The Bee and the Orange Tree

by Melissa Ashley

  Only once did she make the mistake again, her attention slipping from Clotilde when one of the guards coughed. She turned to discover that his head was not a man’s but a dog’s: pointed teeth, and short black fur covering his snout of a nose.

  She blinked, shaking her head to dislodge the mirage. It was not going to be this way. Father Étienne walked ahead of her, and she settled her gaze upon the back of his neck. She squeezed the rosary beads in her fingers and drew in several deep breaths.

  She was ready.

  Marie Catherine

  19 June

  Marie Catherine might have slept until noon, had not Sophie cruelly drawn back the curtains and shaken her by the shoulders. Her maid apologised; she had tried calling her name to no success. There were guests waiting in her chamber – Deidre and Pierre, Theresa and Thierry. She must wash and dress.

  For several tempting moments she considered dismissing her maid and burrowing her aching forehead deep into her pillow, pulling the covers around her tired limbs, letting the tendrils of slumber take her away, their tiny fingers boneless ghosts, white as fish skin.

  She drank the strong coffee Sophie had delivered on her breakfast tray. It was accompanied by fruit and bread, but the thought of pressing the stuff between her teeth, of chewing and swallowing, turned her stomach. After several sips of the thick coffee, the little succubi of sleep began to withdraw and she was able to collect her thoughts. She asked Sophie what to wear, relieved that her maid had anticipated her lack of foresight. Bleary-eyed she moved, more marionette than woman, holding out an arm and then a leg for Sophie to cover and button and tie, first her undergarments and then her black satin gown. Her feet pinched inside their sturdy boots, but she would withstand the pain today. Soon she was dressed, an African beetle, her transparent flying wings folded up and hidden, protected beneath the impenetrable armour of her heavy cape.

  ‘Maman!’ Deidre rushed towards her, her arms extended, her face an open book of concern. She was elegantly dressed, her posture held with supreme poise, but for the terror that glinted like black glass in her eyes. Behind her followed Theresa, her emotions more difficult to ascertain. Her daughters tucked their hands beneath her elbows and walked her to the balcony, where their husbands stood, balancing tea saucers and cups, looking down upon the crowds swarming Rue Saint-Germain. A charge crackled in the air, barely contained, she felt it prickling along the hair of her legs and arms. It was real. Nicola Tiquet’s day of reckoning had arrived, the wheel swinging to a stop, the hags of fate holding aloft their iron shears, the red filaments of Madame Tiquet’s life glistening in the flames of their fiery cave. Her many attempts to adulterate the brew that swirled inside her friend’s bitter cup had been in vain.

  She asked Thierry for the time, surprised to learn that it was past midday. Their party needed to travel to the Place de Grève on the other side of the city, and she had held them up. They longer they waited, the slower and more arduous their passage would be.

  ‘Where is Angelina?’ asked Marie Catherine.

  Theresa clutched her hand, stroking the soft flesh near her thumb. She held her gaze. ‘Do not be alarmed, Maman, but she’s set off already. Perhaps we’ll meet her there.’

  ‘She said you’re not to concern yourself, Madame,’ added Sophie. ‘She prefers to stand with the public.’

  ‘But it’s not safe!’ exclaimed Marie Catherine. She put a hand to her chest, for her heart had suddenly begun to thump painfully. She had hoped Angelina would master her anger and disappointment and join them. Aware of the marshalling tread of tiny insects inside her skin, she became convinced that the hidden nest had been discovered, attacked by the stomping foot of a child, the muzzle of an invading bear. The domestic workers, who never left their underground chambers, who did not venture to forage food, were scurrying hither and thither, moving eggs, amassing forces to protect the vulnerable queen.

  ‘Did she take her mail?’ enquired Marie Catherine.

  ‘The package is gone, Madame,’ replied Sophie. ‘I checked inside her room.’

  With any luck, Angelina would have already made her way to Pierre’s friend’s apartment. She knew the address and was aware of their plans. Marie Catherine muttered a half-hearted prayer that Angelina had recalled her senses and would be waiting for her when she arrived. She would go to her youngest daughter and sit beside her, make an especial effort to comfort her, giving her back some of the strength she had shown her during the past few difficult months.

  Their coach was held up on Pont Saint-Michel, trapped behind a column of carriages; the rows of black canopies, leather membranes stretched over jointed steel bones, recalled to her an illustration of bats; the world had turned upside down, the paved road had become the ceiling of their rocky grotto. The predictions the commentators had published in the newspapers were coming to fruition – all of Paris it appeared, would attend the hanging and beheading. Within striking distance of the Hôtel de Ville, they were forced to stop again, and she closed the curtains of the coach, shutting her eyes, refusing all gestures of comfort from her daughters and their husbands. She felt a palsy seize her limbs. She had grown limp; she would not move. Several attendants had to help her down the stairs, towards the guarded entranceway of the building.

  Pierre had organised for her to be seated at one of the balconies behind the grand ballroom’s four sets of double-doors. She inspected the gathering of associates and friends of the gentlemen whom they had hired the viewing platform from, but could not find Angelina.

  ‘Marie!’ exclaimed Marguerite du Noyer, turning her thin neck to kiss Marie Catherine’s cheeks. ‘How are you bearing up?’

  Marie Catherine gave a short nod, her expression guarded.

  Had she read the papers, enquired Marguerite, her skeletal frame leaning forward, touching her hand. Her cold, flat eyes searched Marie Catherine’s face.

  Marie Catherine replied that she had not found the time, and nor did she care to hear the minutiae of developments in the case. But Marguerite did not seem to hear her. She began to speak of the rogue Cattelain, who had turned himself in to the police, allowing the trial to proceed. His life had been spared, even though he had been found guilty of taking part in the conspiracy to murder Claude Tiquet; instead he had been sentenced to the galleys. ‘Perhaps a harsher fate?’ observed Marguerite. Her friend attempted to engage her in speculating about the fellow’s motives, but Marie Catherine was too distracted to follow her argument, let alone contribute her own opinions on the matter.

  Look at her, poised on the end of her chair, huge black eyes distracted, absently touching her ear as she rambled on, her gaunt arms scissoring wildly, the yellowed husk of her skin. Why, she was like a locust, the spurs on her legs hooked into an ear of wheat, the stem wavering, jerking her helmeted face, mandibles unlocking to feast on the fatty germ of the seed.

  A hand settled on Marie Catherine’s shoulder. She felt the twisting in her stomach uncoil and dissolve. She turned her head, tears welling in her eyes.

  ‘Shall I sit beside you, Maman?’ asked Theresa.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered, her voice choking.

  Wherever was Angelina?

  If only her mind would function properly. She grasped her cane, leaning on the ball of the handle and rising to stand. Gently, she tapped Theresa’s leg; her daughter shifted out of her way. The ballroom heaved with spectators. First her thoughts had grown tangled, and now it seemed that her ears were afflicted. She had been bewitched with the sense of heightened hearing: the whisper of a greeting, the flick of the catch on a fan, the scratch of a fingernail along a stiff collar, the wet smack of a kiss, the scraping of a chair leg, a slurp of cordial, the cracking of a nut, a sigh of exclamation, the buzz of a fly, were all amplified by several orders of magnitude.

  A hunger pain scratched inside her belly, and she pressed on her cane, walking towards the banqueting table laden with canisters of wine and cordial, bowls of grapes, plates of apples and oranges, peaches and apricots. The
ripe skins burned her eyes. She saw that the leaves on some were still attached, and tiny twigs. She imagined below the legs of the table a huge trunk, its limbs forking into smaller and smaller branches and stems. In her ears, at her elbows, near her nostrils, a monstrous buzzing, a clicking and nibbling, and she could see hordes of insects invading the orchard, homing in, piercing the enticing membranes and digging in their tongue parts like tiny surgical tools, until the feast had been utterly consumed.

  She must find Angelina. Stand with her. Sophie had been anxiously shadowing her movements, and she turned, whispering her plan into her ear. Her maid took her arm and they began to tunnel a passage through the densely packed bodies, Sophie in the lead, Marie Catherine close behind, wielding her cane like a wand whenever a tiresome monsieur failed to clear their path. Along the panelled corridors they travelled, and down the curving stairwell. They moved through the colonnaded foyer, avoiding its enormous mirrors and tinkling chandeliers, moving against the flow of people like baubles stuck in a drain.

  The bells of Notre Dame clanged the hour of four o’clock, each chime sending shivers along Marie Catherine’s back. The sky was overcast, an insipid grey. Outside the grand apartment buildings, a plague was descending. Archers mounted on armoured horses sat primed in their saddles, sweeping the crowd for signs of unrest. The scaffold and gibbet, looming like a hideous stage set, were cordoned behind temporary fencing, every few paces stationed with a pair of uniformed guards, itching to draw the pikes and swords gripped in their hands. The hierarchies of the insect kingdom had heralded the call, swooping and swarming, gnats and cicadas, grasshoppers and crickets, the intricacies of their colourful chainmail and familial shields on display. They inched forwards, gaining ground, the pulsing mass adjusting, shifting to allow its parts to assemble as more and more individuals packed together, neat as the microscopic scales on the wings of a moth.

  Hawkers thronged the edges of the assembly, trading their foodstuffs and pamphlets and buttons, trinkets especially stamped to memorialise the event.

  To the east of the scaffold was a heavily guarded corridor, along which the condemned would make their passage. Marie Catherine brandished her cane, unafraid to strike a blow on an offending boot or shin so she could pierce the thickened skin of the crowd and enter its great body. With Sophie she made steady progress, passing a termite clump of clergy, a cluster of red-cloaked magistrates, countless blue-jacketed police guards.

  They had made their way towards the front and centre of the assembly. A brown huddle of nuns signalled hope, and she searched for Angie amongst their pinched faces. There was a struggle to her right, ants descending upon a fallen crumb; a fight had broken out. She kept walking. And then she saw her daughter, her tall frame like a column, a beacon beckoning her closer.

  ‘Angelina!’ she yelled.

  Turning at the sound of her name, she saw her daughter’s pallid face. ‘Maman?’ she cried, reaching out her hand, grasping Marie Catherine’s fingers.

  She kissed Angelina, an immense gratitude filling her veins. Washing out the panic of nerves that threatened to dissemble her. She had made the right choice. She stood beside her, the scaffold mere paces from them, savouring a lunatic fantasy that it was not too late. At any moment a champion would gallop on his white stallion into the Place de Grève, royal pennants whipping, brandishing a decree that announced Nicola’s last-hour pardon.

  Seagulls cawed overhead, and droplets of rain began to spatter. She gazed out at the Seine, convinced that her eyes were deceiving her – its boats and ships and punts had ceased their movements, as if even the city’s industries had paused to mark the momentous day of Nicola’s reckoning. A lazy rumble of thunder made her flinch. Her boots were trod on too many times for her to count. The blast of a military trumpet sounded, and she was united with the assembly, a fibre in the muscles of its colossal neck, contracting as it turned for a better view, its twenty-thousand eyes shimmering like the galerie des Glaces.

  Leading the parade from the Grand Châtelet was a procession of flagellants, their shredded shirts flecked with blood and sweat, mechanically flicking their whips across their shoulders. A sombre cortege of judiciary coaches wheeled behind.

  ‘There she is,’ whispered Sophie, covering her mouth with her hand.

  Her throat too dry to swallow, Marie Catherine watched the tumbrel, a plain wooden cart with two wheels, drawn by two dull nags. A woman, tiny as a doll, dressed from head to toe in white, a man in black vestments standing beside her.

  Behind the humble chariot travelled a hearse led by six black horses, all paid for by Nicola, as was the State’s requirement.

  Another trumpet blast. Marie Catherine’s ears almost rang as the ribbons and filaments of idle chatter dispersed and dissolved like smoke. A terrible silence as the wheels rolled closer. She no longer had to strain to glimpse Nicola. She spied the iron bracelets around her wrists, her fingers clutching the transportation’s wooden railings. Father Étienne – her heart twisted at his dignified, stooped form, the heavy cross dangling from its chain around his neck – held Nicola by the shoulders, guarding her against stumbling.

  She studied Father Étienne as he attended Nicola. Had the hosts been administered? She could not countenance the possibility that Angelina’s merciful plan had not been followed to its last instruction. How tenderly the priest whispered to her friend. His gaze remained on her face, all of his concentration, his minute gestures of care, designed to reduce her suffering. Father Étienne had a gift for allowing one to imagine they were the central concern of his thoughts, that nothing but their heartfelt exchange existed. Had he performed his trick of making the crowds disappear, such that Nicola was only aware of the small sphere of compassion in which he enclosed her?

  She recalled first visiting him, a free woman, six years after her near-arrest, returned to Paris with her two daughters to take up her apartment on Rue Saint-Benoît. He had closed the door to his office and put a finger to his lips, warning her to speak quietly. She had been relieved, and then overcome, when the imaginings that had diverted her during her years of exile, the wish to wind her fingers through his hair, to draw him close to her breast, removing his vestments, feeling the warm skin that stretched over his chest, his heart beating beneath his ribs, the hairs around his nipples, his buttocks, the soft cap of pubic hair above his manhood, inserting her fingers into his mouth … she could only yield when she met his gaze, his own yearning answering hers, his willingness to transgress the covenant he had vowed to obey, melting the pliant wax of her resistance.

  A second tumbrel, in which the condemned servant, Monsieur Jacques Mouer, was being transported, a guard in attendance, rolled to a stop next to Nicola’s. Although her hands were chained, Nicola tried to reach out to touch her former servant. She spoke to the wretched fellow, Mouer’s expression of terror witnessed by the front rows. Their conversation concluded, Nicola bowed her head, Mouer collapsed onto the floor of the tumbrel. An officer unlatched the catch on the vehicle, and Mouer was dragged to his feet, pushed forward and made to climb the steps onto the square, walking several paces to another set of stairs, which lead to the platform and gibbet. He was not a willing condemned man, and had to be helped to climb the stool, shoved and shoved in the side to stand upright. ‘No!’ he moaned, as the sack was placed over his head. The noose was lowered around his neck and he seemed to gain control of his actions. He ceased protesting, no more howls issued from his mouth. The executioner, Monsieur Charles Sanson de Longval, spoke to him. A priest stepped forward, his hand opened on a bible, and prayers were made. In another minute, Monsieur Jacques Mouer’s short life was over. He fell with a great jerk, his neck cleanly broken.

  Marie Catherine, watching with stunned compulsion, let her gaze steal towards Nicola Tiquet. But her friend’s head was bowed low, her expression hidden beneath the gauze of her veil. She felt her chest tighten in dread. She could barely breathe, her throat closing. But for the grace of God it might have been herself, a timid girl o
f nineteen, standing in Nicola’s place. She gripped Angelina’s hand, closing her eyes to shut out the thought.

  It began to pour with rain. Hoods and hats were adjusted, capes gathered around shoulders, the assembly huddling close together. The execution was delayed by a half hour, the priest consoling the condemned with hushed words, the spectators shivering and soaking wet, an ominous impatience swelling.

  One of the guards spoke to Father Étienne, who transferred the message to Nicola that the time had come. She held out her hands, and the chains around her wrists were unfastened. The catch of the tumbrel was opened, and Nicola climbed down the stairs, Father Étienne shadowing her steps. Her posture was straight as the executioner led her to the cushion on which she would kneel to receive the blow of his axe.

  ‘Madame Tiquet,’ preached Father Étienne. ‘Look not on either side of you, but cast your eyes toward heaven, where you are soon to be received. Take this bitter cup, drink of its liquid with the courage that attended Jesus Christ. Resign yourself with just humility to the will of God. Perceive this ordeal with the eyes of faith, as that will more than compensate for the horror that is to be done to your body. This shame is one of the secret treasures of God, and a means for your salvation. Submit to his goodness and acknowledge that he is most merciful. For, after a brief moment of pain, you will purchase eternal peace in his quiet kingdom, where no more storms can arise.’

  ‘I thank you for your consolations and kind words,’ replied Nicola. ‘I shall bear them to the Lord.’

  Monsieur de Longval stood patiently. The young executioner was descended from a long line of state-employed killers. His father and grandfather had both refused to carry out Madame Tiquet’s beheading, for she was high-placed, cultured and beautiful, and Paris was divided over her innocence or guilt.