Years ago, they would both go down so far that there was no light, because neither of them wanted to be the first to move back toward the surface. That was everything down there, deciding your own distance from the sun, letting it go and then finding it again. Fingertips brushing each other’s skin in ways you could pretend never happened once you came up for air.
It was dark enough now to pretend none of this was happening either.
Except now Rosella kissed him. Hard, in a way so lacking in hesitation that it would go with him into his dreams.
His first out-of-nowhere thought was that his glasses got in the way less than he’d always thought they would. But it burned out and faded as she ran the fingers of one hand through his hair, and pressed the other against his back.
Maybe the glimmer came every year. But something this year caught on the air. It was bitter as smoke, and sweet as the raw crystals of honey. It was a current arcing between them. It was the moment that turned a solution from one color to the next, amber to red, fast as a blink. It was the slight change in chemistry that let algae blooms grow on the ocean, bright as a tide of gas flames.
And he couldn’t be sure, not with his eyes closed, but for a second, he could have sworn he caught the glimmer above them flashing as red as Rosella’s shoes.
Strasbourg, 1518
“Help me with this,” Tante says, dragging the wooden table.
Lala takes the other side. “What are you doing?”
Tante conducts it toward the door like a battering ram at a fortress gate, and Lala has no choice but to trot backward.
“Just until we’re done with the chopping,” Tante says.
“We prepare vegetables out of doors now?” Lala asks, keeping the table from crashing into the frame. Sometimes the house seems so brittle that a stubborn enough cow could knock it over.
“It’s the raw garlic and leeks,” Tante says, setting down her side in the grass. “The smell is making me ill.”
“You always loved that smell,” Lala says.
She brings her aunt a handful of dried cherries, to settle the stomach.
“Do you want parsley?” Lala asks. “To chew on.”
“No, I do not want parsley,” Tante snaps.
Lala cannot blame her aunt for her foul mood. The summer is so deep and harsh it seems molten, as though the air might spark and catch. It is the kind of blazing July that will not soften until September. The back of Lala’s neck is damp where her hair falls against it. A dew of sweat is forever beading Alifair’s forehead.
They have almost finished with the onions and carrots when they see the women traveling the lane.
Lala dries her leek-damp hands on her apron and nears the path.
Among what little passing talk she can distinguish—mentions of the canon priests, of heaven and hell, of a blaze of light brought by a falling star outside Ensisheim—one word rises above the others.
Possessed.
The word flares inside Lala’s chest. It brings with it the buzzing sense of a warning, the sounds that come a moment before wasps swarm.
And then a name, a name that must haunt Alifair’s dreams.
Delphine.
Lala runs to catch up, her guilt like pebbles in her shoes.
“Lavinia,” Tante calls down the lane.
But Lala does not stop. None of them stop.
She follows the dirt road until Strasbourg proper rises from the fields and forest. The city walls cast their shadows. The roofs and gables of the wealthy Strasbourgeois top the crowded lanes. The spires of churches pierce the blue, and the single tower of the cathedral soars toward the clouds.
The women in the square move so quickly that Lala cannot count them.
Skirts of wool and linen and hemp fly out from hopping legs. Fine embroidered skirts wilt in the heat, as though the very flowers stitched into the cloth are dying away. Coifs and wimples soak through with sweat. They dance, joyless, on bleeding feet and twisted ankles.
Already their hose has torn. Already their shoes are thinning, damp with sweat and the fluid of blisters. The blood of the barefoot paints the stone.
Mothers turn their daughters’ faces away, worried that a glance might afflict them, like the old plagues so easily spread they passed with a look. A few fathers stand their sons to watch, lecturing them about the evils of immoral women.
The relatives of these women, some highborn, some no wealthier than Lala and Tante, make snatching tries at grabbing their loved ones from the fray. But the force of this dance makes the women too quick, their paths too strong. And if they are caught for more than a few moments, they scream as though the hold is burning them.
Lala catches the breath of that word. It carries on the murmuring voices of the crowd.
Possessed.
It seems the only word to explain it, how a few of the most godly women within the city walls have been afflicted with this strange dance. Cateline, the book binder’s wife, who offered milk to a journeyman’s infant son; the mother’s breasts were dry until a month after she gave birth, and they could not afford to hire a nurse. Frederuna, whose knees bleed from nights of saying paternosters. Berchte and Brida, the sisters who bake bread for those who cannot afford it.
And Delphine.
There she is, spinning at the center.
Delphine, a woman thought strange for how she knots her apron strings when nervous, but a woman seen in mass as often as any wife in Strasbourg.
Possessed.
The word is the sudden prick of a needle on Lala’s finger.
Possessed.
It echoes in Lala every time she flinches, wondering if Strasbourg’s wives are truly flicking their eyes toward her, or if she is only imagining so.
Possessed.
Even Lala cannot deny how it looks, as though these women have demons within them, tormenting them into this frenzy.
Delphine spins fastest of them all, her feet bleeding the most, her face streaked with dirt and salt. She throws her long arms and thin legs, her skirt flying like spilled milk. She leaps and turns, as though her body is letting loose some spirit within her. Her linen cap has soaked through with sweat.
The watching crowd grows by the minute. Merchants cram alongside hawkers, priests with coiffured hair next to tradesmen. Burghers with their jewels and silk gowns sidle near fishmongers if it will give them the best view.
Delphine’s husband tries to take hold of her. Her sons try to still her. The strongest men to be found, masons and blacksmiths, lend their help trying to pen her in.
But with each twist of her body, she escapes. With the force of her movement, she breaks from their grasp. She keeps on with her dance.
They plead with her. They order her to stop.
She keeps on.
Her fervor and passion fall on Lala’s skin heavier than the day’s heat. Her face shows no joy. No satisfaction at disgracing her husband, nor the celebrating air of some festival dance.
She carries the look of a saint in stained glass. Pained but transcendent. Eyes cast toward heaven. As though her body remains among them but her spirit has flown.
This is the expression gilding her face the moment before her heart gives. She drops, one hand reaching toward heaven as she falls.
Then she is gone from them all.
Lala can see the life leaving the woman, like a wisp of smoke.
In a hushed moment comes the crowd’s understanding. Before their eyes, a woman has danced herself to death.
Screams rise through the watchers, as though the sound is a thing being passed from one tongue to the next. As each onlooker realizes what they have witnessed, the horror tears a gasp from each of their throats.
Those screams, the clipped breaths, turn over in Lala’s brain in the hours that follow, as the sun falls toward the blue-green ridges of the Vogesen.
And that night, she lives it all again, as though the scene plays before her.
They will not rest, says the crowd in her dreams.
They will not stop for food or drink, the onlookers whisper.
Their places go empty at mass.
See, they are bewitched.
Lala’s dreams tumble toward the moment of Delphine falling, the instant of her soul fleeing toward the sky, leaping silhouettes at her back.
Lala wakes to the moon hanging low.
Bewitched. That word leaves even more of a chill on Lala’s sleep-damp back than the word possessed.
She finds Alifair working by the light of a single candle. The glow lights his face, showing him tense and haunted.
She wonders if he too dreams of a flailing woman whose form scatters into ten more, like light thrown through water drops. Or perhaps he dreams of Delphine lowered into the earth, the funeral shroud offered to the Church, the green-pine smell of rosemary wreaths sharpening the air.
Alifair presses a dye-darkened pestle into an oak gall, and the shell cracks, the inside crumbling like meringue. The darkened center sticks to the pestle like crystallized honey.
Lala and Tante have tried grinding other things for pigment. Alder and blackberry. Walnuts and meadowsweet. Peach stones and vine. But each makes an ink more gray, not the deep purple or black as rich as an autumn night.
And none of them break as the oak gall, into a hundred pieces with a hard first shove of the pestle.
Lala tries to put her arms around Alifair, to stroke a hand down his back.
“Please don’t,” he says, mixing a jar of water and rusted nails. “You’ll distract me.”
He usually says such words with flirtation. They both know one lapse in attention can ruin a batch of iron gall ink. A bit too much rust, too little acid, and the ink will turn green rather than purple-black.
But now the words come with a regretful edge.
After a long quiet, after grinding a few more oak galls, Alifair says, “Henne told me thirteen dance now, maybe more.”
It is more. Lala already knows.
Alifair pours the solution over the ink base, measuring the way Tante does, this delicate art of balancing tannins and astringents. “We should have said something.”
“We couldn’t,” Lala whispers. “You know that.”
He leaves the mixture to soak. “Tell that to Delphine’s children.”
Rosella
Red shoes. One pair of red shoes I’d sewn back together, and this fall had become more than the bright, almost-lemon smell of rain on leaves. It became more than that spice I could never quite place, as though the trees got their color from being dusted in chili powder.
This fall had become kissing Emil Woodlock, who I had never thought of kissing before tonight. I walked home from the reservoir with the taste of his mouth on mine, and the feeling of the red shoes sparking something into me.
I got so lost in thinking of all this, in licking my own lips to see how long I could feel him there, that I stumbled and pitched forward, like I’d slipped on the rain-glossed leaves.
I tried to get my balance back.
Instead, I slid into the feeling of being dragged from where I stood, like the red shoes were moving without me moving them.
I pressed my feet into the ground.
But the red shoes drove my steps.
They prodded me forward.
The force of them pinched and tore, taking my breath so I couldn’t scream.
In a sudden rush, they dragged me past trees and stones, my feet tripping over roots. They whirled me through the night, their pull as strong as fingers on my ankles.
They were making me dance.
No matter how hard I tried to keep still, I danced.
Even when I threw my body to the ground, the shoes made my feet kick out from me. When I knelt, trying to keep the soles of my feet from touching the undergrowth, the shoes twisted me around. They made me dance on the air as though it were solid as ice.
This was not the delicate turn of the music box ballerinas Sylvie and Piper had when they were little.
This was not the soft mischief the red shoes had been sprinkling over Briar Meadow.
This was a dance as hard and violent as a possession. It had all the fury of vengeance. I felt it in the jerking force with which the shoes led my body.
I reached for them, trying to pull them off.
They wouldn’t let go of me.
I tried to slide a finger between my heel and the cloth of my right shoe.
It didn’t catch. My finger couldn’t find its way into the space. It glanced off the velvet at the back of the slipper.
I grabbed the shoe by the sole.
It didn’t give.
I tried to pull the left shoe off my heel.
It stayed.
I tried knocking the back of one foot with the toe of the other. They would not come off.
I tried prying them away. They wouldn’t budge. I tried to jam my fingers between the arch and the lining. But there was no give, no space, not even between the side of my foot and the shoe’s soft inner wall.
The red shoes would not come off.
I clutched at the ground, digging my fingers into the hardening earth.
But the shoes kept me moving, dragging me by my ankles.
They danced me through the trees, pulling me over roots that bruised my shins and fallen branches that snagged my jeans. They danced me to where the trees thinned again, up to the edge of the county road.
The desperate hope bloomed in me that maybe the woods were doing this. Maybe the second my feet touched the pavement, the shoes would let me go.
But they dragged me toward the centerline, red following the double yellow. They flitted over the asphalt, gleaming with oil sheen.
The first glimpse of headlights broke the darkness.
I looked down at the shoes, willing them to dance me back into the trees.
The headlights grew, turning from far-off lamps into twin moons.
Not a car.
A semi, the kind that came through hauling produce.
My heartbeat grew hard in my throat.
I tried to resist the shoes’ pull, but in this moment, my feet weren’t mine. They fought my effort as much as I fought the red shoes.
The shoes danced me away from the centerline and into the truck’s path. They whirled and spun me until my hair was a veil over my face.
I slipped into the space between terror and resignation, between screaming and bracing, shutting my eyes.
It was only then, with me screaming into the oncoming headlights and the blare of the horn, that the shoes turned me out of the way.
They pulled me from the truck’s path, twirling me back into the trees.
Then they went quiet.
They went still, and I fell.
They left me there, crumpled on the undergrowth, fighting to get my breath back, my lungs as lit up as the burning leaves I could smell in the air.
Strasbourg, 1518
“In the name of our Lord, we beseech you,” the priests say, as strong men herd the dancing women onto the carts.
Lala watches, her throat tight as a rope.
Even with the carts penned in on the sides, the women writhe and turn. Some cannot be brought on at all, twisting from even the strongest grasp.
At the crier’s last count, there were thirty-four. Days of dancing have tumbled blond and copper hair from cornets and ramshorns. Brown and black hair has shaken from its braids. Dirt and blood stain the hemp cloth of shifts, the dyed linen of surcoats, the silk of bliauds.
The ringing of bells for Delphine, the announcement of her death, still tinges the air.
“You will be cured, my daughters,” another priest tells the living dancers. “By Saint Vitus, you will find your rest and your salvation.”
Saint Vitus? Lala wonders. The cave of Saint Vitus is in Saverne, at least two days’ walk from Strasbourg. How well will they make the journey when they can barely keep the women on the carts?
The watching crowd fiddles with their hands, restless in the heat.
Whenever they move,
flashes of color show in their palms. Then they close their fingers, and the color vanishes.
Without turning her head, Lala casts her eyes to the side.
They clutch handfuls of bright purple, rich as a queen’s gown.
Another look sharpens the green stalks and violet petals. It comes with the chill of realizing how many eyes are on her, how many Strasbourgeois whisper.
Wood betony.
They all hold wood betony, the flowering herb for protection against the devil and the witches he sends into the world.
Lala’s throat grows dry as a sunbaked stone.
Witchcraft. It has taken only days for the suspicion to bubble from Strasbourg’s houses.
Geruscha shoves alongside Lala, Henne following after.
How plain they look compared to Enneleyn, with the soft brown and dull green of their dresses, their hair tied back in simple chignons. And how plain Lala must seem to Melisende and Agnesona, with her skin that holds brown even in winter, her black hair as coarse as a new harvest of straw, her body that carries its weight low.
Geruscha presses a handful of wood betony into Lala’s palm.
“To ward off the devil,” she says.
“And his demons.” Henne adds a sprig of angelica to Lala’s hand, and crosses herself.
Geruscha and Henne, it seems, fail to notice how many clutch their own sprigs tighter at the sight of Lala. Are they oblivious to all things on this earth? The snubs from the burghers’ daughters? The scorn rippling toward Lala?
Do they even know what they both witnessed at the crab apple tree four years ago?
Lala listens to the current of whispers.
Some say it is the people’s sin that brought this plague. The immorality of loose hair and kissing behind shops has let in the devil, they insist. Or they blame the sky. “The earth has moved across the stars in opposition to the head of Medusa,” an astronomer pronounces, showing his maps of the heavens, “and into the twentieth degree of the Virgin.”
The crowd breathes and moves like an animal. It shifts at its edges as dancing women who cannot be persuaded onto carts approach. It draws back from their pained, distant expressions as much as from their fevered movement.
Dark and Deepest Red Page 5
