Lost (47 page)

 

At this John looked up and said, “As far as I know, that's the sole mention in family records of a duel and a murder. So of course the
later members of the family assumed Dorothea must have been telling the truth. But I read on.

 

“The dreams or visions that your grandfather had occurred a year or two after. He had built the house in Hampstead the which you bind so fondly in memory's garland. Ozias Rudge was not a young man but, as yet unmarried, perhaps he was disposed to brooding. One year around the time of the solstice, he took ill and spent several days and nights in his bedroom. He claimed to be visited by a spirit from the afterlife, making some sort of a plea. The visions took several forms, and in his final years your grandfather would not always distinguish his original rendition of the tale from the famous Ghosts of Christmas that our Mister Dickens is said to have memorialized from Grandfather's memories.

“My mother has confirmed what I say with firm conviction. The visiting spirits were said to keen and lament with all manner of distresses. Poor Grandfather! Whatever the ghost was asking, Ozias could not decipher. What remained to Ozias Rudge was this: to step forward into the unblemished life of a married man, to beget and raise his children, to turn his back upon melancholic fancies.

“When my father died, I retired my own sentimental attachment to his stories of haunts and missions. On behalf of my mother, I boarded up all nonsense in which the future might take some interest. In the end, perhaps Charles Dickens made a happier man of Scrooge than my father could ever make of himself. Perhaps Dickens did Ozias a favor in revising and glorifying his own sad memories. Choleric or not, my father loved a good story. This
is a regrettable characteristic that I was alarmed to see at Miss Bairnfeather's you seem to have inherited.”

 

John turned the page over. “There may have been more or perhaps this was posted without a signature. But the family legend begins with this document, and all corroborating gossip derives from it.”

Gervasa, bottled up too long, began to burble. Winnie couldn't help it.

“Oh, dear,” said Allegra, turning a shade of pale worthy of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. “I see what you mean. Oh, John.” She held his hand. He could not suppress a tear, but said huskily to Winnie, “Do you want me to leave this letter here so you can look at it?”

Winnie nodded, not knowing whether Gervasa was approving or recoiling. Whatever she meant, she was saying it in a loud voice. Technically a scream. Nurse came through with a hypo. John and Allegra left. Winnie, tossed back in the sheets with Gervasa nearer than a lover could ever get, struggled to hold on to a few words:

. . .
a blanket from the cell . . .

. . . I boarded up all nonsense in which the future might take some interest
. . .

Only, Winnie couldn't tell if it was herself thinking this, or Gervasa beginning to think in English.

 

As far as she could tell, her next thoughts occurred in her dreams. Were they dreams of Gervasa de Normandie or dreams of Winifred Wendy Rudge Pritzke? There was little in them to get a fistful of, not much more than a notion of Ozias Rudge staggering from a room, bewitched by terrors too insubstantial to name. A shape loomed and lagged behind him. A man with a habit of brooding, surviving his trials by telling them as stories to young Dickens.

Her sense of herself shifted in its sleeve of sleep, collected itself. These days you are no more nor less than Madame Scrooge. Pestered by the same apparition that pestered your ancestor. Did Rudge take Gervasa unto his breast? If so, what did she ask of him there? Why—and how—did he relinquish her again?

Had the painter caught, not Rudge and Scrooge, really, not that coalescence of ancestral and literary figures, but Rudge and de Normandie, two spirits staggering to the door in one corruptible form?

And who was the painter of that picture? Maybe Edward Rudge himself, despite what he had written to his chattery niece. After all, he too may have inherited that choleric and fanciful temperament, and needed to expel the humors somehow.

When I wake up, I must compare the handwriting in Edward's letter with the scrawl on the back of the painting. But most likely I won't remember any of this.

Stepping nearer the threshold, struggling with the effort of walking for two. Every step a weight of the present against both the past and the future. In her dream, her feet hurt and she had to pee.

 

When she awoke, Irv Hausserman was bustling around again, this time with a swatch of ripe holly and pretty red berries he'd swiped with his penknife from the garden of some mansion block. Winnie almost chortled with pleasure. He had a man with him, looking familiar if shrunken and furtive. Quite out of place.

“Ah,” said Winnie. “Curstace.” She was trying to say Christmas.

“Curses to you, too, and how do you do,” said Irv. “It's about time. You're sleeping more, and more deeply, than before, and this after they've aborted your sleeping tablets. Great nuisance; I've had to delay my return home. Now here's Ritzi Ostertag. Do you remember him?”

Gervasa didn't. Winnie did. She shook her head and nodded,
but in that order, hoping the result would be clear.
“Ach, mein Gott,”
said Ritzi, in panic, or a send-up of panic meant to make her laugh. But she was beyond such distinctions.

Irv blustered on. “And how are we feeling today?”

We,
a lovely joke, a lovely lovely joke. They both laughed.

“I thought,” said Irv, “that I'd give you the latest we'd deduced from your remarks, and then maybe Ritzi could read your palms or your tea leaves or something. Anything for a diversion. Are you up for that?”

Gervasa didn't know what it meant, so Winnie shrugged. She'd rather have aromatherapy but that didn't seem to be on offer.

“Well, then,” he said. He placed the tape recorder on the bed and extracted from it a cassette. He held it up. “This is my tape of you the other day. You've provided me with a very interesting document, my dear. Some would say that only a novelist could have managed it. You corroborate and extend what little sense I could make out of what Mrs. M had said. Now let the record show that I post no claims of belief or disbelief, I'll be right up-front with you about that.” As he talked he was unwrapping the cellophane off a new ninety-minute cassette tape and snapping it into the machine, but he didn't start it recording yet, as she was being silent, and Gervasa cautious, scrutinizing, and mistrusting.

Did we sign a release, allowing ourselves to be recorded? thought Winnie. But then Gervasa made no growl of mutual irritation; how could she, the technology being unfathomable to her? And Winnie was beyond caring about herself. So she let it go.

“There's much that can't be made out,” said Irv. “But exhibiting a suspension of disbelief that is nearly beyond me—I'll tell you that this tape makes it seem as if you occasionally speak, like Mrs. M, with the voice of someone who died many hundreds of years ago.”

“Tell it as a story,” she said, and then Gervasa began to gargle,
and Irv fumbled at the controls to record it. When Gervasa had dried up, though—Winnie had the sense that Gervasa wanted to hear the interpretation too—Irv stopped the machine and started over.

“All right, a story. You seem to be using a voice some of whose language suggests medieval northern France. Thirteenth, fourteenth century. Professor Ambrose Clements, a pleasantly tolerant senior lecturer who holds a post in modern and medieval languages at King's College, Cambridge, was intrigued enough to give a listen and float some hypotheses. The syntax, such as he can hear, is very simple, devoid of some of the more elegant forms of subjunctive you begin to find in early Renaissance courtly or ecclesiastic prose. He said Anglo-Norman was spoken by the aristocracy through about 1300, though there seems to be an element of Picard in it. But it's a mess, a pottage; he heard only a limited vocabulary of decodable words embedded within a dense mass of archaic or nonsense syllables. So what passes for a story is hard to say convincingly. Even so, there may be an outline of something. Professor Clements says that if you're attempting the language of a peasant rather than a nobleman or a
clergyman, you're succeeding. The references are all very sketchy, the narrator has little sense of history or chronology, and the nouns are all common words familiar to a peasant mentality: farming and harvest, donkey, knife, fire, knave, mother, saint, that sort of thing.”

Winnie closed her eyes. Ritzi, bless him, said, “Hausserman, she
vants
ze
story
.”

“I'm getting there. Don't rush me. All right. Assuming a Gervasa—and even Professor Clements isn't sure why it isn't Gervase—assuming a Gervasa, she's a young woman in trouble. In northern France, Normandy probably, in, oh, the thirteenth century. Gervasa seems illiterate. She seems not to know much about the world beyond Normandy, and the hubs of Paris and Würzburg. She's Catholic down to her dirty fingernails.”

Slyly Winnie inspected her nails. Bitten, perhaps, but hardly dirty.

“So Gervasa, if we get it right, is in trouble with the Church. Maybe she's been caught in adultery. Maybe she's carrying the child of some nobleman who doesn't want bastards growing up to claim the family pile or the title. Maybe she killed someone. Who knows. We can't tell or maybe she doesn't even know. But here's the drama, Winnie. You ready? The prelates and curias and the local rabble round her up, and tie her to a stake, and thrust burning ricks of hay at her to make her confess and repent.”

Ritzi Ostertag shuddered, possessed of his own tremors.

“So they're trying to get her to confess, and they promise a Christian burial if she does, and promise to deny her one if she doesn't. And she confesses, and repents her unnamed crime, but conditionally, because she makes a bargain—this is what she keeps talking about—she says, ‘The baby,' over and over again.”

Winnie thought,
Well, big fucking surprise, that
.

“Seems,” said Irv, “near as Professor Clements can make out, as if Gervasa has tried to make some bargain. They're going to kill her anyway, but she's asked that in return for her repentance, they slice open her belly—this is the knife part that keeps coming up—and save her baby from roasting within her. Sorry, my dear, sorry.” He angled forward to take her hand. “I didn't want to tell you but you did ask.”

“She vants to know,” said Ritzi, of Winnie, not of Gervasa, studying her face, “Hausserman, she vants to know if ze baby vas saved or not?”

“Who wants to know?” said Irv Hausserman.

“Vinnie,” said Ritzi Ostertag.

“Gervasa wants to know too,” said Irv. “That's what it comes down to. She doesn't know. According to your narrative, she passed from this life and was interred in some charnel house reserved for undecided cases. A Christian burial meant a lot, as I
well know from my own studies, and to deny one to a believer was possibly a responsibility a local curate wouldn't care to take. So there were halfway houses, so to speak, for the bodies of souls who died in extremis, without benefit of the blessing of the Church but without absolute condemnation either.”

Winnie thought, Hence the statue of the Virgin and Child. Some poor priest or nun knew whose corpse it was, or some old story about it, and left it a totem for comfort. What a correct totem. You didn't have to be Catholic to know what images of the Madonna and Child must mean to people with sorry, hurried lives, ringed round with so much everyday death.

“And that's the it of it,” said Irv.

Gervasa began to cry, because whatever huge blank pieces of the story were missing, or wrong, there was enough right about it, enough there, to make corroboration possible.

“Oh, no,” said Ritzi, and came forward. He took Winnie's hand, rather roughly, and turned over its palm. He ran a finger along a life line and said, “Look, lots of branches here. A fertile vomb. A family line zat doesn't die out. Don't cry. Pliss.” It was all a load of bunk, unconvincingly said, and Winnie loved him for it, but she couldn't stop Gervasa using her eyes to cry.

“Please,” said Irv. He sat on the bed, rocking Winnie in his arms. “You're going through too much, you don't have to do this. You don't have to have her story in you, you know. You don't have to.”

It wasn't a matter of choice now. Gervasa wouldn't be quiet until an older nurse came in with the morning pill in a paper cuplet and saw the raw eyes. “Oh, you're stirring her up?” said the nurse. “Mustn't do that, chaps.” She gave a sniffy look at Ritzi, and turned a separate variety of disapproval toward Irv. “I'll call the supervisor and see if we can double the dose this morning. Can I ask you gentlemen to go wander off and have a cup of tea in the caff
while I clean up our friend? She's made a mess of herself by the smell of it.”

Oh, the shame, she had.

So, too, she had when she fell off the swing, she remembered now.

While the nurse cleaned her, Winnie wept with very slow tears that had time to flatten on her face and evaporate.

“Hang on, I'll be back in a moment or two,” said the nurse, “you rest up some.”

When the nurse had left, Winnie turned on her side and pulled her knees up to her womb. The tape recorder began to fall on the floor and she grabbed it. More to silence Gervasa than anything else, Winnie pushed the button to expel the new tape and she inserted the prior one, the one Professor Clements had heard. She rewound it for a few moments and then pressed Play.

She heard the voice of Gervasa in her voice. It was eerie. Too clipped and precious to stomach, the voice of Gervasa declaimed away urgently in some archaic dialect of French. It sounded, even to Winnie, as if she were making it up, doing some undergraduate exercise in dramatic improv. Were those words her voice?
Où est la bibliothèque?
was really about all she knew, besides
Oooh la la!
and the French verse of Lennon and McCartney's “Michelle.”