by Sarah Smith
“I am so sorry,” he said.
“No need,” she said, turning brisk and Ruthie-like again. “I have Jules and Count André, and the Necro. I so want Count André to be happy. Like you and your dear Madame Perdita.”
Oh, Reisden thought, better than that. “Philippe Katzmann is taking him on. André will talk with Katzmann for an hour every day. It should help.”
“And do have Madame Perdita get Countess Sabine away from telling fortunes! I know it is just play-acting, but,” Ruthie gestured to the ointment, “perhaps so was this.”
And the fly agaric, or whatever it was, in Egypt; play-acting too, and André had very nearly died. “I’ve talked with Sabine. I think eventually we’ll see the poison issue go away. That was largely in André’s head.”
“It was Mademoiselle Françoise who did most of it. Who would have thought it of Mademoiselle Françoise?”
“Let’s see what’s in her books.”
Ruthie was looking through them. She leafed through one, then another, looked back and forth in them, confused.
“Why,” she said, “I cannot find anything of what I saw before. This is only—a recipe book. This is a printed book,” Ruthie said, distressed, holding it open. “It is a recipe book, but printed.”
She put it down and stared at the tin in his hand.
“And I am almost sure that the tin had no paper label.” She put her hand up to her forehead. “Could I be that . . . confused? I am almost certain that the books were all handwritten. Could I have dreamed this all, because I’ve been thinking of witches?”
She flushed again, this time in anger at herself.
“I even remember recipes,” she said.
But they were all recipes that she had read in her research. “Could I have hallucinated everything?”
They went outside and she watched while Reisden daubed the flying ointment, very carefully, with a stick, onto a hen. The hen clucked and pecked at worms, ducking its long supple neck, completely unaffected.
He tried it very carefully on the end of one of his own fingers.
“Does it tingle?” she said.
He shook his head.
“Oh, this is so embarrassing. I never—never anything like this before.”
“I’ll have the ointment analyzed,” he said. “They couldn’t have been switched--?”
“No one knew I had them. They were in my knitting-bag all the time.”
***
She took the books and the tin upstairs and sat in her room, defeated.
“How could I have thought of it? Dreamed it?” The ointment would have explained everything. Mr. Blantire would have used it (her cheeks pinked) for its intended purpose, and died. Mademoiselle Françoise could have used it to commit suicide out of grief, or poisoned herself by mistake. Or when she was making more. And the cat had licked her fingers, poor puss.
But, she thought with a chill, Mademoiselle Françoise wouldn’t have made such a dangerous thing in the middle of sewing, when her friend Huguette was in the house.
Mademoiselle Huguette might be a witch too, Ruthie thought.
No, not Huguette Giroufle. Witches sacrificed rabbits, witches used beef fat; everyone knew Huguette had been a vegetarian since she was twelve.
Then what had happened?
She felt in her pocket; she brought out the button. She held it on her open palm. Mr. Blantire, Mademoiselle Françoise. She lost a button by the well—
She could see his frantic fingers pulling it off her dress, while she locked him in.
She must really stop frightening herself like this; she had real things to do. Before she knew it she would be writing plays like Count André. She put the button in her pocket and opened her bedroom door— to find Count André himself.
“Ruthie,” he said, and cleared his throat. “Mademoiselle Ruthie—”
“Monsieur le Comte—” Oh, she would say vous to him in a minute, as if he were not her old friend.
“You seem distressed,” Count André said. He must think that her distress was due to— At least he did not say he was sorry for it. Her cheeks burned again.
“It is nothing, nothing at all,” no embarrassing and unexpected moment between them. “But only that I have somehow made a great mistake in some books I brought away with me. They are only recipe books.” She was holding them. “From Mademoiselle Françoise's kitchen,” she admitted.
He opened his mouth and closed it again, opened it. “Let me see.”
He turned them over, looking not at the contents but at the binding. He opened them and looked up at her wordlessly, as if he were waiting for her to say the next thing. Confession trembled on her lips, confession of she didn’t know what. She was miserably conscious of the open bedroom door behind them. He could see her bed from here.
“I looked in your knitting bag,” he said. “These books aren’t the same.” He opened a book. “Look, this is my mother’s handwriting. Why would my mother’s books be at Mademoiselle Françoise’s house?”
“They’re not the same,” she breathed. He was sure of this, she saw, as sure as anything he did on stage. So she was sure too.
“Look, too,” she said. “This tin.” She brought it out of her pocket. “Not the same.”
“The tin had no label,” he said.
“I knew it. They are not the same,” she said. “I thought I was mistaken.”
“No,” he said. “Never.”
“Could someone have switched them?”
She put her hand into her pocket again and brought out the rose button. “This,” she said. “This too. A button like it was in the cellar where Mr. Blantire died.”
He looked at it in her palm. “I know this. I saw it somewhere.” And then he stared. He stared up at her, and she saw him as she never had before; shocked and terrified and not Necrosar at all, but Count André.
“She brought your bag back from the hospital. She wore a dress with these buttons. She didn’t only poison me,” he said. “She poisoned him.”
“Don’t!” she cried, but it was too late.
Sabine sees the grey veil
THE MIRRORS STOOD IN their places on the floor. The lights were blazing on their iron stands. The floor of the Great Hall was covered with chalk marks and X’s. They reminded Sabine of the cabalistic marks Françoise had drawn on the floor of her workroom, but everything was much grander. And around them, all around them, stood the party guests, the dead, swathed in their rags and their grey shrouds.
“You and I are right here,” Cyron said, drawing Sabine toward an X on the floor. “We can both see these ghosts. Mabet tries to bluff it out—” he glared around him. “But Madame Mabet, who has a good heart, is horrified. Binny, do us horrified.”
She rolled her eyes and cringed the way Papa Cyron had showed her.
“Horrified? Eh? Never mind, that’s good enough. You just clutch at my arm and we’ll make do. You, there, you’re toasting the Revolution,” Cyron said to an actor. “We raise our glasses, and, Binny, that’s when you see Madame Méduc. Right over—” Cyron peered at the floor. “Right over here, where’s our ghost? You, into position. You don’t have your baby, where’s the baby?” A stagehand tossed the actress a bundle of rags. “And you see her and your eyes bug out, you round your shoulders, you drop your glass and clutch my arm, like this—”
There was a pop and a shower of sparks. One of the Klieg lights had gone. A technician swore and went off to get another.
Eli Krauss was adjusting the lights on the other side of a huge sheet of glass. “Stand here, honey, we need your light values.” The hair-dresser, Claude, moved in to touch up her makeup and hair.
Ruthie had come into the hall behind her. Ruthie was standing with her hands over her mouth, her face pale over her flowered blouse. André was behind her; and he looked at her, Sabine.
It was as if there had been a noise in the air; it was as if there had been a shot or some great pressure in her chest. It was too early to tell what had happened to her. S
he was far away from him, but she saw his blue eyes, she felt him looking at her, she felt it everywhere.
She had got his attention at last.
He came across the Great Hall to her; he spoke to her, for the first time without sullenness or restraint. “Buttons?” he said. She looked up into his eyes; she was seen, felt, lost in them.
His icy eyes burned her like flames. “It was you. You poisoned Blantire. You poisoned Ruthie.”
Lights were shining everywhere. She looked through the glass toward the shrouded ghost, who was joking with an electrician.
She saw two ghosts, two veiled grey presences in the blackness.
The second one was herself.
André knows how to frighten Sabine
ROWS OF PINK EYES. André remembers them, pink eyes winking at him on her shoulder. Eyes of albino animals, ghost eyes; eyes that would be red in the dark. Monster eyes on a violet checked dress.
And now she is afraid. Just now, there, looking into the glass, she has remembered where she wore the dress with the eyes, and who saw her. She turns pale, she shakes her head in protest. Yes, murderess, I saw you! You were standing next to Mademoiselle Françoise in the Grand’Place. Had you just poisoned her? How did you give it to her? Candy, like me? Apples, bread? The rabbit?
The rabbit.
He grabs her by both wrists. “You poisoned Françoise Auclart,” he says. “And you poisoned Blantire.” He feels Necrosar wrapping protectively around him. “What did you do to Ruthie?”
She tugs away from him, eyes wide. “You’re crazy!”
“Oh, yes, yes, I am, but I know what I’m saying.”
“You’re going to kill me!” she shrieks, pointing at the reflection of the ghost.
“Why not?” There is only one reason why not, and that is Ruthie, shaking her head beyond the sidelines, No, no.
He takes a step away from Sabine, still holding her hands, almost as if they are dancing. And at this distance he sees something that inspires him. “See, Papa Cyron!” he calls out. “I can direct her better than you can. Now she’s frightened. She’s sorry because she’s going to die. I’ve made her crazy.” He drops her hands and moves behind the camera.
“Places,” he says. “Camera. Iris out. Music. On tourne!”
And the ghosts move in on the horrified Sabine.
Sabine tells a fortune and cuts her losses
“BINNY, YOU WERE PERFECT! You’ll be the toast of Paris. Here, we’re going to have champagne.—Go, go, get off your makeup, we’re all going to have champagne.”
“He’s going to kill me! You heard him! He said he would kill me!”
“He won’t, Binny. I’ll protect you.”
Sabine shut herself into her rooms and looked into the mirror. She was grey, grey; her lips were purple. Her blonde hair looked dry and garish. It was a matter of two days, four, a week at most.
I’m only eighteen. How could 1 die? But her fingernails were blue-purple like bruises.
He’s only a man, she thought. I’m a sorceress. There must be some way out.
Could Papa Cyron protect her? How?
She took out her Tarot cards with trembling fingers and spread them on the tablecloth. She was the Empress. The Ten of Pentacles covered her, a card of family matters and the home. The Two of Swords crossed her: danger, fatality. Around her, the Six of Cups, a card of children, and the Ace, Two, and Three of Wands. All of them together. Strife, danger. Cards of great misfortune, but perhaps of fortune. She put her chin on her hands and looked at the future. The Hermit, the King of Cups reversed, the Two of Pentacles reversed, and the Four of Cups. The Hermit might be Mademoiselle Françoise. The King of Cups, a fair man, an artist, but badly disposed to her and treacherous: André.
Her husband wanted to kill her. She saw that in the mirror even more clearly than in the cards.
But in the end-- Where was her death? The Tarot should show it. The Two of Pentacles she did not understand clearly; a long uncertainty, perhaps. The Four of Cups meant she was in for a time of chaos and unhappiness. But there was nothing about dying.
Could Papa Cyron protect her? Could her fate be reversed?
She did the Oracle of Napoleon to make sure. The same fortune: dark clouds facing toward her, treachery, fighting. The Ring was far left of her, her Gentleman as far away as he could be. Her troubles came from her marriage. But no death. There were the Ship, the Tower, and the Clover-leaves. She would go on a journey; she would have long life and good luck.
It was a good thing that the Oracle of Napoleon didn’t depend on reversed cards. Every card but the Cross was upside down.
She took a long look at her mirror.
André hadn’t gone grey, which meant she couldn’t fix him a rabbit and have it over with. And she had gone grey. But she didn’t intend to die.
What did the sign of death mean? In the Tarot it meant transformation. Transformation, a journey.
She was going somewhere.
She could protect herself.
She went out into the Great Hall. Corks were popping; even the technicians were cheering her. André watched her with blue-acid eyes. He started to say something, but that horrible Ruthie stopped him.
Sabine pulled Papa Cyron aside. “Come talk with me.”
“Smile first, let them cheer you.”
She smiled. It was wonderful, the applause. “But come outside now, Papa Cyron, talk to me.”
They went outside onto the terrace, away from the rest of the people. “He’s crazy,” she said. “He said I was going to die. He’s going to kill me.”
“Come on, Binny, it isn’t so bad.” Papa Cyron laughed. “If I’d killed every actor I said I’d kill—”
“But he really means it,” she hissed.
“You’re not afraid of anything.”
“I’m afraid of him.” She took a deep breath and made her declaration. It felt like a chrysalis opening, her declaration, like more of her powers coming on her: dark clouds, but a transformation, and good luck in the end. I’m me, she thought, look at me. “I’m going to leave him. I’m finished with this. Marriage isn’t anything like I thought it was going to be. I’m going to divorce him and move to New York and I’m going to be in the movies there. He wants to kill me. I’m really sorry. I like you.”
Papa Cyron shook his head. “But you can’t—”
“I can’t stay around here, can I, and let him murder me? You heard him.”
“I’ll protect you,” Papa Cyron promised. “You’ll be safe.”
“How?”
“He’s crazy,” Papa Cyron said, grim and quiet. “He should be treated like a crazy man. I’m going to have him locked up.”
Reisden cuts hay with a sword
THE END OF THE story is Mabet’s tragedy, but the part before it is Méduc’s. Méduc’s family has been killed; he reacts, renouncing his father. He has no children, Méduc says. That’s all the script says.
While André was filming the Ball of the Dead scene, Reisden would be filming Méduc’s curse.
Reisden and André discussed the scene. On Reisden’s part, at least, he’d tried to make the discussion about André.
“I don’t understand the scene, Hamlet. I don’t know what to ask you to do.”
“Méduc is a father,” Reisden said. “He’s a husband. He is responsible for other people. That has changed his life.”
André shrugged. “Has it?”
“You’ll see. When his father kills his son and his wife, he loses his identity, his responsibility. His father has tried to murder Méduc, kill his self as a father. Méduc tries to tell his father ‘You have never been a father. You have no children. I renounce you, your son renounces you.’ That’s the scene.”
“Tries?”
“Tries, because it doesn’t work.” He hoped it didn’t. “It can’t. Once you have been a father you are always a father, as you are always your father’s son.”
“I am my mother’s son,” André said. “This Katzmann, Hamlet. He’s
rigid. Dogmatic. Boring.”
“Be bored.”
“Medic wants to kill the whole world,” André said.
“Only his father, I think.”
“Isn’t his father the world?” André said. “Isn’t that what you’re saying?”
Sometimes André was brutally perceptive.
“What do you want from me tomorrow?” Reisden asked. “How will I kill Mabet?”
“You’ll see. Kill the world.”
On the morning of the shoot, Krauss’s assistant cameraman and Reisden and the actor playing the Messenger motored a little way up the road until they found a field where the hay had not yet been cut. Montfort was visible in the distance. The farmer took money for his hay and called his family to watch the filming.
The cameraman had an envelope for Reisden, from André.
Cut the hay down with the sword.
“Do I have a sword?”
The cameraman jerked a thumb at a box in the back of the car. Reisden opened it. Inside was an ancient cavalry saber with the arms of Montfort on the pommel, and honed sharp.
The shadows lengthened and ripened. “You stand there. He told me you’ll know what to do. Iris out, on tourne.” The Messenger came in shot and told Méduc that his family were dead.
If Toby were dead, no blade of grass would live.
Reisden could find nothing in his face to express what Méduc would feel. He turned away from the camera.
He looked out on the tall wheat stalks, brown and ripe, but living. Nothing should live if his Toby were dead. He lifted his sword and brought the sharp edge down almost gently at first. The stalks fell and died. He swung the sword like a scythe. The stalks fell, and fell, and the wheat ears crunched and broke under his feet. He waded into the standing grain and cut at it until his shoulders were on fire, his knees and arms were shaking from weariness, until there was not a sound but his breath. He raised his arms high, holding the sword over his head, its edge trembling and turning down, and he fell to his knees and stabbed at the ground, the broken grain, the world destroyed.