by Anne Groß
The wails from Odile’s cell were beginning to give her a headache. The sound wrapped itself around her thoughts so that any spark she might create was extinguished. The girl was casting banishing spells without even realizing it. When a particularly loud whine assaulted her, Adelaide jumped up and screamed, “Pour l’amour de dieu, cessez de greindre! Shut up!” She stood frozen with her muscles trembling, her ears straining for the next sound, her knitting needles clutched in her fist daring Odile to defy her. There was a loud sniff, then silence. Cautiously, Adelaide resettled herself onto the straw. She pulled the card back out of her pocket, ready to try again now that the incessant cries had stopped.
On the bottom of the card, in the center, were sprigs of heather, rhododendron, and strawberry. Even though herbology wasn’t a useful method for divination she’d enjoyed the process of illustrating each card with a different flower, despite considering it below her talent as a sibyl. Let the more vulgar practitioners like Madame Southill mess about with poultices for oozing sores and teas for coughs. Adelaide found herself squinting at the card as she remembered how painfully tedious her lessons in botany had been—all memorization without utilization. She was utterly bored by it. How could the medical properties of lichen compete with the story of brave Orion stretching his bow over the heavens, or the proper method of preparing a tincture compete with the nuances in Hermetic philosophy? There was no subtlety in herbal lore. There was only the disease and the leaf, the problem and the solution.
Adelaide rubbed her temples again and forced herself to concentrate. Heather was useful for the promotion of urine. Honey made from the pollen of rhododendrons was lethal, but the leaves reduced the heat of inflamation and protected the liver. An infusion of the leaves of the strawberry plant was excellent for calming anxiety, or for strengthening the weak by clarifying the blood. She had known an herbalist who gargled water infused with strawberry leaves to sweeten her breath, although the remedy’s efficacy always came into doubt when she was tête-a-tête with the poor woman.
Heather, rhododendron, and strawberry—neither of the three seemed to have anything to do with each other, or anything else depicted on her card, except they would all be torn up by their roots and swept away to Alexandria when the swollen Nile roared over its banks. Perhaps the crocodile would swim to a quieter tributary and the mongoose would escape drowning by sucking at air pockets in the mud walls of its den. She shook her head. She was finding it difficult to delve beyond literal interpretations. Between the vocalizing of the other inmates and her own deep shame of failure every time she thought of Madame Southill’s condescending letter, her only fully formed thoughts revolved around despair.
“Why?” Odile sounded like she had choked on her question in an effort to silence it. Adelaide took a deep breath and then let it out slowly as she tried not to think unkind thoughts about sweet Odile with her thick blonde hair and trusting blue eyes. Why indeed? Absently, Adelaide traced the mortar between the bricks in the wall of her cell with the tip of her index finger. Odile’s endless question was asked of those who professed to love her, including her god. This was the commonality between all the women who were sharing her fate – they directed their questions outward and waited for someone to give them answers. The majority of them sat trembling in their cells hoping someone would allow them to leave, yet the only women actually locked in at night were those who had proven to be disruptive. Everyone else had the freedom to walk about. The great wooden door from the courtyard to the street beyond was locked, but that was all. That thought gave Adelaide pause. The rule was to stay in your cell after dinner, but rules were meaningless if they didn’t apply to the situation at hand. The new situation was that the location of the golem had been revealed. This changed everything.
For the next three hours, Adelaide tried to sleep but the anticipation of the early morning made the wool blanket scratch excessively. She tried to fold it in half so that it could provide both a barrier from the straw underneath her and a covering to keep her warm, but it wasn’t big enough for both tasks. Besides, the lice made her skin twitch. Unable to tolerate the situation any longer, she rose and poked her head out into the hallway, but could barely see a thing in the blackness. The light from a single distant lamp at the end of the hall near the foyer was barely enough illumination for her to set as a goal. She would still have to slide a hand along the wall to safely navigate and just pray there was no one else in the hallway for her to bump into. She caught her breath to listen for any movement and heard the soft sounds of deep breathing from the opposite cell, which was reassuring. Even Odile had finally fallen asleep.
Her excitement carried her down the hallway on the balls of her feet at a run despite the darkness. In the foyer, Adelaide’s heart pounded in her neck as she tried the arched door to the courtyard, then despite her effort to keep quiet, her breath exploded from her in relief when it opened. She only dared to open it a crack, enough for her to squeeze through, knowing that the hinges would squeal and the old wood would creak if she threw it as wide open as she longed to do.
A half moon shone down into the courtyard and cast long webbed shadows from the crooked branches of the old chestnut tree that grew against the far wall. Adelaide took a deep breath of the cool night air and felt optimistic for the first time since the conjuring. She stepped to the right and started creeping around the perimeter of the yard. The packed dirt under her feet kept her steps quiet as she slunk towards the tree, whose white spikes of blooms shone luridly in the moonlight. The scent filled Adelaide so that her lungs pressed against her ribs.
Usually, the lower branches of chestnut trees were trimmed neatly, so that growth would be symmetrical, but the nuns who occupied the building prior to its prison conversion had been more interested in allowing God to grow the tree as he willed it. As a result, the lower branches were within reach. Assuming Adelaide’s arms, as well as her courage, held strong, she would be able to climb it without trouble. She leaned against its rough grey trunk, feeling protected by its concealing foliage. Not wanting to waste time, knowing that the night was nearing its end, Adelaide bent forward and removed her shoes, then tied them together and slung them around her neck. Taking the back of her skirt, she pulled it through her legs to the front to tuck under her apron strings which both lifted the great swathes of cloth above her knees to give her legs more freedom, and kept her modest if she was unfortunate enough to be seen from below. Then she stretched her arms up above her head.
Even with her feet pushed to the tips of her toes, she still was three centimeters shy of touching the lowest branch. She jumped, and slapped it with the palms of her hands but her weight pulled her back to earth. She jumped again, and this time was able to scramble her fingertips higher so that her palms made right angles to her wrists against the top of the branch. Only now her elbows refused to bend to pull up her considerable weight, so she dangled and kicked until she dropped down once again with a frustrated grunt.
Adelaide leaned against the wall to catch her breath. She heard a carriage approaching outside the courtyard and her heart started pounding. She fell into a crouch and waited, listening for the rhythmic sound of the horses’ hooves fade as it continued down the road. The interruption made her feel panicked. The prison was in the heart of Paris, not isolated in the outskirts where no one would care if one woman slipped away. The escape would only be the beginning. She’d have to move fast to leave Paris altogether in order to remain hidden.
The moon was moving towards the other side of the yard and threatened to illuminate the tree. How dare it, she thought in frustration. She pushed her fear down and stood again, knowing there wasn’t much time left. On the third jump, she again latched on, only this time she flattened her feet against the wide trunk and walked them up to the same branch her body hung from. With the strength of a lover in the throes of ecstasy, she wrapped her legs tightly around the branch and clung upside down. Her shoes were uncomfortable swinging weights attached to her neck by their laces. I
t was one thing, Adelaide realized as she dangled upside down from the branch, to imagine climbing the tree, and another thing entirely to actually attempt it.
It took all her strength of body and concentration to pull herself up and around so that the branch was underneath her instead of on top. She trembled as she balanced with the entire length of her torso pressed against the rough bark and started pushing herself backwards until her bottom hit the trunk. The great muscles of her ass clenched pitifully against the trunk like a squirrel without a tail, or a weak third hand. Then she reached behind her. A sigh of relief escaped her lips as she dug her fingertips deep into the crevices of the tree trunk’s bark. A sturdy handhold is more reassuring than the most detailed plans, and her plan was less than completely thought through. With some ungraceful maneuvering combined with heavy breathing and pints of nervous sweat, Adelaide managed to pull herself up until she was standing on the branch. Luckily, from there the branches above were much more numerous, providing a relative ladder-like ease of ascent as the canopy stretched higher.
The wall, Adelaide’s ultimate goal, was nearly as tall as the tree itself, and as she climbed closer to the top of the wall, the limbs of the tree thinned. When Adelaide heard the branch snap underneath her, she leapt at the top of the wall with a choked cry and draped herself over the very narrow edge, clinging for her very life.
There were no suitable branches on her left to grab onto, so retreating from her plan wasn’t an option. To her right, the cobblestoned street shone far below, six meters at least, with no method for a safe descent. She was effectively stuck. A sob rose to her throat but she swallowed it, and pressed her forehead into the cold tile capping the wall. Someone would have to rescue her for her to survive this scrape, and the laughter that would accompany the rescue would be earsplitting. It was enough to feel defeated, she thought, but to also feel so entirely humiliated was even worse. The image of the mongoose walking into the mouth of the crocodile returned to her behind her tightly squeezed eyelids. Prudence in the face of adversity—the irony of it made her feel sick to her stomach. How prudent had it been to try to climb a tree in order to scale a wall? How would she rescue the golem if she couldn’t even rescue herself?
Suddenly Adelaide realized the significance of heather, rhododendron, and strawberry. Of course the one card she turned would somehow reflect that which most obsessed her, namely, the golem. Heather, rhododendron, and strawberry had all been used to flavor and preserve beer in past times before hops became the fashion, and the golem was working in a public house. Adelaide wondered if she was unknowingly pulling cards to tell the golem’s fortune instead of her own. If that were the case, then the mongoose and the crocodile would have nothing to do with Adelaide at all. The fact that an image of hops was a better representation of beer, and that she’d illustrated the hop vine on another card that hadn’t been pulled, wasn’t lost on Adelaide. It just added more nuance to an already impossible puzzle. She was so tied in knots over the card’s meanings that it took a while for her to hear the insistent hiss from the alley below. She opened one eye and dared to roll her head slightly to the right to look down.
Far below in the street, a pale face peered out from under the brim of a wool cap and looked back up at her. It took her seconds to recognize him, and seconds more to control the emotions that swelled. He was supposed to be in Lille. His presence underneath her was nothing short of a miracle. “Dodo,” Adelaide whispered down at the man, “What are you doing here?”
“Adelaide, is that you? What are you doing up there, you fool?” Dodeauvie whispered back.
“Oh please, pitié, help me.” She tried to control her voice from rising in panic. “I’m stuck.” Her voice cracked as the tears finally spilled.
She watched the man hesitate, no doubt weighing the costs and merits. “Wait there,” he finally said. She listened to the sound of his boots as he jogged off down the street. She wouldn’t be going anywhere, he could rest assured of that.
It seemed like he was gone for hours. She feared her muscles would give out as every single one of them was frozen in its effort to balance along the ridge of the wall. Without daring to move her head, Adelaide’s right eye traveled the path of another carriage as it traversed the street. Then a movement in a window directly across from her suddenly drew her attention. A curtain shifted. Had someone seen her? She prayed the chestnut tree had her hidden in the shadows. Just as she’d decided it was too late, the top of a ladder gently touched the wall near her hands. “Come down,” Dodeauvie hissed up to her.
Her fear swelled when she hesitatingly touched the tip of the ladder. “I can’t,” she whispered desperately to herself. It was too high; the ladder would surely tip and fall; her foot would slip. “I can’t,” she said again in a pitiful wail that sounded, even to her own ears, like Odile. “Come get me.”
“Come down, Witch, or I’ll leave you to your jailors.” The contempt in his voice was familiar and it angered her enough to make a second attempt. This time she slowly pushed her torso up to straddle the top of the wall in a sitting position and was surprised to find she was more balanced. Now she could survey the roof of the prison, the courtyard behind her, and the entire length of the street as well. She noticed a sign for a print shop at the corner and suddenly knew why Dodeauvie had happened upon her. Dodo was too calculating for providential circumstances; he simply had business three doors away. She stretched her right foot to the third rung of the ladder.
CONVERGING FORCES
“You do realize that my involvement here has put me in a very difficult situation. I’m already on house arrest.”
“In Lille,” Adelaide murmured.
“If I should now be found with an escaped prisoner, can you imagine how that would look?”
Adelaide heaved an annoyed sigh. “How many times must I thank you? Would saying it again help you to feel more appreciated?” She rolled her eyes then turned to look at the massive printing press that commandeered one half of the dark room. When she ran a hand over a tray of letters, they rattled in their individual compartments like dice in a cup.
“Don’t touch those, you’ll get ink everywhere,” Dodeauvie snapped.
Adelaide ignored him and rattled the letters one last time before continuing on her self-guided tour of the print shop. When she reached Dodeauvie’s coat draped over the back of a chair, she deliberately wiped her fingers over the shoulders as she passed it, leaving streaks of ink on the boiled wool. There was something comforting about the smell of wood pulp in the stacks of fresh paper on the shelves. The great iron press was like a muscled demon, its machinery was well oiled and ready. Behind it, Dodeauvie stood at a table and was hastily stuffing pamphlets into a large satchel. He tossed a second bag at Adelaide. “Help me with this,” he ordered.
“I should really leave while there’s some night left. You can stuff your stolen pamphlets into bags by yourself,” Adelaide said. “I only came because you said you had a place for me to hide.”
“I’m not stealing. The pamphlets are mine. I wrote them.”
“Yes Dodo, and that’s why we’ve arrived well before the Printer and charmed the concierge into letting us enter,” Adelaide said sarcastically. Nevertheless, she began filling her bag with pamphlets. There was something about the print shop that intrigued her and made her wish to linger, but its location, so close to the prison, was unfortunate. Soon the street would begin to fill with those who might recognize her. Her absence from her cell may already have been noted, and if that were the case, police would be looking for her starting near the prison. As they circled outwards, like dogs on the scent, there was a likely chance they’d find her.
“The faster you fill your bag, the faster we can leave,” Dodeauvie encouraged.
The pamphlets were stacked neatly in a corner of the desk so that she had to rub shoulders with her companion as they worked. Two other groupings of different pamphlets and one stack of bound books were also on the table with handwritten invoice statements
neatly crowning each stack. Dodeauvie’s invoice was conspicuously missing. Curious, Adelaide scanned his title quickly, Les Instructions de Thoth, Divulguée par M. M. Dodeauvie, Partie IV. “I see you are pilfering ideas as well as paper,” she said with a smile.
“Mind your own business.” Dodeauvie snarled. “Zenours is dead, he won’t mind. Besides, I’ve added enough of my own thoughts to make the practical theories my own.”
“Ton-Ton Zenours was good to you. He taught you everything, and you spit on his memory by taking credit for everything he did.”
“And what are you doing to aggrandize our mentor? You flip cards for ridiculous women and then get thrown in jail. You whore whatever small powers Zenours was able to draw out from you. And stop calling him Ton-Ton. He wasn’t anyone’s uncle.” He snatched the satchel from Adelaide’s hand and pushed her further down the table. “Stand aside. I’ll do it myself.”
Pulling herself up in righteous indignation, Adelaide sputtered, “I am France’s most important sibylle. My powers have been sought by none other than the Emperor himself.”
“Yes, I heard about that. I’m looking forward to hearing more.” He pushed the last pamphlet into the satchel and slung both bags over his shoulder. Then he took Adelaide by her arm and marshaled her towards the door, stopping only to pick up his coat. He draped it over her shoulders. “Keep your gown concealed and your head down,” he instructed, handing her his hat to wear.
There is a line between night and dawn that is drawn with a subtle difference in smell, detectable even in a city that confuses the senses like Paris. Just before the first birds start to awaken, the air becomes lighter, more floral, and everything that was worrisome just minutes before seems suddenly insignificant. Adelaide felt none of this as she was shuttled into the street. “Where are you taking me?” she demanded.