Charlotte looked back at the tavern, thinking and worrying as Lesage made his various weak excuses. It was some time before she gathered the courage to speak. ‘But you have to do what I tell you or you’re of no use to me, monsieur. Come. Now. We should hurry. I think perhaps we should go around the back, through this field.’
The man scowled and licked his glistening lips, then peered about as if hoping to spy someone coming to rescue him before he nodded and muttered agreement.
The barley was waist high and insects sprang in front of them with tiny squeaks and twitters as they waded through its nodding, dew-heavy stalks. The tavern was one of three buildings located at the bend in the road. There also appeared to be a forge, as she had smelled, and another cottage set some distance away from the others. Thankfully, there appeared to be no one about as they neared the low-roofed barn at the rear of the tavern.
‘There,’ Lesage whispered. ‘He’s in there.’
‘Where is your weapon?’
Lesage produced a knife from beneath his clothes. It was not long past dawn; the sun was rising in the east. Charlotte had a sudden sense of the largeness and strangeness of the world, and felt uncertain and alone. She thought of Saint-Gilles, of her cottage, of her stove.
She considered the rickety barn. Her poor son. She tucked a strand of loose hair beneath her scarf, picked up her sack of supplies, and they pressed on. Her mouth was dry and her heart beat hard. They emerged from the field of barley and crossed a low wooden fence into the rear yard of the tavern. The privy reeked. With her strange new companion at her side, Charlotte approached the barn. A goat tethered to a nearby tree gazed at them with its slotted eyes and, for a moment, she glimpsed herself and Lesage as the goat doubtless saw them – a woman with a sack in one hand, and an older fellow carrying a knife and trailing after her muttering and tugging at the sleeves of his ill-fitting coat. Like a pair of grubby thieves or murderers creeping through the watery morning light. And she saw, also, with a sickening jolt of recognition, the fear glittering in her own green eyes as she gripped one of the struts of the shelter and peered into the gloom.
A grey donkey gazed back at her from beneath its long, courtly lashes. Bundles of straw, pieces of equipment, a disordered stack of cane baskets. Nothing else.
She turned to Lesage. ‘But there’s no one here. Nothing.’
Lesage shuffled up alongside her. His cheek twitched and he scratched the bristles on his chin with stubby fingers. He shrugged and looked around as if confident that Nicolas had perhaps merely been misplaced nearby. ‘He was here last night. Several children, chained up right here.’
‘You’re sure this was the place?’
‘Of course, madame. Yes. Definitely.’
Charlotte glanced at the rear of the tavern. One of the shutters hung awkwardly from its upstairs window, lending the place the appearance of a man cradling his broken shoulder. A rake and hoe leaned against a dirty white wall. A pile of broken bricks and a dungheap.
‘Perhaps they are inside the tavern?’ she ventured, although she thought it unlikely.
At that moment, as if summoned by her query, the tavern’s back door opened and the shadow of a man appeared in the doorway. Fearing it was one of the men who had attacked her, Charlotte stepped back. The man regarded her and Lesage as he sauntered in their direction, pushing his undershirt into his breeches and weaving from side to side as he did so.
‘Who is that?’ she whispered.
Lesage jammed his knife into his belt. ‘That is the tavern keeper, Monsieur Scarron.’
Indeed, Charlotte could smell wine and tobacco on the man’s breath as he drew near. She relaxed, but only slightly.
This Scarron called out as he approached. ‘You again, monsieur? Lesage! You are back. I did not think to see you so soon. You were in such a great hurry to leave last night . . .’
The two men shook hands. It was clear to Charlotte that this tavern owner was quite drunk; even when standing still he wobbled about like a newborn foal and his face was so sweaty that his cheeks resembled a pair of soft, dewy plums.
‘Where is my son?’ she asked him.
Scarron stared at her, as if bewildered she should speak at all. ‘Pardon, madame?’ Then, to Lesage: ‘What is she –?’
‘My son, monsieur. The children. Monsieur Lesage told me there were children here last night. Chained up. But where are they now? Please.’
Scarron turned to Lesage. ‘And who is this lovely lady?’
‘This is . . . Madame Picot,’ Lesage said.
‘Well, I’m charmed, Madame Picot.’ Scarron gestured so expansively towards his establishment that he almost toppled over. ‘Welcome to my tavern. It’s always a pleasure to see a beautiful woman in –’
‘Please, monsieur. My son. Where are the children?’
The fellow’s expression darkened. ‘There are no children here, madame. I’m not sure what you –’
‘My son was taken from me by some men several days ago.’ She gestured to Lesage. ‘This man said he saw them here last night, monsieur.’
The tavern keeper glanced at Lesage. ‘That’s impossible, madame.’
‘Please, monsieur. My son.’
The fellow sighed and his features contorted with what might have been anguish or guilt. ‘Your son, madame?’
‘Yes.’
‘But he told me they were orphans, madame. Honestly, I had no idea. I have children myself. I would never allow such goings-on at my establishment . . .’
‘Where are they now?’
Monsieur Scarron waved in the direction of the forest. ‘They have gone, madame. To Paris. Monsieur Horst took them away at first light. Long way to go, he told me.’
‘Was my Nicolas among them, monsieur? Please. He is nine years old. He has black hair, he is slight. Nicolas Picot?’
The tavern keeper put a hand to his chin and furrowed his brow. ‘Yes, madame. I think there was such a child.’
Charlotte reeled. She closed her eyes and covered her ears, as if she might make of her body a stoppered vessel to keep out the world. Perhaps this was all part of a terrible vision brought on by fever? It happened frequently. Oh yes. On the night before his death, Michel had imagined himself to be on a ship at sea, and she had heard also that the seamstress Agnes Popin had in her delirium believed herself to be floating about near the ceiling of her cottage. Am I still at home under heavy blankets, by the fire, being cared for by my family? Charlotte wondered. Would that it were so.
But when she opened her eyes and returned to herself, she was still in the yard of a tavern a long way from home as men talked on around her with a conspiratorial air.
‘So,’ the tavern keeper was saying, ‘did you find the woman you were seeking, monsieur?’
Lesage looked oddly at Charlotte, as if she might be expected to volunteer an answer herself. ‘It seems so,’ he said after an odd pause.
‘Now,’ the tavern keeper said, ‘Lesage, tell me: how long will it take?’
Lesage seemed distinctly uneasy in the tavern keeper’s company. ‘Pardon?’ he murmured.
‘My wife is hale and hearty this morning. How long does it take for the, you know, the message to make its way –’
Lesage stopped the fellow with a wave of his hand and glanced at Charlotte. ‘I think perhaps it’s best not to discuss this right now, Monsieur Scarron.’
The tavern keeper slapped a hand across his mouth. ‘Oh. Of course.’
Charlotte began to walk away. ‘Come,’ she said to Lesage. ‘We must keep going.’
She crossed the road and approached the path into the forest. Almost hidden in the long grass was a knee-high statue of the Virgin with her head bowed and both hands raised to the sky. The statue’s nose was worn almost entirely away and around her neck were garlands of dried daisies and rosary beads. At her feet were a pile of burned-down ca
ndles, dead flowers and pieces of paper with messages scrawled on them in script so tiny they might have been the work of fairies. Charlotte had nothing to offer, but kneeled momentarily and crossed herself.
‘Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.’
Then she caressed the woman’s rough head, hefted her sack and plunged into the forest.
‘Wait!’
She turned around. Lesage approached, breathing heavily. ‘Where are we going?’
‘To Paris, of course.’
He looked angry and determined as he wiped sweat from his forehead. ‘Madame, it is many days away. Can you not do some magic to get us there? Fly, if you are truly a sorceress?’ He paused. ‘Who are you, really?’
Charlotte’s heart turned in her chest. ‘I told you my name. Madame Picot. Charlotte Picot.’
He shook his head. ‘I was searching for the Forest Queen. A true witch. And that fellow Scarron’ – he gestured behind him towards the tavern – ‘didn’t recognise you, although he knows exactly who she is.’ He peered at her sceptically. ‘You’re just the boy’s mother, aren’t you? You’re no one.’
Charlotte displayed for him her left hand, with its grubby, bloody bandage covering the wound Madame Rolland had scored into her palm. In her other hand she held up the black book. ‘The old woman passed her powers along to me. I summoned you, and if you don’t do as I tell you, then I shall cast you back into hell, where you will suffer torment and pain.’
Never before had Charlotte threatened anyone in such a manner and her entire body was suffused with an unfamiliar but thrilling warmth. A draught of damp morning air blew in from the forest. She heard the murmurs of an animal. She sensed also, becoming heavier and heavier, the beating of her own heart. A wind sprang up and dry leaves rolled across the ground like a congregation fleeing before a storm.
Lesage spat on the ground and smirked. From him emanated the violent contempt the men of her country harboured in their hearts for women. ‘But how do I know you’re not . . .’
‘That I am not what?’
‘Well, in the dungeons there was a fellow who thought he could fly like a bird if he flapped his arms. Another man thought he was Moses himself. It was the confinement, the heat, the terror. He went mad in that place. And they were not the only ones, oh, no . . .’
‘The old woman warned me about you. Now come.’ Charlotte turned around and kept walking, but when he failed to follow, she faced him again. ‘Come, monsieur,’ she said, and was amazed that her voice betrayed none of the terror and fury she felt humming beneath her skin. Talking to a man in this fashion felt as if she were going against the natural order.
The hideous fellow shook his head. ‘You threaten to send me back, but I don’t believe you can do any such thing. You’re no witch. You’re merely an ignorant peasant woman, and I don’t have to do what you tell me.’
From the book drifted the urgent voices of women. Taking orders from one was to take orders from them all. Thistle, seventy-two princes, a demon might manufacture storms. The wolf is a more scrupulous beast than man. Stand fast and do not quail. Alazan, Mercury, Sansinena.
Charlotte held the book out in front of her in one trembling hand and repeated the words she heard.
Lesage stood fast. Charlotte sensed a shift in the atmosphere, not only because they were on the outskirts of a sprawling forest. No, it was something else entirely. The drone of insects and the twittering of birds – so insistent a moment earlier – ceased. She detected the anxious squeak of mice nearby, a frantic scurrying in the undergrowth, followed by a pooling silence. Her heart beat harder, ever thicker, flooding her body. Your blood, your blood, your blood.
And then the forest around them darkened as if filling with a fine dust. Instinctively, Charlotte grasped at the air in front of her face. But it was not dust at all; the morning was, instead, closing down. The sun, having risen only a short time ago, seemed unable to accomplish what it had yesterday and the day before and every other day of her life.
Lesage groaned and looked around wildly. He cursed and hunched his shoulders as if trying to make himself smaller. Charlotte heard the thump of footfalls on the path behind her but had not time enough to turn around before a large wolf appeared from the gloom and loped past her, so close she felt its bodily warmth on her thigh. She gasped in fright and the animal stopped on the path between her and Lesage. It turned to gaze upon her with its serene and glittering eyes. Charlotte had seen wolves in the distance before and she was familiar with the aftermath of their nocturnal slaughtering of livestock, but never before had she been close enough to hear its breath or smell its rich and smoky pelt. Since she was a girl, she had been warned about these roaming killers but now, eye to eye with one, she felt not alarm but, instead, a curious sympathy. She felt certain the animal would not harm her.
The wolf revolved its great body to face Lesage, who cried out and raised both hands to his face in terror. Instead of attacking him, however, as she might have expected, the creature paced out a number of tight circles with its snout upraised before sliding into the undergrowth. She heard it moving away between the trees, its hoarse breathing, its paws bounding over logs, the sound of it growing fainter and fainter until the forest was silent again.
By now it was almost as dark as night, and when Lesage wailed again and fell to his knees – his greasy face barely visible in the gloom – he might have been speaking aloud her own thoughts. ‘My God. What have you done, woman? Make it stop!’
Charlotte closed her eyes, as if by creating her own darkness the greater one surrounding her might terrify her less. The book was hot in her hand. All was still and she feared it was the end of the world.
They stayed like that for some time – Charlotte standing with eyes closed and her book in one outstretched hand, Lesage on his knees in the dirt with his hands over his eyes – until, at last, from behind her eyelids she sensed the sky lightening and the forest around them awakening for the second time that morning.
When she opened her eyes, she saw Lesage staggering to his feet in the dappled sunlight. The strange man wiped his sleeve across his brow and gazed around. He raised his hands again in her direction, this time in supplication or surrender. ‘Very well, Madame Picot. That’s enough. Please. I believe you. That’s enough.’
Charlotte nodded and licked her dry lips. She inspected her book for a moment before dropping it into the pocket of her dress. Eventually, they recovered themselves sufficiently to continue. Lesage smelled meaty, of sweat, and as they travelled deeper into the forest he muttered almost constantly to himself with one hand pressed to his face, apparently to stay the twitching of his cheek.
14
Lesage had seen some bizarre things in his life, but as he trudged sullenly behind Madame Picot, he found it impossible to rid himself of the memory of that morning’s events – the woman’s great grey wolf emerging from the suddenly falling darkness, the way the creature glared at him, its rippling shoulders, the terrible silence after it had vanished. Even she had appeared stunned by what had occurred. He shuddered and shook his head.
At first glance she didn’t look much – merely another thin peasant – but in her eyes there burned a strange certainty. Before his sentence on the galleys, he had spent a good portion of the past years with people who claimed to be able to perform supernatural feats: talk with the dead, conjure spirits, descry a man or woman’s future in a glass ball or a bowl of water. Some of them truly had great powers, but many were no more than charlatans – fortune tellers, palm readers, abortionists, poisoners, greedy priests – preying on their rich and foolish clientele. But this Madame Picot? She was of a different order altogether. The woman was very powerful indeed, a realisation that filled him with wonderment and terror.
In the mi
ddle of the day Lesage and Madame Picot stopped by a creek in the shade, where they kneeled on the bank and scooped cool water into their mouths. He was sweating heavily. It was hot and the thick forest air was oppressive. They rested beneath a tree on a cushion of moss, beside a cluster of mushrooms that resembled a miniature village perched in a bright green field. A black beetle stepped about daintily among the stalks, then up and over the milky caps of the mushrooms. A centipede ebbed through the stalks of grass. Was this, he wondered, how God viewed the world from his perch in the heavens; everything laid out, its myriad chaotic patterns so manifest? Instinctively he glanced up between the trees as if expecting to catch a glimpse of this God, as, at that moment, the beetle seemed to register Lesage’s presence and waved its antennae in his direction. He lowered a hand towards the insect – who continued to wave feebly, as if brandishing tiny fists – and flicked it away. The crack of its shell against his fingernail. Gone. And then, for good measure, he plucked one of the mushrooms from its loamy soil (the sound and feel of it so like the tearing of a fairy’s limb) and flung the plant – tiny roots and all – into the creek. He, too, could be capricious.
The woman produced more sausage and bread from her sack and offered him a portion. The bread was hard and the sausage tough, but it was tasty and he ate gratefully.
‘And what was it you did for that tavern keeper?’ Madame Picot asked after a while.
Not eager to answer, he stalled by reaching into his mouth to dislodge some gristle from between his teeth. Eventually, he turned to face her. ‘Pardon, madame?’
‘The tavern keeper we met this morning – Monsieur Scarron. He mentioned something about a message. Did you perform an errand for him before we met on the road?’
‘Ah. Yes, yes, yes. That. Well, I . . .’ Lesage looked around and lowered his voice. ‘He wished me to deliver a message to . . . in order to help him with a problem he was having with his wife.’
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