A Citizen of the Country

by Sarah Smith

  What did he want? Reisden asked.

  Us, said Gilbert. All of us. All our attention. Look, he is even jealous of Elphinstone. (A dog, Sir? Any man may be a hero to a dog. Elphinstone growled.)

  He wanted to be everything to Richard, Reisden said. Everything to him, his God.

  Was he?

  Almost.

  Reisden got up and helped Gilbert up. Dotty and Leo were gone. Gilbert, he said, we’re going home. William’s not going; he’ll stay here.—Elphinstone led them away, toward the light; but though Reisden went with his uncle, it seemed to him that he also stayed behind for a moment, putting a pillow between William’s head and the bed-post, in case William should hurt himself when he was left alone. One does that much for any madman.

  Reisden went home, with Perdita and Toby, where he wanted to be. This time Gilbert was there, too, and of course Elphinstone. They sat round the kitchen table and toasted one another. Reisden had water in a wineglass; he could see the glass, beaded with water on the outside. They touched glasses—

  And then he was back in the cave and there was a last ghost in it. André. André had brought light. André was holding a long civilized dining-room white taper, and over his wrist dangled a string bag such as women take to the market. In it clinked two corked wine bottles. Reisden could see the light, jagged on the rocks, on the floor, bright enough to make him squint, the soft long curve of the candle flame, more candles sticking out of André’s jacket pockets. André was grinning, a strange stunned half-laugh. “I found water,” André said, holding up the bottles. “Someone marked a path. I’ll show you.”

  Reisden took the bottle and drank, sip by sip, cold, sharp mineral water with an undertaste of wine. Water from the Holy Well. He knew it was a dream but it was a good one. André had given Jules water; he was breathing more easily. They left him with a candle, one of blessedly many candles. André had marked the route with Sabine’s cards. The Ship, the Mountain; the Serpent, the Garden, the Road; cards of betrayal, cards of journeys; the little colored pictures lay along the tunnels like fragments of life.

  “The smell’s just cheese,” André said.

  The last tunnel smelled sweetly foul, like the path to the cemetery. The Tomb marked the path. But on the ground, in charcoal, someone had drawn an arrow pointing farther down the tunnel, and by it were a third tall green bottle of water, a tin box of matches, and a small cheesecloth-wrapped lump, the size of a tea-ball.

  Coeur d’Arras.

  “Perdita,” Reisden said. He knew who would mark a location by smell. He sank to his knees. He could not say any more, just “Perdita.” Oh, my dear. Here you are in my dreams at last.

  “Hamlet, are you all right?” said André.

  “We’re alive.”

  A coven

  THE ARROWS LED THEM back to the cellar of Mademoiselle Françoise’s shop. Their clothes were gone. All three men were taller than the average, one with shoulder-length hair, one with his jaw in an iron brace, all with frowsty short beards; Reisden and Jules were wearing the filthy ruins of their costumes from the film. Pink shirts. They were not inconspicuous.

  “Shall we simply reappear?” Reisden asked. “I want to see my family.”

  The floor of the shop was still starred with garbage, the remains of tomatoes, rocks. The broken windows were boarded. “Not before we know what happened,” André said.

  Sabine was still dead and André and Jules were still suspected of killing her. “I’ll telephone Perdita.”

  “From Montfort. We’re going to Montfort.”

  How to get there without being caught ... The moon was waxing; until it set, the farmers were in the fields stooking hay. But for a few dark hours the roads were deserted. They stole a wheelbarrow. In the starry dark they staggered up the Arras road to the Auclart farm, wheeling an embarrassed and contrite Jules.

  They were starved. “Half the plants in this garden are poisonous,” Reisden warned, “and I don’t know which ones.” They dug potatoes. The three men went to earth in the cellar below the garden shed. Over a slow fire, using the small pot from the kitchen, they cooked a soup of potatoes from Mademoiselle Françoise's cellar and flavored it with vinegary wine. It was terrible and made them half drunk.

  “Who could have killed her?” André said when they were full. “I didn’t,” he spelled it out like someone needing reassurance. “But who would want to kill her except me?”

  They put together their own confused memories of the afternoon. They had no idea where anyone but André had been. It had been chaos, waiting and more waiting, people wandering off. For the end of the afternoon Reisden and Jules alibied each other. They had not left the platform after they had checked the guillotine.

  “That leaves me,” André said.

  Who had watched André? Reisden, Jules, Ruthie. They might as well have banded together to give him an alibi. They might have broken the mechanism themselves, killing the murderess Sabine for André’s sake. Reisden had a clear cold vision of himself and Jules and Ruthie, the last to check the guillotine.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “I have to tell Perdita I’m all right. Then I’ll talk with Pétiot. You stay here with Jules.”

  There was no telephone at the Auclart farm, probably none closer than Montfort. In the heat, Jules and André stretched out in the cool room under the garden shed. Reisden, starved for light and heat, went inside the house and slept for a while in a shaft of sun. The heat woke him in midafternoon and he explored the house, one room at a time, sitting down when he was tired, which was disgracefully often. He did not even know what day it was. André looked skeletal, Jules worse; they were still dehydrated; they were filthy, covered in grime and dust. How long had they been in the boves?

  He stripped to the waist and washed with water from the well. It disturbed him to use drinkable water to wash. The costumes from the final scene had been brought back here. The wicker costume baskets crowded Mademoiselle Françoise’s sewing room. He threw each of them open, looking for something in fashion later than 1795; no luck. His own clothes might still be at Montfort.

  Proof, he thought. Proof not only to save André but to condemn Sabine. I didn’t do anything wrong, Sabine had said. But she thought André was going to kill her, and that’s what she’d told Cyron; and then she’d died.

  Jules and André were still asleep. In the cellar, Reisden took scrapings from the greasy residue in the big cast-iron pot. There might be belladonna in it, henbane, digitalis. Interesting if so, but it wouldn’t prove Sabine was a murderess. There was nothing in the kitchen. Nothing in the parlor, the sewing room, the bedroom upstairs.

  In the attic he found an old dress and books of patterns, but no reversed crosses or black candles. Mademoiselle Françoise's uncle’s trunk was shoved into a corner. An army uniform and a black Sunday suit waited for the resurrection of the dead. Reisden shoved them aside to look underneath.

  Books. Crumbling school notebooks, ledgers. Grimoires? Reisden brought them down to the living room.

  Mademoiselle Françoise's uncle’s diary. He looked through it for clues.

  The earliest entries recorded Auclart’s life as a young infantryman. Punishment frequently, and with more enviable frequency, a list of what seemed to be conquests: X Marie, X Lucette, XX Anne. The uncle wrote poetry, the last refuge of the inarticulate. Oddly enough, he recorded every time he took communion.

  Reisden skipped ahead to 1870.

  1 September: Infamy! The defeat of the Great Sortie: It is all up to the countryside now. The armistice of January: No, we won’t give up. And on the day of the laying down of arms: I have cast my lot with Sgt Cyron.

  Auclart had been one of Cyron’s partisans.

  February 3, 4 Germans. February 20, Munitions. The partisans hoarded every bullet and made them count. Reprisals and counter-reprisals, raids and hostages. As the spring nights brightened, Auclart kept track of the moon phase; the partisans worked best in the dark. The summer brought frustration; at 1
0 p.m. it was still dusk, at 4 a.m. already dawn.

  In the summer of 1871 Auclart first mentioned that they were working on tunnels.

  The sun was fading from the room; Reisden brought Auclart’s diaries out into the garden and read on. The partisans had already used tunnels in early spring to blow up the munitions dump. Now, in the summer, they began to dream more grandly. Auclart drew pictures.

  At the center of each, like a spider in its web, were the Arras boves. Outward from them radiated various configurations as Auclart drew and redrew them. Four long, optimistic, Haussmann-straight tunnels in the form of a cross. A tunnel under the Arras road. A tangle of tunnels connecting underground barracks, concealed gun emplacements, kitchens, underground stables, everything the modern army would need. Fantasies, diggers’ dreams. Or were they?

  Jules emerged from underground, shaky but standing, to offer him soup. Reisden gave him a volume. “Look.”

  The three of them divided the pile of diaries and read them by the light of Mademoiselle Françoise's kerosene lamps.

  In the fall and winter of 1871 the partisans dug from a basement near the seventeenth-century caserne, under the Petit Champ de manoeuvres. By spring 1872 they had reached the Citadel, where the Germans were headquartered. The massive base of the Citadel stopped them until the fall, but in early October 1872, after a last massive effort, they succeeded in digging inside the Citadel wall, in the north-east corner by the gatehouse.

  From there they dug into the Citadel’s ammunition store. By the winter of ’72, Cyron’s men had armed themselves with German rifles and bullets. Every cannon in the Citadel was spiked. The partisans had keys to every prison cell. From St.-Vaast, the caserne, the Citadel, hostages and supplies were being magicked away into French hands.

  Reisden flipped ahead. “But now he goes away!” he exclaimed, annoyed. Auclart had done his three years’ service; in the spring of 1873, he had gone to Amiens to study pharmacy, just as if he weren’t one of Cyron’s heroes. He had returned to Arras only in 1875, when he had opened a pharmacy in the Grand’Place. By that time Cyron had already gone to Paris; Auclart pasted into his diary a review of one of his early performances.

  “Here’s this farm,” André said.

  In 1875—and not with his own money, apparently—Auclart had bought this farm from his second cousin. For about a year the diary was full of references to “the plan,” digging, and the difficulty of removing the debris inconspicuously. The Germans would come again. Auclart and unnamed others were digging a tunnel under the farm.

  Reluctantly—they had had enough of underground—Reisden, André, and Jules took the lanterns and explored the tunnels. Going toward Arras, the tunnel ended in a cave-in, which they could date by the diary; in March 1876 four men had been killed here. The tunnel northward extended farther, far enough into the dark that they were all joking nervously about getting to Montfort, but then it ended, too, in rubble that slithered when they touched it.

  In late 1876 the tunnel under the Auclart farm was given up in favor of “the new plan.”

  And there was not a word more about it. Auclart went back to his pharmacy. The economy was recovering, the pharmacy was flourishing, and Auclart moved to Arras (XXX Martine, two nights in a row, one can only envy).

  “The new plan was another tunnel, I think,” Reisden said. They were eating the same potato soup as before, but Jules had made it today and it was palatable. Reisden told them what he had speculated about the chalk road and the chalk towers. Rubble from a project.

  “Papa Cyron never let me go into the cellars,” André said. “It’s there?”

  André took the diary for 1876, sat with it, turning the pages in his big hands, looking for something that he didn’t find. He put the book down abruptly and went outside into the garden. Jules got up to follow him. Reisden shook his head. No. Let me do this one.

  André was in the garden. “The new plan of 1876,” he said, jamming his hands in his pockets. “That was me. He needed a bigger area ... He wanted Montfort.”

  “Yes. But then he liked you.”

  They stood for a while in the garden, not saying anything. He wanted you to be exactly what he wanted, Reisden thought, a good little military man. But then— And he thought of Cyron and André onstage, dancing with the ostrich puppet; father and son dancing.

  What do you see? Leo had said. What does it mean? Even after Reisden had realized he would never fit into Leo’s plans, some part of him still occasionally dreamed of being useful, being noticed, belonging.

  André had been sent to military school; André had been jammed into the cavalry; André had been as wrongly cast as Reisden. But every man wants to be a good son.

  “He does like you.”

  “At least it’s an important project,” André said.

  “Let’s find the d—d thing.”

  They went back and read, skimming to find any mention of it. Nothing. Auclart’s energies had turned to something new, something he referred to only as A. Some new part of the secret of Montfort? A included both men and women and met at various underground locations in Arras, as well as in the underground room at the Auclart farm. A secret society? A labor organization? Instead of X, lC Martine. C Josephine. Always female names. Was C the same as X? Was this the same Martine who’d already been XXXed? Whatever A was, Auclart rose steadily in it, organizing events and providing supplies from his pharmacy (what needed so much ethanol?). It was not until 1885, when Auclart started using a standard diary, that Reisden noticed that A always met on Thursdays, at the end of a quarter, or at the dark or the full of the moon.

  A was a coven of witches.

  And try to prove it. Even in his diary Auclart wrote with the discretion of the persecuted. The group could have been accountants or pharmacy students.

  Auclart’s diary continued until just before he died and was largely devoted to his pharmacy business, his garden, his declining health, and his coven. Auclart occasionally went to Paris. He had dinner once with Cyron, and several times went to plays in which “le Sgt” was starring. He was made an honorary charter member of the Friends of Montfort. His liver gave him trouble; he took the cure at Deauville. He became bishop of his coven. In 1895, “my niece Françoise” made her 1C. The Dreyfus affair split A as it did the rest of France; old members began taking their sabbats elsewhere. He lamented his bald spot. The Xs became infrequent. Auclart was getting old.

  After 1900, Auclart’s eyesight began to fail. He closed the pharmacy, sold the shop to his niece, and puttered around his garden, raising rabbits for sacrifice. He went nowhere but the annual dinners of the Friends of Montfort.

  But Auclart was still bishop of his declining coven, and in 1907, two years before he died of emphysema, he recorded a new first communion.

  On March 31, 1907, 1C Sabine.

  The secret of Montfort

  AT NIGHT, ANDRÉ, WHO knows Montfort best, goes to scout.

  The castle is almost deserted. Reisden’s Renault is still in the garage, but the Rolls is gone; Cyron isn’t here.

  He married me to a witch, André thinks.

  Everyone’s gone, Eli Krauss, the lights men, the technicians, the extras, all Cyron’s friends with their valets and their horses, all gone. No hammering or shouting or whinnying from the stables, no quarreling voices from the estaminet. In the dark main block of the Vex-Fort, no lights at all.

  Papa Cyron has closed the house, in the height of summer when he should be in the country. Where is he?

  By the front door of the house, André runs into something large and scratchy like a hay-pallet. Against the moonlight, above him, a great sheaf of wheat nods against the stars. The country people have made a door guardian, an effigy of hay twice as tall as a man, tied into shape with bits of rag. Instead of a head it has a sheaf of wheat, as if the chief of the house has died. That is for me, André thinks wonderingly.

  André circles the house and sees lights in the housekeeper’s parlor. He stands on tiptoe to see inside.
It’s as he hoped. Cyron has taken the house staff back to Paris too, and the gardener is off overseeing his farm; there’s no one here but old Roselle and her niece.

  André crouches in a disused room off the kitchens and listens to the two women gossip. Oh, what a terrible thing, the way Madame died! And the Count her own husband did it!

  André winces and nods to himself.

  And now he’s dead, too, poor man.

  For a certainty they will haunt the house, the niece says.

  “Nonsense, girl!” says Roselle.

  But André never disappoints an audience.

  “Did you hear that?” the niece says nervously.

  “What?”

  “A scraping ... a moan ...”

  Old Roselle marches into the hall, armed with the gamekeeper’s gun. When the electrical system was put in, André made improvements of his own; the lights flicker up in the hall, and in Sabine’s dressing room they turn on with a white theatrical flare. Roselle marches up the stairs, the niece quavering at her heels like a shadow. Powder has been spilled on Madame’s dresser, as if Madame had been powdering her face. “Her jewelry box is open, and one necklace gone—the collar of pearls!” The collar of pearls is costume jewelry, a couple of years out of date, the niece says; Madame would never wear it unless she needed to conceal her neck.

  “Nonsense, girl!”

  But as Roselle marches downstairs she almost slips on Sabine’s cards, scattered on the stairs. Those cards disappeared when Madame died, and there is a slithering, sloshing sound from the Great Hall. The niece bites the ends of her fingers in fear. Roselle marches forward, the gun trembling in her hand. The furniture in the Great Hall is all disarranged, the table and chairs set against the wall as if for a funeral, the trestles ready to receive a coffin. Below the trestles stands a pail of water to cleanse the soul of the dead.

  Across the dark room floats one lit candle.