The Serpent Garden - Judith Merkle Riley (56 page)

“Tell them it is pestilence, and is catching.”

“They’ll hardly believe me unless I produce a body.” That is where an idea came to me and I smiled, and the abbess looked at me very curiously.

“Oh, but you can produce a body,” I said. “God has just in this moment showed me a very excellent idea. An inspiration, really. You can make the captain happy, you can make the Duchesse d’Alençon happy, and you can make God happy by doing the right thing. It’s all come to me. But we’ll need a night.”

“A night? I think I can delay them that much. But what do you mean, an idea?”

“Well,” I answered, “I’ll need some help, and a very large beeswax candle, and plaster…”

“For what would you use these things?”

“For deception, Holy Mother. For taking a life mask and a model of my hands. Can you keep them from touching the body?”

“Of a plague victim? I believe so.” I could see that the abbess, for the first time, had begun to smile. I could tell it pleased her, not to give me up. She could deceive the seducer and have a wonderful story to tell the duchess next time she visited. We both knew how Duchess Marguerite loved a good story—why, it would probably be worth a very substantial donation. We looked each other in the eye, the abbess and I, and we understood each other perfectly.

“Good, start right away,” she said, because she was a woman accustomed to command.

We worked most of the night, waiting until morning for new light to finish up the coloring. First I changed my clothes for a novice’s habit and we stuffed my old ones with straw. The plaster molds of my face and my crossed hands had come out absolutely perfectly the first time.

“Where did you learn this?” asked the abbess as she watched us work in the evening before the light failed.

“Painters cast molds all the time—of limbs, of things they need to draw. You can’t get the shadows right otherwise, and who stays still long enough to model an elbow?”

“
Hmm
. Makes sense. I can see that it’s not simple, the new art. Though I do prefer the old. All the faces looking alike, and just hands, feet, and draperies. And halos. I find a good halo inspirational. This fashion for nudity in art is most unseemly. And as for that little bit of glowing stuff that passes for a halo these days, well, it just isn’t much.”

“Oh, I agree completely,” I said, as I tinted the melted wax and poured it into the molds.

“What’s the color you’re using? People are pink.”

“Live people. Dead ones are bluish gray. I’ll paint on some livid sores when we’re done. I don’t want to look too pretty on my bier.” The abbess laughed.

“Most people don’t get the choice,” she said.

In the morning they tolled the death knell and opened all the windows of the church and the door, too, so that those outside the gates could hear all the chanting. I was just finishing up some very terrifying-looking open sores when the abbess came in to inspect.

“Magnificent,” she said. “But where did you get the hair?”

“See here?” I said, lifting up a corner of my coif. “It’s mine.” There was nothing left on my head but a mass of gingery curls cut very close like a boy’s, but then there is really nothing I wouldn’t sacrifice for verisimilitude in a case like this. I’d even cut out little hairs like eyelashes and planted them in the wax.

“Just look at all the colors you’ve used,” said the abbess. “Even more than a live face, I imagine.”

“Oh, no. You’d be surprised how many colors it takes to make a human face. You have to start with underpainting, then lay other colors on top, to throw the face from flat into round.”

“Why do they always start the saints out in green?”

“That’s terre verte. You have to start with a midtone, then build up and down from that. For the miniatures, I begin with a mix of ceruse and red lead, sometimes with a bit of massicot. Then I build all the way to pale yellow or the whitest pink for highlights, and shade back with a mix of blue. Black makes muddy shadows.”

“You’ve used almost all your colors even before you begin the gowns,” she observed.

“Oh, yes, all the colors are in the human face.” The abbess looked very strange.

“All the colors are in the rainbow,” she said.

“That’s true. I guess you might say there’s a rainbow in each human face. The tones are just different, depending on the person,” I answered, painting some gory ooze down my wax hands. “And then, of course, none of them are as bright as rainbow colors,” I added, thinking.

“Maîtresse Suzanne, I understand what the angel was telling you,” said the abbess, all of a sudden. I looked up from my work at her. What a time to be worrying about dreams! Soldiers were about to batter down her gate, and we were risking everything in a very dangerous deception that could lead to everything getting burned down and maybe some of us being killed if they discovered it. But religious people, they’re odd. “The angel told you to do just what you are doing. Paint. Paint humanity.”

I just stood and looked at her. Here I was painting up my own corpse to deceive assassins and I’d only finished half my commission for the duchess and Master Ashton had probably been killed and there was no living way I could get home again. If that’s a blessing, I’d hate to know what a curse is. “Well, maybe you’re right,” I said, just to be agreeable. “Now look, I’d say you can let them in.”

The abbess directed her nuns to lay the “body” on the bier before the high altar. I was very pleased with my work because it did look like me and especially ghastly, and no one who loved his life would come anywhere near it. Then the abbess opened the gates and escorted the captain of those troops in herself and made him take off his helmet in the church. I hid up in the loft because an artist always likes to see the impression her work makes, and I was very proud of the job I’d done and in only one night and part of a day, too.

“We, of course, have no fear of death, for it is but a gateway to the other world, but you might not wish to come any closer,” she said, in a pious whisper. The guard looked as if he did not want to stay.

“Plague, you say?”

“Yesterday morning she laid down her brush, here in this very church. See that little Madonna? Now it will never be repaired. And the face half done. What a pity. She cried out, ‘Oh, God, what pain’ and we saw she was perishing of fever. Plague—it takes a soul so quickly. If you fall ill in the morning, you must write your will before evening…” The guards had backed out the door, but the abbess persisted in following them, telling them how if they caught a disease in a blessed place like this it would probably take a million years off their stay in purgatory, so they should count themselves lucky.

They left my body set up just in case the soldiers should come back, and after the morning meal, I went back just to admire it and found the abbess walking about it, chin in hand, thinking and talking to herself.

“A pity,” she was saying. “An incorruptible body, so nicely made. A martyr to chastity, taken by God to protect her heavenly crown from a seducer. What a waste. A shrine, now, something cool, like a crypt below ground level with a grille, where it wouldn’t melt…” but I hesitated to come and greet her and disturb her holy thoughts, so I stayed in the shadows of the side chapel. It was then that I saw a dark, bundled figure of a man in prayer beneath that poor little half-repaired Madonna where we had left my brushes and paints artistically scattered to make a better impression. Could it be Robert Ashton? I heard the man groan and then start weeping, and I was sure it was him. My heart wanted to run right to him, but then I thought a person must be cautious and make sure before embracing the wrong person. Also a very tiny wicked thought came to me as well. You see, not many people can find out what people really think of them when they are dead, and I was very gratified to see that Master Ashton cared so much about me. It all had to do with that speckle in my heart that was sharp and cold like ice, and even though it had done much shrinking in all that we had been through together, it was not yet altogether gone, and did so prick when I heard him calculating his advantage. And seeing just how sorry he was about my being dead really seemed to be the final proof that he was not a deceiver like other men, but really loved me for myself. So you see how tempted I was just to wait a little bit and see what else he would do before flinging my arms around him to make a happy ending.

“Too late! Gone! Like that! Oh, monstrous!” he cried. “Cruel God, take me with her!” He rose suddenly and approached the high altar, where the abbess, still thinking holy thoughts, appeared to be in prayer. “I must touch her,” he cried. “I wasn’t here to console her in death, now I will hold her icy hand and pledge my eternal troth!” I had never suspected that Robert Ashton had such a dramatic, poetic side, that is, being a privy secretary and rather rational at most times.

“Stop, stop! It’s certain death!” cried the abbess, fearful that our deception would be revealed.

“How can you understand, Reverend Mother? I waited too long, and now I can never prove to her that I loved her above all things. What coldness! What bitterness! Had I not feared my patron’s wrath, we would have died as man and wife. How small, how cowardly I was in the face of her great love. I swear before you now I will kiss her cold lips for the last time, and we will be wedded in death,” cried Master Ashton in a frenzy, pushing past the shocked abbess. I tiptoed up closer, to see everything, because it was truly the most sadly beautiful poetical scene and beyond anything I could have imagined. My heart felt absolutely warm with love for him. What excellent, devoted passion! Tears even started coming, it was so tragical to see him there falling on my lovely work of art.

Slowly, his lips approached the bluish ones. He had shut his eyes. He pressed his warm ones to the cold ones…

“What the…!” he cried, as he opened his eyes suddenly and pulled back his head as if he had kissed a snake. “What
is
this thing?” he said, poking my straw body with a finger while he stared at the wax head.

“Robert, Robert, don’t blame the abbess. It was my idea,” I called out, for I was still almost halfway the length of the nave behind him. He whirled around toward the sound of my voice. His face was still tear streaked, but now it was red, too.

“I should have known,” he said.

“Robert, it was a deception. I had to fool the guards and get them to go away. I didn’t intend to deceive you….”

“But you just couldn’t resist, could you?”

I came out of the shadows and into a ray of sunlight that came down all colored through a stained-glass window. He looked very good but awfully disturbed, and I suppose I should have been ashamed not to have told him right away, but I was very glad to know he loved me so highly as to join me in death, which may be excessively melodramatic, but a good sign always. “Oh, Robert, who couldn’t love a man who would follow her to the tomb?”

“At least you know I’m not false,” he said, still embarrassed and angry. “But…but, you are considerably better not blue.”

“I did a good job, didn’t I?”

“Good enough. When will you quit deceiving people?”

“I can’t help it, Robert. It just comes over me. It’s natural. You know that’s the way I am. I mean, I was in so much trouble. The Connétable de Bourbon. That’s not a small enemy, you know.”

“I know,” he said, and his face grew soft.

“But you know my heart’s honest,” I said, hoping he would forgive me this small sin and consider instead how badly I had been betrayed before and see it was a natural sort of thing to do when a person wants to make very, very sure that she is loved.

“That I do know,” he said. He looked first from me, then at my excellently made corpse, then back again. Then he sighed, then he smiled, then he laughed. He laughed until he doubled over and the tears came out of his eyes, and the abbess said, “
shh!
,” and then he said, “Susanna, have you any idea of how relieved I am? Here I thought I would die of a loathsome disease and join you in the grave. My life had become an empty shell without you. Now here you are, and I will live, and I’m not sure why, except that’s the way you are. You know it, I know it. You have led me such a dance since the day I first saw you.” Again, he shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He really was very attractive and just quirky enough to please me, with his funny mind, which gave birds instead of a silver mirror. “If I had any sense,” he was saying, not understanding how I was looking at him, “I’d want to change you. How fortunate for me that it’s impossible! There was a time I thought you’d scorn to marry, to leave your high patrons in France, and all that is grand and glittering. And what living could I give you if the archbishop cast me out for my contumaciousness? And you, I thought you’d be counting every shilling from the match in advance, just as every other woman in the world would. What woman loves a man without a place? Why didn’t I understand…you are not like any other woman?” He looked at me so tenderly, I thought I might weep, but I didn’t, and instead, I felt as if my heart had doubled, tripled, inside my chest.

“Ah, God,” he said, shaking his head, “it was the pride in me that feared your refusal. But now, if I asked…”

“Then ask, Robert, and see what I say.”

“Susanna, will you marry me? Now? Here? No matter what the future?”

“Yes I will, Robert, with the most loving heart in the world.” We had spoken in English, but the abbess broke into our conversation in French.

“I take it he has made a proposal. Is it decent or indecent?”

“Decent, Holy Mother. Is there a priest who can marry us here?” asked Robert Ashton. “I have passage with the servants of the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk and want to take Mistress Susanna home with me as my wife. We must hurry if we are to catch them before they leave Paris.”

“Duke and Duchess? Robert, whom did the Duke marry?” I asked.

“He married the White Queen in secret, and it’s only now public.”

“The princess? I always thought she had eyes for him. How did it happen?”

“Redheaded women, Susanna. They always get their own way.”

“I am
not
redheaded, Master Ashton. It’s only a little gingery tint. But if we are married, Robert, will you let me paint?”