Phantom (2 page)

Father Mansart shook his graying head.

"The little mademoiselle refused to accompany me here. She was quite out of her senses with fright and I could not persuade her otherwise."

"Well… that doesn't surprise me," said the midwife darkly. "Did she tell you that the child is a monster? In all my years I've never known anything like this… and I've seen some sights, as you well know, Father. But it doesn't look very strong, I suppose that's a mercy…"

I listened incredulously. They were talking as though I weren't there, as though this dreadful thing had rendered me some kind of deaf and mindless idiot who had forfeited all right to human dignity. Like the creature in the cradle I had become an object of horrified discussion; I was no longer a
person
…

The midwife shrugged herself into her shawl and picked up her basket.

"I daresay it'll die. They usually do, thank God. And it's not made a cry, that's always a good hopeful sign… No doubt it'll be gone by morning. But at any rate it's none of my business now, I've done my part. If you'll excuse me, Father, I must be getting along. I promised to look in on another confinement. Madame Lescot—her third, you know…"

The midwife's voice trailed away as she disappeared out into the darkness on the landing. Father Mansart closed the door behind her, put his lantern down on the chest of drawers, and laid his wet cloak across a chair to dry.

He had a comfortable, well-lived-in face, tanned and leathery from walking in all weathers; I suppose he must have been about fifty. I knew that he had seen many terrible things in the course of his long ministry; nevertheless I saw him recoil involuntarily with shock when he looked into the cradle. One hand tightened on the crucifix around his neck while the other hastily made the sign of the cross. He knelt in prayer for a moment before coming to stand by the side of my bed.

"My dear child!" he said compassionately. "Do not be deceived into believing that the Lord has abandoned you. Such tragedies as this are beyond all mortal understanding, but I ask you to remember that God does not create without purpose."

I shivered. "It's still alive… isn't it?"

He nodded, biting his full underlip and glancing sadly at the cradle.

"Father"—I hesitated fearfully, trying to summon the courage to continue—"if I don't touch it… if I don't feed it…"

He shook his head grimly. "The position of our Church is quite clear on such issues, Madeleine. What you are suggesting is murder."

"But surely in this case it would be a kindness."

"It would be a sin," he said severely, "a mortal sin! I urge you to put all thoughts of such wickedness from your mind. It is your duty to succor a human soul. You must nourish and care for this child as you would any other."

I turned my head away on the pillow. I wanted to say that even God could make mistakes, but even in the depths of my despair I could not quite find the courage to voice such blasphemy.

How could this horrible abomination be human? It was as alien to me as a reptile—ugly, repulsive, and unwanted. What right had any priest to insist that it should live? Was this God's mercy… God's infinite wisdom?

Tears of exhaustion and outraged misery began to steal down my taut face as I stared at the striped wallpaper before my eyes. For three months I had struggled through an unending maze of tragedy, following the one candle that burned steadily just beyond my reach and beckoned me on

—the small, flickering light of hope contained in the promise of new life.

Now that that candle had been extinguished there was only darkness; darkness in the bottomless, smooth-sided abyss of the deepest pit in hell. For the first time in my life I was alone. No one was going to shield me from this burden.

"I think it would be wise if I baptized the child at once," said Father Mansart grimly. "Perhaps you would like to give me a name."

I watched the priest move slowly around the room, a tall shadow in his black habit, collecting my porcelain washbasin and blessing the water within. I had meant to call a son Charles, after my dead husband, but that was impossible now, the very idea quite obscene.

A name… I must decide upon a name!

A sense of unreality had descended upon me once more, a numb, unthinking stupor that seemed to paralyze my brain. I could think of nothing and at last, in despair, I told the priest to name the child after himself. He looked at me for a long moment, but he made no comment, no protest, as he reached down into the cradle.

"I baptize thee Erik," he said slowly, "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit."

Then he leaned forward and placed the muffled bundle in my arms with a determination I dared not fight.

"This is your son," he said simply. "Learn to love him as God does."

Collecting his lantern and his cloak, he turned to leave me and presently I heard the old stairs creaking beneath his heavy tread, the front door closing behind him.

I was alone with the monster that Charles and I had created out of love.

Never in my life had I experienced such fear, such utter misery, as I did in that first moment when I held my son in my arms. I realized that this creature—
this thing
!—was totally dependent on me. If I left it to starve or freeze to death it was my soul that would burn for all eternity. I was a practicing Catholic and I believed only too seriously in the existence of hell's flames.

Fearfully, with a trembling hand, I parted the shawl that covered the child's face. I had seen deformities before— who has not?—but nothing like this. The entire skull was exposed beneath a thin, transparent membrane grotesquely riddled with little blue pulsing veins. Sunken, mismatched eyes and grossly malformed lips, a horrible gaping hole where the nose should have been.

My body, like some imperfectly working potter's wheel, had thrown out this pitiable creature. He looked like something that had been dead a long time. All I wanted to do was bury him and run.

Dimly, through my revulsion and terror, I became aware that he was watching me. The misallied eyes, fixed intently and wonderingly upon mine, were curiously sentient and seemed to study me with pity, almost as though he knew and understood my horror. I had never seen such awareness, such powerful consciousness, in the eyes of any newborn child and I found myself returning his stare, grimly fascinated, like a victim mesmerized by a rattlesnake.

And then he cried!

I have no words to describe the first sound of his voice and the extraordinary response it evoked in me. I had always considered the cry of the newborn to be utterly sexless —piercing, irritating, curiously unattractive. But his voice was a strange music that brought tears rushing to my eyes, softly seducing my body so that my breasts ached with a primitive and overwhelming urge to hold him close. I was powerless to resist his instinctive plea for survival.

But the moment his flesh touched mine and there was silence, the spell was broken; panic and revulsion seized me.

I dashed him from my breast as though he were some disgusting insect sucking my blood; I flung him down, without caring where he fell, and escaped to the farthest corner of the room. And there I cowered like a hunted animal, with my chin pressed tightly against my knees and my arms wrapped around my head.

I wanted to die.

I wanted us both to die.

If he had cried again in that moment I know I would have killed him—first him and then myself.

But he was silent.

Perhaps he was already dead.

Deeper and deeper into the shelter of my own body I huddled, rocking to and fro like some poor, unhinged creature in an asylum, burrowing away from a burden I could not face.

Life had been so beautiful until this last summer; too easy, too full of pleasure. Nothing in its brief, cosseted length had prepared me for the tragedies that had rained relentlessly upon me since my marriage to Charles.

Nothing had prepared me for Erik!

The only child of elderly, doting parents, I had been a little princess, the center of every stage on which I performed. My father was an architect in Rouen, a successful but eminently whimsical man who loved music and was delighted by the aptitude I showed for that art. From an early age I was regularly trotted out in company to display my voice and my moderate skills on the violin and piano; and though Mama sent me to the Ursuline convent in Rouen for the sake of my soul, Papa's sights were set on more worldly ends. Singing lessons were arranged, to the disgust of the nuns, who considered a girl's voice to be a source of vanity and affectation, and every week I escaped to the professor who had been told to prepare me for the stage of the Parisian opera house. My voice was good, but I never discovered whether I had the talent or self-discipline to conquer Paris. When I was seventeen, I accompanied my father to a site meeting with a client in the Rue de Lecat; and it was there that I met Charles and simultaneously abandoned all thought of a glorious career on the stage.

Fifteen years older than myself, Charles was a master mason whose work my father sincerely admired. Papa always said it was a privilege to place plans in the hands of a man who had such a deep, instinctive feel for the artistry of building, a perfectionist who was never satisfied with second best. Between Charles and my father the average client with an eye to economy had a hard time of it. Perhaps it was because they were so totally in accord professionally that it seemed natural for Papa to welcome Charles into the family once I had made my preference clear. Perhaps he remembered himself as the struggling young architect, with no commissions, who had been obliged to fight Mama's family all those years ago. Perhaps he was simply determined—as he had been throughout my cosseted existence—that nothing should mar the happiness of his only child. If he was disappointed at my decision to throw away a promising future as a prima donna, he said nothing.

As for Mama—she was English, with all the characteristics that that word implies. I think she would rather have seen me respectably—if rather ingloriously—married, than on any Parisian stage.

Charles and I went to London for the honeymoon, at Papa's expense, armed with a list of architectural sites that "must be seen." We didn't see much. It was November, the most dismal of all English months, and for most of our three-week stay the city was shrouded in a thick yellow fog. It was a good excuse to stay inside, exploring the wonders of God's architecture, in our neat, discreet hotel bedroom in Kensington.

On the last day of our visit the sun streamed mercilessly through a chink in the heavy curtains and lured us guiltily from the sheets. We couldn't go home without seeing Hampton Court—Papa would never forgive us!

It was early evening when the landau deposited us outside the hotel steps. While Charles struggled with the unfamiliar coinage and an unhelpful cabdriver, I went into the foyer to collect our key.

"A letter for you, madam," said the bellboy, and I took the envelope absently, tucking it into my muff as I turned to watch Charles enter the foyer.

I still caught my breath at the sight of him, just as I had that first day in Rouen; he was so tall and so unashamedly good looking. And when he saw the key in my hand, his smile mirrored my thought.

We ran up the wide, richly carpeted staircase, laughing and bumping heedlessly into two elderly ladies who were descending with all due English dignity.

"French!" I heard one of them say disdainfully. "What else can you expect?"

Charles and I only laughed even louder. Charles said we should pity the English really. They were all as stiff and cold as Gothic gargoyles—none of them knew what love meant.

Two hours later, as I lay in Charles's arms like a contented, lazy cat, I suddenly remembered the letter in my muff…

It was only after our hasty return to France that I came to realize I had conceived my first child in the same week that both my parents died of cholera.

There was no general epidemic.

An old acquaintance of my father's, visiting from Paris, was taken ill in the course of a convivial evening at my parents' house. Papa would not hear of a friend returning home to be nursed by servants; and that natural, generous hospitality of his killed the entire household.

I could not settle in Rouen after the tragedy. The city had become for me a vast architectural museum, a mausoleum dedicated to my spoiled and happy childhood. The baroque chapel of the old Jesuit college, the Place St. Vivien, the elegant Rue St. Patrice with its splendid seventeenth-and eighteenth-century houses hidden behind heavy portes cocheres… No, I could not continue to live in a city where every street corner and every fine old building evoked a memory that gave me pain.

It was a month before Charles would permit me to enter my father's house for fear of contagion. We were by then quite certain that I was pregnant and Charles was fiercely and absurdly protective, determined that nothing should place his precious wife and child at risk. He was behaving as though I were the first woman in the world to have a child and his overanxious caution made me curious, slightly amused, and just a little afraid that if it was a girl I should be jealous.

"You shouldn't be so anxious, Charles. Women have children all the time."

"I just want you to take care," he said solemnly. "I don't want anything to go wrong."

I put a hand on his sleeve, oddly disturbed by his intensity. My father's death had evidently affected him far more deeply than I had thought and I was ashamed that, in the selfishness of my own distress, I had failed to realize how he, too, was mourning the loss of a good friend.

"This baby is very important to you, isn't it?" I said slowly. "Anyone would think you were afraid we won't have any more."

He laughed and drew me into the shelter of his arm.

"Of course we'll have more. But there's something very special about the firstborn, don't you feel that, Madeleine?

Creating for the first time in your own image. It makes me feel like God."

"Oh, you!" I said affectionately. "You are an artist! Papa always said you should have been a sculptor as well as a master mason."