The Porcelain Dove (61 page)

"Come, ma mère," she said. "There's work yet to be done. You may rest later, as long as you wish, but now's the time for laying ghosts and breaking curses. A wound must be searched before it may be healed—that's what my master taught me."

Her voice dropped and her brow twitched as with sudden pain. Is her mourning for the Wizard of Norroway, I wondered, or for Pompey? Which thought caused such a pang in my own heart that 'twas only with the half of my attention that I helped madame to her feet, folded the cloak decently around her, and pinned it closed with the brooch of rushes. Where was the boy? Why had he not come to comfort me? Was it only that I had no feather to call him with?

I heard Jean saying, "Duvet knows more than I. Duvet knows all about it. She was the one found the document I told you of, she never said where nor how."

I turned to see Mlle Linotte considering me, her arms folded across her chest. "Well, Berthe?"

My mind being so full of Pompey and wizards and crows, I couldn't, for a moment, think what they could be speaking of, and bemusedly begged her pardon.

'Twas Justin enlightened me. "When my ancestor murdered the beggar-wizard's daughter, I doubt he buried her in consecrated ground. 'Tis our belief the curse cannot be fully lifted until her bones are found and buried and her soul released to judgment."

"Jean has told us," Linotte interrupted him, "that you once found a document: the dying confession of my cursed ancestor."

My blood ran cold in my cheeks. "I found it, mademoiselle."

"Did you find anything else?"

"Yes, mademoiselle."

"What did you find?"

"Bones, mademoiselle."

"Take us there."

Thinking that even Nôtre Sauveur had only been required to descend once into Hell, I hesitated until madame touched my arm and said, "Yes, Berthe. All the little birds: I must go to them at once."

At the word "birds," monsieur turned his eyes from the Dove to me, and now all the Maindurs were staring at me, expectant and vaguely threatening, like goats waiting to be fed. Well, you can't argue with mad folk any more than you can argue with goats. So I turned on my
heel down the front steps and led the way around the north wing and through the stable-yard to the scorched and blasted laundry-yard and thence to the room of the tubs and the arch and the stairs leading down to the dungeons of Beauxprés.

"'Tis very dark," said Jean nervously.

"Nevertheless," I said, and started the descent. Whoever came behind me made a light so that I could see to set my feet; above and around me, the murk pressed close and heavy.

Forty paces across the guard room took me to the door of the torture chamber.

"Pah!" said Léon. "How it stinks! Worse than the château d'If, by damn."

"Bat dung," I said.

"And behold the bats that made it," said Linotte, gazing ruefully upwards to the ceiling, thick with dark, untidy spikes. Whatever other living things the curse had killed or driven from Beauxprés, the bats had manifestly thrived.

A dazzling light darted through the gloom to rest, cooing mournfully, upon the Iron Maiden. The bats, their slumbers disturbed, rustled and hissed; those caught by the silver glare dropped from their roosts and skimmed noiselessly into deeper shadow.

I was inclined to let the Dove guide the family Maindur to its ancestral chamber of horrors while I awaited them above in the warmth of the new sun. Monsieur was already ankle-deep in the muck, making for the Dove like iron for a lodestone, with Justin wading close behind, followed by Linotte and madame clinging to her belt. As monsieur drew near, the Dove took wing, circled, and flew into the tunnel beyond the Iron Maiden, taking the light with it. I'd certainly have turned back then, unneeded and glad of it, had I not felt the hungry darkness pressing at my back, sucking urgently at my eyes and ears.

After all I had witnessed and suffered, it took more than a moonless dark to terrify me, nor was I subject to phantasmical terrors. Yet I never doubted that all the malice of Hell waited in that darkness to consume me should I lose sight of that silver gleam. I hitched up my skirts to my knees and floundered after it. Jean must have sensed something of the same threat, for I heard him stumbling behind me, and last of all, the vicomte de Montplaisir, cursing a steady stream of filth.

The opening to the passage was as I remembered it, and the passage itself, bare and twisted. The door at the end was open as I'd
left it, and the chamber beyond filled to overflowing with liquid silver. Half-blinded, I blinked and squinted at the squat columns, the wooden table, the document case, the wide hearth, the iron cauldron, and in the midst of it all, madame, monsieur, and Linotte standing frozen in attitudes of wonder. Slowly I came a little down the room to where I might see the row of clothes-presses. The lid of the nearest was raised, and Justin, on his knees before it, spilled cloth-of-gold over its side in a brilliant, molten flow.

"Sacré Dieu," Jean murmured behind me. "What is all this?"

"Chut," I said, and stepped quietly nearer.

Linotte and my mistress stared over Justin's shoulder. Their eyes and mouths were round as rings, Linotte's with simple shock, my mistress' as if the bones she beheld were the bones of her own children. As for monsieur, his back was to the chests, and his worshipful gaze fixed upon the Porcelain Dove that roosted upon a great rusty hook near the top of a pillar. In its soft, clear light, the hook showed a sullen red, like old blood.

The tableau hardly wavered when the heir of Malvoeux thrust himself into it. "What's this?" he said, his voice so rough I couldn't tell whether he were eager, angry, or afraid. "Bones, by the devil's arse-hole! Think you the old bugger ate human flesh?"

"For pity, Léon, hold thy peace," said Linotte.

"For pity certainly," said Justin, "and also for thy soul's sake, that goes in sore danger of Hell-fire."

Léon snorted. "Hell-fire? I don't believe in Hell-fire, brother, nor in thy milk-and-honey Heaven. I don't believe in pity, and I don't believe in God. I do believe in the pleasures of the senses, and I believe in nothing else: in which philosophy I think our ancestor also rejoiced."

"Whatever else our ancestor may have been, his confession is witness that he feared God at the last," said Justin.

"Foutre," said the vicomte.

Jean spoke up behind me. "Those chests, are they all full of bones?" he asked wonderingly. "How will you know which belonged to the wizard's daughter?"

Linotte sighed. "We must bury them all, nameless as they are. I should have known no ancestor of ours would have contented himself with killing a single child."

"All my pretty birds," said madame softly. "Don't cry. Soon it will be time."

Her voice was sane, though her words and her appearance were
mad enough, what with the black cloak clutched around her and her silvered hair falling in swags over it, her naked feet all clottered with dung and her white legs showing above. Her face was calm and her eyes fixed tenderly on air in which, if I squinted, I could catch a glimmer of bright wings. Or was it children's faces? Though I couldn't see them clearly, 'twas apparent that my mistress could. Here was a cue for bitterness, if not on my own behalf, then on Justin's and Léon's and Linotte's, whom she'd never known or loved half so well as these ghostly children four hundred years dead.

Looking upon her, all I felt was love.

"Ah!"

"Ah!"

A cry of triumph and a cry of pain. Justin, opening the last press, had found Jorre's knives and ropes side by side with the silver reliquary, none of them so neatly disposed as they'd been before I went rummaging through them.

Linotte's was the cry of triumph. She stooped upon the reliquary, snatched it up, bore it to the table, set it next the document case, and opened it.

"Colette Favre," she said, half-wondering, half-bitter. "Soon you will rest in peace."

"Peace," echoed Justin, tears breaking his voice like a boy's. But when I turned to look at him, I saw that the tears were not a boy's tears, nor did he look sad, precisely, despite his anguished cry. I thought his face shone; and where his tears fell upon the ancient instruments of torture, they ate into them like drops of acid. In less time than it takes to write it, the knives and the ropes, the hooks and the irons and the mace were gone, sublimated into nothing by a Maindur's tears.

I'd been conscious for some little time of a pain in my elbow, now grown sufficiently sharp to drag my attention from the unfolding scene. It proved to be Jean's fingers, digging into the flesh of my arm like eagle-claws gripping a rabbit; though he himself looked more like the rabbit than the eagle, poor man, with his face all ashen and glazed with fear.

"Dragons," he muttered. "Priests that died and rose again. I did see them, Duvet. In Cathay. Upon my mother's soul I swear it."

"Yes, Jean," I said without irony. "I believe you. Furthermore, I believe you faced them with the courage of a Frenchman."

Shame pulled a tide of blood up his cheeks and across his brow, and he eased his grip on my arm.

I touched his fingers. "They'll be needing you soon, mon brave, to help with the chests. Unless mademoiselle enchants them out of here, I can't imagine how you'll accomplish it."

"The chests." Jean's fingers pinched me convulsively, then relinquished their hold. "We'll need ropes."

"We'll need ropes," Linotte was saying briskly. "And strong arms—yes, yours too, Léon. I will not use magic here."

Getting twenty clothes-presses full of bones out of Jorre's dungeon was easier, I suppose, than getting the infidels out of Jerusalem, for in the end, we did succeed. A noisy business, and not as reverent as it might have been, involving not only ropes, but making wooden slides and improvising pulleys and lighting flambeaux in the old cressets. I daren't think what the bats must have made of it all, not to mention the rats, the crawling things, and all the less substantial vermin I felt sniffing at the skirts of my senses. Linotte and Jean planned the most part of it, and did most of the work as well; for madame was incapable of hauling and lifting and maneuvering, Léon resistant, monsieur indifferent, and M. Justin, though willing, utterly useless. I did my part, me, and all the more gladly for my impression that the darkness of the dungeon recoiled from the noise and light of our undertaking.

By the time we had all twenty clothes-presses sitting in the laundry-yard, the day was nearly gone and I was as bone-weary and sore as I'd ever been in my life. Monsieur sat upon one of the chests, I hardly need say gazing at the Dove, which had perched upon another. I'd dearly have liked to sit on one myself, the stone bench being occupied by the vicomte, but sat in the laundry door instead. Aching legs are no excuse for sacrilege.

"Where's the priest?" said M. Léon suddenly. "Where's the consecrated ground? Don't tell me, sister, that having dragged our ancestor's leavings thus far, we must now drag them down to the village!"

Linotte stared at him open-mouthed. Having thought so far, she'd clearly thought no further. And now dusk was drawing in, with night not far behind. A small breeze tickled the back of my neck. Darkness, I thought. Bats. I shivered.

"'Tis time," wailed madame. "I promised them!"

"Yes, ma mère," Justin's voice came from behind me. "As you say. 'Tis time. I am no priest, nor is this consecrated ground. Yet I trust to God's grace to bend both to His purpose."

I turned and stared at my mistress' younger son, back from wherever he'd been for so many years. He didn't seem a day older than when he'd left, but he did seem different—calmer, more easy of stance, his hands folded quietly at his waist, his eyes at rest upon his mother's face. Where once he'd put me in mind of St. Sebastian awaiting the arrows, now he put me more in mind of a martyr awaiting his crown.

"Wherever have you been?" I asked him.

"In Paradise," he said softly.

And so he had, in a manner of speaking. He told us how he'd crossed the fields to the Forêt des Enfans, how he'd heard a bird singing and followed the song, which was the purest, the most melodious, the most beautiful he'd ever heard. By and by the song led him to a small glade bright with all the flowers of the field: marguerites and violets and lilies-of-the-wood, gillyflowers and eye-bright and wood anemones, all blooming, regardless of season, with gentians and asters. In the center of the glade grew a pomegranate tree—strange visitant to a forest of firs—and in that pomegranate tree perched a white bird that sang without ceasing of the love and glory of God. Adoring, Justin knelt to hear it. A moment only, he assured us, barely long enough to realize his unworthiness to behold this miracle. Two heartbeats, no more, of perfect joy and peace. Then the bird and the tree gave way to his sister and his brother, two horses, and a white mule.

He'd wept, of course—why, I almost wept when he told us of it, imagining Heaven thus opened to me and snatched again from sight. "And long before I'd done mourning," he finished, "Linotte hauled me up off my knees and onto the mule." Unsaintlike, he glared at her.

"I made that bird," said Linotte with an air of defense. "Or at least Pompey made it, with instruction from maître Grisloup, to keep you from harm."

"Le bon Dieu made the bird," said Justin; and what I heard in his voice was less faith than conviction, as a man would say, "The sun will rise tomorrow."

Léon blew a fart with his lips.

"Have some respect, Léon," said Linotte sharply. "Nonsense, Justin. I myself helped Pompey to cast the spell."

"The spell may have been Pompey's," said Justin. "The vision was nonetheless true. Magic and miracles are much akin, when practiced in love and fear of le bon Dieu. And, look you . . ."

Putting his hand in his pocket, he drew it forth clenched and
slowly opened his fingers to display upon his palm a single black seed about the size of a small pearl, perfectly round, with a bit of dry pulp sticking to it.

"From the tree," he said reverently. "The pomegranate tree."

Léon laughed, a harsh derisive bark in which I heard both pain and envy. "I piss upon your tree, brother," he said, "and I spit, sister, upon your bones. Fuck your little birds, madame; monsieur my father, bugger your Porcelain Dove. I reject them all, every one, absolutely and for ever."