The Book of Shadows

by James Reese

  With the Seine frozen solid, barge traffic stopped, and so no wood arrived to heat the houses; soon the laundry boats stopped working as well. The grain markets closed: what little wheat was stored could not be ground, as the mills ran on water and every source of water was still. With the capital too cold to be about in, businesses started to shutter-up: first the inns and eating houses, then the taverns. Finally, even the brothels closed.

  It seemed that those traveling through Paris could speak only of the weather they’d witnessed in other parts of the country. Wolves were spotted in the cities, come down from the frozen forests to feed. Hailstorms occurred all through France, falling unannounced and with hellish fury. Hailstones large as a man’s fist fell fast to the ground, killing what small game survived, cracking their tiny skulls as they scurried about barren fields in search of shelter. No crops could survive such storms. Lost were budding vines in Alsace, Burgundy, and the Loire Valley. The late-ripening wheat in the Orléanais was crushed, as were the apples in Calvados, and the oranges and olives of the Midi.

  Red weather sprang up suddenly at sea. Boats sank all along the coast—some even in port—as wind and wave conspired to dash them against rocks or their own moorings. Few fishermen dared venture out. First no crops, then no fish. Talk turned fast to famine.

  The frozen Seine, the crop-crushing hail, the stilled mills…all this resulted in the rising cost of bread. The price of a loaf—which stood at ten sous the night of the esbat: I know because I shopped myself that evening, something I rarely did—rose to twelve sous, then fourteen, and fifteen by February. As a family of four could easily consume two loaves of bread in a day, and as the father of that same family might earn twenty or thirty sous for one day’s work, well…The math is simple, and it equates to starvation.

  As for my emotional state then…I was sick. I could not sleep. I felt so responsible…. Never, not once did I doubt that we witches had brought all this on with our dance. Many attributed the weather to the supernatural; only I knew how right they were.

  After days, then weeks of ever-deepening depression, I roused myself. I did what I could. I wrote to my coven-sisters, telling them what had happened—how could they not know?—and asking after any spells I might cast, any Craft I might practice to undo the effects of the dance? Few responded—Zelie, Luchina; surprisingly, Mariette—but they had little to offer: a few imprecations, not quite spells, which of course I tried to no avail. It was Mariette who recommended I invoke the Holy Trinity, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Angelic Salutation (each repeated thrice) and then read aloud the whole of the Gospel According to St. John; of course, all this was to accompany the casting of thirty-three hailstones into a fire…. Téotocchi responded, too—again, in cipher; but this time her letter was short, and quickly de- ciphered. There was nothing she or I could do, “rien du tout.” She wrote that she—as Soror Mystica—and her fellow “tempestarii” should have known better, should have shown more “discretion.” My Book should reflect that the fault was hers, not mine. She closed with further apology, and wished me well. (That was the last I’d ever hear from Téotocchi. The last she’d hear from me…well, reading her words, so terribly insufficient, I was incensed. I scrawled across her ciphered note, “Hope all is well in Venice. Paris starves. Adieu,” and I posted it back to her.)

  That winter, I opened my home in the rue Cl——to those who might otherwise starve or freeze in the streets. I fed them as best I could. I opened my cellars, and tried without success to convince all comers that they’d do better to sell rather than drink my wines. Indeed, I told those who came to take away whatever they thought they could sell.

  From the house across the gardens, in the rue Gros Ch——, I sold off all my furniture, my silver, my crystal, and my art. I converted all I could to money. I raised eight million francs, and gave it all away. There were those who sought to dissuade me, of course; I ignored them all.

  Once my charity was discovered, crowds came daily to my home. I could no longer live there. With only my paints and brushes and a few simple things, I decamped to a studio deep in the city. Of course, I could not paint, doubted I’d ever paint again. I barely had strength enough to survive. I was disconsolate. And hungry, too: no amount of money could procure what simply did not exist. I thought…I thought often of death. I knew I did not want to live. But never, never did I consider self-murder. It seemed to me cowardly. And I was…curious. Where would it all end? Would the sun ever shine again? Would spring come? Would the ice that rendered Paris as fragile-seeming as glass ever melt, would the drifts of snow sink, the river flow? Or would the world end in a choke of blue ice, all activity slowed to a deathly stop? Yes, wanting the answers to such questions is what kept me alive.

  Let me say that never once did I think it would end as it did. Never!

  But what choice did the ignored poor, the starving people of Paris have? None. The King and Queen, the nobility, the rich, the privileged—I and my circle—these parties seemed prepared to let the Parisians starve to death. Soon the starving started to steal, and then they started to kill. A simple devolution, really, but one that so few of us saw coming. And when finally we did see it, it was far, far too late. For the fortunate there was time enough to run, into exile; for the less fortunate…

  Soon murder was little more than a means of expression. Severed heads were seen in the streets. I was present when a mob formed outside the shop of a guiltless baker, a merchant refusing to simply give his goods away. This man was condemned, and saw his shop, his life’s work, destroyed. Daring to resist, the baker was then carried off to the Place de Grève, where he was hanged and decapitated (“in that order, of course,” reported Marat, wryly, in his paper, L’Ami du Peuple). The baker’s head, stuck on the end of a pike, was then paraded outside his shop before his friends and family. On another occasion, the mob killed two guardsmen, took the severed heads to a wigmaker, and forced the man to groom and powder the hair. Those heads, affixed by their hollowed spines to poplar branches torn from trees in the park of Versailles, were paraded before the palace windows.

  Yes, the people were beginning to close in on the King and Queen. Their actions were not planned, but rather…instinctive. They were like those wolves wandering down to the cities from the woods, sniffing the air, scratching at this or that, sinking their teeth down, striking when somehow the time seemed right. And in time, of course, the people would have the heads of their Sovereigns.

  All I could do was watch, watch all this unfold. What I could offer—opening my home, raising what cash I could—it all amounted to nothing. It was a long time before I realized, or rather resigned myself to the fact that there was no way, no way to undo the damage I’d done. The damage we’d done with that diabolical dance, that spell so blithely cast. I’d blighted Paris, my Paris. (Beware, witch! Beware your strength! And know that though we may be peripheral, we are not insignificant…. No, we are not.)

  Is there some other explanation for that sudden, strange change of weather? If there is, I never learned of it; and I searched, searched long and hard. Yes, yes, yes, there were a host of other, lesser factors contributing to the fall of Paris; I could list twenty, fifty, a hundred if I cared to…. But no, we did it. We witches did it with our dance. We drew that weather down. We caused that climatic change; and all that happened rolled on from there—just as snowflakes fall a second time in avalanche.

  27

  Romeo Rampal

  I READ THAT first excerpt from Sebastiana’s Book of Shadows deep into the night. Curled up in a corner of the lit clos, having secured two candles, three bottles of ink, and several freshly cut goose quills, I copied the story of “The Greek Supper” into my Book, this Book. That done, I sank into a dreamless sleep.

  Some hours later, I slid back the panels of the box-bed. It was early afternoon: I knew the light, mellow, deeper than the bright light of dawn. By that light the burnished frames and the brushes sitting up-ended in various cylinders and the rolled canvases leaning in
the corners…all of it shone doubly bright now that I knew its story. Unfurling a tall canvas or two, would I find there the indolent Countess Skavronsky, perhaps the Neapolitan Prince or the children of the French throne, toppled some thirty-odd years ago? No; I dared not do it. Sebastiana would not approve of my snooping around the studio. Or would she? Surely there were many other rooms in which she might have had me sleep—why here, in her studio?

  The studio…. It seemed settled into a state of disuse. The bristles of the brushes were stiff. Small glass jars of paint, scattered beneath a rickety easel, like a child’s marbles, were sealed shut; those few I could open showed paint that had thickened or separated, gone bad over time. Did Sebastiana no longer paint? And what about witchcraft? Had she forsaken all her talents years ago, when she knew such regret, such remorse for having so innocently sung a song, danced a dance?

  I found a warm bowl of coffee on the desk. I cupped that blue and white Breton bowl and sipped. Who’d known when I would wake? I shot a quick glance to each corner of the room. No one. But this did not discomfit me, not at all. Company of any sort—seen or unseen, mortal or not—was welcome. I retrieved both Books from the bed—Sebastiana’s, so full of wonder, and mine, empty but for the story of the esbat. I would settle at the escritoire, resume my reading, my copying from Sebastiana’s Book to mine.

  But instead, I found myself walking, bowl in hand, toward the studio door, the one that gave out onto the roseraie. Stepping out into that late-day light, so wonderfully warm, I tilted my face to the sun and smiled. Then I sat, right there beside the door, sat cross-legged, my back against the centuries-old stone wall, the bowl of coffee balanced on my lap. How full I was then, how happy! I believed I’d finally found a refuge, a place where I might hide away a happiness all my own. I wanted nothing less than to live and die at Ravndal. As for Sebastiana’s Book, I was quite eager to read it, but I thought I’d have days and weeks and months to devote to both our Books. Why devour what I might savor?

  It was perhaps a minute, perhaps an hour later that I resolved to find Sebastiana. I cannot say why, exactly. Doubtless I was eager to ask the innumerable questions, large and small, that our supper had left unanswered. (I thought then that Sebastiana’s answers would set my life aright. Too, I wanted to be near her.)

  Wearing only a simple white nightdress and the slippers I’d worn to dinner the night before, and with my hair loose and falling full over my shoulders, I went off in search of my Soror Mystica.

  I walked into the roseraie, to where I’d first found Sebastiana beside the fountain. But she was not at the fountain. She was nowhere in the roseraie. It never occurred to me that I might call out her name; Ravndal, even its grounds, had about it the feel of a church, a great cathedral where silence was preordained. I turned to head back to the studio, still determined to find Sebastiana, or another of my saviors.

  Smarter this time, I’d left a trail of rose petals behind me as I’d made my way deeper into the roseraie, winding this way and that among the tall hedgerows. I retraced my steps now, following crimson and pink and purple and yellow and cream petals. I congratulated myself: quite clever, I thought, to thus mark my way through the labyrinth. (Of course, I’d later discover a note in the studio, the handwriting already quite familiar. “Dearest,” it read, “should you put my roses to such purpose again, I will curse you till your teeth fall from your head as those petals of mine fell from the vine. Yours, S.”)

  Returning to the studio, I felt a chill; the sort of chill that is ever present in places made primarily of stone. From a tall armoire, I drew on a dark green gown of silk, its hem heavy with embroidered leaves; I wore it over that white shift. I then set out through the tapestried door of the studio, stepped from the sunlit studio into the dark halls of the house.

  In construction, if not in aspect, Ravndal was very much like the hated C——. Such stony structures not only exude a steady chill, they suffer no light. Their interior rooms are invariably lightless. So too are the corridors lightless, and chilled. Such places seem not so much constructed as born of stone, as statuary is.

  Stone. Stone everywhere…. I thought then of my mother. How horrible it must have been for her when the Blood came! A witch who knows her nature knows to expect it, knows every sister will die that way. For my mother it must have been dreadful. She knew enough to pack my few belongings and take me to C——, where, in sight of that stony edifice, the Blood overtook her. There, on the packed-dirt road, beside that brook that her blood would cause to run red. She’d known enough to tell me to “Go to the stone.”…Yes, as I wandered the corridors of the manor that afternoon, I thought of my mother. I imagined her smiling to see me there.

  I walked and walked through Ravndal, lantern in hand, my progress marked only by the sounds of the slippers I wore, their waxed bottoms whispering, their low heels tapping like tiny hammers along those long avenues of stone.

  I stood with my ear pressed against locked doors. I peered through keyholes. Nothing. I searched out signs of Madeleine’s presence: blood pooled here or there, red prints on doors or walls or banisters. In the darkness, it was hard to discern substance from shadow. Spying a suspicious spot—blood, surely—I’d reach out a finger and…no. Nothing.

  The first-floor rooms were large common areas. In addition to the studio, my room, there were twin parlors, sparsely furnished. There was a second dining room—empty but for another huge table, this one of carved wood, much simpler than the red marble one at which we’d dined. There was another room, adjoining this secondary dining room, spacious as a ballroom; its herringbone parquet tiles were loose, and walking, let alone dancing, over this floor would be a slippery affair. I came across a smallish room with a vaulted ceiling painted sky blue; its dark wood shelves rose from ceiling to floor, lined every wall, including the back of the door; but the shelves of this library were bare, supported not a single volume. Surely there was another library somewhere, stocked with all those S-marked volumes I’d read that final night at C——.

  What few pieces of furniture I found in these first-story rooms were exquisite but in disrepair. A table of inlaid marble, lame, missing one of its thin and bowed legs, stood propped against a windowsill. A chaise longue, its yellow silk torn, let go its downy stuffing. Chandeliers sat on the floors in corners, like drifts of icy snow. Wallpaper hung from the walls like the skin of half-flayed livestock. Wooden baseboards had fallen away, disclosing avenues for the many mice that must be resident. The furnishings, fit for Versailles, were scattered about, broken and forgotten, relics. Yes, the house was little more than a reliquary. A fantastic tomb. If it had once been a home, it was now but a refuge. A place set apart from the world. Yes, here was a strange haven indeed—and how I loved it! Granted, it was not what I’d expected; the studio, by far the most well-appointed and comfortable room, had set a standard that the rest of the manor—what I saw of it anyway—did not meet. Still, it seemed as if I’d come home.

  On the second floor I came across a large room full of chairs, all turned to face the same, stageless wall. These were complete sets of chairs; I counted thirty of one style, each bearing the signature of that Parisian upholsterer, Daguere. In the hallway outside this room, a deep armoire was crammed with Sèvres settings, hundreds of pieces of hand-painted porcelain, some sets complete, others chipped and in pieces. As I opened the armoire door, a tiny teacup, delicate as an egg, fell and cracked beside my foot.

  A chapel occupied more than half of the third floor. Whole panes of stained glass had fallen from their moorings and lay shattered on the floor. A huge wooden cross standing in a corner showed an active nest upon the nape of Christ’s neck. There were wine bottles on the altar, bound there by silvery cobwebs. Candles had burned to nubs, and had not been replaced. The fount at the door was crammed with foul-smelling rags. Dried flowers flowed from tipped vases; a white chrysanthemum, perfectly preserved, crumpled at my touch. The wood of the many icons scattered about was slick with mildew, pocked and splotchy as
though with disease—the stained-glass windows, fallen inward, had left the chapel open to the sea air, the rain, the seasons, and time.

  Finally, I found myself on the fourth-floor landing, despairing that I’d found no signs of anyone. This was the top and brightest floor. It was the brightest for one simple reason: parts of the roof had worn away, and the sun shone directly down into those tiny, low-ceilinged rooms tucked up under the eaves. Perhaps they’d once been servants’ quarters, or spare bedrooms for children—hard to imagine children ever having lived at such a place—regardless, they’d long been used as attic space. Some were crowded; others sat empty. Yes, these rooms had seen the rain and snow, and long hours of summer sun: I watched as mice wove among the warped floorboards. There were nests scattered everywhere. Surely some of the bird-cry I’d heard the night before had come from these fourth-floor rooms. It seemed at least one horned owl was resident at Ravndal, for, as I explored, I came across more of its handiwork: the headless skeletons of rodents, some quite large, littered the floor as they did the surrounding fields.