Barbara shook her head to dismiss the idea. LeFevre was right. “It still wouldn’t hurt to give him some experience with properties. And no, I never meant him to become an armin. But it’s a path he can understand—a prize he can value. When a boy dreams of bold knights and dashing musketeers, you can’t tempt him by pointing out that a courtier will go farther in finance than fencing.”
She thought back to the previous summer when she had met her Chamering cousins for the first time. “I wanted to give something back. My Aunt Heniriz had her full share of the family’s misfortunes. Why shouldn’t her son have a share in the legacy it brought me? There’s nothing she herself needs or wants from me, but Brandel was such a fish out of water. I could see he was meant for something beyond mending horse harness and bringing in the harvest.”
“It’s honest work, you know,” LeFevre said. “Bringing in the harvest.”
Barbara winced. She knew better than most how precarious the value of noble birth could be.
“Well, it’s settled then,” she said, ending the conversation. “Brandel can be your eyes whenever you need him. We’ll find someone here in Turinz to oversee the survey before we leave and then an accountant in Rotenek. The priest was suggesting a man named Akermen. A local family but he’s had some schooling at the university.”
Chapter Three
Serafina
Early September, 1823
The stones of the chapel held the chill close, even late into the afternoon. Serafina pleaded through her shivers, “We could try again tomorrow. Surely there’s time.”
Summer had passed here at Saveze, there was no denying it. Summer had passed and she was no closer to touching the divine, to reaching the ears of the saints and having them hearken. She had spoken the right words, inscribed the right names, touched the relics and lit the candles, and except for the burning of the wick, the chapel had remained dark. Except for the rustling echo of her movements, it had remained silent. When Margerit Sovitre had spoken the same words, the space flared with the bright swirling fluctus and echoed with whispering power in answer to her prayer. And for her…nothing.
Margerit reached out a hand to take hers and steady her as she rose from the embroidered kneeling cushion before the altar. “We’re leaving tomorrow. Time enough to try something different when we return to the city.”
Serafina stared at where their hands were clasped, Margerit’s pale fingers against her dark ones, like an echo of the presence and absence of the mystic light. She shook her head and drew back her hand. Rotenek would drive them apart.
She’d come to Alpennia nearly a year past in search of a teacher and had been plunged unexpectedly into a labyrinth of politics. She’d told herself it was no wonder that her studies made little progress over the winter. This summer should have been different. Here at Saveze, immersed in Margerit’s little community of scholars…if she could come no closer to learning how to turn her visions into truth here, what hope would there be back in the city?
“Let me try one more time,” she begged.
“Serafina, this is useless. We need to find a different approach.”
Useless. The word cut through her memories. Once again, Paolo’s voice rang in her ears. What did I marry you for? You’re useless! Your father promised me you could see visions and work mysteries. And what do I get? You can’t learn the simplest charm. Useless!
She had married Paolo for so many reasons: to escape the constant reminder of her mother’s death, to grasp a chance to see something of the world beyond her one small corner, because he was charming and witty, because even in as cosmopolitan a city as Rome, not all men would be indifferent to the color of her skin. But above all else, she had married him because he promised to teach her to work mysteries.
Useless.
She thought he’d wanted her—wanted more than the promise of her skills. He had praised her beauty teasingly and he’d brought her a gift: a book about the interpretation of visions. They’d talked late into the evening about the nature of miracles and the study of thaumaturgy. There had been a connection, she thought. A bond of passion both of mind and body. When it was time for him to leave for Naples, he’d asked Papa for her hand and she had agreed.
They’d lived an itinerant scholar’s life in a series of cramped apartments that she did her best to make into a home. She learned to cook the dishes he liked, and managed the money he carelessly kept in a tin box for everyday expenses, and put his notes and papers in order. Paolo laughed at all the things she didn’t know. Everyday things that her mother had never learned in all the years after she came to Rome, and that her father had never thought important. He laughed, but he never taught her better. The only thing he taught her was magic. The only thing he tried to teach her.
She was slow, clumsy. The lessons that had begun in such excitement became an ordeal. You must have stumbled over a word. You haven’t performed the gestures correctly. Try again.
He had her learn the rituals as she must have learned her first prayers, back in the days before her baby-tongue had given way to Romanesco. Word by word, without sense or meaning behind them. She read through all of Paolo’s most precious books, trying to understand how she was failing. It felt like the times she had looked through her father’s Ge’ez prayer book. She could sense the power in the words, but they made no sense. The fluctus that bent ever so slightly to Paolo’s rituals lay quiet and silent under her hands.
You’re useless! What good are your visions if you can’t get me what I need?
The first time Paolo left her, she was terrified. After two days she ventured to the library where he’d been working to ask after him. They said he was traveling to Rome. The French who occupied the city were gathering treasures for their emperor and Paolo had gone to…to what? They weren’t certain. But he had gone to Rome and hadn’t thought that she might like to visit her father, or even that she might want to know when he would return. Every evening she counted over the money in the strongbox, afraid of how long it would need to last. Then one evening he was there again, dusty and tired and demanding to know why there wasn’t any fresh bread in the house.
She’d cried and begged him never to leave her alone again. He’d comforted her awkwardly, and the next day he’d taken her to speak to a man in an office who’d shown her columns of figures. She never before realized the sums that made possible Paolo’s carelessness with money. She’d thought he was the poor scholar that his clothes and habits proclaimed him. His banker had been instructed that she was to have his authority to draw an allowance and he didn’t care to be pestered in the future over expenses.
They moved to Palermo. The next time he disappeared, it was for a month. One of his colleagues came to ask about some papers. Serafina found the unfinished work, and promised its completion. This time he returned empty-handed, angry and tired. He began the lessons again, drilling her in precise repetitions of word and gesture. Again he gave up in frustration.
She knew more by then of why he wanted her skills—the skills she didn’t have. Paolo hunted books: books of magic, manuscripts with bits of rituals, thaumaturgical secrets. And she was meant to have been a hound to scent them out. He had divinations to find their traces through maps and letters, charms to call power to power in libraries and archives so that he could steal a march on his rivals. And more than that, she was to have helped him unlock the rituals, once he’d found them. His own vision came in fits and hints, hers in a blaze of glory. She was to have been the means of his triumph, but it was a blaze of light with no heat. She was useless.
The curious interest he had shown in her body when they were first married had faded to something she recognized as boredom. She was too proud to beg for his touch, even as her right. If there had been other women, she would have raged at him. Perhaps there were. She didn’t want to know.
Back to Rome. She was ashamed to tell her father of her failure when they met now and again. Instead they spoke of Paolo’s new work. The Vatican archives stolen by
the French were being returned and the work of cataloging was more than the priests and clerks could manage, and so they helped set to the work. Paolo thought it a good hunting ground and left the tedious parts to her. Years passed.
And then, in an incoming shipment of documents, she had stumbled across a bundle of colorful notes and diagrams labeled “Observations on the Tutela of Saint Mauriz, Rotenek” and seen a woman’s name—Margerit Sovitre—scrawled across the bottom of each page. For the first time in all her study of mysteries, those notes gave her a glimpse of how they could make sense. How the pieces came together and fit each other. She saw her own visions echoed in the sketches and the hunger burned again.
Paolo would have delighted in those papers, but Paolo was gone once more, leaving her to labor in his place. This time he had gone to Paris itself. Not everything that had been taken had been returned. As more of the crates and inventories were sorted out, Paolo’s mood had darkened. And then he was gone, hunting whatever it was he hadn’t found in the shipments. Serafina hadn’t dared ask whether he hunted it for the Pope or for himself. If the prize were easily found, he’d be gone for months. If the quest were more difficult, a year. Perhaps two, he couldn’t say.
Serafina had made plans idly at first, only daydreaming. Alpennia was not an impossible distance. A ship to Marseilles, a barge following the rivers or even a public coach. The bankers never questioned when she asked for letters of introduction. Paolo wrote rarely, but a message arrived saying that he would certainly not return before the spring, perhaps longer. She set all in motion before doubt could creep in. Why shouldn’t she run madly off after her own prize, as he had so often? And if he returned to find her gone, then he could know the pain of wondering when—if—she would return.
* * *
The cold of the chapel drew her back from her memories. Serafina began gathering up the apparatus from that last working. It gave her an excuse to turn her face away. Margerit wasn’t fooled. She felt Margerit’s hand on her arm, turning her back toward the light from the candles on the altar.
“You have a true talent, Serafina. A talent for seeing—for perceiving how the world spins. That’s the first step,” Margerit insisted. “Think how much harder this would be if you hadn’t the skill to see the results of your efforts.”
“But there are no results! Nothing I’ve ever worked has had any results. I can see the currents stirred up by your slightest prayer. But mine? No one hears mine.” She tried not to hear pity in the younger woman’s voice. Margerit, at least, was willing to keep trying. Paolo had given up ten years past.
“The saints hear your prayers, never doubt that.” Margerit’s voice was softly confident.
“Is that faith speaking or knowledge?” Serafina gathered the candles and parchments and all the other small objects into a writing case then genuflected to the altar as they turned to leave.
“Serafina.” Margerit was more hesitant now. “Miracles aren’t granted to everyone. It isn’t a judgment on you.”
No, miracles weren’t granted to everyone. But to enough. Any parish congregation would have enough members whose prayers could turn the ears of the saints to make their mysteries true and effective. And most of them hadn’t even the vision to know it, taking all on faith. That was the curse of visio: that—no longer needing faith—you could see the holes in the world.
Serafina held out the writing case and asked, “Do you mind taking this back? I’d…I’d like to walk by myself for a while.”
Margerit’s concern stayed unspoken. “Don’t be too late. It’s our last supper all together for now.”
There was a path that led from the gates of the manor down along the riverside and Serafina followed it aimlessly. On a still, early autumn evening such as this, she could see the trace of power in the prayer a nightingale raised in the branches, singing its praise to the one who gave it wings. The whole world around her was awash with mystical currents, from the gentle flow that coiled around the village church as the bells tolled out the hours, to the soft constant glow from the Orisules’ convent, bright as the white of their walls, to the cold and ominous fingers that reached down from the mountain peaks like drifts of fog-waves breaking over a jetty. Yet when she reached out to grasp that power, it was as insubstantial as mist. She could see it, but was cut off from its touch. No, not cut off. She could be transported by the miracles others worked. There had been that time in Palermo… It was only her own hands, her own mouth that had no power and no skill.
It hadn’t felt like this when she was a girl. Visions had been a joy, a gift, a promise. A tiny white-walled room, with the blazing Roman sun slanting through the shutter slats to form stripes on the carpet. She sat cross-legged on a cushion, practicing her letters on a slate. Her mother sang as her dark hands lifted up another sheet of injera from the griddle. Serafina knew it was a charm-song, even without understanding the words, by the way the light danced in harmony. In memory, the visions mixed with the aroma of the spices and the sharp scent of clove and sandalwood in the oil Mama used to dress her hair. The magic seemed to dance in time with the swaying of her gauzy white shawl that somehow never slipped from her shoulders or fell into her work.
And when the dancing sun-stripes slanted just so, Papa would come through the door, looking all-important in his dark suit just like the Roman men in the world outside, with her brother Michele trailing after him, carrying his books and writing case. Papa and Mama would say the prayers together in the tongue she’d never learned, and she and Michele would repeat the Pater in Latin and the everyday prayers in Romanesco—there was no Coptic church here and she and Michele had been baptized by the Catholic priests. Then there would be the sharp sour taste of injera and the rich spiciness of the stew wrapped within it. Papa would sigh and say he could almost think himself back in Mekelle at their wedding feast. He and Mama would be sad together for a time, remembering, but it was their sadness, not hers.
In time, the magic faded from her mother’s work. She stopped singing the old songs. Serafina hadn’t noticed, for the visions still came in church. They would stand together in the back and Mama would say her own prayers quietly, but Serafina would drink in the way the lights of the candles and the colored windows rose up in a great symphony of movement, answering the priests as they celebrated the Mass, or flowing throughout the crowd of worshippers during the special holidays. When she gasped and exclaimed at the sight, Mama would grasp her hand and murmur, “My little angel!” and Papa would smile with pride and say, “You will become a learned woman!”
And then she was the one who carried Papa’s books and writing case to the wonderful place where he translated books for the priests, for Michele was apprenticed to a carpenter. She learned languages and studied the scriptures and read whatever came to hand while Papa worked. Michele brought home a table and chairs, made with his own hands, so they didn’t have to sit on cushions on the floor anymore, he said. For months Mama stood beside the table to eat, saying the chair hurt her back, but then one day, without a word, she sat.
The next time Michele brought a surprise home, it was a wife. After Giuletta took charge of the household, her mother seemed to shrink into herself, moving aimlessly through the tiny apartment, no longer setting foot outside the door. Serafina blamed herself for how her mother faded. But what could she have done? When Giuletta was overbearing, there was escape in books. And then, one day, Mama had taken to her bed and never risen again.
Mama was gone, and all the magic had left the world with her. Even the memory of her songs, her quiet movements, her scents were swept away by Giuletta’s brisk changes. Papa never talked about it, only sinking deeper into his work. That was why she had grasped at what Paolo offered—the chance to work mysteries for herself. She’d never learned her mother’s charm-songs, or the other rituals Mama had used to make their home a place of magic and beauty. But if she could learn, she could have it all back.
* * *
That evening was bittersweet. They had formed a
little schola here in the hilly backlands of Alpennia. In these close quarters, removed from the formality of the city, some of her fears had been left behind. Yet at odd moments, she would look around and feel herself lost and alone. She had dreamed last night that she looked in her mirror and a strange pale face looked back at her. Rotenek was no Rome for variety, but it was not the relentless sameness of Saveze.
Serafina looked around the table at this last dinner together. There was Margerit, her heart-shaped face and chestnut curls making her look far too young to be presiding over them all. And Margerit’s daunting baroness, blade-sharp with understated power and authority in every movement, whom Serafina still hadn’t dared to address by her Christian name. Baroness Saveze presided over their gathering like a heroine out of legend, her conversation darting equally between philosophy and farming and the dreadful state of the mountain roads this summer. Next sat the red-haired Akezze who turned schoolmaster over them all so easily. When they returned to Rotenek, Akezze would return to a formal distance, no longer the admired philosopher but a struggling tutor of rhetoric to aspiring young men. The Vicomtesse de Cherdillac had long since teased her into addressing her as Jeanne, even before this shared holiday. Hers was a more comfortable and earthy presence, though even the traces of silver in her dark hair would not stretch the point as far as “motherly.” And there was Jeanne de Cherdillac’s lover Antuniet, whose forbidding features discouraged friendship but who had little patience with strict propriety. If Baroness Saveze gave the impression of a golden-haired knight, Antuniet matched her as a raven-haired sorceress, softening only in Jeanne’s presence. In Rotenek, Antuniet and Jeanne would once again take up their precarious infamy: too open in their devotion to each other to be entirely respectable, yet brilliant enough at their chosen positions that most of society was willing to look the other way. But there they couldn’t enjoy the careless affection they knew here at Saveze.
Mother of Souls: A novel of Alpennia Page 4
