The Wave Theory of Angels

by Alison Macleod

  14

  Stillness at the grave but for her.

  She sucks at the air as if it can never fill her, as if it is only light or heat. She is naked. Thin. Dumb. Her face is the colour of meal. Her eyes blink and strain against the strangeness of light. Her nipples stand hard, as if she alone is cold this smothering day.

  She retches, but there is nothing in her stomach to bring up. Her back is caked with mud. She sits in a pool of urine, scratching at her forearms and stares, horrified, as wax comes away in her hands. The arum lily that rested on her chest lies crumpled now between her thighs, its bright, sticky stamen an absurd obscenity.

  Marguerite turns, dazed. Something is on her arm. At her arm. Someone is tapping her arm. A finger. A hand. You.

  Pass it to her.

  She stares, slow to realize. The stolen volume. You nod to the ground where it fell. She takes it, not meeting your eyes under the wide grey of your hood. She knows you know such a thing cannot belong to her.

  She wants to run back, to the cool of the cathedral step; to François smearing his daughter’s face with mud; to the dogs’ thumping tails and the monks in the pleasure garden; and beyond all that, before it, to the tap-tap of Brother Vincent’s nailless finger on the page about to be turned.

  Perhaps she is about to speak, to make an excuse, but her sister falls back again, and there is a crack of flesh on flesh. Marguerite winces. You turn. L’Ymagier has hit his newly risen daughter. He is cursing her weakness for all to hear.

  He remembers her nakedness. He demands an acolyte’s alb. He asks for help as he struggles to get her on the litter. No one moves. He asks again. The stink of the churned grave is riotous in the heat.

  He bends and hoists her clumsily into his arms. People are quick to step out of his way as he carries her past the grave and out of the burial ground, a perverse pietà. What can Marguerite do but follow? She does not lift her face as she walks. She does not meet anyone’s eye. She knows her way by the gathering stream of boots and clogs.

  There is no joy this marvellous day.

  Athalie approaches them on the street, hot, bewildered. She is the only one who does. ‘Giles, it wasn’t there. I swear to you. Ahmed and I went with the barrow. The lodge was empty.’

  He refuses to look at her. ‘I left it there myself.’

  ‘Someone must have found it.’

  ‘Who? Who would want a likeness of my daughter? Who would trouble themselves with such a thing?’

  ‘It wasn’t there, Giles. I swear.’

  ‘It had no legs, no feet. Do you think it walked?’

  ‘You’ve had a shock, I know. But what could I do?’

  ‘Stop the bees. Why disrupt the mass if there is no body to switch? Why not keep the damned queen in whatever phial you carried her in? If nothing had happened, I would at least have known that something was wrong.’

  ‘I knew nothing of the bees, Giles – that had nothing to do with me. Yvain was to run in during the mass. Ahmed and I stood waiting with him at the door of the chapel, to give him courage. For still we were going to act, we were going to take her, with or without the carving to leave in her place. A risk, and perhaps a wrong-headed one, but I understood your despair. I told Yvain to enter by the main doors shouting for holy water for his sores, as if crazed with the pain. I told him to stay at the back and not to leave until the priests themselves came down from the sanctuary. I knew no one would remove him. They’d have to touch him first. And not one of your priests is your St Francis, no?

  ‘Ahmed had a flat-bottomed boat waiting on the Avelon. We needed only a few minutes’ confusion. A good head start. He’d left the caravan upriver. We were going to get word to you. But when the bees flew in, the chaos was too much – people were suddenly everywhere – and Yvain was terrified. Of the bees with his sores. Of the priests. Of the commotion. We had to get him out of there before his cries led everyone to us. So our moment was lost. Thank the heavens she was able to move her foot. This at least is what I’ve heard.’

  L’Ymagier shifts the body of his daughter in his arms. ‘You will excuse me, Athalie.’ He starts to walk again. ‘As you can see, my daughter is not well.’

  I am not. My skin is like wax. See how it comes away.

  15

  The Epistle on the Angels. A volume smuggled eight centuries ago across the craggy peaks of northern Spain into France to be locked, finally, in the scriptorium of sleepy St Germer. A volume purchased at great expense only so that it might never be opened again.

  L’Ymagier had guessed right.

  Yet a controversy of angels? A heresy of the heavenly host?

  Once upon a time metaphysics of course was physics.

  The richness of matter in the medieval universe was nothing other than an endless series of vibrations emanating from an original, divine energy. The angel was both the receiver and transmitter of this energy, and not merely a decorous messenger. Church wisdom decreed not one heaven, not two, not the seven of Ptolemy and popular song, but nine, each governed by its own lofty angel.

  Avicenna went further. He believed there was a tenth sphere between the nine ordained orbits and our own lonely mortal sphere. This was the clime of the Tenth Angel, the divine guide to whom we were intimately bound and for whom we could not but long.

  Which was the problem. The embarrassment. All this desire.

  Not surprising then that the Church Fathers ushered in the static universe. Here, as we well know, angels do not yearn. They do not evolve. They are eternal. They act on God’s will. They may on occasion mediate on our behalf. Or advise from time to time on points of knowledge, especially in the domains of justice and ethics. They do not seek relationship. They do not deal in personal revelation or the stuff of private epiphanies.

  They also have no balls. Literally.

  As for the force of universal desire, it will be erased again and again with the ease with which whole texts were once erased from wax-covered tablets in the scriptoria of monasteries. Listen. ‘Love,’ spake the mystic, that scientist of the heart, ‘is closer to the lover than is his jugular vein.’ Ancient words. Words with a pulse. Scrape, rub, blow and they’re gone. Like that. ‘Thou wert I, but dark was my heart.’ Scrape, rub, blow and the Tenth Angel never was.

  Scrape. Rub. Blow.

  Trailing behind her father, behind the body of a sister who has come back to life, Marguerite feels herself only in the necessity of each step. Onlookers gather in the street and in doorways. She hears them above her on the scaffolding by the west wall.

  She tries to assume the face of a girl whose sister is merely unwell, whose sister has fainted and needs fresh air. Nothing is changed. She will buy meat at the market again without feeling her neck go hot. She will make confession without stumbling over her words. She will go tomorrow to the scriptorium. Soon perhaps she will even marry. Perhaps here, now, he looks at her. Perhaps he will tell her that it was pity for her troubles this day that moved him first.

  She dares, fleetingly, to take in the faces. They look past her, at her sister’s body, at its state of collapse, at the ragged tail of Christina’s hair drawing a vague line in the dust.

  She remembers the contraband under her tunic. Risala fi’l – Mala’ika. And below it, in smaller letters: Epistle on the Angels. That’s what her father wanted. So badly he insisted she steal it this day of all days. Did he know their world would turn upside down? Is there rare wisdom between its covers? Or does someone at the university in Paris wait for the volume? Will he put even his family at risk for the sake of old passions?

  She takes the volume from beneath her tunic as she walks. Suddenly she is past caring. The cover is sticky with the sweat of her stomach. She opens it to a random page. It’s waxy and thick with time. She turns to another.

  ‘Marguerite,’ shouts l’Ymagier from ahead, ‘keep up, I said!’ It is too late, she thinks. Don’t you know? Already I have lost myself in the world. No magician’s cloak for me, Father. No seven leaves of St John’s wort n
eeded here, for already I am invisible.

  She stops in the middle of the street. She takes her time. Her sister can die all over again. The drama is not hers. She opens the volume once more. She turns over the first page and the second. She turns the third, the fourth. She has missed something. She starts again. The first page. The second. The third. The fourth. Page 5. Page 6. She is losing patience. She flips through the loosely bound sheaf.

  She has opened hundreds of volumes in the scriptorium. She has turned thousands of pages. But this is a volume no longer. Through the thickness of the wax, she can see only the ghosts of words.

  Does her father know some enchantment by which it may yet be read? Like the time he scattered nettle juice on words and they appeared, drop by drop, on the page. Is that the reason it is still kept in the scriptorium’s cage? Or have the monks been at it with their knives and pumice stones? Is it preserved as nothing more than a mute testament to the authority and determination of the Mother Church?

  One page after another: as blank, as smooth, as apparently untouched as the last.

  16

  Keep the hood up, though it is hot. And your head down. Lie low. Anonymity is your talent.

  You will not see Marguerite. She will circle the cathedral, dazed, alone. She will return at last to the burial ground, where she will find the sexton already at work with the shovel. ‘Your sister,’ he’ll tell her, ‘might be the first in Beauvais to come back to life, but she sure as hell isn’t the first to die.’ He’ll jump into the grave and sigh as he shifts corpses.

  When his back is turned, Marguerite will let it slip from her hand.

  And when her father says, ‘Where is it, Marguerite?’ she will say, ‘I’m sorry, Father.’ When he says, ‘Enough. I will have it now,’ she will show him her psalter. ‘It is my psalter you saw at mass,’ she will say. ‘There was no volume. No fragment.’ She will not say she was suspicious of its invisible words. Of the trouble they could yet cause. Had they not had enough already? She will repeat, ‘There was nothing.’

  Follow l’Ymagier. Up ahead. Christina is slack in his arms. The strain cannot be easy in the swelter of the day. Already he has been to his home. Others are there before him. They stand by his water trough and toe the earth. They lean against the door of his atelier, arms folded across broad chests. They press their faces to the horn of his windows. They have rubble in their hands, lifted no doubt from the pile outside the masons’ lodge. They have shards of glass too, cast-offs from the glaziers’ yard. One with a thick sunburnt neck pisses against the door.

  L’Ymagier has no choice but to shift her weight in his arms and turn back towards town.

  He walks in the direction of St Pierre, and passes it. He is slowing down, yet he does not stop. At the fringes of town he passes Yvain the leper’s hovel and the tumblers’ makeshift camp. At last, at the edge of Beauvais, in a warren of houses that teeter against the town wall, he stops at the sign of the eye in the flaming heart. Ahmed opens the door.

  ‘My mother is not here,’ he says.

  ‘I will wait if I may. You see – ’

  ‘You cannot stay.’ He looks at Christina. ‘This is no place.’

  ‘Perhaps for only a day or two. Till we can go elsewhere. It’s not safe for her – ’

  ‘You forget yourself, Monsieur l’Ymagier. You forget how things are for my mother and me.’ He draws himself in, changes his course. ‘It is all I can say. We have done all we can.’

  ‘I am sorry to ask. I am afraid for her. Do you understand? If there were anywhere else – ’

  ‘I will tell my mother you came, Monsieur l’Ymagier.’ His eyes narrow. ‘I will tell her that you are grateful for her help.’

  You think your eyes play tricks.

  It is l’Ymagier, at another door. We have been here before.

  He is doubled up now with the strain. He beats the knocker with difficulty. No one. He hammers with his fist. For he, who once bore a rotting swan to the door of a bishop, now stands before that same door, his newly risen daughter a dead weight in his arms.

  The door opens.

  ‘I have come to ask for the Church’s asylum.’ L’Ymagier looks the man in the eye. ‘For my daughter. Not for myself.’

  If the bishop is surprised, he does not show it. ‘She will not be denied.’ He dismisses the serving nun with a brief nod.

  ‘There is nowhere else,’ says l’Ymagier.

  ‘Evidently.’

  ‘She needs to be kept warm.’

  ‘She will be seen to. You have my assurance.’

  ‘She needs quiet.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘What else is there?’

  ‘No terms? No conditions?’

  L’Ymagier looks up, measures his thoughts and smiles. ‘Another time perhaps.’ He passes Christina, not to the attendant the bishop is about to summon, but into the arms of the bishop himself. Then he turns to go.

  ‘A moment, Monsieur l’Ymagier. I don’t think you understand. There won’t be another time.’

  ‘You have my daughter.’

  ‘Precisely. I have your daughter.’

  ‘I have another. Marguerite. I’m going to find her now.’

  ‘Nor will she lack.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘But you do, Monsieur l’Ymagier. I feel sure you do. Your services to the Mother Church are now complete. You are no longer required.’

  Does l’Ymagier suppress something? A smile? An oath? ‘Be that as it may, Your Grace, I cannot simply disappear. Surely we have had marvel enough this day.’

  ‘Indeed, you will find you can disappear, Monsieur l’Ymagier, for you are finished here already.’

  ‘Marguerite and I will be back, just as soon as I can make provision – ’

  ‘Forget Beauvais, Monsieur l’Ymagier. That is my strong advice.’

  L’Ymagier frowns in an act of apparent contemplation.

  ‘Very difficult, Your Grace, given I was born here. That my daughters were born here. That my wife is buried here.’

  The bishop sighs. ‘I regret to say that you have an unhappy habit of not recognizing grace when it is given you. You truly do not seem to understand, and you, I gather, a well-educated man. Why, if I’m not mistaken, I believe the tribunal at Paris commended your scholarship, if not your heresy, all those years ago.’

  L’Ymagier feels the heat rise in his face.

  ‘ ‘‘Fear of the Angel’’. Yes, as I recall, that was the charge dropped at my door, along with – that’s right – a rotting swan. Goodness. How you like to perform, Monsieur l’Ymagier. My poor serving nun Françoise never recovered from the shock.

  ‘Naturally, you assumed I wouldn’t take seriously, or even remember, what I couldn’t understand, for who would have expected word of the politics at Paris to reach a backwater like Beauvais? An understandable mistake even for – no, especially for – an educated man. Yet, in spite of your considerable learning, I see I will have to make myself perfectly clear.

  ‘You will forget Beauvais. You will disappear, even as I have said you will. For there is worse. There are privations . . .’ He regards l’Ymagier. He observes the soiled garments, the flickering eyes, the panic that bubbles below the intelligence. ‘Do not berate yourself. You have been foolish, perhaps. Proud, undoubtedly. But wherever you walked, you would have found yourself here at my door. There is a Will, you see.’

  He shifts the young woman in his arms, then calls inside. He looks once more at l’Ymagier. There is a hushed query from the other side of the door – a member of the bishop’s retinue. He cocks an ear to his right. ‘No,’ he says. ‘No need. He is gone.’

  *

  You see the door close. You see Christina disappear behind it. Giles of Beauvais turns around, a man unlike the one who arrived at that door. He is without magic. He is without celebrity. He is without daughters, wife, family, a home, a town. He looks up. He does not expect to see you standing there, a stranger under a cloak and hood. He does
not expect to see anyone, for he understands now. It is true. Already he is gone.

  Through the wavering haze of heat, he peers at you, suspicious, as if you might be in the bishop’s employ. A spy masquerading as a pleurant.

  ‘Weep for me if you will,’ he says. ‘You’ll be alone.’

  Say nothing.

  He draws closer, studying you studying him. He lowers his voice. ‘Are you from the university? I have nothing. There is nothing. I cannot help.’ He hesitates, moving on only reluctantly, as if there is something more yet to be said.

  You watch the dark line of him recede and finally disappear, as if into a ripple of the day’s relentless heat. And from this same ripple, from this same dizzying moment, something – someone – emerges, gathering form and mass as he approaches. For in the bright flux of eye, mind and world, realities tangle.

  Giles Carver is walking back towards you.

  Dr Giles Carver of River Forest, Illinois.

  Digital Time

  1

  You read his face. High colour. A lean line of a mouth. Eyes like lodestones. He’s looking at the sky – ahead, behind. He’s smelling the air for rain.

  ‘Every day,’ he begins. ‘I don’t get it.’ A woman laden with groceries eases past you on the sidewalk. ‘I get off the train at Oak Park. The River Forest stop makes more sense, but after work I like the walk. I buy a paper outside the station and hang a right on to Oak Park Avenue. By Erie Street, you’re behind me. Where’d you come from? No idea. Sometimes I cut over to Forest instead and head home through the gardens. I used to take my daughters there years ago – they liked the wild flowers. But by the time I hit Erie, you’re behind me, same as usual.’

  He looks up – wonders if that was a drop of rain he felt. ‘Coincidence? Okay. I leave the station and stick to North Boulevard instead. But by the time I turn from Harlem on to Lake, you’re there. We pass William. Monroe. Jackson. Lathrop. I turn up Lathrop, only because I don’t live there. Then it’s Quick Street. The tennis club. The public library, where my younger daughter – never mind. I turn to look once, maybe twice, and, sure enough, you’re still there. Listen. If someone at the university has put you up to this, you’re wasting your time.’