Most of the soldiers were screaming now. I couldn’t hear it, but I could see their mouths.
Every minute added more ghosts to the fray. They jostled around French John, Jupiter, Major L’Enfant, Mama and me, but left us unharmed, aside from a bitter chill. They clambered over the walls of the house across from The National Intelligencer and peeled the roof off the rafters. They flipped it at a troop of redcoats running up Pennsylvania Avenue from the east. The roof sheared off the heads of the front rank. Then it dropped, crushing the rest. Blood spurted from underneath the edge of the shingles.
That’s when I left my breakfast in the dirt.
The soldiers still upright ran for cover. Those who cowered and prostrated themselves, hands clasped over the backs of their heads like captive prisoners, the spirits left alone. The ones who pulled pistols from their sashes or knives from their boots were caught and cast aside like broken toys. The spirits snatched riflemen from the shelter of doorways. If a soldier braced his gun against a tree they uprooted it beneath him.
Something struck the small of my back. I dropped to my knees.
Mama invoked Damballa. She whipped the snake off her right arm and hurled it at the sky.
Clouds rushed towards us from every direction until the heavens went black. Lightning cackled. Thunder exploded like a volley of cannon shot. The clouds burst as if gutted, spewing rain in torrents. The wash stung like needles, sharp and cold. It jabbed from above and knifed us from every side.
I scrambled to my feet as a feather bed sailed overhead. The spirits rode it like a magic carpet over the rooftop bier. Another bevy of ghosts lifted an entire house off its foundation and cast it like a single stone at the redcoats running down Seventh. The impact staggered me, but I didn’t fall.
Neither did Admiral Cockburn, though his horse bucked and fought. A legion of the dead flailed his troops, thrashing His Majesty’s Army like ripened wheat. A legion of clouds sent the deluge, undoing his fires for a second time. His hat was gone. His face was scratched. The front of his dark blue coat was torn clean off. Watered blood dripped down the front of his shirt. But he refused to submit to the storm or his bucking horse. In the midst of his own struggle, he called on the soldiers to regroup. I had no love for the British right then, but I had to admire his bravery.
I only realised the dogs had fallen silent when I heard Mama tsk in disgust. The rain had soaked her clothes clean through and flattened her snaky hair into shapeless lumps. She swiped a dripping hank away from her eyes – clear brown eyes returned to their rightful place. The remaining snake slithered down her left arm. It drooped from her hand like a length of wet rope. She flicked it against the rump of Admiral Cockburn’s horse.
The horse shrieked and leapt over the dead fire. Its hooves were galloping before they reconnected with the ground. It tore down Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill as if Mama’s snake was climbing its behind instead of the nearest tree.
Somehow Admiral Cockburn held on. He clung to the horse’s neck, his hands fisted in its mane. With him went the rest of his men’s resolve. Those few who still retained their wits scrambled after him, running, limping, crawling. The ghosts propelled them forward, lifting their feet to speed them on their way. The spirits’ rage was spent, but not their malice. They battered the wounded with water and sticks, and grinned at the sound of their moans.
The squelch of something solid moving in the wet drew my eyes to the remains of the fire just as Barnes’s injured hand closed around a heavy spar. He was drenched, battered and cut. His left eye was puffed closed. The other locked on me, its corners creasing. Grabbing the post with both hands, he pulled it free of the ashes and stood, ignored by the spirits harrying braver men.
The Devil with the Black Laws. I wouldn’t let that villain hurt us again. A discarded sword lay nearby. I snatched it from the ground. I snarled, ‘Not me. Not mine.’
He laughed. ‘Stupid girl, don’t you know your Bible? Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’
He swung. He didn’t judge the distance or reckon on the gale. The post bounced off a shield of wind, spinning him round. Three more phantoms sprang from the street, their gauzy forms complete down to the tatters of their clothes. He shrieked at the sight. Then he ran and ran, ghostly bayonets jabbing his back at every step.
Mama swayed. I dropped the sword and caught her under her arm. Her face was washed clean of blood, but her skin was fever hot. I was half surprised she didn’t steam.
‘Help me.’ She licked her lips. ‘Help me kneel.’
We lurched to our knees. The street had become a shallow torrent. Cold, dirty water sluiced over our calves and splashed up our thighs. Mama scooped a fistful of mud from beneath the flow. She tried to stand. She couldn’t do it on her own. I wasn’t much better, but somehow together we staggered upright.
She flicked a little bit of mud to each of the four corners. In a voice stronger than it had any right to be, she called into the storm, ‘Go back from where you came. From dirt you were made. To dirt you may return. Dirt to dirt. Ashes to ashes. Amen.’
At first it didn’t seem to work. The rain fell just as hard. The wind blew just as fierce. If anything, the gale seemed to grow. I needed Mama to stand as much as she needed me. Then I realised the rain streaming down our faces and plastering our clothes was clearer than it was before. Slowly ghosts lost their shape, dissolving back into mist, which the rain carried to the ground. At last the downpour eased. The sky paled to grey.
A man sighed.
French John sagged over the shoulders of Major L’Enfant and Jupiter. The ashes had run from his hair to stain his coat, which was ruined beyond mending. The tie on his queue had come undone. Snarls of dark hair clung to his collar as tightly as the curls plastered to his perspiring forehead. His face – still not quite his own – was as white as his sodden cravat. Laboured breaths rasped through his open mouth.
The major’s dog sat on the stoop of The National Intelligencer. As the rain trickled to a halt, he started to whine.
The soul behind French John’s face smiled wistfully at Mama. ‘Tis well,’ he said, and slumped forward in a dead faint.
But she wasn’t looking at him. She stared ahead at nothing I could see.
‘It will be,’ she said. ‘It will be.’
*
My hand shook as I set the last page of Mrs Fouchet’s story on my desk. It was impossible, inconceivable . . .
Yet I found myself recalling the many strange accounts of the British occupation. The two storms, each as fierce as Monday’s gale, are a matter of record. Late summer hurricanes are fairly common, but nowhere in our nation’s history have two such storms struck the same place in such quick succession. In addition, they were most particular in their effect, targeting British emplacements and empty houses, while leaving a partially finished American Navy hull adrift in the Potomac unharmed.
Moreover, within hours of the second hurricane, the invaders fled the city as if pursued by the ancient Furies. Officers left behind their stolen mounts lest the horses’ neighing betray their flight. The hooves of the animals drawing their ammunition carts were muffled with rags. They abandoned the wounded where they lay, and made no provision for the dead. The dismembered victims of the 25 August 1814 dry well explosion at Greenleaf Point (which as noted in Mrs Fouchet’s narrative, shook the ground across the Federal City) as well as the corpses at the Navy Yard and the battlefield at Bladensburg, were left to rot in the summer’s terrible heat.
These circumstances made it harder than it should have been to remind myself that ours is a rational age, and the wonder of God’s Creation lies as much in its order as in its variety. Nature keeps His Law more religiously than man His Commandments, freakish storms and superstitious soldiers notwithstanding.
However, my credulity or lack thereof was irrelevant. Mrs Fouchet believed what she had written. Her face was drawn with anguish; her pale gaze burned with desperation.
I asked her, ‘Madame, what is it you want fr
om me? It would appear the problem lies with your mother. Do you wish me to counsel her, or hear her Confession?’
She waved the question away. ‘Mama’s been dead these six years past. Her fate is in the hands of Our Merciful Saviour. I’ve prayed long and hard He won’t judge her too harshly. She was as good a woman as she knew how to be. In her place, for my children, I would’ve done the same.’
‘Then why did you go to such effort to describe these events? Do you feel guilty for partaking in your mother’s rituals?’
‘I confessed my part years ago, and did my penance gladly. I’ve had no truck with magic since. I refused to learn Mama’s voudou rites. The only charm I wore under my clothes was my blessed scapular, and I bought my medicine from the apothecary, same as other folk. Even after Mama came to live with my husband and me, I wouldn’t let her do her workings in the house or even speak of it in my hearing.’
A sob caught her in the throat. ‘Maybe that’s why this judgement’s fallen so hard upon me. I should’ve learned her ways, if only to guard against them. But I didn’t. Now I don’t know what to do.
‘Father, my youngest . . . she called Monday’s storm.’
Ω
There is no record of Bishop Hughes’s reply to the priest at St Peter’s, or of his recommendations for how he should deal with Mrs Fouchet’s daughter, if any; but the fact that this account was sent to the Vatican suggests that the bishop took it very seriously.
What accuracy we can place on Mrs Fouchet’s recollection of such traumatic events a quarter of a century earlier, when she was just thirteen or fourteen, is clearly debatable. Memory is not dependable, and as a tale is retold, even in the mind, imagination can add colourful details. Having said that, there is no doubt that something remarkable happened in Washington that day in August 1814, and even at the time people were ascribing the rout of the British by the weather as an act of Providence.
It may or may not be significant that both of the accounts of events in North America that we have selected from the documents in the Vatican Vaults concern what might be called weather magic.
1848
In 1848 a spate of liberal and nationalist revolutions erupted across Europe in what subsequently become known as the Springtime of the Peoples. Pope Pius IX originally encouraged these liberal aspirations, but in April of that year he had a complete change of heart and issued the Allocution condemning the revolutions.
This was a severe blow to those who had held up the Pope as an example for all Catholic European monarchs to follow. From then on the revolutionaries faced repeated defeat at the hands of monarchical forces.
Historians agree that Pope Pius IX changed his mind after taking fright at revolutionary excesses, but this account by the Pope’s chamberlain, found in the Vatican Archives, sheds a different and quite remarkable light on his decision.
Pio Nono and the Papal Allocution
Damian P. O’Connor
The werewolves were abroad in the Vatican City and their howls could be heard all the way to the basilica of St Peter. Revolution had come to France once more and a Bonaparte was rising; the Habsburg Emperor was under siege in Germany, in Hungary, in the Balkans; there was cholera in Naples and starvation in Sicily; war in Lombardy, Milan and Piedmont. Death had touched the palaces of the rich, the hovels of the poorest, the merchant’s warehouse and the artisan’s workshop without distinction; the vile had preyed upon the fey; the plough lay deserted, the loom broken; the child starved, the honest man turned beggar. Inside the Vatican itself, the Chief Minister had gone down to the assassin’s merciless poignard. As Pio Nono – or more properly, Pope Pius IX – looked across Europe from the high turreted battlements of the Castel St Angelo, his last refuge from his own Consulta turned against him in vitriol, it seemed to him that in this springtime of 1848 the whole world was on fire.
All hung in the balance and all were likely to be found wanting: the Tsar’s Cossacks were burning Wallachia and the Ukraine; the Three Paladins of the Holy Roman Emperor were gathering fresh armies, Count Jellacic in Croatia, Baron Schwartenberg in Bohemia and General Radetzky in Italy, readying to strike with disciplined musketry and cannon, to sweep away the barricades of the squabbling revolutionaries. None would be spared; not even Holy Rome would escape the ruin. Here, at the centre of the world, between the tears already shed and the corpses to come, Pio Nono, liberal, nationalist, idealist, the bridge between Man and God, stood holding his white head in his epileptic hands, begging for Angels to succour mankind from the flames that the spark of his own hopes had ignited.
And Uriel came! Down from out of a sky azure blue with Canaletto’s dreams yet streaked with the hot fingers of scarlet fever. He came down at the head of his troop of big men on big horses, war weary, at an urgent gallop, his breastplate scarred and dented, his lips darkened with the smears of black powder, his glittering veteran’s eyes marked by a thousand years of war experienced in the flash of the musket’s pan. Behind him his scarlet dragoons glowered under plumed comet-tail helmets, straight backed, chin-strapped, fists clenched, black wiry-haired knuckles on reins and heavy sabres. They were fatigued from a long ride at the end of a long battle, swathed in gunsmoke and the copper smell of blood, and weary at the thought of a longer one ahead.
‘You have summoned, Pio Nono, and we have answered.’ Uriel’s voice was of urgent brass and thunder. ‘But this is the only time you may use Peter’s gift to call us, so if your request be frivolous be away to think again, and allow us back to the Line.’
Pio Nono, a tall man with a kindly, broad brow given to smiling, now shrivelled and bowed. He was suddenly conscious that his jewelled triple tiara and cloth of gold robe was no more than a shallow bauble tacked to a rag before the laurel wreaths, oak clusters and starlight medallions that writhed and glittered across the scarlet tunic of brave Uriel. His voice stammered and his body filled from breast to water with fear.
‘It is not frivolous, My Lord,’ he whispered.
‘Then aid will be sent to you.’
‘I shall obey your command, whatever.’
‘There will be no command. You will be sent advice, no more. The demand of God that men should enjoy Free Will entitles you only to this.’
‘Then I shall follow the advice of the Almighty.’
Uriel’s stone gaze did not change, though the constellations in his eyes whirled around a thousand wounded suns.
‘Two Angels will come to you. One is from our Legion, the other from the Adversary’s. It is the Law. They will give advice. You will choose the course which seems better to you.’
There was a crackle of lightning, tearing across the firmament like the scissors of a comet through the silk of the evening sky. Uriel looked up.
‘We must be away, the offensive begins,’ he cried, and his troop drew bright swords, changed front in disciplined manoeuvre, and prepared to wheel away in the direction of the moon. ‘You must release us!’
‘How will I know which is the Angel of the Lord and which the Devil’s brood?’ cried Pio Nono, horrified.
‘You must make that judgement yourself,’ answered Uriel impatiently. ‘Do you think the war in heaven waits for your indecision? We must be away. There are guns on the heights of the Milky Way and the trenches of the enemy sap towards the fortress of paradise. We must be away!’
‘Will you give me no clue?’ He spread his hands like a market haggler.
‘We must be away! Cannot you hear the cries of dying Angels in the scream of the storm?’
‘I must know!’
‘You have been granted the gift of Free Will and the faculties to use it, so you alone must make the choice. No Angel or Demon may reveal himself in the contest of Peter’s Gift; neither through word, deed nor object. It is the Law. Now release us. We must go to war. I can give no more help.’
‘Then be away . . .’ He clasped his hands to his despairing bosom.
‘To arms!’ cried Uriel, amid the echo of vast trumpets. ‘To war!’
‘. . . And God have mercy on the souls of mankind.’
‘They will come to you in the vaults of the castle,’ cried Uriel, as the jingle of harness and the crack of a ragged banner in the wind punctuated the flying departure of his words. ‘Go now, below Hadrian’s tomb to the roots of the mountain. They will come soon and you have this night only to debate with them.’
*
‘Come, Niccolo, you must help me with my robes, for I must not trip on my journey. Hurry now, take them away, the tiara too.’ His fingers drummed at his lips. ‘And then you must guide me down to the lower dungeons by back ways and unseen. Bring a lantern.’
Your humble servant, Niccolo Parvatti, led the Pope at a trot down the steps from the battlements as the waning light of the long evening threw tiger-stripe shadows from the braziers onto the honey stone of the walls. The Holy Father undressed as he went, tugging at the ruby fastenings and snagging his rings on the silver inlays of the cloth of gold, then handing the pieces to Niccolo Parvatti, so heavy that he could barely keep them from dragging on the sandy stones.
‘Haste, make haste,’ he demanded, his frown creasing as we entered the papal apartments where Niccolo’s aching arms could gain a little release by allowing the stole and the cloak to slide onto a chaise longue. ‘Lift this crown from my head, Niccolo, for it is too heavy for me to bear.’
‘Master, Holy Father,’ said Niccolo, his humble servant. ‘Have we not just seen a miracle? Should we not tell the world the good news? I only ask . . .’
Tales from the Vatican Vaults: 28 extraordinary stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Garry Kilworth, Mary Gentle, KJ Parker, Storm Constantine and many more Page 36