A Citizen of the Country

by Sarah Smith

  Downstairs she found a tin of the right size among the cans and bottles and old newspapers in the larder. For ointment she mixed some of Papa Cyron’s muscle liniment with cow-balm from the stables, dried mint, and a little of the beef fat the cook saved for soap. In the library, on a bottom shelf, she found some dusty old recipe books; one was green-bound instead of black but it would have to do. She put the replacement tin and books in Ruthie’s knitting bag.

  She went out and stood on the terrace, thinking.

  Ruthie had found Mademoiselle Françoise’s bibles. Had she read them? Well, Ruthie wouldn’t steal recipe books from a dead woman if she hadn’t.

  What to do?

  ***

  Sabine had known what to do before, with the incubus and Mademoiselle Françoise—but then she had seen the grey on their faces. They were going to die anyway.

  The incubus, the horseman, hadn’t gone away, that had been the trouble. She had tried to explain to him. His work was done. It was time for him to have other lovers and for her to get back to the task of conquering Necrosar.

  If he had been a demon, she could have banished him. But he was a man. He was sunburned and used a camera. His toes were squeezed and knotted and pointed together from his strange boots, but he had no hooves nor horns. He was going bald in back. All demons can speak French—it is their natural language after Latin—but he could hardly say a word.

  Sabine had taken holy water from the font in the chapel and flicked it over him. He had only laughed. Powers of the Underworld, Sabine prayed, he is only a man; banish this man from my life. But spells had runneled off him like water off slate.

  He told her he had always wanted to go down into the lower cellars at Montfort. Sabine led him there. They found a roomful of bones, a series of crumbling dangerous tunnels. Are there more tunnels, he asked her, de plus, like this?

  She had shown him the Well.

  She had shown him it, she had even drawn water for him from the tap that came out of the box. Exorcised water, which drives off demons. He had tossed off the cupful without hesitating. She had been standing outside the well cage looking at him, with the keys in her hand, and from inside where he had been poking and tapping he had looked over his shoulder at her and she had seen his face dark grey in the lamplight.

  For a while Mademoiselle Françoise had been almost the only person to notice he was gone. She had kept asking about him. “What has happened to Mr. Blantire?” she had said in that cracked, sharp little voice of hers. “I’m so worried about him.” Mademoiselle Françoise’s arms had been full of costumes; as she was turning to hang the uniforms on the racks, Sabine had seen pale grey flow across her face.

  She had been very sad to lose her friend, and it had been awful about the cat. Sabine would have adopted Merlin for her familiar. Mademoiselle Françoise would have liked that.

  Now there was trouble again. Ruthie had found the bibles. Ruthie read books. She had studied witchcraft for the film; she would know what she’d read. She hadn’t turned grey, though. Not yet. It was no use poisoning her.

  Not yet.

  The breakfast dishes were still in the dining room. She would have to speak to the maids about that. Sabine got a small, sharp fruit knife and took it down to the first cellar. In one of the disused wine-bins, in the dark, she spat across the back of her hand, turned clock-backward three times, and poked the tip of the fruit knife into the ball of her left thumb, squeezing the blood to drip out onto the living stone floor.

  “Oh, Great Master, turn your attention to your servant Sabine. Thank you that your power has delivered me before from people who might harm me. Now Ruth Aborjaily threatens me. Curse her in all ways, curse her in her coming and her going, curse her in her speaking so that no one will believe her. Do not give her anything she wants,” Sabine added, because what Ruthie wanted would be André. Necrosar.

  Sabine’s Necrosar. She would have Necrosar. She would.

  “Let her die. Let her die. Let her die.”

  She took the knife upstairs again, washed the blood off, found a piece of sticking-plaster for her thumb, and went off to speak severely to the maids.

  Ruthie looks at buttons

  BY MONDAY AFTERNOON RUTHIE felt not only well but restless and dis-turbed. She thought she knew what had happened to her. Books about witchcraft spoke of a “flying ointment,” which witches smeared on themselves to be transported to sabbats.

  Ruthie had not dreamed of sabbats. She had dreamed she was in the last scene of the film, about to be beheaded, and rows of costumes were chasing her up the guillotine stairs, throwing sausages from the caterer’s van. Both cameras had grown wings and escaped, perching like gargoyles on the Dutch roofs of the square. Then it had begun to rain pink buttons that gleamed like blood.

  But she felt too conscious of her body. All of these strange things seemed to promise some horrible pleasure.

  To her astonishment, when she woke, Count André was asleep in the chair by her bed. He had been sleeping softly, smiling, as though in a happy dream, and her heart melted for him; but mixed with it was the same flushed excitement at the shape of his lips and his hands. That was the drug, she told herself.

  He awakened and looked at her as confused, as red-faced, as she at him.

  And there she was, in bed with her hair down. For a moment she could not catch her breath. She was conscious of every inch of her body--

  “Are you well?” he asked. “Please be well.”

  “Quite well,” she said. “I am so embarrassed to have you see me this way.”

  She was drugged; that was all.

  “Everything will be back as it was as soon as possible,” she reassured him.

  He combed his disarrayed hair out of his face with his fingers. All the time he was looking at her.

  Suddenly he leaned forward and brushed his lips against hers.

  She jumped back. “Go, go, go,” she said.

  “Oh,” said André. “I am sorry. I just— I am glad you are well.”

  “I am; now go away.”

  But when he had gone she pressed her hands against her mouth, disturbed.

  Even drugged she knew better.

  He was a married man.

  What a thing even to say to herself, he is a married man.

  ***

  “I must walk to our office in the Grand’Place,” Ruthie said to the hospital sister. “To see how many extras we have for the last scene. I dreamed the costumes had to wear themselves.” She wanted to be again the competent, helpful Ruthie she knew, not the Ruthie whose mouth he had kissed and whose hand he had held.

  He was simply pleased she was alive. Surely that was allowable. She scrubbed her mouth with her hand.

  Sister St. Placide, her nurse, had the brown face of a woman who likes the sun; she allowed herself to be persuaded. “But if you feel the slightest out of breath—”

  Shakily, leaning on Placide’s arm, Ruthie made her way to the Grand’Place. At Mademoiselle Françoise's old shop was Mademoiselle Huguette, Mademoiselle Françoise’s friend. The woman signing up extras was just going out to lunch. Ruthie offered to stay with Mademoiselle Huguette.

  “Did Mademoiselle Françoise own a dress with rose buttons?” Ruthie described them. Mademoiselle Huguette considered.

  “I’ve seen that button somewhere,” she decided.

  “Could you look?”

  One whole wall of Mademoiselle Françoise's shop was lined with button-drawers. Mademoiselle Huguette pulled out drawers one by one, talking as she went. She had been offered the lease of the shop, she said, did Ruthie think it was too much for a single woman? She would have to find an assistant. She wasn’t sure she was up to it. “Françoise was so strong-minded, and I’m not, perhaps it’s because I don’t eat meat, but the dear little calves and bunnies, it just doesn’t seem right.... What do you think?”

  Ruthie thought Mademoiselle Huguette was probably not a witch.

  They looked at red celluloid roses with green leaves, red velv
et buttons with rhinestones, and big garnet beads. “These,” said Mademoiselle Huguette finally.

  There they were, half a box left of them. “I think she put them on a yellow blouse,” Mademoiselle Huguette thought aloud. “Yellow ... some color like yellow. Coral stripes perhaps. Or checks? Perhaps it was a dress. Violet? Blue? Françoise always had the eye, not me!”

  “Was it a dress for herself?”

  “I suppose . . . I don’t know . . . She was always changing the buttons on her dresses, she said it was almost the same as having a new one. But she didn’t sew much for herself.” Mademoiselle Huguette’s bulging eyes overflowed with tears. “She was too successful, too much in demand!”

  Ruthie remembered Mademoiselle Françoise's clothes cupboard very clearly. Nothing yellow or coral. Mademoiselle Françoise had been a sallow blonde; she would never have worn yellow.

  “I will take one of these buttons,” she said to Mademoiselle Huguette. She would show it to Dr. Reisden.

  Sabine among the pigeons

  MONDAY SABINE REHEARSED THE Ball of the Dead scene with Papa Cyron until she was frustrated. “Bonnie, you’re not giving me what I want,” he complained. Sabine hated to do anything badly; it was like being back at school.

  She was a good actress, a wonderful actress, Papa Cyron said, but this scene, she was fluffing it.

  She was supposed to see ghosts and go mad. Méduc’s wife and child had been killed; Mabet had condemned hundreds of people to death; she had encouraged him. Now she was supposed to be suffering torments of conscience.

  “Think of a time when you’ve suffered torments of conscience,” Papa Cyron said.

  “I never have,” she said indignantly. Sabine had never done anything to be ashamed of.

  “Then think of something that scares you.”

  “Nothing scares me.”

  Couldn’t she be scared? Couldn’t she imagine it? Papa Cyron said he had seen some terrible things in the war, he could make her hair stand on end. He told her about a friend of his, one of his soldiers, who had been blown apart, both his legs and one arm gone. She thought about when the sorcerer had been run over. Papa Cyron must have been so happy to be alive.

  “You’re a good, brave girl,” he sighed. “Let’s stop for lunch. We’ll think of something.”

  What frightened her? She thought about it in her sitting room with the terrace doors open, eating her omelette. Nothing had frightened her but being a little girl in Lalie’s cut-down skirt and orange blouse, never going to be anyone interesting. Since the sorcerer had given her his powers, everything had gone right. What could she be afraid of? Demogorgon or Lucifer himself? They would come with gifts for her.

  Even Ruthie didn’t frighten her; something would happen to Ruthie.

  But Ruthie and Necrosar together made her feel wrong, made her feel like the little girl in the cut-down skirt who was missing her destiny.

  To be a witch is like being a mill wheel, Sabine thought. You have power, but only in the direction the mill-stream moves. She was young and pretty and rich and good in bed and she was giving André a sorcerer baby; what else can you do for a man?

  André wanted his theater run well. That was the only mill-stream he had.

  Something must happen to Ruthie.

  The extras were arriving back, all full of questions about the body in the cellars, as if it were still there. Dead people bored Sabine. From her windows Sabine had a good view of the Lazarus Gate and of her husband, who had been sitting by his mother’s grave during lunch.

  Sabine got up and examined herself in her full-length mirror. Her hair was still down. She loved it now it was blonde. She pulled it up over her head and let it cascade down. Her breasts were big, she could feel herself ripening, gathering power. Now, she thought, now I am just what he should want.

  Outside, on the long terrace, the pigeons were strutting and cooing. She put down her cup of tea and went outside in the sun, barefoot and in her embroidered Japanese dressing gown. Below the terrace, the sheep drifted across the green fields like clouds. A gull hung in the sky. The bull-pigeons huffed up their peacock-colored necks and swept the flagstones with their tails, making their mating call, roucoule. She raised her arms and spread them wide; one of the pigeons, startled, rose lazily and perched for a moment on her out-spread palm. Translucently, behind her, her Japanese sleeves spread a multicolored shadow, coloring the pigeons, as if she were a tinted film projecting herself over them. She felt as if she were giving off light.

  André looked at her, but dully. If he doesn’t love me now, in this moment, he never will. His expression did not change; he still shrank away from her.

  Fate is fate. She had tried her best. She saw herself and her husband as if she had spread cards out on the flagstones of the terrace: Necrosar and herself far apart, black clouds and coffins between them.

  Let fate deal with him and Ruthie.

  Soon enough, it would.

  Ruthie has the wrong books, but the right button

  WHEN REISDEN AND PERDITA went to pick up Ruthie, they were told they’d need to wait; Ruthie was so much better she had gone for a walk. Perdita suggested they have a cup of tea and talk.

  Reisden suggested they tour the boves. He had brought an electric torch and the compass he had got from the Auclart farm.

  The official entrance was through the Hôtel de Ville. They found their way through the low vaulted corridors and rang for the guide, who shuffled into view still holding the mop that indicated his usual duties. Reisden paid him to take them all the way through the tunnels under the two squares.

  With the compass it was relatively easy to navigate underground. The compass-needle danced in the torch-beam and the brass indicator pointed which narrow tunnel to take; from the Hôtel de Ville the Grand’Place was north and east. The whole area under the city was riddled with tunnels. Under Arras, at the Citadel, at Mademoiselle Françoise’s farm . . . He and Perdita found themselves safely first under the airwell in the Grand’Place, then, finding it by smell, at the cheesemonger’s cave at the southeast corner of the square. Reisden bought one of the heart-shaped, foul-smelling Coeur d’Arras cheeses for André, to inspire him, and a heart-shaped tin box so the cheese wouldn’t asphyxiate them on the way back to Montfort.

  “What is this about, in the boves?” Perdita asked him.

  I could tell you, he thought, but then I’d have to tell you more.

  At the hospital, Ruthie looked tired and shaky. “We were very worried about you,” Perdita said.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” said Ruthie. “But I am so worried about the number of extras for Sunday. I looked at the Grand’Place; it is so large. I think we must ask General Pétiot to keep the soldiers for the weekend, so they can fill up the scene. And we must ask the market men not to take down the stalls.”

  They talked about the guillotining scene all the way back to Montfort. But when they arrived, Ruthie drew Reisden aside.

  “I wonder if you would look at something with me?”

  ***

  She sent a maid for her knitting bag. They went into Cyron’s office, off the Great Hall where rehearsals for the Ball of the Dead scene were finished at last and Krauss was setting up his cameras. Scripts were piled on every surface. In the office, a set of magician’s linking rings dangled from the back of the only chair.

  “What do you have?” he asked.

  Ruthie closed the door behind her and felt in her knitting bag.

  “At Mademoiselle Françoise's farm I found a very odd thing. Mademoiselle Françoise was growing foxglove and monkshood. She had books in her kitchen. And there was an ointment. I’ve read about flying ointment in my research,” Ruthie said, her cheeks going pink. “The Romans used it, and so did the witches. They rubbed it on their feet, which paralyzed them and made them feel they were flying above the ground. I felt as if I were flying.” Ruthie paused and went on bravely. “It gives some people . . . the desire for romantic pleasure.”

  “Mademoiselle Françoise
made this ointment?” he said.

  “I’m afraid I took it. And her books. I really should not have done it; it was stealing. But I thought—evidence— Here they are,” she kept rummaging, “right in my bag. Would you have that ointment looked at, by the people who looked at Count André’s father?”

  She set out on the desk four battered books and, very carefully, holding it in her flowered handkerchief, a tin labeled Denti-Frais Pearlescent Tooth Powder. “I dipped my fingers in it and touched my tongue to it. I shouldn’t have. It was wrong.”

  “What is in flying ointment?” Reisden asked.

  “Aconite and digitalis principally.”

  Contact poisons. “Yes, don’t touch it again.” Reisden used his own handkerchief, doubled over, to open the tin.

  “Do you suppose this killed them?” she said.

  “Very possibly.”

  “It was,” she hesitated, “the effect was not entirely unpleasant,” and she blushed almost angrily. “I should not have felt it though. It is unlike me.”

  He wondered why it was unlike her. “We’ll have it analyzed. And please, please, Ruthie, if you come across anything else, don’t touch it.”

  But Ruthie didn’t want advice from him; she wanted to say something. She was still blushing furiously; she looked up at him in a way that reminded him oddly of André, making him the audience for the play about his parents’ deaths.

  “It is such a gift to have a loving marriage!” Ruthie said defensively. “A normal life! And such a perversion to take pleasure from— to play at poisoning and witchcraft— to poison each other for pleasure!”

  A normal life, he thought. Jules? Did she think she had to stay with Jules and be prevented from having a normal life? “Surely you could marry.”

  “Jules did not tell you?” she said. “Anything about us? He told me he saw you at Jouvet.”

  “You tell me.”

  “He told you, I think, that,” she hesitated, “the Turks caught us.” Jules had said no such thing. “They caught us. Since then,” incredibly, she folded her hands and smiled, Ruthie’s familiar smile, the smile of a spinster simply left unaccountably aside. “I have forgiven them. But since then marriage is not for me. It is no one’s fault. It is my choice.”