Revenant Eve

by Sherwood Smith

  The draper gave directions and admonished Jaska to say that Hansel had sent them. Half an hour later the storm hit, but they were safe and snug as it roared onto the slanted roof over their heads.

  Their pose as music students required them to offer some tunes for the household. Their audience, a bunch of cheery faced Austrians, clapped and stamped to the bouncier tunes and listened more quietly to Mord’s musical exegesis on the ruined countryside. I could hear it in the fragments of melodies he played, broken apart and shifted to minor keys.

  After a sumptuous meal of mainly starches and dairy, as it was too early for any vegetables, the three retired to their attic. They were camping in the same room for the first time since the days of their jaunt down the Seine.

  Wool-stuffed pallets had been laid out amid neat stacks of horse and human gear. As he set his haversack down, Mord said again, “What did you hear?”

  Jaska said, “I heard a story about war, and how it disrupts life.”

  Aurélie said, “The broken melodies, yes.”

  Mord set his violin gently in its battered case. “Perhaps I am learning,” he admitted.

  “Learning what?” Jaska asked. “I say you play better than ever, but you sigh and look as if you caused the strings to squawk like a chicken. My opinion’s worthless?” He put his fist to his chest. “I’m insulted!”

  Mord raised his hands, smiling and shaking his head. “Sorry. Sorry.”

  Aurélie looked sorrowful. “I don’t want to tell you what I see, because it always makes you sad.”

  Mord flushed. “I’ve been arrogant. Your words humble me, for which I thank you. I see only my failure to successfully tell Rabbi Nachman’s stories through music. The Rabbi, may he live in peace, teaches that music is the highest form of deveikut, higher than prayer. I do not understand deveikut—you could say devotion—anymore. I do not understand prayer. But I understand music. So I thought, maybe I can spread those stories to others through my music.” He pressed his hands to his eyes and then startled everybody by lifting his head and saying directly to me, “Do you see the seraphs following us, ghost?”

  I’d forgotten he could see me.

  I said, without expecting to be heard, “Do you mean by ‘seraphs’ those beings with the dark wings? I’ve seen them. Three in particular, one of which spoke to me in Paris.”

  Mord frowned. “They spoke? The seraphs spoke? Do you see your fellow ghosts as well?”

  “Some are clear, and others waver, like light in water,” I said.

  Aurélie whispered my words to Jaska, who looked surprised.

  Mord gave a thoughtful nod. “When you spoke to this seraph. What did it say?”

  Totally unused to anyone hearing me except Aurélie, I touched her, and whispered in English, “It was when you were with Bonaparte. Do you want me talking about that?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “You didn’t tell me.”

  “There was no time, and the winged creature didn’t do anything, just talked.”

  Mord was gazing at me warily, so I said, “One of the seraphs was there when she was talking to Bonaparte.”

  “Bonaparte? You had an interview with Bonaparte?” Jaska asked.

  Aurélie blushed. “Yes.”

  “Perhaps the time has come to tell us what your mission is?” Jaska looked troubled.

  “But I did,” Aurélie exclaimed, hands open. “Madame Bonaparte is sending me to the Sisters of the Piarists, in Vienna.”

  “You did not tell me what she wants,” Jaska went on, “from the smallest and humblest of convents, attached to a small group of teaching brethren. The same brethren, as it happens, who ran the school where General Kosciusko was taught.”

  “What has that to do with Madame Bonaparte wishing to conceive an heir?” Aurélie asked in surprise. “I told you the mission was personal.”

  He thought Aurélie was a spy.

  It hit me about two heartbeats before it hit Aurélie. Then her hands became fists, and for a second or two I thought she was going to take a swing at him. “You thought I was a spy?”

  Then she turned her face into the crook of her elbow and laughed.

  It was Jaska’s turn to blush.

  Tears glittered along her eyelids as she struggled to get control. “Oh, oh,” she said, gasping. “I am almost angry, except…How could you think me a spy? What possible motive could I have?”

  “What motive does anyone have? It could be ideals, it could be profit, or power,” he said. “Your circumstances appear to be both mysterious and strange. And you just admitted to a private interview with Bonaparte.”

  Aurélie blushed deeply. “That interview was an accident. He—he encountered me when I was leaving Madame Bonaparte, and he made—he mistook—he wanted something I would not give.” She looked miserable, facing away.

  Jaska’s expression cleared. “Ah,” he said.

  Aurélie looked down, a small, wretchedly embarrassed figure.

  “If that’s so, it explains the search for you. He’s said to be vindictive when crossed. The General attests to that. And everyone’s circumstances are strange these days.” Jaska’s tone was apologetic.

  Aurélie looked up at that. “So very, very many lives disrupted, even destroyed by these wars. So many different motives! There’s a general whom Madame Josephine says is now very high in Bonaparte’s regard. He wants Bonaparte to declare himself king, but this is the very man who accused Madame’s first husband of anti-republicanism and caused him to die on the guillotine.”

  “I think,” Jaska said, “we’ve only to point to Fouché for changing political motivations as circumstances dictate. But we’ll acquit you of that, especially if…well, if Bonaparte saw fit to add you to the list of wanted spies, without giving any reason.”

  Aurélie said with dignity, “I am no spy!”

  “Because you’re haunted by a ghost who seems to get information by mysterious means, I’ll admit that this particular convent is known to me, to certain among my own people. They have connections with magic.”

  Vrajhus, I thought. He’s got to be from Dobrenica.

  Aurélie threw her hands wide. “And that’s exactly what Madame seeks, a magical solution to her failure to bear a child. Did you know she was severely wounded at Plombières several years ago, when she went for a cure?”

  “I remember that. The physicians published their treatment regimen,” Jaska said. “Madame de Staël was reading these. I was in Paris at that time. It was enough to turn the stomach of a ghoul.” He seemed to come to a decision and pulled from his haversack a small shaving mirror. This he held up, turning it until he saw me. Which he could do without Aurélie touching the mirror first, a fact that hit her the same moment it hit me.

  “You told us before that Napoleon was about to declare war on England. Only Bonaparte would have known that or perhaps a trusted few. Including demons following him to overhear.”

  “Look,” I said. “I can’t prove that I’m not a demon. No one can prove a negative. All I can tell you is that my powers are pretty much limited to knowing some facts about what Bonaparte is—” going to do “—doing and the ability to talk to Aurélie and now to you. If I had greater powers, I’d waft her to safety right now.”

  Mord glanced up. “And yet something protects her from the demons drawing near, the shadowed shapes that one perceives at the edge of vision, at a distance. And from the vampires. I heard them from time to time as we traversed the woods. Yet they never came close.”

  I had completely forgotten about the necklace, worn all this time around Aurélie’s ankle, hidden by sturdy socks and her voluminous breeches.

  I think she had forgotten it as well. She said uncertainly, “Maybe they sense my duppy and are afraid to come near. It was that way with the fae…” She was remembering the necklace now. And clammed up.

  Okay. If she wasn’t going to mention it, I wouldn’t either. It was her promise to keep, and I didn’t see how the necklace mattered one way or another to the probl
ems of Bonaparte, spies, or secret missions, even if it did ward off vampires and demons.

  Jaska glanced to the side, something he did when uncomfortable. “After we reach the Piarist Sisters in Vienna, what do you plan to do?”

  Aurélie looked troubled. “I must take the cure back to Madame.” She didn’t look any too happy about that.

  Jaska didn’t, either. “Permit me to make one more observation: Whatever Bonaparte’s motivation for reporting you as a spy, the fact that you were added to the lists of suspects indicates that Madame Bonaparte did nothing to keep suspicion from you.”

  Aurélie said in a low voice, “I thought about that after we left Strasbourg. But she’s oftentimes so very afraid. She cannot always influence the First Consul. In any case, I made a promise. So I have to keep it.”

  Jaska said finally, “I don’t want to be suspicious of you, Mademoiselle. Especially as it appears that you aren’t Bonaparte’s creature, or he wouldn’t have put you on that list. But there are still mysteries here, and one of them is this ghost.”

  “Think of me however you must, but Kim is not a demon,” Aurélie declared.

  Almost at the same moment Mord said, “Citizen René’s ghost is not a demon.”

  Jaska smiled and made a whimsical half-bow to Aurélie. “I shall accept that and be satisfied. My apologies for doubting.”

  She said in a low voice, “My apologies for keeping secrets that are not mine to reveal.”

  Jaska made a business of spreading out his greatcoat and placing his haversack just so, to act as pillow. Then he said, “Tomorrow I will arrange for us to take a riverboat the remainder of the way to Vienna.”

  Mord murmured something about yichud, the religious prohibition against opposite sexes, not married to each other, residing together in private. He retired to the far end of the attic. Aurélie curled up, facing away from the guys.

  It took a long time for Aurélie to fall asleep. When she woke, Jaska had already gone. He rejoined them at breakfast, which was served at a gigantic table with the rest of the stable family and staff.

  After that, they walked down to the riverside, where their boat was readying to cast off. They joined the gaggle of passengers moving up the ramp.

  The seats were unsheltered, exposing them to the misting rain. Aurélie sat forward shivering, gazing at the mountains against the ragged sky. Her mouth dropped open when she first glimpsed the monumental stonework of Melk, which I knew contained books going back a thousand years. She gazed up at the picturesque ruin of Dürnstein, where Richard the Lionheart had been kept prisoner above a charming golden baroque village. It was Richard’s vast ransom that had paid for the city walls we were about to pass.

  But by then it was too dark to see much, so she dozed off until, early in the morning, the riverboat docked outside Vienna. Because of the arrowhead juts of the city walls, Vienna, in the distance, looked like the Castle of an Evil Doomlord.

  THIRTY-TWO

  VIENNA WAS WHERE I’D MET ALEC. I could see the familiar spire of St. Stephen’s poking above those mighty ramparts—which, in my day, had become the Ringstrasse, a wide street circling the inner city. St. Stephen’s was the single familiar sight, basically unchanged since the late 1200s.

  Once we got closer, the impression of a vast and villainous lair evaporated as the baroque glory of Vienna opened up. The fortified city that had withstood two sieges by the Turkish invaders had been moderated by Emperor Joseph II. His trees were everywhere, giving the lovely pale-stone and golden baroque buildings the sense of a gigantic and secluded palace surrounded by pocket gardens.

  The city streets were pretty clean. That, too, was a result of the resolutely enlightened Emperor Joseph II. It was strange to think that this guy had died only thirteen years before. At least he didn’t see the horrific excesses of the French Revolution, or what happened to his little sister, Marie Antoinette.

  The trio took a coach into the inner city, which was an amazing tangle of narrow streets and palaces, a fantasia of statuary, carvings, ironwork, bow windows, fountains, and pediments rich with images from Greek, Roman, and Christian myth.

  Jaska looked around with a kind of alert, subtle tension, then finally said to Aurélie, “I will take you directly to the Piarists, or you will have to wait until Monday, as they will be busy from Maundy Thursday through Easter.”

  The coach stopped outside a street too narrow to admit passage. The walls were high with no windows. A door was fitted into them, however, with a tiny peephole. Above the door jamb was a bell pull on a chain. Aurélie rang the bell.

  The elderly nun who opened the peephole said, “We do not interview during Holy Week. And we only educate the daughters of the poor.”

  She began to shut the peephole, but Aurélie leaned up and said quickly, “I am sent by Madame Bonaparte. I’m a woman, and I must speak to the prioress.” Her French accent was unmistakable.

  The door opened, and Jaska said from the coach door, “I’ll return for you.”

  Aurélie cast him a distracted glance then followed the nun inside. She was conducted into a plain, clean hall. Distant voices could be heard—girls’ voices praying, rising and falling in unison. Aurélie in a small room furnished with nothing but a couple of benches and a crucifix on the wall.

  “It smells of incense here,” she whispered to me. “Oh, that takes me back to Saint-Domingue.” And she put her hand to her chest, where she had been carrying her mother’s letter inside the waistcoat, ever since that night at Saint-Cloud.

  An older woman appeared. From her manner she had to be the prioress, though her robes—plain black except for the thin band of her white wimple—were exactly like those of the first nun.

  She sat down on the bench next to Aurélie. “You wish to speak to me, my daughter?” Her French was accented and quaint.

  Out came Josephine’s story, exactly as Aurélie had heard it. “And so,” she finished. “What can you give her for a cure? She said she would pay anything. See? I brought these gold coins all the way, minus a small amount as my portion of our travel.” Aurélie brought out the small purse and shook its clinking contents.

  The prioress bowed her head and was silent for a time, then opened her eyes. “It is true that some of us can, at times, see and hear a little of the world unseen. Our sacristan is one of these. We also know enough to effect cures for some of the ills common to this world, though that is not our primary calling. But I would have to see her directly.”

  “She is in Paris and does not believe the First Consul would let her come here to consult you.”

  “Sometimes,” the prioress said, “the path we see is difficult to explain, except in terms of sacred image. Are you a daughter of the church?”

  Aurélie said, “I was baptized by my grandmother in Saint-Domingue, but I have been part of many traditions.”

  The prioress was again quiet for a time, then lifted a hand. “Here is what I can tell you in practical terms. The way to Paris lies in shadow. The reason you were sent, a young girl, traveling in dangerous times, instead of a diplomatic query, is the very reason you cannot return.”

  “But I must return,” Aurélie said. I could hear the stress in her voice. “I promised Madame that I would.”

  “If you do, you will endanger her.”

  “Madame Josephine? Endangered by my return? How?”

  “Your reappearance, even with a verbal message, will occasion exactly the questions your friend wishes to avoid.”

  “The mouchards,” Aurélie exclaimed as I said to her, “She’s right. You can’t go back to Paris.” Relief flooded through my invisible self.

  “Then I must send her a letter,” Aurélie said.

  “A letter would meet the same treatment. However, I know of a way to get an answer to her through ecclesiastical channels. One of our order is being sent to Paris to consult with fellow Christians who are re-establishing schools. I can charge this nun with a simple message to your friend that will not endanger either party. If Ma
dame wishes to hear what I have to say, she must find her path to me. She has the means. She must have the will, and perhaps I can do something for her, even if it is only to attempt to give her peace.”

  Aurélie handed the prioress the remainder of Josephine’s gold coins. “I think she’d want you to have these, for your students. Perhaps you could pray for her, until she can come here?”

  “We will put the money to good use,” the nun said. “And we will dedicate a Mass to her.” She made the sign of the cross between them, and said, “Go in peace, my daughter.”

  Aurélie thanked her politely and walked out. The moment the outer door shut, she leaned against the whitewashed stone wall, her eyes closed.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “I am giddy,” she whispered.

  “With relief that you do not have to go back to Paris?”

  She opened her eyes. “No. Yes. I’m glad that I needn’t return to Paris, but I cannot say I need never again be afraid of Bonaparte, because is he not going to bring war all this way?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Duppy Kim, the conversation with the prioress, I dreamed it. Every word, only it was as if I saw myself through someone else’s eyes.”

  “When did you do that?” My relief vanished like smoke, leaving me kind of creeped out.

  “Long ago—very long. So long ago I had forgotten, until she began talking about Madame Bonaparte. I think it might have been when Aunt Kittredge confined me to my room for lying, or right after. None of it made sense, because I did not then know what eine Priorin—a prioress—was, or a Piarist, or who Madame Bonaparte was. I had never heard the name ‘Bonaparte’ when I was twelve. I only knew of her by her previous name, which was Rose Tascher de la Pagerie, and sometimes Madame de Beauharnais.”

  “Aurélie, I think you are dreaming people’s actual lives.”

  “Yes. I came to that conclusion a fortnight or so ago. Each woman who wore the necklace. But this is different, because it’s part of my own life.”

  “You saw a possible future,” I said, trying to be comforting. “Dreams can’t harm you, even if some of them don’t end that well.”