City of Crows

by Chris Womersley

  About City of Crows

  A woman’s heart contains all things . . .

  France, 1673. Desperate to save herself and her only surviving child from an outbreak of plague, the widow Charlotte Picot flees her village to seek sanctuary in Lyon.

  But, waylaid on the road by slavers, young Nicolas is stolen and his mother left for dead. Charlotte fears the boy has been taken to Paris for sale, for it is well known there is no corruption in a man’s heart that cannot be found in that terrible City of Crows.

  Yet this is not only a story of Paris and its streets thronged with preachers, troubadours and rogues. It is also the tale of a woman who calls herself a sorceress and a demon who thinks he is a man . . .

  ‘One of the unrepentantly daring and original talents in the landscape of Australian fiction.’ – Sydney Morning Herald

  Contents

  Cover

  About City of Crows

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Townscape

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About Chris Womersley

  Also by Chris Womersley

  Accolades and Awards for Chris Womersley

  Copyright page

  For Minka

  I have never seen a greater monster

  or miracle in the world than myself

  Michel de Montaigne

  Faith is to believe what you do not see;

  the reward of this faith is to see what you believe

  Saint Augustine

  France

  1673

  1

  Summer stole across the country, bringing its heat and its fevers to their side of the mountain, to the cluster of cottages known locally as Saint-Gilles, and some days Charlotte Picot thought that all of them, one by one, would surely die from the plague. It had its own particular smell, said those who had encountered it up close. Slightly sour, of things turned bad, like meat gone to rot or the woollen rags found sometimes by the old bridge.

  They attempted innumerable cures, as always. Scented grasses were burned in a special brass bowl, orisons were murmured, promises of one sort or another made to the stars and moon. A group of local women ventured to a nearby rock that was shaped like a crouching devil and berated the mute thing, threatened all sorts of reprisals should their families die of the sickness. Spare our mother, our sister, oh please, you little bastard.

  One afternoon a travelling merchant named Hugo appeared in Saint-Gilles, a man no one recalled ever seeing before and, with much fanfare and brandishing of instruments, he set about cutting the lump from the armpit of Céline, the midwife, as others held her down.

  ‘It’s a method I learned in Venice,’ he told them. ‘You’re lucky I happened past! All the greatest doctors in the world are performing this procedure. In Naples, in Toulouse. You people know nothing of the wider world.’

  And they deferred politely to him – because that was the kind of people they were – but said outside, privately: ‘Certainly we know nothing of the world, but what is there, really, to know?’

  The smell of her exposed gristle, they said later, was putrid, and pus bubbled from Céline’s ugly wound thick and yellow, as if she had been storing soft cheese for too long beneath the folds of her skin. The operation was grotesque, a failure, and the peddler was hounded from the village with sticks, with rocks and a mighty kick up the arse. All up and down the other side of the valley he taunted them as he went, his shouts echoing against the rocks like those of a drunken soldier, all laughter and scorn and You tribe of fucking peasants, if the fever won’t get you then the bandits eventually will, peasants . . . eventually will . . . will . . .

  Poor Céline’s cries and moans disturbed the sleep of everyone in the vicinity until her husband, acting from kindness, from sorrow, and on a vision that had visited him in a dream, smothered the woman with a blanket. There was no money for a coffin, certainly no time to fashion one, so she was sewn into a winding sheet, a coin placed into her clawed hand, and then buried in the cemetery further up the mountain. Happy as a corpse was the saying in their country, and never was it truer. They remarked, those who attended her burial, that Céline sighed in her sheet like a saint when the first spadeful of dirt splashed onto her face, as if she were a burning woman sensing the cool water that might ease her agonies.

  When Charlotte was a girl, her father had delighted in frightening her and her brother with descriptions of the Wild Horde who roamed the countryside with the strange Hellequin at their head, leading fresh souls to the underworld. Sometimes he would tell her of having spied this unruly parade of the dead on the previous night and how he had been forced to bar the door against their entrance. And now, on some nights in the midst of this latest outbreak of fever, she heard the sinister gambolling of the Wild Horde as it passed through their country, the hem of Hellequin’s cloak swishing in the dirt, fingers scratching his bristly chin as he pondered where next to make his dreaded visit. Yes, thinking, thinking, thinking.

  In the morning, Charlotte’s husband Michel Picot left their cottage to organise the sale of several horses in a nearby town, but Charlotte forbade her young son Nicolas to go outside unless he needed to shit. Already she had lost three children. Two daughters in the same year to fever and a son who couldn’t survive his infancy. She would not lose another. No. No. No. The thick curtain lapped at the window frame. They crouched in near darkness, a single candle burning, silent, their hands wedged beneath their thighs as if already entombed. Nicolas was afraid and sullen and he spoke even less than usual. He had always been easily frightened and now he sat on the edge of the bed rocking back and forth, occasionally murmuring prayers, his head overflowing with crickets.

  The other villagers also remained indoors if they could. Occasionally they called out encouragements to each other. Still alive over there, are you, my dear? Have courage. It will be over soon enough. There were more prayers offered to Saint Roque and his faithful dog. Prayers they had all offered before, with limited success.

  From the centre of their low ceiling, in a hard shaft of sunlight, a spider dangled on her silken thread. The sight of the creature chilled Charlotte because, as everyone knew, it was bad luck to see a spider in the morning. Charlotte watched the creature for a long time, thinking how like an abyss must this room be for one so tiny. Did she feel fear, this spid
er, spinning around on her thread? What did she see with her tiny eyes? Did she wonder at the largeness and strangeness of this world? The tiny black creature hung there for a long time, revolving slowly as if admiring the room and its meagre fittings, before clambering, leg over leg, back up her thread.

  At that time of the year, the days were hot and long, but Charlotte was nothing if not patient. She and Nicolas and Michel would outlast this fever. Yes. She and Nicolas and Michel would outlast this fever. In this way, time passed.

  But when it came, oh, it came. Just as she feared it would.

  2

  Three days later, the villagers filed into the cottage and said their prayers over Michel Picot’s body before they arranged themselves on the low bench along the wall to mutter and pray. It was late afternoon. At times the dark cottage overflowed with the earnest sounds of devotion, and this comforted Charlotte somewhat. When the cottage became too crowded, the village men gathered outside in the warm breeze, smoking their pipes and talking in low tones. The women stayed indoors, moving around unhurriedly like murmuring ghosts.

  Charlotte listened vaguely to their condolences, to their assurances as to Michel’s entry into heaven, of the friends and relatives he would surely encounter there. His children, his parents, God himself on his great throne. Think, also, of the suffering he would no longer have to endure. No hunger or sorrow. The curé, Monsieur Larouche, who had not been able to come over from the church in time to hear his last confession, sprinkled holy water over Michel and prayed loudly. He felt certain, he said, that Michel’s soul had been in good order before he died. Charlotte sensed this to be true; although the parish church was some leagues away, she and Michel and Nicolas had attended Mass there almost every Sunday.

  Late in the day, the villagers left her and Nicolas alone to finalise preparations for Michel’s burial. As was the custom in their country, Charlotte leaned close to her husband’s face and said his name three times to offer him a final opportunity to prove he was alive.

  ‘Michel,’ she said. ‘Michel. Michel.’

  No response, of course. No flicker of eyelid, no warmth of breath, no pulse of blood. A thick and empty body. Dry teeth. Michel’s mortal suffering had ended, but never again would he press his face to a horse’s mane or bite into an apple. He would not pause a moment in the day to watch his son wrestling with friends or playing a game with the other boys of the village, never gaze upon her as she undressed for him. A drop of holy water glistened on his temple, like a dead man’s tear. Sorrow, then, was the price of this life. With a finger she wiped away the drop of water and put it on her tongue.

  How difficult it was to believe there was no one behind that waxen mask. Where had he gone? They all said to heaven, and yet it was tempting to imagine her husband somewhere deep inside his own body, as if in a labyrinth of vast caverns, becoming ever smaller and fainter as he journeyed away. Charlotte pictured this miniature version of Michel hearing her voice calling his name and pausing momentarily to ponder its echo before continuing onwards, downwards, until he was finally out of earshot. For a long time she observed his face for any sign of such fanciful interior activity, then placed her palm to the cool, dry skin of his forehead. No. He was gone. The dead, at least, cannot die again; this was some consolation.

  As she had done for each of her children when they had died, she took up a knife and gently cut off a curl of her husband’s dark hair. Michel’s hair was coarser, naturally, and as she rolled the lock between her fingers, she was overcome. Her own tears dripped from her eyes and bloomed momentarily dark on the white linen of the winding sheet before they dried. Her husband had been quiet, dependable, kind. Yes, she had loved him in her way.

  When she had composed herself, she tied this lock of hair with a short length of twine and deposited it in an envelope of paper with the others. She took out her needle and twine and began to sew the winding sheet closed. The tiny pock and draw of the thread was the only sound in the cottage; Nicolas was quiet, even the stove burned silent. She concentrated, took her time. This final act of tenderness she performed most diligently, pinching the sheet well clear of her husband’s chest, his throat, his chin. Skin slack, his plum-coloured mouth, silver bristles. Nicolas shifted impatiently on the bench behind her.

  Earlier today she and her son had washed Michel’s body with a damp cloth and dressed him for burial in his wedding clothes, softly and superstitiously explaining their movements to him as they worked, so that he might find no reason to object to their ministrations were he able to hear them. There, your arm in the shirt like so, Father. Your best shoes. Your hands are cold, my dear. Remember when we were married, the storm that night so loud?

  Into his nostrils they had stuffed plugs of cloth. She could see the blood already pooling under the skin at his shoulders, along his thighs. His body lolling as they moved him, arm flopping at an awkward angle, eyes stubbornly open but unseeing. The only purpose of a corpse was to display the boundaries of life.

  And now her husband, the only man she had ever known, was gradually being sealed away, as if inside another skin.

  Nicolas broke the silence. ‘What do you think it’s like?’

  Charlotte paused, one hand in the air holding the needle. She cleared her throat. ‘What is what like?’

  ‘For my father.’

  ‘What can you mean, Nicolas?’

  ‘What does he – I don’t know – what can he see?’

  Charlotte considered the sheet in which they had wrapped her husband. His milky eyes and the blackened mouth that had been locked open so hard they had been unable to force it shut, try as they might. Beneath his earlobe was a tiny speck of dried blood they had missed. She restrained herself from wiping it away.

  ‘Louis once told me that he saw a woman having her head cut off and after it was done, her eyes were still wide open in her head. While it was on the ground. And that the woman looked at him and spoke.’

  Charlotte had heard this kind of fantastic story before – and many others like it. It seemed they were living in an age of terrible wonders. She had heard of nuns who spat nails from their mouths, of men who could fly through the air on greased sticks, of the woman with cat’s paws instead of hands hidden beneath the sleeves of her gown. These tales she didn’t quite believe, but nor did she discount them altogether.

  She turned to her son. ‘And what did this headless woman say?’

  As if to ensure they were not overheard, Nicolas glanced around before speaking. It was clear this was something he had long wanted to tell her but had been too fearful to – until now.

  ‘She said: “It’s getting late, my child. I see dark halls and so many vast underground chambers. It is surely time for you to go home for the night.” This was while her body was still tied to the chair. Then she blinked because there was blood in her eyes, blood all over the ground. Her own blood. Then she died.’

  Nicolas watched Charlotte intently to gauge her reaction to his anecdote. Firelight played over his ruddy cheeks. She remembered vividly the night he was born nine or so winters ago – the forest wolves howling at the scent of her fresh blood, snow banking up around the cottage – and felt a surge of love for the boy, her only child still living; the only son, now, that she would ever produce. The love for one’s child, she thought, was forever braided with an intense fear of his loss. It was an inescapable fact that the birth of a child meant disquiet for the mother.

  Charlotte coughed into her hand. ‘Well. I don’t know if we should trust the stories of young shepherd boys like Louis. I’m sure your father is by now in heaven. You have been listening to the curé, I hope?’

  ‘And what’s it like in heaven?’

  This son of hers, always full of questions, convinced there might actually be an ultimate answer to everything. The first word he uttered – why – would doubtless be his last.

  ‘I try not to think about it,’ she said eventually. Wh
ich was a lie, of course; it was impossible, in these fevered days, not to think of death and what might be beyond. Brood on it she did, and often. But, in order to forestall further interrogation, she added: ‘You have heard what the curé has told you, have you not? He knows what it is like there. He knows all there is to know about such things.’

  Nicolas shrugged.

  ‘It’s beautiful in heaven,’ she continued. ‘It’s sunny and there is always enough to eat. All the people you have ever loved will be there. Which is why you must always try to be good, so you can meet them again.’

  ‘My sisters? My brother?’

  Charlotte took a moment to answer. ‘Yes,’ she murmured at last. ‘And there are angels playing beautiful music. Green fields, sunlight. Lovely sweet wine.’

  ‘My father would enjoy that, at least.’

  She was uncertain if this was intended as a joke, for Nicolas was not renowned among his fellows for his sense of humour. She smiled for the first time in days and felt ashamed for doing so. ‘Indeed he would.’

  A sudden gust of wind skittered down the chimney and nudged a glowing coal from the grate. The coal landed on the dirt floor, where it throbbed several times with orange light before expiring.

  But, of course, the boy’s interrogation was not yet complete. ‘What did you say to my father? Before, you leaned over him and spoke with him. I saw you.’

  Charlotte was sad and weary and this conversation was only making her more so. ‘I wished him well on his journey and said that I would see him again in heaven one day. That’s all I said.’

  Nicolas sniffled. ‘Should you not have said a prayer for him?’

  ‘I did, Nicolas. And I prayed for us, too. God has a lot to do in these times, I think, and we need his help. Your father’s time had come. He has left us. He has gone from this earth.’

  Nicolas sniffed, wiped his eyes. ‘He won’t come back?’

  ‘No.’