The Conjured Woman

by Anne Groß

  “Thank you,” Elise said, and was surprised at how genuinely she felt it.

  “Thank me?” Mrs. Southill laughed. “I’ve done you no favor. Why do you think I live out here in the middle of the forest? I’ve no neighbors out here, there’s no one but the trees. Out there,” she waved her hand towards the path to town, “everyone is ill, everyone is dying. And now you’ll be killing yourself to save them all, even if their life isn’t decent or kind. In my younger days I ran all over London, day or night. Now, if someone has need of me, they’d better be well enough to come find me. I may live in the forest, but I get a full night’s sleep every night.” She shook her head and made a rude gesture in the direction of London. “Out there you can’t walk two feet without someone coughing and lobbing their sputum on you. Everyone is bleeding or oozing from somewheres on their body. The second they figure out you’ve got the skills to help, they’ll be knocking down your door. Thank me? You’ll see. You’ll be cursing me by the year’s end and hoping to find your own forest clearing.”

  Mrs. Southill pulled two drawstrings from around the hem of the tablecloth and it gathered around all the herb bundles to become a sturdy sack. To Elise’s delight, the old woman handed her the sack before sitting back with a satisfied smile. “Now. You must be hungry.”

  For a woman well versed in plant and herb lore, Mrs. Southill cooked a remarkably bland stew of indistinguishable meat and limp vegetables. It looked like it had been simmering for days with new water added to the pot with each serving taken out, maybe simmering a full week even, given the pale broth. Regardless, Thomas slurped it down quickly, swiping the liquid from his chin, and even asked for seconds.

  Elise was delighted by her gift. Mrs. Southill added a couple needles, silk thread for sewing wounds, muslin for bandages and other items she thought might be needed. When it was time to leave, Thomas offered to help her carry the sack, but she slung it over her own shoulder. It represented for her the one thing from her past that she had been able to keep with her in this new time: her pride in her career. She carried the bag like a trophy.

  Back at the trailhead on the edge of the clearing, Elise hesitated, looking as far down the dark path as she could for any strange movements. Evening was setting in, and the forest had gotten darker and more sinister. Even Thomas looked wary.

  Suddenly, she felt something slam between her shoulder blades and she stumbled forward into the oppressive green. “Find your courage, girl,” Mrs. Southill shouted. The woman had given her as hard a shove as her small, withered body would allow, causing Elise to trip over the stone ring and stumble onto the trail. She chuckled at the surprised and angry curse that erupted from Elise. “That’s right,” Mrs. Southill said. “Let your anger rise. You’ve a long journey ahead of you, and you’ll need all your courage. Anger simmers in the cauldron nicely with courage, and I hope I’ve given you enough of both. I hope you don’t come back here, Miss Elsie Duboyse. You don’t belong here. Find your way home.”

  “How?” Elise demanded. “How do I go home?”

  Mrs. Southill chuckled. “Catch the light, dear. Hold it in your fist and follow the trail back to the road.”

  June XX, 1808

  London, England

  My Dear Mlle. L.,

  I have found your golem. After spending most of a long day with her, I recommend that you forgo your attempt to recapture this quarry. I found her to be profoundly self-centered, unknowledgeable about the things that matter most, and of very little use in any general manner.

  Since you mentioned in your letter that you were not sure what type of creature you brought forth, allow me to describe her so that you may know her better. Although at the outset of our meeting she seemed frail, she is actually powerfully muscular and given to fits of violence. She has already sliced one man’s neck, although I was told it was to save his life. I suspect that you have brought her forth from another place, perhaps even another time as she utilized strange idioms in her speech and had an unnatural accent.

  I must confess I did consent to give her a smattering of the Knowledge, only a few hours worth, and flatter myself to think that she took to the lessons quite readily. The young man who brought her to me is under the impression that she has considerable talents, so it may be that your continued interest in her is not completely unfounded. Should you still feel it necessary to the Cause to return her to Paris, she currently resides at the Quiet Woman public house in London where she is using her considerable untapped talents to empty chamber pots. Please use caution in retrieving her as the young man I mentioned earlier can be dangerous when provoked.

  I did wonder, however, how a golem who calls herself Elise Dubois, a perfectly French name, pulled forth by someone with your esteemed lineage, ended up in a public house in London? I delight in the idea that one day we may be able to meet in person so that I might hear the tale directly from your lips. I am sure that the story will be fascinating.

  The last Sabbath was such a pleasant night. If only all our encounters on the astral plane could be so peaceful. I’m afraid it will be a long time before we experience that again as you and I well know the near future will be tumultuous and the war between our nations devastating.

  I hope that this letter, so hastily written, will put your mind at ease regarding this matter.

  Yours, etc., etc.,

  Mrs. U. Southill

  LA PRISON DES FLEURS

  The clicking of Adelaide’s knitting needles divided time as precisely as a metronome. Since her arrival at the prison, she had knit a single stocking, one mitten, and a neckerchief, and had unraveled the yarn in between each creation with deliberate care. The act of organizing a single strand of yarn into a useful object was just as interesting to her as the act of pulling the yarn away from itself to wind into a ball, ready to be knit again. While Adelaide’s ball waxed and waned, she spoke her meditation to herself quietly, feeling the words form on her lips, “things that are made, can be unmade.” In the dim evening light, she concentrated on the feel of the yarn as it slid through her fingers, her muscle memory taking the place of her vision. She could knit twenty stitches for every one of the pathetic wails that came from a neighboring cell directly across the hall where little Odile was incarcerated. It took five wails for her to reach the end of the row.

  “Why? Why? Why?” cried Odile—her own metronomic meditation. The sound resonated in Adelaide’s mind like the distant mewling of a baby and she resolutely ignored her instinctual pull to protect. Instead of pursing her lips in a consoling shush, she ground her teeth. She was no mother. She knew no lullabies. And Odile was not a baby.

  Earlier that afternoon when they were allowed to take in the sun in the great courtyard of the prison, Odile had wheeled in delighted circles at the relative freedom and joined a game of cache-cache with the other caged kittens while Adelaide had watched under the shade of the old chestnut tree near the wall. In the warm summer sun the young women’s oppression temporarily lifted. But now that night had descended, Odile was simple enough to allow her mind to whirl around a single word.

  “Why?” sobbed Odile as she railed against the betrayal that caused her to be locked away within the cold, stone walls of the prison. Was she not obedient enough, productive enough, quiet, pretty, smart? Her self-flagellation went on and on into the night. In their dark cells, young women’s restless thoughts took torturous paths, bruising against the walls of their cages. The prisoners bit their nails and pulled out their hair one single strand at a time as they agonized over why they were being punished by those that had professed to care for them.

  Adelaide wondered if she would have locked away her own children, had she ever conceived. She wasn’t sure she’d have been a good mother, her own being but a dim memory. Mostly she remembered how she would be pulled away from her mother’s weak embrace whenever the hacking coughs began. She had died when Adelaide was still a small child. Her father had died a few months later, after remarrying. He left his new wife with Adelaide and her s
ister and brother, but when her stepmother remarried, a new baby quickly became the center of attention and Adelaide and her siblings were sent away. Her brother went to apprentice at the iron foundry where he made cannons for the navy, and Adelaide and her sister went to stay with the Sisters in Alençon. They had been lucky. They could have been sent to prison, like Odile.

  Ironically, the prison was a converted convent and brought back memories of a childhood filled with the promise of life everlasting. The wailing paralleled the melismatic tones of the Hours, chanted in unison. The Church had given her the groundwork to not just endure, but to utilize routine and rigidity for maintaining her self-possession and independent thought.

  The sound of retching came from Odile’s cell. She’d made herself sick again. It made Adelaide think of the first time she had vomited in the hallway of the convent’s boarding school. It had been after eating a large serving of hachis parmentier for lunch, and then devouring her little sister’s portion as well, who had a weak appetite and would helplessly push food around on her plate. To punish Adelaide’s gluttony, the Sisters told her she wouldn’t be given dinner that night, and sent her straight to bed where she luxuriated in the peace and quiet of the empty barracks. She stole a romance novel from out of a classmate’s trunk and read it cover to cover that day while everyone else sat in class. Her classmate had kept the contraband literature for over a month without sharing it, so Adelaide felt justified in helping herself.

  The second time she’d vomited was a few months later. The schoolgirls had taken a trip into the country where they picked baskets full of strawberries. The smells that floated through the hallways as the sisters boiled the strawberries for canning was excruciating, so while everyone was memorizing their psalms, Adelaide slipped away to the abbey’s great kitchen pantry and ate three boites de confiture au fraises and an entire pain de campagne. For that misadventure, she was made to clean her own mess before being banished to the barracks. That time Adelaide had waited in bed with the covers pulled up to her nose for fifteen minutes, but when no one came to check on her, she slipped away to spend the early evening exploring all of the most shadowed corners of the convent until the Abbess herself, old Sister Marie-Therese, found her trying to pick the lock to an inner garden reserved for the Bishop. The Abbess dragged her by her ear all the way back to Sister Ignatia’s classroom and made her stand on a stool in front of all her classmates for the last twenty minutes of class. The students jeered and laughed, ignoring Sister Ignatia’s calls to order until one sharp bark from the Abbess got all their heads bowed over their books again.

  Two weeks later, a doctor was called for a third bout of vomiting, this time most likely due to the night vapors that had come through a window accidentally left open. The doctor had forced her to swallow a spoon full of thick black syrup that tasted of anise which caused a fourth bout that brought up beef and onion bouillon onto his shiny buckled shoes. The back of her left hand had been slapped for that transgression, but happily the doctor insisted she be quarantined from the other fourth year students. She was given a tiny room all to herself with a window that overlooked the same garden she’d tried to break into two weeks earlier. Despite feeling woozy, she still had the presence of mind to pilfer the bottle of sirop d’anise out of the doctor’s bag when his attention had been focused on returning his shoes, which Sister Marthe had brought back, clean and polished, to his feet.

  One week after she’d recovered, Adelaide sat in the classroom with the little brown bottle tucked deep inside her sleeve, still thinking of the garden. She’d been carrying the bottle with her for the last four days, having taken three days to get the courage to pull it out from under her mattress where she’d hidden it. She was glad she now had the fail-safe tucked into her sleeve as Sister Ignatia droned on at the front of the room, head bowed over her text, reading aloud the steps involved in the set up of an algebraic equation.

  She was seated second from the back in a modest sized classroom with twenty other girls all lined up behind little desks in four rows of five. It was moving on towards the afternoon and Adelaide had been in the same position for what seemed like an eternity. Despite her ample supply of cushioning flesh, her bottom hurt from sitting so long on the wooden seat. She stretched her feet forward, threading them between the legs of the chair in front of her, and accidentally bumped the ankles of the girl sitting in front of her. Adelaide caught her breath when Roxane’s body straightened from the contact. Keeping her upper body still to hide her movements from the professor, Roxane slammed the heels of her wooden sabots into Adelaide’s shins in retribution. The loud scrape of clogs against the floorboards that was Adelaide’s reflexive retreat from pain caused Sister Ignatia to look up sharply, but since nothing looked amiss, she bowed her head and returned to reciting algebra.

  Adelaide put her hand up her sleeve and fingered the smooth glass of the bottle as she considered how she would force its entire vile contents down Roxane’s gullet. Her shins throbbed where she’d been kicked as she stared at the part on the back of Roxane’s head where her blonde hair was sectioned into two braids. The part was irritatingly straight and white. Adelaide glared at it until another classmate in the next row two desks forward rose to her feet. The movement alerted her to the end of the lecture and the beginning of the drills. Adelaide knew she wouldn’t bear the pain of being called upon to do the same—listening to the girl stumble through the task of solving for x was painful enough. She retrieved the bottle and sunk down in her chair to hide behind Roxane.

  As the standing girl coughed and stuttered through her mental gymnastics, a pall had fallen over the classroom. Everyone sat in dread of sharing the mumbling girl’s fate, and stared at her as she shifted her weight nervously from one foot to the other. It was the perfect moment, Adelaide decided. She raised the bottle to her lips to drink only as much as would be effective, leaving the rest for future pedagogical emergencies.

  “Adelaide, what are you doing?” Sister Ignatia asked sharply. It never took her long to notice when students were marching out of step. “Why are you slouching? Sit up.”

  Roxane took the opportunity to turn around and give Adelaide a withering smile. Adelaide locked eyes with Roxane while under her desk she hastily corked her bottle.

  “You might as well stand,” Sister Ignatia said with a sigh. She picked up her ruler, more with resignation than with threatening intent. “Tell me how you would solve the following: The market vendor’s basket has potatoes, parsnips, and turnips. He tells you there are forty-nine tubers in all and that there are as many parsnips as there are potatoes, and only three turnips. Solve for the class how many of each tuber is in the vendor’s basket.”

  Adelaide pushed her chair back to stand uneasily in the aisle. She cleared her throat. “We know that there are three turnips,” she began nervously. Roxane’s snicker was barely a breath, designed to be inaudible to all but Adelaide.

  “Yes, that is what I said. Three turnips. How did you manage to stain your frock again?” Sister Ignatia clicked her tongue in consternation at the large brown spot on Adelaide’s skirt that had been invisible up until that moment. Everyone turned to look, but Adelaide merely folded her hands over the stain. The gravy from the pot au feu they’d eaten that afternoon had been too watery and had spilled from her spoon. Goose bumps stood up along her arms and sweat rolled down her sides. The sweet poison in her little brown bottle was working, and the thought of the pot au feu made her mouth water.

  “Et alors?” asked Sister Ignatia impatiently. “The class is waiting. Shall I repeat the question?”

  Adelaide opened her mouth to respond, but saliva unpleasantly flooded over her tongue. She slurped it all to the back of her mouth and tried to swallow, creating exactly the trigger she needed. Adelaide took two lurching steps forwards and then turned to open her mouth over Roxane. Happily, the watery gravy was easier to expel than if it had been cooked to the correct consistency. Beef chunks and bits of orange carrots spilled into Roxane’s la
p and perfumed her with musk of boiled fat, hints of stomach acid, and a finishing bouquet of anise.

  It didn’t take long for the classroom to fill with black robed Sisters who set to calming the screaming Roxane. Three took to caring for Adelaide, whose strange smile was proof of her delicate state. Within minutes Adelaide was led to the little room with the pretty window and sweetly tucked under the bedcovers by Sister Marthe. The three Sisters gently stroked her hair and kissed her brow before they left to tend to steaming cauldrons of laundry.

  As attentive as the Sisters had been in ensuring her comfort, it still wasn’t Adelaide’s intention to stay in bed. It was the first day she could remember without rain, and in Normandy it was a crime to not take advantage of every precious warm afternoon. She kneeled at the foot of the bed and threw open the window. Bracing herself with her arms on either side of the window frame, she leaned her body out to take a deep breath of the fresh air but withdrew quickly when she glanced down. The ground looked very far from her third floor vantage, and the vertigo it induced made her stomach clench, a side effect she wasn’t prepared for so soon after her earlier gastric adventure. She moved back to the head of the bed where she could see only a slice of the garden wall and the sky above, enough to entice her to return to the window.

  The scent of the blooming hedge roses and the possibility of adventure made her breath catch. She welcomed the feeling of blood pounding through her veins, this time experiencing it not as vertigo, as she leaned from the window, but as liberty. The garden was bursting with a promise that made her feel fully alive. Thank you God, she remembered to pray, looking up to the sky. Thank you for saving me from algebra and for punishing Roxane by letting me puke in her lap. The warmth of the sun on her face felt like a blessing and gave her the courage to lean out again. Faced with so much evidence of the goodness of her guardian angels, Adelaide knew nothing bad would happen.