Lost (51 page)

Winnie turned her head this way and that. The sky looked cold and ready beyond the glass. Gervasa wanted to spit. The priest said, apropos nothing, “At Christmastide, so our dear ancestors believed, the souls of the dead are freed from their torment. They can visit the living.”

“You have no call to talk to me about such things,” said Winnie.

“Christmas is coming,” said the priest. “I mean no more than that. You are the woman with the spirit in her, I think. I only mean to remark on that.”

“How do you know about me?”

He shrugged and put out his old leathery fingertips on her wrist. “Stay a while longer,” he said. As he spoke, a uniformed security officer, some sort of gendarme, came through the doorway, politely standing back until the priest had removed his hand. When he did, Winnie made an effort to wrench free and begin her long approach to a flight worthy of angels, and a fall the same. Before she could take three steps the guard brought her down onto the greensward as gently and perhaps religiously as he could, which wasn't very.

He rolled over her to keep her prostrate while a backup officer was summoned. She lay under the weight of his strong form. With respect to France's great tradition of civility his face was turned from hers so, she thought, to protect her dignity. Her eyes blinked without tears at the clouds over the cloister garden. They shriveled and tore their edges, making a sound in the sky too terrible to be heard. A pale blue tinted with ocher showed through.

Gervasa lay in shock within her, a frightened bird in its casing. Winnie imagined Gervasa entertaining the temptation to take her body hostage—with a final effort of will to make Winnie do what she'd promised, and deliver her incubus into a fuller death. But that, indeed, would be murder, a virus infecting a host to death, and would Gervasa's restless soul find any grade of rest through such an exercise of power?

With a pendulum motion of pain in her upper respiratory tract she realized that she had not been breathing, and now she was. The gendarme's tackle had knocked her breath out. With breath came shame, regret, and the mortal and immortal childhood fear of having soiled her panties, a fear that with a little exploratory wriggling proved to be unfounded.

The old priest continued on his cell phone and then snapped it shut. He motioned the gendarme to crawl off Winnie. The security person was young and blushing from the contact, Winnie saw. Don't mind me, I'm an old sow next to you, she thought, but corrected herself. Well, good. Mind me a little, as you clearly have. I'm not so old that I can't make you uncomfortable.

This thought made her cheerful, at least for a moment. She sat up.

With Winnie's breath returned, taken in frosty gulps—it was cold up here, now that she'd stopped climbing—the claw-tongued opinions of Gervasa began to publish themselves aloud again. The speech was no longer coherent. Winnie could not understand the language. It was as if a few of the connections had been knocked loose. The priest attempted to kneel by Winnie, perhaps to pray for an evacuation of an unclean spirit, an exorcism even, but Winnie was glad to see that arthritis gripped his knees too firmly. He had to stand up as he flipped pages in his breviary.

“They'll be here within the hour,” he said then, in English.

“Who?” Winnie squeezed out the single English word while Gervasa, in her ranting at the priest, at Winnie, had paused to gather steam.

“Your companions. Your family.”

She didn't know who he meant. She thought: I am going to look up and see Ozias Rudge himself in his greatcoat and pince-nez, stepping down from the haunted omnibus to collect me and take me home. But only another gendarme arrived, an older, stockier one, who when summoned had not had the younger partner's vigor at sprinting up steps. Between them they lifted Winnie to her feet and in a modified frog-march escorted her from the garden. The priest followed, watching where he put his brogans.

“Where are we going?”

“Down.”

For the first part of the descent, the parade was difficult. The halest of tourists had already achieved the chapel, ponying up forty francs to gawk at its Gothic solemnity. “La Merveille,” said the priest, as if sensing Winnie's discomfiture through Gervasa's braying commentary. “Built in the 1200s, four centuries after the first chapel was consecrated here. A Benedictine glory.”

Winnie managed to say, “You live here?”

“I make an extended visitation for purposes of prayer and devotion. Less a reward than a penance, sometimes,” he said, rolling his eyes at the families in sweats and running shoes, noisily pawing through postcards and memorabilia at the shop in the chapel's antechamber. Gervasa's protests were causing heads to turn. Several visitors, yielding to the mood of the place, blessed themselves ostentatiously as they passed. Perhaps to have mercy on Winnie, the priest led the party past a sign that said
Interdit
and through an oaken door on massive iron hinges.

“We take the private passage, and wait until your family arrives.”

They had entered a stone corridor lit with high, arrow-slit windows, and passed along to the top of a staircase with splintery wooden rails. They descended into the bowels of the building, or into the stone of the Mount itself. The way was lit by timid lightbulbs at unhelpful distances apart.

Then Gervasa fell silent, so utterly that for an instant Winnie wondered if she had escaped, or fled. Winnie had the feeling of a gong struck some moments ago, a quiver, a disturbance in the air. It was Rudge/Scrooge on the doorsill, eyes inward, hand to his brow, leaving a room and not seeing where he was headed next. “What is in there?” she said, stopping in her tracks, nodding her head at a door set in a crude archway.

The priest shrugged and put the question to the gendarmes, who growled in response. He then interpreted. “A stairway to some crypts. Nothing of note.”

“Let me see.”

“You have no right to ask.” But he didn't sound offended, and after a grudging negotiation with the escorts and a glance at his wristwatch, he pushed open the door.

Another set of steps, cleanly swept, at the foot of which had been erected a makeshift table, an old door set on sawhorses. A table lamp worked off a long rope of extension cords looping toward some electric socket in the dark distance. Above a huge cup of coffee bloomed the face of an old nun. Hunks of bread floated in the coffee and crumbs stuck to her airy mustache. She was dressed in the traditional garb and looked pearly skinned, as if she'd been born an infant nun and raised down there like a mushroom in the caves. Her skin was blued by the light of the screen of a Powerbook, working on a battery pack, and a few tomes with rotting leather spines lay open on top of one another.

More negotiation. The priest reported, “She is Soeur Godelieve
Bernaert of Louvain, Belgium. She is the Hound of Hell. Ask her what you will.”

“May I pass?”

Winnie expected an objection, but there was none. The sister leveled herself to her feet and fortified herself with a dripping hunk of bread. Then, rasping like an asthmatic, she collected a commercial-strength flashlight from a shelf and led the priest, the guards, Winnie and Gervasa down a sloping corridor in which occasional random steps were cut. She moved slowly, shining the light backward for their safety; she seemed to know this passage like a mole. She showed no fear of taking a wrong step.

At the end of the corridor were four or five archways. Soeur Godelieve spoke in a monotone, as if for several decades she'd given tours every hour on the hour.

“An . . . ossuary?” said the priest, reducing the speech to a phrase. “Is that the word?”

Winnie put her hand out. An old iron beam wedged into the floor was leaning outward, like the trunk of a riverside tree. It supported another beam, more thinly hammered, that ran five feet each way along the ceiling, holding it up.

“Maybe my ancestor did this.”

“If you have an ancestor who is a Benedictine monk, we would rather not know it,” said the priest.

Winnie said, “May I?” The priest, the nun, the gendarmes, Gervasa: no one objected. She ducked her head through the second of the five archways, feeling her way in all the varieties of dark.

“We are very close.”

They were very close.

Before the nun could bring the light around to a helpful angle, Winnie had found the far wall, five feet in—just deep enough to have room to rotate a shrouded corpse stiff with rigor mortis. She
ran her hands up and down the dry stones. She felt the ruts and edges of carven marks before the light arrived, but then it did. She saw rude crosses carved in the wall, done, she imagined, with hasty chisel strokes, by monks or artisans or servants eager to make their retreat from what once must have been a malodorous tomb.

The light splashed as much shadow as anything else, and in the arrangement of shadows could the architecture of the crypt be understood. A dozen or so separate walled-up chambers, like closed bread ovens. On either side of the doors were the lopsided crosses. An inventory system, no doubt, to help Brother Cryptmaster know when a chamber was full.

She sank to her haunches, feeling more than seeing. Feeling was the only sense that made sense, here.

It was, she imagined, Gervasa's hands within hers that found the cross with the slash through it, next to an opening near the floor that, yes, just might appear a bit more tidily bricked in than its neighbors. As if the shroud and the statue had been removed and the wall repaired 150 or 170 years ago. Certainly more recently than seven hundred years ago.

“Here we are. This is it. The slashed cross. A poor woman who died without the benefit of the final sacrament. As good as cursed.”

The priest translated. The nun sighed in mild irritation.

“No,” said Soeur Godelieve, through the labyrinth of translation. “Someone cared enough for the deceased to lay the body here, after all. This is not hallowed ground, we think, but this entire place is holy. The earth is sacred here. No one is cursed.”

“She was a peasant, burned to death. She was buried with a child inside her womb, nearly ready to be born,” explained Winnie.

“No, she wasn't,” said Soeur Godelieve. She trained her flashlight to other walled-up apertures. “Look here. Look here.” A few more crosses. “Noblewomen dying in childbirth and their infants
not surviving them—look.” The light centered on a small cross next to a larger one and slightly superimposed upon it. The crosspiece of the baby one bisected the upright of the larger one. “Mother and child. Mother and child. Very common. That's how they marked it, so that the prayers for the remembrance of the souls of the dead could be said.”

“But this body is not with them. It is apart,” said Winnie. “The cross with the slash through it.”

“But you are wrong. Very wrong. It is not a slash. Look, foolish child.” The priest did not flinch at translating the remonstrating adjective. “No one would bury a body in a crypt and say, ‘Don't remember me, don't pray for me.' A waste of effort. If she was not to be prayed for, she'd have been dumped in a bog, a pauper's grave somewhere. This is not a slash. It's not a prohibitive mark. Look. It's a sprig of holly. It's a bit of life marking this grave. If she was pregnant, the baby lived. That's what the sign says. In this chamber, anyway, of women and infants dead in childbirth.”

Winnie's voice trembled. “Some time ago a statue was found in there. A Virgin and Child. It was removed and taken to England.”

“Bring it back,” said the nun, as if Winnie were talking yesterday.

“I can't do everything.”

“Hmmmmph.”

The priest said, “It will take me a long time to climb all those stairs back up. Your family is waiting. Let us go.”

“If someone thought to lay a corpse with a holy statue of the Madonna and Child,” said Soeur Godelieve, with a gleam of historiographic conviction, “it was an act of charity, to comfort the corpse. The statue was put in there for consolation. Christ is the child of every mother,” she concluded smugly.

“Someone loved that dead woman,” said the priest. “Come.”

The Gervasa virus sat within Winnie with a different heft now. If it were a meal, it would be curdling, but the ghost was not a meal to be digested, nor a tumor to be excised. The effects on Winnie were peculiar. Her palms were damp and her temples pulsed, and the wood grain on the arms of the chair in which she sat seemed alert enough to raise its ridges and bite her forearms. The news had been good, had it not? Proof, of a sort, the only proof possible, that Gervasa had been buried without her baby. The twitching limbs of the medieval Church had managed to honor her plea bargain. But why was there no sense of elation? Gervasa was pooled in a sack of silence. Maybe she was dying in there, finishing her dying, now, at last.

“
Who
is coming?” asked Winnie, to change the subject, though no one was speaking.

“Your family.” The priest shrugged as if to say, Family, who can even recognize the concept anymore?

Winnie looked at the priest and thought of her own father. She rarely thought of him. But there was a cat in her childhood, some selfish bag of bones named Fluffy or such, who died as cats are prone to do, without giving proper notice. The cat had received as much of a Catholic burial as was permitted cats, but Winnie had nonetheless been hard to console. Her dad had taken her up on his lap and spooled out platitudes about God and the afterlife. God and God's plan. “But Daddy,” she'd wailed, taking no comfort, “what would God want with a dead cat?”

Her father, her mother, all the people standing in a line back to Ozias Rudge and further; that crowd so long obliterated from her thoughts by the death of Vasile and the departure of Emil. She imagined her forebears coming for her. Would they accept the Gervasa infection? They'll think I've gone lesbian, she thought
with a small pleasure at the notion, just before she fell asleep in the chair.