Revenant Eve (21 page)

Furtive figures slunk here and there, and from the open doors of taverns erupted loud noise: laughter, shouts, bellows and, in a couple of places, music. Tipsy customers roared songs and stamped and clapped.

Most people who wanted to be safe were probably home, locked in tight, and here she was, a kid alone. My strategies for the future had shrunk to one anxious worry: Keeping her alive through a single night, though I had no physical form or powers.

“First, I must eat,” she whispered with her hand closed over the mirror, as if I couldn’t hear her any other way. “Then I must find a safe bed. Then tomorrow, back to the quay. I shall find a ship to take me back to Jamaica.”

S
HE MIGHT HAVE BEEN BETTER OFF
at a nicer inn—except a nice inn probably would have turned her away. She picked a total dump that advertised a bed and supper for two for a
decime
.

Her first mistake was taking out the coin purse to pay. By the light of the single guttering lamp in the common room, I saw the quick grin on the innkeeper’s grizzled, greasy face. I knew there was going to be trouble. I poked her, but she was too wary to pull out the mirror and be seen talking to me.

The innkeeper acted pleasant enough as he set a bowl of fish soup before her and a hunk of bread. She sat down to the meal, and her second mistake was her manners. She delicately picked off the bits of mold, and broke off pieces of the hard bread, which she determinedly chewed. She was too hungry to notice the innkeeper whispering to a hard-faced woman with a filthy apron and a hulking guy of about twenty who looked like their son.

Aurélie finished the bread. She picked through the soup, which swam with grease, until she found a few scraps of cabbage. She left the rest, then stood up.

“My soup not good enough for ye?” the woman asked in an angry voice, as the other few customers looked up. They were no more than vague, shadowy shapes in that dim light.

“It is fine,” Aurélie lied. “I am very tired, is all.”

“Then come this way, your majesty,” the innkeeper said.

The others burst into a loud guffaw at this witticism, and I thought,
This is so not going to end well
. I railed against my own helplessness and tried futilely to reach for any idea.

The innkeeper picked up a candle, lit it at the lamp, and led the way upstairs to one of the two rooms. It had two items of furniture: A bed on the floor and a slop bucket in the corner. The bed already had two men asleep in it.

The innkeeper walked over and kicked the nearest of the men, who was snoring in a drunken stupor. “Make space, citizen, make space,” he ordered. “You didn’t pay for two places.”

In the light of the wavering candle, the customer rolled blearily, and as he shifted, several insectoid shapes crawled out of his dirty cravat into the hair behind his ear.

Aurélie leaped back. “He is crawling with lice!”

The innkeeper gave a crack of laughter. “So will you, citizen. So will you.”

“I’ll not sleep there,” she said. And then came her third mistake, “I’ll pay for my food, but I want my
decime
back. I cannot sleep here.”

“He wants his
decime
back, he does, because my bed isn’t good enough for his aristocratic hide,” the innkeeper roared.

Angry voices down below responded in language that Aurélie hadn’t heard since her days in Saint-Domingue’s harbor.

“Keep it, then. I will go elsewhere,” she said, backing down the stairs.

Mrs. Innkeeper stood there, a cleaver gripped in her fist, and her hulking son with a cudgel.

“I’m thinking you will go to the prefecture,” the innkeeper said menacingly, following her down. “You and your clean hands and your risto tastes. You’re either one of
them
, escaped justice, or you’re a thief. Either way, it seems to me my duty as a patriot and a citizen is to report your thieving, aristocrat carcass.”

Aurélie’s lips tightened, and she reached for the pistol—which she’d tucked securely into her waistcoat.

“He’s going for a knife,” the missus shrilled, and the innkeeper kicked Aurélie down the last two stairs, causing her to fall with a splat.

The missus thrust an efficient hand into the waistcoat pocket and pulled out the coin purse. She let out a laugh when she encountered the trinkets. Aurélie rolled blurrily to her feet, having managed to fish out the pistol, which she leveled desperately.

The three fell back.

“You got one shot,” the innkeeper snarled. “And then whoever you don’t shoot will be on you.”

Aurélie didn’t answer, but backed to the door. They followed, but at a respectful distance. She got to the door, stepped through…and ran.

The rain was coming down too hard for them to chase her, or maybe they figured she wasn’t worth pursuing as they’d gotten her money. At any rate, she lumbered in those awful shoes down the narrow street and dodged desperately between houses until she stumbled on a hen house, into which she crept.

She cried herself to sleep.

When I say that was the highlight of the next few days, you can imagine how rotten things got.

She still had the mirror, so we arranged a system that next morning: If I poked her once, it was a reminder that I was with her. She seemed to need that. But if I poked her twice, it meant I thought she was in danger, and she was to run and hide as soon as she could find a place to hide in.

She made her way to the harbor, her plan to stow away on board a ship to Jamaica. I told her I didn’t think it was a good idea, but she put the mirror back, and I knew she wasn’t going to listen. I couldn’t blame her for the longing to go home.

After two anxious days of lurking about, she discovered that first, ships did not go to Jamaica from Dieppe, and second, it was impossible to sneak onto them. And even if she could have managed it, the roughness of the sailors hanging around the wharfs frightened her. Though she was still pretty clueless about the facts of life, it didn’t take much imagination
to guess that nothing good would come of those sailors discovering she was a girl.

That wasn’t the only threat. While she lurked around barnacled pilings and noisome, fly-swarmed corners, she was eyed in no friendly way by some of the ragged, miserable homeless kids whose parents had either died in the revolution or else left them for whatever reason. They made it real clear that interlopers could expect no mercy if they tried begging in their territory.

The only thing I could think to suggest was, “Watch how they get food when they aren’t begging.”

She did, after a morning’s begging in a place where the orphans didn’t hang out. Her attempts earned her cuffs, kicks, curses, and threats from the shopkeepers. So she followed some of the smaller orphans and discovered a few of them lurking behind the dockside taverns and inns. When the scrapings of meals were tossed to the pigs, the kids would scramble into the sties, picking out whatever didn’t get immediately immersed into the disgusting black mud.

After a day or so of watching, she got in first and managed to snag some old potatoes and a stale bit of bread.

How to get her out of there before she either got murdered or died of some disease? The horrid problem of the poor confronted her—too many desperate people competing for scant pickings. But if she tried the nicer part of town, she’d be chased away, or worse, dragged to the prefecture. Where she would no doubt be searched, the necklace and her gender discovered, and thence to a short, sharp end.

Barns turned out to be guarded by dogs, but hen houses, too small for adults, worked as shelters, and she could usually find a raw egg to suck. She cried herself to sleep every night, waking each day to the quest to survive.

“You’ve got to find a way to earn money,” I said to her one night, when she took out the mirror for the comfort of my useless company. The mirror and the necklace were the only things she’d managed to save. I’d tried to talk her into selling the mirror, but so far, she wouldn’t. She knew it wouldn’t bring much anyway.

“How can I earn money?” she asked. “The only thing I know well is how to play the fortepiano. Would anyone hire me as a governess? Where do I go to get hired?”

“I don’t know much more than you do about that. But here’s another idea. Remember that first night, before you went to that horrible inn? You passed by some places where I heard music. Try going back there. See who is playing, and if they are friendly, ask how they got the work.”

“Oh, what a very good idea,” she said. “But first I must eat. My head swims every time I stand up.”

A sudden noise silenced her. People crashed through the yard—thieves or drunks or who knows what. The bangs and crashes and screams of someone getting strangled set the chickens clucking, and somewhere a dog let out a hoarse howl, then yapped. More dogs barked, pigs grunted, and the scream cut off short.

Gradually silence fell, and all living things settled back into torpor.

As soon as the sun was up, Aurélie felt around for eggs and found one. She cracked it open and slurped it out of her filthy hands. The rest of the day was entirely taken up in hiding, cruising pig yards, and scavenging for anything she could eat.

When the sun sank, and the taverns opened to nighttime entertainment, she made her way back to the center of Dieppe and the row of shops, taverns, and pubs.

Rain fell, hard. “At least I will get clean,” she said, teeth chattering.

The taverns all seemed to be full, the voices mostly male, loud and rough. From one came ragged singing and from another the tail end of a French folk tune played on a violin, nearly smothered by a roar of laughter.

Aurélie paused, uncertain. The fiddle player started up again—and this time, I recognized the melody, an Eastern European Jewish folksong.

I wasn’t aware that I’d poked her until Aurélie jolted. She backed up onto a porch, lurked behind a stack of old baskets, and pulled out the mirror. “Duppy Kim? What is it?”

“I’m curious about that melody from the other side of Europe being played in the north of France,” I said. “Why don’t you go into that tavern? The fiddler is good, and at least you will be out of the rain.”

“Very well,” she said, and tucked the mirror back into her waistcoat pocket. “I shall go in here.”

S
HE DUCKED UNDER ELBOWS
and dodged the rowdies busy whooping it up. Even in the lamplight she was as grungy as any of them. At least no one was going to accuse her of being an aristocrat anymore.

In the corner near the fireplace, surrounded by a thickening crowd, three musicians played. Aurélie worked her way into the press, her attention on the tall black-haired guy with the fiddle. His eyes were closed, his face pale and mournful as a romantic poet. He seemed to be in his mid-twenties, his coat patched and threadbare.

Seated on a three-legged stool next to him, another equally skinny guy in shabby laborer’s clothing played an hautbois, a kind of oboe, as one foot jerked up and down. His face was lowered, greasy hair the color of cookie dough escaping under a shapeless worker’s cap. His much-patched boot had a tambourine tied to it by twine, and when it hit the floor, it clashed with a percussive beat. The guy had the toe of his boot thrust through a bit of frayed rope that was attached to the bellows. As he thumped his foot up and down, he not only played the tambourine, he pumped the bellows for the regal.

Hopping on her toes, Aurélie spotted the regal, played by a third guy. He was ruddy-faced from the heat and probably from the tall mug sitting on the floor, next to the barrel on which he’d propped the regal. His playing
didn’t always keep the beat set by the tambourine or the fiddle, creating a ragged effect that caused the audience to rock with laughter.

The fiddler lowered his bow and began to sing, joined by the regal player. They both had very fine voices, the fiddler tenor to baritone in range, the regal player baritone to bass. The audience’s mood shifted as the duo belted out words about equality, brotherhood, and the blood of martyrs, but just as the audience got into the song, the regal player faltered, scowled, and let out a stream of curses.

The mood was lost. The audience broke into laughter and cat calls. A few rinds of cheese and bits of food were tossed at the players. Things were about to turn nasty, but then the hautbois player set down his instrument and took up an odd-looking pipe-like instrument that came to two parallel points—a
sheng
! How had one of those managed to get all the way from China to Western Europe? Theft, loot, trade, who knew?