“Your Highness.” The doctor nodded. From his medical bag, he produced a shiny syringe and loaded it with an amber-colored liquid, tapping the side to clear an air bubble. He held it up to the light, inspecting the dose. A bead of moisture gleamed at the needle’s tip.
Itzy struggled to sit up, but unseen hands held her down. Her mouth tasted like bile—her throat raw and sore. Her eyes found Pippa’s frightened face where she cowered against the wall.
“Pippa,” Itzy called. Pippa’s eyes darted nervously around the room. “Pippa, please—get Luc.”
The fiendish gathering parted then, and a figure emerged. The crowd gave him wide berth—his twisted wings, Itzy could see, brushed against their dark cloaks.
42
The scene was one of grainy film, flickering light. At times, when she opened her heavy eyes, her room was too bright, overexposed. At others, murky dark. All the while Luc was there, by her side, sitting on an old straight-backed chair, holding vigil by her bedside.
Others came and went, but it was only Luc she saw. She refused the water brought for her unless Luc held the glass to her parched lips. Her skin was hot and dry, her ankle far away—someone else’s ankle.
Once, she awoke as the filtered light from the air shaft played against Luc’s features. His face, soft, radiant—utterly beautiful.
For the most part, she slept.
He would talk to her. He would tell her stories. She would wake and he would still be talking, as he would be when she drifted off again. She listened, somehow. It seemed vital, his voice familiar.
His voice.
She had heard his voice before.
He had been there before—by her bedside—in childhood illnesses. But that was not all. Luc had been the lingering guest at that last fateful dinner party in Brittany. He had talked, late into the night, refusing to go, pouring more wine. Her mother had laid Itzy down on that scratchy blanket by the fire, and, as the embers died out one by one, she had slept to the sound of his voice. Luc had been there, the night the awful creature had come searching for her by the ash bin.
PART II
LUC’S STORY
43
Paris, 1771
I met her in la Grande Galerie—the famed Hall of Mirrors—at Versailles. Marie Antoinette was all of sixteen, or so she appeared. Even amidst the crowded hall, she was the undisputed beauty—her alabaster skin, her eyes of blue, a faint flush upon her cheeks.
The room stretched out in all its glory, golden mirror after golden mirror, and as she giggled, turning to me, one thousand thousand of her reflections beheld me. Her ladies-in-waiting tittered, each a beauty in their own right, whispering, while Marie Antoinette and I locked eyes.
She smiled and exhaled on a mirror, leaving behind a small bloom of fog.
“Angels’ breath,” she said, tracing a heart in it before it faded.
Maurice was there—he knew her for what she was.
“She is trouble, that one. Stay away from her,” he said, grabbing my elbow. “Look—” He pointed to a pretty woman in courtly attire. “That one fancies you. And that one with the fan. You can have your pick of anyone here, Luc! Anyone but her.”
I ignored his warning.
I saw her next the following week; I knew her habit of walking in the gardens.
When she saw me, she smiled. It was bewitching.
She ran ahead playfully, and I followed. Her gown billowed out behind her like some sort of confection, her little dog chasing her heels. She wore a small hat pinned to one side of her beautiful head, atop her bright curls. She walked as if on wings.
It was spring, and the grass of Versailles was a sea of emeralds. We sat together in the shade of an ancient tree beside the fountain of Apollo’s Basin. I threw a stick, and her dog, Mops, chased it into the reflecting pool, and she laughed, clapping her hands together in delight. Mops returned, drenched, and she laughed further as the small pug shook himself vigorously, drenching me in turn. She turned her pale blue eyes to me, smiling. Hers was that rare beauty, the kind that derails you, that possesses you, the kind that is painful to behold.
Here was something new, I thought.
O, Itzy! I should have known, for an angel not much is new.
I kept a studio atop a carriage house near Montmartre, and I painted her. She would sit for hours, staring into my eyes, and I into hers. My brush swept across the canvas in tones of shimmering pearl, lush peach, sky blue. The light—it was impossible to describe. It was different then, younger, brighter. It gathered around Marie Antoinette in shimmering waves. When she moved, it chased her. And when she departed my studio, it was as though the sun had set.
There, in my atelier, we were finally alone. At court, she was trailed by hangers-on, courtiers, servants, jewelers. But she could sneak away and did, alone. I would shoo away my manservant and bar the doors.
We would talk. She would tell me of the various gossip of the day and I would listen, entranced by even the dullest of tales. She would pose, surrounded by canvases in her own likeness, mirroring back her face. They lay everywhere, propped against the wall, discarded in the corners, stacked willy-nilly, as if we were again in her Hall of Mirrors, meeting for the first time.
A fever burned in me to paint her face, and I did. Over and over and over again.
I painted at night by candle.
I painted sleepless and staggering, trying desperately to capture that elusive spark in her eyes—as if she were forever laughing at me from someplace deep inside. I painted like one consumed, like one possessed. I painted her beautiful, shimmering face by memory alone, trying desperately to fill the loneliness in me.
For here, Itzy, is the truth.
Angels—demons, too—are not whole. What we lack are souls. O, the irony! Humans—unbeknownst to them—are intrinsically whole, having both a body and eternal soul. How we envy you, your perfectness, your completeness.
And what we have in place of a soul is an aching desire to be whole, an all-consuming feeling of loneliness—as if some fundamental part of me was torn away at birth and forever, forever, denied.
How we curse your ignorance.
That last good day, it is etched forever in my mind. We spent the afternoon together in the gardens of Versailles. The Basin of Apollo, its twinkling fountains.
Her hands ran through my hair, my wings. She had gold dust on her lips. She whispered other things in the dappled shade. She drew close, her handmaidens giggled.
Somehow it happened.
My beloved Marie plucked a feather from my wing.
The pain—the pain was new and terrible. The color drained from the exquisite gardens all around me as I gazed up in confusion to where she stood towering over me; the sky behind her was bleak with roiling clouds. Gone was the glory of Versailles, and in its place some forlorn moor, some wasteland of despair. I saw Marie Antoinette then, as she really was—as Maurice did.
The Divah was horrible to behold, her eyes—no longer blue—were dark eternal pits; her alabaster skin, where it was not charred and peeling, clung to her form. Her dress was the moldering cloth of the tomb. Her hair, once a thing of beauty, was a soiled, rotting wig, and insects crawled in and out, nesting in its dreary curls. From her spine sprouted terrible things—wings, yes, but in what world could such wings be used? They were covered in scales and taut, veined skin. My stomach recoiled as they unfolded. Her handmaidens had become gaudy, awful things—aged streetwalkers on shriveled legs. They cackled and blew me kisses from their putrid, toothless mouths.
Her dog—that cursed hellhound Mops—turned on me, teeth bared, blocking my way. My wings—they shriveled and lay at my sides, tattered and broken.
Marie brandished my feather, laughing. It was long, the plume soft and billowing. Her eyes locked with mine and she licked the tip of the quill, sharpening it with her jagged teeth.
“Wicked angel,” she taunted me. “Naughty, wicked angel.”
I was now powerless against her. With my feather in hand, I was
hers.
Eternally.
44
His name was Nicolas Jacques Pelletier, my darling Itzy, and he was about to die. A rowdy crowd had gathered to watch his demise at the Place de Grève, in Paris, that April day. Taut clouds stretched across the sky like scar tissue.
“This is to be your salvation, Luc,” Maurice grunted. For months, Maurice had been distant, secretive. Now, his eyes were bright, his wings tensed and ready.
We wandered the crowd as they grew restless. In the center, a large stage had been erected, and upon it something new—something never before seen. A novelty of French innovation. It towered over the restless crowd and had been painted scarlet, the color of blood. Its blade was polished, and in it I saw the crowd reflected back upon itself in miniature, as if all the world had suddenly come to exist in its honed slant.
Vendors sold curiosities, hastily printed cards with heads torn from bodies, lead charms, roasted pigeons.
We took our places amongst the enthusiasts who had gathered up front. An old woman next to me had brought thread and needle, and she busied herself making a lace collar, while the executioner lurked upon the scaffolding in the shadows of the strange, new apparatus.
“They’ll not like this. You watch.” Maurice turned to me, grimacing.
“Why?”
“Too clean. Too quick.”
I nodded.
“They need to see pain,” Maurice continued, scanning the buildings on the edge of the square. “Their insides need to come out for them to feel satisfied.”
The executioner, a gargantuan man named Charles Henri Sanson, dallied—allowing the crowd to grow restless and bloodthirsty. He was a showman at heart. He had tested the machine on corpses from a lunatic asylum for weeks. He had perfected it.
Finally, the thief was assisted onto the scaffolding.
Nicolas Pelletier glanced up at the guillotine but once. Instead, his eyes scanned the crowd and found mine. The crowd heckled and jeered. Sanson asked the prisoner for any last words, but Pelletier had none. His eyes bore into me.
The prisoner did not struggle as he was made to lay upon the bascule, his neck fitted into the lunette, his hands bound in leather. The crowd grew still. Something startled a flock of crows and they exploded, squawking, flapping from one rooftop to another. Their grumbling was the only sound to be heard.
My neighbor had ceased her lace-making, and her gnarled hands were tensed in anticipation. Monsieur Sanson paraded from one side of the stage to the other, arriving again at the guillotine. The moment, he knew, was his.
The executioner released the lever upon the tall upright, and the blade fell, rattling as it went. All of Paris leaned forward, holding its collective breath, while a slight gust of wind caught the shock of white hair upon the prisoner’s scalp. The anemic sun chose then to part the overcast sky, illuminating the diagonal blade as it flew down, lending a heavenly component to the killing spectacle. The machine was well oiled, the blade sharp and polished, and it made short work of the condemned thief. It passed through skin, flesh, and bone with but a small sound, and then the severed head of Pelletier landed in a woven basket with a muffled thud.
Silence followed.
Some confused grumbling from the crowd.
“That’s it?” someone shouted.
“Where are his agonized cries—mad ravings in the face of torture?” another demanded.
Sanson held Pelletier by the hair, parading him across the stage. A cluster of angry earwigs fell from the head.
A few ladies rushed forward to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood, waving them about dutifully, but the blood was dark, thick, and black—and only served to bring about more confused mutterings. As Sanson neared, my lace-maker leaned forward, and from her toothless mouth she shouted something loud and bawdy, then with one of her gnarled hands, she slapped the ashen face of Pelletier.
The executioner could never have been prepared for what came next.
Unlike his corpses from the Bicêtre Hospital who had been long dead, the head of Pelletier blinked when the hag’s hand struck his cheek. His pupils focused, alert—and his eyes gleamed. They scanned the crowd hungrily—searching, glowering. They alighted upon mine, and his gray lips mouthed a hideous curse and then grew slack.
“Démon! ” Maurice cried, turning to me.
The crowd was now a roiling, angry mass. Someone shouted, “Stoke the pyre! He must burn.”
Then, from the rooftops came Gaston.
“Crows saw you,” Maurice scowled. “You’re losing your touch.”
Beside me the old lady became René.
René and Gaston flanked Maurice stiffly, prepared for the worst.
“This thing—Luc,” he turned to me, “this guillotine. It is your salvation.”
I looked at it again. They were removing Pelletier’s headless body on a gurney quickly as the crowd surged forward to storm the stage.
“I hardly see—”
When I turned back, my angels were gone.
The crowd was furious. They had come for a show, and this had not satisfied. Sanson, for his troubles, received a stone aside the head and, clutching a bleeding temple, he marched toward the stage shouting for the coward who threw it. Rotten eggs, a lady’s corset, and a stiff dead cat sailed through the air alongside several old and worn boots. As I pushed recklessly, making for the edge of the square, something hit my shoulder. I turned.
The head of Nicolas Pelletier lay at my feet.
I grabbed it, wrapping it inside my cloak, and I ran.
I ran, Itzy, because I could not fly, for I was already a prisoner then. My wings were shrunken, atrophied things—useless on my back.
Maurice had warned me.
No good will come from consorting with demons.
45
Nicolas Jacques Pelletier’s beard had been trimmed by the same stroke that removed his head, so I held him by his thinning white hair as I trudged across Paris. Rain had set in, and we were soaked. The dregs of chamber pots mingled with horse manure and became a river of sludge that ran through the streets. Near the cemetery, the ditches held worse things. I stepped over a foul pool beneath the entrance of the cemetery of les Innocents. A femur bone floated in the murk.
“Cassedents!” I cried.
The grave digger appeared finally, lumbering along at the speed of one employed by the dead.
“Give this a proper burial,” I said, slapping the head down upon a sepulcher. It made a muffled thud.
Cassedents looked at Nicolas and then at me. He was shirtless and wrapped in an old, stained shroud below his waist.
“Where’s the rest of him?” he grunted.
I found some coins of the king’s mint and tossed them down beside the head. Pelletier stared at the silver with cloudy eyes—more money than the thief likely saw in his lifetime.
“Right here,” I said.
“Full up,” Cassedents shrugged. He scratched a lousy armpit.
“Surely you have room for one head. A small one at that,” I gestured.
He showed me a stack of bodies behind him. By the looks of them, they had been waiting for some time. “We’re closed. By order of la reine.”
I took a moment to look around the crowded cemetery. Graves stood open and in them men toiled, rainwater up to their waists, gathering bones, some still dangling flesh.
“The queen?” I asked sharply.
“Plagues, wars, famine—the dead come. We’re outnumbered by them. They never cease; the cemeteries of Paris are overflowing. Stacked ten high in the pits, they are, and still they come. ‘Cassedents,’ they say, ‘just one more body.’ ‘Cassedents, surely this little one will not burden you. A babe! Une petite. An innocent for les Innocents.’ But I’m no magicien. The babes? I have a broom closet that I throw them in. Everyone else I let rot, you see, before I stuff them in the ground. They’re smaller then; they take up less room. Men are but grave soil.”
“Where are they taking them?” I gestured to the workers.
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“Who knows? Who cares? So long as they’re taking them, I say.”
“This is the queen’s work?”
He nodded. “She’s calling the dead.”
I was silent for some time, until the sound of Cassedents’s wheezing grew intolerable.
“So you refuse me, grave digger?”
Cassedents looked at me then. “What use have I of your silver? What would you have me buy?” He pointed with a soiled finger where the men were working. “I have everything I need. That’s mine. The queen promised it to me.”
“Yours?” I stared at a rectangular pool of filthy water.
“My grave. I’m saving that one for me.”
46
I headed to an old funeral carriage, black curtains drawn, parked at the cemetery gates. The interior was stacked with bones, and the driver eyed me suspiciously.
“Where are you bound with such a load?” I asked.
“The Roman quarries. They’re emptying all the churches of their dead and taking them there.”
“For what purpose?”
The driver looked around nervously. “A massive crypt, some say. Catacombs.”
Oh, I knew the catacombs. As it happened, I was headed there myself.
“Might we ride with you?” I raised Nicolas’s head up for his inspection.
The driver hesitated. I tossed him a coin.
“If you don’t mind riding up front,” he said, biting the silver with a chipped tooth.
I rode with Nicolas’s head on my lap, swaying over the rutted street. We traveled south in silence. The few people we passed averted their eyes or crossed themselves nervously. Nicolas stared off ahead into the growing darkness.
The driver pulled a cork from a dented flask and offered it to me. I took it happily, the bitter taste of wormwood stinging my throat.
“A friend of yours?” the man asked, indicating Nicolas with his square chin.
I held Nicolas up and looked at him.
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