Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris (46 page)

‘Do you know why you were the perfect little Magdalene?’

Estelle didn’t answer. She retreated from the horrid green toad.

‘Because you have red hair,’ said Christian. ‘Judas had red hair, too.’

He flipped the coin. It hit Estelle in the chest and fell to the floor.

She sobbed and ran into the kitchen. She climbed onto the bench beneath the open window and stuck her head out. Rain splashed her face. She looked down into the alley and saw what she already knew: there was no way to climb down; and the drop was much too high. She had betrayed Grymonde. She was a Judas. There was nothing worse. Her tears ran down her face with the rain. Should she jump anyway?

The one-toothed
sergent
reached from behind her and shut the window.

‘Don’t fret little Magdalene. This isn’t our affair. And, by my oath, isn’t that onion soup I can smell?’

One-Tooth sat her on the bench and she watched him taste the cold soup and smack his lips. He filled two bowls. Estelle didn’t want to eat. She wanted to warn Grymonde that Petit Christian and the Soldiers of Christ were coming to get him.

‘
Sergent!
Quickly!’

Petit Christian’s voice was a frightened hiss. One-Tooth took a huge slurp of soup from his bowl and went to the doorway. Estelle followed him to watch. In the bedroom, Baro was holding a cudgel and had flattened himself against the wall by the front door.

‘Arm yourself,’ said Christian. ‘There’s someone at the door.’

One-Tooth shrugged his bow from his shoulder and nocked an arrow. He retreated into the kitchen, ready to shoot. He looked down at Estelle and put a finger to his lips. The door rattled with a heavy knock. Christian stood back and nodded to Typhaine.

‘Who’s there?’ called Typhaine.

‘It’s Papin. Let me in, I’m wet as a boiled frog.’

‘One of Grymonde’s lot,’ whispered Typhaine.

Christian bit his lip and hesitated.

Estelle’s heart raced. Papin could warn Grymonde. But would he hear her through the door? He might hear her scream but, here, screaming was usual.

‘Invite him in and smile,’ said Christian. ‘You know what’s at stake.’

Christian made a hammering gesture to Baro, who raised his cudgel.

As Typhaine smiled and opened the front door, Estelle squeezed past One-Tooth. Papin, dripping, lumbered over the threshold. Estelle shouted, loud as she could.

‘Run, Papin! They want to kill Grymonde!’

Papin looked at her. Baro’s cudgel smashed him across the nape. Estelle didn’t see him drop. The back of Typhaine’s hand cracked her across the face and for a moment she couldn’t see anything at all. She found herself on her hands and knees, staring at One-Tooth’s shoes. She heard groans and shouts behind her but none of that mattered.

She had failed Grymonde.

She was a Judas.

She would never fly with the dragon again.

THE BIRTHING ROOM
seemed located in some mythic realm where time did not so much stand still as repeat itself, end on end. A pang would roll through her and she would ride the wave; then the next would come, always before she expected it. The monotony taxed her almost as much as the pains. There was a bed in the room, covered with a piece of ship’s canvas, stained but not putrid, and on the canvas a sheet. Dry rushes covered the floor.

She paced, she squatted, she leaned over the back rail of a bench. She resorted to the chamber pot half a dozen times, but usually failed to pass water. When fatigue became too much she lay down and turned this way and that, without finding any comfort. She groaned and was aware that she sounded like a cow. Sometimes a contraction would awaken her with her mind still clinging to the fragments of some dream, but she could not have dozed for more than a minute or two. Fairy tales. Dreams.

How much time was in a minute? Or in two?

Though Alice assured her that foul language of any extremity was welcome in her house, Carla did not complain. Not complaining was her last hold on the dignity which she had otherwise abandoned without a qualm. The curtains were drawn against the sun but the heat was inescapable. Thyrus smoke lingered in the air, invisible except where it curled in blue wisps through the shafts of light. The boy she had found beautiful, Hugon, ran errands at Alice’s command, fetching water, linens and tea. Carla heard him ask after her welfare, and twice she saw him at the door, but Alice didn’t allow him to enter the room.

Carla had changed into a white nightgown, which was saturated with sweat, as was her hair. She decided that she was the Fire and her body the tower under siege, melting, gaping, splitting apart. The prolonged confrontation left her racked, bedraggled, exhausted; as if she and Life Her-own-self had each other by the throat. She recalled Bors holding forth on the nature of glory, the elation, the delirium, which arose from the struggle with pain, fear and death. Was this how Mattias felt in battle? She doubted it, but if so, and if this was glory, its charm eluded her. Yet the experience had brought Alice into her life. That was glory enough.

Carla was lying on her back at Alice’s request, or, rather, instruction. The old woman had examined her and declared her progress well and happily advanced. Now she wrapped a damp linen cloth over Carla’s belly. The cloth was soaked in a lotion of boiled sorbe apples, egg whites, powdered hart’s horn and frankincense, which she claimed would help mitigate stretch marks and wrinkles. Whether or not this end would be achieved, it felt good.

‘Alice, what will happen to us, after this is over?’

‘Even with the cards, we can’t know that.’

‘I’m not my usual self, yet I believe that in any circumstance we’d find things to admire in each other. Speaking for myself, very many more things than I can say.’

Alice laughed and coughed and swallowed phlegm.

She slid the linen cloth in cooling circles.

‘Hellfire, this woman has never met another like you, and will confess it’s been a grand lesson in the manners of the on high, one to put her to shame.’

‘Whichever might pass for “on high”, I’m far from any such state today, and my manners are no one’s but my own.’

‘This woman meant only to return your compliment. Here in the Yards we’re not used to giving them, so forgive her if she missed the mark.’

‘No, I’m the one who should apologise. You’ve shown me nothing but kindness.’

‘Now, now, let’s not plough that field again. If you are asking shall we remain joined – once the babe is born and you’re both fit to go on your way – then of course we will. Our fates have entwined, we’ve shared – we are sharing – the most sacred of cups. Best not to put a collar on these things, or we’ll choke them. For now, now is more than enough. Hell, this old girl hasn’t left the yard in a dozen summers, and rarely this house. Next time she leaves, she’ll be going a ways farther than the fish stalls, and come to that, the cemetery, too.’

‘At least I’ll know where to find you.’

Alice put her hand on Carla’s breast. ‘You’ll find me in here. Always.’

Carla put her hand on Alice’s. She looked into the winter eyes. The love that shone there, through the mist, was unlike any Carla had known. It seemed founded in something more than human. She realised the contrary was the case. The love in Alice was all that being human was meant to be. Carla began to cry. She choked her tears back.

‘Always,’ she said. ‘Always.’

‘Let them fall, love.’

A fresh commotion arose from the yard beyond the curtains. Alice glanced towards the noise and hoisted herself to her feet and lumbered away.

Carla clenched her fists as a contraction lifted her shoulders from the mattress. She bellowed. She rode the wave. She wiped the sweat from her eyes with her blue scarf. Alice returned holding a stiff sheet of paper, roughly the size of a large quarto.

‘Few there are have ever seen this. My son believes it was burned long ago, but this old she-fox forgives herself for fooling him.’

Alice sat on the edge of the bed and handed the sheet to Carla. Carla took an involuntary breath. It was a portrait – a shirtless, bust-length, three-quarter profile, drawn in black, red and white chalk – of a stunningly gallant young man. His features were so fine yet so rugged, the curves and angles of cheekbone, brow and jaw, fixed in such perfect harmony, the musculature modelled with such right proportion, that one might have wondered if the artist were striving for some allegory of masculine beauty. Yet, so exquisite was the work in its subtle mingling of colour, its sureness and ease, its intensity of expression, its tenderness and empathy, that she did not doubt a true artist had captured a true likeness. The youth stared from the frame with a lofty ferocity, his eyes those of a man who knew that the world lay at his feet. The curl of his lip he could have learned only from his mother.

Carla said, ‘Grymonde.’

‘The bonniest lad that e’er I saw. Now a doomed and tormented man.’

Carla looked at Alice and saw the sorrow that she nursed deep inside. Carla had many questions, yet in the face of Alice’s sorrow they seemed trivial. The old mother had a tale to tell, perhaps one she had never told. Carla took her hand and waited.

‘You’ve seen what my son has become. Ten years it’s taken, one day stacked on another, since that picture was made. He lives under a curse that slowly consumes him. What we see on the outside is the blossom of the sickness in the tree, in the growing timber, in the sap. And I it was who cursed him. I cursed him because of a woman, and the child they two had made, and because I was jealous, and because evil hid in my heart, awaiting its moment to claim me.’

‘I don’t believe that. As this babe fights for life inside me, I don’t believe it. Grymonde has some unknown malady – a slow ague, or some poison he ate –’

‘This mother thanks you, and mayhap you’re right, but all things are connected, and I did – again I say “I” – I did curse my son, which is a wound to any mother’s soul. The moment it flew from my tongue a molten arrow pierced me, and Our Mother cried out from the stones beneath my feet, for some things once said cannot be unsaid. He took his whore, for such she was and is, and he took his babe, a daughter every bit as bonny as he, and he left this old fool alone to sup on her regrets.’

Tears fell down the purpled cheeks. Carla swallowed on a great sorrow of her own. Her womb clenched and she squeezed Alice’s hand as the pain spiralled through her and she made no sound.

‘This was wrong,’ said Alice. ‘You’re in no fit state to listen to my follies.’

Alice reached for the portrait. Carla shook her head and held onto it.

‘I’m glad you told me. Alice, I know what it is to betray a son. The cards spoke of that plain. Weighed in the balance and found wanting. Such was I, as a mother. I feel foolish telling you anything, but is this not our burden? Is it not the hardest to bear?’

Alice wiped her face on the back of her hand. For an instant she looked like a child. She nodded and Carla smiled at her, and Alice smiled, too, and shook her head.

‘He was in love, you see. And this old woman feared what it would cost him. He could have had any girl, there were plenty willing and not just in the Yards, and he’d had his share, too. It wasn’t that. It wasn’t losing him, it was losing him to her. She was a bad sort. The Devil’s blackest whore. But there’s no rhyme or reason to love, we don’t need the cards to tell us that. She cut his heart out soon enough, as I knew she would. She was a beauty, of sorts, it must be said, and there were gold trinkets and gay times to be had elsewhere, among the better sort. He made a fool of himself, as men will in such straits, but in the end he found his way home and licked his wounds, and he made himself King of Cockaigne, over the bodies of many a stern foe. His enemies called him “The Infant”.’

‘I have heard that name. Why?’

‘At first it was meant as an insult. He was scarce nineteen. The veterans thought he didn’t know what he were doing, that he should’ve been working for them. By the time they learned different, they were dead. You see, my son values his life no more than a flower values its petals, and his enemies reckoned their lives were worth much more.’

There was pride in Alice’s voice, as well as pain.

Carla almost said:
I know such a man. I married him. I love him.

But she didn’t want to interrupt Alice’s reverie; her sharing of a mother’s burden.

‘He never wooed another, lost all feeling for love – refuses to speak of it – but this old woman won’t credit the whore for that. His heart mended as hearts do. No, he lost his desire. That was the fruit of his mother’s curse, too. And who knows what else? For he’s grown into the darkest of men.’

‘You say Grymonde has a daughter?’

‘He never recognised her, for which, among much that he can, he can’t be blamed. He never knew his own father, though that was no tragedy. This grandmother hasn’t seen that little love since she was born, right here in this room.’

If these events were about ten years ago, Grymonde was much younger than Carla had imagined, only thirty or so. She couldn’t help but think of Estelle. She recalled the fierce, sooty face, and could find no resemblance, though, as she knew too well, that meant little. It was the girl’s look that struck a bell, the molten arrow of jealousy she had loosed at Carla. Whoever the granddaughter was, the wound her loss had left in Alice had never healed.

‘My son was taken from me the day he was born,’ said Carla. ‘He was raised a bastard, an orphan, in a world not unlike these Yards. He was twelve before I saw him again. It took me that long to find the courage to look for him. And now he is lost again. This child, I swear, I will never let leave my arms.’

A pang arose of such tremendous intensity that Carla felt that her hips would be rent in two. It passed and she felt purged of emotion. She asked for some cold tea and Alice gave it to her and she drank. The drawing lay on the bed and Carla picked it up and studied it, again marvelling at the work. The blacks had been sketched in powdered slate with a metal stylus. The red flush that made the subject throb with life was in rusty clay. The spark of light in the irises was caught with brown pencil. It was a masterpiece. She contained her curiosity. Alice smiled.