This strategy worked until we reached a small wood just outside Fontainebleau. The trunks of the oaks were dark and thick, with low, spreading canopies that shadowed the ground beneath with shifting light, so that the whole wood seemed to be moving slightly in the wind. I was vaguely admiring the effect, when I noticed that some of what I had assumed to be tree trunks were in fact moving, turning very slowly to and fro.
“Louise!” My exclamation and my grip on her arm stopped her chatter in mid-word.
She lunged heavily across me to see what I was looking at, then flopped back to her side of the carriage and thrust her head out of the window, shouting at the coachman.
We came to a slithering, dusty halt just opposite the wood. There were three of them, two men and a woman. Louise’s high, agitated voice went on, expostulating and questioning, punctuated by the coachman’s attempts to explain or apologize, but I paid no attention.
In spite of their turning and the small fluttering of their clothing, they were very still, more inert than the trees that held them. The faces were black with suffocation; Monsieur Forez wouldn’t have approved at all, I thought, through the haze of shock. An amateur execution, but effective, for all that. The wind shifted, and a faint, gassy stink blew over us.
Louise shrieked and pounded on the window frame in a frenzy of indignation, and the carriage started with a jerk that rocked her back in the seat.
“Merde!” she said, rapidly fanning her flushed face. “The idiocy of that fool, stopping like that right there! What recklessness! The shock of it is bad for the baby, I am sure, and you, my poor dear… oh, dear, my poor Claire! I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to remind you… how can you forgive me, I’m so tactless…”
Luckily her agitation at possibly having upset me made her forget her own upset at sight of the bodies, but it was very wearying, trying to stem her apologies. At last, in desperation, I changed the subject back to the hanged ones.
“Who?” The distraction worked; she blinked, and remembering the shock to her système, pulled out a bottle of ammoniac spirits and took a hearty sniff that made her sneeze in reflex.
“Hugue… choo! Huguenots,” she got out, snorting and wheezing. “Protestant heretics. That’s what the coachman says.”
“They hang them? Still?” Somehow, I had thought such religious persecution a relic of earlier times.
“Well, not just for being Protestants usually, though that’s enough,” Louise said, sniffing. She dabbed her nose delicately with an embroidered handkerchief, examined the results critically, then reapplied the cloth to her nose and blew it with a satisfying honk.
“Ah, that’s better.” She tucked the handkerchief back in her pocket and leaned back with a sigh. “Now I am restored. What a shock! If they have to hang them, that’s all well, but must they do so by a public thoroughfare, where ladies must be exposed to such disgustingness? Did you smell them? Pheew! This is the Comte Medard’s land; I’ll send him a very nasty letter about it, see if I don’t.”
“But why did they hang these people?” I asked, interrupting in the brutal manner that was the only possible way of actually conversing with Louise.
“Oh, witchcraft, most likely. There was a woman, you saw. Usually it’s witchcraft when the women are involved. If it’s only men, most often it’s just preaching sedition and heresy, but the women don’t preach. Did you see the ugly dark clothes she had on? Horrible! So depressing only to wear dark colors all the time; what kind of religion would make its followers wear such plain clothes all the time? Obviously the Devil’s work, anyone can see that. They are afraid of women, that’s what it is, so they…”
I closed my eyes and leaned back in the seat. I hoped it wasn’t very far to Louise’s country house.
In addition to the monkey, from whom she would not be parted, Louise’s country house contained a number of other decorations of dubious taste. In Paris, her husband’s taste and her father’s must be consulted, and the rooms of the house there were consequently done richly, but in subdued tones. But Jules seldom came to the country house, being too busy in the city, and so Louise’s taste was allowed free rein.
“This is my newest toy; is it not lovely?” she cooed, running her hand lovingly over the carved dark wood of a tiny house that sprouted incongruously from the wall next to a gilt-bronze sconce in the shape of Eurydice.
“That looks like a cuckoo clock,” I said disbelievingly.
“You have seen one before? I didn’t think there were any to be found anywhere in Paris!” Louise pouted slightly at the thought that her toy might not be unique, but brightened as she twisted the hands of the clock to the next hour. She stood back, beaming proudly as the tiny clockwork bird stuck its head out and emitted several shrill Cuckoo!s in succession.
“Isn’t it precious?” She touched the bird’s head briefly as it disappeared back into its hidey-hole. “Berta, the housekeeper here, got it for me; her brother brought it all the way from Switzerland. Whatever you want to say about the Swiss, they are clever woodcarvers, no?”
I wanted to say no, but instead merely murmured something tactfully admiring.
Louise’s grasshopper mind leaped nimbly to a new topic, possibly triggered by thoughts of Swiss servants.
“You know, Claire,” she said, with a touch of reproof, “you ought really to come to Mass in the chapel each morning.”
“Why?”
She tossed her head in the direction of the doorway, where one of the maids was passing with a tray.
“I don’t care at all, myself, but the servants – they’re very superstitious out here in the countryside, you know. And one of the footmen from the Paris house was foolish enough to tell the cook all about that silly story of your being La Dame Blanche. I have told them that’s all nonsense, of course, and threatened to dismiss anyone I catch spreading such gossip, but… well, it might help if you came to Mass. Or at least prayed out loud now and then, so they could hear you.”
Unbeliever that I was, I thought daily Mass in the house’s chapel might be going a bit far, but with vague amusement, agreed to do what I could to allay the servants’ fears; consequently, Louise and I spent the next hour reading psalms aloud to each other, and reciting the Lord’s Prayer in unison – loudly. I had no idea what effect this performance might have on the servants, but it did at least exhaust me sufficiently that I went up to my room for a nap, and slept without dreaming until the next morning.
I often had difficulty sleeping, possibly because my waking state was little different from an uneasy doze. I lay awake at night, gazing at the white-gesso ceiling with its furbishes of fruit and flowers. It hung above me like a dim gray shape in the darkness, the personification of the depression that clouded my mind by day. When I did close my eyes at night, I dreamed. I couldn’t block the dreams with grayness; they came in vivid colors to assault me in the dark. And so I seldom slept.
There was no word from Jamie – or of him. Whether it was guilt or injury that had kept him from coming to me at the Hôpital, I didn’t know. But he hadn’t come, nor did he come to Fontainebleau. By now he likely had left for Orvieto.
Sometimes I found myself wondering when – or whether – I would see him again, and what – if anything – we might say to each other. But for the most part, I preferred not to think about it, letting the days come and go, one by one, avoiding thoughts of both the future and the past by living only in the present.
Deprived of his idol, Fergus drooped. Again and again, I saw him from my window, sitting disconsolately beneath a hawthorn bush in the garden, hugging his knees and looking down the road toward Paris. At last, I stirred myself to go out to him, making my way heavily downstairs and down the garden path.