“Not without my friends,” I said.
The old man looked at me. “Stubborn,” he hissed as he fumbled with the locks. “Still the stubborn hussy that you always were. Perhaps they’re right, and you really are a witch. There must be some dybbuk inside that red head of yours. You’ll be the undoing of us both.”
The night smelt of freedom. We drank it in furtively as we fled, each in a different direction. I would have stayed with the others, but Giordano forbade it so furiously that I obeyed. Through the streets of Épinal we ran, hiding in the shadows, picking our way through back alleys knee high in refuse. I was in a half dream, every sense accentuated beyond comprehension so that our flight seemed touched with a feverish unreality. Slices of memory: faces at an inn, gaping in soundless song in the light of a red lantern: the moon riding over a bank of clouds, an edge of forest black beneath: boots, a packet of food, a coat hidden beneath a bush in readiness: a mule tethered close by.
“Take it. It’s mine. No one will report it stolen.” He was still wearing his mask. A burst of affection for him almost overwhelmed me. “Giordano. After all these years. I thought you were dead.”
He made a dry sound that might have been laughter. “I don’t die easily,” he said. “Now will you begone?”
“Not yet,” I said. I was trembling now, half in fear, half in excitement. “I looked for you for so long, Giordano. What happened to the troupe? To Janette and Gabriel, to-”
“There isn’t time. I could talk to you all night and still you’d be asking questions.”
“One question, then,” I said, gripping his arm. “Just one, and I’ll go.”
He nodded heavily; in his mask he looked like a big, sad carrion bird. “I know,” he said at last. “Isabelle.”
I knew at that moment that my mother was dead. All those years I’d kept her untouched, like a locket worn close to my heart; her proud figure; her smile; her songs and cantrips. But she’d died in Flanders, Giordano told me, had died meaninglessly of the plague; now all that I had of her was fragments and dreams.
“Were you there?” I said in a broken voice.
“What do you think?” said Giordano.
Love not often, but forever-it might have been my mother speaking, very quietly, behind the rasp of his breathing. I knew now why he had followed me; why he had risked his life for me and could not now bear to look at my face, or reveal his own behind the Plague Doctor’s mask.
“Take it off,” I told him. “I want to see you before I go.”
He looked old in the moonlight, his eyes sunk so far into his face that it looked like a different mask, eyeless still and more tragic in its attempt to smile. Moisture leaked from the holes and into the deep channels at either side of his mouth. I tried to put my arms around him, but he pulled away abruptly. He had always disliked physical contact.
“Good-bye, Juliette. Get away as quickly as you can.” His voice was that of the old Giordano, crisp and sour and clever. “For your safety and theirs, don’t seek out the others. Sell the mule when you have to. Travel at night.”
I hugged him anyway, though he was stiff and unresponsive in my arms, and kissed his old brow. From his clothes I again caught a familiar scent of spice and sulfur, the smell of his alchemical experiments, and I was engulfed in sorrow. In my arms I felt a tremor go through him, almost like a sob but deeper, from the bone, then he pulled away with a kind of anger.
“Every moment you lose is a wasted chance,” he said in a voice that shook a little. “Be off with you, Juliette.” In his mouth my name sounded like a dry caress.
“What will you do?” I protested. “What about you?”
He gave a tiny smile and shook his head as he had always done when I said something he considered particularly unintelligent. “I’ve compromised my soul enough for you, girl,” he said. “In case you’d forgotten, recall that I don’t travel on the Sabbath.”
Then he lifted me onto the mule’s back and slapped the creature’s flanks so that it leaped forward onto the forest path, its hooves tapping smartly on the dry earth. I still remember his face in the moonlight, his whispered farewell as the mule trotted down the path, the scent of earth and ashes in my nostrils and his voice as it pursued me with his Shalom, with the voice of my thirteenth year like that of my essential conscience pursuing me sourly, like the voice of God on the mountain.
I never saw him again. From Épinal I traveled across Lorraine toward Paris, then back toward the coast as my belly increased. I foraged for food when Giordano’s supplies gave out and sold the mule on his advice. In the mule’s saddlebags I found such things as my old mentor had salvaged from my caravan-a little money, some books, the jewelry discarded among my costumes, paste indistinguishable from real. I dyed my hair to avoid detection. I listened attentively to the reports from Lorraine. But still there were no news, no names, no rumors of burnings. And yet a part of me is waiting still, five years later, as if time has been suspended since then, a quiet interval between two acts, a conflict unresolved that must one day inevitably end in blood.
My dreams show me his face again and again. His woodland eyes. Our passion play continues there, the stage empty but not abandoned, waiting for the players to resume their roles, my mouth opening to speak lines I thought I had long since forgotten.
One more dance, he tells me as I twist and turn on my narrow bed. You were always my favorite.
I awake in sweat, certain this time that Fleur is dead. Even when I have checked a dozen times I dare not turn over but stay listening to the soft sound of her breathing. The dorter seems filled with unquiet murmurings. My jaw is a vise clenched around my fear. Release it and my scream will last forever.
12
It was Alfonsine who saw them first. It was almost twelve o’clock, and they had to wait for the tide. Ours is not a true island; at low tide a broad pathway to the mainland is revealed, painstakingly cobbled to allow for safe passage across the flats. At least it appears safe: but there are currents across the bland surface strong enough to drag the cobbles free, sunk as they are in four feet of mortar. On both sides there is quicksand. And when the tide comes in, it sweeps the flats with terrible speed, spilling across the road and taking with it what it finds. And yet they moved with slow, relentless dignity across the sands, their progress mirrored in the shallows, the distant figures distorted in the rising column of hot air from the road.
She guessed who they were immediately. The carriage limped across the uneven causeway, the horses’ hooves struggling for purchase against the green cobbles. Before it came a pair of liveried outriders. Behind it, a single man on foot.
I had spent the morning alone on the far side of the island. Waking early and unrefreshed, I left the abbey and took Fleur for a long walk, basket in hand, to pick the tiny dune pinks, which when infused and distilled give peaceful sleep. I recalled a place where thousands of them grew undisturbed, but I was too restless for such work and I only picked a handful. In any case, the flowers were just another excuse to escape the cloister for a few hours.
As it was, we lost track of time. Beyond the dunes is a little beach of sand, where Fleur likes to play. There are broad white scars on the dune where she and I have worn away the grass, climbing and jumping, climbing and jumping, and the water is clear and shallow and filled with small jeweled pebbles.
“Can I swim today? Can I?”
“Why not?”
She swims like a dog, with shouting and splashing and great enjoyment. Mouche, her doll, watched us from the dune’s edge as I discarded my habit and joined Fleur in the water. Then I dried both of us with the skirt of my habit and picked some small, hard apples from a tree by the side of the road, for I realized that the sun was high, and we had missed lunch. Then at Fleur’s insistence, we dug a great hole, into which we flung pieces of seaweed to make a monster pit, and afterward she slept for half an hour in the shade, Mouche under her arm, while I watched over her from the duneside path and listened to the whisperings of the turning tide.