Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy

by Stephen Morris

  Daniela ran down the alleyways of her dreams, hearing the women behind her laughing and mocking her for losing her husband to not just one of them but to all of them together. She could also hear Bartolomeo’s voice behind her, singing a vulgar drinking song and laughing with his bevy of mistresses. Daniela’s face burned with shame. Covering her ears but unable to keep out the noise of the laughter and the singing, she closed her eyes in her dream but only saw the other women again much more closely and in more detail. Daniela could make out every mole, every freckle or slight discoloration of her rivals’ skin.

  Shame was joined by anger, anger that Bartolomeo should treat her so and that he should not only take a hoard of mistresses but do so in front of her face. Anger that she should be mocked so by those other women, his mistresses, in the public spaces of her own dreams. Anger that her husband should turn to one amante after another rather than seek whatever consolation he hoped for in her arms, not theirs. Was each of them a prosituta? Did he pay them a coin or did they scopare and fottere him simply for the pleasure of it and to disgrace her, Bartolomeo’s lawful wife?

  She wanted to scratch all their eyes out. All the eyes of all the women and then the eyes of her husband. Although a husband’s infidelity was usually attributed to his wife’s behavior and the seductive qualities of her rival, Daniela held Bartolomeo as responsible as the women for his behavior in her dream. Even as she seethed with fury, she could hear his voice mingle with theirs, calling out her name in mockery and derision. Sweat broke out across her forehead and she reached out to strike repeatedly, over and over and over again, whichever of the shadow figures came within her reach. She screamed in savage, inarticulate rage.

  “How could I have been so foolish as to ever love you?” She threw herself at the dream-Bartolomeo but he slid from her grasp like shadow, impossible to grasp and hold. “You liar and deceiver! You never did love me, did you? Your only thought was to convince me otherwise and then laugh at me behind my back with all your lovers and whores! Is that not right? Has that not been what you have done all these years since I came with you from sunny Tuscany to this cold, ice-bound Bohemia?” She turned to lunge at her dream-husband yet again, and yet again her hands reached through his form and clutched at air.

  “Your words and protestations of love have been nothing but deceit and lies! Just as Jason deceived Medea! She gave him everything and then he spurned her! I gave you my life, Bartolomeo, my life and all that I had to give, and still you laugh at me and spurn me with your whores and mistresses!” Her words descended into garbled syllables and phrases as she attempted yet a third time to strangle him and found her fingers closing in on themselves rather than his throat.

  Suffocated by her frustration and wrath, Daniela knew that she could escape from the dream, if not her life, by waking. Finding herself conscious again, she was wrapped in sheets drenched with sweat and she felt a burning not unlike fever wash over her in wave after wave of disgust for how she had been duped by Bartolomeo.

  “It is no great wonder that he has become so sullen of late,” she grumbled. “The effort to maintain the pretense of love for me, his chaste and loving wife, has become too much. His lies are unraveling and he cannot bear to look his wife in the face any longer as he laughs behind my back in the taverns with his whores and mistresses.” The words flowed effortlessly as if she were admitting aloud something she had known for years but hidden from herself.

  “The whole town must be laughing at me,” she realized a moment later. “If I can see through his deception even when he tries to hide the truth from me, how much more easily must the whole town see the truth? My neighbors must think me the greatest dupe, the most foolish wife to ever be faithful to such a vile and loathsome cheat!”

  She sat up in the bed, the room still dark and the crickets chirping outside the windows. She looked at the sleeping Bartolomeo, his quiet breathing slow and steady. How could she ever have allowed him to touch her? She shivered with disgust.

  A cacophony of birds began to sing in the trees not far from their home. “Sunrise is coming.” The birds always sang lustily an hour before sunrise and an hour after sunset as they established themselves in their new places at the turning of the shadows. “I shall establish myself anew as well,” Daniela resolved. She untangled herself from the sheets and stood, dizzy and unsteady, and reached to the edge of the mattress for support. Finding her garments in the dark, she stepped into the principal room and dressed herself, wrapping her cloak about her as protection against the mid-November chill in the predawn air.

  She unbolted and opened the door slowly, hoping the hinges would not squeal and awaken Bartolomeo, whom she wanted to avoid speaking with today. “I’ll hear no more of his lies,” she promised, stepping through the door and closing it carefully behind her. “No more of his protestations of love. I rued my sterility and my inability to give him a son, my failure to give him children. Ha! Now I bless my barren womb! God forbid that such a one as he should ever have a child to perpetuate his name or sully the world with the memory of such a fiend!”

  She stepped from the stones that formed the doorstep of her house. Although it was not too early in the season for frost to collect between the stones, there was a thin, slick sheen of something on the step that was not the sparkle of frost. She examined the soles of her shoes but could see nothing unseemly there. “No, wait.” She twisted her feet up closer to her face and leaned over as low as she could manage. A pin was stuck into the sole of her shoe. “How was that left on the doorsill?” Daniela wondered. She pulled the pin out and tossed it aside, glad that she had not stepped on it more heavily and pierced her foot. She looked at the doorstep again. There were damp stains there for sure, as if a dog had urinated there and missed the door or wall he had been intending to mark with his lifted leg. But nothing else that she could see.

  “Or maybe it was a bitch out running loose in the night,” Daniela concluded. In the early morning darkness, she did not notice the other pins scattered about the doorsill, and loathe to lean down and rub her hands over what she suspected to be dog urine on the step, she did not investigate further. She stepped into the street, unsure of how she knew where she was going but determined to reach her destination unobserved.

  She hurried along the empty streets as the birds continued their early morning chorus. She found it difficult to breathe, even though this pace had never been difficult for her before. Once or twice she found it necessary to pause and lean against a house to catch her breath. Her clothes were already drenched with sweat as if a fever raged within her, but the only fever she took notice of was the fever of fury, indignation and distress at her plight and how public she assumed it to be.

  “I am here.” She was standing before the door of Giuseppe the carpenter and his family. She had arrived at her destination and knew what she needed even as she did not question how she possessed this knowledge. She bent down and searched between the cobblestones and weeds bursting through the mortar between the stones. She found pebbles and marbles that children had lost as they played in the lane, scraps of food that stray dogs had discarded and the usual offal that found its way from the neighborhood dumps onto the streets of Prague. She continued her search, knowing that whatever she searched for must be there.

  “Ah.” Her hands closed around a nail that had dropped out of Giuseppe’s shoulder bag of carpentry tools and supplies. There were doubtless other nails in the street to be found, but she only needed one. This one. A large iron nail that had flecks of rust along its shank. She picked it up and kissed it.

  “You shall be my deliverance.” Now she only needed… what? She stood and looked about. The darkness was fading and the first streaks of dawn were reaching toward the castle high above the Little Town but not so far from where she stood.

  What else did she need? She hesitated, less sure now of which direction to go, and then, sure again that she was correct, quickly darted down a side lane that curved down the hill toward the woods and wild ga
rdens below the Strahov Monastery. She came to the lowest turn of the lane, where it was little more than a rut with a few cobblestones that had not sunk into the muddy earth over the years. In the gap here between houses that were dilapidated and nearly uninhabitable, the wildflowers and herbs of the uncultivated hillside burst into the confines of the city. Many of the plants had begun as seeds from the monastery gardens, seeds blown over the monastery walls by unruly winds or stolen by squirrels and rats and then dropped into the earth. Some of the flowers might have been planted by the original home dwellers along this dip in the lane, when the houses nearby had been built, but the plantings had long ago escaped human control. Some of the plants were simply native to the region. The hillside was rife with greenery and even now, mid-November, it looked lush, as the taller evergreens covered and somewhat protected the shorter seasonal plants beneath them.

  Daniela stood before this veritable replication of the overgrown portions of Eden. She knew what she was looking for though she could not explain even to herself how she knew. She stepped off the remnants of the lane and into the midst of the unkempt plants.

  She reached up and pulled loose a few needles from a yew tree that leaned precariously over this corner of the hillside, causing the sap to ooze and congeal on the branch. A drop grew heavy enough to fall onto her sleeve. She placed the needles, with the nail, in her apron. Stepping a bit further along, she discovered a withered clump of sage that must have been planted by an expedition of squirrels from the monastery up the hill. She plucked some of its leaves as well and then stepped sideways, noticing the stalks of nettles that lurked ready to attack the unsuspecting. Careless of her own safety, she wrenched a handful of the wretched leaves away from the stalks.

  Her palm stung and seemed to burn and blister as she looked at it before stuffing the nettle leaves and the sage into the apron with the nail and the yew needles sticky with sap. Daniela looked about her.

  “Is there anything else here that I need to collect?” she asked, searching her thoughts. The urgency that had driven her here and directed her to these particular leaves and needles had evaporated. She continued to look around, turning this way and that, her cloak caught first on the stinging nettles and then on the bark of the yew tree. She struggled to find her way back to the path. “Thank goodness the mud here is half-frozen,” she declared. It would have been incredibly more difficult to clamber about otherwise.

  Daniela extricated herself from the undergrowth of the hillside and stepped back onto the broken-down alleyway that led back towards the center of the Italian quarter of the Little Town. Urgency seized her again and drove her quickly towards her own home. Stepping over her threshold and locking the door behind her lest an intruder interrupt her, she heard Bartolomeo stirring in the bed and then his gentle snoring resumed.

  She emptied her apron and sat at the table. An iron nail. Sage. Yew. Nettles. What had she gathered? Why? She picked up the nail and turned it around in the dim half-light that filtered into the room from outdoors. Even as she held the nail in one hand to examine it more closely, she began to smear the yew needles and sap along the length of the shank with her other hand. “Yew, for the dead,” She knew that much, at least. Yew was generally planted in or near churchyards and gravesites to demarcate the boundaries of the living and the dead. It was known to trap wandering, careless souls in its branches. The blisters on her palms and fingertips burned more sharply, irritated by the sticky sap of the poisonous tree.

  Dropping the spent needles, Daniela picked up the sage next and smiled, holding the few leaves she had collected close to her nose. Crushing them to release their fragrance, she inhaled deeply as the faint aroma rose from her fingertips. The cool balm eased the pain in her fingertips. She breathed again and then rubbed the crushed leaves along the length of the shank too.

  “What was it my mother would always recite?” Daniela tried to remember her mother’s words about sage. ““How did it go? ‘How can…’” she began. She tried again. She was frustrated, knowing that the words lay just beyond her conscious memory. Then they burst through some small chink in the wall of her mind. She heard her mother’s voice again. “How can a man die if sage is in the garden?” That was it! Leaves of the sage plant were often chewed to promote long life or foster the hope of gaining immortality. The remains of the leaves crumbled away as she continued rubbing them along the rough-hewn iron shank of the nail.

  She grasped the nettles firmly and scrubbed those against the shank last. Her hand burning and her tears making it hard to see, she scrubbed and scrubbed the nettles against the iron as if she were scrubbing overcooked meat from the bottom of a skillet. She heard her mother again, a warning from her youth to avoid a patch of nettles: “The only thing nettles are good for is to confound one’s enemies.”

  The stringent nettles tore at her skin and then, dropping them but continuing to scrub the nail as if she still held them, the iron tore at her flesh. Droplets of blood mingled with the flecks of rust. Exhausted, she fell back against the chair and closed her eyes, allowing her tears to flush the irritants from her eyes even as she hoped that whatever she was about to do would flush the irritation of Bartolomeo and his flagrant infidelities from her life. Just as her dream had flushed the delusion of his love from her heart and soul.

  Afraid Bartolomeo would awake, and not wanting to be found sitting at the table holding the great nail and staring at it as if it were an exotic jewel, Daniela finally stood. She walked slowly around the table towards the door to the sleeping room, where Bartolomeo continued to snore. She allowed her eyes to linger on each object as she passed it, cherishing them as if gazing on them for the last time. Seeing the mirror she had received from him, lying face down on the shelf, she winced. She continued her slow progress toward her snoring husband.

  “Wait! One thing more is necessary.” She reached for a small vial on the shelf near the terrible mirror, the last gift she had received from her husband when she had still trusted and believed in his love. Although the parish priests discouraged vanity and the use of cosmetics among the women of the parish, the one indulgence she had always allowed herself was this diluted juice of the belladonna plant, which was commonly used by the woman of Tuscany and throughout the Italian peninsula to intensify their beauty by causing the pupils of their eyes to grow large. Deep, dark, alluring pools of mystery. She had always enjoyed that effect. So had Bartolomeo. Or so she had thought. She tipped the vial, and the liquid dribbled onto the nail and spilled onto her dress and then the floor. She stood silently sobbing as the contents of the vial poured out and were wasted, leaving wet trails down her bosom.

  She entered the sleeping room. Her husband’s clothes were where he had dropped them on the floor when he had finally come home from the taverns and his lovers and collapsed with little more than a grunt to acknowledge her presence. His clothes lay in a heap, and next to them, his leather shoulder bag of masonry tools. She leaned over, retrieved what she was looking for, and stood again.

  She walked with patient grace to Bartolomeo’s side of the bed, where he had clung to the furthest edge of the mattress to spare himself the agony of touching her in the night. His snoring filled her mind like thunder, but then the thunder paused. He coughed. He rubbed a knuckle in one eye and rolled onto his back. He rubbed both eyes now and looked at the ceiling, only to see his wife standing beside the bed.

  “Hmmm… Daniela?” Bartolomeo seemed unsure if what he saw was dream or waking life. Daniela imagined she loomed over him like a giantess from an old Tuscan tale for scaring children.

  Daniela said nothing. She placed the point of the nail atop her husband’s forehead, near his slightly receding hairline, and then, lifting the heavy mallet she had taken from his shoulder bag, she drove the nail into his skull with a single blow.

  Stefano noticed that Bartolomeo was missing from his workplace along the rising wall of the castle precinct. His friend had not said anything the day before to indicate he was feeling ill, but his mood
had been sullen and quietly angry. “Perhaps he is ill after all,” Stefano mentioned to some of the other masons and apprentice bricklayers along the wall. No one had seen him this morning. “Perhaps it is another hangover,” Stefano then thought. Bartolomeo had been drinking much more than his typical few mugs of ale the last few evenings.

  As the sun was dipping towards the horizon and the workmen all descended the castle hilltop to their homes, Stefano detoured and knocked on the door of Bartolomeo’s home. There was no answer. Even the shutters were pulled shut. He stepped back from the door and looked at the houses on either side, but their shutters were pulled back and the doors stood, if not open, at least ajar, and voices or laughter could be heard within. The wife of one of Bartolomeo’s neighbors walked by, bringing home laundry.

  “No one has seen either Daniela or Bartolomeo all day,” she told Stefano, seeing his inquisitive stare towards his friend’s door. “No one answers the door, either. Or at least, so I have been told.” She entered her own home with her great basket of carefully folded washing.

  Stefano stared at the house of his friend again. “Are he and Daniela both ill?” What else would explain the absence of both of them and the lack of response to knocking at the door?

  “But, still.” Stefano thought it out, using words to help him disentangle his confusion. “No matter how ill they might be, one of them should have been able to request assistance, if they need it. If they are so ill that they cannot answer the door, they certainly must need assistance.”

  He rapped his knuckles on the door again. No answer. He rapped his knuckles on the shutters. No response. “This is too strange to simply leave them within, if within they are.” He pulled on the door. The neighbor’s wife had been correct. It was locked. Stefano took out his heavy mallet, and carefully taking aim along the door where he knew the bolt to be, he smashed the timbers in a few simple strokes.