Pernelle's Escape : A Rhetoric of Death Novella (9781101585832)

by Rock, Judith

  “Madame made me show her your laundry again, madame,” Annette said, putting the couvre-feu in place.

  Pernelle knew what her mother-in-law was looking for—signs that her courses had come. Or not. She had said as much to Pernelle directly.

  “Captive,” Mme Bayle had said meaningfully, watching Pernelle with cold gray eyes. “Captive to dragoons. We know what dragoons do with Huguenot women. Are you pregnant?”

  A penniless widow with two children, one of them a bastard, would have no hope at all for a second husband, would be forever a burden on her in-laws. And so far Pernelle’s courses hadn’t come, not since early August. But exhaustion and being bone thin could account for that, as she was still from all it had taken to reach Geneva. But if that wasn’t the reason, and if she was pregnant—well, she knew that no dragoon was to blame. Not that she wished to blame anyone. Whatever happened, she had no regret.

  “I know. I heard her.” This was not something to discuss with servants, but Annette—often enough in trouble herself with Mme Bayle—was in awe of Pernelle’s escape from France and had become her passionate champion.

  The girl turned from the fire, her round, pockmarked face full of concern. “If there still isn’t—after a while—” She stopped and licked her chapped lips and her voice dropped to a whisper. “I know someone who could—help you.”

  “No, Annette!” Pernelle looked over her shoulder, praying that Mme Bayle had really gone to bed and was not listening. She knew what the girl was suggesting. Most women knew of ways to be rid of an unwanted child.

  The girl gave her a fearful glance and looked down. “I only thought—”

  “If madame should hear you, she’d report you to the church court. Leave this imagining.” Pernelle handed back Lucie’s empty cup. “God knows more than we do.” She managed a smile. “May He give you a peaceful night.”

  Pernelle’s lips were set in a thin line as she carried the half asleep Lucie upstairs. She settled the little girl in bed, tucked in the heavy blue bedcover, and kissed her. Then she closed the embroidered blue curtains and stood with her head bowed against her clasped hands, praying that Annette’s imaginings—and her own—did not come true. Not because the imagined child would be unwelcome. She would welcome it with her whole heart, but no one else would. Telling herself, as she’d told Annette, to leave her imaginings, she took off her black coif and unpinned her hair in preparation for sleep. She had her share to do in the house, and Mme Bayle’s housework began early.

  But instead of undressing, she went to the fire and stirred new flames from it. Annette’s worrying and her own had left her restlessly awake. She sat down again in the big, slant-backed armchair and drew her feet under her for warmth. Her hand went to her bodice, searching for the reassurance of the little Huguenot cross David had given her when they were betrothed.

  But of course it wasn’t there.

  Chapter 7

  Chalex, France

  July 1686

  In spite of all her kicking and gouging, the soldier who’d caught Pernelle at the border had flung her belly down across his saddle bow and ridden with her to the nearby military camp, through the village of Chalex. Men and women had leaned from windows and followed them down the village street, jeering at her and laughing. When they reached the small camp, just half a dozen tents and a dilapidated cottage, the soldier had dragged Pernelle from the horse and turned her over to a gap-toothed old woman grinning in the cottage doorway.

  “Search her, grandmère. I’ll be back.”

  The woman pulled her inside, not bothering to shut the door. “Stand over there, you.”

  When Pernelle hesitated, hardly able to understand the thick mountain accent, the woman cursed—that much was understandable—and shoved her roughly backward against a wall. She began pulling Pernelle’s clothes off. Pernelle slapped her and the old woman knocked her to the floor with a fist like an iron hammer. Within moments, Pernelle was wearing only her shift and the woman had her purse and the Huguenot cross. She took the cross to the candle burning on the table and muttered to herself over the shining gold, turning the little cross so its garnets caught the light, running her finger along the notched ends of the cross. Pernelle had always wondered why the Huguenot cross was so like the cross the king gave for his Catholic Order of the Holy Spirit. Both crosses were deeply notched at the ends, and from both hung a tiny golden dove, the Holy Spirit’s sign.

  The woman tucked the cross into her bodice and bent over Pernelle’s scattered clothes. She pawed through them, snatched up the heavy white linen petticoat, and kicked the rest back. Pernelle was still lacing her bodice when the soldier came back. Without a word, he clamped a hand on the back of her neck and walked her out of the cottage and into a candlelit tent. Pernelle prayed for strength. But a sleek man wearing a red military coat and a luxurious brown wig rose from behind a small table, dismissed the soldier, and gestured her into a chair.

  He perched lazily on the edge of the table and looked her over. “So, madame, I have been told that you are cousin to Bishop du Luc of Marseille.” His high-pitched voice dripped disbelief, and something in his gaze reminded Pernelle of a woman choosing chickens for market.

  “I am,” she said coldly.

  “And you have another cousin who is a Jesuit.”

  Not a muscle moved in Pernelle’s face, but the words turned her sick. Could they know what Charles had done? If they did, he might be as dead as she was perhaps about to be. Or he might have been sent to the galleys, also usually death, but a much slower one.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  He walked the few steps across the tent and stood over her. “I am Aumery de Guyon, madame. I am in command here.”

  He made her an insultingly elaborate bow, deliberately bringing his face too near hers as he straightened, and in spite of herself, she shrank back in the chair. He gave her a slow smile.

  “Oh, madame, calm yourself! Your noble relations guarantee that you have nothing to fear—of that kind. Noble but heretical ladies like you have their political uses. That is why I am sending you with the others here, who are about to leave for the House of New Converts in Paris. It is a penitential house. A very penitential house. Where you will realize your errors and become good Catholics for all Paris to see. So that the king’s subjects in the capital can see how good and kind is his fatherly care for heretics.” He blinked slowly and licked his lips. “We will, of course, bring in the woman and the child who were with you. Never fear, they won’t get far. I hear the girl is very young. Very pretty and—” The sound of boots outside made him turn. “Yes? What is it?”

  Pernelle was almost relieved when the soldier who’d caught her came in. The commandant dismissed her and the soldier took her to a well-guarded tent, where she spent a miserable night on dirty straw with seven other Huguenot women. The women prayed silently together, clutching each other’s hands, and then she prayed for the rest of the night that Julie and Lucie had made it safely across the border. In the morning, the women’s hands were bound in front of them, and each rode behind a soldier out of the camp, past Chalex, and back across the stream where Pernelle had been captured. Once across, they were bundled into a waiting coach and set on their way to Paris with a guard of dragoons. At first they’d sung psalms to defy their captors and comfort themselves, but soon they were too exhausted even for that. It took more than two weeks to reach Paris, and by that time the woman whose arm had been badly broken during her capture had died of wound fever. The nineteen-year-old bride, whose new husband had been shot trying to protect her, had passed from hysterical crying to blank, unmoving silence and curled in on herself a little more each day, like a withering leaf. For the others, despair had thickened with every jolting mile back into the danger they’d lost so much trying to escape.

  They finally arrived, filthy and exhausted, at the New Converts’ House on t
he Right Bank of Paris. To Pernelle’s surprise—though she was too nearly spent for surprise at anything—the nuns who were to be their keepers were quiet and gentle. There was water for washing, hot food, and decently blanketed straw pallets for sleep. The next day, the women had to go to Mass in the morning and Compline in the evening, but other than that, they were at first allowed simply to eat and rest. Then those able to work were made to, and Pernelle spent two days silently scrubbing floors, going with the other captives to and from the chapel to hear sermons, and helping in the kitchen. Behind her outward obedience, she prayed constantly for Lucie and Julie, and tried to remember all she’d ever heard in Nîmes about the Huguenot highway—the secret route from helper to helper that got Huguenots out of France—and where it might run in Paris.

  On the fifth night in the New Converts’ House, she lay straight and still on her pallet, listening to the small sounds of the women sleeping around her and the snoring of the leering guard called Gustave, who slept outside their barred door like a watchdog. So far, there had been no sign or sound at night of a guard in the garden below the window. The convent windows were barred lower down, but here on the fourth floor they weren’t. She supposed the fourth floor seemed an unlikely entrance for thieves and an even less likely exit for female captives.

  Silently, she pushed off her blanket, stood up, and picked up her cloak from the end of the bed. The room was bat dark, but there was a moon, and in its light she picked her way around the other pallets to the window. The window stood open to the night, because the women had agreed that the night air’s danger was better than being shut in.

  The window looked out on the convent’s walled back garden, silver and black now with moonlight, nothing but leaf shadows moving in the breeze. She was surprised at the huge city’s quiet, but she sensed that it was a live, breathing quiet and easily disturbed. She stared down at the decorative ledge below the window and tried to gather her courage. She’d noticed the ledge the first time she opened the shutters. Perhaps ten inches wide, it ran the length of the building. Go now, she urged herself, trying to ignore her thumping heart. The longer she stayed here, the fewer her chances of escape would be. Every day it would be harder to stay quiet, harder not to anger her keepers past hope and get herself confined where escape would be impossible. Biting her lip, she looked back at the sleeping women, conscience-stricken at leaving them, as she’d left her neighbors in Nîmes. But of the remaining six women, only one looked as if she might be able to walk the ledge, and Pernelle wasn’t even sure of her. Knowing that if this chance failed, she might never find her way back to Lucie, Pernelle turned resolutely to the window.

  Grimly grateful for the guards’ poor opinion of female abilities, she put on her cloak, gathered her skirts, and pushed the small, inward-swinging casement back against the wall of the room. Holding her breath, she swung her legs over the sill, found the ledge with her feet, and eased herself through the window. Holding to the windowsill, she stood up, one foot in front of the other on the slender path of stone. If she could find handholds enough on the walls’ rough stonework—and if no one was wakeful and looking out the windows—she could reach the building’s corner, where a tree soared and spread its branches.

  The moonlight showed her every crevice and detail of the pale stone wall, but she felt terrifyingly visible as she pressed her right hip against the wall, inched her front foot forward, brought her back foot up behind it, and repeated the move until she could grasp a projecting piece of stone. Looking only at the wall stretching ahead, she inched her way to the next window. To her relief, both the casement and the shutter inside were closed. Clinging to another jagged handhold, she made her slow way forward. One more window. She had nearly reached it before she realized it was open. She froze, listening to the faint snoring coming from inside the room. The sleeper snored on, and finally Pernelle made herself move. Steadying herself with a hand on the window’s edge, she willed her feet to silence and went past as quickly as she could. Then she was facing the final long stretch of stone, but it was smoother stone with little to grasp. Go on, she told herself. But her body refused to obey.

  Suddenly, and so clearly that she risked a startled look over her shoulder, she heard Charles’s voice telling her to remember climbing the rocks with him, reminding her that he’d called her Little Goat because she was so surefooted, so fearless. She slid her front foot forward, then her back foot, hugging the wall with her hip and her side, until it seemed she’d been doing only that for a lifetime. Her knees began to tremble. At the corner, she traced the slant of a tree branch with her eyes from the wall to the trunk. She jumped and caught the rough bark of the limb with her hands. She swung her legs up, locked her ankles together around the branch, and hung like a deer carried home from the hunt on a pole. Then she inched her way to the trunk, felt with her feet for the crotch of a lower branch, and levered herself upright. Breathing a fervent prayer of thanks to God, she wrapped her arms around the tree and rested her head against it until she stopped shaking.

  Climbing down was far easier than the journey to the tree. Before she dropped to the ground, she rested a little more, listening and watching, and licked her scraped hands to ease them—and to keep from leaving blood where it might be seen. She wanted there to be no trace of her going. Let the guards and the nuns think some witch or demon had taken her in the night for her sins. Ears pricked for the slightest sound, she dropped lightly onto the grass, picked up her skirts, and ran from the tree’s shadow to a dark stretch of the garden wall. With the help of an old grapevine, she hoisted herself to the top and dropped lightly into the street.

  As Pernelle’s feet touched the cobbles, bells began to clamor. She cowered against the wall, thinking that her escape was discovered. Then reason came back and she realized that the bells were ringing for midnight prayers. Walking the ledge had taken longer than she’d thought, and in a very few moments the hunt would be up, because the women were awakened for Matins and Lauds. She fled, turning wherever she found a street that took her farther from the convent, choosing always the darkest way, running for her life and the hope of once more holding Lucie in her arms.

  Gasping for breath and holding her side, she came to the end of a lane and found herself facing a towering stone wall. She rounded the corner of it and saw that she was skirting a church. In the distance, voices shouted and answered. She leaped up the church steps and flung herself at a massive door, which opened and spilled her onto cold stone. Scrambling to her knees, she pushed the door shut and leaned against it, fumbling for a way to lock it and panting for breath, a hunted animal too spent to go farther. There seemed to be no bolt and she moved farther from the door, hoping the darkness would hide her.

  But no one came pounding up the steps after her. The church’s hush enfolded her like a cloud. Feeling her way, she followed the line of pillars along the right side of the nave. Moonlight gleamed distantly from a few windows high up in the walls, but mostly there was only the matte lightlessness of stone. She crept toward the distant altar lamp like a castaway sailor swimming toward a shore light. Not that she could sleep there. If a drowsy priest saying the morning’s first Mass tripped over her, she doubted he’d let her claim sanctuary as a fugitive Huguenot.

  But she needed to rest, if not sleep. And being out in the city at this hour, even if she evaded the guards, would be more dangerous than staying here. Moving away from the line of pillars, she found the side wall and felt her way along it, feeling for openings to side chapels, alcoves, somewhere she’d be hidden if she did fall asleep. Suddenly, the wall wasn’t there and a cool air current brushed her face. She moved cautiously into the opening and smothered a cry as she tripped and fell forward. Feeling cautiously with her hands, she realized she’d fallen onto a stone step, the foot of a staircase, down which the current of air was blowing. It smelled of unwashed bodies, even more unwashed than her own. Beggars and vagabonds. Crowds of them roamed the roads, even though la
st year’s harvest had been good and this year’s promised well. They slept in fields and under bridges and, when they could, under any roof that would have them. Telling herself that she, too, was a vagabond now, she crept up the stairs.

  The air around her was alive with soft breathing, snores, an occasional rasping cough or sleepy whimper. She ventured a few feet beyond the stairhead, feeling with her feet so she wouldn’t trip over a sleeping body. She’d lost all sense of direction and had no idea now where the front of the church was. Her thighs butted up against a barrier and she tilted forward into empty air. She cried out and her flailing hands closed on the stone railing she’d hit. Voices muttered irritably and someone cursed her. Seeing the altar lamp burning below, she realized she’d run into the balustrade around a gallery above the nave. She sank down beside the railing and cautiously pushed herself a little away from it, to be better hidden from below. Burrowing into her cloak, she lay down and gave herself over to sleep. She dreamed that a soft light bloomed above her in the darkness.

  The murmuring Latin of the Mass drew her slowly out of sleep. Alarmed at how late it must be, she raised herself on an elbow and saw that the other sleepers in the gallery were gone. Well, she couldn’t go anywhere now, not until the Mass ended and the church was empty. Better to lie still and quiet. She lay down again, blinking up at the shadow-hung roof and listening to the soft prayers rising in the air. It seemed impossible that sounds so gentle and places so drenched in centuries of prayer had birthed the violence she was fleeing. That thought brought her fully awake to the fact that the people murmuring the soft words would be only too glad to return her to her prison. Or worse. When the staccato tap of heels told her the Mass was over and the small group of worshippers were leaving, she rose to her knees and peered cautiously down into the nave. A thin, stooped priest was putting away the altar vessels. She watched his slow coming and going, willing him to finish and leave. Then the west door crashed open, the heavy tread of boots burst into the church, and Pernelle cowered to the floor.