Englishwoman in France

by Wendy Robertson

  The sun has climbed to its height and Modeste, Tib and I stop to wipe our brows and cry thirst. Lupinus keeps digging. Tib runs down to the river to refill our flagons. Lupinus suddenly grunts and we look down at the earth beside his mattock. He rubs it with the sole of his sandal and we can see a pattern. He has hit a tessellated floor.

  Tib jumps into the hole and trickles some water beside Lupinus’ moving foot. I rub with my foot, then get down on my knees and rub the ground hard with my gown. The floor is black and white with touches of green and red: some kind of corner design with green leaves and dark red roses.

  ‘This gives us the direction,’ Modeste says quietly. ‘We follow the pattern.’

  We work on with a greater will now, using our shoulder sacks to hurl soil up out of the hole. Finally the low slant of sunlight shows us a round arch and we dig on. Then we use our hands to claw away the soil. Lupinus jumps up out of the hole to kick away the pile on the top so it doesn’t tumble back in. Tibery is standing back watching as my hand keeps bumping into Modeste’s as we scrabble away at the soil.

  My hand finally hits something that isn’t soil. ‘Modeste,’ I say. He puts his hand over mine. It’s a lump of greasy wood.

  Lupinus jumps back into the hole. ‘Stand away!’ he says.

  ‘Stand away!’ he repeats.

  We climb out of the hole and watch as he clears away the last of the soil from what now looks like a very large box and hauls it out from under the arch. The box is five feet long and two feet wide and is bound with what looks like heavily greased ship’s ropes. From the way Lupinus grunts as he lifts it out of the hole it must be very heavy.

  Now we can see it is made of what looks like blackened ship’s timbers. And around us there is the faintest smell of the sea. Tib puts a hand on a rope and pulls it. It comes away, falls to pieces in his hands. Modeste peels another away, then another. I look up to see Lupinus pulling his hand down his face to get rid of his tears.

  ‘Now what?’ says Modeste, his voice trembling. ‘What do we do?’

  ‘We open it,’ I say firmly. ‘Open it, for goodness’ sake.’

  ‘Open it, Modeste,’ says Tib. ‘You’ve waited a long time.’

  ‘Open it, messire,’ Lupinus’ deep voice whispers.

  Modeste pulls away the last of the rotten rope and looks across at me. That look contains all our time together: the talk, the laughter, the work, the lovemaking. ‘Help me, Florence,’ he says.

  I take one end and he takes the other and we both pull at the top. It doesn’t budge. Tib and Lupinus come to help: now there are four hands on four corners. The lid creaks, and finally it moves. And falls to pieces in our hands. We look into the box and all we can see is pebbles. I sit back, disappointed. This seems very cruel. Have Léance and the Cesseroneans played a trick on us?

  Then Tib leans forward and removes one pebble, then another. We all join in, scooping out the pebbles at random. My palm hits a carved wooden surface and we slow down, moving the last pebbles with great care. The object in its pebble bed is hard to make out in the shadowy depths of the hole.

  ‘Wait!’ Lupinus puts a hand on my shoulder and on Modeste’s shoulder and we stand back. He leans down and plucks a heavily carved box from its pebble bed. It is the size of a walker’s backpack and smells faintly of salt and sandalwood. He walks backwards and places it on a piece of clear ground.

  The afternoon sun is shining, the sky is Delft blue, and the land is still. There is no movement but still I can feel the watching eyes in the scrubland around us. We are seen. We stand around the box, paralyzed by fear, by delight.

  At last Tib kneels down beside it, clicks two wooden levers and it opens. I kneel down beside him. Modeste kneels beside me. Lupinus towers over us all. Whatever is inside is covered by a small, perfectly preserved purple cloth embroidered in gold around the edge.

  For a second the world slows to a halt about me. I see the midwife holding Siri, offering her to me that first time. The world starts up again and, when I lift the purple cloth from the casket, I’m the only one who is not surprised. Around me a chorus of groans greets the sight of a baby perhaps three or four months old. Perfectly preserved she’s lying on cloth of gold, and wrapped in fine wool the colour of new cream. She has a topknot of black hair, an olive complexion and round smooth features. Beside her are miniature sandals, as beautifully wrought as the sandals given to me by the Empress. By her head is a little felt hat in red, the colour of Siri’s hat in the attaché case at home: the hat Siri was wearing when we met Philip.

  Behind me Lupinus sets up a continuous muttering. Modeste clutches my arm too tightly. Tib murmurs, ‘Hello baby!’ in a voice without fear. I hear my own voice echoing his. This is – or was once – a real child.

  Each of us in turn touches that cold, exquisite face: we offer her a kind of greeting. ‘Who are you, baby?’ says Tib. ‘Who are you?’ Modeste touches the black hair, smoothes it across the fontanelle. Lupinus starts to hum a strange, gruff lullaby.

  How long we have been here I don’t know. But suddenly the sun has lost its daytime heat and I shiver. Someone, probably Léance, has lit a fire under the trees and left wine and bread. He’s also left us torches – bundles of sticks tied with rag and dipped in beeswax. He intends us to work on into the night.

  ‘We will eat,’ announces Modeste, carefully drawing the cloth across the baby’s face and closing the lid of the carved box. ‘We should eat.’ He nods at Lupinus, who stands up, lifts the casket, puts it safely under his arm and heads for the tree. Tib leaps to his feet and follows, and Modeste and I follow him, our hands joined.

  We sit around the casket and eat, breaking the bread and drinking the wine in silence. The bread tastes of nuts and sunshine; the wine tastes of earth and roses. Finally Tib wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Now, dear Modeste,’ he says. ‘What have we here?’

  Beside me I can feel Modeste shake his head. I sense his disappointment. ‘It’s not clear to me at all. I’ve searched for it through many ages. My mission was to find it. I thought it might be . . .’ His voice trails off. ‘But I am not sure.’ His gaze moves across to the hole in the hill, the tumbled stones and columns, the rash of pebbles, the detritus of our desperate digging. Now Tib stands up and holds out his hands, one to me, one to Modeste. We all stand up and now Lupinus is between Modeste and me holding our hands, completing the circle around the casket. They start to say their prayers, familiar to me now. Lupinus’ deep tones join their lighter ones and I close my eyes. Behind my lids I see again the baby’s round dark face. Her eyes blink open and widen in – what? Appeal? Recognition? They are very dark with violet just around the iris. I’ve seen those eyes before. Then the fragile eyelids close again and I open my own eyes to find the four of us standing there around the casket, staring at each other.

  Now I know why I am in this dream. ‘This baby should be left here,’ I say firmly. ‘No one knows who she is. She may be a child from your story. Or she could be something to do with the emperor who built the shrine. If we bring her out and talk about her she’ll be the plaything of idiots.’ I turn and look Modeste in the eyes. ‘She is some mother’s child and we should leave her in peace. Believe me, you and Tib may be the wisest of souls, but I know about this thing. She is some sad mother’s child. We should leave her in peace and let her stay undisturbed. We should not hold onto her.’

  Modeste sighs as he looks around our little circle. ‘Florence is right. Perhaps she herself is here with us now just to show us this truth. We could force the baby into our legend and weave stories about her for our own virtuous ends. But we have raked her out of her last cradle and we should return her there. Any other way has no honour. I see now that my search is over.’ Despite the authority of his words his tone is very sad.

  ‘Poor baby,’ says Tib. He looks at me and in his eyes I see twin reflections of Siri with her cloud of black hair. ‘Let her go.’

  Let her go. Let this baby go. As I must let Siri go. I see now tha
t my grief has clung to Siri, not allowed her to go. In my heart I forgave – or at least understood – those boys who killed her but I could not forgive her for dying, for going from me.

  We all stare down at the sandalwood box. Then I kneel down and open it again. My nose twitches and I want to sneeze. The sandalwood smell has gone. It has been replaced by something more bitter – earthy and acrid at the same time.

  I lift the purple cloth and gasp. The others mutter in surprise. The fresh pink bloom on the baby’s cheek has turned grey. ‘This is it . . .’ I search for the right words in my head. ‘This is it. Why we had to find her. It can’t be right that a baby’s body stays intact, remains uncorrupt . . .’

  Modeste joins in. ‘She was halted on her way, imprisoned still in her body. Her preservation in the shrine prevented . . .’

  Now Tib: ‘We can see now why you had to find her, Modeste. You had to free her to go on her journey.’ He nods. ‘So now we’ve freed this little one. Now her body will decay and she’ll be free to go on. We have touched her and she is ready to go on.’

  I pull the cloth back across the blackening face of the little girl and close the lid of the box. ‘We have to put her back there into the hill.’

  ‘We must make haste,’ growls Lupinus. ‘We’re losing the light.’ He leans down, picks up the sandalwood box and puts it on his shoulder. He takes one of the beeswax flares, lights it from the dying fire and marches up the hill. We take two flares each and follow him. Above the hole we give light with our torches as Lupinus jumps into the hole and makes a new cradle for the casket. He works quickly, making the cradle with fallen columns and flat stones. Then he places the casket at the centre of the cradle and fills it with the pebbles before lying more flat pieces of marble across the top. Then on top of this he carefully places the rotting planks that have been the little girl’s cradle these hundreds of years.

  Then Tib and I hold the flares while Modeste and Lupinus work frantically to refill the hole from the soil and detritus all round its edges. They are both grunting and sweating by the time they have finished and the hole is roughly filled.

  ‘Look!’ says Tib, pointing. ‘Trees walking.’

  A torchlit procession of men, women and children is mounting the hill. On their backs they are carrying woven baskets with trees and branches poking out in all directions.

  Léance comes first, carrying two torches. He stands before us and bows deeply to each of us in turn. Then he looks towards the hole, where Lupinus and Modeste are still working frantically to finish the backfill. He bows again. ‘Messires! We note that you decide to restore the mystery and are glad. Here are the men and women of Cessero come to help you to make good the ground with new trees of fig and olive. In this way no one will know the hill has been breached and the secret will remain with our ancestors.’ He pauses and looks again at me and Tib, then back at Modeste. ‘Are you happy, messire, with your discovery in the shrine?’

  Modeste nods. ‘We are content.’ He pauses. ‘Are you not curious, Léance?’

  The old man shakes his head. ‘Such things are the fancy of the men who flood across our land, messire, like water finding its own level. They stay for their own reasons and depart for their own reasons. They leech all our goodness away and plant their strange seed. But you, messire, and the boy doctor want nothing from us; you leech nothing away. At least you recognize that we live by older rules.’ The light from his torch flickers across his face. ‘Now, messires, we must work on. The making good must be done before the night is through.’

  The digging that had taken many hours during the day is now made good in what seems to be minutes by the men and women of Cessero, helped rather limply by the four of us. Then we stand back and hold new torches, one in each hand, as they set about planting their olives and their figs. They work quietly, by feel. It’s too dark to see the whole effect but I know it will be good.

  Finally we put our bags and tools together ready to trudge back to the camp. But Léance will not hear of our returning there. ‘Good friends, you should not – must not – return to your camp. Danger lurks there. They say there have been soldiers across the land, looking for you. Some may already be at your living place. Else they will be anchored on the river waiting for daylight. There’s word of a new edict and your names on documents for arrest.’

  So we end up this day – probably the most exciting of the whole of our lives – sleeping in one end of Léance’s cowshed on palliasses of prickly grass. I go to sleep in a second, too tired to worry about tomorrow.

  The next day Modeste shakes me awake before dawn. ‘We’re going back to the camp,’ he says. ‘If the soldiers come for us they must not find us here. The Cesseroneans risk their lives sheltering us. Come!’

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The Swarm

  Léance was mistaken. When we got back to our camp there were no soldiers lurking in the undergrowth, no imperial barge on the river. All was peaceful in our hideaway. The bees, though, were angry, buzzing in clouds in the old olive tree and settling in heaving clumps on the roof of the shed.

  In the days following our discovery of the shrine we settled into a kind of Heaven; a world in suspension. Day by day Tibery and Modeste offer their medicinal skills to all comers to the camp. The crowds of pilgrims swell; they come from far and wide. We hear tales of how long it has taken to walk here from Setus, from Massalia, from Biterre where the road is pretty decent, thanks to the Romans. They also tell tales of comrades killed there in the great Arena, sacrificing themselves and being sacrificed for their faith in the Way.

  One of the women from Setus takes Modeste’s arm and leads him to the other side of the great tree, talking swiftly in his ear. ‘Who was that?’ I ask him later that night when all is quiet in the camp.

  ‘She’s the one who sent me the map,’ he says in my ear. We are lying spoon-like on his palliasse. Tib is down in Cessero, playing a bat and ball game with some of the travelling children.

  Modeste goes on. ‘It seems she got it from a man of Corinth who called there some years ago. When she heard of my searches and that I was also from Corinth she sent me the map.’

  I’m suddenly afraid. ‘What did you tell her, Modeste? Did you tell her about the shrine? About the baby?’

  I can feel him shake his head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I told her the map made no sense to me. That its contours must refer to another place.’

  I’m relieved by that. I want that baby left in peace. I feel as well that although Modeste found no answers for his intellectual quest in our discovery of the shrine, he too is at peace now; no longer striving.

  And still people keep coming to the camp for help. As far as I can tell the cures offered by Tib and Modeste are mainly down to knowledge of herbs, reassurance and care, cleanliness and order. Always, though, they offer prayers. Tib’s special caring is for the possessed, the convulsed, the disturbed. It’s with them that I witness his personal magic. His very presence seems to calm these people, to drive the light of madness from their eyes. Many go away tranquil and clear eyed. It would be comforting to say that there’s a rational explanation for what happens. But there isn’t. Like the people of Cessero and the whole province now, I’ve come to accept Tib’s gift as God-given.

  As I say, since our discovery of the shrine and its contents, since the planting of the new forest of olive trees to protect it, Modeste has become quieter, less driven. He’s more loving, more childlike, and somehow much less powerful. We touch each other lovingly even when Tib is around and sometimes we go off to our secret garden to make love. But the passion is fading. These are wonderful, quiet times infused with a kind of mournful grace.

  The only blot on our landscape is our bees. They have finally buzzed off in a swarm and no matter how hard we look we cannot find them. I miss them. They have become part of my life, pointers in the day. And I feel now that they have something on their communal mind.

  Then one day, Peter the seaman brings the Governor’s barge up the river. Watcher
s on the banks run to Cessero with the news and Léance comes to tell us, his face worried. Then, with warnings and anxious shouts he herds the pilgrims still milling around our camp like distracted sheep, back to the village.

  Modeste, Tib and I run with Lupinus to the landing place and wait for the boat to dock. It moves with its splashing raw grace in its familiar livery, brightly painted and immaculate. In minutes the oarsmen are standing to attention, their oars held vertically, like halberds. Then Tib shouts with delight and runs forward as he watches old Peter lead his mother Lady Serina down the double plank. She’s clutching Misou to her bosom. On dry land she puts the little dog down and he scampers across to me to lick my hand with his soft, rasping tongue. Then she turns and draws her son to her and embraces him in an excess of emotion I’ve never seen before. Tib has tears in his eyes. Over his head Lady Serina’s eyes – the window also to the soul of Madame Patrice – meet mine. They are dark and full of sorrow. She speaks to me. ‘My husband is travelling in the north of the province pronouncing judgment on the . . . people of the Way.’ She turns her gaze to Modeste. ‘I’m forbidden to come here, dearest friend, but time is so short now.’

  She pushes Tib from her and looks into his face. She has only to bend slightly now to kiss his round brow. ‘My, you have grown, dear Tibery! And your face is thinner.’ She pauses. ‘Good Fortune is alive with news of you. Of your mission. Of the mission of the good Modeste and Florence. Many of the people travelling through Good Fortune, to and from Massalia and Setus, sing your praises.’ She looks across at Lupinus. ‘And who is this, Tibery?’