have to go.”
“What kind of daughter are you? You feel no love for your own mother?”
But how could she? thought Gabrielle. Until the plague struck, until her midwife mother fell ill, neither of her parents had shown the slightest warmth or caring toward one another or, for that matter, toward her. Theirs was a union based on practicality and the running of a household, a way to satisfy the needs for sex, security, and mutual support. Love was a luxury for idle, wealthy ladies and lovestruck troubadours. The poor had no time for such frivolity.
Now Gabrielle observed the change in both her parents, a transformation that appeared wrought by suffering, and found herself both horrified and envious. For never had anyone shown her the kind of tenderness her parents now bestowed upon each other. It was as though, through suffering, they had paid some terrible price required for the giving and receiving of affection.
Looking at neither her father nor her mother, she hurried toward the door.
“Gabrielle!” The undercurrent of fear in her father’s voice brought her up short. “You are coming back, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”
“I–I don’t know.”
“What if I fall ill? Your mother’s taught you about herbs and medicines. You could make my dying easier.”
Gabrielle stared at this man whose love she’d never managed to win, who’d never offered her a moment of affection. “I know nothing of my mother’s skills,” she said stubbornly.
“She taught you everything,” her father insisted. “Please, girl, I don’t want to be alone. Promise me you’re coming back.”
“I’m sorry,” Gabrielle murmured.
Behind her, her father’s voice rose in anger.
“You think you’re safer in the outside world? The plague is everywhere. Only God can keep you alive.”
Only God.
But God was nowhere to be found these days. The young abandoned the old, the healthy left the sick to expire in alleyways and filthy deathbeds, even priests refused to hear confession from the dying, lest they contract the sickness. Some people reacted to the danger by living lives of ascetic abstinence, while others, wanting to make the most of what time was left, indulged in every kind of excess and debauchery.
At the cathedral in the town square, Gabrielle stood at the edge of the crowd and held a handkerchief dipped in perfume to her face, for it was common knowledge that pleasant odors helped protect one from disease.
The Flage
llants marched up the main street, men in the lead, women following. The men were stripped to the chest. Each carried a hard leather whip festooned with little iron spikes which he brought down, rhythmically and slowly, across the back of the one preceding him. Bent and bloody, the procession snaked toward the cathedral. They were silent and sweaty and a great stench rose from them – not the sickly sweet odor of sickness, but the musky tang of unwashed, bloodied bodies.
Gabrielle watched the blood streaming down their raw backs, saw how the sweat glistened and ran in the deep furrows that the pain had etched in their faces. Some appeared to be in agony, others simply exhausted. And some appeared to have gone beyond the pain and seemed entranced in what looked like ecstasy.
Gabrielle stared, transfixed by the bizarre spectacle, amazed by the stoic silence in which the Flagellants bore their pain. As one man passed by, she could not stop herself, but reached out to caress his mutilated back.
“What do you suppose it feels like?”
At first Gabrielle didn’t realize the voice was speaking to her. Then fingers gripped her elbow. She whirled around, appalled and startled by the presumption of this stranger.
A young man with fair hair, tanned, pockmarked skin, and black eyes that glittered like a raven’s regarded her. He was dressed in the rough, simple garments of the Flagellants, but his clothing had no rips or bloodstains, nor did his sturdy-looking arms bear signs of abuse. Something in the cunning, slyly mirthful way that he appraised her made her uneasy, as though he knew things about her she did not even know herself.
“What are you talking about?” she whispered, holding the scented handkerchief tighter to her face. “What what feels like?”
“The whip, of course.”
“Pain beyond my ability to imagine it.”
“At first, there’s terrible pain,” the young man said, “but still it seems bearable at first, or so you think. Then the lash keeps falling and the pain mounts. It fills your whole body, your whole being. At that moment, you’d sell your soul to make it stop. You think that you can’t possibly bear it another moment, that you’ll lose consciousness or die.
“Then it’s as though the body becomes completely overwhelmed, and there’s a giddiness. You laugh, you scream, you weep. At that point, you’ve gone beyond the pain – it’s still there, but it’s not your body anymore, or you’re not in it. That’s when it begins to feel like a holy sacrament, like you’ve touched the face of God.”
Gabrielle looked at the man’s hand where it still rested on her elbow – large and heavy-knuckled, covered with fine wheat-colored hair.
“How would you know about such things?”
“In the spring, I marched with the Brethren for thirty-three and a third days – to commemorate the life of Christ, as is the custom.”
“And do you think your suffering will save you from the plague?”
“No. Only luck and my own wits will do that. But I learned a great deal about pain – and what lies on the other side of it.”
He turned and pulled his shirt up to reveal his back, a gouged and furrowed tapestry of scar tissue and half-healed wounds. Gabrielle ran her hand across the scars. “You must be insane. Who in their right mind would choose pain when there’s so much of it to be had without asking?”
“The Flagellants believe it brings them closer to God.”
“I don’t believe in such a God. No loving father would willingly send such misery on his children.”
“Perhaps that’s how He wins their love – by sending misery and then, according to his whim, providing minor comforts.”
Gabrielle laughed. “Then you aren’t talking about God. You’re talking about Satan.”
“Maybe he’s the one in charge.”
“That’s blasphemy.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s not the truth.”
His hand, which up to then had rested lightly on her elbow, moved slowly up her arm. Heat spread through her belly as his fingers curled around the back of her neck and collected a great fistful of copper-colored hair.
“My name’s Gerard. You remind me of a woman I was once in love with.”
“What happened to her?”
“She died of plague. That’s when I joined the Flagellants. I thought the pain of the whip might take away the greater pain of losing her.”
“And did it?”
“For a while. And then it made it worse. Now I think that only death will truly cure me. But I’m not ready to die yet.” He released her hair, let it tumble in long glossy coils around her face. “I’m on my way now to the countryside. If I keep to myself, stay in abandoned houses, I figure there’s a chance I’ll survive. If you like, you could go with me.”
She shook her head. “Nowhere is safe from plague.”
“Perhaps not, but some places are better to die than others.”
The crowd surged around them, pressing them close. So thick was the odor of blood, so sharp the cracking of the whips, that Gabrielle felt light-headed.
“Good luck to you, then,” said Gerard, and began to elbow his way out of the mob.
Gabrielle thought about her mother, the foul-smelling boils that swelled along her armpits and groin, the dark blue spots that blotched her skin. Before long, she thought, her father would be dying, too, and it would fall her lot to tend to him, to comfort him in his death throes, press cool cloths to his brow, wipe up the waste that would gush from him. She knew she couldn’t bear that.
But on her own, she also knew, she would be prey to the roving bands of looters and marauders that, emboldened by the almost complete absence of the law, terrorized the towns and countryside. That possibility terrified her, too.
“Wait,” she called out, catching up to him. “Before you go – I want to know – I want . . .”
She hesitated, felt an unfamiliar heat creep up her cheekbones.
“I know exactly what you want,” he said, and took her hand. They traveled along narrow, rutted roads leading through the countryside of Tuscany, sometimes cutting through untilled fields and deserted orchards. Occasionally they passed through abandoned villages, where dogs and livestock roamed at will. Along the roadside, the corpses of those who had fallen while trying to escape lay bloated and putrescent.
The first night they camped in an open field with others fleeing the plague. The second night, after Gerard had led them on a circuitous route along the ridgetop of some hills, they came to an abandoned town where the only signs of life were feral dogs that roamed the dusty streets and wild-eyed rats that held their ground almost until the last instant, then skittered away as Gerard and Gabrielle approached.
Gerard picked out the most luxurious of the deserted houses. Like a lord and lady returning from an outing in the hills, he and Gabrielle made themselves at home.
“Who lives here?” asked Gabrielle, looking around the beautifully appointed rooms.
“We do, now.”
“Whose house was it?”
Gerard shrugged. “Whoever it belonged to, they’re gone now. Like everything else, the house belongs to whomever takes it.”
That night, when Gerard moved on top of her, Gabrielle found herself aroused, but strangely distant. It was as if she watched herself from a corner of the room, moving beneath this man, arranging her body to accommodate his, but somehow profoundly absent. She let him penetrate her body, but knew that he could never touch her heart.
“You don’t want me,” he said finally.
“I want to want you. I want to feel something. I just – don’t.”
She turned away from him, finding no way to describe the sense that vines and briars encased her body and leaves of deadly nightbane numbed her heart.
“Have you ever loved anyone?”
The question seemed unfair, humiliating. “Of course I have.”
But she saw he knew that she was lying.
Later that night, she dreamed of her mother. Saw her father bending down to wipe her mouth with a wet cloth and stroke her face. Her
dead mother’s eyes were open. Her father reached down and gently closed them, placed the cloth across her mother’s face.
Something was wrong. She was awake now, but couldn’t get her eyes open. A rag or cloth was tied around her head. When she tried to remove the blindfold, her wrists were seized. She was roughly shoved onto her belly and her arms bound behind her.
She knew about the bands of rogues and thieves who preyed upon those fleeing the cities. Surely it was such a miscreant who had her now.
“Gerard!” she cried out. “Help me.”
“Silence,” he hissed. “Not one word or cry or I’ll gag you, too.”
He pulled her up off the bed and dragged her into another room, where he shoved her up against a beam or column and bound her there face-first.
“What are you doing?”
“Just because we’ve fled the plague doesn’t mean we aren’t going to die. I want to make the most of every moment. I want you to learn to love me. I’m going to make you love me.”
So saying, he bent her over, kicked her legs apart, and entered her from behind. This time he made no effort to be gentle. His ramming hurt her, but when she squirmed and tried to pull away, he withdrew from her and forced his way into her other orifice, wringing forth screams of pain.
He gripped her hips and forced himself in deeper.
“You want this, don’t you?”
“No!”
“Tell me you want it harder, deeper!”
“No, I hate it! Stop!”
“Tell me you want more!”
Finally, desperate to appease him and end the torture, she whimpered, “Yes, please, harder,” her voice choked with tears.
When she said that, he thrust one more time, released his semen into her and then withdrew.
She sank to her knees, weeping.
