by Sarah Smith
Which was as good an excuse for Alexander not writing as she could muster, that is, no excuse at all.
It is very crowded here . . .
Under the best of circumstances, Perdita learned, a film crew on location is a barely controlled mob. This was not the best of circumstances. The Vex-Fort (the main castle) had eight bedrooms, of which André, Sabine, and Cyron used three. The two New Buildings, which had been the abbey guesthouses, had thirty rooms between them, but there were many more than thirty people here. Wardrobe had a wardrobe mistress, five laundresses, and three full-time seamstresses including harried Mademoiselle Huguette. There was Boomer O’Connelly, the Irishman who made the explosions, and Mr. Krauss and his assistant, and the men who worked the lights and the men who painted the sets and the men who took care of props.
And that was before the actors.
Citizen Mabet was full of actors: banquet guests, witches, soldiers, judges of the Revolutionary tribunal, a physician, an executioner, and crowds of crowds. Monsieur Cyron had many friends, all of them distinguished, generals, political persons, important Conservative hostesses; they all came to do a cameo and stayed the night. They brought valets, secretaries, and friends; some of them brought their horses. Every one of these amateur actors had to be rehearsed, fed, flattered, and got onto the set at the right time.
“Every nob’s got a diet,” the caterer complained to Perdita. “He can’t eat celery, she can’t eat beef; this one has to have a cup of chicken soup exactly at ten o’clock, and the soup can’t be too hot, but it can’t be cold. . . . They’re worse trouble than your baby.”
“The dang horses have diets,” the horse-handler Zeno Puckett said.
“Not one of those women is the size she should be,” Mademoiselle Huguette spoke up in her trembling voice. “Taking two inches in, letting two inches out, it’s nothing to them.”
Reisden, Perdita, and Toby had one cell in the New Buildings, with two small rolling iron bedsteads with straw-stuffed mattresses. They slept a different way every night: beds pulled together, beds roped together, mattresses on the floor. Perdita sent for Toby’s bassinet from Paris.
There weren’t enough dishes, forks, knives, glasses. The half-ruined commune at the foot of Montfort walls was too small to have even a bakery. The bread, the milk, the meat except for mutton, and the vegetables came from Arras. The house staff washed dishes and changed linens from morning until bedtime. The Holy Well pumped constantly—at night the pump from the New Buildings woke Toby—but there was very little water supply when spread over so many people, and much of it was saved for washing the film during developing.
And all day they worked, every day, and what went on film had to be perfect. The world isn’t perfect. “Cloud,” someone would warn just as they were preparing to shoot, and they would have to wait, looking up, while the cloud drifted by overhead. A kitten wandered into the shot just as Monsieur Cyron was condemning an aristo to death. They filmed a scene without noticing that a sheep was doing something private in the background, and filmed and developed another before they saw André’s shadow falling over it.
If everyone had been calm, it would have been bad enough. But tempers were very short.
Germany had started a war.
***
Agadir.
France had Agadir; Germany wanted it.
It was not the war between France and Germany, at least, Alexander said, but it was serious. Germany had sent a warship to Agadir in Morocco, which no one had heard of before but now seemed vital, a center of finance and trade for the whole southern Mediterranean. The German warship was sitting in Agadir harbor with its guns trained on the town.
France refused to give Agadir up.
The war was not only in Morocco but between Cyron’s army friends and the set crew. Two young cavalry officers and three infantry officers were helping to stage the big battle scene. The soldiers swaggered around boasting of what France would do to the Boche. “What you’ll do?” the second carpenter spoke up. “You lot’ll sit on your rear ends while my lot do the dying.”
There was one bar in the half-ruined commune of Montfort, and it was too small for the factions that developed. The army men drank at one end of the bar, the tech crew at the other. They could be heard perfectly well through the guest room windows.
“Instead of sitting on your round pink arses, why don’t you aristos go in the front lines?”
“The capitalists make money and the workers die!”
“Bloodsuckers!”
“Cowards!”
On the Fourth of July--her American soul wanted fireworks—Spain officially declared that it supported Germany in Morocco and England that it supported France.
That night the bar discussions got out of hand. Bottles crashed. In the yard behind the bar, men grunted as they hit one another. The fights woke Toby, who cried and woke everyone on their part of the floor.
“If we’re lucky,” Alexander said, “the only real fighting will be over a mahogany table in Berlin. Joseph Caillaux is a peacemaker; he’s handling the diplomatic negotiations for France.”
“But if we’re not lucky?” she asked.
He didn’t answer.
Alexander was avoiding her. He got up before dawn, to practice for the big battle scene, he said, but then he was always away doing something. She and Aline and Toby kept track of when he was acting, to watch him, but there were whole days when he wasn’t acting and was simply off somewhere else. He came in late and fell into bed, hardly speaking to her except to say good night.
He was doing something and wouldn’t tell her what, or he was avoiding her.
Toby, who was usually such a happy baby, fussed. He was getting a tooth; he missed his house and his toys; there were too many people here and he didn’t know any of them. When Alexander left early in the morning, he would wake Toby and Toby would shriek. Perdita walked him, held him, comforted him, “it’s no worse than being on tour, Toby dear, is it?” but he sobbed and grizzled and sweated against her neck, and just when she thought he had finished he burst into howls again until people began pounding on the walls.
“Don’t leave so early,” she asked Alexander.
He had to, he said; most of his role was in the battle scene.
“At least don’t wake the baby, then!”
“I don’t mean to wake him!”
“But you do wake him! You should go live in a tent in the fields!”
Of course she had to apologize to him afterward, which didn’t help her temper at all.
“Your little boy’s sick,” said Count André, noticing Toby crying. “He’ll die,” he added hollowly.
Perdita snapped. “I should think even you would be sick of your nonsense, Count André.” She hated that man.
My dear Mr. Daugherty—Half of Citizen Mabet is in the can, as Mr. Krauss says. She wrote a hurried note at lunch. On one side of the hill, horsemen were practicing for the big battle scene, which, she was told, would be the largest scene of its kind ever filmed in France. Horses thumped up the hill in geysers of dust; someone was banging a drum. On the other side of the hill (the invaluable sun side) a different scene was being filmed. A string quartet played with a tinny plucked-string instrument. She pricked up her ears with interest; it must be a harpsichord, a real eighteenth-century survival rescued from someone’s attic. She longed to explore it. Pink clouds danced, heels thumped on a wooden floor; people laughed and chatted on the sidelines, fill-ing up the scene. Below everything the camera clicked and whirred.
“OK, Countess, Sabine,” Krauss said. “Move left a little, I want that spot behind ya head. Okay, honey, smile, ya look great. Ya look gorgeous.”
And Count André’s wife!
Count André’s wife was the center of every scene she played. She wasn’t an actress as Perdita understood acting; actors had beautiful voices, Sabine had a tiny nasal breathy one, it made your teeth ache to hear her. But she was one of those people everyone looked at and everyone admired. Perd
ita had been at the center of things and knew what it sounded like. Perdita had to translate most of Mr Krauss’s oh honeys and instructions for her while she jiggled Toby against her hip to keep him from crying. She missed being a person and not just Toby’s mother and the cameraman’s translator, the useful woman who spoke both languages and didn’t have anything else to do. I’ll go live in a tent in the fields, she thought. And I shall take the harpsichord and a piano.
She was furious with Alexander, who was too busy for her, and with Sabine, who hogged the spotlight without having done the work to deserve it.
She wasn’t getting enough practice time, which always made her nasty.
To keep the actors getting into bar-fights about the war, Monsieur Cyron began to put on entertainments in the evenings. There was a terrace outside the old main building, with a nice flat green lawn on two levels, and every night the actors put on some kind of amusement. General Pétiot, who came frequently, told funny stories. The American horse-handier, Zeno Puckett, played the banjo. Monsieur Cyron performed magic tricks; a chauffeur did comic songs; three of the maids did a chorus line; everyone wanted to do something. Sabine told fortunes.
Well, she could do this too. Perdita played “The Maple Leaf Rag,” “The Bow Wow Rag,” W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.” Toby stopped crying; people applauded. They were the most successful concerts she had ever given in France.
It was her protest, to play American songs: the only way to say what she was feeling. She wore Uncle Gilbert’s necklace because it was too valuable to leave around, but also because it said exactly what she meant.
She wanted to talk to Alexander about Uncle Gilbert, to have him talk with Gilbert, to have them all at peace with each other again. Until they were, she felt breathless and angry and wrong.
But Alexander avoided her.
Sabine tells fortunes
APART FROM SEEING DEATH, Sabine had thought she had no talent for fortunes at all, but last winter her treasure of a father-in-law had taught her how to force cards. Sabine could put the Last Judgment or the Emperor anywhere in a deck she pleased.
She turned up art, harmony, and music all together to please Dr. Reisden’s wife. For Papa Cyron, she dealt a full ten cards of good luck; he knew what she was doing but it pleased him all the same. For a maid, she dealt a journey (“to a big city! Paris?”); for a young lieutenant, glory.
A real witch tells her clients their dreams.
Sabine could tell fortunes with the Voyage of Life, the new Waite tarot, straw in water, Chinese bamboo, herbs, any one of a dozen ways; but her favorite was the Oracle of Napoleon, because of two cards in it, the Bear and the Nesting Storks.
The Bear was the Germans. “’An enemy sly, here is the Bear. Treachery’s nigh, so watch and beware!’” And the Nesting Storks meant Alsace. The soldiers laughed to see the Storks. “I’ll get to fight in Alsace, it looks like!”
Sabine made sure the Storks were in good places. She surrounded them with the Star, the Key, the Tower, and the Mountain: “You will have great luck and long life! Go on a journey, seize your luck! Strike hard, strike first!” She gave them allies: the Dog, the Cavalier. She sent into faraway exile the Dark Clouds, the Robber Mouse, and the Grave.
The Russians came in on the French side.
The soldiers celebrated. “You’re a marvel, Madame Sabine,” the soldiers said, “didn’t you say that France would have more allies? The Dog, that’s the English bulldog. So the Cavalier must be Russia.”
Everyone adored her. Everyone believed her. Even while the Paris papers said the situation was only a diplomatic crisis, the fighting would be only in Morocco at best, and everyone could depend on Joseph Caillaux to make peace, the officers believed their fortunes and dreamed of war in Europe.
Jules arrives; looking for secrets; the Arras Citadel
JULES ARRIVED ONLY THREE days after everyone else, leaning on two canes, gritting his teeth, needing to be helped to sit down and to rise; but he had had to come.
He had heard from Gehazy. He handed the postcard to Reisden. Donnez-le-moi, give me the secret, and a time and place: Saturday afternoon the fifteenth, by the obelisk in the Place Victor-Hugo.
And on the same day, forwarded from Jouvet, Reisden got a postcard too. Reisden’s was of the crypt of St.-Vaast Cathedral in Arras. His date and a time, typewritten in purple ink, was the sixteenth of July, the Sunday of Bastille Day weekend, at eleven in the morning. High Mass, when the church would be crowded. A place for spies to meet. Donnez-le-moi.
“He wants it from both of us?”
“But he bloody well doesn’t tell us what he wants.”
Jules spread his hands wide.
“He thinks you know,” Reisden said, “he thinks I know. Would André know? Shall we ask him?”
But André shook his head. “Military secret of Montfort? Hamlet, you must be joking.”
Reisden sent a letter back to Gehazy. Tell us what we’re looking for. How very likely that was.
He didn’t tell Perdita about this threat. He was ashamed of Gehazy, of the past Gehazy had come from.
“You sit and think for us,” he told Jules. “Ruthie and I’ll explore.”
He told Perdita he was busy with the battle scene. With a Kodak he bought in Arras, Reisden climbed up into the abbey bell tower; he clicked a panorama all the way round, showing the base of the tower, the ruined abbey, and the maze of Montfort castle. From the air the walls of Montfort looked like the ruins of a city. Around it spread roads, woods, hedges, farms, bits of village at more or less regular intervals along the main road to Arras. To the east, the same flat land, the rutted road to Neuville-St.-Vaast and Vimy, the woods along Vimy ridge; farther east still, the artificial pyramids of the Wagny coal mines.
Ruthie and Reisden spread out the photographs and divided the castle into sections. Each of them had a list of places to search.
The abbey: nothing. Reisden spent a night looking for secret hiding places. Jules insisted on coming, shining a torch down into the tumbled stones and leaning forward stiffly to peer at them while Reisden climbed down to find--nothing. The abbey towers: nothing. The walls of the castle, the towers, the outbuildings, the New Buildings: nothing. Reisden searched white chalky walls, rooms without doors, stairs leading nowhere. Potting sheds, gardens; the outhouses behind the New Buildings; the generator; the apple orchard and the farmers’ barns at the back of the hill; the stone-dump of broken chalk. The Lion Tower. The little towers scattered in the grass, some no higher than a man’s knee, scratched with their patriotic slogans. Nothing.
Reisden drove the Arras road, looking for some signs of military activity. No. Arras had factories for farm equipment and fertilizer, not for bullets and guns. Farther north and east, farm country. He passed Mademoiselle Françoise’s isolated house, standing out yellow against the woods. Toward the village of Vimy, the road climbed. He let a bit of air out of the tires, for traction, and drove up on the ridge by Vimy, where he could see all over the valley from Montfort to Sabine’s mines.
Rich land. Coal mines. Sugar beets; most of France’s sugar came from here. Was sugar a military necessity? Probably. Rich Flanders farmland, land worth taking.
Not protected by anything but the Citadel at Arras.
Which was too far away to be the secret of Montfort, and was not secret in any case; but it was the only military thing in miles, and it was odd.
***
Méduc’s attack on Montfort castle would be the most difficult sequence of the film. Squads of men would charge up Montfort hill, battling Mabet and his forces. Cannons would fire into hundreds of men in hand-to-hand combat. It was as large a scene as had ever been filmed; it would use two cameras at once and take three days to film; and it would use conscripts from the Citadel in Arras.
Reisden was one of the group leaders, and with the others, he went to the Citadel to train the soldiers, and to spy.
The Citadel was like provincial army barracks everywhere: rules and regulations we
re posted on every wall, guards snapped to attention at every door. Conscripts drilled on the huge parade ground, their figures wavering in the heat. Only the horses, switching their tails in the long brick stables, allowed themselves to look bored.
The “aggression” in Morocco had cast its shadow here too. The commandant took the Austrian Reisden into his office and interviewed him personally before letting him inside. Puckett had to go through none of this; he was an American, either neutral or on the French side.
They met their men in the dining hall. “This is your flag,” Reisden told his recruits, showing them a banner from the Necro props room. “This is your cue.” The trumpeter played a tune. “When I wave the flag and you hear your cue—if you hear it, the scene will be noisy—you’ll charge up the hill.” The soldiers nodded eagerly, sitting straight on the hard benches, grinning at being soldiers on film.
When the recruits went off to be measured for their uniforms, the commandant gave Cyron and his guests a tour of the Citadel. Certain doors were left closed, and the commandant looked meaningfully at Reisden; but Leo had taught him how to guess from what he saw. Long rows of barracks testified to the size of the garrison. Underground, the chill arsenal gleamed behind bars; Reisden counted rows of guns.
They were let see only parts of the arsenal; behind a barred door, a tunnel lined with more doors led into the distance. Reisden wondered what they were hiding. Not simply more weapons, but something that needed ventilation, men or horses; in the distance he could just see the light of a ventilation shaft.
He had been too well trained to linger at something interesting. Leo would have sent a second person to look into the Citadel.
The film people, escorted by the Citadel horsemaster, walked the long circumference of the brick-and-granite walls. They sat on the top of the wall, with the parade ground on one side and the long green slope of the moat on the other, and watched soldiers replanting flower beds and whitewashing outbuildings. It was a humid, hot, lazy July afternoon; the grass smelled sweetly damp. The soldiers waved up at the film people.