Englishwoman in France (23 page)

The Empress hugs the boy to her. ‘The boy's absence must not be noted. We must return at speed.'

‘Lady,' I say, to keep her here for just a few moments. ‘The boy's parents? Where are they?'

‘Modeste will tell you that the Emperor has adopted the boy, who is my daughter's son. His stepfather, my son-in-law, is away campaigning in the East. I've sent his mother, my daughter, on a mission for me to Rome. She was disturbed by his condition and is carrying another child. I can't have her mixed up in all this. Too dangerous for her.' She sinks back on the cushions and hugs the boy to her. The servant woman climbs aboard, flicks the horse with a small whip and drives the chariot forward, skilful as any man.

We stand and watch the chariot as it rocks down the narrow alleyway. Modeste claps his hands and rubs them together. ‘A job well done, friends. Now we can return to Good Fortune and Cessero. God's own country. We've work to do there.'

Tib nods his head, his red hair glittering in the light of his torch. ‘Our bees will be buzzing around for us,' he says. He sounds young and boyish again: not like the grave healer he's been these last few days. I'll be glad too, to return. On the long journey and the short stay here I have not been properly alone with Modeste and I miss him. I so need the refreshment of our private times. This refreshment is both physical – the sheer joy of our bodies entwined – and mental, the puzzling challenge of our conversations. They help me keep balance in this time and this place. They sustain the reality of this dream, almost like charging a battery.

We climb up to our roof eyrie for one last time where I sleep in one corner on a low couch and they sleep in another corner together on a kind of long shelf. And because I know I have to wake to travel in the morning I find it hard to get to sleep. I remember the rocking boat and the endless journey. Returning will be no simple thing. Then when I do sleep I dream of Siri: a dream within a dream you might say. Dangerous. In my dream Siri is dead, laid out on this long soapy marble slab decorated with writhing horses. She is dressed in an embroidered tunic – a miniature of that worn by the Empress under her flowing cloak. Someone is hovering over her body with a golden stick, using it to point to her head, her chest, her shoulders. I hear phrases like
sustained bruising
and
blows to the chest and the side of the head
. The tunic is stained with blood. But as well as this Siri is standing beside me, pale and shaking but here still whole and unbruised, pulling at my sleeve like she did when she was a very little girl. ‘Come
on
, Mummy!'

I wake up sweating and terrified. Then I force myself to breathe very deeply ten, twenty times. Now I conjure up the face of the woman in the chariot, the face of a woman in her prime. And I'm certain that within that great soul is the living soul of Siri, whose life with me was so, so short. Here surely is the life after and the life before death – Modeste's
reinvested spirit
.

Then like a lightning bolt, here among these brave people who are risking all for their faith, I'm visited by the blasphemous thought that the truth is not about some man-made ritualized magic about a man who died and rose again in three days. The truth is this DNA of the spirit that reinvests itself, generation after generation.

Now I'm aching for some private time with Modeste, to try to put these wild thoughts into a coherent cosmic whole. Of course, the legacy of Paul of Tarsus has made him a true believer in the great spirit force for good of the man he calls the Nazarene. But over and above all this, Modeste has seen the world and time in a pattern that can incorporate those beliefs into an even larger whole.

At this point my meandering thoughts are shattered by the deep bark of men's voices. My ears are assaulted by the hammer of footsteps up the stone steps. I leap to my feet to see that the palliasse on which Modeste and Tib sleep is empty. I pull my habit up to my chest and draw right back into the corner.

The door bursts open and a man in a metal ringed tunic fills the open doorway. At his shoulder is the other man from the palace, the man with the rod of gold: the one who kept us in order on that first day in the palace. Mr Goldwand. ‘That is the woman,' he says, gasping, his voice puny with excitement. ‘Florence is her name. Take her!'

I need Modeste. I need Tib. Where are they? I put my chin up and look him in the eye. ‘Are you a spy?' I say. He brings up his stick – this one a wooden one, tipped with a golden fox head – and strikes me hard in the shoulder. The violence of the blow makes me drop to my knees. ‘I am the servant of the Emperor,' he snarls. ‘My mission is to protect him from heretical bitches like you and your dog friends.

‘But I'm not . . .'

He was already turning away. ‘Bring her down,' he says to the guard. ‘The only way to stop this vermin spreading their filth around this city is to clear them out.'

Down below in the courtyard, trussed like turkeys, are the lodge keeper, Modeste and Tib. They must have been disturbed and come down before I heard the footsteps pounding on the stairs. The others must have got away. Modeste's cheek is blighted by a black and blue bruise the shape of a fox head. Tib, also trussed up, meets my gaze tranquilly enough. There is no fear in his eyes. But my heart is full of fear for him, and for all of us.

‘Florence!' says Modeste. ‘Don't—' Another blow across the cheek with the fox stick stops him saying anything further.

Goldwand directs a soldier to tie my arms behind my back and to hobble my legs with a length of rope. That done, the soldier throws me over his shoulder like a sack of coal and my calls for Modeste are muffled by the soldier's metallic tunic. He throws me into a wooden wheeled barrow and then covers me with some kind of canvas. I can smell the sea. This canvas has been a sail at one time. Are they going to throw me into the sea?

The barrow jerks and then moves forward. The man could be pushing or pulling it. I don't know what's happening to me. I've lost my Modeste and my young Tib. I don't know what will happen to them. Or me.
Tib. Modeste
. My brain freezes with fear as I am bumped along.

With all my heart and all my soul I wish that this dream would end. It's all too hard. I wish I could see my stars on their eternal path through the heavens. I wish I was back on the roof of the Maison d'Estella, staring up at Virgo and Ursa Major. My heart was broken then, but things were so much simpler. I find myself wishing . . .

Star light, star bright,

The first star I see tonight.

I wish I may, I wish I might,

Have the wish I wish tonight.

I
crouch here in the smallest of spaces. I think I've been in this poky, stinking space for two days and two nights. There's this window slit high in the wall and in daytime it fills the room with grim grey light; at night the room is pitch black. I've made marks in the hard earth floor with my heel: one for each night. I realized straight away that keeping track of time would be a useful thing to do. I read this once in an autobiography of a man who had been taken hostage and survived. Find a means of keeping track of time.

I have to use the corner of the room as a latrine and I survive on water thrust through a hole in the door every few hours. For two nights I've not even seen the night sky. Not one star. At first the darkness by night and the dimness by day engulf me. And this forces me inwards, makes me contemplate this dream I'm inhabiting or which is inhabiting me – I don't know which.

Every hour or so, as my mind drifts, I deliberately bring Modeste's face before me. And then I call up Tib's honest, wise stare. I've been bringing them into my mind the day I saw them both in Agde, the town that in these times they call
Good Fortune.
I think of them on the canal boat – Modeste with his book and the boy swimming in the water, racing the boat. I remind myself of Modeste in the guise of Louis, the twenty-first-century scholar with a mission leaning out of his window, his shirt cuffs flying like white flags.

I remember lying on the roof of my house with Olga by my side, looking up at the night sky for Virgo and invoking that wish. I remember Madame Patrice in the café with Misou, her little dog. How glad I was that she, unlike Philip (
was that his name?
) had seen the redheaded boy. And I conjure up the vision of Tib's mother Serina who – in her deep soul – is also Madame Patrice and also loves Misou. And in these two dark days in this stinking cell how many times have I conjured up that backward glance of the Empress, which contains so much of my Siri in its bright gaze?

This is all very hard but I feel I'm making this painful effort so I can remember a safer future, to give myself some distance from this stinking room where I am forced to use the corner as a latrine.

In the middle of the third night the door creaks open and standing there is the Goldwand, Fox Man in his grand cloak. A soldier moves in front of him, sticks his flaring torch into a metal holder, hauls me to my feet and stands behind me, his hands on my upper arms.

The Fox looks around the space, his small nose wrinkling. I'd estimate that he shares Hitler's star sign. Aries tipping over into Taurus. A dangerous combination.

‘Ah! Madam Florence,' he says, smiling. ‘I thought you'd be entranced to know that we have broken the boy. I have to say that he was a hard nut to crack. Did not waver, even when he witnessed the terrible sufferings of his teacher. As I say, he was a hard nut to crack, with that blank gaze of his.' The man's eyes glitter in the flickering light of the torch. ‘But in the end . . .'

I turn my face from him. I want to put my hands over my ears to shut out this evil talk but that is impossible. The soldier is holding tightly to my upper arms. Tears run down my face. I am sobbing.

The Fox sniffs and goes on. ‘The key to my success is this nail board I had especially made for vermin. It has a very good mechanism that stretches the soul out of a person. In the end the boy was begging – begging – me to allow him to rise from the bed of nails and pay sacrifice to our proper gods rather than that degenerate Nazarene.'

‘No! No!' I shake my head and my tears fly around the room, glittering in the torchlight. ‘I don't believe you. Tib is a brave soul, a true believer. He would not betray his faith. Never!'

The Fox giggles out loud at this. ‘You will see, madam. It will be proved for your own eyes.' His eyes narrow slightly. ‘Your lover the doctor has a much more intractable soul. He resisted our finest persuasions. Our best! Our finest!' He pauses. ‘Even her gracious majesty the Empress could not prevail upon him. She asked him to join her in her holy sacrifices to our gods but he refused her.'

His mention of the Empress sets warning bells away in me. She must be in danger too. Someone must have betrayed her as well as us. ‘I don't believe you!' The words burst from me. Then I stop. Part of me wishes I could tell him I am really from another place and although I don't believe in his pagan Roman gods, neither do I quite believe in the divinity of the Nazarene for whom Modeste and Tib – and now the Empress – risk their lives.
I am neutral!
I want to shout at him.
I am neutral about these things.

My back is aching and my arms are sore in the clasp of the soldier. It would be so easy to placate the Fox with a half-confession that although I don't believe in the Roman gods that I've read about in primary school text books, I also don't believe in what Tib and the people in the lower room believed. I believe in the stars and the universe of the sky and the universe of inner personality. And now I half-believe in Modeste's notion of reinvestment of the spirit because I've seen evidence of it with my own eyes.
So I have my own crazy church in my head and don't want any of yours, thank you very much
.

He pokes me in the ribs with his fox stick, a flare of anger in his eyes. ‘Pay attention, woman. I want you to tell me of these two reprobates and their deviant ways.' He lifts his stick and brings it down on my shoulder. The pain is overwhelming. I squeeze my eyes to stop shameful tears falling.

My eyes move to the wall, then raise to a narrow interior grille, like the one where I stood by the Empress and her woman, and watched Tib work on his cure of the little boy. I know she's there now. And there's someone at her side. A man: a bulky shape.

‘I will tell you about them, sir.' The words force themselves through my lips.

‘A-aoh!' There is pleasure in that exhalation, satisfaction at a task nearing its end.

I take a deep breath. ‘I have never seen either of those two – neither man nor boy – do a bad thing.' I raise my voice, so that my words may be heard through the grille. ‘The last thing I saw them do, here in the Imperial Palace, was to take the poor crippled soul of a boy and straighten it out. They stopped him destroying himself. They saved his life.'

The stick comes down hard, sideways this time, on my legs. I stagger. The soldier behind me keeps me upright.

I go on. ‘And before that I saw them cure many people of their physical ailments. But mostly I saw them dissolve the madness in many poor souls and restore them to laughter.'

Thwack! On my face. I don't know if I can stand this. I look up at the grille and force my bruised mouth to form my words. ‘I wish to see the Empress.
She
saw Modeste and Tib help the grandson of the Emperor. I want to look her in the eyes.'

Thwack! I hear a cry of protest somewhere outside my swimming head. The soldier behind me moves uneasily. I can smell his sweat, even in this stinking space.

The Fox man growls, ‘Slaves like you may never look on the great and holy.' There is spit in one corner of his mouth.

Thwack! This time the fox stick hits me across the face. Blood in my eyes; swimming darkness. In the mist I hear a bell ringing. A neat, clear sound, like the one you ring in hotels when you want service. Then total blank darkness. I have a vision of the night sky but there are no stars. It is all a deep blue-black. It's a terrible thing, a night sky with no stars.