City of Crows

by Chris Womersley

  From where she had hidden it, she took out Madame Gallant’s heart, still wrapped in the executioner’s cloth. She unwrapped it and held the strange and bloody fruit in one hand. Veins, tubes of yellow gristle, dried blood. It weighed about the same as the book Madame Rolland had given her. It was hard to believe that something which balanced so easily on one’s palm was the source of everything.

  The baby on her lap was light, as much blanket as flesh. He pursed his lips and gave a squeak. Instinctively Charlotte leaned over to inhale his rejuvenating scent. Each child who survives its birth is a miracle, her mother used to say. The curé said similar things: hope in a troubled world; the child to save us all. One is all it takes. Our saviour. Yes. How true. She opened her black book and listened to its pungent voices. Nigromancy, according to the wisdom of Agrippa, taken from the Book of Soyga, The Book of Buried Pearls and the Clavicle of Solomon. A babe at the breast is required. Say the words at the moment of cutting. Ask of the Angel Uriel for his assistance. Innocence and possibility. Tabula rasa. Balance is restored. Say the words thrice. Agnus Dei. The lamb.

  She took up her knife. The baby knew nothing. ‘I’m sorry, little boy,’ Charlotte said as she closed her eyes. She muttered secret words under her breath and pressed the point of the knife to the baby’s doughy chest. Κύριε, ελέησον. Κύριε, ελέησον. Κύριε, ελέησον. Mercy on my soul. Your blood, your blood, your blood.

  It was done. In one hand Charlotte still gripped the portion of paper on which she had written Nicolas’s name. It emanated a soft heat, like that of a stone warmed by the sun. She wiped her hands as best she could, then wrapped the baby in his blood-thickened blanket and placed him back on the bed. Exhausted and afraid, she sat on the stool and waited. The drying blood was tight and heavy on her skin. It had splattered on her hands and neck, all over her forearms. It had soaked thickly into her dress. Some of it resembled clumsily applied lacquer. Other portions were still wet and sticky. Puddles of blood, too, on the floor, seeping into the cracks.

  She thought of the moments directly after her own children were born. The throbbing agony of delivery, the midwife’s muttered prayers, bloodied sheets, terror and exultation. ‘Pater Noster, qui es in caelis . . .’ We are but parcels of organs and bone. The smell of meat. Would the child be still living, have the correct parts, seem sturdy enough to survive? Does he breathe as he should? How is his colour? Please, show him to me, put my baby to my breast.

  Charlotte barely breathed, hardly altered her position on the stool, as if to do so might jeopardise her terrible request. It grew gloomy as the day slipped away but she lit no candle, accepting that darkness was more suited to her desires.

  Eventually, there was a knock at the door. Charlotte started, but did not respond immediately. A dreadful silence. Another knock. She tried to speak, but her voice failed. No matter. The door opened with a low creak and there, in the dim passage, stood Nicolas. Her son. He was dirtier than when she had last seen him, certainly, but it was him. Her heart caught, a sleeve on a twig. Her beloved son had returned at last. Behind him on the landing a face dissolved into the darkness – the face, presumably, of the hateful creature who had delivered Nicolas to her.

  Cautiously, Nicolas stepped into the room. He was filthy, barefoot, and his clothes were red and torn. He was trembling. ‘Mother,’ he whispered. ‘Is that truly you?’

  With a hand over her mouth she stifled a sob.

  ‘But are you injured? What is all the blood?’

  ‘No, Nicolas. I am quite well.’

  ‘But they told me you had been killed. I saw the arrow . . .’

  Charlotte opened her arms. ‘Come to me, my son. Here.’

  Nicolas approached slowly, as if he suspected her of being a phantom. Charlotte stood until hesitantly, wordlessly, he allowed himself to be enfolded in her bloody embrace. Her son. Yes. It was him. He was warm, he breathed in the way of the living.

  She grasped his hand. ‘Here. Put your hand here. Do you feel it? My own heart? How it beats? Yes. And you? Are you . . . are you truly alive, my son?’

  She placed her own palm to Nicolas’s chest. Yes. There. His own heartbeat, like that of a bird. She ran her hands feverishly along his thin arms and sensed the blood thrumming beneath his skin. ‘Did they hurt you?’

  The boy looked stunned. He shook his head.

  ‘Don’t be afraid, my son. I have brought you back. And now I will protect you.’

  Only then did she permit herself to weep.

  37

  Lesage watched from the shadows as Madame Picot embraced her son. He had seen terrible acts performed by terrible people. Black masses, executions and murders, brutal fights in the galleys. And he had been present, of course, when Catherine and Abbé Guibourg had sacrificed babies and chanted dreadful incantations over the bodies so that Madame de Montespan might win the favour of the King.

  But this seemed so much worse because Madame Picot had hitherto seemed so innocent. The blood on her hands and clothes, the blood-soaked bundle on the bed. What had the woman done? People were capable of all sorts of inexplicable things, weren’t they? Horrified, he fumbled his way down the dark stairs, across the courtyard and into the street, where he ran into the troubadour girl, Marguerite, coming the other way.

  ‘Good evening, monsieur,’ she said. ‘Have you been to see Madame Picot? Did her son return?’

  Lesage nodded. Then, without a word, he fled.

  38

  Over Nicolas’s shoulder, Marguerite materialised on the dim landing, pale as an apparition. She looked at Charlotte and Nicolas with great puzzlement as she stepped into the room. ‘My brother, madame? Is he with you? But what has happened? There is so much blood.’

  The girl moved to the bed and bent over her brother, cooing endearments as she did so. She picked him up and drew aside his wrapping. Charlotte watched as if she were trapped within a dream’s thick amber, unable to act as the girl gasped, then recoiled in shock. ‘Dear God. What happened to my brother? He is dead?’

  Coming to her senses, Charlotte detached herself from Nicolas and moved to prevent Marguerite’s escape, but the girl was nimbler than a cat and managed to push past Charlotte and slip from the room. There was the clomp of her feet on the stairs and yelling, followed by voices in the courtyard as she screamed and screamed.

  ‘Help! Help! She has killed my baby. The witch killed my baby. Help!’

  Charlotte hesitated momentarily before grabbing Nicolas by his tattered red tunic and dragging him onto the landing. To judge by the commotion echoing around the courtyard downstairs, it would be impossible for them to make it through the house and onto the street without being caught. They would surely kill them for what she had done – kill them both and burn their bones. She glanced around. A narrow flight of stairs led to an upper room. Nicolas was weeping and muttering. She shoved him in front of her and they clambered up into a tiny attic, where the ceiling beams were so low she was unable to stand upright. She closed the door and bolted it. Then, with Nicolas’s help, she pushed the only piece of furniture – a low bed – in front of it as a makeshift barricade.

  ‘But what are you doing, Mother? What has happened?’

  She looked around. A shutterless window offered a glimpse of the evening where pink clouds and smudges of brown smoke hung in the pale blue sky. Voices drifted up from the street below and there came the clatter of boots on the wooden stairs. Doors slammed, cries and lamentations. ‘Catch them. Call someone. The baby. Dear God, where did they go?’

  Charlotte pushed open the dormer window and leaned out. It gave onto a flat portion of the tiled roof that abutted the neighbouring building. She held out a hand to Nicolas. ‘Come.’

  ‘But we’ll fall into the street, Mother. There is nowhere to go.’

  ‘There is. Trust me. Quickly now.’

  Voices closer now on the stairs behind the closed door.
Nicolas relented and they slipped through the narrow window onto the roof. Charlotte had never in her life been so high above the ground and, once on the roof, she stood still for a moment to orient herself to the unnerving sensation. Several men burst into the room behind. Crouching low for balance, almost on all fours, Charlotte and Nicolas scrambled along the lichen-spotted tiles as quickly as they dared, but the flat section of the roof was short and ended in a long drop to the street below. The old slate cracked like pie crust beneath their feet. A wet-lipped woman in a window opposite screamed at them. ‘There! The sorceress. There!’ The entire quarter, it seemed, was yelling and crying out.

  Charlotte hesitated, putting a hand to the pitched roof for balance. There was no way they might escape over the rooftops and they would almost certainly not be quick enough to outrun the men who, at that moment, were clambering through the window with daggers and shovels in their hands. Nicolas was sobbing and shaking his head.

  The men would be upon them in no time at all. ‘Come down,’ they were saying. ‘Come down now, woman. There is no escaping us. Think of the boy . . .’

  Think of the boy. As if she had thought of anything else. Charlotte hauled Nicolas up the steepest part of the roof. It was difficult. Her shoes slipped on the slate. Nicolas, barefoot, made swifter progress and reached down to assist her. They ascended the roof’s peak and clung to a crumbling chimney. The grimy streets and rooftops of Paris spread out in all directions. A crowd had formed in the street below. People cried out in fury. Merchants, a trio of monks, a swineherd with his pigs. Boys were throwing stones and women were jeering. ‘There on the roof! Child-killer. Kill her. Break all her bones. Push the bitch off!’

  But Charlotte had stopped listening. These ordinary people, with their meagre words. She smelled smoke from the evening’s fires. She saw a flock of geese and the pale crescent moon. Closer at hand, church bells tolled for evening prayers. Three crows flew in low and landed on the chimney of the neighbouring roof, where they watched her with interest. What did they see, these crows? A woman and her son. What could they know? One of the birds shrugged and turned to its companions, as if to confer on the matter. It was almost dark, but not quite; the time between the dog and the wolf. When all great and wondrous things happen.

  With extreme care, Charlotte stood with one foot on either side of the pitched roof. The crowd in the street fell silent and the men below paused in their sinister entreaties. After taking a moment to steady herself, she retrieved the black book from her pocket and held it aloft. She grasped Nicolas’s hand. My beautiful son, at last; his fingers so warm and alive in my own.

  Above the racket of Paris, through her skin, Charlotte absorbed the black book’s whisperings. Then she closed her eyes and spoke aloud its incantations. An awful majesty swelled in her breast; her heart was a cathedral, her chest a city, her body the world and all it contained. Delight and murder and eruption and quakes. Babies and fire. Dogs. Mountains. Cities. Language and rivers and trees. Its people, its knowledge, its many winds and vast oceans. Command the elements and they can be yours, Madame Rolland had told her. And this was what Charlotte did.

  There was a swirl of wind. She was buffeted, but then became light, as if swelling with air. She felt the slate roof shift beneath her. Nicolas cried out and gripped her hand more tightly. Those in the street gasped in terror and amazement. A woman’s wail of alarm, a prayer. Charlotte opened her eyes and saw the buildings fall away beneath her feet, saw the street thronged with terrified people. Their upturned faces, their furious eyes, their tiny round mouths opening and closing soundlessly like those of baby birds awaiting food. And she laughed with unexpected delight.

  On the cool evening breeze she and Nicolas were borne away as if weightless. Over squares and spires and over the river running golden in the last of the day’s sunlight. Over the city’s black, jagged rooftops, its rickety carts and muddy streets. There a man hoisting his basket of apples, there a boy chasing a grey cat. The city made miniature – all its walls and churches, its great prisons and bustling gates, the roads laid out like lengths of pale rope. Travellers the size of ants. She saw lanterns flickering in windows, smelled rabbits cooking in pots. A pair of nuns giggled at a lewd joke, a distant woman sang to her child. She detected the melancholy scent of autumn as it rolled over the land. Spring, summer, autumn, next year’s summer. She heard the distant, bitter laughter of the Wild Horde. She smelled the fragrances of foreign bazaars, of rank battlefields, of oceans and bundles of rags in meadows; of remote cities, those terrible places where they spoke in languages that resembled so many mouthfuls of broken glass.

  Other visions she didn’t understand. Vast skies, icy wastes, the severed heads of kings, blasts obliterating entire cities. Multitudes. Everything, nothing. Chaos and beauty, the future and the past, the manifest and the obscure, the sacred and the profane, terror and pleasure, the living and the dead. Yes, she thought. Yes. My eyes are jewels, my bones are of silver and my veins now run with gold.

  Your blood, your blood, your blood.

  Author’s note

  The magician Adam du Coeuret – also known as Lesage – remained in Paris for several years, working with Catherine Monvoisin – or La Voisin – among Paris’s network of abortionists, poisoners, sorcerers and fortune tellers. On 22 March 1679, he was arrested in connection with the scandal known thereafter as the Affair of the Poisons, in which Parisian police unearthed what they feared was a plot to poison King Louis XIV. As a recidivist on charges of sacrilege, Lesage faced execution if guilty, but when the Chambre Ardente established to investigate the affair was dissolved in 1682, Lesage was imprisoned without trial for the rest of his life in the Chateau de Besançon. The date of his death is unknown.

  The fortune teller and abortionist Catherine Monvoisin was arrested on 12 March 1679 on suspicion of involvement in a plot to poison King Louis XIV and for her role in black masses designed to secure for Athénaïs de Montespan the affections of King Louis XIV. She confessed to witchcraft and was burned alive on 22 February 1680.

  In March 1680, the daughter of Catherine Monvoisin, Marie-Marguerite Monvoisin, was interrogated and described all she knew of her mother’s involvement in an alleged plot to poison Louis XIV. Although only in her early twenties and not charged with any offences, she was imprisoned without trial for the rest of her life on the island prison of Belle-Île-en-Mer. As with other female prisoners jailed in the affair, she was guarded by women to ensure she could not use her feminine wiles to escape. The date of her death is unknown.

  Athénaïs de Montespan, King Louis XIV’s official mistress, or maîtresse-en-titre, had several children with Louis XIV over the course of their thirteen-year relationship. These children were recognised officially by Louis in December 1673, several months after the black mass conducted for that purpose by Lesage, Abbé Guibourg and Catherine Monvoisin. Although numerous people arrested in the Affair of the Poisons mentioned Madame de Montespan in connection with the sorcerers of Paris, there was never any proof of her involvement in witchcraft. In 1691, Madame de Montespan retired to a convent, where she died in 1707 at the age of sixty-six.

  Françoise Filastre was arrested in December 1679 and burned alive in October 1680 for practising witchcraft.

  Nothing further was heard of Charlotte Picot, although mention of a prophetess living in a forest near Lyon by the seventeenth-century English essayist Joseph Addison could be a reference to her.

  Acknowledgements

  All books are, in some way, engaged in conversation with other books, so it is fitting that City of Crows – which has a book at its centre – began taking shape several years ago when Arwen at Brunswick Street Bookstore suggested I might be interested in Grimoires: A History of Magic Books by Owen Davies. She was right, and the book sent me further down the rabbit hole to others such as The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide & Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV by Anne Somerset, Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison,
and Sacrilege in Louis XIV’s France by Lynn Wood Mollenauer, Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom by Norman Cohn and The Discovery of France by Graham Robb. Although fiction, City of Crows is based on historical incident and real people, and anyone interested in witchcraft or the general period of French history in which it is set (and how could you not be?!) would be advised to read the above books.

  I was incredibly fortunate to be able to spend time in France researching City of Crows, thanks to a grant from The Australia Council for the Arts – for which I am truly grateful. While in Paris, I spent time with some wonderful people, each of whom assisted me in all sorts of ways and made my stay there particularly fruitful and memorable. My appreciation firstly to Marie Furthner for her invaluable assistance in unlocking the occult mysteries of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Thanks also to fellow flâneur Alex Landragin for his companionship, and Francis Geffard for his unflagging friendship and support. Thanks to Chloe Baker, Melissa Cox and Chris Kenna for the dinners, drinks and music. Thanks to Aude Sowerwine for the apartment in Paris and to Rob Annema and Els Zoon for the room in Pampelonne where Charlotte Picot truly came into focus.