Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris (48 page)

Carla took the blue coil in her hand and felt her own blood pulsing through it.

‘It feels strange, but beautiful. Should we not cut it?’

‘We cut it when it stops its beating. Is it not still a living part of you both? What fool would kill it before its natural end?’ She scoffed and held up her palm. ‘Don’t tell me. Now, while you’re both content, let’s see how the afterbirth goes. And you, you big ox, clear up those wet reeds before they go sour in this heat. And draw those curtains, we’re roasting.’

Grymonde laughed. ‘The big ox will tend to the caul, then the slops.’

‘And tell Hugon to make us some fresh tea.’

Grymonde spun, quick as a wild beast, his hand on his knife, as a strange sound, itself deep and raw enough to have come from the throat of some fabled creature, echoed up the stairs. Carla knew the sound. Someone had bowed her gambo violl, crudely but well.

‘Don’t be alarmed. It’s my violl.’

‘Your violl?’

Grymonde bellowed down the stair.

‘Who’s that? Get up here now!’

Hugon appeared at the door, shamefaced and afraid. Grymonde glowered.

‘Is it true, knave? Did you tamper with the violl?’

‘Please,’ said Carla. ‘He did no harm. Don’t chastise him.’

‘Your pardon, madame. I heard your music. We all did. It made me cry.’

‘I’ll make you cry, boy.’

Grymonde raised a hand and Hugon waited for the blow. It didn’t fall. Hugon looked at Carla without remorse; but with the yearning she had seen before.

Hugon said, ‘I wanted to know how the sound was made.’

‘You made a fine start,’ said Carla. ‘You attacked the strings with a spirit that few ever dare.’

Hugon blinked, amazed. He avoided Grymonde’s glare.

Carla smiled. ‘You should learn how to play.’

‘Me? Could I? It’s possible?’

‘I could give you your first lesson.’

‘Now?’

The boy lit up with such hope that Carla almost said yes.

‘Enough,’ said Alice. ‘Bring us some tea and all will be forgiven.’

She flapped a hand to drive them away and they left.

‘Hugon is an outsider, but a decent soul. He’s different from the rest, but too young to know why or how. He suffers for it. When he becomes a man, he’ll suffer more.’

‘I wasn’t being kind. The violl spoke for him.’

‘This woman heard it, too. But there’s many can speak who will never be heard.’

Shade cooled the room. Very gently, so gently Carla felt nothing inside, Alice tried the tension on the cord, but didn’t pull on it.

‘Grand. When you feel the urge, a push will help, but no hurry. There’ll be a bit of bleeding, or what might seem more than a bit, but that’s usual. Then, when you’re ready, this old girl will give you a bath – and you can bathe that little treasure.’

After some time the pulsing in the cord stopped and Carla’s throat tightened. The toils of the pregnancy, the throes of the labour, were already memories. She would have endured a thousand times worse to cradle her daughter for even a moment. She let go of the cord. One connection had ended and others had begun, too many and too deep to be imagined, yet already known in her every fibre. She stared at Amparo’s face as she suckled. She wondered if she would ever want to look at anything else. She felt a strong cramp in her belly; after what she had been through, it didn’t deserve to be called a pang.

‘I’m ready to push.’

Alice lumbered over with a bowl of water, linen cloths draped over one arm, and set them down. She caught her breath and leaned over and nodded and Carla bore down. A membranous reddish-blue mass bulged from inside her, accompanied by trickles of blood. Alice massaged Carla’s belly and guided the afterbirth with a gentle tug on the cord. Carla pushed with another contraction. As the mass emerged further – a large flat disc nearly an inch thick at the centre – Alice rolled it up and over on itself in her hands. The manoeuvre made its passage easier and the afterbirth slid free. More blood drenched the towels, a cupful or so, but, as Alice seemed unimpressed, neither was Carla.

‘Did I tear?’

‘No, you’re sound as a bell. Do you want to see this?’

Carla leaned forward as Alice laid the afterbirth on the towels. It was the size and shape of a dinner plate and the side through which the cord entered was white, like the caul, and marbled with blood vessels. Alice turned it over to display the inner face, which was raw in texture and the colour of red wine. She pored over it with a finger.

‘We must examine this maternal face of the cotyledon exactly, to make sure all the lobes are intact. If one or several are missing, they are still attached inside the womb and may bleed or turn putrid. But as you can see, this afterbirth is unbroken, the surface even, each lobe complete and fitted to its neighbours without a flaw.’

Carla nodded. She had not examined an afterbirth before. She was amazed that she could have generated so peculiar a thing and that it had been her connection to her baby.

Alice blew her cheeks.

‘And with that we may declare the miracle it performed complete, and yours, too, and give all due thanks to our Mother Nature, for it’s her genius we honour here. That said, you may pray to any God or idol that you wish.’

Carla looked at Alice. Her features were drawn. The day had taken its toll on her, too, more so than Carla had been able to see; or than Alice had allowed her to see. The grey winter of her eyes shone with the bloom of another spring; yet conveyed, too, some knowledge that this would be her last. Carla opened her mouth to speak but could find no words to convey what she felt. Alice curled her lips, as if to fend off displays of excess sentiment, but Carla needed to make some gesture.

‘Here, hold Amparo.’

Carla made to offer the babe and saw that she was asleep, her open mouth still at her nipple, her lips yellow with the first milk. Once gain, Carla was entranced.

‘Let Amparo nap on your breast, the little treasure needs it. You don’t think she slept through all that to-do. My joy can wait while we’ve seen to the cord and so forth. And then we’ll call for a jug, for this old girl is parched something terrible.’

She put one hand on her thigh and the other on the bed and shoved herself to her feet. She stood still for a moment, her breathing crackly. She spoke without turning.

‘You couldn’t have chosen a lovelier name. Your other Amparo is shining.’

Alice checked that the cord was done and tied it with string and cut it with a knife. She smeared some ointment on the stump and Amparo slept through it all. Alice cleaned up the blood and gave Carla a sponge bath, which almost sent her to sleep, too. The pleasure of giving Amparo her first wash they shared, and still she did not awake, though she moved her lips and her eyes shifted beneath their tiny lids, and her hands fluttered, as if she were dreaming her first dream in this new world.

‘Shouldn’t she cry more?’ asked Carla.

‘We’ve given her nothing to cry about, yet. But we will.’

Grymonde returned from below with a loaded tray.

‘Tea for the Countess of Cockaigne and a jug of fine wine for its Queen.’

‘Keep your voice down, the little one’s napping.’

Grymonde had brought honey to put in the tea and Carla took some. Alice quaffed a large cup of wine without taking it from her lips. She gasped. Grymonde refilled it.

‘They’re roasting a pig in the yard,’ he said. ‘Can you smell it?’

‘Did Estelle come back?’ asked Carla.

‘La Rossa? I haven’t seen her. There’s too much other game afoot.’

‘Whatever’s going on in the yard – or anywhere else in civilisation – interests us not in the least,’ said Alice. ‘And we’ll thank you to have that rabble mind their noise.’

‘I think she should be told,’ said Grymonde.

‘If there’s something ought to be done, then go and do it. If not, keep your peace, and let us have ours until it’s worth interrupting.’

‘There’s something you think I should be told?’ asked Carla.

Her state was such that she was pressed to think of much that might disturb her. The sounds of revelry rose from the yard. With a stab of guilt she remembered Antoinette.

‘Is it Antoinette? I’ve neglected her all day, is she –’

‘Antoinette is thriving,’ said Grymonde. ‘If she stayed a week she’d be running the place. No. This wayfaring husband of yours, Mattias? Is his name Tannhauser?’

‘Speak of the wolf and he will come,’ said Alice.

Carla held Amparo closer. She didn’t know what to feel.

‘Yes. Mattias Tannhauser. He is a Chevalier of Saint John the Baptist.’

‘That drives the nail home.’

‘What do you mean?’

A rumble of summer thunder rolled across the Yards.

Grymonde ignored his mother’s glower and shrugged his black brows.

‘I’ve strong reason to believe the man is here. In Paris.’

THE RAID ON
the Hôtel D’Aubray had been contracted five days before, through the mediation of Pope Paul at the Blind Piper. Thirty gold
écus
and all the plunder they could carry, not for simply killing all who dwelled within – though the deaths of the two ladies had been emphasised – but for leaving a gaudy show behind them.

‘Cut their tits off,’ Paul had said. ‘Something bold and bloody, let your lads off the leash. Give
Les Messieurs
some tittle-tattle. Make them sweat in their fine silk sheets.’

Paul had admitted that so public and vile an outrage made the venture more than usually dangerous, which was why the Cockaigne Infant had been his first call. The hazards were reflected in the price.

Grymonde had knocked it up to fifty, a sum which told him that the malice footing the bill festered somewhere far beyond the Yards. The money answered all other questions and Grymonde hadn’t asked them. It was to claim the last twenty in gold, and to try to learn more from the fat bastard, that Grymonde went to visit Paul now.

As he strode down the hill in the wane of the day, towards Les Halles and the Blind Piper, he reflected that, for the first time in memory, the Yards comprised the safest streets in Paris. There were no Huguenots here, nor was there aught worth stealing but for that which had been stolen from elsewhere, and which no man who valued his life would dare even covet. Furthermore, the gangs of villains and vagrants, the beggars and feral children, whose usual haunts were any shadow dark enough to hide them, had deserted their posts. They had flown in search of pickings, which, thanks to the King, could be found all over the city, regardless of creed. A chance to forget their station at the bottom of the manure pile.

Strange, but though Grymonde had been born here, and slept most of the nights of his life here, and had never even had cause to go outside the city walls, he always believed his own station lay elsewhere, above and beyond the manure pile altogether.

Today had taught him otherwise.

Today he’d been gnawed from within, as if by La Rossa’s rats.

Now the cards on the table gnawed at him too.

The irony was that Grymonde was well used to being gnawed from within. He was poxed to the core. There were bodies in yonder pits sporting better-fettled insides than his. He’d been dying for years. The vast weight of his bones, his head; the gross corrugations of his scalp; his disfigurement; the pain in his joints and hands, his swollen tongue; all these he could endure, or ignore, or even use to advantage. Even the fact that his cock had long since failed to serve any purpose other than pissing had its benefits. The price of fornication had always been a piece of his soul, a fact all whores could thank for the existence of their trade, for money could be replaced. These things he could grasp: deformity and wounding were part of Nature’s way; he’d seen enough babes fall blighted from the womb to know that. His horror of this morbid affliction, be it malady or evil spirit, lay in the things he could not grasp but even so knew.

His heart was getting larger, like some great black crab growing inside his chest. He could feel it clatter against his ribs where once it had not. Sometimes the crab stifled his breath. His kidneys were corrupt; they cramped on him; in the middle of the night he would rise to piss like a horse. Headaches; bellyaches. Lately some new ague had infected his eyes, for at times they’d quake in their sockets and he would see double. Men believed him mighty; but he was not.

He was a dead man in handmade boots the size of charcoal barges.

This slow rot was familiar enough; but the rats that had worried his insides today were not, for they ate at an organ he had forgotten he possessed. His conscience.

He had tried to glut their appetite with barbarity and had failed; and then, when blood had all but choked him, by lending a hand to his mother, and to Carla and the babe. As always, Alice had been right, and as always he had not listened, for the gnawing had returned with a vengeance since he had raised with Carla the name of Mattias Tannhauser.

Grymonde heard distant thunder.

Summer rain started to fall, but the street got no cooler.

He padded by the Cemetery of the Innocents, its stench a challenge to even his filth-hardened nostrils. Paul’s tavern, the Blind Piper, lay on its far side.

Inside the great necropolis, Gobbo and the others Altan Savas had killed were already rotting. Though they had enjoyed no such ceremony, a funeral here meant a drop of variable depth, through the hinged floor of a coffin, into one of the huge pits – each sixty feet deep and over a thousand corpses-strong when full – through which the burials rotated like crops. There the deceased would rest until his flesh had putrefied and settled, along with that of his thousand companions, into a fatty potage through which his bones would rise to the top. In principle, these bones would then be dredged and stacked in the charnel houses that lined the cemetery walls, and which afforded a degree of privacy to fornicating couples and sodomites; in practice they went for bone flour, and the fat to scented soap for
Les Messieurs
, whose power to profit from the poor reached even beyond the grave.