Marguerite nodded. Then she began to weep again.
Charlotte embraced her, felt her shoulder bones moving beneath her clothes, beneath her skin. ‘Your father will come back to you. I promise. I can tell he is a decent man. Grief will have its way with him for a while, but he will take care of you. Your mother’s death is a terrible loss for him. And for you.’
But the girl shook her head. There was something else. ‘I need your help again, madame. Monsieur Lesage told my mother to take special care with baby Jean. He said he could die of plague. The card he drew for him was terrible. I saw it. It was a skeleton. Can you make a charm for him, for his protection? Please. I know you can. Please. My brother is so weak. I’ll pay you, of course.’
‘Where is your baby brother now?’
‘He is with my uncle. He does not want him to be too far from his sight. He cries all the time.’
It was unclear if she were referring to the baby or her uncle, Monsieur Boucher. Charlotte considered the poor girl before placing her left hand on her book and closing her eyes. Paper blessed by a priest on which are written prayers to Saint Roque. Lavender flowers, dragon seeds, amulets bound with twine and sprinkled with the purest vinegar. Save us from such vile pestilence and fevers. Praetectio. Place the charm around the neck and wear it at all times.
She opened her eyes. ‘I have none of the ingredients to make such a charm, Marguerite.’
The girl wiped tears from her face and scrambled to her feet. ‘There is an apothecary near the fair at Saint-Germain, on the other side of the river – Monsieur Maigret on Rue des Canettes. He has everything. He is the best in Paris, they all say. He’ll have what you need. Come, madame. We can go there now.’
Marguerite’s eagerness was heartbreaking, but Charlotte shook her head. ‘No. I cannot leave here. Not now. I have to wait for Nicolas. I can visit the apothecary later. Come back tonight. And bring your brother with you. I was intending to leave Paris as soon as Lesage returned with Nicolas, but I’ll wait for you.’
28
Even with only three of them travelling in it, the carriage was stuffy and felt extremely crowded. Its shades were drawn and Lesage was forced to sit sideways on his bench to avoid touching the boy’s bloodied knees with his new breeches. The added disadvantage with this awkward sitting position was that it brought him into even closer contact with Willem’s sweat-damp thighs and grubby elbows. His many years on the galleys – chained day and night to other convicts – had instilled in Lesage a horror of other men’s bodies and a suspicion they were composed primarily of lice, wretched oaths, pus-filled sores and blisters. Truly a debased half of humanity.
He was unnerved, too, by the boy’s miserable condition – not to mention the experience in taking him from the house. Rather than resist it, as Willem had warned he would, Nicolas had meekly acquiesced to being led from the cellar, even though – as he made clear – he was certain his fate was to be used in some vile manner by the criminal gangs of Paris. He’d already seen what happened, he’d said, and no amount of reassurance was enough to allay these fears. Willem’s snickering and general sinister demeanour had certainly not helped.
Lesage had told Nicolas that he was taking him to see his mother, to which the boy had merely nodded and said, ‘Well, that is a curious thing, because my mother is dead.’
‘No, no, no,’ Lesage had replied. ‘She is not dead at all. No. This is the miraculous thing. The injury was not as bad as she first thought. She is not well, certainly, but she is not dead. I saw her already this morning, Nicolas. She is very eager to see you once more. Please. You must believe me – I intend you no harm. Quite the opposite, in fact.’
But the boy clearly did not believe him at all. And, now, as they travelled in the carriage, Nicolas sat with his hands tied together in his lap, staring over Lesage’s shoulder – like a cur avoiding the eye of the man he knows to be the instrument of his demise. If the boy had ever possessed any fight, then it had clearly been squeezed from him by his time entombed in that cellar. Hardly surprising, Lesage supposed, considering the horrible state of the place and the other boys held there – its reek of shit, blood on the floor, wet straw and weak murmurs.
Nicolas muttered something incomprehensible. The boy lisped slightly, probably on account of the cut on his upper lip. There was also a thread of blood between his two front teeth.
Lesage leaned forward slightly. ‘Pardon?’
‘You seem a decent fellow, monsieur.’ A glance at Willem, as if to make clear this decency was only relative to his companion. ‘Perhaps you might untie me? My wrists are so sore.’
Lesage knew the pain of captivity only too well, but he could not risk the boy escaping before he’d been delivered safely to Madame Picot; after all, his own freedom depended wholly on it. He shook his head. ‘I’ll not be at ease, Nicolas, until you’re safe in your mother’s arms. We have come a long way to find you, and at great risk. I’ll not take any chances now. Don’t fret, there’s not too far to go.’
They had entered through the city’s eastern gate and were travelling along Rue Saint-Antoine, past the Jesuit church and the Hôtel de Ville. The clamour of Paris filled the air outside the carriage – merchants and maids, voices and clatter. The carriage driver called out to someone beside the road and urged his horses on with a wild curse. There was the smell of burnt wood, a song sung by a girl, laughter fading away to nothing as they shuddered to a stop.
Then, quite suddenly, the sounds of the street gave way to a lone voice crying out, hoarse and urgent. Alarmed, Lesage drew aside the shabby curtain and recoiled momentarily from the blinding burst of daylight. When his eyesight had adjusted, he squinted through the window. He saw crowds of men and women of all descriptions, a boy with a sack of apples at his waist, a donkey, a cobbler with his box of tools slung over a shoulder. There were pilgrims setting forth on their journeys, merchants selling candles and crosses. And, above the heads of the assembled crowd, a thin, bearded man with arms outflung in appeal. It was the same monk he had seen preaching on Rue Saint-Denis several days earlier. Yes, the fellow was still at it.
His audience had grown. It spilled all over the road and had wedged their cart in, preventing it from moving forward. The carriage driver yelled at the crowd to part so they might pass, but he was no Moses, the crowd no Red Sea, and no one paid him the slightest attention.
The monk’s voice, meanwhile, was swelling with passion as he paced back and forth and delivered his wild prophecies. ‘Fear the abyss!’ he was saying. ‘This city – with its whores and thieves, its unbelievers –’ (a chortle from the crowd; of pride or indignation, it was hard to tell) ‘– you can feel it in the air here. You can smell it on the women, despite their civet and their rosewater. The men, with their . . . disgusting habits and clothes. Decadence, sodomy, all manner of sin. There are those who murder children and drink their blood. Yes. There are! You know this to be true as well as I do. All that you can imagine exists. Witchcraft, pacts with the Devil. I sense there are those among you here today who have indulged in all manner of despicable acts, who have allowed your darker selves to reign in the kingdom of your soul. Why? Why? Because we are all sinners. We are all wicked. We are all doomed. The end is coming. Oh, yes. I have heard the word of the Lord. I have listened to the Lord. Allow me to tell you what happened, friends. Out there in the fields where I lived near Rodez, He came to me, while others quailed in the face of fevers and plague. To me alone. Because I believed. He came as a great light, a great voice, all thunder and noise. The clouds were churning, the trees caught fire, birds fell like rocks from the sky. A terrible thing it was, and I fell to the ground and covered my head and trembled. Like a lamb I trembled! Soon now, He told me. Infidels are at the gates. Fear the scourge, oh yes. Fear the barbarians. Fear apocalypse and damnation. But it is not too late. No. Go forth and tell them. Save them. Save their souls.’
Crowds in Paris usually had little patien
ce for these sorts of itinerants; Lesage had seen them beaten away with rotten fruit and scraps of offal, with curses and mockery and din. But for some reason, this fellow had struck them dumb and – despite his frustration at their lack of progress – Lesage was also oddly compelled. The preacher possessed an unusual urgency of delivery. With his weathered face and straggly beard, he resembled any number of preachers who roamed the land, and yet heads in this crowd nodded like rain-burdened stalks of wheat, as if what they heard were utterly new to them. Others muttered prayers or raised their hands in apparent spasms of ecstasy. A woman was weeping. The monk had stopped pacing and he searched the crowd with his hard, black eyes, assessing them, it seemed, with hope and regret, alighting here and there before moving on.
‘The Kingdom of the Lord has no borders,’ the monk continued, his gaze still appraising them as if he were a ship’s captain and they a storm-racked ocean through which he wished to chart a course. His voice then became so quiet that Lesage had to strain to hear what he was saying.
‘The Kingdom of the Lord is not at all like this world. And He will welcome you into His mansion of numberless rooms. He will forgive you. He will salve your wounds and ease your heart. All of you. The fallen butcher’s wife, the greedy gem merchant who beats his three children. The boy who lies to his father about where he’s been, who pinches his sister’s arm when no one is looking. The girl with lust and avarice in her heart. The Lord knows everything about these men and women and children. He sees directly into their hearts. He knows of the merchant from Normandy who has been led astray by an evil assembly right here in Paris, who has committed unspeakable acts in exchange for money and power . . .’
The monk’s gaze had, by this time, alighted – could it be? – on or near Lesage. He shrank back slowly, reluctant even to pull the curtain for fear of drawing further attention to himself. There followed a silence so lengthy and strange that members of the crowd turned to see what had caught the monk’s eye. General murmurs, baby’s bleat, the distant cry of a girl.
‘. . . how he lied and deceived and has had so many dealings with demons and witches. Do not gasp in such a manner, good people. Do not pretend. You know as well as I do there are people in this very city who engage in terrible crimes. In magic and impieties. The Lord knows you are in pain, but there is relief at hand. There will be a reckoning. But there will be mercy, too. Imagine it. Hunger and disease no more. No agony or trouble, no heartache. But you must repent. Otherwise it will be hell and eternal damnation for you all. Here is the truth: if you do not go towards the reckoning, then the reckoning will surely one day come to you. Yes. And you will have to choose.’
Lesage let the thick curtain drop. He reeled back and shut his eyes. Dear God. Dear God Almighty. The heat. It was the heat in this horrible carriage and the sun and the terrible strain of his predicament. The words of the raving monk retreated like an ebbing tide. ‘The divine’, the monk was saying, his voice fading as if he – or perhaps it was Lesage – were drifting on those waters. ‘The divine and the magnificent and it is there for us, we only need to choose.’ The words of the monk. The words of the monk. ‘Damnation. Salvation. A reckoning.’ Words and clamour and the shuffling of the throng.
Then there was a new commotion, the ringing of a single bell becoming ever louder. Again Lesage peered out. The crowd’s attention wavered, then drifted to some new spectacle further along the road. He followed their gaze. Heads turned, someone urged the mob to make way. Women leaned out from their windows. A group of people jostled their way through. Cowled heads, weeping women, children wailing, a bier for a corpse. It was a ragtag funeral cortège, as if conjured by the preacher himself.
The funeral procession was unable to pass and the two groups began to bicker. Lesage thought he recognised some members of the funeral party. Yes, one of those carrying the bier was the troubadour fellow. It was Monsieur Leroux, and the procession was for his wife Madame Leroux, who had drowned in the river. The girl’s monkey was perched on her shoulder. Monsieur Leroux was haggard, drunk, and he remonstrated with a woman in his path, gently at first, but then with increasing hostility. Spittle flecked his beard. His grip on the bier’s handle slipped and the body, wrapped in its burial sheet, sagged at one end. The others supporting it hurriedly compensated for the tilt, but a portion of the woman’s sheet came adrift. One of her arms flopped free. A clawed, yellowed hand with bruised fingernails. A few boys jeered. A member of the funeral party punched someone, a woman screamed. A furore, the crowd was roiling now as a pair of rat-faced dogs squirmed through their legs.
Many years ago, Lesage had been in the Low Countries doing business with a burgher of Amsterdam called Egbert van Roos, a self-important and fastidious fellow (as they so often were in that part of the world) who, as part of their transaction, insisted on escorting Lesage all over Amsterdam – a city of which this van Roos was most proud. Lesage had hoped to sell this man a fair quantity of wool, and so he bore Monsieur van Roos’s amiable bullying in good humour. He ate a wide variety of pickled seafood – some of it quite repulsive – and generally partook in all manner of social intercourse with other merchants in the city. Guilds and fur-lined coats on broad-shouldered men, the discreet aromas of northern wealth. It was winter. The canals were rimed with ice and the streets treacherous with sleet. Upon leaving a tavern, Lesage, who was slightly drunk, slipped and tore his breeches at the knee, so Monsieur van Roos escorted him to his house, where the maid could mend his trousers and provide a bandage to sop the bleeding. The canal house was narrow, but the man’s upstairs study, in which a fire blazed, was warm and smelled reassuringly of pipe tobacco and furniture polish. The man’s family fussed about, running here and there fetching blankets and cushions. At one stage, Lesage was left alone on the narrow sofa, his head throbbing, feeling altogether unwell and not a little embarrassed at what had occurred and the trouble it had occasioned.
Hanging above the fireplace was a large painting that, at first glance, appeared to be no more than a dull mess, perhaps not even properly finished. Could it be the work of Monsieur van Roos himself, or a relative of his? The man certainly struck Lesage as the type to display his own amateurish efforts in his house. When his eyes adjusted to the light and afforded closer examination, however, the painting resolved itself into one of immense detail and skill. It was a scene of extravagant debauch. Hundreds – no, thousands – of tiny figures swarmed over a blighted landscape committing all manner of atrocities. Men were garrotted and impaled on spears. Armies of grinning skeletons rampaged on the horizon and swarmed from dark caves. Corpses in piles. Farting nuns, strange-faced priests, a dog licking blood from a dead child’s face. A merchant was fucking a pig, a woman was hoisting her skirts for a goat. Great fires burned orange and the sky was dark with smoke. Vile creatures – half bird, half deer – played cards. Frogs wielded cutlasses, a bear wore antlers.
Lesage was familiar with depictions of damnation, but that night on the burgher’s sofa he quailed, for he had never seen it illustrated in such ghastly and exhaustive detail. He could almost hear the cries of the wretched and the glee of those who pursued them.
He never discovered who had painted the monstrosity in Amsterdam – nor did he care. As soon as his knee was bandaged he made some hasty apologies to Monsieur van Roos and his family before fleeing into the freezing night as if the house were collapsing into the icy canal. The transaction with Egbert van Roos was never completed. The painting had horrified Lesage so deeply that he never mentioned it to a soul and, in fact, had banished its memory altogether – until that hot afternoon on the corner of Rue Saint-Denis and Rue des Lombards, when it seemed to be coming to life before him.
He let go of the thick carriage curtain, reeled back against his bench and shut his eyes. He scrambled through his doublet in search of a kerchief with which to wipe his face. No luck, but in one of his pockets he found instead the ball of wax containing the message Madame Picot had written to be delivere
d to the Devil. He was cheered at the thought that his sleight of hand had deceived not only a peasant like Madame Picot – no great claim, perhaps – but also a much worldlier woman like La Filastre. The wax was dirty from having been in his pocket. He prised it open with his thumbs and took out the folded piece of paper. please where is my son nicolas please. Madame Picot’s writing was like that of a child’s and he was unexpectedly affected by it. Merely lines on a piece of paper – but how much yearning they contained! He held the message in his hand for a long while. It was all anyone wanted, wasn’t it? Their loved ones near them, safe and prosperous.
When at last he returned to himself, Lesage was startled to realise they had left the riotous funeral procession and were again lumbering north along Rue Saint-Denis. If Willem and the boy noticed anything amiss in his demeanour, they gave no outward sign of it. He wiped his sweating face on his sleeve.
The three of them travelled in silence for some time before the boy leaned forward. ‘Please, monsieur,’ he said. Then, when Lesage didn’t answer, he went on. ‘Please. It’s not too late to save yourself, no matter what evils you might have committed.’
‘I’m saving you, boy. There are some in this city who would murder you for their own purposes.’
‘You do not appear to be such a terrible man.’
‘And what would you know of my life?’
‘Oh, but your life is written on your face, monsieur. It’s not too late to save yourself from hell.’
His face? He was tempted to slap the boy, but managed to restrain himself. The driver called out to his horses and the carriage shuddered to a halt. Willem pulled aside his shade. A sudden burst of daylight illuminated the boy’s eager and despairing features, the blood on his lip, the frayed seam of the leather seat on which he slumped. Lesage would be most pleased to see the back of him.
City of Crows Page 25
