The Stress of Her Regard (13 page)

He introduced himself as Francois des Loges, a poet, and assured Crawford that this was indeed France—a village called Carnac, on the south Brittany coast near Vannes. There was a government office in Auray, eight miles distant, and Crawford's passport problem, whatever it was, could be rectified there.

Crawford was beginning to get used to the old man's accent, and he could see why he had mistaken it for Spanish at first; not only did the man pronounce all the terminal
e
s, he also gave words like "mille" an almost Spanish or Italian lilt, and he rolled his
r
s. It was recognizably French, but seemed to be French as it had been spoken when the Romance languages were still more parallel than divergent.

Des Loges had pulled a straw plug out of a bottle as he was speaking, and now poured brandy into two blue crystal cups. Crawford sipped the liquor gratefully, and then, setting aside his doubts of the old man's ability to give arbitrary and illegal orders to Customs officials, asked what he would be expected to do in return.

The brandy in des Loges's cup caught a gleam of morning sunlight through the warped glass of the little window, and threw a spectrum of purple and gold across the weathered planks that were the wall.
"Qui meurt, a ses loix de tout dire,"
he began.

Crawford mentally translated this as
A dying man is free to tell all.
As des Loges went on, Crawford had to keep interrupting with requests that he talk more slowly, and even so he wasn't sure he was understanding the old man's speech.

Des Loges seemed to be saying that he had imprisoned his wife—though he waved toward the sea when he said it—and was now free, with help from the right sort of person, to get away forever. The in-laws might not be pleased—here, for some reason, he nodded toward the pans Crawford had moved—but they couldn't touch him. He picked up one of the lightweight pans, made a face, and tossed it out the door onto the dirt outside. "Disrespectful, I know," he added in his strange French, "but they're not even good for cooking—they're always getting pitted, and they discolor sauces and eggs terribly."

He had had many women during his life, he told Crawford, but he wouldn't tell anyone where these "yquelles" resided currently. None of them could get at him now, that was the important thing. He pointed at Crawford's maimed hand and, with a grin, said he was sure Crawford understood.

Crawford was pretty sure he
didn't
understand, though, especially when the old man concluded his speech by saying,
"Les miches de Saint Estienne amors, et elles nous assuit,"
which seemed to mean, "We love the loaves of St. Stephen, and they pursue us."

But when des Loges stood up and asked Crawford if they were in agreement, Crawford nodded and assured him that they were. If he can get my passport stamped, he thought, then I
will
help him do whatever this procedure is that'll protect him from his in-laws, or from loaves of bread, or whatever it is. And even if he can't, even if he's crazy, at least he's a contact in a foreign land—and I'm ahead already by a roof and a glass of brandy.

The old man threw Crawford a pair of ancient shoes to put on, and from behind the door he lifted a cloth sack and indicated that Crawford could carry it—remarking, as they left the little house, that he had bought extra food and drink when he had heard that Crawford was coming.

Startled, Crawford asked him how he had heard that—but des Loges just winked, pointed at Crawford's hand again and then pointed to the tide pool below them. Crawford stepped to the edge of the rocks and looked down, but the only thing he could see in the pool was a knee-high pyramidal stone with a square base.

Walking back away from the water, Crawford looked around for some sign of a paddock where horses or donkeys might be kept, but the little boat-house was the only structure on the heathery hillside. Was old des Loges planning to
walk
eight miles at his crippled-bug pace?

He was glad that the shoes were a good fit—and a moment later he wondered if des Loges had bought them when he had bought the food, having been told Crawford's shoe size in advance too.

Then he saw that the old man had dragged out from behind the house a child's wagon with a rope attached to its front, and that some kind of shoulder-harness was tied to the far end of the rope.

As Crawford watched incredulously, des Loges climbed into the wagon, with his knees tucked up under his chin, and tossed the harness-end of the rope into the dust at Crawford's feet.

The old man helpfully pantomimed putting the harness on.

"In case I didn't get the idea, eh?" said Crawford in English as he picked the thing up. He slowly put it on, feeling the stiffness in his joints and wishing he hadn't spent the night curled up in a cold wooden bin. "Well, I'll tell you this—you'd better be able to get me a passport."

Very clearly, des Loges asked him if, for the walk, he would prefer stone-soled shoes.

Crawford declined the offer.

"Ah, le fits prodigue!"
remarked des Loges in his barbarous French, shaking his head.

Crawford leaned forward against the rope and the wagon creaked forward, but then he realized that he was still carrying the bag. He stopped and walked back and, over protests, made des Loges hold it. Then, with that small victory won, he walked back until the rope was tight again and began pulling. Within the first few minutes he had figured out the most comfortable way to wear the harness, and the easiest-to-maintain pace.

As he plodded away from the sea, leaving the village behind as the ground slowly rose, the only smells were of sun-heated stone and the spice of heather, and the only violations of the sky's quiet were Crawford's heavy breathing and the creaking of the wheels and the monotonous skirling of the bees.

After what might have been an hour he crested a hill, and found himself facing a broad, shallow inland valley . . . and he stopped abruptly, letting the wagon roll forward and bump him in the calves, for an army of giants stood in ranks across the distant gray-green slopes.

Then he heard the old man laughing at him and he realized that the figures in the valley weren't men but were upright stones—the landscape reminded him vaguely of Stonehenge.

A little embarrassed at having been startled by the sight, he began walking down the north slope of the hill; but after the wagon had twice more bumped him from behind, he decided that it would be easier to let the wagon roll down the hill ahead of him backwards while he trudged along after it, hauling back on the rope and acting as a brake.

In this ludicrous posture they were passed by a party of six unamused monks on donkeys, and des Loges added to Crawford's humiliation by choosing that time to recite, in a loud and sarcastic voice, a local legend that held the stones to be a pagan army that had been chasing one St. Comely toward the sea until the saint turned, and, by the exertion of his virtue, petrified them all in place.

A narrow arm of the sea extended far inland, narrowing to a river eventually, and the buildings of the little town of Auray clustered around the mouth of the river and mounted in steep lanes and terraces up the flanks of the hills on either side.

From the old man Crawford had learned that the history of the whole area was peppered with miracles and apparitions—only a mile away to the east was the Chappelle Ste. Anne, where the Virgin had appeared to a peasant named Yves Nicolazic and told him to build a church there, and down the road a little way stood a cross marking a fourteenth-century battlefield, the unshriven casualties of which were condemned, according to popular belief, to wander the hills until the Last Day—but the citizens weren't prepared for the procession that came plodding and creaking and barking into town at a ceremonious pace just at sunset on that Friday.

All day Crawford had alternately sweated in the sun and shivered in the sea breezes as he dragged the wagon along the rutted road, and at lunch he and his passenger had each drunk an entire bottle of claret with the bread and cheese and cabbage des Loges had packed; just before they resumed their journey the old man had bitten eye-holes into the cloth bag and pulled it over his head like the hood of a bucolic executioner, and Crawford had followed his example by donning as a hat the hollowed-out shell of the cabbage head.

Having finally reached Auray, these many hours later, the cabbage was wilted but still clinging to his head, and he was noctambulistically intoning the refrain to a song des Loges had begun singing hours ago; and the melody, or perhaps the wing-flapping motions with which the wagon-bound old man had chosen to accompany it, had attracted a following procession of barking dogs. Children ran into houses and several old women blessed themselves fearfully.

Des Loges broke off his singing long enough to tell Crawford where to turn and which one of the fifteenth-century buildings to stop in front of; and when the wagon rolled to a halt and he was finally able to take off the harness, Crawford blinked around at the steep streets and old houses and wondered what he was doing here, weary, fevered and cabbage-decked.

They'd stopped at a two-story stone building with half a dozen windows upstairs but only a single narrow one at street level. The eaves projected a good yard out beyond the wall, and the building was just perceptibly wider at the bottom than at the top, and Crawford thought the place had a forbiddingly oriental look. A thin, middle-aged man in an outmoded powdered wig was staring down at them in consternation from one of the upstairs windows.

"This had better be
it
, Francois," the man called.

"I'll see that the widow is delivered to you in a lace dress and a veil," answered des Loges in his archaic French, "and that Mont St. Michel stands in for her father! But Brizeux!—until my cousin here resumes his travels I can't spare the hospitality."

The man in the window nodded tiredly. "Everybody needs help in passing on. One moment." He disappeared, and a few moments later the street door was pulled open. "Come in, come in," Brizeux said, "God knows you've drawn enough attention already."

The morning sunlight overwhelmed the lamplight inside, and it wasn't until the door was closed again that the ranked shelves of ledgers and journals regained their air of significance.

Brizeux led them into a private office and waved toward a couple of velvet-upholstered chairs; dimly on the faded cloth backs Crawford could see the outline of the embroidered Napoleonic
B
that had been cut off recently and, more faintly, the shadow of the fleur-de-lis that had preceded it. Brizeux was as erratic in his politics as the chair, addressing his guests as "citoyens" one moment and as "monsieurs" the next. His French, at least, was pure Parisian.

Crawford looked at the man curiously. He was nearly a caricature of a law clerk, fussy and shabby and ink-stained and smelling of book-bindings and sealing wax, but he seemed to hold a position of authority here—and, to Crawford's surprise, he seemed to be willing to give Crawford a passport.

He opened a drawer in his desk and dug out a double handful of passports and then shuffled through them, squinting up at Crawford from time to time as if to judge the fit. Finally, "Would you be more at ease as a veterinarian or as an upholsterer?" he asked.

Crawford smiled. "A veterinarian."

"Very well. Henceforth you are Michael Aickman, forty-two years old, late of Ipswich, who arrived in France on the twelfth of May. Your family is doubtless worried about you." He handed Crawford the passport.

"What happened to the original Michael Aickman?" he asked.

Brizeux shrugged. "Waylaid by criminals, I imagine. Perhaps he was carrying a lot of money . . . or perhaps his assailants simply killed him for his passport, which could be sold to," he permitted himself a sour smile, "certain unscrupulous public officials."

"And how much would a public official charge for one of these?"

"Quite a bit," said Brizeux cheerfully, "but in your case des Loges here has elected to . . . pay your bill for you."

Crawford glanced at des Loges and began to wonder what, exactly, the ancient man expected in return; but Brizeux had now initialed the passport and was flipping through the pages to show him what his new signature looked like, and Crawford pushed the worry away.

"You'll want to practice it until you can do it instinctively," said Brizeux, grinning up at him as he handed the document across.

It occurred to Crawford that Brizeux resembled young Keats—not in much, for Keats was young and burly and Brizeux was gray and frail, but very strongly in the eyes. The eyes of both of them, he realized, had the same unhealthy brightness, as if they were infected with the same rare kind of fever.

When they were outside again des Loges began hobbling back toward the wagon.

"No! We'll take a regular coach back," said Crawford in slow, carefully pronounced French. "I'll pay for it." His feet had been throbbing painfully ever since he had stopped pulling the wagon, and he could feel them swelling in the borrowed shoes.

"No doubt you could satisfy the coachman, but what
I'd
need to be paid isn't yours to offer," laughed des Loges, not looking back or pausing.

"Wait, I mean it. I would think you'd prefer it yourself, that can't be the most comfortable position to be in all day—or all night, in this case. Why don't we just—"

The old man had stopped, and was looking back at him. "Didn't you look at the wheels?" he demanded in his barbaric French. "Why do you think I asked you if you wanted stone shoes?"

Crawford walked bewilderedly to the wagon, crouched beside it and spat on one of the wheels and rubbed off the caked mud. The rim of the wheel was studded with flat stone ovals—no wonder the grotesque vehicle had begun to seem ponderous during the day! He looked up at the old man blankly.

"Your wife never told you?" asked des Loges in a quieter voice. "Travel over stone doesn't age us, you and me. A family courtesy, you might say. I wore stone-soled shoes for more years than I can count, but age crept up anyway, when I'd change them or take a stroll barefoot for a treat, and now I just don't have the strength for it anymore. I've got a stone base to my walking stick, though, and I make sure to lean on it. Every little bit, right?"