A Citizen of the Country

by Sarah Smith

  Jules gestured to Ruthie to get his costume. There was a moment of panic; someone had moved it, it couldn’t be found. Jules went even more pale. “No, here it is—” Ruthie handed it up; it had simply fallen. Jules shrugged his way painfully into the cloak and hood. Under the cloth, his breath puffed in and out; he was panting.

  André, being André, was playing to the crowds. “Look at my wife! She’s a poisoner!” The miners shouted, shook their fists, threw rotten vegetables from yesterday’s market at André; Sabine was one of theirs. Eli Krauss’s backup camera was catching it all.

  “Now!” André turned his megaphone and shouted at them on the scaffold. “Places!” Eli moved over to his principal camera, already set up. “Three, two, one, on tourne!”

  Sabine took Cyron’s hand just before she knelt to put her head in the lunette. Reisden couldn’t see her face any more, only her bent shoulders. He was behind the guillotine, watching Cyron as Méduc should: eyes narrowed, lips drawn back from his teeth. Mabet’s eyes turned from one betrayal to another, his wife being executed, his son despising him. He turned helplessly toward the crowd, toward the camera and André, looking for some help. He has no children. No one will help him or pity him, no one will forgive him for having done his best—

  Jules, the Executioner, moved from one side of the guillotine to the other. He jerked the rope, and the blade fell.

  The crowd cried out.

  One woman screamed first, then there were ragged cries, and then a scream, a universal scream from a thousand hoarse thirsty panicked throats, a shriek of horror and fear.

  Curls of blonde hair, cut, tumbled and drifted across the platform floor.

  ***

  Sabine looked up at the guillotine. The blade hung against the sky like a sword. It was the moment of her death and she could give her powers. She gathered them all, her life, her riches, telling fortunes, seeing death. None of them would go now to her son. There will be no more sorcerers in the North, she thought oddly, because there would always be sorcerers as there would always be shepherds and blacksmiths and priests in the little villages around Arras. But there would be no more Sabine. I give my powers to— And she took his hand and grasped it hard and looked into Papa Cyron’s eyes.

  Peur té seuc’, she said. Because you were sweet to me.

  She laid her chin and neck down on the smooth wood. It will not be long, she thought, trying to console herself. The lights darkened but it was only Jules’ cloak passing in front of her. She tugged back, hoping, trying to get free, but her chin was caught.

  And then it was as if all the powers she would have had in her life came upon her at once, and the lunette fell away and she was free. She had escaped! Escaped! Astonished, delighted, full of life, she opened her mouth to laugh.

  ***

  André knows audiences, and it’s never happened to him before but he knows the difference between an audience and a riot. He stops the cameraman’s hand and tears the film across, snaps the screws that hold the magazine, gestures to Krauss to put the magazine of exposed film under his coat, safe, safe, you understand? Now get away from here. Krauss looks down at the crowd, terrified. André leads him over to the ladder and almost pushes him down. The crowd isn’t paying attention to Krauss, it’s pushing toward the steps of the scaffold. A man in the lead points at Jules. André picks up his microphone.

  “She’s not dead!” he yells through it. “It’s a trick!”

  For a moment it works. They stop, they look at him. But the man in the lead shouts something, points at the guillotine.

  And below, in the crowd, a woman starts to scream.

  The crowd draws back and leaves an empty space and a woman is in the center of it, all alone, a white-haired old woman under the spotlights near the camera platform. And she is holding something, something pale with blonde hair that drips and drips in the light. What an illusion, André thinks, what a marvelous illusion, the lips move and the eyes blink.

  And he begins to laugh. He drops the megaphone and puts his hands over his mouth and begins to giggle like a child, because it is such a marvelous illusion. Sabine’s head, Sabine’s severed head, the woman is holding it, carefully, tenderly in her two hands like a salad bowl she is bringing in to dinner, and screaming, screaming, it is perfect, everything has gone right at last, so where is Krauss to film it? And his laugh is like screaming because he is so frightened, because he doesn’t know who has created this effect.

  The face of the mob turns toward him.

  ***

  Policemen’s whistles shrilled, but it was Pétiot’s soldiers, the men detailed to watch André, who moved in on the men on the scaffold. The soldiers took Jules first, jostling him through the crowd. “He’s under arrest! Make way there, we’re taking him in!” The police moved toward them, batons at the ready.

  But everyone was trapped in the square. No street leading to the Grand’Place is wider than a seventeenth-century carriage, and the streets were shoulder-to-shoulder crowded with shouting people, some pressing forward to see, some recoiling.

  Cyron stepped to the front of the platform. He shouted but even Reisden, next to him, could hear nothing; the mob was shrieking, crying, roaring. From above, the movement of the crowd was braided and confused like eddies in turbulent water, heads bobbing, turning toward them on the platform, toward Jules, above all toward André.

  Pétiot’s men moved in a wedge toward the camera platform. André was up there all alone, laughing with his head thrown back, laughing or shrieking or sobbing, impossible to tell, and the crowd could not bear it; the crowd was pushing at the platform, trying to pull it over. Two men climbed on others’ shoulders, but the soldiers pulled them down. André swayed at the top of the camera platform; an officer held up a hand, trying to help him down.

  “Get out of here,” Pétiot shouted to Cyron. “We don’t want you in this.” He tugged at Cyron’s elbow.

  “We can’t leave André,” Reisden said.

  “Go, go, we’ll take care of him!” Pétiot shoved Reisden into the circle of soldiers around Cyron.

  As they elbowed their way down the scaffold steps, the lights flickered and died. The soldiers beat their way through the screaming crowd. The crowd stank of gin, sweat, and fear, a sharp rank animal odor like goat or fox. The soldiers shoved and the crowd shoved back; they were pulled back and forth like undertow through thick liquid.

  The soldiers who had arrested Jules were in front of those guarding Cyron and Reisden. They had got as far as the wide rue de la Taillerie, but the street was blocked with people, and as the soldiers faced them, an ominous murmur rose to shouts. The group turned toward the rue du Noble and the rue des Trois Marteaux, but they were blocked, too.

  Between them was Mademoiselle Françoise’s shop. “Inside, ’sieurs.” The door was open. For a few seconds it was completely dark in the shop, then by the dim reddish light they could see blurred rectangles of film stills against the dark of the button drawers. Through the window they could see the backs of the soldiers in a double rank between them and the crowd.

  Garbage splattered the window glass. The rank of soldiers writhed and André was pushed inside the door, sprawling on the floor. His face was splashed with garbage.

  Stones hit the windows and the door. One crashed through the window glass and hit André on the arm. Jules was standing between two soldiers; he tried to tug himself away, to stand over André. Reisden took André under the armpits and dragged him backward, into the inner room where Mademoiselle Françoise’s shawl was still hanging on a hook. The soldiers shoved Jules in with them, and the techs crowded in, too, white-eyed. “Get them downstairs,” Pétiot said. “Into the cellars.”

  The cellar of Mademoiselle Françoise’s shop was bare; there was only a costume-rack built of pipes and a curtain hung along one wall. This was the stars’ changing room. The kerosene lamp smoked against the ceiling. There was a folding chaise longue here and, dropped carelessly over it, a Japanese kimono embroidered with butterflies. S
abine, Reisden thought. André, half-collapsed on the floor, opened his eyes and stared at the colors. Cyron was nowhere to be seen. From above they heard breaking glass and shouts.

  Jules was leaning against the wall. The hood was still over his head. Reisden pulled it off. The fabric was wet and came hard. For a moment Reisden thought that Jules had been hurt, and then he saw the dark sprays and stains across Jules’ shirtfront, his trousers, the cloak, and knew where all the blood had come from. Jules stared down at the floor, his shoulders bowed over, pulled in, his face pale.

  “They aren’t after us,” one of the techs said tightly. “Just Jules and Count André. I say send ’em out.”

  Jules raised his right hand. Yes, and touched his chest: Me. Only me. “No,” said Reisden.

  “We’re trapped, monsieur.”

  “We’ll go out through the boves.” Reisden found his own jacket on the rack and felt in the pocket the weight of the compass. “To the Hôtel de Ville. I know how to get there—” The city hall was a good solid building; not even mobs would break into it. He was shivering; he put the jacket on over his costume and jammed his hands in his pockets. “You—” he nodded at one of the techs “—take the lantern; you—” the other “—bring André.”

  “I’m not going in them boves.”

  Mademoiselle Françoise’s entrance to the boves was behind the red faded curtain. Reisden twitched it open.

  And then they heard, from very far away, the sound of voices.

  For a moment it was impossible to tell from where the sound was coming. They might have been from above, the boves echoed so; but it was the mob, in the boves, coming through the tunnels.

  “They’re breaking into the boves! They’re going to catch us here!”

  One of the techs broke and ran upstairs.

  “André.” André looked at him woozily; he was like a drunken man. “Do you really know the boves?”

  “She’s dead!” André muttered.

  “Pay attention. Can you take us through them to the Hotel de Ville or the Arras road?”

  André’s head bobbled, more or less a nod.

  “Then do it now.” The other tech was wide-eyed, standing back against the wall. He broke and ran too. Reisden took the lantern and pushed André.

  The cold of the boves hit them immediately. André straightened up and walked first, too slowly, holding himself up by leaning against the wall; he was half in shock. Reisden came second with the lantern, Jules behind. The darkness pressed in on the circle of light.

  There was no pattern to the tunnels. Within a hundred feet, three branched off. Reisden kept his eyes on the needle, dancing on its pin. André was going northeast.

  “I did it,” André said in a half-asleep voice, stopping. He had brought along Sabine’s dressing-kimono and was clutching it around him as if for warmth. The insects’ wings fluttered, the garish colors catching the light.

  “Don’t talk now.” Over the scuffle of their shoes he could hear a ragged muttering in the tunnels behind them.

  “I’m not going to the asylum. I’m going to be torn apart by a mob.—This tunnel,” André said.

  The tunnel was wide and worn, and on the walls were initials in candle smoke, dates a hundred years past, and iron rings for rushlights. The tunnel opened up into a room, and Reisden knew where he was. The floor was slippery with wax. Under the chalk idol were new offerings, bits of rabbit, and candle-ends, held upright by melted wax. Reisden snapped the candles loose and dropped them into his pockets.

  From the dark in back of them they heard, quite close, the echo of voices. André looked backward, behind them, suddenly realizing what was following them. Wordlessly he pulled Reisden and Jules off into a side tunnel, into the dark. He led them into a narrow, descending cul-de-sac. They all crouched under a rocky shelf, hardly big enough to hide the three of them. Jules pulled his black executioner’s cloak over André’s blond hair; the smell of blood gagged them. Reisden turned the lantern down to a red wick-line of light, and then, reluctantly, blew it out.

  “Get the bastard!” From their hiding place they saw the shadows of torches, very faint and far away, like a hallucination in the eyes. “—gone this way?” “—can’t be far—” “Wish I’d brought my lamp.” “And a pickax for the bastard’s skull!” A hand thrust a lantern almost over their heads; the light hammered around them. Reisden held his breath.

  But nothing crashed at them out of the darkness, no one turned on a torch and shot at them as if they were trapped rabbits. The light withdrew, and finally the voices fell away into mutters and deepening faraway echoes.

  “Reisden?” André whispered finally. “It’s all right.”

  Reisden got matches out of his jacket pocket, spilled them on the ground, and for one terrible moment thought he couldn’t find any of them again. He felt along the ground as painstakingly as he had ever done with any experiment, felt a match, picked it up in clumsy careful fingers, scraped the match-head along the box, and lit the lantern.

  He simply stared at the light for a minute, grateful for every bit of it, the line of light.crawling along the wick and the yellow and blue flame rounding above it. He could feel the darkness, the weight of rock above them.

  He counted the matches as he picked them up. Twenty-two, more than half a box. He counted the candle-ends, nine, three of them as long as a thumb, the rest shorter. The lantern was half full of kerosene. The end of the Arras road should be close; they had a compass; they had light. They had André, who knew the boves.

  “Northeast,” Reisden said.

  Perdita is alone

  PERDITA AND TOBY HAD not gone to be a part of the mob scene; babies do not mix with mobs. She had packed instead, getting ready to go back to Paris by the night train. She brought Toby’s things downstairs, put them in his perambulator, parked it and Toby and herself by the Jerusalem Gate, and waited.

  The coach didn’t arrive. No one came back from the shoot. It grew full dark to her eyes, and then dark to anyone’s. The château should have been lit up but no one was there. She wondered if she had been forgot. She could only imagine the scene there might have been when André was taken away to the asylum.

  No one arrived until near midnight, when the police came.

  They took her to Arras in a car. She brought Toby, and realized only halfway there, when he needed to be changed, that she had left everything behind, his diapers, his food, everything. In the Grand’Place the crowd had dispersed, but she could still smell a stink like skunks and garbage.

  She repeated what the policemen told her to make sure she understood it. “They chased Count André and Jules into the boves. And my husband went with them.”

  Alexander had a compass; she found out that much by talking to the technicians. It was so much like him; he would have had useful litter in his pockets, his watch with the stopwatch built in, a penknife with extra tools, string, a compass, matches, some-one’s business card. But he wouldn’t have remembered food or water; he would have worked all day without stopping for more than coffee.

  She listened quite calmly to the searchers talking about the men’s chances.

  They had had lights, that much she knew. Alexander had taken a lantern. She didn’t have to think of him in the dark.

  He would keep Jules and André in the boves until the danger is over.

  “My brother was dehydrated,” Ruthie said tearfully.

  Extras whispered to one another. André had threatened his wife and laughed when she died.

  “Alexander knows what he’s doing,” Perdita said. “He has a compass.”

  Monsieur Cyron led a party into the boves; he knew them as well as anyone. Monsieur Cyron would find them. But the party came back at sunrise, tired, hungry, and unsuccessful.

  “They will come out as soon as the danger’s over.”

  All Monday they waited for the men to come out of the boves. By the late afternoon Toby had run through all the diapers and clothes Perdita could borrow. She took him back to Montf
ort.

  At dusk Sabine’s body was brought home to lie overnight in the Great Hall. Aline went downstairs and reported that people from the country and the mines were standing in line to see her. Some of them were crying; most were curious. Monsieur Cyron had had her dressed in a beautiful costume from the film, Aline said, but she had a thick scarf across her neck and her jaw looked wrong, small somehow. Perdita shuddered. And there was a pail of water by her feet, very strange, an ordinary pail, as if the washerwoman had left it.

  In the early morning, when Toby was asleep, Perdita went down to the Great Hall to sit by Sabine and pray for her. No one else was there but Monsieur Cyron, who was sitting in a corner. She said “I’m so sorry” and he talked about Sabine, little things Sabine had done and said to him. He said nothing about André. She sat with her hands folded. In the silence, with Monsieur Cyron’s shuddering breathing and the drip of ice, she tried to think about Sabine. But all that came into her head was the shush and click of cards, Sabine laughing and flirting with the soldiers and promising them war in Alsace, and a cooked rabbit.

  She thought of Sabine’s baby. The baby had been a subject for a fight, an accessory to Sabine’s triumph over André, but it had never been the center of anyone’s universe the way Toby was. It had never been really loved, and it had died. She wept for the baby. She went upstairs and held Toby and wept for the baby, and that helped for the moment to keep her thoughts away from the men in the boves.

  Sabine’s funeral was the next morning, from the abbey at Montfort. Perdita went for as long as she could, but she couldn’t stand being at a funeral. She went back into the house, into the kitchen, and found Ruthie filling bottles at the sink.