Revenant Eve

by Sherwood Smith

Silence fell. I suspect that the two men were waiting for Aurélie to disclose her mission, or talk about herself, but she stayed quiet, her expression troubled.

  The General began to carve again, gouging the tool into the wood to fashion an ear. “So melancholy a subject, the war. Let us banish it with music, since, from the sounds, our dinner is still in preparation. Citizen René Baptiste, will you and my former aide-de-camp favor us with a tune?”

  Aurélie agreed at once and ran upstairs to pull her music case from her satchel. When she came down, Jaska was fitting together not his old hautbois, but a beautiful clarinet. His careful fingers, his little smile of pride, betrayed his feelings before he played a note.

  He’d been good with the hautbois, but on a clarinet, he was (at least to my ears) an orchestra-grade artist.

  Aurélie, very much on her mettle, began hesitantly, then plunged boldly into a Bach piece, as Jaska tapped the floor lightly, then came in on counterpoint, the notes clear and sweet.

  The music acted like a beacon, and before long the entire house had accumulated, from the kids to the servants. Jaska and Aurélie played three more French airs, then Jaska trilled the opening notes of one of Aurélie’s fae pieces. She flushed with pride and dashed off an arpeggio. They launched into the piece, which was one of my favorites.

  The older kids began dancing about, the General beating time with his hand on the table.

  They’d just settled into the chorus when, high as a nightingale’s call, a violin echoed the main line, then soared up and up in a complexity of notes.

  Everyone froze.

  The sound, coming from nowhere and yet everywhere at once, was like the fae had arrived in secret. Only better, because they could only mirror emotion, but the violin brought it straight from the heart.

  The door opened, and there was Mord, looking like an ancient prophet with his long hair, his short, silky beard and mustache, violin under his chin, a host of travel-worn people at his shoulder.

  TWENTY-NINE

  THE FIRST DAY, everything was great.

  The second day was proof that you can’t cram a lot of strangers into a small house and not see signs of strain.

  For one thing, there was not enough room in the barn for the farm animals and all the horses, even with Lady Vera-Diana’s carriage left out in the weather. As for the ladies, I don’t think I was the only one noticing that Lady Vera-Diana and Madame Zeltner both, though exceedingly polite to one another, each wanted the general’s attention. The Poles wanted to talk politics, and the rest of the family was trying to live around the visitors. The kids got louder, and the adults got more polite, the smiles more fixed.

  When Jaska came alongside the spinet after Aurélie tutored a lead-fingered little kid, he said softly, “When you’re finished, Mordechai and I request the favor of your opinion.”

  As soon as she slogged out into the muddy yard, Aurélie found the two awaiting her in the cold air, Mord looking at the ground, his hands loose. His new beard curled softly, emphasizing the fine bones of his face. He had a new hat, low in the brim, that shadowed his eyes, and he wore a long, shabby black coat over his clothing.

  He glanced sideways at Aurélie, then away very quickly.

  Jaska said, “We are ready to leave for Vienna. But there is a question to be settled first.”

  “Which is?” she said.

  “We might have to walk most of the way,” Jaska said. “It’s ten times the distance from Dieppe to Paris. We can take mounts, but if we encounter any French, especially if you are correct that Bonaparte is shortly to declare war, the French military will at best offer to buy, and more than likely requisition our mounts. The animals deserve better than a battlefield. I’m thinking that if we continue to travel as musicians, we have a better chance of passing undisturbed if we walk. Musicians never have any money, thieves have no use for musical instruments, and if we look sufficiently armed, we should dissuade the lout looking to pass the time by thrashing strangers.”

  “I will need better shoes,” Aurélie said. “These are from the theater. They won’t hold out more than a day.”

  “We will stop at the first cobbler we come to.”

  “How will we afford that?” Mord asked.

  “We have means,” Jaska said at the same moment that Aurélie tapped her waistcoat pocket. She spoke: “Madame Josephine gave me plenty of money.”

  Mord looked up, his brows lifting. “We serve Bonaparte’s wife?”

  “It is a personal errand,” Aurélie stated. “It has nothing to do with the military.”

  Jaska started toward the house. “We will leave in the morning.”

  And so they did.

  They could hire two rooms at decent inns. Jaska saw to it that he and Mord were always next door to Aurélie. Thus, she told me, she felt perfectly safe.

  With her own room she was able to bathe and to wash out her shirts, stockings, and underthings before she slept, and dry them at the fire at night.

  The trio offered music wherever they stopped. Some of the better inns even had a keyboard of some sort in the common area.

  The first few days of their journey were under snowy conditions. Their progress was slow at first. Toward the end of each day, Jaska leaned more heavily on his walking stick (from which he’d removed the dashing military tassel) and Aurélie winced as she broke in her new shoes. All that week, France’s landscape was blanketed with white, cross-hatched and stippled each day a little more by the carriage tracks and foot or hoof prints of regular life.

  Mord was mostly silent. He would take out his spectacles when it was time to play, and rehearsed whenever Jaska suggested it. He memorized all the new music Jaska had brought, so he could play without having to read.

  He had always been good, but something had changed. There was an urgency to his interpretations of the pieces, the volume sometimes flamboyant, sometimes diminishing to a murmur, the tempo speeding up and then slowing to a lingering poignancy. Sometimes he would go off into solos of his own, leaving the others to accompany as they could. And early in the mornings, if Aurélie came downstairs in time, we sometimes saw him walking off a little distance to play to rustling evergreens, or a trickling brook.

  When they set out, Mord took care to position himself so that Jaska always walked in the middle. It was so casually done that they had fallen into the habit before Aurélie became aware of it.

  Jaska tried to make conversation, asking easy questions—never about politics, the Bonapartes, or Paris, but of reading, childhood, families. To the latter, Aurélie returned evasive answers, and he was not exactly forthcoming, either, so I still didn’t know how he related to the Dsarets.

  Mord didn’t talk at all.

  One night, Aurélie said to me, “What have I done to Mord? He will not talk to me. He barely looks at me.”

  “I suspect it’s because he knows you are a girl inside those clothes.”

  “But nothing has changed!”

  “Everything has changed. Here.” I touched my head, since she could see me in the tiny shaving mirror set on a stand. “I believe that in his culture, unmarried women and men do not mix. It’s not respectful.”

  “But he is apostate, I thought.”

  “I know of people who have no belief in God, but who celebrate their religion as a cultural tradition,” I said. “Those things are not always easy to define.”

  “Nor the perception of God.” Aurélie crossed her arms. “I came to hate the word ‘Providence,’ because it was Aunt Kittredge’s God, the one who gave things to people who acted like her because they were supposedly good and let others starve or die because they deserved it. That’s not le bon Dieu. Enough of her. We shall never see one another again. I think I see, now, why Mord calls me Citizen René, or sometimes Monsieur Baptiste. He is more comfortable if he can pretend I am a boy.”

  “I think that’s correct. And as long as you both maintain the pretence, then he can be comfortable.”

  “But with Jaska, it’s different. H
e knows I’m a girl, and the pretence is also different. He never says ‘he’ about me, though he calls me René. There are little things…I cannot explain them all. But I know he knows who I am. And he’s very respectful.” She was silent for a time, then smiled. “I like it.” Her smile vanished. “What I don’t like are questions about my origins. I don’t want to lie about who I am, and yet I don’t want to tell him that I’m the daughter of a slave.”

  “But he talked about how he believes in freedom for all.”

  “Yes,” she said, her gaze uncertain. “But I can never forget the horrid things my aunt said. I don’t think I could bear it if he heard the truth, and I saw that same disgust in his face, though I am the same person I always was! When Aunt Kittredge thought I was a marquise’s daughter, my aunt was good enough to me, but though I had not changed, her idea of me changed.” She clapped her hands. “Like that. No, I can’t bear thinking of it.”

  “We all want to be accepted as we are,” I said. “Including Jaska.”

  Aurélie brought her chin down in a slow, thoughtful nod. “’Tis just.”

  “So talk to him about other things.”

  That next morning, Jaska gave up the questions entirely. As soon as they hit the road he pulled a thick little book from his pocket and began reading aloud from Fielding’s Tom Jones.

  Within half a page, Aurélie clapped her hand over her mouth, trying not to laugh.

  When Jaska looked her way, she begged his pardon.

  “Was it the text or how I said it?” he asked. “I’m teaching myself this language. I was trading lessons with the English courier last fall, and as I don’t want to lose what I learned, I’m puzzling out meanings by virtue of this dictionary, but it doesn’t tell me pronunciation.” He plunged his hand into another pocket, and there was a very battered copy of Johnson’s dictionary. “Peste!” he exclaimed. “‘Through.’ Is this said thruff, or throw? Throff?”

  Aurélie tried not to laugh as she corrected him.

  “Threw?” he exclaimed, a hand raised in protest. “Why is through said threw, but though is thoh? All one does is remove the R. But if one then removes the H, the word becomes tuff. So why is the first one not thruff? And this one.” He coughed. “Is c-o-u-g-h said coo or cow?”

  Aurélie muffled a snicker.

  Jaska waved the book. “If gh is to be f, then is not ghost properly pronounced fost?”

  Aurélie smiled as she gave him the correct pronunciation.

  Mord pulled his spectacles from his pocket and regarded Jaska to see if he was kidding. A quick, sideways look at Aurélie, then he snatched off the glasses as if he’d been burned. “It appears that this language was fashioned by a madman. I like that,” he added thoughtfully as he folded his spectacles again and slid them inside his coat.

  Jaska grinned. “Have you read this book, René?”

  “My cousin and I were taking turns reading it aloud as we sewed, the winter before we left for France. But we only got as far as London before my aunt took it away and scolded us mightily, saying it was written only for men.”

  Jaska looked surprised. “Is that English custom, then?”

  “It depends upon the household. Another female cousin had read it.”

  “Will you help me learn these words?” he asked.

  “In trade, will you teach me German? I know you know it. I remember you and Mord speaking it once or twice, on our journey to Paris. The nuns I am to visit will probably speak Latin, and everyone says French is universal, but I would prefer to speak the language of the country I am in.”

  “Agreed. How is this? Mornings, we spend in English, and afternoons in German. I have in my haversack two fine novels, one by Goethe and one by Richter. Do you have a preference?”

  “Not if it’s The Sorrows of Young Werther,” she said. “It sounds horrid. Madame Bonaparte told us that it’s the First Consul’s favorite book, so I do not want to read it. Is the other one amusing? I like comical novels.”

  “I’ve only the first volume of Titan, which is quite new. It was given me by a courier from Prussia, but he had none of the rest of it. We might find other volumes where we are going. In the meantime, I assure you, there will be plenty to discuss. And to laugh over, for Richter loves a good joke.”

  “And I discover in myself a desire to learn a language where one cannot tell by spelling if one is hacking with a cold or warbling like a dove,” Mord observed. “I foresee endless amusement.”

  So that’s what happened.

  On the first Friday night, Mord vanished before the sun set. He returned well after dark without saying where he had been. The next morning, they found him standing in the common room, head bowed.

  “My knee pains me,” Jaska said. “Let us not travel today.”

  Mord turned a smile his way, then vanished outside again. To Aurélie’s quizzical expression, Jaska replied, “I think when he goes off to play in that solitary manner that he’s making Hitbodedut, that is, devotions. And last night, when he vanished coincided with the start of the Sabbath. But if he does not wish to tell us that he is making devotions, our part, I believe, is to pretend we don’t notice.”

  After that, they halted for the Sabbath by mutual accord. And Jaska needed the rest. He never complained, but the difference between his stiff gait of a Friday and the freer walk when they pushed forward again was apparent.

  Eventually they crossed from Lunéville to the forested, hilly territory west of Strasbourg. The secluded timberland seemed to bring darkness earlier, and they sought shelter earlier, especially when the thick woods echoed with the howl of wolves. They often practiced shooting as they walked, which kept their weapons in shape and also scared off lurking predators.

  Aurélie told me that she hated the loudness of the noise, the stink of burnt metal and powder, but she was determined to so refine her aim that she could wound the hand raised to strike her or hit the knee bent to lunge without destroying the attacker’s life—even the life of someone bent on evil.

  “There are too many deaths in my dreams,” she said to me one night, when cleaning her pistol and reloading it before she went to sleep.

  Early stops meant rehearsals, to which the locals listened with interest. By now they were a musical trio of professional quality, but even so, the listeners almost invariably leaned by increments toward Mord, whose playing continued to achieve extraordinary range and power. But he never seemed satisfied.

  Aurélie began having nightmares again. I’d thought those had ended when we arrived in Paris. Jaska looked with concern at her heavy eyes on those mornings, but when he asked why she didn’t sleep, she only said, “Nightmares.”

  The day before we reached Strasbourg, she took everyone by surprise. “I have a new song,” she said, as she sat down to the village’s single fortepiano. “It is called ‘Miyyah fi Miyyah.’” She worked it out with determined fingers, as Jaska picked up the melody on his flute. And to me, in English, she murmured, “It came in last night’s dream. The woman in the dream was Spanish. If I have to have nightmares, then at least they can give me music.”

  She turned away, yawning so hard that her eyes watered. She did not see the long, thoughtful look that Jaska gave her.

  Strasbourg revealed the familiar depredations of the Revolution, the oddest, the gigantic Phrygian cap still covering the spire of the vandalized cathedral. On either side, French mixed with German voices. When she heard the latter, Aurélie lifted her face with a delight I recognized. It’s cool when the indecipherable patterns of a foreign language begin to make sense.

  That night, having located an inn with a resident spinet, they offered to play. After an early dinner, they were going about setting up their instruments—reeds, tuning, Aurélie getting the touch of the spinet—when a loud clattering outside the inn caused an abrupt drop in voices and a tense shift of attention to the door.

  In strode a captain and two attendant guards, muskets at the ready. The captain unrolled a piece of paper and read, “By order of
the first consul, war has been officially declared against the British for their refusal to obey the terms of the Treaty of Amiens. All English are to be arrested. If you see any of the following, you are to report them immediately to the local prefecture.”

  He then read out names and descriptions of persons suspected of being spies against the Republic of France. Most of them were men, and then:

  “Going by the name of Aurélie de Mascarenhas, female approximately sixteen to twenty years of age, petite, black eyes and hair, Mediterranean complexion, dressed as a court lady.”

  THIRTY

  THE CAPTAIN ROLLED UP HIS PAPER, turned with a self-important air, and walked out followed by his guards, who had scrutinized the adult males in hopes of nabbing a spy and gaining a promotion. They’d looked right past the young boy hunched on the stool at the spinet, hat jammed low on ‘his’ head.

  As soon as they were safely gone, the innkeeper said mournfully, “My dear fellow citizens, I have little respect for the roasbiffs, but even an English spy would know that England lies to the north and not to the east?”

  This heavy-handed joke at the expense of the English received appreciative chuckles as a round of wine was served out to re-establish the proper festive atmosphere, and the innkeeper gestured impatiently for the musicians to play.

  Aurélie’s hands trembled, causing a false note or two. But she flexed and shook her fingers, then pounded the keys until she recaptured the rhythm.

  The next morning, she waited until they were well away from the inn, and exclaimed, “They think I am a spy!”

  “Yes,” Jaska said, his expression wary. “This should not be a surprise.”

  “But it is. I remember Minister Talleyrand warning us, but that was months ago. I have never done anything to warrant accusation.”

  Mord kept broody silence as Jaska said mildly, “Apparently Madame Bonaparte said nothing about your departure so, effectively, you vanished the day after receiving a letter from the islands. That must have raised suspicion, if no other of your actions did.”