"The chain of penal dulcitude continues indoors. That is where the female criminals are kept." The Abbe looked at Claude's two sisters. "Yes, that is correct. The fair sex is not immune to the punishments of the Pompelmoose Atoll. Women caught pursuing unmentionable but well-imagined acts are given a most appropriate chore: refinement. Only it is refinement not of themselves but of sugar in the baker's drying room, which Ar-buthnot tells us is heated fifty-four degrees beyond that of the human body. The heat is such that it will kill a sparrow in two minutes. Here they must toil to make pastries, their breasts dripping in the syrupy heat. That is why, incidentally, they are called, in England anyway, tarts."
The cottage's occupants were all ears (especially Fidelite) as the Abbe confected his convicts' chronicle, describing callused hands, screams, and cries for salt in a world of bitter sweetness. He beguiled with great seriousness, mixing the terrors of the valley with the mysteries of distant lands, and in so doing offered up a story that satisfied listener and teller alike.
The Abbe wrapped up his tale as neatly as the piece of demi-royal that had inspired it: "So when someone asks you if you want a taste of sugar in whatever form, whether in cane, rock, or refined, remember the source of the sweet that tempts you. It bears the labor of street thief, murderer, whore."
The sugar and the story had served to comfort Claude. Combined, they acted as an analeptic, restoring and renewing the spirits. Now that he no longer had either treat, however, Claude felt a throbbing through the turban on his hand. The Abbe observed stains darkening the gauze. He turned to Staemphli and mentioned the efficacy of alum, noting, "I brought some that I mined myself in Liege. It might be helpful."
"The bandage must stay on for at least a week," the surgeon said.
"But the alum will stanch the trouble spot," the Abbe replied.
"There is no trouble. The discoloration is caused by the digestive medicine."
Claude's mother disagreed, arguing that the ointment of crushed nineshirts, a kind of wild garlic, would not cause such stains. "The flannel could be too tight," she said.
The surgeon was now adamant. "A week, including the Lord's day, must elapse before we remove the bandage." The patient moaned with renewed energy, partly out of fear, partly to challenge the surgeon. The Abbe unraveled the bandage despite Staemphli's protests. It was a lengthy process. The flannel and gauze mounted on a stool beside the box bed. When the dressing was removed, the Abbe looked at the surgeon and said, "I was wrong to trust you. The gauze hides a horror." His tone betrayed rage. Claude caught sight of his hand before the Abbe could reapply the bandages. The mole was gone, but so was something else.
Claude fainted.
Where he had once had five fingers, he now had only four. In the gap: a raw and angry sore. Adolphe Staemphli, surgeon and citizen of Geneva, had cut away the middle finger of Claude's right hand.
The subsequent conflict between the mother, the Abbe, and the surgeon was as messy and convoluted as the tangle of bandages. A snarl of exclamations, accusations, and curses from the hostess and the Abbe received looks of moral indignation from the surgeon. In his defense, Staemphli tried to offer a succession of excuses involving the fusion of bones in boys and the odd formation of the hand.
"It had to come off," the surgeon said.
"It most certainly did not," the Abbe cried. "And had you thought so, you should have mentioned that necessity to his mother."
Staemphli tried to play down the gravity of the operation. "What does a child's finger do? Pick a nose, poke an ear, ex-plorate the seven apertures the body is granted by God. It was only one finger of ten. The child has nine others that function as they need to function. War has scattered limbs and organs more vital than his over the fields of battle, and men have picked themselves up and moved on. The child will as well. You must weigh the loss of a finger against the gains of science." Staemphli revealed the real reason for the enlarged excision. "It was essential that the mole be kept intact. The ringer is a commonplace— the mole, unique. It will find a spot in my collection. It will advance understanding and pay tribute to God's greater glory."
"Collection? God's greater glory?" The Abbe was incredulous.
The surgeon replied calmly. "Yes. You know very well I am gathering specimens for a treatise on the surgical arts. It will contain copperplates that will outdo Cheselden's. The child's anomaly is going to fill a gap in my studies." The surgeon was deaf to his own wordplay. He tried to push the dispute away by wrapping it in obscurity. "You will be amused to know, my dear Abbe, that the ignorant use moles for divination and endow these growths with all sorts of silly meaning. My intention is more rigorous. Maupertuis suggests we look at hexadactyly to understand the ill effects of interbreeding. I am of the opinion that moles also should be considered. Why else do you think I am willing to suffer the vagaries of these valley folk? They harbor blasphemy, heresy, and more specific forms of wickedness so effectively kept in check by the Consistory. Do you know what Bacon says? He says, 'Deformed persons are commonly even with nature, for as nature hath done ill by them, so do they by nature, being . . . void of natural affection; and so they have their revenge of nature.'
The Abbe was furious. "Damn you, damn your study, damn your misreading of Bacon. I hope that this deformed person will have his revenge on you. In fact, I declare right now that he will! I should never have brought you here." The Abbe pounded his fist against the kitchen table. "If I had not borrowed from your library, or from your bankers, and if I knew why you had agreed to come, I would not have called you to the valley. It was never my intention to have you fill your jam jars with the extremities of Tournay."
"As I explained, it was a remarkable sample. And I do not use jam jars. My bottles are made to specification in the Lorraine."
The Abbe tried to console Madame Page, who at this point was highly agitated by the sight of her unconscious son. "You chose the wrong proverb," he said. "God tempered nothing at all, except perhaps the steel that sheared your little lamb."
The mother was reduced to more gnomic incantation: "On the fool's beard the barber learns to shave."
"No, Madame," the Abbe said. "We have been worse than fools. If I held sway with the authorities . . ."
"... but you do not," the surgeon interjected. "It is / who hold sway. And with that, I think, the subject can be closed."
The Abbe shouted, "Enough of your grim-reapery! Leave!" He moved menacingly toward the surgeon and held up a poker that suggested a surprising capacity for violence.
And so the surgeon left—with Claude's finger, it should be noted.
3
THE vengeful WIDOW entered again as the surgeon hurried from the cottage. She blew through the herbs hanging from the rafters, sprinkling the occupants below with the petals and leaves of the older and less potent plants. She whipped up the cards on the floor, extinguished an unglobed candle, and ruffled open the pages of Claude's copybook. The last assault caught the Abbe's eye. He adjusted his spectacles and took the copybook gingerly in his hands. Opening it, he observed the first page was blank. "The frontispiece of the perfectionist," he said.
The images that followed confirmed the Abbe's expectations. Claude was indeed an exacting draftsman. His reputation had spread to Grand-le-Luc, a village on the other side of the valley. He was known as the Pencil Boy, in the way other children of the region were distinguished by cowlicks, or their unusual predilections, the Boy Bee-eater being perhaps the most noteworthy. Claude had a great deal of time to pursue his talents. Except during the seasonal mushroom explosions, when Madame Page insisted on help, Claude was free to do as he pleased. And when he was not obliged to skirmish with his sisters, what pleased him most was drawing. Hence the nickname.
What did Pencil Boy draw? What was it the Abbe now observed? It was a private register of fascinations, frustrations, and flights of uncontrolled fancy. Claude drew the cemetery yew, and on its branches hung a few dozen water rats affixed by their tails. He drew a soap house overtaken
by a colony of spiders spinning webs worthy of the finest watch work. Wild as these designs were, both the tree and the soap house faithfully represented Claude's curious vision. So did the windmills that spun through the high-domed skies, the paddle wheels that slapped the Tournay river dry, and the sparks that rose from the scalp of Christine Rochat, the local pyromaniac. The Abbe found little or no depiction of the conventional. There was one image of Matthew Rochat, the farmer who also served as the local barber. He was sketched behind the Red Dog, performing the surgical procedure on the aforementioned ridgeling. A phrase ran across the bottom of the page: "Shave for a Sou, Bleed for Two. Hogs and Rams Gelded." Next to it, Claude had drawn a picture of a chicken freshly decapitated and hanging from a drying line.
The Abbe leafed back and forth through the disturbing images of the copybook. He came upon a picture of a wedge of cheese, a variant of Gruyere. In the bubbles, Claude had placed the heads of some of the more powerful residents: Sister Constance, a Discalced Carmelite who greatly distressed the Abbe; Gaston, the proprietor of the Red Dog; and, near the rind, a rotund, bespectacled fellow the Abbe rightly took to be himself. Claude drew a few self-portraits and even a series of Mole Kings, studies of his deformed hand.
While a curiosity to be sure, the mole was not the most serious of physical aberrations visited upon the village of Tournay. Claude's little book documented with tremendous acuity the dreadful results of intermarriage and unacknowledged couplings of a more temporary nature. Once, a company of performers passed through the village, a rare event given the rugged terrain and the scant and miserly population. By the time the players decamped and left the valley, it was hard to establish who had been more surprised, the visited or the visitors. What had the performers made of the Tournay family with toenails like oyster shells, or of Hairless Ruth the lacemaker? When the Abbe observed Claude's drawing of Ruth without her bonnet and scrubbed clean of the burnt cork that normally traced across her fuzzless eyebrows, he thought of an acorn deprived of its cap.
The reason for the limited and intense commingling of families can be reduced to a single word: inheritance. Along with the land and livestock, lace and lock tools, the racks of pewter common and fine, came bequests unrecorded in the heavy elephant folio registers kept by the parish notary. There were harelips, bulbous noses, large ears, high foreheads, and, yes, sometimes even the odd mole. The genealogical trees of the valley often grafted branches back to trunks.
The Abbe came upon portraits of Claude's family. Evangeline found kinder but less frequent representation than Fidelite, whose delineations made the Abbe laugh aloud. And there was Claude's mother, depicted hunching over a large cluster of mushrooms. The Abbe's favorite image was of the three children and Madame Page standing beside the chimney, a hookah and telescope on the mantel and the Dragon rug under their feet.
The Pencil Boy awoke, again indulging in a sleepy, full-fisted rub of his eyes. He became agitated when he observed the Abbe inspecting his copybook. The Abbe silenced the objections with a question: "Where is your father? Why haven't you drawn him?"
"I do not remember what my father looks like." There was an edge to Claude's reply. Indeed, what was missing from his copybook was missing from his life. As if by conspiracy, Michel Page was never mentioned. The only hint of paternal legacy was hidden in the family portrait. "This is all there is," Claude said. He pointed to the telescope, the hookah, and the Dragon rug. These souvenirs told the story of Michel Page, a second-generation watchmaker.
As with an increasing number of the farmers trapped in winter by the windswept snows, Claude's grandfather had cut a window in the wall of the farm, set up a bench and chuck, and crafted timepieces in a land ruled by the sun and stars. He acquired the valley's secrets and transferred them to his son, Claude's father. Michel Page augmented these secrets during a polygonal tour of France. On his way home from apprenticeship, he met a sturdy Lyonnaise girl, a minister's daughter, whom he liked and promptly married. Juliette was uninterested in the devotions of the Church. She chose to dedicate herself instead to plants and children, which suited Michel Page perfectly. Returning from an almost somber wedding celebration overseen by Juliette's father, the young couple shared a coach with an enigmatic vizier. (Is there any other kind?) Michel Page struck a deal to construct a complicated watch reckoned to the Muslim lunar calendar. Other orders followed, and not long after, he made a six-month trip to Constantinople. He did well satisfying the Turkish love of astronomical watches. Pearls and blue-green enameling practically guaranteed profitable sale in Constantinople, and if not there, in Baghdad. His business expanded. He negotiated lucrative arrangements with Persian caravans that stopped in Smyrna and Aleppo. Silk for watch works. More deals were made. Michel Page befriended the people he needed to befriend, the French consul in Constantinople in particular, and was granted a concession normally unavailable to a man of his humble origins. He returned from the East with a pouch of silver piasters. He also brought back a hookah, a telescope, a carpet of fantastical design—called the Dragon rug by his children though it depicted no recognizable dragons—and stories of distant lands.
Claude loved the stories best. Michel Page mixed Eastern myths and local tales shamelessly. Travel had taught him to burp like a Chinaman, pass gas like a Prussian, and tap his head like a woodpecker pecking at the trunk of a hollow oak. He could even play little tunes on his teeth, until he lost a left incisor, a C-sharp, in a wineshop brawl outside the port of Toulon.
The stories stopped when Claude turned seven. Page pere kissed the forehead of Page fits and left for Geneva. From there, it was on to Besancon and beyond, a trip that would take him to the farthest reaches of the Turkish Empire. He never returned. Two years later, the Abbe brought news of his death. In his vast web of correspondence, he had learned of a devastating plague in Aleppo that had turned every fourth resident into food for worms. According to a trusted spice merchant, an unnamed watchmaker had been snatched up by the horrid malady. The Abbe wrote again, and in less than four months a letter arrived detailing the tragic end of Claude's father. "The tally stick of Michel Page," the merchant wrote in a postscript, "has been marked." No effects were returned except a watch of little value hiding gears of ingenious design. This was an important, if unrecognized, heirloom for the young boy.
Michel Page hadn't been a fool. Before leaving to conduct business with the Muhammedans, he had purchased an annuity for his wife. The receipt, a printed document with manuscript additions, was kept in an iron box near the chimney. He had paid 8,450 livres for an annual income of 650, which made the widow one of the richest residents in the community. Yet even with this wealth, she retreated to the forests, a kind but lonely woman, who, as Claude's drawings made clear, was happiest digging for roots by the light of a waxing moon. She spent substantial sums on the education of her children—they learned to read at an early age—and little on herself.
The Abbe shut the copybook. The feverish and unruly images appealed to his own scattered preoccupations. Many of the drawings reached beyond the borders of the page, as if the paper were not large enough to accommodate Claude's desires, as if his field of focus were at once too narrow and too wide. The Abbe worried that the talent displayed in the copybook had been, in a single stroke of the knife, severed. (Staemphli, with more exactitude, would have said the act necessitated three crosscuts of a surgical saw.)
The Abbe turned to Madame Page. "Before the operation, your boy had a skill that would have made his father proud. It must be retrieved. I wish to see him next session day."
Claude lost a finger that night but acquired something much more valuable: a patron and a mentor. Amputation had brought about attachment.
The patient did very little during the days that followed. Barricaded in the attic, he directed his attentions to his hand, a scabrous island surrounded by a pink-and-scarlet sea. He spent hours playing with the flap of flesh that was supposed to heal.
He refused to speak and controlled his immediate environment
by flinging turnips and dried-up field mice at anyone who attempted to enter his lair. It was soon clear, however, that the hand was festering, and that the healing promised by the surgeon was not taking place.
Madame Page forced her way up the ladder and tended her son's wound despite his protestations. She made him take a wormwood drink, but the bitter taste, worse even than the opium, only provoked more hailstorms of rodentia. She switched to lemon-balm infusions, and still the fever rose. She applied a cabbage leaf bought at great expense from a hothouse near Geneva, hoping that as the leaf withered, the hand would grow strong.
It did not. As a last, desperate act, she employed a risky febrifuge known to produce quick and dramatic results. The fever finally broke, and after a fortnight of suffering, Claude's hand was clearly on the mend. The gauze was soon replaced by dossils, basil-laced clumps of lint. As the wound healed, however, the corruption appeared to move inward; that is, Claude's mood began to fester. He was so mournful that his mother likened him to the pasteboard pietas dispensed by Sister Constance. He refused to draw in the copybook during his convalescence. What imaginative power he retained was employed in thoughts of revenge against his elder sister, against the surgeon, against the world. In fitful dreams, he banished the surgeon to the Pompelmoose Atoll. He contemplated the use of bell-topped stalks of wolfsbane, the plant made famous by the poisoner of Passerale. He finally responded to Fidelity's taunts with the surreptitious application of a powerful laxative, which kept his sister bent-kneed in the bitterly cold outhouse for two days.
A month after the operation, the Abbe returned unexpectedly. He brought three winter pears from his orchards and a snake stone from the quarry that ran between the mansion house and the Page cottage. He gave a piece of fruit to each of the three children and made a special gift of the fossil to Claude. When he learned that Claude had not drawn since the fateful night, he administered a remedy far more efficacious than all those previously applied: praise. Taking hold of the copybook, the Abbe moved his spectacles to and from the sketches. "Excellent. Truly gifted. Your sister's nose hair is treated with great subtlety, though I must say you've been kind. Does your mother really hunch over so much? Perhaps she does. 1 hadn't noticed until you drew her. Am I so silly in appearance? Maybe 1 am."
A case of curiosities Page 3