The Book of Shadows

by James Reese

  …I’ve strayed. The dream, yes….

  I don’t know which prison it was I saw in the dream. I saw it all as through a keyhole. I saw only what moved across my fixed field of vision, and so I could not turn this way or that to situate myself by signposts or landmarks. I saw…

  I saw the mob draw itself tighter, to move more quickly through the prison’s narrow entryway, which the warders had thrown open. Those with pikes were shoved to the fore. A horrid cast of heads came together. Some men, some women; the wigs of the women were powdered, the tall creations atilt, some tumbling down. None of these heads were animate, none of them saw as mine did. Besides these hideous heads there were also pikes topped with genitalia; one woman boasted that the red flaps atop her pike were the breasts of the Princesse de Lamballe. I’d learned from Father Louis that the Princesse had indeed met such an end; she was taken from her cell, hacked to pieces, and promenaded, on pike, before the windows of the Temple, where her friend the Queen was still imprisoned—the Queen, said to have recognized a certain piece of jewelry in the coiffure, had fainted away.

  I saw raised arms bearing an assortment of weapons—mostly those sharpened iron rods favored by les piquers, but also pistols, bayonets, and, most frightful of all, the hand-crafted blades that would do butchers’ work on behalf of…

  It was the officials of the Commune, convinced that the prisons were hotbeds of conspiracy, who’d decided to turn over entire prison populations to the people. The courts of law, it was said, were too slow to act. And so there was sanctioned an orgy of slaughter that would last five days. In the end, hundreds of priests were dead, and the population of the Salpêtrière—which housed only women—was decimated.

  It was not the Salpêtrière I saw, for with locked eyes I witnessed only the slaughter of men. Men pulled pleading from their open cells—opened, of course, by the jailers, who cooperated with the Commune’s plan, for this “house cleaning” would empty cells that could be let again, at higher prices, at greater profit…. So indiscriminate were the slaughterers that they rarely stopped to see their work through: they’d swing their blades—here a limb lopped off, there a deep gash—and move on; few of the imprisoned died of their wounds directly: it was the steady exsanguination that brought death, and colored the prisons, colored the dream a deathly red. Every stone, every flat surface, was slick with blood. The slaughterers slipped on the stones as they escaped.

  Sickening, the facility with which the people of Paris killed. Of course, they’d had occasion to hone their skills. The tenth of the preceding month, August, for example. It was then the people took the Tuileries, calling for the heads of the King and Queen. They’d first ransacked the gardemeuble, near the palace, taking from it antique halberds, knives, and a sword said to have belonged to Henri IV; most impractically, they took a cannon inlaid with silver, presented to Louis XIV by the King of Siam, and pushed it room to room, blowing out entire walls when they found thin, lacquered doors locked against them. The Royals fled under cover of the Swiss Guard. The King and Queen, the royal children and their governess, the Princesse de Lamballe, and several others hid for hours in a tiny closet in the chapel as the mob moved room to room, cracking mirrors as tall as three men, tossing gilded furniture from the windows, slashing tapestries and paintings. No one stole, for it was against the Revolution to covet the Royals’ wealth. Destroy, and slaughter, but do not steal.

  And slaughter they did, that day. The Swiss Guard, ill-equipped, quickly fell. So too did the band of the King’s private protectors, a group of aged men known as the Knights of the Dagger. Slaughtered too, regardless of their sympathies, were the royal servants—cooks, grooms, seamstresses, page boys.

  It was in September, their thirst for blood still not slaked, that the people passed through the prisons. October, November, and December came with more of the same; all the while, the Royals remained in the Temple, imprisoned and awaiting a fate that grew ever more certain.

  Meanwhile, those in power—an ever-changing cast of characters—tried to determine how best to rid France of its Sovereigns. This, after all, was a lesson no European country of the day had learned. True, there was the American example; but they, the colonists, had simply sailed away from their King…sailed away to that vast country’s eastern shore.

  While debate raged, la famille Capet was kept in the Temple, a tower fortress on the grounds of an estate that had formerly belonged to the King’s brother, Artois. The two floors accorded the family were comprised of tiny, airless rooms. The stony walls were slick with lichen. The ceilings were suffocatingly low. The floors were white-speckled with the droppings of vermin, still in residence despite “the royal infestation.” No linens were allowed on the hard beds. The walls, which had long been painted with the pure white of the Bourbons, were bordered in insulting red, white, and blue bands; over this revolutionary pattern was scrawled the text of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

  Imprisoned, the royal children passed the days reciting Corneille, playing battledore and shuttlecock, bowling hoops and tossing balls. The Queen did needlework, which was confiscated and burned lest it conceal a secret message she sought to smuggle out to conspirators. As for the King, deprived of the intricate locks with which he’d passed countless hours, and too dispirited to keep up with his detailed lists—of his game, his riches, his courtiers—he suffered without distraction the insults, large and small, heaped upon him. As there’d been innumerable ways of honoring the King at Court, now, in prison, there were as many ways of insulting him: it was an inverted sort of protocol. And the family was never left alone: there was always a representative of the Commune present, even at their most intimate rituals. Indeed, a highlight of the day was the Queen’s…evacuating; an alarm would rise, and all the guards would assemble to watch, to jeer, to cheer, and place grotesque bets.

  The Queen found some solace in her dog, a gift from her lover, the Swedish envoy, Axel Fersen. (Only the King believed the dog was a gift from Madame de Guéménée.) Too, she shopped; for, even while their jailers were encouraged to heap all manner of abuse upon the Royals, even as their fate was being debated, the Legislative Assembly accorded the Capets a resident staff of thirteen, including a valet and the aforementioned shaver. (Imagine the particular thrill that Asmodei must have taken in holding to the multiple chins of the King, twice daily, a straight-edged razor.)…In keeping with this contradictory indulgence of the Royals, the Commune allowed the Queen to order a new wardrobe. Dressmakers came and went from the Temple, and seamstresses busied themselves outfitting a Queen they knew they would kill. She, in a typical act of vengeance, one particularly sweet, or fragrant, burdened the Commune with a bill for 100,000 francs—for perfumes.

  Finally, early in the new year, the Convention, after thirty hours of debate, condemned the King to death.

  Some months later, with the Revolutionary Army victorious over the allied forces at Hondschoote, it was determined that the Queen—known as “the first deputy’s mother,” a reference to her surviving son, whom only she referred to as Louis XVII—was expendable; her foreign affiliations, which had kept her alive, would no longer need to be called upon. She could be killed. But first there was the matter of a trial.

  The Queen awaited her trial not in the Temple, but in the prison of La Conciergerie on the Île de la Cité, in a tiny room without windows. She was allowed no visitors; indeed, she never saw her children again. The charges against her—in general, Conspiring Against France—ranged in their particulars from her alleged complicity in various assassination plots to the counterfeiting of assignats to the disclosing of state secrets, and even, most absurdly, to incestuous relations with her son. This last charge the Queen fought vociferously; in her teary and strident defense, she nearly won over les tricoteuses, those old women who sat knitting through all the trials, looking up from their handiwork only to stab at the accused as they passed.

  A jury of two carpenters, a musician, a hatter, a café-keeper, a wig-maker,
and a printer unanimously convicted the Queen, and condemned her to death.

  Such were the days—known now as the Reign of Terror, known then as the Reign of Virtue—during which the paths of my four saviors crossed.

  Simply put, the elementals trailed Asmodei from the moment they discovered him in possession of the King’s head. Eventually, he led them to the Bal des Zephyrs, held in the cemetery of St. Sulpice; and it was there they met Sebastiana.

  Asmodei, said the elementals, was everywhere at once in the days of Blade and Blood; but Sebastiana’s attendance at the ball was unusual—or so they’d learn—for she had long been living at a literal remove. Having thrown the Greek Supper and seen its consequences, having had her fill of Society and life itself, she’d retired to Chaillot. “Overwhelming was her remorse, her guilt,” said Father Louis. “She’d sunk into a darkness of mood, an abyss from which she could not rise, abandoning her paints, poring over whatever Books of Shadows she could find, seeking a way to undo what she believed she had done.”

  In those early days, while still at Chaillot, Sebastiana would venture into Paris only to see what it was she’d wrought. She would load her coach with food, bags of coin, clothing; she’d go to where the poor were massed and give it all away. Yes, said Madeleine, she gave away a great deal; but she’d earned such wealth, wealth unknown to any uncrowned woman.

  “She kept up with events in the aptly named capital,” said Father Louis, “following every act of the Crown and the Clubs. And so it was she learned of the Victims’ Balls, asking herself, ‘Can it have come to this?’…She would go. To partake of Death, as the faithful do Holy Communion.”

  In order to attend these balls, said Madeleine, one had to present documentation, proof that one had lost a close relation to the blade. It was a fine day for forgers; trade was brisk. And so it was Sebastiana attended the Bal des Zephyrs as the sister of one Madame Filleul, tried, convicted, and killed for “wasting the candles of the nation.”

  “The Victims’ Balls were stylishly grotesque,” said Father Louis, “as death was fashionable then. To dress à la victime was all the rage. Women wore their hair up, and tied thin red ribbons round their necks; men too sported such ‘blade marks.’ At the end of each dance, one saluted one’s partner with a sudden drop of the head, chin to chest, meant to mock the work of the blade.”

  Sebastiana came masked to the ball, said Madeleine; otherwise she’d have been quickly recognized and associated with the Court or the Queen, and that was simply too risky. In Paris, then, one lived as one died: quickly.

  …She saw him standing far across the cemetery, tall and broad and pale as a Norse god. I remember his blond hair was untied, and he wore a scarlet domino and a half-mask of hardened black taffeta through which his emerald eyes burned. He approached her. He asked her to dance. And not a half-hour later she’d learned from him the latest German waltz…. And there the two of us stood, incarnate, watching as they traipsed over tombstones set flat in the ground.

  Now doubtless she’d had a bit to drink. Doubtless too she was distracted by this strange man’s attentions…

  “Oui,” concurred the priest, “but by her own admission the act was rash.” He explained: “The night nearly over, the moon opalescent overhead, the air thin and fine, Sebastiana showed Asmodei l’oeil de crapaud.”

  And thusly did she win him to her side for life. This, with no little sarcasm, from the succubus. Apparently, most men stare or scream or fall in a heap at the witch’s feet when shown the eye. Not Asmodei. He simply threw back his blond mane and laughed that laugh of his. And they waltzed on. In their way, they are waltzing still.

  Within weeks, I learned, Asmodei was living in Sebastiana’s cottage. Later, at the height of the Terror, when she decamped to the Breton coast, he followed. There they remain, living, according to the priest, “in an approximation of love, of family life…which satisfies, is enough.”

  Somehow, said Madeleine, Asmodei roused her, finally. It was he who convinced her that it was not the literal climate she’d called down that had caused such catastrophe, but rather the climate of excess that had long been brewing. Why he, of all creatures, bothered with such an effort of kindness, I’ve no idea.

  “Love, I’d say,” came the priest’s response, which met with a sneer and silence from the succubus. (Sebastiana has written warmly, if discreetly, of that night; indeed, when first I discovered the entry, there fell from her Book a thin red ribbon, doubtless the very one she’d worn to tease or to appease the ghosts of the guillotined.)

  Madeleine suspected Sebastiana was a witch when first she saw her; her showing Asmodei l’oeil de crapaud confirmed it. Not long after, though still not knowing what species of man Asmodei was, the elementals decided to ally themselves to those two beings, so fortuitously met. Their goal then was the same: Madeleine’s end.

  So, the elementals showed themselves to Asmodei and my Soror Mystica.

  Father Louis visited Sebastiana in Chaillot. He considered going to her as the King (and he could have, for he had the Sovereign’s gloves, stripped from the pudgy hands as they lay hardening in the tumbril), but in the end he decided on taking the more handsome shape of the Queen’s lover, Fersen, the dashing Swede. (Of this encounter there is no mention in Sebastiana’s Book.)

  As for Asmodei, waking from a nap beneath a linden at the end of its seasonal turn, he encountered the Princesse de Lamballe, whom he’d seen several months earlier in…in several pieces. In this way his attention and admiration were won.

  Years passed. And, as is the nature of a family, my four saviors were not always near one another, but neither were they ever far apart.

  39

  The Battle for a Single Soul

  WE ARRIVED in Orange. It was late in the day, for I’d whiled away some hours inducing the dream and recovering from same. The next night the new moon would rise. All was quiet in Orange, save for the rushing river, already on a level with its parapets and brilliantly blue under the last of the sun. The market was open but uncrowded. The houses were closed up tight, their northern faces devoid of windows or doors, owing, certainly, to the great winter mistral that blows down from Mount Ventoux, pulled by the warm Mediterranean and said to render the pale blue skies scar-white.

  We drove on, out of Orange—past its copper and violet ruins, speaking so eloquently of the Roman era—toward Avignon. Along the way, rocky pine forests vied for precedence with orchards of almonds, olives, and cherries. Homes not so very far from the road sat up to their sills in brown water, and hay that had been harvested into cones poked up through the floodwaters, an archipelago of bristling, tiny islands.

  We reached Avignon near dusk to find water in many of the streets of that ancient place. A rose-bronze moon was rising in the sky. I decided to sleep in Avignon, in a proper bed. From what little I understood of our mission and its map, we were near enough the crossroads. I did not consult the elementals, for they’d not shown themselves since Montélimar.

  I let a room in the shadow of the Palace. And, ensuring that Étienne had money enough to see to his own amusement, I set off in search of mine.

  In the still-settling, violet shadows of the Palace were encampments of gypsies, brightly clad. Stalls were established along the outer ramparts, giving the scene a fair-like aspect. Honeysuckle, eddying off the river, married the still air of a market square, infused with the aromas of saffron, thyme, fennel, sage, black pepper. In Avignon, as elsewhere in the South, I’d find the food wonderfully overrun by garlic and adrift in oil pressed from the olive; my tongue, accustomed to bland stews and overdone game, would suffer the concentration of spice.

  As day gave over to night, and the streets grew cramped—with amusing abuse, bad language, and gesticulation the common tongue—I took refuge in a café off a secondary square, hard by the theater. I sat at a tiny table on the terrasse, beneath a pergola heavy with plumbago, and waited a long while for a waiter to come. When he did, I ordered “un café, c’est tout,” and when he s
tepped sniffingly away it was to reveal a woman seated two tables from mine whose beauty fell on me like a hammer-blow.

  She was among a gaggle of women, all dressed similarly, in a garish fashion quite unfamiliar to me. Men lazed among them. Only when a call boy, tramping over my foot without apology, ran onto the terrasse to issue their common cue did the entire flock of actors rise up and run; and I saw by their strides and broad gestures that those whom I’d supposed to be women were costumed boys and men of slighter build. Coins were tossed onto the tables, which had been shoved together like game pieces. There were shouted protestations, and plans were made to meet at a later hour. The commotion caused several well-heeled ladies to look aghast at…at my mistress, seemingly the lone true woman, who stood, bowing to same with biting insincerity, and, abandoning a marble-topped table strewn with tiny white cups and distended snifters, proceeded to approach me. Me!

  “Monsieur,” said she, “are you the poet of Spain? I was to meet a poet of Spain here on the hour, just passed.”

  “No, Madame,” I stammered. She stood before me in her merino skirt, dyed a deep orange, and a man’s waistcoat of scarlet silk; into a pocket of the latter, and attached by a long gold chain, was tucked a pair of tortoise-shell spectacles. She was a tall woman. Her head was set squarely on her spine, thick and true. She had gray eyes that would go violet as the light died, a short, sculptural nose, and high-set cheekbones. Her black braids were wound into a tight bun, aromatically fixed with a rubbing of lemon oil. “You are not he?” she asked. I know now that she was waiting for me to stand, as a gentleman would have. When I, dumbstruck, failed to invite her to join me, she achieved the same end by saying, in a deeply accented French which I’d no hope of placing: