A Citizen of the Country

by Sarah Smith

  Reisden talks with Necrosar

  NECROSAR AT NOON AT the Gare de l’Est: he wasn’t inconspicuous. Hair down past his shoulders, high top hat and long black travelling cloak, people whispering behind their hands as he passed. Hard for André, now, to exist anywhere but the Necro.

  Ruthie had reserved a private compartment for them. Once the train had started, André brought out a box, and from the box a model guillotine, beautifully made, about a foot high. Reisden nodded at the guillotine. “De Vere?”—André’s favorite maker of magic.

  André brought out an egg from the box and balanced the egg on the lunette of the guillotine. “Hard-boiled,” André said. The blade fell with a heavy thud; the egg sheared in half. André offered Reisden half the victim. Reisden shook his head.

  “You’ve changed,” André said, looking at Reisden through his hair.

  “Because I don’t like eggs?”

  “You’re so normal. How did you get normal? You’re married. You have a child, and a business. You go home halfway through the Necro. Did your wife scream?”

  “No.”

  “But now she’s traveling . . . and you’re here. The Necro draws you? The film? Do you want a role?”

  Reisden shook his head. No egg. No role in the film.

  “Everyone does. They want the violence. They’re drawn, like flies to blood. But not you. My poor Hamlet.”

  “Hamlet was ten years ago.”

  “You come back to Paris, you don’t see me, you don’t act for me. You’re afraid of the Necro.”

  “Isn’t that the point.”

  “Hamlet doesn’t want to be afraid; how can that be? You ‘study’ madness. You think if you study a monster it won’t eat you. You’re not normal. It won’t last. You don’t have normal in you.”

  Oh, André was good; he was terrifyingly good. And yet he wanted normal; he depended on normal, on the Aborjailys, on his kind Fury who would fix everything.

  “I hope I do. I’ve come to ask a favor.”

  André considered, counting on his fingers mime-style. “Papa Cyron welcomes you back to Montfort. All is forgiven. You’re on his side. It’s about her. It isn’t Hamlet who’s coming for the weekend; it’s Dr Jouvet.”

  “You’ve heard what Cyron’s saying about me.”

  “Are you a spy?” André asked. “For the Germans, or on me?”

  “Cyron’s accused me, but the principal accusation is that I encouraged you to write Necro plays.” André folded his arms defensively. “And, yes, this is about your wife, because he wants you to get on well with her.”

  “She really did poison me. Cyron doesn’t believe me, and neither do you. But poison, Hamlet, it’s my job. I know.”

  “Like your mother poisoned you?” Reisden said.

  André’s shrug was a masterpiece of understatement.

  “He thinks you’re unhappy, and so do I. Send Necrosar off to the corner for a moment, will you? I want to talk to you.” It was a trick they’d used before.

  André shrugged and changed position almost imperceptibly in his seat, gestured at an invisible skeletal Necrosar moving toward an empty corner seat. G-d, André was spooky.

  “Will you help me? After the film is done, before if you can, come to us at Jouvet and talk about your mother poisoning you.”

  André looked thoughtfully at Necrosar’s corner, then got up and walked deliberately to it. “He wants to get rid of me,” he said: Necrosar’s voice. Reisden’s neck chilled. “He wants André to be normal.”

  “I want to give you alternatives,” Reisden said. “The nightmares stay; believe me. One simply has alternatives.”

  “You have your secrets too, don’t you?” André said; Necrosar said. “That your little wife doesn’t know.”

  “Actually? She does. Come to Jouvet,” Reisden said. “You will get Cyron off my back and I won’t need to sell my business.”

  “She doesn’t know, your wife, why you—” André drew a finger across his own throat.

  “You mean,” Reisden aimed a finger-pistol at himself. “Yes, she knows why.”

  “Tell me, then,” André said.

  No, André; you don’t get that much of me. “Because I was crazy,” Reisden said, and brought together André’s calling him Hamlet and asking him about suicide. Anyone who tries suicide has to have this conversation from time to time afterwards; other people wonder what they did to set the poor madman off. It’s one of the annoyances of the situation. “Acting in your Hamlet did not drive me over the edge; don’t give yourself airs, Montfort. I am stronger than you think,” he said, “and not so crazy any more; and it’s largely because I have a family now.” Who are all in America. “I want you to have that strength.”

  “Insanity is the only sanity,” André said; Necrosar said. “Crazy, Hamlet? Don’t worry. You still are.”

  “You won’t lose Necrosar,” Reisden said. “And I won’t give up.”

  The old man of the boves

  ANDRÉ, IN THE ROLE of the Count de Montfort, was scheduled to stop at Wagny-les-Mines to be photographed with the mayor, the head of the workings, and representatives from the miners’ union. The train simply stopped, unscheduled. Thanks to his wife, André was now a very rich man.

  Reisden thought briefly about André’s money. A rich friend with no agenda would have been a useful investor. But Necrosar, investing in Jouvet? No.

  The pyramid of Wagny-les-Mines’ mine tailings loomed over the town. The one main street of the town was narrow and rotten with coal dust. Coal dust peppered the evening meals being cooked at the public ovens and the bread displayed in the baker’s window; coal dust made a gritty crust on the street and tattooed the miners’ faces; coal dust smeared the narrow windows of the corons and turned the bar-signs to shadows of gilt and black. André was photographed with the miners, next to the ventilation fans. In the flashbulb explosions, the air danced with grit. André was at least six inches taller than anyone in Wagny-les-Mines, including the manager and the mayor. Counts, however poor they have been, are never as malnourished as miners.

  André was reserved and sympathetic, exactly what le patron should be; it was a scene he knew how to play. But back in the train, he relapsed to Necrosar. “I’ll do a play in the coal region. ‘Pollution oozes from the earth like pus from wounds. Around the mine shafts the earth falls away like decayed flesh from bone.’”

  “André,” Reisden said, “you’ve no social conscience.”

  “It’s evil there. Don’t you feel it? Her country.”

  Oh, really. They sat in silence until Arras.

  The yard of the Arras station was dominated by the Montfort coach. Not the rackety wagon drawn by farm horses that Reisden remembered; this was a sleek antique English mail coach, of the sort that rich men keep as pets, and the four bay horses were perfectly matched down to their white socks and pink noses. A footman was laying out English tea for them on the folding boot: sandwiches, cake, drinks.

  “Poisoned, all of it,” André muttered to Reisden.

  “Shut up, André,” Reisden murmured back.

  A man and a woman descended from the train and the driver greeted them like old guests. It was, of all people to be here this weekend, cherubic Lucien Pétiot and his wife.

  Checking up on Reisden’s progress with André, already? “What a surprise! What a delight!” Pétiot bubbled to Reisden. André smiled at them skeletally.

  The coachman spoke to André. “Madame la Comtesse is still with her dressmaker in the Grand’Place, messieurs, and we are waiting for one more guest on the next train.”

  “She’s coming with us? In this coach?” André said sharply.

  “Let’s walk around the town,” Reisden said, taking him firmly by the arm and steering him away from Pétiot.

  Arras centre-ville is large for a county town, a couple of miles across, and they walked all of it—all but the Grand’Place, where André’s wife was meeting with her dressmaker. André kept up a steady stream of Necrosar. They circled t
he enormous brick-walled Citadel, where André had been stationed as an officer, and André described dead men’s bones rising from the military cemetery and walking the streets. In the stark grey Place Victor-Hugo, André conjured up vampires. In front of the eighteenth-century theatre, André talked about Joseph Lebon, the Butcher of Arras. “It was like a slaughterhouse here, fifty or sixty guillotined in a day, blood on the pavement, the machine soaked with blood and stinking. What a feast for Death!” Necrosis cackled. But André’s eyes darted past Reisden, examining the crowds for someone who threatened him more than vampires or the Butcher of Arras. André was stalling rather than going back to the Grand’Place and his wife.

  Finally they reached the enormous town hall. “I haven’t shown you the boves,” André said. He was already ducking into the arched door-way. He reached up above the arch and produced an enormous iron key. “You can’t miss the boves of Arras. You’ll be frightened.”

  André was trying to control the situation. “Yes, I’m sure you can do that.”

  “I’ll show you where the witches meet. The witch cathedral!”

  “All right, but then we go back.”

  André led the way down an unlit corridor to an iron-bound oak door and unlocked it. On the other side was a tiny dim vestibule, like a closet, and another locked door of iron bars. André worked the key into the lock, which was sandy with rust. On the other side of the bars lay utter darkness. André got the door open, reached up in the darkness, and found a cracked yellow end of candle. He lit it; a worn stone stair fell down into the dark. He plunged down.

  The darkness was thick and resistant. Reisden felt he was inhaling it. He groped his way down the stairs, which were damp, slippery, and hollowed out from centuries of descending feet.

  “The oldest boves were Roman chalk mines,” André said, playing guide. “Caesar had his winter camp near here.” From their right came a breeze and the sounds of shouts, wagon wheels, and horses’ hooves on cobblestones. “Do you hear the market? There’s a dry-well up into the plaza. The Romans used it to haul up blocks of chalk.”

  The dark was almost impenetrable; in the candle flame Reisden could see the rough-cut walls, part of André’s arm, and that was all. He reminded himself he was not afraid of the dark.

  André held up his candle, scanning the wall foot by foot for marks. Black flints glittered from the chalk like eyes. “I know the way to the witches’ cathedral from here,” André chuckled hollowly. “I think 1 do.” André turned off into a still narrower side-passage.

  “D—n you if you get us lost for effect.” He forced himself to breathe deeply. He was not afraid of the dark, but he didn’t like it.

  The tunnel widened into complete blind blackness. Even here, the faint reverberations of the market still came to them, thudding from rock to rock in the darkness. The floor was slick with something; Reisden slipped, caught himself, and swore under his breath. The footfall and his voice came back in deep inhuman murmurs.

  “Saint Vaast,” André said, and the reverberations hissed back his words like snakes. “He came to Arras five hundred years after Christ. The Roman Empire had fallen to ruins. The land was in darkness, the legend says, and ruled by a great bear. Saint Vaast tamed the bear. But he didn’t kill it, just left it sleeping in its cave.” And André raised the candle high.

  Out of the darkness, man-high in stone, a white face thrust forward into the candle flame. The crude mouth lolled open, half-grinning, half-dead; mismatched eyes glared in the candle shadows, the thick lips writhed, the tongue moved. The candle guttered and the face struggled outward as if the chalk were trying to make itself alive.

  André knelt down and held his candle close to the floor. “She says she’s a witch,” he said.

  On the floor underneath the crude face were flowers, bunches of herbs, a pathetic bit of fur and bone that might have been a rabbit.

  Offerings.

  Reisden meets Sabine

  THE GRAND’PLACE IS ONE of those unexpected, enormous market squares one finds in the Low Countries; after the imprisoning darkness of the boves, it seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon. A wool market was going on prosaically in one corner of it, a grain market in another; the tracks for the grain market’s railroad spur curved across the cobblestones. A mackerel-seller cried her wares as she crossed the plaza, her red-and-yellow cart pulled by a dog: “Fresh mackerel, not dead yet!” On all four sides, seventeenth-century arcaded shops with top-heavy roofs displayed the local wares: gin, beers, cheeses, tulips, chalk animals, and really dreadful chalk replicas of the Town Hall. A breeze made the iron signs clack. Under the sign of a dressmaker’s shop, a young woman in a violet dress was just taking leave of an older woman while a maid hovered with parcels in the background.

  André shrank back. “She’s here!”

  Timidly, across the square, André’s wife waved a white-gloved hand. This was the poisoner, the witch who terrorized Necrosar?

  “We’ll meet her,” Reisden said. “Come, André.”

  Sabine, Countess of Montfort, Cyron’s choice to be the mother of André’s children, was not anyone’s idea of a witch. She had thick, brown, curly hair, slightly freckled skin, and brown eyes ringed inexpertly with kohl. She was wearing a violet-and-white checked silk dress with rows of buttons, small clear glass buttons with pink roses. An old-fashioned cut (men with blind wives learn the anxieties of fashion) but so new that the cloth still smelled of dye. It had lost one of its buttons already, one of the vertical rows that outlined her high, large breasts.

  And it was easy to see at least one of her attractions, for Cyron if not for André: Sabine was one of those women who would always have trouble with clothes. Buttons would undo for her, leaving bits of creamy freckled skin peeping out. Bodice lace would tear, needing intimate repairs. Mad for sex, Milly had called her. He thought—the first thing he thought was that Perdita had been gone too long; if she had been there he wouldn’t have looked at Sabine in quite the same way. Bait, our Sabine. She was a girl one took to bed.

  “This is Mademoiselle Françoise, my couturière.” Sabine had a soft, slightly nasal voice, the accent of French Flanders. Mademoiselle Françoise sucked her teeth and giggled and ducked her bright blonde head, holding out a hot little hand like a chicken-claw.

  Sabine held out her hand to André, but he only looked at it, smiling like Necrosar, and turned away. Sabine stared after him. Her mouth was lovely, the top lip slightly short, the bottom lip round and cushiony, quivering a little, from unhappiness or offended pride. A hurt, sulky, kissable mouth.

  Oh, Cyron.

  “May I?” Reisden offered her his arm like a good guest. Sabine took it and trudged along beside him, shoulders rounded, face clenched like a fist.

  The coach was crowded: not only General Pétiot and his lady, but an ancient sergeant with a stiff leg. There was luggage, the general’s wife’s knitting, Sabine’s parcels. “I’ll sit outside,” André said. Reisden offered to sit outside instead and was refused. Sabine leaned her head against the glass coach window, kicking her heels.

  The men made conversation. Pétiot and the sergeant had come at Cyron’s invitation. The older men would mortar a few stones at Montfort, then amuse themselves wandering the countryside or watching younger men work at the building. “Yes, sir,” said the sergeant, “they’re a-sweat to get that new tower finished. And there’s our boys from the Citadel—”

  Sabine, sitting by the window, sighed explosively. She took out a magazine—a theatrical magazine, with a picture of an American moving-picture heroine on the cover.

  Reisden had already been cast as the foreigner, so he asked the obvious question: “How does rebuilding Montfort build French defenses?”

  “Rebuilding a sense of France,” Pétiot said. “Not enough of that nowadays, is there?”

  “It’s,” the sergeant said, and hesitated, “it’s fine. You get up there, do your work, turn your face to the wind; there’s a view, there’s a vista, you see the land. . . .”<
br />
  Neither of them could say why rebuilding a medieval castle was important to France in 1911, but they knew it was important to them. Pétiot had raised over a hundred thousand francs for the project. The sergeant had worked on it every year since the castle rebuilding had started. Montfort belonged to them.

  “‘God loves the French soldier,’” the old sergeant said, quoting Cyron. “If I died there, with my hand on a stone . . .” Pétiot puffed on his pipe, agreeing. Sabine, sitting next him, gave Pétiot a look of loathing, pulled open the window, and fanned ostentatiously.

  “Shall we change places?” Reisden suggested.

  “Oh, that would be wonderful,” Sabine said and made room for him with a wiggle. “Do you like films?” she said. “I love films.” She gazed up at him from under the black tangle of her eyelashes; Reisden recognized the chaste-but-torrid gaze of a movie heroine. “This summer I’m going to be in a film. And then I’ll have my picture in L’lllustration and in all the theatre magazines, just like this!”

  And Reisden looked at André’s wife: her disheveled clothes and hair, her ripe figure, her teenaged inexpert flirtatiousness; and he realized the other important thing about Sabine de Montfort. She would be good in films. If the camera caught anything at all of her, it would be that breathless warm aura. Perhaps she was able to act, but it didn’t matter; when Citizen Mabet opened, Sabine de Montfort would be a sensation.

  He wondered how long it would take her to know it.

  Sabine makes a proposition

  MONTFORT. HE HADN’T SEEN it for years except in photographs, and the first sight of it took his breath away. Ridiculous, grandiose Montfort.

  It dominated the sky. Montfort Abbey and the castle stood on top of Montfort hill, the biggest—the only—elevation between Arras and Vimy. One saw first, like scratches against the sky, the ruined black towers of the abbey; and then, rising from the fields, the whole hill, spiky with the Fortifications—square towers, round ones, towers with pointed roofs, towers with battlements, all of them made from chunks of chalk mortared with cement. Round the hill, like a maze, ran a chalk white road with low chalk walls on either side. In the fields where the sheep grazed stood a profusion of little buildings, gazebos, garden sheds, simple memorials, crude statues, all made of chalk as well. At the back of the hill, visible as the carriage passed, was a vast white stone-dump, where blocks and chunks of chalk waited to be made part of Montfort.