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

by Rock, Judith

  “You may not bring weapons in here, messieurs,” the priest called out sternly.

  “We’re hunting a fugitive heretic, mon père. The witch got out of the New Converts’ House last night, the devil only knows how. Black hair, green cloak. Pretty.”

  Pernelle hardly dared to breathe. The voice belonged to Gustave, the New Converts’ guard. From the noise of boots, he wasn’t alone.

  “As you see, my son, there is no one here but me.”

  Pernelle searched the gallery frantically with her eyes, looking for somewhere better to hide. But there was nowhere. Her only chance was to find another staircase leading down from the gallery before the guards came up to search. She started crawling on all fours toward the gallery’s west end. Behind her, Gustave rumbled a question at the priest.

  “Oh, yes, beggars sleep in the gallery at night,” she heard the priest say mildly. “But they’re gone. I clear them all out very early before people come for Mass, poor devils. I make sure no one stays up there. Though, of course, they’re welcome to stay in the nave and hear Mass.”

  “We’ll look, anyway,” the guard said, his voice coming nearer. “I tell you, this heretic’s a witch, she goes invisible when she wants to. Take that side, Bernard.”

  “Wait—this heretic.” The priest’s tone was suddenly sharper, as though he’d thought of something. “You say she wears a green cloak? Now that I think, I did see someone in a green cloak. Before dawn, that was, when I shooed the beggars out of the gallery. You’ll no doubt find her a few streets over—there’s a fountain where the beggars go to drink after they wake. Most of them stay a little to divide up the day’s begging places. But then they’ll be making for the streets. And the roads out of the city, many go there, you know. So if I were you, I would go quickly.”

  The guard who seemed to be in charge grunted skeptically. “Which fountain do you mean?”

  “Toward the old wall and then left before you reach it. You’ll pass a cookshop—a very good one, the smells will guide you—and then you’re there.”

  “Cookshop?” Pernelle heard the other guard say hopefully.

  “We’ll be back if she’s not there,” the one in charge growled at the priest.

  Their boots thudded down the nave and out the door. Shaking with relief, Pernelle risked a glance over the rail. The priest’s back was to her. He repositioned the candlesticks and fussed for a few minutes more over nothing much. Then he went slowly down the nave, hands clasped at his waist and head bent as though he were praying. He opened the enormous door, propped it wide, and stood for a while in the doorway. Just as she decided to risk the stairs, he returned and disappeared through a low, arched door into what she guessed was the sacristy. He came back with a cup and something in a napkin, bent out of sight behind the altar, and straightened again with empty hands. With a fleeting glance up at Pernelle’s side of the gallery, he disappeared back into the sacristy and closed the old door firmly behind him. Pernelle heard a key grate in the lock.

  She swallowed and her empty stomach growled. Suddenly she remembered her dream of a light shining above her. So the priest really had seen her in her green cloak. Most likely when he roused the beggars. But why hadn’t he turned her out with the rest? Had he perhaps seen the quality of her dirty clothes, seen that she wasn’t in such bad case as the others? Did he wonder if she might be a fugitive Huguenot? Had he set a trap for her with the cup and the napkin? But no, if he meant to give her up, he could easily have done it when the guards were there.

  She let her stomach lead her warily down into the nave. The church was filled again with a thick silence that seemed to stifle the sounds of Paris and its morning business. She ran on tiptoe to the altar and ducked behind it. The earthenware cup was full of watered wine. The napkin held a hunk of dark bread as big as her hand and a savory piece of cheese. Huddled there, hidden from anyone coming into the church, she ate and drank ravenously. When the edge was gone from her hunger, she put some bread and cheese in the pocket under her skirt. Wondering about this priest who gave bread and wine to a heretic, she folded the linen napkin, laid it on top of the cup, and whispered her thanks toward the sacristy. Then she tore a piece of blue linen from her remaining petticoat and bound her hair with it, turned her green cloak so that only its plain brown lining showed, and slipped out of the church’s south door to search for the Huguenot highway.

  Chapter 8

  Pernelle’s husband, David, had told her once that in Paris, there was a merchant who helped fugitives along the route. All she could remember about him was that his name was François, and that he sold grain at a market called Les Halles. But when she found Les Halles and saw its size, its long crowded halls and the thronged vendors’ booths and carts outside, her courage failed her. A flare of suspicion, a hard grip on her arm, and a yell for police, and she would be shut up again in the convent, or some far worse place.

  Wanting a better disguise while she tried to think what to do, Pernelle plucked a broken-sided basket from a rubbish heap, tied her cloak around her waist like a rough apron, and mingled with the crowd, passing well enough as some slatternly household’s slatternly servant. She found the grain hall easily enough, a long building, well roofed but open-sided. She walked slowly along it, squinting through the dusty air and watching narrow-eyed merchants and wary buyers. Many of them argued across tables that held only empty scales. They were arguing over what didn’t yet exist, she realized. This year’s crops were still ripening in the fields. But they were banking on the good enough weather lasting long enough to produce a good enough harvest. She wondered whether that was audacity or faith, and whether there was a difference. Whichever it was, it somehow shored up her own hopes.

  But how to find the man called François? Such a common name--there was no telling how many men in the grain hall were called that. She walked slowly along the hall, watching and listening, but learning nothing. Finally, she withdrew to the shade of a tree beside the market wall and sat down to eat a little of her bread and cheese and try to think. She could ask someone in the hall for François. But the way she looked, no one of quality was likely to listen to her. She looked covertly at a ragged man and boy dozing against the wall. They looked like beggars, but François sounded like a man who would give alms.

  She turned toward the man. “Monsieur?” His eyes flew open and she saw that he was blind. “I beg your pardon,” she said, “But do you know a man called François who sells in the grain hall?”

  The man’s whitened eyes seemed to stare at her. “Why?”

  “My master sent me with a message, but I can’t—” Pernelle broke off as a familiar voice turned her throat dry with fear.

  “No luck here, damn the bitch. We’ll go toward the river.”

  The guard from New Converts was coming toward the tree. Pernelle slid close to the startled blind man and nestled against him. “Please,” she whispered, “help me, pretend to sleep. I beg you.” She felt his shrug and nestled her head on his bony shoulder.

  Boots tramped past. She opened her eyes just enough to see the New Converts guard and his fellow going toward the market gate. When they had shoved their way through, she sat up and felt in her pocket.

  “Here. It’s all I have. God keep you.” Ignoring the blind man’s questions, she thrust the remains of her bread and cheese into his hands, stood up, and hurried in the opposite direction from the way the guards had gone.

  She walked along the grain hall again and again learned nothing. She asked a shopping maidservant about François and got only a shrug. By the time the bells were ringing noon, she was near panic—and tormented by the smell of meat pies from a vendor’s booth. Unable to help herself, she drifted toward the booth. Theft was a serious crime. But her body refused to consider what would happen if she was caught. When the woman in the booth bent to pick up coins she’d dropped, Pernelle snatched a pie, hid her hand in a fold o
f her skirt, and smiled at the vendor, rising red-faced from her search. Turning serenely toward the gate, like someone with no worries in the world, Pernelle went to find a place where she could sit and eat, and try again to think.

  Outside the gate, she walked beside a high wall, toward the sound of splashing water. At the corner where the wall turned, she found herself in the midst of servants and housewives filling pottery jugs, brass ewers, and wooden buckets at spigots ranged along the walls of a fountain. The fountain had been built to look like two small but elaborate houses, with a walkway between them, and above the spigots, the stone was an elaborate fantasy of carving, wide arches, and gables. She stood in the shortest line, watching the women come and go, aching with envy of their aproned and coiffed domesticity, for the settled familiarity of their lives.

  When she reached the brass spigot, she stooped and cupped her hand to drink directly from its stream. Then, looking for a place to sit away from the street, she went a little way along the paved walk between the fountain’s two “houses” and sat down against a wall. She bit into the fat meat pie, closing her eyes in thanks as its rich juices filled her mouth. When she opened her eyes to take another bite, a dirty, bony yellow dog was sitting in front of her. It looked even more gnawed by hunger than she was and tracked the pie with its soulful eyes like someone watching a slow game of tennis. She broke off a piece and held it out. The dog swallowed it at a gulp. They finished the pie together, the dog edging closer with every offering, quivering with hope and gratitude. It was only a dog, but Pernelle’s eyes pricked with tears. Dear God, she prayed, don’t let Lucie and Julie be hungry, don’t let them be lost.

  A smell stronger than the dog’s assailed her, and she looked up. A tattered, barefoot young woman sat down beside her and began nursing a swaddled baby. Shoving a mass of greasy blond hair off her face, the girl looked scornfully from Pernelle to the dog, which was now lying with its head in Pernelle’s lap. Pernelle leaned forward to look at the greedily sucking baby.

  “Is it a boy or a girl?”

  The mother scowled suspiciously at Pernelle. “You some kind of foreigner, you?” Her voice rasped like an old gate.

  The response to her unfamiliar accent woke Pernelle’s caution. The dog whined and she turned away to stroke its head.

  “Give you fleas, that thing will,” the girl said. “It’s a boy.”

  “The dog?”

  The girl rolled her eyes. “What do I care about a dog? Can’t see its privates anyway, can I? Him.” She nodded down at the baby. “You asked.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Doesn’t have one yet, he might not live.” The girl bent over the nameless infant, wetting her finger in her mouth and cleaning the little face. “The first one didn’t.”

  No, Pernelle thought sadly, looking at the pair. Given what this girl’s life was probably like, and the tendency of babies to die, this one was unlikely to live long. Pernelle leaned against the wall and closed her eyes, remembering the two newborn sons she’d lost before Lucie was born. David and Charles, she’d named them. They’d been just that size in their swaddling, just that warm weight in her arms . . .

  When she awoke, girl, baby, and dog were gone and the shadows had stretched eastward. Pernelle got up, washed her face and hands at the fountain, and brushed at her dirty skirts. She knew now what she was going to try next.

  But first, she needed bait. Apologizing to God for more stealing, she searched for a pastry stall, but found only a stringy old woman with a tray of tarts hanging from a strap around her neck. Stealing from under the woman’s long nose was impossible, but Pernelle followed her anyway, hoping for a miracle—though not praying for one, since she could hardly pray for successful theft.

  But as the tart seller reached the end of the market, a swarm of yelling, ragged children rushed from behind a huddle of loaded wagons and gave Pernelle the miracle she hadn’t asked for. The children nearly knocked the woman down. The woman shrieked and grabbed for the tarts raining from her tray, but the skinny children were faster. All except the youngest boy, and Pernelle was too fast for him. Grabbing up the last two tarts, which had fallen behind the woman, Pernelle thought that at last her luck was changing. This was going to be even easier than she’d imagined.

  “Come here,” she mouthed at the outraged child, “and you can have them.”

  She walked quickly toward the grain hall, not bothering to look back. No street child would abandon food, especially not something sweet. When she stopped and turned, the boy was at her skirts, scowling and holding out his hand.

  “What is your name, mon petit?”

  “Louis. And I am not little.”

  “I beg your pardon.” He looked perhaps seven, but she knew he could be older, since he surely did not get enough to eat. “Are you big enough to remember what people say to you?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a message.”

  “Of course.”

  “I want you to take a message into the grain hall and bring back the answer. Start with that one.”

  The boy’s pinched face was eager. “I will fly like an eagle, madame, and come back in a little instant. Then I will have the tarts?”

  “Yes. But before you fly, listen to the message. Ask for a man called François. Tell him a traveler wishes to see him. There.” She pointed to the shadowed alley she’d noticed between two of the halls.

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes. But be sure you say a traveler,” she cautioned. Traveler was a Huguenot highway code for a fugitive who needed help.

  She watched him into the hall and then slipped into the alley at the hall’s end, noticing uneasily that the alley’s far end was blocked by a blank wall. After what seemed an interminable wait, a bulky figure darkened the alley’s entrance.

  “Monsieur—” Pernelle stopped in confusion. The figure blocking her way was wearing skirts.

  “Who are you?” the woman hissed.

  She took a few steps into the alley, letting in light, and Pernelle saw that she was fifty or so, in an aproned black gown and short white veil over a close-fitting white coif.

  “I want Monsieur François,” Pernelle said, thinking that she would be faster than this woman if she had to run.

  “You are too late. So it’s you they’re looking for? The guards?”

  Pernelle ignored that. “Too late? What do you mean?”

  “They discovered him”—the woman’s voice broke—“they found out somehow that he helps—people like you. Our travelers. A mob beat him and tried to burn our house.”

  “He is your husband?”

  “My brother. He is like to die. So far, Lieutenant-Général La Reynie—the head of the police—has left many of us—many Huguenots—alone here in Paris. But only so far. God help you, madame, because I cannot. Forgive me.”

  She was gone in a whirl of skirts, leaving the sour smell of fear behind her. Badly shaken, Pernelle crept to the alley’s mouth. Someone grabbed her skirt and she jerked away, stifling a shriek.

  “It is not my fault the man wasn’t there, madame!” Her small indignant errand boy stood in front of her.

  “No,” she whispered,” it isn’t.”

  She held out the tarts with shaking hands. He grabbed them and stuffed one whole into his mouth as he turned and ran, nearly colliding with the pair of guards, back again and going into the grain hall.

  Chapter 9

  Pernelle forced herself to stride purposefully through the market gate, holding her basket under her cloak and leaning a little, as though it were heavy after a successful marketing. Through the gate, around a corner and another and another, ignoring a preaching monk, a shouting coachman, a broadside seller singing a scurrilous ditty about a playwright, she walked as though she knew where she was going and didn’t want to be late. It took every sh
red of self-control she had. She wanted to run until Paris was far behind her, but innocent ordinary women did not run in the street, and her only chance was to remain unnoticed. As she walked, she wondered if she could at least avoid starving by hiring herself out as a servant in another part of the city, far from the New Converts’ House. If she could clean herself up a little more, she would be presentable. She’d learned, since the dragoons came, to be a good enough liar. She knew how to pretend to be Catholic. She—

  A woman’s screams brought her sharply back to the present. Two men walking ahead of her looked at each other and started toward the sound. But when raucous male laughter half drowned the screams, they shrugged and kept walking. Pernelle, remembering how the guards had controlled the Huguenot women with touches and insinuations and threats on the way to Paris, forgot everything else and ran toward the screams. They were coming from a courtyard just beyond a secondhand clothes dealer’s shop. The courtyard’s wooden gate hung half off its hinges, and Pernelle looked cautiously around it. Across the garbage littered cobbles, a pair of laughing men had a cursing, kicking girl trapped against a wall. The girl was clutching a shrieking baby against her breast, and Pernelle recognized her as the girl from the fountain. The man pressing her to the wall pulled her skirts higher, and his fellow started to unlace his own breeches.

  Pernelle grabbed up a short heavy piece of board fallen from the gate and flew at them. Their own noise covered her running, and she caught the one who was thrusting his loins at the woman full on the back of the head. He dropped like an ox. The other man lunged at her, and she swung the board again with all her strength. She overbalanced and the blow was glancing, but his knees buckled and he went down. The girl with the baby was pawing through scattered trash in the yard’s corner and cursed as Pernelle dragged her unceremoniously out of the court.