Betrayed

by Lynn Carthage

  “God be with you, girl,” he says.

  I don’t want to watch what Pierre does with Giraude, pulling her head out from between her thighs. I don’t want to see him reattach her head or witness whatever stitches he’ll be able to sew here in the dark. I don’t know how he’ll reanimate her . . . Wait.

  “Will she need to drink from the vials again to become alive?” I ask Phoebe. “Maybe he has the vials with him?”

  “Maybe,” she says. “But why would he, a servant, have them? And even if he does, how does it benefit us? We can’t touch them or bring them back in time with us.”

  “If he has them, we can stick with him to find out where he lives, where he keeps them.”

  “They must be at Versailles,” says Phoebe.

  “We don’t know that for sure,” I argue. “It’s worth staying with him and observing him.”

  “Worth it? As if we have any control over it?” asks Phoebe. “We’ve been stuck in this time period for hours.”

  “Well, we could try again,” I say. Halfheartedly, knowing it won’t work, I try to intention myself back to the present day, to Versailles . . . and it works.

  For a second I look at Eleanor’s startled face, the family sprawled on the picnic blanket, Tabby asleep in her mom’s arms, the parents chatting—then I instantly return to Picpus.

  Phoebe’s not there.

  No one’s there.

  What have I done?

  What have I done? I shout Phoebe’s name and run a circuit around the grave pit. I was only gone a second—how did Pierre drag Giraude’s body away so quickly?

  Unreal.

  I go back to the present day. How odd to go from an open pit of bodies to another rectangle: the tartan blanket they’re all reclining on. Eleanor rushes to me. “Where’s Phoebe?”

  “I lost her,” I say.

  She stares at me, her mouth wide open.

  “It was stupid. I just wanted to see if the past would release us—we’ve been trying all day—but I didn’t expect it to work!”

  “Go back!” she shouts. “Go get her!”

  I return to Picpus, which feels different from even just a few moments ago. More time has passed. I see tumbrels at the gate; it’s the new day’s load. Based on the sunlight, it seems like early afternoon here.

  “Phoebe!” I yell. “Phoebe, where are you?”

  I go to the edge of the pit and stare down. I don’t remember the layout of bodies enough to know if it’s been more than a day. It’s just a ghastly assemblage of tortured, murdered people.

  I head toward the chapel, a squat white structure with a Germanic-looking clock tower. Maybe Phoebe took shelter in there. I enter and see blood on the stone floor.

  Not puddles of blood: smears. As if knives or bayonets were used on people still in motion, fleeing, twisting.

  The nuns aren’t safe. The priests aren’t safe. They’re enemies of the state just like the nobles. The reliquaries and statues lie smashed on the floor and the niches for the icons are empty. I shiver and move to the shadows. “Phoebe?” I call out again.

  I have no idea what to do.

  I screwed up.

  I don’t want to go back and see Eleanor’s accusing face. I can’t go back until I have Phoebe. And she’s somewhere in this vicious version of Paris.

  I sink to my knees. What can I do? I hear the tumbrel wheels rolling on the other side of the chapel wall. More bodies. More death.

  God, what am I supposed to do? Find the vials? Some force sends me back in time and I’m supposed to learn from everything I witness, right? I’m supposed to be taking notes like this is some screwed-up version of French History: 1700s to the Present. I scan back through it.

  Yolande and Giraude competed for the same lover. He died for his failure to be true. Yolande tried to take over Giraude’s place as firstborn in the family, heir to all the Arnaud secrets. She used her striking identical-twin similarity to seduce secrets out of Athénaïs, who seemed to know everything. Athénaïs told her the vials were hidden where one prays. We saw Giraude kill herself with a guillotine and apparently her servant is going to sew her back up and send her out to continue business as usual with a big ribbon covering the gaffe in her neck.

  And Phoebe’s missing.

  The light flickers, fades, and changes. Thank God.

  Yes, bring on something different, show me.

  The first thing I notice is an overweight woman in a bright red fleece. She’s wearing khaki shorts and black socks under her Tevas. It’s the present day but I’m still at the Picpus chapel.

  Things have been fixed up. The niches have statues again. They can’t be the originals, but they look old. The bloodstains are gone. There’s fluorescent lighting and a buzz of interested murmurs. France is a different beast now.

  “Phoebe?” I call out at the limits of my voice. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever raised my voice so loudly before. I see the red-fleece woman wince, but it crosses her face so quickly I’m not even sure it was a reaction to me. Maybe gas from the croissant-laden breakfast she’s not used to.

  I walk back outside and it’s the same as it was the day we visited with Phoebe’s mum and Tabby in the buggy. Gravel covers the pits and a nice plaque marks the spot where the nobles have shed their tissue and skin and become nothing but skeletons.

  “No!” I scream to the sky. “I can’t believe this!”

  Is it random? I feel like I’m a pinball in the machine, the flippers sending me side to side for no good reason.

  “. . . the perpetual prayer,” murmurs a tourist next to me. “We should put some money in the offering box to fund it.”

  The perpetual prayer. Right: the nuns have never stopped praying for the victims in this pit. Athénaïs couldn’t have known about that—it predated her discussion with the young Yolande—but the chapel has always been a place of prayer, perpetual or otherwise.

  I may be slow. But it’s dawning on me.

  I think the vials are here.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Washington Irving’s short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” tells of a schoolteacher’s terrifying horseback ride through the night pursued by a headless Hessian soldier, who throws his head at him. Irving’s tale, however, makes it clear that the “ghost” was a rival suitor and the head, found later in shatters, merely a pumpkin.

  —A Life in Tarrytown

  Now it’s pleasurable to look, not like the stupid wanderings through the chapel at Versailles. It’s like I know I’m on the right track. This is the place. God only knows why a Catholic church would be the place to hide vials that deliver an unholy immortality to those who drink from them, but this is it.

  I go back inside the church and head for the altar. Everything seems in order, so I walk along the edges of the walls and check each paving stone in the floor. I wander into the nave, drift through walls to the areas meant only for the priests, thoroughly search every inch of the structure. I even drift up to the bell tower and check the clapper, the bronze, concave interior of the bell, the whole apparatus that lets it ring.

  No dice.

  I head back down to the main part of the church again and watch an old woman sit and make the sign of the cross, then begin her prayer. Where? Where could the vials be hidden?

  Vials, Phoebe. Phoebe, vials. Things I need to find.

  Maybe they’re outside in the mass grave, deep in the pit, I think. Maybe the revolutionaries dug atop an already-excavated vials repository.

  Ah! Got it. Digging. Deeper.

  The crypt.

  How did I miss this? There’s a little door (damn, Miles, there’s always a little door . . . have you learned nothing from Marie-Antoinette’s bedroom setup?) behind which is a steep and narrow winding staircase that leads up to the bell tower . . . but it also leads down to the crypt, so long as you’re dead and can drift through padlocked doors.

  I can feel it.

  I take the stairs, sinking into the cool depths of the chapel.

  The
vials are here. They’re almost humming, like they recognize I’ve come for them. I walk the vaulted undercroft, aware that the musty dead are here, paper-dry, at peace since they died after confession and last rites, assured of everything going their way. No haunting required. I don’t know if they actually received that expected final reward, but regardless: there’s no regret here.

  I close my eyes and follow the low hum or moan or whatever it is that I can sometimes tune into, that undercurrent of energy.

  And I crouch in front of a part of the wall that is unremarkable other than the fact that scratched into the wood, worn away by generations of damp, is a symbol.

  A special stone! This must be it! This is where the vials are.

  I found them.

  The symbol shows a dragon in a cell, its wings outstretched and pressing against his ceiling and walls. He looks like he’s trying to break free, and his mouth is open in a miniature roar. Around his feet, his tail winds in an angry twist. Between his claws is a dropped sword.

  The image upsets me, even in the midst of my triumph. I can imagine the frustration of being so powerful and then confined to so small a space.

  I put my hand to the dragon, but I can’t do a darn thing to open the cabinet, to trip the hidden levers, to enact the centuries-old lock that keeps the vials safe. I could pass through the wall and look.

  I almost don’t.

  But then I think, I have to. This is the source of our quest.

  I press my face to the stone and move forward. It’s so dark in here I can’t see a thing, but the scent is intoxicating—a sort of sweet, warm odor, like amber. The humming becomes louder.

  Phoebe might be able to open the cabinet. She could touch Arnaud things, and these vials are connected to her family. I’ll find her, wherever she is, bring her here, and she’ll open the door.

  I withdraw and look again at the dragon guarding the hoard behind it. Everything will work itself out. We’re so close to understanding everything.

  The humming gets agitated. It’s like the vials are angry I retreated. “I’ll come back,” I say.

  Reluctantly, I back away from the stone wall. From a distance, the dragon is impossible to see. I close my eyes to leave the crypt and return to Versailles.

  I found the vials.

  Phoebe’s on the blanket with her family and Eleanor. Thank God.

  I leap on her and nearly knock her over. I nuzzle into her neck, inhaling the sense memory of whatever shampoo she used to use when she was alive: lavender, mint . . .

  “You’re okay?” I ask.

  Instead of hugging me back, she pulls away. “Where the hell did you go?”

  “It was stupid. I was just testing the machinery. I came back here and saw Eleanor, and within a second I returned but it was too late. It seemed like it was the next day.”

  “I spent two days in the past with Giraude’s corpse,” says Phoebe.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “But I’ve something amazing to tell you.”

  “I kept trying to pull you to me with intention but it wasn’t working.”

  “This was a different kind of trip,” I say. “We traveled geographically, too.”

  “Sure, blame the trip,” says Phoebe.

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes, seriously!” Her jaw is set and she’s staring into the distance: anywhere my face is not, it seems. Darkness has settled into the foundations at Versailles, and the fireworks will begin any minute.

  “Yeah, that was stupid,” I admit. “But I can make up for it by what I have to tell you.”

  “Can you scrub my eyes? Because that would make up for it. It was all very Frankensteinian, if that’s a word. He sewed her up. He used black thread.”

  I look at Eleanor, who’s biting her lip. I think we’re both interested in details, but at the same time don’t want to hear them.

  “He slumped her body against his legs as he sat, and positioned her head in his lap. He leaned over to sew, and it looked very uncomfortable. He sobbed uncontrollably the whole time.”

  “Poor man,” Eleanor says. “He could’ve picked a more deserving recipient of his devotion, though.”

  I’m bursting with my news, but I also figure it can wait. Those vials have been there since Louis was king (one or all of them, who knows?)—and Tabby’s right here with us. We’re all safe. Plus, Phoebe needs to debrief. We’re her ad hoc therapists.

  “Did she instantly reanimate?” I ask.

  “No, and that made him cry harder than ever. He put her on his bed, laid out nicely, and slept beside her on the floor. The next morning, she was still dead, but she was . . . what’s the word?”

  Phoebe pauses and she’s going through vocabulary lists in her mind, I imagine. “Pliable. That’s it. No rigor mortis. He could lift her arms and legs and bend them, and that made him think there was hope. He passed an entire day by her side.”

  “So he didn’t use the vials,” I say. I can’t help it; I burst into a smile when I say vials. Phoebe frowns.

  “No, he didn’t seem to know anything about that, although he did have faith she would come back to life, as if he understood something about the Sangreçu ways. It wasn’t until the next morning that she stirred just as a regular person would, making murmurs and stretching.”

  Oh my God. I can imagine how that would so profoundly upset Phoebe, seeing a woman whose head was completely severed, now “waking up” and making all the normal sounds of rising.

  “You must have freaked out,” I say.

  “I almost threw up. I kept looking at her neck, where those stitches were straining. I kept thinking they would break. I think she was afraid of that, too. She held on to her temples as if she had a big headache, but I think she was making sure her head didn’t topple off.”

  “Were you scared she would see you?”

  “I hid in Pierre’s kitchen and peered around the corner at the bed.”

  “Then what happened?” asks Eleanor.

  “As soon as she realized she was alive, she sobbed. It was awful. Pierre was devastated. He brought her a mirror and she looked at her stitches and screamed. A little blood came from the stitches then. He cleaned her up. She was like a dog at the vet, struggling to get away.”

  “He couldn’t calm her down?” I ask.

  “No. He kept saying things in a comforting voice. I couldn’t understand what he said, but she would always shriek ‘Non!’ I didn’t need a translator for that. I actually started to feel bad for her.”

  I shudder. “She really did want to die that day.”

  “A servant who completely disregards his instructions,” observes Eleanor. “How long did that go on?”

  “Hours, I guess. Then she made him hold the mirror while she took a length of ribbon from her garter and wound it around her neck to hide the stitches. She crawled out of bed and left him.”

  “She . . . left?”

  “Yes, walking unsteadily, limping a little until she got used to it. He didn’t bother to follow her. She was dressed as a peasant, so I think she thought she’d find some way to walk back to Versailles without calling attention to herself. I walked behind her for a while, but since it was taking forever, I decided to come and check in on Tabby and you guys. That was a story in itself: the past didn’t want to let go of me. She struggled to walk, and I struggled to come back to the present.”

  “You did great, Phoebe,” I say.

  I see her lips part to say thanks, but she stops herself, still sullen about my taking off.

  “I’m sorry again about leaving,” I say. “It was an accident. I just impulsively came back to the present day because, if you remember, we were talking about whether we could—”

  “To see Eleanor?” she interrupts.

  “Uh, no,” I say, with an apologetic look at Eleanor. “I was just testing it, I guess.”

  “What? Testing what?”

  “Whether I could control our traveling or not.”

  “And meanwhile you stranded me with a very
unpleasant task!”

  “Please stop, both of you,” says Eleanor.

  “I didn’t mean to!” I say. “I screwed up!”

  “Okay,” says Phoebe flatly. “It just sucked.”

  “I don’t need any of this,” says Eleanor, standing up. She straightens her cap. “I was fine being lonely and haunting an abandoned mansion until you came.”

  “Listen, I have something good to tell you. While Phoebe was—”

  “I’m just as much a victim as you are,” Phoebe interrupts. “I didn’t ask for this, either.”

  “Your betrayal caused this,” says Eleanor. “You set events in motion long ago.”

  “Oh my God, Eleanor . . . could you stop with that? I didn’t even know you. I lived on a completely different continent!”

  “Well, look,” I say, trying to bring peace. “We do know that something in our heritage and whatever it is that my ancestors did haunts us,” I say. “We have to atone for their deeds—not Phoebe’s—or undo them somehow.”

  “We’ll find the vials and dump them out,” says Phoebe.

  “Dump them, or drink them,” says Eleanor. “I bet you would.”

  I drop my face into my hands. What’s happening to Eleanor?

  “No,” says Phoebe. She gives a tight smile. “There’s nothing good in collections of other people’s blood.”

  “Tell that to the bloke in the emergency room bleeding out,” I say, hoping to break the intensity.

  “Perfect idea!” exults Phoebe sarcastically. “We can just donate the vials to a blood bank.”

  “Problem solved. Have a motorcycle accident and wind up Sangreçu! Whatever the hell that is,” I say.

  “Yeah, what is that, really? Just . . . immortality from drinking magic blood?” Phoebe asks. Eleanor is silent.

  “I guess so. But it hasn’t seemed to have brought glory or happiness to any of the Sangreçu we’ve seen.”

  “What’s your heritage, Eleanor?” Phoebe demands suddenly. “Anybody famous in your background?”

  Eleanor laughs, and I take a deep inhale that we seem to have moved off the testy ground that made everyone angry. “There aren’t many famous servants whose names have come down from history to us.”