Dark and Deepest Red

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  Lies that satisfied the bailiff will do nothing in the face of the Strasbourgeois. Any rumor about her and Tante and some lesser Italian prince will crumble to dust. This is a city that slaughtered starving peasants for revolting against their usurers, and Jews for nothing but their faith.

  They say that for all things in heaven, God has created a corresponding match on earth. They say there are as many points of light in the sky as fish in the sea. Lala can only imagine what the Strasbourgeois consider her celestial mirror to be. Some dark star. A glint in a constellation that, as it moves across the crystalline spheres, brings misfortune and deadly magic.

  This is a city where the story they choose to believe about you depends on how well they think of you, and that story can shift as suddenly as the wink of those stars.

  Just as a limp courgette strikes Lala’s leg, a tall, fair-headed girl pushes through the crowd.

  “There you are!” Enneleyn cries, in a voice so pointed Lala knows it is for show. “Do you know how long I’ve gone on looking for you?”

  For a moment, Lala blinks at Enneleyn, unsure if her friend means to distract the crowd from its scorn. Or, if she is really so oblivious as to not know where Lala has been, why she stands in the murk and mire of this disdain, thick as spring mud.

  Which of the two is no simpler to guess than a throw of dice. To a girl used to silk and pearl pins, all the world must wear a shined gloss, like a delicate frost on a yule morning. How easy it would be for such a daughter to overlook anything ugly befalling a girl like Lala. But then, it was Enneleyn who recounted the full story of the color red, of its banning within the city walls. How often men must speak freely before her watching eyes, how empty they must consider her pretty head, when in truth she is always listening.

  The crowd murmurs back to their business, caught by Strasbourg’s most beautiful daughter.

  Enneleyn takes Lala by the arm. “I’ve thought of the perfect dress for you to borrow.” She leans closer, and whispers, “If we believed everything every fishwife ever said of us, we’d never leave our beds.”

  Lala lets Enneleyn pull her along, trying to ignore the glances thrown her way.

  If it is not rotted vegetables, it will be pine cones and acorns next.

  Then, if she does not do exactly as she should, kindling.

  So, on the night of the great dance, the one meant to cure the fever, Lala presents herself to Enneleyn, to Melisende and Agnesona. She offers herself, so they will make her into the sort of girl more likely to be tossed admiring glances than spoiled fruit.

  The sisters fuss over her hair.

  “Is Sewastian so handsome up close?” Melisende asks.

  “Did he say anything about us?” Agnesona asks.

  “I cannot believe you had him all to yourself,” Melisende says, as though Lala met the man in the loft of a barn instead of him escorting her to her own questioning. “I could die of jealousy. My father won’t let me alone with a man until I’m a wife.”

  “Are his eyes so blue indoors?” Agnesona asks. “I bet they were deep as the sea.”

  Before Lala can remind them that she has never beheld the sea, only the canals and the Rhein, Enneleyn sweeps between them.

  Enneleyn throws dresses across the bed and onto chairs. She casts an herb-green gown onto her bed, its weight rippling the red and white roses embroidered into the brocade. She tosses aside one in the golden tones of dried wheat and mustard seed, stitched with leafed vines and red grapes.

  Lala’s heart bends in sympathy to whichever of her family’s maids will have to put them all away, seeing to the wrinkles. But she offers these girls nothing but a grateful smile. If she does not keep herself in the good graces of Strasbourg’s favorite daughters, what little guard she and Tante have left will thin even further.

  It is already threadbare enough.

  Enneleyn holds a wine-colored kirtle between them and gives it a wistful look.

  “It really is too bad,” she says. “I would lend you this one but”—she sighs—“some priest will declare it too red.”

  She throws it atop the others.

  Something in Lala turns, and for a moment she despises Enneleyn, in a way as small but heavy as how she hated Geruscha and Henne four years ago.

  She turns the hate over in her hands. It is not about Enneleyn being spoiled, or pale, or adored.

  Just as she hated Geruscha and Henne for seeing a part of herself she wanted to hide, she hates Enneleyn for not seeing it.

  Melisende offers Lala a bit of her lip potion, each of them dipping their ring fingers in.

  “And will you dance with your fairy prince tonight?” Melisende asks.

  Lala smooths the lip potion over her mouth, pretending not to hear the question. She tenses her heart against the thought of Alifair, how she must ignore him tonight especially, when all will be watching.

  Enneleyn tucks an amber-adorned hairpin just behind Lala’s ear. “When we are through with you, you will have your pick of a dozen young men.”

  Lala’s guilt is heavy as damp wool. Her silence, her allowing these girls to think she is looking for a new love, feels soaked in disloyalty. But the closer she stays to Alifair, the worse peril he will face.

  Agnesona tries her pale powders on Lala, even though they are far too light, and only make Lala appear sick.

  Her skin and Dorenia’s is no browner than it has always been, and not much darker than that of the men who work in the fields. Beneath the July sun, Alifair’s back deepens even through his shirt and tunic. If it is something in her features—her dark eyes, the shape of her nose and lips—has she not looked this way all her life?

  Something has made them all glance at her again. Something has made the word Zigeuner spread within the city walls. And deep within her stomach, Lala fears it resembles a growing crowd of women spinning over the cobblestones. It has the same shape as the word witchcraft, the hint of it dangerous as a coiled adder.

  She lets Agnesona add blush to her cheeks, made from pigment and rosewater; Agnesona frowns when it takes layer upon layer to show on the brown of Lala’s skin.

  That frown makes Lala’s neck tighten. Is Agnesona taking a more careful look at her? Is she reconsidering whether Lala’s particular shade of brown can truly be explained by Italian blood?

  Is she thinking the word Zigeuner?

  Lala’s heartbeat feels as though it will drum through her throat.

  “God in heaven,” Melisende says, snatching the pigment. “Don’t make her look a whore.”

  Lala tries to smile, but her face fights the effort.

  The sisters each tie on new kerchiefs bought from a traveling merchant, the cloth embroidered with birds and flowers and trimmed in gold thread. Their particolored dresses make them seem lovely mirrors of each other, the left side of Melisende’s cotehardie the same green as Agnesona’s right, and the right half a dawn orange, matching Agnesona’s left.

  Their world, and Enneleyn’s, is one of leaf-green pottery glaze, of drinking glasses blown in gray black. These girls’ fathers are the reason Strasbourg boasts its own gold coins. And those coins, minted next to the Pfalz, now travel the continent, their gleaming backs declaring the glory of the men who called them into being.

  Wealth, to these girls, is a language as familiar as beauty.

  If letting these girls dress her will make her seem soft and blameless, she will let them as willingly as though she is their doll. If their rosewater and tinctures will gild her enough to make her look like one of them, she will offer her cheeks and wrists, and accept all the paling powder in Strasbourg.

  The brown of her skin has drawn the suspicion of a city. Maybe these girls, with their complexions that seem poured from spring cream, can veil her from it.

  Emil

  Emil threw on jeans and a sweatshirt. When he couldn’t sleep, he usually went out to the old shed that had become his sort-of lab. An hour focusing on something that hard, looking at a flame through cobalt glass or sketching the jag
ged rainbow of bismuth crystals, was usually enough to wear out his brain.

  Outside, he found his mother tugging an old sheet over the vegetable garden.

  Emil took one corner and bunched it under the pumpkin vines.

  “What?” his mother asked. “No wisecracks?”

  Emil’s guilt stung. He’d barely concealed his skepticism at his mother covering the pumpkins and melons, shielding them from the moon. His great-aunt had told stories about the full moon felling herbs from their stems, withering violets to the ground, splitting open melons and pumpkins so that, in the morning, blood streaked their rinds.

  It wasn’t that Emil didn’t believe these stories. He did. Sort of. He believed that melons could break open and flowers could fall away from their stems overnight. He believed there was blight or infection, sudden frost or tiny parasites no one could see. He believed that whatever it was, a sheet holding back the light of the full moon probably wouldn’t stop it. And that held true whether it was chemistry or bibaxt, misfortune finding its way into their garden.

  His mother unfurled another sheet. This was one of the few traditions their family held to. Flour and water in a bowl on the windowsill. The fortuitous meaning of certain days. Lemon and pepper and cabbage. He had never quite figured out the pattern of what they held on to and what got lost, what stayed, and what got cleared away, like his mother reordering her desk every Sunday night.

  Emil helped with one side of the new sheet.

  “What’s gotten into you?” his mother asked, snapping the corner over the Moon and Stars watermelons.

  He ignored the question and tapped a knuckle on the deep violet rind. “These are gonna freeze before they’re ready.”

  “All the more reason to cover them,” his mother said. “And that was not a rhetorical question. What’s going on with you? You usually roll your eyes over this so hard I’m afraid you’ll lose them in the back of your head.”

  He couldn’t argue. But tonight there was some kind of turning in the air, a stirring. It was the smoky smell even though no one nearby was burning leaves. It was the shadows lengthening so quickly. It was the jack-o’-lanterns leering out from their porches, soft pumpkin mouths looking ready to make some snide remark. (And around here, you never knew if they might. Mrs. Carrington swore it had happened a few years before Emil was born, the carved pumpkins spouting Poe and Dickinson at one another.)

  “Bonne nuit,” his mother said, setting a hand to his shoulder on her way inside. “Don’t stay up too late.”

  “I won’t.”

  He went for neatening up his lab bench, because he’d been putting it off, and there were few tasks more boring than that. After fifteen minutes, he’d be half-asleep.

  He pulled the overhead string in the shed. The single bulb threw light over the forgotten garden tools that shared space with his secondhand bench and the rusted paint cans that he kept at a healthy distance from his burner.

  Emil went hard at the beakers and flasks, something he always put off when the weather got cold because the sink out here didn’t get hot water. It took a combination of patience, prayer, and banging on the pipe to get it started. It would only run for a few minutes before he had to do the whole thing again. It always encouraged rushing, as evidenced by the lace of salt residue he was now scrubbing off the glassware.

  He moved on to relabeling vials and bottles, fixing the tops and spouts where the plastic had split.

  A tuning-fork hum vibrated the air, like the far-off charge before a storm.

  Emil’s hands stilled.

  The feeling of someone touching his shoulder sent a rope of cold down his back.

  “Maman?” he said, more a hope than a guess. He could hear the tension in his own voice, the shock of the unfamiliar.

  He turned around, losing the sense of both his body and his hands. He lost them so completely that it took a few seconds for him to register the sound and wet feeling of mislaying his grip on a bottle, and acid splashing out over the bench and his hands.

  Strasbourg, 1518

  Tante brushes away any talk of attending the great dance. Folly, she calls it. Superstition.

  But Lala wouldn’t be surprised to catch her covering the melons in the garden, the rinds ice blue and not yet ripe, so that they won’t bleed in the light of the next full moon.

  Tante shows no sign of knowing the oath Lala swore. But even looking at her still brings the taste of the hyssop in Lala’s mouth.

  Enneleyn leads Lala toward the dance. Her hair flows against the pale satin of her gown, green as early June flax. With each step, the noise grows.

  The animals have been moved out to graze, and the whinnying of mares and braying of mules is replaced by shouts and music. The grain markets and two guildhalls have been cleared for the dancers. Hired guards block off the streets, and pen in the afflicted. The raw grain smell of barley water thickens the air, the drink recommended to any afflicted who will take it.

  The scene is bright and loud as a carnival, the sight matching the high music. Many wear dyed stockings, adorned buckles, shirts trimmed with lace. The ruffled edges of scalloped sleeves hang wide to show silk linings. Striped and checked cloth flashes one shade, then the next. Men strut about in pointed shoes, or in codpieces of bright color and comical size.

  Those with bells dangling from their belts add to the music, their bodies living tambourines. Some dress as devils or beasts, masks over their eyes. Some whom Lala knows to be wealthy burghers wear ripped clothes, playing at being peasants.

  Both the stricken and well dance so hard that sweat drenches their bodies. The unafflicted whirl as if spinning around a bonfire.

  With one lapse in attention, Lala loses Enneleyn.

  She searches for Enneleyn’s gown, for the white and yellow lilies embroidered onto the field of green, the thread the same shades as the striped lining.

  “Enneleyn?” she calls, feeling as lost as a younger sister.

  The sound vanishes under the guiterres and citterns, the vielles à roue and lutes. The music is a tangle of fifes and fiddles, the twinkling of flutes mixed with the hard chimes of tambourines.

  Lala stands at the edge of the fray, amid the smell of spilled wine, the storm of limbs, the sound of drum and horn.

  The afflicted pass through the crowd so perfectly that, at first, Lala can’t pick them out. The sisters of stricken dancers leap alongside them. Men twirl women with so much abandon it seems there is no fever at all, only this great dance. Strong men have been hired not just to haul the drink, but to dance alongside the women, to keep them going.

  The only sign of worry is the mothers of the younger girls, chasing after them with brown bread and thinned wine. Each time one collapses, two or three women rush to where she has fallen with water or ale.

  All have put on their finest. The ladies who can afford taffeta and damask flaunt their gleam. The burghers wear black underdyed with blue to keep the color fast. Even the poorer Strasbourgeois wear their best hemp and wool, newly dyed with plants and lichen. The color, Lala can tell, has been done cheaply, without mordants or underdye, and will fade within weeks. But for tonight, these skirts and tunics paint the air green and yellow. A few farmers’ daughters even wear lighter shades of woad blue; Tante offers her less intensely hued lots at softer prices, especially to families she likes.

  Lala collides with a tall, well-built young man, feeling his solid form before she sees his face. He is both slender and muscled, in a way built more for admiring than work. His slashed sleeves reveal a near-purple fabric beneath.

  Lala lifts her eyes, trying to comprehend the strange costume this burgher’s son has chosen.

  Another moment makes his dress sickeningly clear.

  He has darkened his face and hair with roots and donned a turban of coiled silk, like the young men declaring they are Turks at Carnival.

  It makes her want to slap them all in their painted faces.

  She looks away, pretending to study the other dancers. She can pick
out the afflicted only by the way they leap a little higher and spin out of time from the music.

  “Do you like it?” he asks.

  She moves her eyes back to his, the green a shade darker than Enneleyn’s dress.

  “My costume,” he says. “I would think you would enjoy it. It’s so much like you.”

  Now her voice comes. “Pardon?”

  He skims his eyes along her hair and dress. “Exotic.”

  He nearly purrs the word, and it bucks in her stomach.

  Exotic. The word such men use when they want to make dark-eyed women into their mistresses, or rare pale deer into their pets. A word that carries both their thrill and the sense that they are entitled to all that interests them.

  Exotic. What Melisende and Agnesona probably say of her and the stories about her being the bastard daughter of some southern Italian nobleman.

  Exotic. The word that makes Lala pull out of this man’s hold.

  The burgher’s son grabs her arm. “I thought you wanted to get acquainted.” He gives her a smile that is both bright with his wealth and slack from how much he has had to drink. “You did throw yourself toward me, after all.”

  Lala shoves him back.

  His grip tightens, and Lala can feel the bruises it will leave.

  The burgher’s son pulls her close. “Do not think a borrowed dress makes you highborn.”

  Lala feels her heartbeat at her throat. She wills Enneleyn to appear, to make some joke about how young men are such brutes, to shame this one away with her smile.

  Lala has never been so proud or foolish as to refuse help. Not from Enneleyn. Not from Tante.

  Not from Alifair.

  But the appearance of Alifair now, with his hair lightened by the summer and his skin tanned by it, makes her nearly as wary as the hold of the burgher’s son.