by Sean Wallace
[The last segment is crossed out, and this penciled in above it: Évariste insisted on revising his waltz with each reprisal. He has been allowed to retire to the Clock of Waters in the music room.]
The other entry covers the last pages of the catalogue.
The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois contains four and twenty automata, none less than twelve hands tall. Beginning with the pair of blood bays and circling left, they are: the bays, Hesperus and Phosphorus; Prometheus the black bear; the Cockatrice, the Phoenix, the Chimera, the Sphinx and the Manticore; Terpsichore the zebra, Ambrosias the elephant, Gamaliel the lion, Caesar the panther; the three white horses of the moon, named Artemis and Luna and Selene; the three black horses of the sun, named Apollo and Helios and Sol; the dragons, Boreas and Ariel; Lucien the serpent, Zephyr the eagle, Clytemnestra the ox and Antigone the silver dolphin.
[In fainter ink near the bottom of the page: Clytemnestra does not like the current Duke of Cloud. Gamaliel will only carry virgins if their lovers are riding Caesar, and Caesar will not carry men over forty who wear too much musk. Phosphorus will suffer no mistress but my own – the lady Porphyrogene.]
Of the page’s final bit of marginalia, I can only read the name Hesperus, and a word that might be killed.
27 September
The weather has become unbearable – the lightning burns the sky without pause, the thunder’s roll is as constant as the sea’s – and today I have found the first evidence of Summerfall’s ghosts.
One manifestation I am quite familiar with, and it points – however unsteadily – to the ghost’s identity. No matter how many times I return the Margravine of Blois’s catalogue to its place on the shelf, it appears on a desk the next morning, always open to the entry on the carousel. This has happened now four days consecutively, and I can find no natural cause. (Of course, Jean-Baptiste will not hear of me spending the night in the library.)
The other circumstance is subtle, so that I hesitate to mention it at all, yet I have gathered enough incidental evidence to be certain that something is in fact taking place. The clocks of the Margravine of Blois are dying.
Having studied the Margravine’s catalogue on the night of the twenty-third, I took an inventory of the thirteen clocks in my apartment. That night, all of them seemed to operate passably; but on the twenty-fourth, the Clock of Ravens was missing three of its birds. The next night, the prince from the Clock of the Seventh Slumber would not awaken, no matter how many times his clockwork princess kissed him; and yesterday evening, Death laid down his violin and refused to play. I repeat that I know little of the Clockmaker’s art, and moreover, I do not know if such occurrences as these have been frequent in the past, or if this is a new development. I shall have to read more of Monsieur Cloud before I draw any conclusions.
Strangely, while I am glad to have made some progress in my investigations, these discoveries do not relieve the restlessness that has plagued me for days. When I think of a ghost in Summerfall, I feel – dare I say it? – a sort of vague and simmering envy.
Why should Porphyrogene be haunted by the woman she loved?
Why should I not be?
28 September
Dinner with Porphyrogene again. Whatever her business is outside of Summerfall, the rain must keep her from it. She was terribly restless all afternoon, turning every surface beneath her fingertips into an impromptu and poorly tuned pianoforte.
My news about the Margravine’s catalogue did not impress her – “We all have our lullabies, don’t we, m’sieur?” was her cryptic response – but my report on the clocks seemed to plunge her into melancholy.
“No,” she said in response to my enquiry, “it is not new, though it seems to be accelerating. How terrible …” She closed her eyes and laid a hand across the lids. “Do you miss your wife, M’sieur Saint-Pierre?”
I literally choked on my wine. “Madame, you may as well ask if I breathe.”
“She doesn’t haunt you, then?”
“No,” I said, remembering my thoughts from last night. “Forgive me, but I don’t think—”
“Do you know that the carousel is broken? It hasn’t worked in twelve years.” She lifted her hand from her eyes. “It’s a terrible thought, isn’t it, M’sieur Saint-Pierre, that all their work dies with them?”
Involuntarily, I shuddered.
“There are days you wish, don’t you, that you had something of hers – a letter, a lock of hair – something you could hold and say, this is her. This exists because she did.” Porphyrogene stood and began pacing between the parlor windows. “The rhymes didn’t lie entirely, you know. I did leave her blankets turned down. As if that was all it would take to keep her here.”
Keep her here, she said – not bring her back. There was a brief silence. I said, quite softly, “I understand.”
She turned to me, and I felt my face heating. “Violeta could have moved the world,” I said. “When she died, I could only watch as it rolled back into place.”
“The cruelest things on earth,” Porphyrogene said, “are that it never changes and it never stops. Grief, M’sieur Saint-Pierre, is a carousel. You get on and you ride as fast and as hard as you can, but it only brings you back to where you started.”
We finished the meal in silence. It must have been clear from my eyes, as I know it was clear from hers, that neither of us was whom the other wanted to see across the table.
30 September
That dream again. I am standing on the shore as the sea rolls in, staining the bleached stones with all the colors of a jewel box. Suddenly, the smell of lavender and fever. I turn and see the Margravine of Blois.
This time, I reach for her. Her face becomes Violeta’s the moment before it slips through my fingers like foam.
1 October
I have found the bedroom of the Margravine of Blois.
It is at the end of a long corridor in the north wing, which I discovered by means of a concealed passage behind one of the library shelves. I cannot say the existence of the passage surprises me very much. From what I have seen of Summerfall, and of Jean-Baptiste’s miraculous powers of apparition, I’d expected to encounter one sooner or later. On emerging behind a standing clock of prodigious size, I had planned merely to look around, perhaps trying the keys from Porphyrogene’s ring; but upon seeing in one room the distinctive handwriting of the Margravine of Blois, I abandoned caution and went to investigate.
The writing, incidentally, which arches over the bed and would normally be hidden by the curtains, quotes only a line of poetry: Here I took my rest; my joy came in other places. I cannot imagine why, as the chamber itself seems cheerful – enough, I was going to say, but truly a great deal more than that. The walls and bedclothes are covered in golden silk, painted, in the case of the former, with emerald branches that serve as perches for dozens of painted birds. A portrait over the dressing table shows Porphyrogene seated on a garden bench, the Margravine of Blois kneeling at her feet. There is only one clock in the room, standing on a window ledge, its hands formed by a pair of racing blood bays.
As I came closer, I saw that there was a slip of paper wedged into the door of the pendulum box, yellowed and ratty, as though it had been taken out and stuffed back in many times – more times, indeed, than its contents seem to warrant. Here they are, transcribed from the writing of the Margravine of Blois:
13 April
Ha! You see, madame, that I bow as always to my lady’s request. Though your sad little jest alone could not tease laughter from these lips, your command shall be to me as God’s.
19 April
Another, my love? Are all your riddles so miserable? Pray bring something more cheerful, lest I am forced to drastic measures to steal a smile from your sweet mouth.
24 April
I am forced to reply in kind: what goes on scales in the morning, on feathers at noon, and sleeps at the end of the day on flesh and bone?
24 April
A ring, madame: the jewele
r’s scale when it is made, to the down box in which I purchased it (at no small cost, I might add), to my lady’s finger, if she is clever enough to undo the knot with which it is bound to Phosphorus’s neck!
And indeed, the miniature bay on the hour hand still wears a silver ring. Though tempted, I did not try the knot.
2 October
I had been hesitant to pull the golden cord, but curiosity, as always, had finally gotten the better of me. For days I had pondered a question to which, it seemed to me, Jean-Baptiste would know the answer.
“Why did she ask me to come here?”
He blinked, his large pale eyes moving slowly down and up. “Monsieur?”
“Be honest, Jean-Baptiste – you know there is no ghost in Summerfall. Certainly no ghost of the Margravine of Blois.”
He nodded slowly. “I suspected so, monsieur. She was not the sort to linger. I myself have seen nothing – nothing but the clocks, and while they are haunting enough in their own way, I daresay Monsieur Christopher of Cloud could put them in their place.”
It occurred to me to wonder how familiar a servant could be with Monsieur Cloud, but I let it pass. There is no denying that the Margravine of Blois was a genius Clockmaker; perhaps it permeated her conversation, even with her lover’s valet.
Jean-Baptiste was watching warily as I paced the room. “Monsieur? Will that be all?”
“No,” I said. “I know Porphyrogene is no fool. What did she expect to gain from me, if this place isn’t haunted?”
“Perhaps she wants to be haunted, monsieur.”
It took every ounce of self-control I possess to limit my reaction to a raised eyebrow.
“I beg your pardon, monsieur.” He waited until I gestured for him to go on. “Porphyrogene is not grieving for the Margravine of Blois. It seems to me she cried all her tears for the woman twelve years ago. But for the artist, the builder of the carousel? That is a hard thing to let die.”
“I suppose it is,” I said. And weak fool that I am, I began to cry.
2 October, later
In the northernmost room of the library, there is a book by the Margravine of Blois called Clockwork Souls. I have always thought it was a silly concern, and a quintessentially artistic one – what happens to automata after they die? In all probability, they are simply gone, vanished as if they never were. With all my experience, I have never met a clockwork ghost.
Nor have I met the ghost of the Margravine of Blois. Does this mean that she, too, is simply gone? And even her clockwork is vanishing – the carousel is broken, the clocks are dying or dead.
Isn’t it a terrible thought, that all their work dies with them?
And here is a worse thought:
The night Violeta died, I climbed up to the rain-slick roof and looked up at the sky. One by one, the heavy clouds were clearing and the stars emerging from the darkness. In a feverish fantasy, I imagined that there had been a time, when the world was young, that stars filled the sky – made it a solid sheet of light arching over the earth. But one by one, the stars began to die – and Man, having a poor memory, began to believe that the sky had always been black.
I am a widower. I am the black spot left in the sky when a star has guttered out.
9 October
For a week, I have been gone with fever. I need not detail my dreams, save to say that they were the haunting grounds for more than one ghost. I woke this morning to find Porphyrogene standing over me, a moist cloth in one hand and a look of profound unease on her face.
“You were calling for Violeta,” was all she said.
I flopped back on my pillows, and found myself staring at the portrait of the Margravine of Blois hung over my head.
“Why did she leave?” I asked.
Porphyrogene followed my gaze, her lips pressed thin. “An accident,” she said finally. “On the carousel. The simple fact, M’sieur Saint-Pierre, is that all clockwork goes mad eventually, and she built that carousel too big. We thought it was going to be Phosphorus first – he was such a violent, crazy thing, and wouldn’t be tame for anyone but me – but it wasn’t. It was his brother.”
She chaffed her wrists, heedless of the cloth in her hand. “Hesperus was carrying Évariste of Blois – the Margravine’s cousin, son of the famous composer. The carousel had stopped, and the Margravine was helping me down from Phosphorus’s saddle. Hesperus reared suddenly. She managed to roll out from under his hooves, but Évariste fell.”
“Was he … ?”
“Trampled. The corpse was unrecognizable.” Porphyrogene looked down at her hands, then swiftly dabbed at my forehead with the damp cloth, as if that glance had brought it back to her mind. “I begged her to stay, of course. It was a nasty scene all around. She said Hesperus’s madness had been a much-needed awakening, showing how enslaved she had become to me – a gelding, like Phosphorus when I held his reins. Those were the last words she spoke to me. She did something to the carousel before she left, and it hasn’t worked since.”
“You said she died here – because of the carousel.”
“I think …” Porphyrogene frowned, biting her lip. “I think she wanted to reawaken it. She was terribly sick by then – consumption – she knew she was dying. I think she wanted to leave something behind.”
I sat up. It was a slow, laborious process, and it left the room buzzing around me like a swarm of bees. “Why is it so hard,” I asked when I’d caught my breath, “to believe she came back for you?”
Porphyrogene shook her head, smiling or grimacing.
“I’m serious. Why does it have to be the carousel – some unfinished business, left behind for you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You should get some rest, M’sieur Saint-Pierre, after your fever …”
“I want to be haunted, Porphyrogene.” She looked at me as if I had gone mad – as if I were about to trample something, or go battling songbirds. “I told you that Violeta doesn’t haunt me, and it’s true. Horribly, unbearably true. When I think of everything she was, the quick ripostes over dinner, the magnificent letters she wrote when we were away from each other, her way with languages … it makes me sick. All of it is gone.” I felt a moistness on my lip, and licked it away, thinking it was sweat; but it tasted sweet, the briny sweetness of tears. “Anything that could remain of her, I would take. A disembodied footfall, a slip of mist, a cool breeze in the night. A book that could not stay shut. And if I thought here was a man who could draw ghosts to a house—”
“How dare you,” Porphyrogene interrupted, “compare your flippant little wife to the Margravine of Blois?”
“You’re trying to build a ghost, Porphyrogene. You want to be haunted.”
She flung the cloth at me and ran from the room.
10 October
All this time, she has been going down to the carousel.
It explains the persistent reopening of the Margravine’s catalogue, and Jean-Baptiste’s familiarity with Christopher of Cloud – what valet, after all, is not familiar with his mistress’s reading? For six years, perhaps longer, she has been trying to reawaken the carousel of the Margravine of Blois.
The rain let up sometime over the seven days of my sickness, and I went down this afternoon to the gardens. Years of neglect have left them as barren and white as salt flats. In the center of the desolation, as red and black and golden as the Margravine herself, is the carousel and its twenty-four clockworks. Even from a distance, I could see their characters from their poses and expressions: clever Antigone, balanced nearly on her tail, and graceful Ambrosias with his trunk held high, and proud Clytemnestra striding firmly across the metal stage. Closest to me, the bays Phosphorus and Hesperus lay peaceful and dormant on folded legs.
I did not stay long, as I knew Porphyrogene would be coming down shortly. But I will confess, there is something terribly captivating about the carousel. When I lay my hand against Phosphorus’s flank, it felt as warm as living flesh – or as warm as metal that living hands had touche
d.
13 October
This shall be my last night in Summerfall. As I said to Jean-Baptiste, there is no sense in me staying on when the only ghosts are made of metal.
“I understand, monsieur,” he said, then looked at me oddly. “I know she has done little to show it, but the lady Porphyrogene is grateful that you came. It was good to have this bed filled again, if you understand me.”
“I beg your pardon!” I exclaimed, leaping up from the furniture in question.
“That bed, monsieur. It was Porphyrogene’s, while the Margravine of Blois lived in Summerfall.”
“The very bed whose blankets poets satired, I don’t wonder.” Weariness came over me then, and I leaned heavily against the wall. “You know, Jean-Baptiste, I wish I had followed Porphyrogene’s example. The last thing my wife touched was a silk blanket, to pull it closer around her. I wish I had never moved that blanket, so that something could remain as Violeta had put it.”
“Ah,” Jean-Baptiste said, eyeing the bed pensively. “But then where would monsieur have slept?”
14 October, early morning
In my dream, Violeta is riding the carousel of the Margravine of Blois. I am watching her from the gravel walkway, my heart pounding in my throat, and she waves each time she passes me, standing gracefully in the blood bay’s stirrups.
But something is wrong. With each cycle, her color drains a little more. Soon she is nothing but a streak of white, like a tearstain… and then she is gone.