At last the mob halts before a building. The people press together, some rising on tiptoe to see what is happening. They are looting a bakery, flinging loaves through the smashed windows, passing sacks of flour out hand over hand only to see them torn apart, releasing white clouds into the air, turning the looters to ghosts.
“I cannot help it! I don’t decide the prices!” the baker bellows from the floor above, his voice echoing in the street. “Go attack Turgot, go to Versailles, they are selling the very grain from our fields to line their own pockets!”
The mob roars back, a bestial sound. Isabella seizes the corner of a building, dragging us bodily forward. Across the street is the rue Mondétour and a hint of open space around the bend–
And then I smell the fire.
The flames fill the ground-floor windows, licking up the walls, smoke billowing into the street. A woman screams from somewhere within, screams and screams, and a ripple of mocking laughter runs through the crowd. Now they begin throwing things back into the bakery: rags, trash, whatever is to hand and might burn.
A little boy appears above the heads, balancing on a man’s shoulder, and begins to sing:
Panis angelicus
fit panis hominum
Dat panis coelicus
figuris terminum
O res mirabilis!
Manducat Dominum
Pauper, servus et humilis
And just then, listening to his sweet soprano and the screams of the people dying – just for a moment, the world flashes terrifyingly golden.
It is happening.
Isabella pulls me across the street and around the bend, so fast I nearly lose my pattens as we hurry back to the safety of the brothel.
* * *
“Creation,” Mémé tells us that night, “is always violent: look at how babies come into the world, how plants rip their seed-shells apart, how birds hack and bite their way free of the egg. Is it no wonder that the mobs tear apart the bakeries, that they burn houses regardless of who might be within? They too are trying to wrest power from those who have it. They simply don’t know a better way.”
And what might they do to us, I want to ask, if they knew you thought fit to starve them for your own schemes, using perversion and witchcraft?
Outside there is still so much noise. Scattered cheers and shouts, the spatter of pistol shots – there were militia on the streets, Louisa reported breathlessly, there was talk of adding gibbets to the Place de Grève.
Aimee’s room is dark and silent. I can still hear the screaming, can still smell the fire in my hair.
What have we done?
3.
It is nearly our week again when Mémé finally goes out. To look for custom, or so she says. She goes to the Opéra and the Comédie, salons and supper-parties, with blood-red mouth and crimson gown and one of us in tow: a sample. She lets the men boast about their connections, their power, their proximity to the king’s ear – and when she thinks she has found a suitable candidate she takes him to a room or her coach, the better to be fawned over.
And you know who does all the work, Aimée had confided in me, while she gets away with a few kisses.
Aimée…
I wait until the brothel is quiet, save for a trio of young noblemen who came to the door with a fat purse and a great deal of wine. We drew lots for them, the other girls salivating at the money, and I pretended to be disappointed, but wasn’t it a sign? Their loud voices covering my noises as I tiptoe into Mémé’s room and go to her little desk.
The drawers are locked. And if I try to break them open, and am caught…
I search the rest of her room, looking for a key, trying to think on what to do. Love letters at her bedside, from men – perhaps she has done a little more than kissing. At first her bookshelves seem mostly libertine novels, but when I open one up a pamphlet falls out, a tract on grain. More pamphlets and broadsheets are wedged between the books, many of their authors’ names familiar.
There is nothing, however, to explain the sigils.
And then I open her commode.
It is filled with shreds of paper, smelling of urine, but I can see the marks clear enough. Letters, stretched and cramped, twisted and combined.
The sigils are words, their letters layered over each other to form one shape.
I can make out a few of them, words like King and People. Numbers too: 60 livres – that is what some say is the price of flour now. 4 sous. Lenoir – he replaced Sartine as the head of police, only to be fired in turn.
Wincing, I reach in and push the pieces around. Burn. Gallows. Turgot.
Aimée.
I stare at her name, the pale ink lines smudging and blurring. To what end? To save her? Or to be rid of her?
She had always been a little crude, a little boastful. Never a favorite.
Who among us had made her name glow?
Voices in the hall. Quickly I close the commode, wincing at the smell on my fingers. But as I hurry back to my room, I start to feel a nervous excitement in my belly.
I can make a sigil. Not for myself, I cannot paint my own ceiling, she would suspect me at once.
But I can make a sigil for Isabella.
* * *
To love me. To run away with me to the ends of the earth. To feel the same wet desire that I do, to want to taste me as I long to taste her.
To stop Mémé’s madness. To make us all safe from that mindless rage.
To love me.
Long into the night I stare at the blank page, I start to write words and stop again. If it takes eight of us just to raise the price of bread, what can I do, alone?
Is it not enough, to simply want to love?
But I think of that mob, and how it would feel to be battered by their clubs and their fists, or helplessly burning as they feed the fire.
I write, then, before I can rethink it, printing the letters atop each other, over and over on scraps of paper until at last I have a drawing that looks like Mémé’s.
I tear up the other papers and I lay them in my chamber pot and cover them with my own waters. I will slop them out later, in the far corner of the yard, where the muck gathers just before the drains.
And then I lie in bed, staring at my sigil. My will. Staring at the intersection of lines, the moonlight streaming in. My will upon the universe. Already my body feels full and heavy. Isabella. It is happening. My hand between my legs, stroking, rubbing. My will. Watching the lines, the paper lit by moonlight as I hold it above my head–
I cry aloud as the sigil flares white, so bright as to blind me, my whole body arching off the bed. Never have I. Never. So much bliss.
The paper on the bed. My palm streaked with rust. Only the fat moon as witness.
Waxing gibbous, Mémé would say.
Almost time.
* * *
I am cramping as I dress, breathing through gritted teeth as I wiggle into my gauzy petticoat and draw on my red-clocked stockings, securing them with red ribbons. My feet in slippers. Only then do I lace up the ridiculous stays that stop just below my breasts.
In Mémé’s room she is handing out the buckets, their brushes swinging gaily inside. That strange cloudy liquid, what is it? Where does it come from? The smell like burying your nose in dirty clothing, sweat and piss and something deeper–
I think of last night, washing my hand after, and I blush. Like that smell.
One by one Mémé hands over the slips of paper, pairing us with a flick of her wrist. “Sophie, for Marie. Jeanne, for Catherine. Isabella, for Claire.”
My stomach drops. If Isabella paints my ceiling, how can I paint hers?
To wait another month–
“Catherine, for Louisa. Marie, for Isabella.”
I grab the slip instinctively, snatching it from Mémé’s hand. Marie looks surprised, and then she smirks at me. “Claire wants to paint herself in Turgot’s place,” she says slyly, and the others laugh.
“Bite your tongue,” I mutter. “I – I
thought she said Claire.” More giggling.
I have not let go of the paper.
Mémé studies me for a long moment. “It is… unusual,” she finally says. “Two marking sigils for each other – but perhaps it will intensify the results?” She nods at the slip in my hand. “Claire, for Isabella. This might be a special night indeed.”
* * *
Isabella’s room smells of her: her odors lie across every surface like dust, and they rise as I move through the space, clinging to me in turn. Her few dresses, the Bible on her nightstand – how is it that she has such a thing, Mémé will not permit so much as a rosary in our rooms.
There but for the grace of God.
I kick off my slippers and climb onto her bed. I paint in quick, strong strokes, I have memorized every line and curve, I know them by heart. For it is my heart I am painting, the picture of my love, the shape of my hope.
Our hand upon the tiller of the world. Or so Mémé said, and I pretended to believe.
And what do I believe now?
I am just finishing when Isabella comes in, surprising me; the brush falls from my hand to her bed, the liquid quickly spreading on the coverlet. At once I snatch it up, not sure where to look, my face burning.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” she says.
Still I cannot think. I stumble off her bed. I am trying to gather up the coverlet and keep the bucket and brush to hand, great armfuls of cloth and the bucket swinging wildly. Mémé’s slip flutters from my hand to land in the bucket, soaking into the residue. I am scarlet, my ears on fire.
Isabella takes the coverlet from me, wadding it into a ball and shoving it under her bed. And then just stays kneeling on the floor, one hand on my ankle as if to keep me in place.
“Claire,” she whispers. “Oh, Claire, they just came…”
I put the bucket down and kneel beside her, carefully putting my hand on her face. Her soft cheek in my palm; I nearly sob aloud, I am so overcome. Still I draw her face towards mine. Her eyes are full.
“Policemen. I heard Mémé speaking with them. About Aimée.” Her tears spilling into my hand. “They found her in the Seine, they say she was not, she was not whole…”
I hug her tightly, feeling her body shudder against mine as she cries, rubbing her back through the thin silk of her negligee. And if my sigil doesn’t work, if she is next to disappear into the crowd, never to come back whole?
“Oh, Claire, Claire,” she whispers into my neck. “What if we’re making things worse, so much worse?”
“We are making things worse,” I say fiercely. “This whole business is madness.” Then, in a rush, “If I could get enough money, for us to leave–”
There is a knock on the door, then it swings open. “Mémé’s changed the lantern to red,” Marie says. “And Turgot is already here. You’ll just have to wait your turn, Claire,” she adds, sniggering.
Isabella pulls away from me, wiping at her face; when she looks at me again I see not only sorrow and fear in her eyes but a hint of something else, something hard. “I will come to you after,” she says.
I will come to you. She has never spoken so before, she has never held me save after my first night. She had come to me after the man left, saying nothing, just holding me until I fell asleep.
I will come to you I will come to you I will come to you
All I can think, as I hurry back to my own room and quickly rouge my face, douse all but a few candles, arrange myself on the bed – all I can think is that something happened, last night. I had made the sigil glow, truly glow, without the energy of a man.
Yet Isabella’s words, and all they imply – that wasn’t what I had written at all.
* * *
I change the sheets after Vergennes leaves, I open the window to the fresh night air. I wash and I comb my hair and I put on my softest, prettiest shift.
But Isabella never comes.
* * *
It is early when the knocking rouses me from an uneasy sleep. I think Isabella, but instead it is Catherine, looking nervous.
“They brought in emergency flour last night,” she says. “The price of bread has dropped to three sous four deniers and the people are cheering Louis. Mémé is furious, she thinks one of us changed their thing.” She shrugs, but keeps her eyes lowered. “More likely we just missed a line. Anyway, she wants us to show her what we painted, and to talk to each of us.”
As she speaks I feel my stomach disappear. I cannot remember what Mémé gave me, I had been far too intent on getting my own sigil right. I manage a nod, but as soon as Catherine leaves I drop before my dressing-table, trembling.
I do not fear for myself. What can she do to me in the end? Beat me, turn me out. If she denounces me to the police she risks herself; if she throws me out I know better how to survive now.
But I know she will never let me see Isabella again.
I make myself dress, swallowing my sobs. Halfway down the stairs I remember: the paper had fallen in the bucket, it might still be there–
But when I hurry to the closet, I find only clean, dry buckets, neatly stacked for next month.
And when I step back into the hall Mémé is standing in her open doorway. She beckons to me, her strange smooth face expressionless. Her long thin hand, beckoning, as Isabella had beckoned all those months ago.
My choice.
As I enter the room she shuts and locks the door behind us. Isabella is sitting on Mémé’s bed and she will not meet my eyes.
“Sit at the desk, Claire,” Mémé says.
There is a piece of paper, a pen, an inkwell. The chair creaks beneath me as I sit down. My hands on the polished wood surface. All the drawers are unlocked now, but what does it matter anymore?
“I want you to draw, as best you remember, what you painted on Isabella’s ceiling.”
In my mind’s eye I can see the sigil flaring into life. The pen and ink sit there, waiting to be used.
“And thus hath the candle sing’d the moth.” Mémé sighs the words out as the bed creaks beneath her weight. “Claire, Claire. I have never before taken a girl I did not choose myself, but Isabella is special to me. Now I can see I made a mistake.”
She strokes Isabella’s head. Isabella still won’t look at me.
“We are so close, Claire.” She takes Isabella’s hand and presses it into her own lap. “So close to an uprising that will change all our lives. But I cannot have less than eight each month. Did I not take Aimee’s place myself last night, so we could be eight? So we might finish what we began?” She takes a breath. “Yet now, because of you, we were not eight. Because of you, we may lose all that we have worked for. What did you paint on her ceiling?”
“I cannot remember,” I say, hoping against hope it sounds like the truth.
Mémé’s foot taps on the floor, the tempo increasing with each passing moment–
And then she seizes Isabella by the throat with one hand, a knife in her other, pulling her close and driving the point into Isabella’s cheek, just below her eye. Blood wells around the blade and Isabella shrieks in fright, making me cry “No!”
“Draw it,” Mémé says calmly. “Draw it or I will cut her face and she will spend the rest of her days servicing men at the quays. Draw it.”
“You wouldn’t hurt her.” I nearly stutter in my panic. “You need her, you need her for Turgot.”
“What do I care about Turgot if we fail? And if I am to replace one, I can as easily replace two.” She digs the blade deeper and Isabella starts sobbing. “Draw it!”
Choking on my tears, I shove the pen in the ink and draw as fast as I can. The point digging and scratching, the ink splattering. Isabella crying behind me, oh my love–
“There,” I yell, holding up the paper, smeared and blotched. “That’s what I drew! And it didn’t work because it’s all a ploy, to make us do what other whores won’t. We haven’t made anything happen, we’ve changed nothing!”
Mémé shoves Isabella aside and lunges forwa
rd, seizing my arm and spinning me face-first onto the floor. Her knee pinning my back, her hand on my neck; she presses down, crushing my face against the wood.
“We’ll see what I can change,” she cries furiously. “Let’s see if I can change your world, eh? Yours and hers and anyone else you have turned with your deceit.”
I buck and kick but I cannot dislodge her, something in my nose is cracking and I cannot breathe and I can feel her tensing against my back–
There is a rush of air, a sickening thud, and her weight disappears. I look over my shoulder to see Mémé fallen on her side; I turn over completely and Isabella is holding the poker in her hand, its tip darkly wet. It takes me a moment to realize she is trembling everywhere, her face pale save for the scabbing blood on her cheek.
Mémé’s body is still.
I start to crawl towards Mémé. If she is dead it will be the gallows for us both…
“No,” Isabella says hoarsely. “Don’t touch her.”
I get to my feet, my head throbbing, my nose hot and tender. “We need to get away.” I sound as if I am speaking through a tube. “There may be money in her desk.”
Isabella only stands there, shaking, her eyes darting from Mémé to me and back again. Carefully I take the poker from her hands, not daring to touch the gouge on her cheek.
Behind us Mémé makes a gurgling sound; we both jump. Still she lies unmoving.
“I’m so sorry,” Isabella whispers then.
“For what? She would have killed us both.”
“For bringing you here.” She is crying again. “I – I changed your sigil. Claire! I changed your sigil. Only I could not find the words to confess it, she was enraged, it frightened me. But it was me, it was me, I figured out how she made them and I changed yours.”
I can only gape at her.
“I changed your sigil,” she repeats more slowly. “I couldn’t bear it any more, watching them go to you, knowing I did this to you. You were just so beautiful that day, so beautiful and sad, and I thought I could help you, give you some, some food, money, I don’t know. And then Mémé thought… well.” She wipes at her eyes, takes a shuddering breath. “I made it say you would leave Paris, leave and be happy and never again have to do this.”
Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History Page 14
