Goddess (8 page)

C
LARA WAITS IN THE POULTRY HOUSE
one evening, in spite of the dark, in spite of the spiders. She waits for her—friend—soul mate. Love. Although she will not say that word. Not ever. It’s wrong. And yet, she is. Listening for her footsteps, now—every moment of the day. She can’t help it. Here they are. Running. The door creaks open.

‘Come.’ Julie holds out her hand.

‘What is it?’

‘It is our moment—our escape.’

Fear clutches at Clara’s bowels. ‘Not yet.’

‘Yes,’ says Julie. ‘Tonight. Now. Sister Carmella is dead. I just found her in the hallway—laid her in her room.’

‘Oh! Did you tell the Abbess?’

‘Not yet. She’ll find out soon enough.’

‘Poor Sister Carmella.’ Clara tries to remember her face but it’s one among so many. ‘We must take her to the Chapel of the Dead and pray for her soul.’

‘Let the others say the rosary. Tomorrow. I have a plan.’

The body is still, soft, with the bones of a bird, easily carried to another bed—Clara’s bed.

‘This is wrong,’ says Clara.

There’s a candle by the cot, burning down to a pool of yellow fat and smoke.

‘It’s marvellous,’ says Julie. ‘We’ll be long gone by the time they work it out.’

‘But Sister Carmella—’

‘Has gone to meet her Saviour. She’s happy. So shall we be.’

Clara drops to her knees to whisper a prayer over the body, lays the back of one hand on the nun’s cold cheek.

‘It’s a sin. All of it.’

‘Don’t say that.’ Julie grabs Clara’s arm and pulls her to her feet. ‘Listen to me. I will set you free.’

‘I never asked for that.’

‘That’s only because you don’t understand how it feels, but I do. Believe me, once you have been freed, you can never go back. I can never go back.’

‘Why, you sound so fierce. You’re scaring me.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to. But whether you like it or not, I will free both of us.’ Julie gulps a breath. ‘Or I will die.’

Clara stares at the bed. The tumbled linen, the chamber-pot, the stone floor. The scarecrow body, eyes and mouth open. Was Sister Carmella surprised by death? Even at her age? The red demon shouts in Clara’s ear. She will not listen.

‘They’ll know …’ She casts around for reasons, obstacles, anything.

‘How? One burnt body is much like another. They’ll think you’re dead.’

‘For a while.’

‘That’s long enough.’

At home in Marseille there were servants in green coats who brought hot milk and eggs on a tray. Housemaids who mopped the stairs and set kindling in every fireplace even if it wasn’t cold. Clara had a harpsichord of her own and a parrot. She had never visited the poultry house or even the kitchens. Never scrubbed a slate floor or washed her own underclothes. Never chopped wood or picked apples until her fingers blistered. Never even saw anyone do those things.

‘I want to go home.’ The plea in her voice is almost too much to bear—for her, for both of them.

‘You can’t.’ Julie shoves a blanket into a satchel. ‘Not ever. Not now. This is the only way.’

‘They’ll never forgive us.’

‘I don’t need forgiveness—not from anyone.’

‘You will, Julie.’ She is close to tears. ‘One day.’

‘Forget all that. Listen. We’ll need horses—one will carry us both for a few days. You weigh less than Sister Carmella and she’s been starved for forty years.’

‘They’ll come after us.’

‘We’ll travel by night.’

Clara stands still at the foot of the bed with prayer beads wrapped around her fingers, trying not to look at the cross above the door. Julie covers Sister Carmella with layers of cloth. Both of them whisper, urgently, fearful of being heard or of being wrong or of what happens next.

‘My father will not let it rest.’

‘I’m not afraid of him.’

‘We will be damned.’

‘We are already.’

‘In God’s name—’

‘Clara, we must go. Now. The city gates will open soon. Take my hand.’

She does.

The candle flickers when it touches the sheet. Almost splutters out. Then the linen smokes and catches, the flames shimmer in the gloom. The bed is alight. The red demon laughs, triumphant, and Clara laughs, too. She has lost, is lost, was always lost.

They leave by the gate in the garden wall, closing it soundlessly behind them. There’s smoke in the sky now. Soon the bells will ring.

They run in the dark, through the orchard and rows of purple cabbages. Clara trips and gasps. They race between the stone fences and through narrow lanes that protect monasteries and tiny chapels and merchants’ houses full of sleeping children.

At the city wall they slow down, try to appear calm, and slip through the Porte Saint-Lazare at dawn—two virtuous postulants off to pick herbs on the hillside or visit the sick. The guardsmen on the gate wish them a good day.

At the first bend in the road, they rip off their veils and fling them into the bushes. Julie thinks of the chaos left behind them—the burning bed and foul smoke and nuns with buckets of water and the screaming—and smiles. She and her love breathe the air of liberty, of the countryside, of autumn in Provence, and race across the fields towards the coast road, towards the morning, towards freedom.

D
ON’T WRITE THAT DOWN
. I never meant to tell a soul. I swore I would not. It must have been the fever talking.

But now. I have begun, here, at the end. Or was it?

Sometimes I’m not sure where I am. Or when.

The story? Yes. I’m sorry. I’m just so tired. Always. Perhaps sitting outside for hours wasn’t the best thing for me. Perhaps it will hasten the end. Perhaps that’s for the best. I’m weaker. I feel it.

But I know my job, my role, my lines. So I will go on.

We were—somewhere. Everywhere. Running. Hiding. Together.

We waited for the metamorphosis. It never happened. Each night Clara prayed I would wake up as a man, and each morning she was astonished to find that I was exactly as I have ever been.

I don’t care what Ovid says, the gods don’t bother themselves with such trifles—such human dilemmas. They let us figure these things out for ourselves. Otherwise we would be less than human and much less than holy.

Clara wanted to believe it, and I suppose a small fragment of me did, too, if only for her, if only to make it easy for us to be together—to take her as my wife, to be husband, lover—to feel a love that was blessed in the sight of God.

I have had such a love, since, in spite of my unchangingly female body.

But still, every night, whether in a shabby tavern or a hedgerow, she slept wrapped in my cloak and in my arms. Chaste. But ever so close. Every dawn I woke to feel her eyelashes tremble against my skin.

I remember her eyes and a freckle on her neck. She had a slight limp—you’d never notice it under her skirts—from a childhood riding accident, or so I was told, but it never slowed her down, until we had to run.

And run we did.

Through the dark. Around in circles. Through villages that never even knew we were there, through muddy days on the road to Aix. There we stopped.

There they found us.

Strange as it seems now, we had no idea how many men were hunting for us, how righteous and driven was their anger. Clara’s family, of course, and the Abbess, and every other stickybeak in the papal city—filled with wrath and shame. We sparked a fuse of fury that ignited across the south. La Reynie heard of it in Paris and sent men and dogs to trace our scent. D’Armagnac—perhaps it was an order from my own father’s pen—dispatched riders and guardsmen. Dozens of men on the King’s finest horses rode through the nights in search of two bedraggled girls. Priests in every town denounced us at Mass. The doors of convents all over France were twice-locked each night in case any other sinners were possessed by similar thoughts. The Parliament in Aix passed sentence on me—me, alone—in a secret hearing, as though my crimes were too horrible to describe in public.

We knew nothing of this at first.

All those men scoured the country lanes and villages, all those notaries argued the case for days, the countryside was up in arms, but they couldn’t find us; and we—we were together and free.

Strange, really. We were hunted all over Provence and yet I was completely at peace. With her.

Clara. The name of a saint. Face of an angel, too. She had the disposition of a saint, for that matter. Trusting. Faith such as you’ve never experienced, Father—yes, even you.

Faith enough to renounce her family, her finery—her whole life. Faith enough to make her reckless—foolhardy, even—she who had never so much as disagreed with her mother or teased a baby sister.

That faith was her only flaw. You think faith can only ever be perfect?

Pig’s arse.

I can think of a hundred examples of faith that has destroyed people, cities, even whole civilisations—their faith or others’—it’s all the same. The fall of Constantinople. The Massacre of the Innocents. The destruction of the Temple—of the Huguenots—of the King of England. That’s faith at work in the world. For every miracle, there are a hundred lives lost. More.

In Clara’s case it’s quite simple. Her faith was misplaced. She had faith in me, an unworthy recipient if ever there was one. She believed that I would save her, protect her, hide her.

She was wrong. There was no escape. No more contentment. No metamorphosis. Dear God, if only I’d learned the truth—from d’Armagnac, from Séranne, from all those books and all those boys. I thought our passion—for that’s what it was—was fruitless. I didn’t realise that a metamorphosis was unnecessary, that I might have made her happy as a lover, as a husband—or a wife—or both. I was not much more than a child—it’s my only defence—and my lovers had only ever tended to their own needs. I didn’t know that romance and sex were different creatures—one of the soul, one of the body. I had no idea that two souls can feel as if they are joined in one body, as it were, no matter the shape of the bodies involved.

Clara believed that I would love her as long as I lived. In that, at least, her faith was justified, although she will never know it.

But me? Did I really commit such wrongs as to deserve this fever, this interminable dying—and you appearing at my bedside like an avenging angel every morning?

What do I regret now? What do I confess?

My crimes against people, against the law—yes. Utterly. The arson. Of course. I still smell the burning bed—the burning flesh—in the night. It was foolish. Unnecessary. Vicious. Madness, really, since it made them all the more determined to find us, to punish us. Without that, we might have got away, stayed free. We might have lived together, happily, for years—as sisters, perhaps, or lady companions in some little village in the Var or by the sea, not bothered by anyone except the odd meddling priest, for all our days. I might even have been content, living like that—in peace—incognito—you never know.

But nobody was abducted. That charge I reject. Totally. Those crimes still hang over my head, here, where they began. The King has pardoned me. You may not—I don’t care. But I have paid for them. Then. Now. Ever since. Paid through the nose. For years.

My crimes, my transgressions. You think they are legion, but no—they are few. People say I’ve killed dozens of men, deprived children of their fathers. That I’m a whore, a libertine.

In truth I am marble. I am flame. Fever. I am still and the world swirls around me. I am sea and the great shark. I am caught, dying. I am here. Back here.

The memories sear my flesh, my heart. I still see Clara’s face, my last glimpse of her, asleep and trusting.

These are my sins, Father. Those, and loving too much, too violently. But I am reformed. You believe me?

It’s true. I won’t commit any further crimes, you can be sure of that. Not with this cough, this wasted body, these trembling fingers. I have run out of time, it would seem, but if by some miracle I am granted another year—another ten—I swear to you I wouldn’t live my life any differently.

I won’t love again. That would be impossible, after …

But everything else—no—I have regrets, but I will not recant. No matter how much you threaten and scowl.

I’m the way I am because this is how God made me—God and my own father—and that is how I will die.

‘J
ULIE,
I’
M HUNGRY.’

‘You’re always hungry.’

Clara’s feet slide sideways in the mud. She picks up her hem, already filthy, and walks on. ‘We should stop somewhere soon. Beg some supper. Or you could steal another chicken.’

Julie strides ahead of her, looking around at the trees, the sky. ‘You told me theft is a sin.’

‘I’ve changed my mind.’

Julie glances back. ‘I love it when you smile.’

‘I love it when you steal chickens.’

In the villages, everyone watches them. The eyes of every farmer’s wife, baker, parish priest—especially the priest—follow the steps of the two strange girls in grubby white robes.

It’s impossible to steal an apple from a stall or a loaf of bread. They need a market town. A city. Not Marseille. Not Avignon.

Aix.

It takes weeks to walk there along mule tracks and across hillsides. Julie steers them clear of the high road, the taverns, the toll gates, the guardhouses. They eat raw mushrooms dug out of pine needles, a fish left in someone’s trap, bowls of porridge begged from a ferryman, rosemary leaves and birch bark. One day they steal a hare hanging outside a huntsman’s cottage. Most days they go hungry.

As they walk, they hold hands and imagine the world.

‘Tell me again, Julie. How will we live?’

‘A goat farm? I always liked goats.’

‘Roasted?’ Clara can almost taste it.

‘Not for eating, silly. For milking.’

They talk about food constantly. It doesn’t help.

‘Can you make butter from goat’s milk?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Julie. ‘But at Versailles the children have little goat carts and race each other across the forecourt. They’re very dainty.’

‘The children?’

‘The goats.’

‘I don’t think I’d be very good at farming,’ Clara admits, after several days of planning a future filled with goats. ‘Animals scare me a little.’

‘A tavern then?’ says Julie. ‘An inn. In the mountains. In Italy.’

‘Naples?’

‘Why not?’

‘My grandmother lives in Naples.’

‘That’s why not.’ Julie grins. ‘Somewhere else. Venice? I could sing in Venice.’

‘Sing for me now.’

She does. Something Italian, for her Neapolitan love. A duet. She sings both parts, weeps dramatically, falls to one knee in the mud to declare her undying devotion. Her accent is appalling. Her Neapolitan love applauds and helps her up. That night they sleep under a tree. It rains.

Clara weeps into her sleeve, silently, but not silently enough. The red demon has nothing to say on the subject of hunger or blistered feet. It has abandoned her. Sometimes she misses it. Sometimes Julie wishes Clara would shut up.

By the time they reach Aix they have only one pair of sandals between them. They hitch a ride on a cart through the city gates and head for the market.

Clara holds tight to the edge of Julie’s robe. ‘So many people.’

‘Have you forgotten how noisy a big town can be?’

They wait at a crossroads while an old man shepherds his flock across the square towards the market.

Clara flinches at the noise. ‘I like it better when it’s just us.’

‘When it’s just us we don’t eat much.’ Julie throws her satchel on the ground, arches her back and stretches. ‘You wait here. I can sneak around better alone.’

Clara doesn’t loosen her grip on the robe. ‘You’ll come back?’

‘Of course I will.’

‘Promise?’

A sigh. ‘What’s wrong with you, Clara?’

‘I’m scared.’

‘Don’t be.’ Julie attempts a smile, but she’s too hungry to make it work properly. ‘I’m going to come back with a roasted chicken. You’ll see. Or better still, a purse full of silver. But I can’t do it with you holding on to me like that.’

‘I’ll wait. I’ll be brave.’

‘That’s my sweet. Stay here by the fountain so I can find you again.’

The city is not as old as Avignon and not wild like Marseille, either. It’s a town of shopkeepers and bakers, of markets and coffee houses, of sober buildings and stonemasons hammering. A flock of ragged sheep pours through the avenue towards the saleyards. It takes until midday for Julie to find a man willing to pay in silver for a few moments in a quiet alley. And then another.

On her way back to the square she sees a warrant posted on a church door. It’s tattered but she can read it. It has her name on it. And other words. Arson. Body-snatching. Abduction. Corruption of an innocent. Sentenced to death. To be burned alive at the stake. Reward for capture.

She reads it again. Sentenced to be burned alive at the stake. The words drip ice into her chest until her heart freezes. She will die, here, now. They will catch her, kill her. Kill them both.

No. Wait. There’s no mention of Clara on the warrant. Clara is safe. Could be safe. Clara alone.

Her love waits by the fountain.

‘Is everything all right? You look odd.’

‘I’m tired, that’s all.’

‘Did you steal a chicken?’

‘Better. A few coins.’ This time she manages a convincing smile.

‘Such an accomplished thief. I’m proud of you.’

‘It’s enough for a night in a real bed and a hot bath. And a chicken.’

The inn is in darkness. There’s a shadow by the fireplace. It stands. Kicks a log further into the coals. A knock at the open door—soft at first, then more insistent. The shadow looks up.

‘What is it?’

A man steps into the room, looks around, and closes the door behind him.

‘Monsieur d’Aubigny? Or should I call you Madame de Maupin?’

Silence. A sigh. Then: ‘Perhaps. Who knows? It depends.’

The man moves closer to the fire, to the shadow. ‘Where is she?’

‘Who?’

‘The other girl—your captive.’ He sees her now: thin face, hair pulled back. Not the famous beauty he was expecting.

She grimaces at him. ‘Who are you?’

‘An emissary from Comte d’Armagnac.’

‘A ghost. Or is that me?’

‘I beg your pardon, madame?’

Julie stares at the man’s face. Dark beard, a scar over one eye. Never seen him before.

‘What do you want?’ she asks.

‘I have come to make an offer.’

She sits down heavily on the chair nearest the fire. ‘Make it.’

‘You cannot escape. That much is clear.’

‘They’re not looking for me,’ she says. ‘I saw the proclamation. So unimaginable are my deeds that the Parliament has accused someone called Monsieur d’Aubigny. Because, let’s face it, no woman could be guilty of such crimes.’

‘The gendarmes know the truth. If I can find you, La Reynie will certainly track you down and hand you to the Parliament.’

Julie laughs. ‘Monsieur d’Aubigny. The metamorphosis at last.’

‘Whatever you had hoped, madame, it cannot be.’

‘Me? I hoped for a clear road—a life free of despair. And look at me.’ It is over. She knows it. Clara will know it soon enough. Perhaps she already does. ‘I’m weary. We both are.’

‘Where is your prisoner?’

‘Upstairs. Asleep. But she’s not a prisoner. She is free. We left together. Nobody was abducted.’

‘The Parliament will not believe you. They will never even hear it. You will be sent straight to the stake.’

Julie glances up at him. ‘What does it matter to you?’

‘It doesn’t. But it matters to the Comte.’

‘Why should he care?’

‘I can’t speculate.’

Julie looks away, deep into the embers. ‘What will become of her?’

‘She’ll go home. She has done nothing wrong.’

‘That much is true.’

‘It was a flight of fancy, at most,’ he says. ‘She’ll recover.’

‘Is that it? Fancy? I suppose you’re right. No woman would love another so deeply that she would risk everything, do anything, to enable them to be together. Would she?’

‘Surely not. And you—’

‘I …’ Julie shoves a log further into the flames. ‘I am the villain.’

‘So you will burn. Publicly, shamefully. These provincials make a feast of such occasions. Unless …’

She turns to look at him and he sees it now—hunger has worn away her beauty but it’s still there. No. It’s not mere beauty. It’s something else, something fierce in her eyes, something so powerful that all at once he can hardly speak.

‘Yes?’

‘The Comte, in his wisdom—’

‘Never his strong point.’

‘In his wisdom offers you this—a horse, a disguise, a thousand
livres
.’

Her eyes narrow. ‘What is my part of the bargain?’

‘Leave. Leave her to her family. Go north, anywhere, away from here, and never return.’

‘Why would I—why does he want that?’

A shrug.

A smile.

‘He’s embarrassed?’

‘Perhaps.’

She chuckles. ‘That’s priceless.’

‘No, it’s not, madame. It’s worth one thousand
livres
.’

‘And a horse?’

‘Exactly.’

Julie stands slowly and takes a step towards him. ‘If you harm her, I’ll kill you.’ She moves back into the darkness and waits for him to speak.

He nods slowly. ‘She will be safe.’

‘When?’

‘Now.’ The soft clunk of gold coins. ‘Take the black mare at the second trough. There are clothes in the saddlebags. Be gone.’

‘I should—’

He has to remind himself of her crimes, her sin. His master’s wrath. ‘No farewells. Just go. Now.’

‘But—’

‘The gendarmes will be here by midnight.’

The woman in the shadows moves, takes the purse from his hand, a cloak from the hook by the door, and vanishes. It’s too dark to see the tears on her face.