Dark and Deepest Red

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  He didn’t sound bitter about it. More resigned.

  With another coating of powder, he turned the flame mint green.

  After a few more colors, and a long time of both of us being quiet, Emil said, “You know, the first time I ever saw the ocean was with my grandfather.”

  I almost asked, What does that have to do with anything? But I kept my tongue still, realizing I wanted to hear him talk, even if I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “It was from a bridge, and I saw this buoy in the water,” he said, turning the flame pink. “And this buoy, it stayed in place. I knew it was staying in place because it was a buoy, right? But I didn’t understand, because it looked like it was moving. It was still, but it left a wake behind it, because it was staying still while all the water around it was moving. It was staying in the same place in a current. That’s why it left the wake.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t get it.”

  “Sometimes you have to stay still.” He looked at me, the brown of his eyes as dark as his hair. “You have to work to stay where you are. Sometimes if you want to move things around you, you have to do everything you can to stay still.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He turned the flame the bright yellow of a field daffodil. “I mean we should’ve stayed friends.”

  Our eyes stayed on each other long enough that I felt the heat of it on my shoulders.

  I felt caught between kissing him and telling him, two equally impulsive and probably disastrous possibilities.

  I didn’t mind didn’t mean I should try it again. I didn’t mind could have meant he was writing it off as an aberration, a shift in a gravitational field, the color of a rare bird, a strange result of this year filled with red shoes.

  And telling Emil the truth, telling this boy who held science and logic as close as a first language, made even less sense than telling my parents. He wouldn’t believe it anyway. He’d probably just think I was stupid and reckless, or susceptible to the suggestion of magic that all red shoes held this year. He’d think I’d fallen under some shared hysteria, or conversion disorder, like the girls we’d read about in history class, the ones who seemed possessed during the Salem witch trials. Briar Meadow’s magic probably wouldn’t even be real to him if it weren’t for Gerta.

  When Emil looked at me, my skin felt like glass to him, like he could see everything inside.

  “Try this one,” he said, and handed me a vial and a stick, our fingers brushing again.

  The powder turned the flame as red as cherry candy, as red as blood or berries, and any thought I had of telling Emil the truth burned up with it.

  Strasbourg, 1518

  Lala’s chest sears from running, but she does not stop.

  Gall nuts, her aunt taught her, begin in the spring, when a wasp punctures an oak tree to make a home for its eggs in the soft, young buds.

  The tree, quite understandably, protests, forming the galls around the holes the wasp has made.

  When something living senses the presence of something new and venomous, it closes it off.

  The spire of pink sandstone looms high over Strasbourg’s tiled roofs and country churches, a crown of blush-hued stone. The light from the morning is still cool, silvering la cathédrale’s single tower. The rose window catches the sun, knives of perfect white pointing at the flower in the center, strokes of lapis blue, harvest-warm leaves inlaid among sea colors. The cathedral seems enormous as a mountain but delicate as if it were carved from alabaster. It is the guide by which Lala first learned her way from Tante’s house to the city.

  Where Lala would expect wings and soft rustling sounds, she hears, instead, voices, and the hard pounding of steps.

  Lala rushes through a narrow lane until it opens onto the cathedral square.

  Instead of the usual flock of birds, the square holds as many bodies.

  Instead of the horned larks with their yellow heads and pristine brown backs, the bodies here leap and flail. They turn and jump.

  They dance.

  This is more than the familiar sweep of skirts. Cassocks mix with the spin of kirtles. Priests chase after them, canons calling out orders. Some urge them to rest, in the name of our Lord. Others demand their confession. Others still yell at the dancers, or, if they can grab hold of them, scream down their throats. “I order the devil from you. I command the demons to leave you.” Some try to grasp the dancers and shake them out of it, but they only whirl away.

  Lala’s understanding feels like a thumb pressed to her throat.

  It is not just cassocks and dresses in the fray.

  It is a sprinkling of tunics and hose.

  Men.

  Lala does as fast a count as she can manage, trying to keep up with their furious movements.

  At least twenty men.

  Thirty.

  More.

  There are so many dancers she cannot count them.

  Dozens.

  More than dozens.

  A hundred.

  Two hundred.

  The stone beneath Lala’s feet seems as though it is crumbling.

  Lala has faced death to see the end of this fever, Alifair alongside her.

  But now it rages all the fiercer, wrathful as a fire across dry fields.

  Lala weaves through Strasbourg’s streets. She rushes past the dancers who flail and throw themselves about. Past those with red-rimmed eyes. Past the mothers who fear for their children.

  Past two weeping girls who tend to a cousin, collapsed from the dance.

  Past Melisende and Agnesona, their heads still veiled in fine scarves.

  Their eyes follow Lala. They do not greet her.

  A noblewoman and her attendants pass between them. Her dyed leather shoes kick up a stripe of color.

  Blue.

  Lala stands, staring even after the noblewoman passes.

  A familiar scrap of fabric.

  A ribbon dyed with Tante’s woad blue.

  A ribbon Lala prayed into, and then gave to a friend.

  A ribbon now trampled into Strasbourg’s cobblestones.

  Enneleyn.

  “Lavinia Blau?” The voice comes with a man’s broad shadow.

  Two sergeants pause before her.

  She lifts her face to them, and all she can ask is, “Where is Enneleyn?”

  “If you will come with us, Mademoiselle Blau,” the elder one says.

  “What happened to her?” is still the only question Lala can speak.

  “You must come now,” the younger one says.

  “Where is Enneleyn?” She is shouting it now, all in the square watching.

  The sergeants take her arms and lead her away, her eyes clinging to that blue ribbon.

  But the question still breaks from her lips. She yells it. “Where is she?”

  Emil

  Even when Rosella was gone, the smell of her stayed in the shed, that powdery, flowery smell he always thought of as belonging to the Olivas’ house. He’d learned a long time ago that it was her mother’s favorite fabric softener, one that always sat on the windowsill in its yellow bottle like a vase of flowers.

  He wanted to hold on to it, that scent, their fingers touching near the burner, the way her expression shifted like the colors of flames. He wanted to know all of it as well as he knew the details of sodium and selenium.

  But the question he’d had all day still knocked around in him.

  A minute after his father came home, his parents were in the kitchen arguing.

  Not fighting.

  Arguing.

  “Mon cheri,” his mother said. “We all know it is yours about the fluctuation of grain pricing according to storage method.”

  “Mais non, mon trésor,” his father said. “It is clearly yours on the evolution of the codpiece.”

  “That is my most popular and you know it!”

  Emil set his thumb and third finger to his temples.

  They were back to the long-running debate over which of them
had written the most boring paper.

  “Your exploration of nitrogen fixing in the arable region of the Vosges Mountains?” his mother said. “You want to talk about watching grass grow.”

  “Your sixty-page treatise expounding on the ratio of domesticated to wild goats in the Bas-Rhin?” his father asked.

  “It was feral goats!”

  Emil cleared his throat. Loudly.

  They both turned.

  His mother studied him. “Tu vas bien?”

  Emil looked at his mother, then his father.

  Was he really doing this? He’d spent years learning as little as he could about their family. He knew his grandmother’s prayers to Sara la Kali, his cousins’ heart for certain trees. But he’d kept away from tracing their family back like his mother and father had, learning about the hundreds of years before them. Hadn’t it been talk of caring for their dead that had gotten his parents that first call home?

  Emil never could turn his back on family he knew by name or face, those he kept in his own memory or who he learned in old photographs. But dredging up something five centuries old? It went against everything he’d taught himself since grade school.

  He took a sharp breath like he was going underwater. “What really happened in Strasbourg?”

  His mother’s stare joined Emil’s, both squarely on his father.

  “You’ve made it very clear you don’t want to be bored with all this,” his father said, in a way that managed to be sad but not bitter. “So why do you ask?”

  It had never been a matter of Emil being bored. Was that really what his parents thought?

  “I want to know about the dancing plague,” Emil said.

  His father glanced at his mother.

  Then at Emil.

  “People died,” his father said, the words as unadorned as in an academic paper.

  “Died,” Emil said. “From dancing?”

  “Their hearts gave out,” his mother said softly. “They had strokes. They, more or less, died of exhaustion.”

  Emil braced enough to ask, “Did that happen to anyone we’re related to?”

  “No,” his father said. “Not that we know of.”

  “Why didn’t they stop?” Emil asked. “The dancers, I mean. They had to feel it killing them, so why did they keep going?”

  “They couldn’t,” his mother said. “At least that’s how it seemed to everyone watching. There could have been some biological cause, but most likely it was a form of mass hysteria.”

  “What—” Emil stumbled over the start of a question, not quite knowing where he was going until halfway in. “What stopped it?”

  “We don’t know that either,” his mother said.

  “What do they think stopped it?”

  His father looked away.

  “Papa,” Emil said. “What do they think cured it?”

  His parents swapped another look.

  “Will you two stop trying to signal each other and just tell me?” Emil asked.

  His father sighed in a way so heavy Emil felt it in his own chest.

  “Emil,” his father said. “Two of our relatives weren’t just in Strasbourg during the dancing plague.”

  Emil’s heart tightened, and he almost stopped his father, told him he didn’t want to know. The air hummed in a way that told the truth a second before his father could.

  “They were blamed for it,” Emil said, the words falling between him and his parents. “Weren’t they?”

  The girl, the woman, in his dreams. A fever from five hundred years ago.

  The screaming.

  Emil hovered between the two awful possibilities, two potential results of Strasbourg needing someone to blame for their dancing plague.

  The first, the least, was that those relatives were stripped of their home and livelihoods. Because so often, that was what being Romani meant. It meant being blamed. It meant holding your ground as best you could, because if you gave every inch they asked for, they would drive you off the earth. And sometimes it meant they did anyway.

  But that screaming, so deep it felt written into his bones, left him standing with the second possibility.

  He made himself ask. He made the words come.

  “What happened to them?” he asked.

  His father shook his head, as though telling him to turn back. It was the first time Emil wondered if his father knew what he’d been doing this whole time, keeping distance from their family’s history so he didn’t have to rip it out of himself every time he left the house. And for the first time, Emil wondered if his father maybe thought he was onto something.

  “Papa,” Emil said. “What happened?”

  His father’s eyes fell, and in that small flinch, Emil knew.

  Emil had never asked how their sixteenth-century relatives had died. He already knew there were a stomach-turning number of ways to die five hundred years ago. He’d seen them in his parents’ papers. Childbed fever. Bloody flux. Saint Anthony’s fire. Lepry. The ague. Venereal disease. Unexplained fever. “The red plague.” The bite of a “wayward sow.” Being thrown into a river by “a skittish calf.” Drowning in a ditch. Scythes. Falling from things—a tree, a window, a yarn winder’s stand. Falling onto or into things—a rock, a well, the horns of a bull.

  He had never before considered death from a dancing plague.

  And he had never before considered execution, not for those relatives in Strasbourg.

  But now, when he shut his eyes, all that history grew its own voices and called up its own ghosts. The scream of that girl, that woman, burned away every possibility except that one.

  In the few seconds before his father said, “They were executed,” Emil had already run through the possibilities. Even from what little he’d heard of his parents’ lectures, he knew enough about criminals hanged in the center of town. Women thought to be adulterers strangled by the tradesmen with the strongest hands. Poor men punished with lashing that led to infection and then fever.

  Suspected witches murdered by water or rope or fire.

  “How do you know?” Emil asked. “How do we know any of this?”

  “Church records,” his father said. “Coroners’ rolls. Physicians’ logs. Transcripts of sermons. Strasbourg city council notes. Firsthand accounts. Transcriptions after the fact.”

  Emil flinched. It was all so damningly specific, detailed as the footnotes in his mother’s articles.

  “All of them say that?” Emil asked. “That they were executed?”

  “No,” his father said. “But we have enough to guess.”

  “How?” Emil asked.

  “Death records,” his father said, without hesitation or ceremony. “Their names are spelled a little differently every place you find them, but it’s the same women. Lavinia and Dorenia Blau, their ages more than ten years apart, both listed as, Commended back into the hands of the devil for the blessing and good of the people, who now live free from the demons who once plagued them.”

  Emil tensed. He wondered how many times his father must have read that translation to have committed it to memory.

  “‘Commended back into the hands of the devil’?” Emil asked. “What does that even mean?”

  His father set a hand on the counter and looked away. “What do you think it means?”

  Those strange words—commended back into the hands of the devil—fit so neatly with what gadje thought of them. It mapped so cleanly against the scorn that landed on his grandmother when that little girl went missing, and the lack of apology when she turned up again.

  “You know so little about those who came before us, Emil,” his mother said. “Don’t let this be all you think of. We are more than what we’ve survived.”

  But Emil swore he could smell the dust and stone of Strasbourg, a thin cord through the house.

  In those few seconds above the reservoir, the space between centuries had thinned and faded.

  In those few seconds, Rosella Oliva had blurred into a girl from five centuries ear
lier.

  He had thought he’d imagined it all, that he’d lost himself somewhere in the haze of not-sleeping. But everything that had happened five hundred years ago was coming back to life, and it was dragging Rosella with it.

  Strasbourg, 1518

  So many dead, their names rung out in the square, one after the next.

  Cateline, the book binder’s wife, and the book binder with her.

  Enneleyn, the girl called the Lily of Strasbourg.

  And the miller’s elder daughter.

  “The miller’s son himself swears he has seen you engaging in witchcraft,” the friar says.

  The bailiff has left her in the room with this tall, proud man in his robes.

  That is the worst sign thus far.

  “And that he caught you pilfering artifacts from the dead for your dark magic,” the friar says. “Do you deny his charges?”

  She must, if there is any chance of surviving this.

  “I deny them,” she says.

  “And you deny even his claim that he saw you fly from the crypt on a pitchfork? That which he was sworn to see with his own eyes?”

  Perhaps in any other place, such a charge would make her laugh. But here that laugh comes as nothing but a stalled, disbelieving breath.

  “Yes,” Lala says, forcing straightness into her back and composure into her voice. “I deny this.”

  “The finest physicians in the city have testified before the Council of Twenty-One.” The friar’s voice rises. “They say that there is no reason of body for this madness, that it could only come from the devil himself, and still you deny it?”

  She swallows, and it sticks in her throat, dry from saying the same words so many times. She must say the words again, or they will assume the testimony needed to condemn her.

  “I deny it,” she says.

  “You deny the truth that you were seen bewitching a stream?” the friar asks.

  Lala’s throat grows hard as a knot in rope. The suggestion of tampered-with water was the death of so many Jews, what gave the Strasbourgeois the reason they needed to kill a quarter of them, whole families who had done nothing.

  All she can say is, “I deny it.”

  “Do you deny that you bewitched one of your own friends simply by the grasp of your hand?” the friar asks.