Dark and Deepest Red

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  Lala can smell their sweat, sharp and sour, and the blood their feet leave on the stones. By the way some dance, the physicians can tell they have broken ribs and loins, cracked bones in their toes, twisted ankles that will take months to mend. And still, they dance on, in clogs, or in boots, or barefoot.

  Enneleyn slips alongside Lala, looking neat as the white and gold stars embroidered on her dress. As always, the mere sight of her makes Lala feel disarrayed. She feels the sudden impulse to brush her own hair and straighten her skirts.

  Melisende and Agnesona follow behind her. Veil and wimple cover the sisters’ heads, as though they are married women.

  They are so proud of their hair that to witness them hiding it seems as odd as a cat wearing breeches.

  “Is there some new fashion I don’t know about?” Lala asks Enneleyn.

  “You haven’t heard?” Enneleyn says. “Within the city walls, all those with red hair must cover it, married or not.”

  “Why?” Lala asks.

  “The dancers go into fits at the sight of red. They cannot stand to see the color of Christ’s blood.” Now Enneleyn whispers. “It’s the devil’s way of keeping the women from being brought back to the Lord. If they see it”—she glances right and left to be sure no one is listening—“they become violent against their own bodies and others. They scream that they are drowning in a red sea of blood. So the council forbids any shade of red for all but the priests. Cloth, jewels, even hair.”

  Over the noise of the square, the beating of the women’s feet against the stones, comes a new pronouncement. Not from the priests, but decided by the magistrate and his commission, the ammeister and stettmeister, the councils of men who command this city, men who wear their wealth and family names as comfortably as dyed tunics or Swiss leather boots.

  From so deep in the crowd, Lala cannot catch all of the crier’s words. She wants to reach into the air and snatch them from above her head, but finds only a few at a time.

  The council has sought the wisdom of the physicians’ guild …

  … a natural affliction, born from overheated blood …

  Lala cannot help sighing with relief.

  It is an explanation free of witches or the devil.

  … excess heat in the body, which must be released …

  Lala glances between Enneleyn and Geruscha, who never exchange more than a curt greeting. Their polite but chilled distance should make Lala feel even more favored, but it only reminds her what she is to the burghers’ daughters. A curiosity. Perhaps the daughter of some distant nobleman. These girls with smooth, pale fingers wear cloth that she and Alifair dye, and their fathers write in Tante Dorenia’s best ink.

  At least Enneleyn shows more effort than Melisende and Agnesona. She at least greets Geruscha and Henne, while the sisters’ lips curl into twin sneers as though they might dirty the hems of their skirts.

  How quickly Lala would lose their affection if they knew what she and Tante hide.

  … the only cure will be for them to dance day and night until the affliction passes …

  The words cure and affliction snap Lala’s attention back to the crier.

  “There will be”—at last comes the loud crescendo of the announcement—“a great dance.”

  A murmur of excitement fills the crowd.

  “The trouble is dancing,” Lala says to Enneleyn, “and the cure is more dancing?”

  Before Enneleyn can answer, a tall man’s shadow draws their eyes.

  The sergeant named Sewastian pauses before them.

  Melisende and Agnesona flicker their eyelashes at him. Sewastian is a handsome man, younger than his hard face would suggest, with a carved jawline and eyes as blue as dayflowers. Ever since he became a widower, the city’s maids have wondered who he might marry next. Melisende has told Lala, no less than three times, that his long nose speaks of virility.

  Sewastian looks among them, as though he cannot tell them apart. As though they do not look as different as any six girls in Strasbourg. Geruscha, with her pretty but serious features and rush-colored hair. Henne, with her tan forehead and her chignon so tight it seems to pull at her face. Melisende and Agnesona, who, with their covered heads, have only pale green eyes to give color to their faces. Enneleyn, with her linen-flax hair.

  And Lala, in all her shades of brown.

  “Lavinia Blau,” Sewastian says.

  Her own name lands with a stone’s weight.

  Lala swallows, and steps forward.

  Emil

  It was stranger than the year bats hovered over backyards, fluttering alongside hummingbirds in the half dark before sunrise and after sunset. Stranger than the year that points of light, like the embers off a sparkler, drifted around houses where babies would soon be born.

  Tonight, Rosella Oliva had kissed him. It was as much unexpected magic as anything that ever came to Briar Meadow.

  He could feel the oddness of the season in the night air. It held the bitter tang of ashes, and the clean cold of the sky. The bright eye of the almost-full moon winked between clouds, like it knew he could still taste her lip gloss on his mouth.

  That was what he wanted to hold with him as he fell asleep.

  Instead, he dreamed of a time centuries earlier. He dreamed of the corner of Alsace, where his family lived five hundred years ago. The stone bridges and towers, the shuttered windows overlooking the canals, the city walls that shortened the daylight hours.

  And the fever his father had told him about a long time ago, the plague of uncontrollable dancing, stranger than anything that had ever happened in Briar Meadow. In his dreams, he could hear their steps striking the stone. He could smell the dust they were kicking up, and the blood on their heels.

  He could catch the smallest glimpse of a dark-haired, brown-skinned girl, and the salt-sting of her horror as she watched it all.

  When he woke, sitting up fast and breathing hard, the feeling didn’t leave him. Ancestors whose names he didn’t know seemed to rise and fill the dark. Their calls sounded like the far-off shriek of the wind. Their fear came so sharp he thought they were dragging him back across five hundred years.

  He slowed his breath.

  Yes, he still had his Romanipen. That meant knowing his family’s dead a little better than most gadje knew theirs. But ever since that day he’d listened on the stairs, he’d stayed clear of his parents trying to tell him about their family’s history. If it got into him, it could spill out of him again, like those things he never should have said at school.

  He couldn’t tell what he didn’t know. And he didn’t know their names, the name of this girl, because he hadn’t let his father tell him.

  Strasbourg, 1518

  The bailiff is a man more imposing in posture than body, but the sight of him still makes Lala’s neck tighten.

  “It is no secret that this town has fallen under a sort of madness,” he says, gesturing at a plain wooden chair.

  As she lowers herself, her spirit feels as though it is drifting from her body.

  The room is small, sun streaming in from a single window, high and narrow.

  In the center stands a table upon which a hundred men and women have probably signed confessions they could not even read.

  “Whenever such afflictions reveal themselves,” the bailiff says, “there are always rumors.”

  Lala shuts her eyes, bracing for the charge of witchcraft, for the entrance of the friar who will extract her confession.

  The bailiff walks back and forth, his fine, heavy boots sounding his steps. When he stops, he looks at her and says, “There are those who whisper that you are not true Strasbourgeois. And neither is your aunt.”

  Lala’s stomach turns over.

  It is not just her.

  It is Tante Dorenia with her.

  Lala cannot help it; she turns over her hands on her lap, her fingers still blue-green from the woad dye.

  Richest blue from those yellow and green plants. Perfect black from the oak galls. To
Strasbourg’s finest merchants, such color must seem a kind of alchemy. Magic in fine blue and ink black.

  And in the hands of two women, it will be called witchcraft.

  “The magistrate,” the bailiff says, “has no wish for this matter to continue, but only to see it resolved.”

  At the word magistrate, Lala’s heart feels brittle as an icicle.

  She will be blamed for la fièvre. She will be drowned, or hanged, or burned. She cannot stop herself from imagining the chill of the water, the tightening of the rope, the vicious teeth of the flames.

  And Tante. The thought of her bibio being dragged to the stake or gallows leaves her breathless.

  She opens her mouth to confess, to keep Tante Dorenia out of it, when the bailiff speaks again.

  “As you know,” he says, “it has been some time since we have forbidden die Zigeuner within our city walls.”

  Lala’s heart stops, pivots, turns.

  The words bring the echo of a common law, not just here but throughout Alsace and far past the Vogesen. The one that chased her and Tante from Riquewihr, and so many other families from their homes.

  Wer Zigeuner schädigt, frevelt nicht.

  Whoever harms a Gypsy commits no crime.

  These few words remind Lala of what she has known her whole life: that gadje will get away with killing their men and burning their houses. And the law provides generous room for it.

  This is why there is no friar. She has been brought in on a matter of city ordinance, one the men of the Church must consider beneath them.

  “So you understand our concern with the speculation that you and your aunt…” The bailiff trails off, motioning with his hand for her to complete the thought on her own.

  Lala nods, because it is all she can do.

  And because it is not a lie.

  She does understand.

  Lala’s heart spins faster, like the limbs of the stricken women.

  This is how she will be blamed, her and Tante. They will be like the Jews blamed for the plague a century ago, hundreds slaughtered in this very city, all on an unproved suspicion that they put sickness into the wells. And again, four years ago, so many thrown into jail because someone had to be blamed for the bitter winter.

  Lala stills her breath. Who has pointed to her and Tante’s black hair and their dark eyes and their skin that stays a warm color in winter? She searches the pit of her stomach for any suspicion that it might be Geruscha and Henne. But their strange efforts at friendship persist, and more and more she thinks they do not understand what they saw. So who else? Guilds who do not want Tante Dorenia’s competition? Men who think women should not be in the business of ink and dye at all?

  “Mademoiselle Blau.” The bailiff casts his winter-blue eyes at her. “Are you a woman of die Zigeuner?”

  Lala drags herself from her own fear, calling up the words her aunt told her to say if anything like this ever happened. Tante Dorenia taught them to her until she could repeat them back without flinching.

  Except that Lala has already failed, because Tante Dorenia taught her never to need them.

  Lala’s eyes water, her own eyelashes prickling her. She thinks of the fines, the cropping of hair, and far worse, that so many before them have endured.

  Now, to save Tante and herself, she must deny her mother and her father, the dead in the ground, her own blood and her aunt’s.

  It is the thought of leading Tante away from that imagined execution that steadies her tongue.

  “No,” Lala says.

  “And your mother and your father?” the bailiff asks.

  Lala crosses herself, out of reverence for the dead, but it brings the benefit of seeming like a gesture of shock.

  She replaces her parents’ vitsi, Manouche and Sinti, with the words her aunt gave her.

  “A Frenchman and a German woman,” Lala says, because the bailiff will assume two Roma could not also be French and German.

  The bailiff nods, satisfied with a job done.

  She has said it.

  She has denied her mother, whose heart held the most beautiful fairy tales. She would enthrall children with stories about a čhavo and a princess who glowed gold as the sun, or a young Rom completing an impossible task given by a wicked king or queen. Lala was not old enough to remember them, and whatever small threads live in her, she has now surrendered.

  She has denied her father, who spent his short life mastering the davul-zurna. A man with a musician’s heart, he was such a contrast to his serious, business-minded sister, Dorenia. What would he say of his own daughter now?

  “And you will swear an oath to this, yes?” the bailiff asks.

  He asks as though it is nothing, no more than the oaths sworn for the Schwörtag every year.

  Her lips part to protest, but no words come.

  An oath, one that denies herself and her mother and father.

  She is caught, a moth ensnared in the sticky lace of a web she did not notice. She has flown straight into it.

  She knows, in this moment, three things.

  The first is that she will never tell Tante what has happened in this room. The shame would crush Lala where she stands. Tante taught her the words she has spoken—a Frenchman and a German woman—so she would know how to save herself. But Tante taught her more not to need them, not to be brought into this room in the first place.

  Second, she will bake hyssop into unsalted bread to atone for the words she is about to speak. She will take it onto her tongue, and perhaps the penitence will stop her heart from growing so heavy it breaks her ribs.

  The third is that she cannot touch Alifair again.

  She will put an even wider distance between her and Alifair than he did when they were younger. Now that the magistrate has cast an eye toward Lala, any suspicion could catch him too. If she is not careful—more careful than she has been—the very things she loves about him, that which make him someone who could learn Romanipen, will destroy him.

  Lala readies her tongue to speak, and is sure she can already taste the bite of hyssop leaves.

  Mother and Father, she prays, forgive me. Forgive me. I must live, and I must save the woman who has treated me as her own.

  The hidden altar Lala and Tante made them feels so paltry now. The best cloth they had, the white candle and dish of water, the food brought as earnestly as Lala would have brought her mother flowers she picked; it seems so small compared to what Lala must now do.

  Mother and Father, forgive me.

  The words become a chant through her bones, through the blood she must forswear.

  “Yes,” she forces out, making herself meet the bailiff’s eyes. “Of course.”

  Rosella

  I flew past my parents’ room, both of them asleep, thinking I was staying over at Piper’s.

  I went into the bathroom and soaped up my ankles. I splashed them to bubble up the soap, wondering if maybe I could slip the shoes off like a too-tight ring.

  But the shoes dried as fast as if I’d left them out in full sun, and still did not move.

  I did the same thing in the shower. I let the spray soak my hair and clothes and all of me as I worked to get the shoes damp and pliable. I fluffed up lace sheets of soap bubbles to loosen them from my arches.

  The satin only slicked and then dried. My feet did not squish inside the lining. There wasn’t even space between the cloth and my skin to let water in. The seal was tight as wax over wood. I couldn’t even feel my feet inside the shoes.

  I turned off the water, fevered and out of breath.

  I dried off, and found everything sharp within reach. Scissors. A letter opener. A kitchen knife with a good enough grip that I wouldn’t slip and accidentally impale myself.

  I took each to my family’s beautiful work.

  My hands went at them. My hair, tangled and wet, streamed in my face as I dragged each sharp point through the beaded patterns.

  The blades only left soft imprints on the cloth. And in seconds, even they fa
ded.

  I went at the shoes harder, driving the sharp points into the cloth, pulling them across the beading.

  They did not give.

  The scissors, the letter opener, the knife left no cut in the fabric.

  I kept at them until I wore myself out, my heartbeat and breath so hard and fast I fell to the bathroom floor, the red shoes dragging me down. They felt heavy as iron. They had such weight, and fighting them took so much of me, that they pulled sleep over me like heavy curtain.

  These shoes would not be pried off, or torn away, or even slashed.

  They had sealed to me, like they had become part of my skin.

  Strasbourg, 1518

  Lala walks into the light. She senses the stain of her own words, a weight on her skin. But in the same moment she feels how she has been stripped bare of something that once kept her to the earth. It is as though, all her life, she was held together with a little bit of the stars, and now that part of her has been spooled away. It has been drawn back into the sky. And now what remains of her is crumbling to ash.

  The sun and the noise leave her dizzy and unmoored. The clatter and rasp of a wooden stage going up at la Place Broglie is so loud she feels the bones in her head are coming apart.

  A rounded thing, warm and soft but with a hard core, strikes Lala’s skirt.

  She reels back, and it tumbles to the ground.

  A pear, bruised and sun rotted. It has gone mushy enough to leave a wet, sticky trail on her skirt.

  For a moment, Lala wonders if it has fallen from a cart.

  Until she notices the woman staring at her.

  The miller’s wife. The mother of a girl who dances. She stands with her hands dropped to her sides, her fingers wet from the rotted fruit.

  A spoiled apple strikes Lala’s hip. She does not see where it came from.

  She faces the stares of the close-gathered crowd. The preparing of the stage for the great dance carries on, but those not hurried along in the bustle pause to watch. The fishermen bringing up pike perch and bream from the water. The currier fitting boots. The apothecary taking money for a tincture he insists will guard against the fever. Even the ladies in their striped skirts, attendants pausing at their heels.