by Sarah Smith
“No one gave you the job of being her judge and jury.”
“You are wrong about that,” said Pétiot.
“Did Cyron know she was going to be killed?”
Pétiot looked toward Cyron, standing alone on the terrace by the guillotine.
“Maurice is—protected. The odd thing is,” Pétiot said, “I don’t really believe in what Maurice does. I know the world admires him, the theatre, the pictures in the newspapers, but Citizen Mabet—” He shrugged. “Madame Mabet in particular. ‘I’ve done wrong. I’m going mad.’ Doing wrong? The world is full of people doing wrong. I admired her. She wouldn’t have gone mad. She would have done very well, Sabine. But she married the wrong man’s stepson. It was one of those things.”
André was sending people off in all directions: Krauss and the technicians toward the truck, Ruthie toward Cyron. Reisden watched them curiously. Krauss came back with his camera.
“Do you know,” Pétiot said, “I believe your André is going to film something?”
Trust André. “He never did get Cyron’s last speech.”
Pétiot gave a last tug to his gloves and smoothed his beard. They were almost done with each other for now. Reisden and he would have to work with each other. Pétiot looked up at Reisden as if something had been left unsaid, something that would have made a difference to him. Then he shrugged, accepting some advantage.
And Reisden knew what it was. He had failed completely to see what Pétiot was doing with Gehazy. “One question,” he said. “When you told me to meet Gehazy at Saint-Vaast, he was already dead, wasn’t he? But you wanted me to look at the message. To incriminate myself?” He answered his own question. “For the archives of Jouvet?”
Pétiot looked up at him for a long, long moment. “Ask your wife. I would have been the chief of the trustees.”
“I must set up a good board,” Reisden said, “in case anything happens to me.”
“Always wise to take precautions,” Pétiot said. “Until September, then. Unless there’s a war.”
“Will there be a war?”
Pétiot looked up at him. Here we are, his look said. Two men in a world where men are things, counters to be sacrificed. And you ask me?
“Not this year, I think,” Pétiot said, and beamed with all his teeth, almost like Father Christmas.
Cyron's last speech; ghosts, families, soldiers
THERE IS AN ADVANTAGE in being just a little odd. André looks at Papa Cyron and sees an expression he has never seen before: a loneliness, a terror. It is beyond Necro. The sun has risen. André calculates foot-candles and sends a technician for lights.
“Come,” he says to Papa Cyron. He leads him up the stairs to the guillotine. The lights go on.
André is seeing a ghost. On the terrace, Sabine in her rainbow robe embroidered with insects brushes out her yellow hair. On the sun side of the hill, Sabine in a pink eighteenth-century dress and a wig reads movie magazines. Sabine is at Papa Cyron’s side, smiling up at him, asking him Did I do well? And here she is, too, here at the guillotine, turning to look at him and laying her head on the block.
“Do your speech now,” says André. He has set Krauss up on the platform itself. Even the shortest lens is almost in Papa Cyron’s face. “‘What I have done, I did for France.’”
Behind the camera, André looks at him. “What I have done, I did for France,” Papa Cyron says. He gives his beautiful speech. He pleads for understanding. He says how much he has lost. “For France I have lost everything.” Now Méduc should kneel at his feet, saying Father, you have not lost your son. But Reisden isn’t here. And Papa Cyron runs out of words to say, waiting for André to say “Cut,” looking finally into the camera itself, wondering why it is all continuing, and André waits, getting the expression he wants. When he edits this scene, André will cut in a shot of Méduc. But the last shot of all will be this, a puzzled old soldier just beginning to get angry, wondering why he is still onstage.
***
When André finally shuts off the camera, Cyron gives a little speech to the young soldiers who have made up the crowd. “Keep up your courage! Sharpen your swords, clean your guns! The enemy is always at hand,” he says, “the enemy attacks our hearts, unless we give ourselves wholly to our beloved country!”
Ever since Sabine died, something has been wrong with Cyron’s eyes. In the audiences at his speeches, in the young soldiers shining up at him now, there are patches of greyness, shifting veils. It feels to Cyron like an absence; their faces are somehow unfinished, too bright, too eager, young faces in which there is no shadow of an old age to come.
He is getting old, he thinks.
In his memory Sabine is already taking on the same glamour, the beauty of youth that will never age. Cyron is already seeing the need to forget her. There were problems there. One has to forget. One has to move on. Mistakes have been made. It was an accident.
There are some things that shouldn’t happen, some facts that shouldn’t be. It’s every man’s job to change what shouldn’t be into what is.
“Think of nothing but this,” Cyron says to his audience, “that the right is on your side, that victory is within your grasp. Forward! Forward! Always forward! Morocco is ours—Alsace will be ours—Berlin will be ours!”
And they cheer him, his children.
***
Perdita is changing Toby, pinning a diaper on her wriggly little boy, and Uncle Gilbert has taken the old diaper off to the bucket when Alexander tells her Gilbert is staying in Paris.
“Is anything wrong?” he says, looking at her face. She ought to be happy. She is happy, she tells herself. But what she feels most clearly, most keenly, is something ending.
“I won’t have anyone to visit in Boston,” she says. Ridiculous. She has lost a country, the landscape of her childhood, the house in Boston with Uncle Gilbert there, unchangeable, waiting forever for Richard to come home. But she has gained a family.
“Gilbert is leasing an apartment,” Alexander says. “Actually I think he’s buying a building. In New York. For when you’re there, between tours.”
“New York?” she says, and wants to kick herself for sounding so happy.
“Happy birthday from him. I’ve lost track of the days; I didn’t remember.”
Her birthday, she realizes—she forgot it too—was the night he came back from the boves. Idiot, idiot Alexander. “You won’t make me stay in New York all the time,” she says, “when my family is in Paris?” That is not quite what she means. She means, will you understand I want to be there and here?
“You must come back to save me from Gilbert’s money. There’s too much of it.”
“Gilbert’s money will be all right.” She is still holding Toby on the table with one hand; the other arm she puts around her husband. “I hope everything will.” I have gathered everyone I love in France, she thinks, but I miss America still. Will it be all right? What have I done?
“You can come to New York,” she says. “When I’m there? Come with me, sometime?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “If we are to have the scandal of kidnapping Gilbert, perhaps I can visit America.—New York’s an inter-esting city.”
“You have no idea— Just let me put Toby down.” She sets Toby on the floor, turns back to Alexander, and puts both her arms around him. What have I done? “Love,” he says. Inside her head they feel like question and answer. What have I done? Love. Not live happily ever after, not know all the answers, just love him. It is no solution but a dilemma, a house half-finished, something always needing fixing; too big, half-explored; something to live up to, to grow into; home. The place where one lives.
“Love,” she says.
***
One of the technicians goes into the cellar and brings out champagne, for a toast. André takes a glass. Citizen Mabet is over. The filming will recede into the mists of theatrical horror stories, and months from now they will go to the premiere and see half-recognizable grey fragments of what t
hey remember.
Reisden is saying something to his wife. The old man, Gilbert Knight, has swung the baby up on his shoulders and the baby is pulling at the old man’s hair.
André has never liked families. He thinks about Mama, Papa. He thinks about Mama’s gloves and Papa working on the greenhouse. There’s more to life than death; there’s all the rest, and André doesn’t know much about it. He knows it hurts. He knows it makes men cowards sometimes; it makes them bullies, and afraid, and mad. But he wonders if he will envy Reisden.
He thinks about Ruthie and Jules. If he has a family, it is them.
“Who’s the old guy?” one of the techs says.
“Aah, look at them. That’s Reisden’s dad. That’s baby’s grandpa, Reisden?”
Reisden looks up sharply, the old American too, the same movement, the same set of the shoulders. They have their own ghost, André thinks, someone they will see whenever they see each other. It is like a moment out of the Necro; André wants to wrap a play around it.
But a new kind, a kind he doesn’t even know yet. A horror story with a different ending. Where no one disappears and no one escapes, where the survivors have to live with the ghosts and the villains are only heroes with different lighting.
“No,” says Reisden. “That’s not baby’s grandpa.”
“Yes,” says André.
He cannot write this play yet, but he knows what to do. “Ladies, gentlemen, and madmen! Gather round!” He spreads his arms; he fixes the tech with Necrosar’s fateful blue eye. “A night dark as the pit,” he intones. “Thunder rumbles in the distance,” he is making all this up as he goes along, “a door creaks open—” André looks into Reisden’s eyes. I am giving you the theatre, André tells him silently. I am giving you what I have, Necrosar’s freedom, to tell the truth and have no one believe it. “And who enters?” He turns and points at the old American. “It’s Reisden’s secret father!”
Reisden understands what he is trying to do, and something in his face changes. He looks once at Gilbert Knight, as if conferring with him on something that he already knows he is going to do.
“You have it wrong. Not nearly Necro enough, André. I am Richard Knight, the Vanished Child.” He is almost laughing, but look at his eyes; it is as if years of being hunted fall away from him; it is a moment André will remember forever, a moment to get on film too, though he never will.
“No,” says the old American earnestly. “Richard is dead. You must not believe anything else.”
“Everyone always believes the worst,” Reisden says. “So we shall make it worse. I murdered William Knight.”
The techs look at each other; who’s William Knight? They look at André for the next piece of the entertainment.
“Horribly,” André agrees. “Hacked him to pieces. Fed him to hogs. Big hogs. When the hogs were butchered, the butcher found—”
Reisden holds up his hand. “Too far, André.”
“Make it vile,” André counsels.
“As bad as possible, that’s what everyone believes,” Reisden says, “and they may believe it if they please. But if I have to choose which I prefer, let me be Gilbert’s son. Don’t you think so, Toby?” Reisden looks at the old man and the child. He picks up his son and holds him out, and the old man reaches to take him. “Toby,” he says, “this is your grandfather.”
Gilbert Knight’s dog barks once. “And this is your dog,” Reisden says.
So there is that story at an end, the story of Richard Knight. Not even a horrible death lasts, André thinks; then how can anything last, and especially this happy family Reisden wants for his boy? It can’t. André leaves them and looks one last time at the guillotine, which is already half taken apart. Without its blade it looks like two posts, unfamiliar, with an unknown purpose. By the front door of Montfort the straw man still stands, its arms outstretched, its wheat-sheaf head nodding. André raises his arms high, mimicking it, like a sorcerer. He goes out through the Jerusalem Gate and looks across the fields. The sun is warm on his shoulders. In the green fields the leaves are steaming. A row of workers is moving through the field, picking beets and piling them in baskets. André watches the rhythmical wave of the movement.
“Count André?” It is Ruthie, with Jules behind her.
“Look.” He points the movement out to them.
Behind them, on the terrace, he can still hear Papa Cyron haranguing the soldiers.
People make the most sense together, André thinks. It is people who hurt each other worst, but it is also people who look after each other. People are like pieces of film, nothing in themselves, nothing but bits of light and darkness, ghosts of meaning without each other.
Far away, across the valley, a line of light flickers, moving up the side of Vimy Ridge. It looks like the guns of the soldiers in the battle scene. Jules points; André squints.
But today it is only the farmers at Vimy with their tools, making the harvest, and André takes Jules’s arm and Ruthie’s and stands between them.
They will not be safe forever. No one ever is. They are happy today.
Acknowledgments
“AT ARRAS. . . THE BRITISH hold the town, the Germans hold a northern suburb; at one point near the river the trenches are just four metres apart.... The Hotel de Ville, the Grand’Place and the cathedral are mostly heaps of litter. . . . The streets are strangely quiet and grass grows between the stones.”
—H. G. Wells, describing Arras, September 1916 from Italy, France, and Britain at War
The Moroccan crisis of 1911 was resolved, a month past the date of this book, by an unlikely coalition of international bankers, organized by the French diplomat Joseph Cambon, the pro-German peacemaker Prime Minister Joseph Caillaux, and the German Socialist Party. They patched the peace together for three more years.
In the summer of 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was shot. It was the excuse everyone wanted. Caillaux might have been able to head off war again, but this time he was involved in a scandal; his wife was being tried for murder. All during July 1914, while Germany aimed its armies toward France, the French newspapers were absorbed by the trial of Mme Caillaux.
In August 1914 Europe went to war.
By early September 1914 the Germans had almost captured Paris. The French army beat the Germans back to the countryside just east of Arras, to the small town of Vimy and the ridge outside it. There both armies dug in. They would fight on Vimy Ridge for three years.
Of the places in this book, only the boves and the enormous castle I have called Montfort still exist in anything like their former state. In Arras, the Grand’Place and the town hall are reproductions from the 1920s. Cemeteries now dominate the Montfort road. The fields around Vimy Ridge cannot be plowed because of unexploded bombs. Villages, woods, houses and trees and gardens, chalk pits, sheep and shepherds disappeared in bombs and shrapnel, victims of the war; with them went most of the culture of prewar French Flanders, including its witchcraft. (Though there are Flanders witches again; one emailed me after this book came out.)
For bringing it back to life, particular thanks to Jacques Borge and Nicolas Viasnoff’s Archives du nord; Marguerite Yourcenar’s two memoirs; Alcius Leduin’s important compilation of folk beliefs, Traditions populaires de Demuin (1892); Maxence van der Meersch’s Invasion 1914; and Nigel Cave’s Arras/Vimy Ridge for chalk pits and tunneling. For help in finding these and other sources, thanks to the staff of Widener Library, Harvard University, and the Brookline Public Library, Brookline, Massachusetts. For aid on site, I am grateful to the Bibliothèque municipale de la ville d’Arras, the staff of the Arras Office of Tourism, and the people of the commune of Mont-St.-Eloi, Pas-de-Calais, France. Though my Montfort and the extraordinary Mont-St.-Eloi share some architectural features, they are not the same.
Nor is Count André de Montfort the same as Count André de Lorde, cofounder of the Grand Guignol—though they, too, share some architectural features. For sending me to André de Lorde, I am grateful to L
aurence Senelick, who also read this book in manuscript and taught me, among many other useful facts, that quintessence of French culture, the difference between a baguette and a ficelle.
Sabine’s ideas of witchcraft should not be taken as typical of anything we know; Flanders witchcraft was different in many ways from Wicca and modern paganism. Nevertheless I have used bits of them and other pagan traditions as “frog DNA” where the details of the culture aren’t known; thanks to Alan Seeking Wolf Bosell, Kirsten Houseknecht, and others for sharing their religious experiences. Katherine Neville shared her experiences of magic, and Michele Slung, as good a friend as she is an anthologist, found and passed on to me A. E. Waite’s Ceremonial Magic. Thanks also to U.S. Games Systems, which publishes the Oracle of Napoleon.
Many friends of historical stage magic shared their expertise. Yvette Grimes, magician and generous friend, unstintingly loaned books and videos from her enormous collection; thank you, Yvette. Thanks also to John Stanley at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University; the Harvard Theater Collection; Ricky Jay; Valentino (the magician of Magic’s Greatest Secrets Revealed); and Le Grand David and the late Cesareo Pelaez (Marco the Magi), national treasures of magic, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing.
My knowledge of early films developed in part through the generous support of a Fulbright fellowship and a fellowship at the American Film Institute. Of the many people with whom I’ve had the privilege to talk about film, I am especially grateful to Thorold Dickinson, W. K. Everson, and Vlada Petric. Robert B. Wyatt, film fan and collector, loaned me his copy of Les Vampires; thanks also to the generous Joe Blades and to Lew Gamerman, video lover extraordinaire.
The members of the Cambridge Speculative Fiction Workshop (David A. Smith, Steve Popkes, Kelly Link, Brian Yamauchi, and Mary Tafuri Ross) and the members of the Ladies’ Main Thang (Delia Sherman, Phyllis Birnbaum, and Kelly Link again) read this book in manuscript. They and Laurence Senelick saved me from many mistakes. I’ve kept a few, though. Thank you all. Thank you, Delia, for those sanity-saving lunches, Kelly for the inspiration your own magical stories provide me, and David and Steve for good tough criticism. Thanks to Ellen Kushner, a light to all who know her and an instant purveyor of emergency Yiddish, and to Andreas Teuber, who shared with me his experiences of acting as a young, raw actor with Richard Burton.