A Citizen of the Country

by Sarah Smith

  “At least,” Dotty murmured, “André looks at her from there."

  Milly gave a little crow. “That’s it! That’s why Cyron wanted her instead of a decent actress like me. Isn’t it, Nicky? He’s going to make her an actress,” Milly said. “She’ll be pretty on film, I grant that. André’s filming her, André edits the film— Poof!” Milly said. “André has to look at her. André pays attention to actresses.”

  “Jules thinks so,” Reisden said.

  Milly snorted. “But André hates her, so he’ll light and edit her badly—”

  “No, André wants the film to succeed,” Reisden said.

  “Of course. But,” Dotty asked, “what does André want most? To make the film work, will he accept her?”

  Milly fixed him, sapphire eyes beaming under her hennaed hair. “What does darling Sacha want, that’s the question! Do you want me to teach her to act?”

  “My dear,” Dotty said, “he’s asking me to teach her to dress!”

  “What a horrible man.”

  Reisden spread his hands in masculine helplessness.

  “I suppose I must talk couture with her.” Dotty wrinkled her perfect nose. “I am the century’s most put-upon woman.”

  “It’s why I love you,” Reisden said.

  Milly groaned.

  “But you are forcing it, darling,” Dotty said, “you know you are. You are playing the innocent. They’ll never make a happy family. They’re hopeless. Doomed.”

  The sexual frustrations of witches

  SABINE HAD ALWAYS WANTED children. If one is a sorceress and lies with a sorcerer, one’s chil-dren will be sorcerous too. And to be loved by Necrosar! The enormous black cloak, the face made up like a skull; she wanted to lie naked on that cloak, shivering in the chill of underground, while he took her, masked and anonymous. Their first son would be Count of Montfort, keeper of the Holy Well. He would drink the water of the Holy Well, bathe in it. In his seventh year, on Christmas Eve at midnight, when powers can be multiplied, Sabine would give him her talent for seeing death.

  Sabine’s son would be a great sorcerer, a force in the world. And Sabine would be his sorceress mother, and Necrosar his father, and everything would be perfect. It made her quiver inside just to think of it.

  And so Madame des Poirées was sent, grumbling and tottering on her high heels, to make discreet inquiries to Monsieur Cyron and Necrosar’s lawyers; and in the course of time, in a room crowded with lawyers and intermediaries, Sabine and André met and shook hands, and he gave her the big old diamond that had been his mother’s, and he smiled cynically, as if there were a secret between them. That smile tore her heart as a hook tears a fish; she was ecstatic, pulled out of her element into a new atmosphere, breathless, airless with delight; she was afraid with love. On a windy day in May, in another room filled with lawyers and witnesses, they signed papers, and then, in the ruins of the old abbey church at Montfort, with her veil blowing in her face and the witnesses standing silent in black, Sabine took André’s chill hand and swore to be his wife.

  But Necrosar was cursed, and sorceress though she was, she could do nothing about it.

  He was sick on the wedding night. She wasn’t (she didn’t like salmon). They went to Egypt. Sabine shopped in the bazaars and came back with silk bustiers and colored veils thin enough to count her freckles through. Necrosar bought a mummy, visited the Pyramids, and stayed up all night writing The Pharaoh’s Revenge. He no longer said he was sick, but he seemed to have assumed that their life had fallen into a pattern, while she was still waiting for it to begin.

  Who could have done this? Her success must have made other witches jealous. Sabine looked through her husband’s baggage for strange knots and bits of soil. She threw out his favorite English tea “by accident”; you know the English. One day she walked moonwise around his dressing room and counterspelled every object in it. His mirror? From her pocket Sabine took a little box of black wafers, which were always with her, and stuck one to the back of the mirror so that his thoughts of passion would not be reversed. His daybed? Sabine ran her hand under the mattress, looking for knots tied in the sheets. She changed the sheets for ones of her own; it was not unknown for a malicious person to weave sheets with crossed threads.

  Each photograph over his desk she marked with a wafer. In André’s closet, she counterspelled each piece of clothing. She marked the knob of the door, the key, the lintel, and the doorframe. She opened the dresser drawers to say words over each of his underclothes and to mark them, and one pair she carefully unfolded. Taking off her own lacy underclothes, she put on a pair of André’s inside out.

  As you walk, think of me; as you put on your clothes, think of my skin; may this mark protect you from all harm, and this lend strength to nature. As this is close to me, may I be close to you. As this key opens your door, may you open to me.

  She wore the underclothes for three days, with no success at all.

  “Everyone dies,” André said. They were watching a funeral on an Egyptian street, a little white coffin being carried toward the river. “Everyone always dies."

  “But that’s the fun of it,” Sabine said. “We don’t, we live.” She wanted to live. She looked around the crowd. One or two people were veiled with grey: a blind old man being led by a boy, a fat auntie in the funeral procession. But she was alive, alive, and it was a hot sunny day. It would be cool behind the shutters, on soft Egyptian cotton, their bodies striped with sunlight. She had not ever seen her husband naked. Not once.

  She could divorce him if he refused to sleep with her. He would be poor again if she divorced him. But she wanted Necrosar.

  One day, in the souk with a new guide, she came across a tray of love potions, and among them was a powder that she didn’t know. “Lady no try that,” her guide said. “Powder very strong, very strong, no good.” But the spell on Necrosar was strong, too, and she was sure, of course, that it wouldn’t harm him.

  André couldn’t stop vomiting. He threw up blood. In the hospital, his eyes followed her, then slid away. “Go away,” he whispered. “I don’t want you.”

  They came home from Egypt— Home? He sent her to Montfort and stayed in Paris.

  On Epiphany night, girls use a spell to see their future husbands. Starting at dusk, Sabine sat motionless in her room, eyes turned away from her big mirror, reciting spells. As the bells rang for midnight from Ste.-Catherine, she stood and walked backward toward the mirror; as the last bell struck, she looked over her shoulder.

  In the mirror, she saw a coffin, the spinster’s sign. As if she had never been married at all. As if she would die and be carried in her coffin, never knowing her husband’s love.

  She made the fists and the horns at the mirror.

  There is a spell against unknown enemies, a spell that will eat the strength of a curse and spit it back at the giver. Sabine used five mirrors, holy water, and the fingerbones of a dead man, and with all her heart she cursed the unknown who had set this spell between herself and Necrosar.

  No one had unusually bad luck, that early spring, but her husband and her father-in-law.

  They were making a film and everything went wrong. Cyron told Sabine about his problems every Sunday morning at breakfast, before the Friends of Montfort came to help build the castle. At first, of course, she thought of suspecting him. Why had he had this bad luck, if he hadn’t cursed her and her counterspell turned it back on him?

  And then he explained to her that André was directing the film.

  She had turned the curse back, and it had fallen on her own husband. The fault was Necrosar’s. Necrosar himself was the source of everything that had gone wrong with them.

  Love embittered is perfect hate. “I despise him!” she burst out (surprising Cyron, who had only told her that André was directing). “I love him and I married him but he didn’t mean it. I want a child!” she wailed. “I want him!”

  “Oh, Sabine girl, my poor Binette.” Papa Cyron patted her hand.

 
Her hate wanted to turn back to love, as vinegar wants to turn again to wine.

  At past midnight on a shivering March evening she rang her friend Mademoiselle Françoise’s bell. Mademoiselle Françoise answered the door in her nightgown, her hair up in its leather tails to curl it.

  “Françoise, get up and get your books. I will have a child from my husband, whether he wants or no.”

  Sabine conjures an incubus

  “‘IT HAS BEEN THE experience of all times and all nations, that witches practice coition with demons,’” Sabine read aloud. “‘I add that a child can be born of such copulations with an Incubus devil.’” Sabine put her finger on her book and looked up triumphantly.

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Mademoiselle Françoise. “I never heard of such a thing.”

  “‘Devils cannot, as animals do, procreate children by virtue of their own strength and substance; but the devil can collect semen from another place, as from a man’s vain dreams, and by his speed and experience of physical laws can preserve the semen in its fertilizing warmth....’ It’s not even wrong because it’ll be his child. And it’ll show the new bishop up if we do it,” Sabine said cunningly.

  For years Mademoiselle Françoise’s uncle had been the bishop of their coven, and Mademoiselle Françoise had done all the gardening for her uncle, supplying fresh herbs for salves and spells. But when the uncle had died, a blacksmith from Ste.-Catherine had been named bishop, and now the herb business was going to the blacksmith’s aunt, who lived two villages away. Instead of sitting in a place of honor by the altar, Mademoiselle Françoise was now just one more member of the congregation. The herbs always arrived wilted, Mademoiselle Françoise complained, and as for the aunt’s flying ointment, one might as well hop on one foot and flap one’s thumbs.

  “You’re right,” Mademoiselle Françoise said. “I’ll do it.”

  For nine days before the ceremony Sabine drank only water and ate only bread; she avoided human society and abstained from labor and from luxury. She prayed five times during the night and four during the day, that those things that I conceive in my mind may happen in the flesh.

  “You must bathe in water from the Holy Well, exorcised water,” Mademoiselle Françoise said. “Not from the tap, but from the well itself.”

  The Holy Well was in the deepest of Montfort’s three basements, which was supposed to be dangerous because of rock falls and bad air. Sabine stole the key from Papa Cyron’s desk and went down into the cellars. Down, down she went, through the first cellar with its wine bins, through the cobwebbed second cellar, and down the deepest, narrowest stairs to where twisting tunnels drove through the hill like Montfort’s roots. And so she found the Holy Well.

  She found the Holy Well by the galvanized pipe that led from it. The Well had been covered over, boxed in with wood. A gas-powered pump crouched by it. Everything was imprisoned behind thick modern iron bars. She stared at it in horror. I’ll fix this, she promised as she unlocked the door.

  She brought a bucket of water back to Mademoiselle Françoise, and from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet she purified herself with exorcised water, then clothed herself only in linen.

  Meanwhile Mademoiselle Françoise made the ointments. This you don’t do in your own kitchen, not if you value your life; Mademoiselle Françoise had a workroom deep in the chalk under her farm, a room that had been an old animal byre. Tunnels led away into the earth. Shivering in her linen dress, Sabine sat on the stone bench carved into the chalk walls, nodding from the heavy green scents of belladonna and nightshade, drinking tea Mademoiselle Françoise had given her. She was light-headed from lack of food and sleep, from cold and drugs, and hate and love churned in her like a heavy sluggish fire.

  She would be Necrosar’s at last; he would be hers.

  On the thirty-first of March, which was a Friday night, the two women scrubbed the stained, hoof-scarred floor of the old byre. Sabine took off her stiff linen dress and cast it aside. She stood naked in the low cellar. It was so low that her hair brushed the ceiling. Mademoiselle Françoise drew around her the symbols that would wall her in with the demon, then chalked signs of protection, pressing the soft chalk hard against the irregular flinty floor, muttering, holding up her skirt to make sure she didn’t smudge a line. Sabine watched the candle flame, Mademoiselle Françoise's swinging gold ear-drops with the little pearls, her scuffed suede slippers piled in a corner. Who would come? Lucifer, who appears in the shape of a handsome boy? Ashtaret, a fiery cloud? Vapula, a lion with griffin’s wings?

  “I conjure you ...” Mademoiselle Françoise prompted her from the book.

  “I conjure you, I abjure and call you,” Sabine said, then more loudly, “I constrain and command you: come, and obey. . ..”

  Nothing. No naked man, horned or tailed; no fire; no black goat or long-tailed donkey or lion. No Necrosar; no husband; no child. Nothing. Sabine was shaking from the cold.

  “Louder!” hissed Mademoiselle Françoise.

  The lights were surrounded by rainbows. The cave was thick with smoke from burning sage and unfamiliar herbs. “I call upon you,” Sabine shouted, “with my flesh I call you, with my body 1 call you; come, obey—”

  And he was there, in the shadows beyond the fire. He had come from the tunnels. His face was dark but his body was white. For a mo-ment Sabine doubted; that is how men look who work in the fields.

  “Françoise, he’s just a shepherd!” she hissed.

  “Look, though: have you ever seen him before? It’s no one from around here! Because it’s not a man!”

  “He isn’t Necrosar!” she said.

  “Why would it look like Necrosar? It’s a man of air—”

  The man looked her up and down. He had a round flat face, thick lips, and strange slanting eyes, almost Chinese. She had been expecting something that looked like her husband. He beckoned her to him. She hesitated. He said something in a thick-tongued language, nasal and throaty at once, and beckoned again, then put his hands on his hips and simply looked at her.

  He was not a man of air; he was a man. The incubus had taken him, slipped into him like a hand into a glove, made him its own, but he was not Necrosar; something stranger was going to happen than what she had prayed for. She moved around the sage fire and took his hand (it was callused, a living man’s hand). She looked up into the face, the hot firelit eyes.

  And the incubus took them both. They moved back away from the smoky firelight, into the cracks and crevices of the tunnels. His hands moved over her, rough like the pads of a big cat. His body was hot. She shuddered and wrapped her leg around his. He knelt and laid her down on the live rock. All this time he was talking in the guttural language of demons, and sometimes he laughed. He took her breast in his hand. He lay on top of her. She was swaying inside, liquid as fruit; she felt a pain, light, a heat gathering around pressure, and then something she had never felt before burst out from them together, so that she shrieked from the deadly pleasure of it. Necrosar! Necrosar! She died, she fell, she burned, she cried, she hated; she loved her husband and no one but her husband; she despised him and had taken a lover; it was not a lover or good or evil or anything, it was herself she was finding.

  As Sabine stumbled up the stairs and out the door of the garden shed, she looked up and saw trails of fire in the sky.

  ***

  She thought the man of air would come once and no more, but he came to her next at Montfort.

  He came to Montfort on the day of the spring washing. In the kitchen, every pot was being scoured. Every featherbed and pillow had been pulled down out of the bedrooms and the maids were shaking them on the lawn; they scattered feathers like little flowers among the grass.

  This time he was dressed, but he wore a huge hat (to cover his horns) and he wore boots, preternaturally long and thin and pointed. He said he was to be part of her husband’s film. He was here to look at everything. No one else had time for him that day; he had been clever.

  She took him by t
he hand and led him down into the cellars, to one of the cobwebbed tunnels of the second level. She motioned to him to take off his leather coat. His skin was leathery, too, dark in the candle-light and cracked. She unbuttoned her dress. His eyes went wide; he laughed and said something in the language of demons. She lay on the leather coat, which smelled of smoke, of animals, of kingdoms on the other side of death, and opened herself to him.

  He said he needed to know everything about the land around Montfort. Together they explored Montfort in the spring. In those warm days the castle seemed to be infinite, white room after white room open to the sun, shadowed places under stairs, tunnels leading nowhere from dark basements, not meant to be lived in, only to be built and built and forever to be built. She stole Papa Cyron’s keys and together they explored the locked Bluebeard-rooms of Montfort, which had in them nothing terrible but only supplies for the builders, mortar for cement, rooms piled with boxes of nails and hardware.

  Above them, a gull hovered in the clouds, an eye watching over them where the trails of light had been.

  On horseback, they explored the woods near the castle. Instead of using a whip, he slapped the horse with his hat. He had no horns. He took pictures of her with a Kodak camera, which made her laugh; what did demons want with pictures?

  If he was human, it didn’t bother her; he was not her lover, he came from Necrosar. She accepted it all. His thumb on her nipple, his tongue on her breast. Her legs around him as they lay under the trees. He gave her a present, jet and amber beads, blood-red, a present for a witch. She wore them everywhere; they were from Necrosar.

  Her breasts swelled and grew tender. She yearned constantly for strawberries. When she walked on the castle wall, the pigeons flew down and strutted around her, spreading their tail-feathers and cooing, and the gulls haloed the sky above her.