by Sarah Perry
Then Alice said, I know not what you are, save that you tempt me, for indeed my heart fails me! And yet my Saviour did not falter at the last, when he sweat as it were great drops of blood, and sought that the bitter cup would pass from him, yet drank deeply, for love of all whom he had chosen!
Ah! said Melmoth, and spake yet more softly, Then you are elect?
Indeed I am! said Alice.
And once elect, may you be lost?
That I may not be, for before the foundations of the world, my name was writ in the Book of Life!
And was your name writ there, because tomorrow you pass through the flames?
My name was writ there by grace alone, and none of my doing.
Then surely, child, is it not mere pride that guides you to the pyre?
It is not pride! It is faithfulness, for to recant would be a sin!
What were the punishment, were you to escape the fire?
I should fall upon the mercy of God, for my cowardice and sin.
Then was it your hand, that built the Mercy Seat?
It was not my hand!
Was it you, that lit the Shekinah Glory?
I have done nothing—I can do nothing—I claim only the promise of God’s grace.
And who most knows God’s grace?
Why, the sinner.
And whom is forgiven most?
She who sinneth most!
Then Alice—my dear heart, my friend!—would you not sound the deepest depths of God’s love? Would you not sin much, that you may be forgiven much? That being forgiven much, you may love yet more? Then Alice fell, for the weariness in her bones, and indeed in her soul, and in her mind, for she was much taxed, by the horror which had passed before her, and which awaited her. And this same Melmoth pressed her mouth against her mouth, and her breast against her breast, in an embrace most unholy, and yet most chaste, and said, Alice, my dear one, my longed for, whom I have watched, who hath never left my sight! Alice, do not consign your flesh to the fire, but rather your soul to the grace of God. Sound the depths of that grace—would you not be forgiven much, for sinning much? Alice! Come with me! Take my hand, for I have been lonely!
* * *
All this Alice Benet told me, with much weeping, such as I had never before seen even a child weep, and would say no more. Oft-times she raised herself against the bolster, being yet weak, and would be watchful at the window, with a fixed watchfulness, as of a man seeking out his lover, nay, of a man whose debt is great, fearing the bailiff at the door. I gave her to drink from a cup, and she placed her hand upon mine, that hand which had been branded with the cross. Then at last she ceased her weeping, and asked that I commend her to God’s mercy. At dawn, as the cocks crowed, she spake her last, which was this: Sir, have a care, lest her eye be on you, for her loneliness is terrible, and she will not withstand it. Thus she passed into Judgement, and all was silent.
My dear Elizabeth, I am desirous that I should return to thee, more swiftly than thou hast anticipated, being much disturbed in my rest, and on occasion certain, that a pair of Eyes are upon me, and that these Eyes, are not as thine and mine, for they perceive not my actions alone, but my thoughts, indeed my very soul, down to its blackest depths! Five days yet remain, until that day, when I am safe with thee—pray God that I keep safe—for I am certain—that when I lay down my pen—and turn for my bed—that I shall see—as it were a plume of smoke—burning far distant—though in truth my chamber is but small—and there is about me—very sweet—the scent of the lily-flower -------------
Look! It is evening now, and no snow falling: the cobbles on Charles Bridge and in the Old Town Square are glittering and treacherous and every minute someone somewhere stumbles. Master Jan Hus in his winter cloak looks silently over the crowd: you might think, were you so inclined, that he is recalling how once he wore a paper hat on which painted devils danced, and walked to where the fires were banked to burn him; but perhaps after all he is merely watching the mice dining well from the bins at his feet. Stalls strung with lights sell ham on the bone, and disks of potato cut thin as paper and fried in oil; the astronomical clock strikes seven times. In the National Library of the Czech Republic (you recall its pale bell tower, and the ghosts of the Jesuits praying in the aisles) Helen Franklin finds she is unable to complete her work. It is not merely that she sees on the page not a leaflet in German cautioning against the onset of cataracts and blindness, but the final words of Sir David Ellerby; it is not merely that within arm’s reach there is desk 209, where Josef Adelmar Hoffman wrote his life and met his death. It is not even (though you’re certainly right to think of it) the notion that somewhere among all the backs turned to her—the many bent backs of students at their books—there might be, silently waiting, Melmoth the Witness, making notes in the margin of a document entitled The Sin of Helen Franklin. It is not quite these things that cause Helen’s pallor, her look of unease. It is this: she is being followed. On her walk that morning—brisk, purposeful, all documents relating to legend and myth decently stored at home—she saw, at every pause by traffic lights and on street corners, a figure at her heels. The figure is dark, slight, swift—moves as quickly as she sees it; slips behind passersby, behind cars, behind kiosks selling tickets for the tram. Sometimes it seems to her that it is singing, so quietly that it is impossible to make out the words, or whether it is a man or woman so diligently at her heels; sometimes it has a way of walking that she half-remembers. It arouses in her a kind of dread which Melmoth has not yet—not quite—been able to evoke: a feeling that she ought to drop her satchel, her papers, and bolt. But where would she go? It seems pinned to her coat like her shadow.
It is no use. She cannot work. Overhead the plaster babies yawn and gape. A librarian stands and with authoritative tread crosses the library floor, scowling at a boy who is drinking a bottle of water, and flings open a window. Cool sharp air comes in and with it the sound of someone singing. Helen flinches as she always does when she hears music and is not guarded against it. Night is coming. She imagines her follower sitting cross-legged beneath the window, singing perhaps, waiting patiently. She is saved from further reflection—from the rising tide of memory which laps about her feet—by three messages in quick succession. It is Thea, fumbling at her phone: Come n. Come now. Helen come now please.
“Karel!” says Helen, aloud, and receives from all sides looks not of censure but amusement. It is Karel, she thinks: either he has come home, or Melmoth has taken him! This last thought is cheering, because it is so absurd. She gathers her papers; the singing beyond the window has stopped. He’s come home, she thinks. Thank God!
Reader, witness, here is what you see: a woman so nondescript as to almost vanish. All Bohemia around is vivid and bright—a gold serpent painted on a crimson wall, a woman looking in wonder at an owl on her arm, a man in green silk robes imploring passersby to stop and drink beer in a lamp-lit den. There are jackdaws on high ledges and doorsteps: courtly jackdaws, nodding their gray-cowled heads; above the river a flock of swans flies north. Among all this Helen Franklin passes without notice, but it is best to look, and go on looking. For there behind her (she has stopped to adjust her satchel strap) is a watchful figure in a dark hood. You cannot see, from where you stand, what face is concealed within the shadow—cannot make out the shape of the body in the coat. But certainly there is something there which is very attentive, very fixed; whether benign or malignant you cannot guess, but all the same: don’t you think it might be kind to take Helen Franklin by the arm, and guide her back within the library walls?
Thea and Karel’s home is hardly ten minutes distant—down the lanes, across the Old Town Square—but all the same Helen hurries. It is noisy in the evening in the tourists’ thoroughfares: everyone is hectic, happy; there is the sound of pop music from an ice-cream parlor and a child crying merely because he is excited beyond endurance. All the same she is certain that there is a kind of echo to her footfall—that with each step her follower takes another, that wi
th each pause her follower pauses. Schoolboys in yellow vests come winding down the lanes hand in hand, herded by watchful teachers: they block her path and make it necessary to stop at the foot of curved stone steps leading up to the door of a church. It is not quite deconsecrated, but God isn’t there so much these days. On the children come, rather solemn, carrying small meals in plastic boxes; across the road a woman in furs is staring with the ardor of a jilted lover at a case of garnets. It begins—again, as always—to snow. The waiting crowd presses up behind Helen, impatient, waiting for the children to pass. In among the bustle of German, French, Korean, Dutch, she picks out very clearly and with a cool hard piercing in her heart the sound of someone singing. It is low and soft and might be either a man or a woman, and the melody is one she hears at night while sleeping—which she sometimes wakes half-singing and must instantly suppress: I dreamed I dwelt in marble halls, with vassals and serfs at my side . . . It is foolish, sweet, wistful, and its effect on Helen is like that of a blow to her back. She stumbles, as if jostled—grasps at the coat sleeve of a man who rebuffs her with a curse, thinking himself at the mercy of pickpockets; she rights herself, and finds she cannot look behind her. And of all who assembled within those walls, she hears, and her eyes grow very wide, very startled. On the schoolboys come, and they seem to her malevolent now, summoned up from who-knows-where to pin her back against the church steps, in earshot of the singer behind her (. . . that I was the hope and the pride . . .). The children stop, clutch hands, look at her one by one: there is in each plump face a look of censure and distaste, as if they’ve seen through the belted coat, the colorless hair, to what is kept inside. A boy with dark hair brushed back from his dark placid eyes surveys her for a long while and begins to acquire a knowing lascivious look—he winks, very slowly, and without smiling. Then the teacher gives a signal—slowly, reluctantly, they look away; slowly they walk on. I dreamed that one of that noble host, hears Helen, and it is closer now—very close—seeming at her ear; the dark-haired boy turns and winks again—then looks behind her, to where she supposes the singer must be, and he grins, showing all his sharp young teeth; he nods as if in recognition, then moves on. The steps behind Helen are littered with flyers for a concert, with receipts, with sticky paper napkins that once held cakes—she stumbles blindly up towards the door and blunders in. It is a heavy door, studded with iron, and beyond it velvet curtains are hung against the chill. They have the smell of incense in them, or of funeral flowers, as if the church was still put to the use for which it was intended. They enclose her deliberately and with malicious intent; the heavy fabric wraps around her shoulders, her legs; causes her to stumble again, and fall prostrate as a supplicant on the cold stone floor. Then the cloth releases her, and she finds she has come into a concert. Seated on red velvet chairs men and women in winter coats have all turned at the sound of her heels on the hard floor and seen her pitch forward out of the curtains and onto her hands and knees. Then they look away, out of decency, and because in front of the altar a woman has begun to sing. She is wearing a pink dress in stiff nylon that rustles as she moves: there are hard pink rosettes on the hem and shoulder, and the hem is frayed, and under it there are layers of cheap petticoats gone gray with washing. Helen, kneeling, sees the woman nod with practiced hauteur at the waiting pianist, then she begins to sing, and it is the kind of music that most disgusts her: a sort of melodious form of hysterics. The singer gapes and trembles. It is unseemly. Coming slowly to her feet, rubbing herself where she aches, Helen makes for the nearest chair. The song is a punishment. She has so long avoided music of any kind—taken this alley, and not that, to dodge a busker; learned which cafés will not torment her with their radio—that to be compelled to submit to it now is intolerable. Pressing a palm to each ear for respite she looks about her, and sees the mottled surface of silvered mirrors on the ceiling and on the walls, the gilded organ pipes with their look of a ribcage cracked open to reveal the heart. A pair of angels above the singer exchange dubious looks, and each holds an empty scroll. The music grows still louder, still more hysterical—then abruptly, mercifully, stops. The singer extends a hand to the pianist, smiling very sweetly indeed; the pianist returns the tribute; both bow. There is desultory applause. Helen’s knee is bleeding. She looks at it, and as she looks a gloved hand appears, and somebody says, “Geht es Ihnen gut?” and then, shyly: “Are you all right?” Her accent is neither German nor English, nor is it Czech.
“I am fine,” says Helen. She presses her hand to her knee and looks without surprise at the blood in her palm: she is bleeding through her clothes. “I’m fine,” she says.
“I have something, here.” The gloved hand moves, is gone for a moment, and returns with a packet of tissues. “Press hard for a minute. It will be all right.” Helen looks up, and sees a young woman with soft hair growing thickly to her collar. She wears a white shirt, well starched and pressed, and a small gold cross on a silver chain. She smiles, and it is, I think, a very appealing smile—somewhat hesitant, very warm. “Sometimes you don’t want anybody to see when you fall over, I know.”
“It was the curtains,” says Helen. Her fear of her follower is taken over for a moment by her indignation that she should have made a disgrace of herself. “I caught my ankle, and fell.” She takes a tissue and presses it to her knee. Concertgoers stand and gaze at the ceiling, the floor: there is much discussion regarding the organ, which Mozart is said to have played. A pretty girl adjusts her fur collar in front of a gilded mirror and accepts a kiss from a friend.
“Did you enjoy the music?” The woman in the white shirt places both gloved hands in her lap and looks placidly at Helen. She seems unmoved by the organ, the many mirrors, the angels with hard gold feathers weighing down their wings: she has the air of someone to whom all this is too familiar to be noticed.
“No,” says Helen.
“I always think,” says the young woman, “that it’s a little—undignified, somehow.” She removes her gloves. She wears no wedding ring. “You are still bleeding. You may need a stitch or two.” Her voice, which is soft and quiet, grows a little brisker here, with a kind of professional disinterest.
“I don’t think so,” says Helen; but the tissue is wet. Silently the woman hands her another.
“Have you far to go?”
“Not at all. Just by Jakubská.” Then, keen to demonstrate to this young woman, who is really hardly more than a child, that she is not so helpless as she seems: “I am visiting my friend.”
“I am walking that way too.” The woman stands, and draws on her gloves. They are of a fine gray wool, and could do with a wash. She is large-boned, a little ungainly, rather tall; she wears a pleated skirt over tights and stolid shoes. The extreme plainness of her clothes suggests suddenly to Helen that she may be a nun. “Perhaps we could walk together?” She flushes. “Only it’s easy to fall when the snow freezes, you see.”
It occurs to Helen to reject, as has always been her habit, this offer of company. But in everything the woman says—in her shy uncertain smile, her way of offering help—there is an appeal which is very hard to resist. Somebody turns out the light, and the gleam of gold on her small plain cross is gone. “That’s very kind,” says Helen. “I’m Helen, by the way.”
“Adaya,” says the woman. She removes her glasses—wipes them—returns them to their place. Behind them her eyes are unremarkable, save for a very steady gaze. “Are you able to stand, do you think?” Under her gaze Helen feels young, and rather foolish: she would like to say, You must understand that I am generally the one who remains on her feet when others take a tumble. “I think so. There’s not much blood.”