The Conjured Woman

by Anne Groß

  Adelaide stepped to the Empress’s side and took her hand consolingly. “I have said before that this ceremony will be conducted for the sake of France, but after this week with you, I must admit I feel it is as important to do this for your sake as well. You have been so kind. I hope with all my heart that the outcome of tomorrow’s event will give you back the attentions of your husband. No one deserves him more than you.” When Josephine’s eyes filled, Adelaide patted the back of her hand in hers. “Courage, my dear. Courage,” she consoled. Josephine took a shatteringly deep breath and pulled herself up straight. “That’s it. No tears.” Adelaide turned the Empress around and, still holding her hand, led her towards the exit.

  THE RITUAL

  “Everyone, please quiet down. It is time to begin.” Josephine clapped her hands to get her guests’ attention.

  From the head of the long banquet table, Adelaide waited as conversations were slowly brought to a close in titters and whispers. There were about twenty men and women gathered around the table, alternately seated by gender and in degrees of importance with those being of less import farthest from Bonaparte, who sat opposite Adelaide. Mademoiselle Poulette, so far from Bonaparte that she was practically nonexistent, bounced in her seat and clutched excitedly at her escort. Adelaide stared at the girl until she rested her hands on the table in front of her and calmly faced forward. Without bothering to look at Napoleon down at the other end of the table, Adelaide felt confident he was slouched in his chair. A quick glance revealed he was affecting a blasé countenance by staring at the ceiling as he swirled a strong digestif in its glass. Seated next to him, Josephine alternated between trying to increase his interest in excited whispers and maintaining the hauteur of an Empress.

  Malmaison was a far cry from her humble beginnings in Alençon, Adelaide mused. She hated to consider that she had reached the pinnacle of her career since she was still young, but having displaced the Empress from her spot at the head of the table so that she could be directly opposite the scowling Emperor was not something she had ever imagined she would do. As the faces of the Imperial couple’s friends began to turn towards her in anticipation, it was hard to think anything in her life could ever be better. Certainly it would be worse if she failed to impress that evening. The thought of failure made it difficult to breathe, so she closed her eyes and blew out slowly through pursed lips.

  When she opened her eyes again, the room dazzled. The table was decorated lavishly with silken cloth that shimmered with brilliant golden threads. Low vases were filled with red roses from Josephine’s garden, the petals of which fell gently onto the table’s surface adding a negligent grace to the decor. Three platters of carefully constructed pyramids of puff pastries were quickly losing their height as the guests licked cream from their fingers. Infinitely reflected in three enormous mirrors were golden candelabras holding ivory tapers that flickered like starlight while the chandelier above sparkled with the inner heat of the crystal teardrops. Adelaide carefully took inventory of everything and reminded herself that the combined value of all the items in the room could never trump her own worth. Nevertheless, it was hard not to look at the items from her trunk that she’d placed near at hand and not feel somewhat diminished in comparison to the wealth on display. There was clay she’d dug from the shore of the Seine, beeswax, a mortar and pestle in which she’d placed a mixture of herbs to be ground, a tightly lidded jar of salt, her athame, five black candles, and a matching silver bowl and chalice—nothing worthy of the intense interest the Empress showed the previous night. She would not be using her cards, but she kept them close, fanned tight across her chest under her corset.

  The event was finally coming together, but it had been a difficult battle to maintain control over the details. She had solved the problem of Napoleon’s reticence by appealing to Josephine’s desire to maintain her position. However, telling the Empress that the ritual would strengthen her marriage and guarantee her husband’s world domination hadn’t been the convincing argument. What Adelaide had failed to take into consideration was the vain pride the Empress held in her ability to throw a party. In Josephine’s imagination, the ritual had become the most important event of the century, seconded only by her own crowning, and attended by all of the best artists, politicians, philosophers, and military strategists of France and some of other nations as well, who would be properly amazed and delighted by the Empress’s audacity in tampering with the metaphysical. Adelaide, on the other hand, desired the ritual to be completed with solemn dignity, with only the Imperial couple present. Keeping the event limited to twenty had been a long negotiation that led to an unsatisfying compromise. Furthermore, Adelaide had wanted to do the conjuring in the library, a room she already knew well, a small room, confined and controlled, but the Empress preferred the airy banquet hall. A table with corners was never ideal, but Bonaparte must sit at the head, thus Adelaide could not convince the couple to abandon their long mahogany banquet table for a more egalitarian circular one. Adelaide had asked for the mirrors in the room to be covered, the crystal chandelier to be removed, and the roses be replaced with the purple flowers of bee balm, but Josephine refused each request and complained that Adelaide was trying to make the room common and ugly, an observation which was not too far from the truth.

  And so, seated in the Empress’s own chair, a battle of placement which she’d barely won, Adelaide opened her eyes to scan a large tome open to a handwritten page helpfully titled, “Conjuring a Golem,” and hoped she wouldn’t forget any of the steps during the evening. The guests were all anticipating a Grande Spectacle of royal proportions—a show of magic and trickery, perhaps smoke, perhaps electrical zaps from hidden wires in their chairs, but she knew there would be none of the showmanship they anticipated. There would be chanting; they would sip herbed spirits; and they would hold hands. Adelaide could only hope that the end result would be interesting enough for the Empress to consider the event a success.

  If anyone had noticed Adelaide’s moment of self-doubt, it didn’t seem to cause any worry. She looked down the table and saw only smiles. Had they been sober, the guests surely would have understood the seriousness of the powers that were about to be released, she thought. They would pay closer attention. The smiles made her nervous. She picked up the lump of clay and began to warm it in her hands. If the lump of clay were cold, it would be difficult to shape, however if she rolled it between her palms for too long, it would dry out and cease to be malleable. Adelaide could feel Napoleon’s black eyes boring into her. He was a bit like her clay, she thought. She’d overly rubbed him and now he was drying out. Like his guests, he wasn’t taking the event seriously; unlike his guests, he wasn’t entertained. Adelaide put the clay back in the bowl, met his eyes, and saw his glare slowly dissolve to a jeering smile. He stood and confidently gestured to all present, taking on the personae of the gracious host. “Ma petite Yeyette,” he called to Josephine, using her pet name in a loud voice even though she was sitting right next to him, “please introduce our honored cartomancer to our guests so that she may begin showing us her tricks.”

  The Empress made a great show of standing, swishing her diaphanous skirt. The outline of her meaty thighs was teasingly shown for mere seconds through the thin white silk. “Dearest friends,” she started, “rarely does Mademoiselle Lenormand venture from her own home. Those who are lucky enough to know of her talent, those like Madame de Staël and our very own Talleyrand, will draw their carriage into the queue outside her home on Rue de Tournon every morning to have our charming sibylle turn her cards so that they may go about their day with the confidence of knowing what the future holds.” Josephine paused in her delivery to smile knowingly at her guests, none of whom had ever heard of Adelaide, but would, no doubt, be gracing her with their business at her home by week’s end. “We are so lucky to have her here today as I had great difficulty drawing her away from her regular customers. ‘My friends need me,’ she said. ‘I cannot turn away those who seek my council,�
� she protested. But I insisted. ‘France needs you,’ I countered.” Josephine leaned over and placed her palms on the table to emphasize her words. “France needs you,” she said again, her décolletage heaving with the heavily drawn out words. Her guests tittered and nodded and looked at Adelaide with new admiration. “Had Ropespierre listened to her wisdom when she read him her cards, had Marat heeded the dire warnings she saw in the bottom of his teacup, perhaps France would be a different nation today. So I beseeched her on my knees, ‘Do it for France,’ I said. ‘Come to Malmaison for France.’ And so she came.” The audience sighed rapturously and applauded Adelaide’s rare sacrifice. Josephine stopped them with a wave of her arm and then self-deprecatingly folded her hands over her cleavage. “Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the greatest sibylle of all time: Mademoiselle Marie-Anne Adelaide Lenormand.”

  Napoleon yawned loudly over his guests’ cheers. He knew full well that all it had taken to convince Adelaide to leave her regular customers was a fat purse. He acknowledged her with a barely courteous nod as she stood and thanked the generosity of the Imperial Majesties. When Adelaide sat, all attention was on her. “Please help me to do the following,” Adelaide projected in a voice that was more commanding than it should have been, considering the people she was addressing. The voice was more of a compensation for the butterflies in her stomach than it was a grab for attention. “Take up the candles from the table and place them on the floor behind you so that they form a circle around the table.”

  Mademoiselle Poulette giggled nervously as her gentleman friend stood with exaggerated importance to honor Adelaide’s request, and motioned for the other gentlemen to help. Five candelabras were carefully placed on the tiled floors in as close to a circle as the room would allow, as Adelaide stood and walked clockwise around the table, trailing salt crystal from the jar to join each candelabrum into a circle. Before she took her seat again, she lit the black candles and positioned four on the table at each point of the compass and a fifth candle in the center of the table directly under the chandelier.

  Now, within the protective confines of the circle she had just drawn, she felt her power come to her. She returned to the head of the table, but remained standing. “Compatriotes,” she began in a voice she deepened and lengthened for effect. “This night I anticipate much will happen that will be unexplainable. Many of you will be frightened, confused, and perhaps even angry. These feelings are normal, but I hope that you will also be delighted by the creative powers of this world, amazed to find founts of power within you never knew existed, and thrilled by the collaborative powers of hands held in friendship and love. Despite these emotions, both positive and negative, you may not,” Adelaide paused for emphasis, “you must not,” again, another pause, this time accompanied by a glare, “rise from the table and cross the circle of salt, for to do so is to risk the safety of your dear friends.” A man seated near Napoleon chuckled and Adelaide caught his eyes and held them until his smile disappeared. “Am I understood?”

  She waited for the nervous giggles and the assurances to die down before she took up a tiny pouch filled with short strands of black hair, a collection of navel lint still damp from previous engagements, and the corner of a linen rag crusted with unmentionables. These ingredients she dumped into the silver bowl. Still standing for all to see, she kneaded the bits of Napoleon into a lump of beeswax and placed the soiled, hairy mass in the center of the warmed ball of clay. She finished by forming a rough model of a figure and stood it in front of her on the table.

  “Is that a man or a woman?” Josephine asked.

  “It’s neither,” Adelaide replied, thankful Josephine hadn’t asked what had been placed inside her clay figure. “It’s a representation of the golem.”

  “It looks a little feminine, wouldn’t you say? Such gracefully thin limbs. It’s even turning up its pretty chin coquettishly. Is it looking at me? I think it’s looking at me!” Josephine exclaimed to the guests. Everyone laughed politely.

  Adelaide irritably answered the question by placing a prominent and pointed nose on one side of the round head, showing it to be facing herself, not the Empress. “I now ask you for silence for the rest of the proceeding.”

  She sat back down to look at the open book in front of her, but the words in her grimoire swam. She closed her eyes again and steadied her breathing. As she sat there in silence, she slowly became aware of the breathing of everyone else. To steady her own nerves, she pushed her consciousness out to touch each participant, starting with Mademoiselle Poulette. When the young lady calmed, she moved on to the gentleman sitting next to her, and then the lady next to him and on down the table to Napoleon, where she paused to struggle with the doubting Thomas. When she had successfully gathered the Emperor, she spread her consciousness along the other side of the table. She knew she’d completed her blanket of spiritual influence when she heard twenty sets of lungs align to breathe as one animal. To test her control, she sped up her respiratory rate, and her audience lurched to keep up. Before anyone fainted she took four deep lung-shattering breaths and opened her eyes, watching two of the older women who still clung to the past fashions struggle against their tight-waisted corsets. At that moment, she knew she could climb onto the table, stand on her head, and fart in the air and no one would raise an eyebrow. She heard the pounding of her own heart slow and strengthen as she took up the hands of her neighbors. The energy of the circle flowed through her palms as hands were taken up all around the table. She began to call upon the Forces to draw them down.

  Elise ran because every time she landed on her heel was a moment that jarred her brain, loosening the extraneous thoughts so that they settled into insignificance. Usually, when she began her runs, anxiety about her patients would float to the surface before slowly drifting off. Next would come the unfinished chores of life, like grocery shopping, buying batteries for the remote, or scheduling a haircut. Then she’d resolve, again, to hang her clothes up in the closet and take her vitamins. By the end of the second mile she wouldn’t be thinking about much at all and would barely notice the landmarks as she ran past them—the rock where the lizards looked warily at her and practiced their pushups, the boxing saguaro that stood with arms up and head ducked, the little wooden bridge anchored deep in the banks of the dry and dusty creek. Her goal was to reach the point where her only concerns were the repetitive motion of her body as the blood pulsed to her muscles, where to put her feet, the heat her body created, her breath. It was Elise’s moment of peace.

  With the parking lot only thirty feet behind her, she hadn’t yet reached that coveted moment. Instead, Elise had just finished being horrified by the amount of phlegm she’d coughed up and was now transitioning from the guilt of her failed attempt to quit smoking, to the text she’d received from Emmett. It had been simple and sweet. “Missed you this morning. Next time, coffee. Call me.” After reading it she’d gone home, showered, and crawled wearily into bed, sleeping nearly another four hours without calling.

  He was nice enough, attentive, and from what she remembered of the conversations they had together, he had a job, possibly even a good job. Elise tried to imagine having coffee with Emmett after a night of binging and screwing. It seemed like a huge amount of effort. What would they talk about, television show plot twists, or the state of the economy? Would she listen politely while he postured over his stupid political views? Would he be disappointed if she gave a contradictory opinion? Elise would rather chase two ibuprofens with a beer and go back to bed than have to work up the energy for a conversation.

  Without realizing it, she had picked up her pace as though running from the very thought of Emmett’s affection. “Fuck no,” Elise said as she breathed out, kicking up the fine yellow dust in the trail. She wouldn’t call him until she got bored again, maybe next week, but not for coffee. She enjoyed him on her own terms, and didn’t have room for conversations over warm drinks. “Fuck,” she said as she sucked in her next breath. “That,” she exhaled. She co
ncentrated on the rocky outcropping in the distance that was her halfway point. “Fuck,” suck, “that,” suck, “Fuck,” suck, “that,” suck—it was a drumbeat that paced her as she headed up the dusty trail. Soon she forgot the words as she concentrated on her breathing. The looming cliffs moved up and down to the rhythm of her lope. Only the slowly setting sun as it threaded itself through thin fingers of red clouds shook her concentration.

  Elise had been running the trails in the lower foothills of the Catalina mountain range since college, and there was not much about the Arizona desert that surprised her anymore. So when the wind picked up, and the quality of the light began to change, she knew the rain was finally on its way. The desert always warned before it snapped; snakes had rattles, cactus spines shone like spikes of glass in the sun, and storms were seen for miles in advance of their arrival. She knew the storm was gathering, but felt confident she had enough time. Her goal was the sandstone ledge that thrust out from the low cliffs on the horizon and Elise was determined to get there. She wanted more than anything to sit for a while on the smooth outcrop and watch the world below.

  As she continued higher into the foothills, boulders began to crowd the trail. Pebbles slid out from under her feet in the dust, so she slapped her palms onto the nearby boulders to maintain her balance as she climbed. The rock formations that sheltered the sandstone ledge appeared and then disappeared as the trail started its switchbacks up the terrain. The wind hit her in strong intermittent gusts as she pushed on, and the increasing humidity was heady with the scent of creosote and the yellow mounding flowers of brittlebrush. Finally, she came to an abrupt stop, cut left, and walked off the trail. After rounding a particularly mean-looking cholla cactus, she turned sideways to slip through a narrow crack between two massively tall matching boulders she liked to call the sister stones and found herself completely alone on a thrust stage of a rock. Elise bent forward in a bow to the world below to catch her breath. Then she walked in tight circles, which was all the outcrop would allow, to cool her muscles. When she finally stopped moving and looked out across the valley, she smiled at the unrestricted view. She felt exhilarated and gloriously empty; a small speck on an enormous landscape.