He sat down, one booted foot flung casually over the chair arm. His anger was gone and now he looked tired and-genuinely, I thought-rather hurt. “What’s this?” he said. “Don’t you trust me yet? Do you think I would stand and let you be accused?”
“You did it before, remember?”
“All in the past, Juliette. I suffered for it, believe me.”
Not half enough, I thought, and said as much.
“I’m sorry. I can’t let you go.” His voice was final.
“I wouldn’t betray you.”
Silence.
“I wouldn’t, Guy.”
He stood up, putting his hands on my shoulders. I was suddenly aware of his scent, a dark aroma of sweat and damp leather, of the fact that in spite of my height he dwarfed me.
“Please,” I said in a low voice. “You don’t need me.”
The touch of his hand was like a breath from the ovens, crisping the hairs at the nape of my neck. “Trust me,” he said. “I do.”
Ten years ago I would have given anything to hear those words. It alarmed me a little that a part of me might still want them, and I closed my eyes to evade his. It was a trap. Didn’t I know him by now? His skin was smooth, smooth as my dreams.
“As what? A pawn in your game of bishops?” I pushed him away with my hands, but somehow my body drew him closer so that we stood entwined, his fingers clasped at the nape of my neck, tracing letters of fire on my raised hackles.
“No.” His voice was very gentle.
“Then why?”
He shrugged and said nothing.
“Why, LeMerle?” I cried in angry desperation. “Why this charade? Will you risk both our lives for your revenge? Because a man once had you exiled from Paris? Because of a ballet?”
“No, Juliette. Not for those things.”
“Then why?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
It must have been witchcraft. Or madness, perhaps. I fought against it, scarring his wrists with my fingernails even as I clung to him, sealing his mouth with mine as if by so doing I might consume him whole. We shed our clothes in ferocious silence, he and I, and I saw that his body was still hard and strong, as I remembered it, and I was startled to realize just how tenderly I recalled every mark, every scar, as if they were my own. The ancient brand on his arm shone silver-snakeskin-pale in the moonlight, and though some part of me protested that I was making an irrevocable mistake, I could hardly make it out above the roaring in my mind. For a time I was more than flesh; I was sulfur, I was a pillar of fire that raged and fed and thirsted. It was what Giordano had always warned me about; the hidden savagery in my nature that he had always taken such care to subdue-and with so little success. It occurred to me then that although Giordano may have been learned in the properties of elemental substances, there were far more powerful alchemies in the world than his, alchemies that melded flesh and burned away the past and changed hatred back into love with a simple cantrip.
After a time the fire slipped from us and we lay gently, like lovers. My anger had left me, and a new languor possessed my limbs, as if the past five years had been a dream, nothing more, grim shadow play on a wall that reveals itself to be nothing more than the movement of a boy’s hand in the sunlight.
“Tell me, LeMerle,” I said at last. “I want to understand.”
In a sickle of moonlight I saw him smile. “It’s a long tale,” he warned me. “If I tell you, will you stay?”
“Tell me,” I repeated.
Still smiling, he did.
39
Well, I had to tell her something, and she would have worked it out in the end. A pity she’s a woman; if she’d been born a man I might almost have thought her my equal. As it was, I still had a weapon to wield, and the battle was sweet for a time. Her hair smelt of burnt sugar, the scents of baking and lavender warm on her skin. I swear this time I meant to keep my promise; my mouth on hers, I could almost believe it was true. We could take to the road again, I promised; together we could take to the air. L’Ailée might fly again-in fact, I never doubted she would. Sweet fantasy, my Winged One. Sweet lies.
She wanted the tale, so I told it in words that would please her. More than I intended, perhaps, lulled by her sly caresses. More, perhaps, than was entirely safe. But my l’Ailée is a romantic at heart, wanting to believe the best in everything. Even this. Even me.
I was seventeen.“ Imagine that. ”The son of a local girl and some passing seigneur; unwanted; unacknowledged. It was understood that as such I belonged to the Church. No one asked me if I understood it. I was born a few miles away, near Montauban, and I was sent away to the abbey at five years old-that was where I learned my Latin and Greek. The abbot was a weak but kindly man who had left Society twenty years before to join the Cistercians. His connections remained good, however; and although he had renounced his name, it was reputed to have once been a powerful one. Certainly, the abbey was wealthy enough under his direction, and it was large; I grew up in a mixed environment, with monks on one side and nuns on the other.“
The tale is almost true-the name of the other protagonist eludes me but I recall her face beneath the novice’s veil, the fine spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose, her eyes, the color of burnt umber flecked with gold.
“She was fourteen. I worked in the gardens, too young even to have earned my tonsure. She was a minx; she would glance over the wall at me as I worked, laughing with her eyes.”
As I said, almost true. There was more, my Ailée, darker, uglier currents and crosscurrents you would not so easily understand. In the reading room I would linger over the Song of Songs and try not to think of her whilst my masters watched me closely for signs of rapture.
I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.
I never could bear the sight or the smell of those flowers, afterward. A summer garden is filled with bitter memories.
“For a time it was an idyll.”
This is what she wants to hear, a tale of innocence corrupted, of vanquished love. She is more troubadour than buccaneer, my Winged One, in spite of her sharp claws. You’d understand that, Juliette, with your sweet and sheltered childhood among the painted tigers.
For myself the idyll was a darker thing, the scents of that summer’s flowers colored with those of my solitude, my jealousy, my imprisonment. I neglected my lessons; I did penance for what sins they could discover, and on the rest I brooded in growing resentment and longing. I could hear the sound of running water beyond the abbey walls and wondered where the river led.
“It was summer.” I’ll let you believe it was love. Why not? I almost convinced myself. I was drunk on moonlight, on sensations; a curl of her hair, cut in secret and passed to me in a missal, the imprint of her feet on the grass, the imagined scent of her as I lay on my pallet, looking up at that tiny square of stars…
A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up; a fountain sealed.
We met in secret in the walled gardens, exchanged shy kisses and tokens like lovers long versed in the arts of intrigue. We were innocents…Even I, in my way.
“It could not last.” This, my Ailée, is where our tales diverge. “They found us together, grown careless perhaps, giddy with delight at our forbidden pleasures…”
She screamed, the little fool. They called it rape.
“I tried to explain-” I had pulled down her uncut hair; it hung in ringlets to her waist. Beneath her robe I could feel her small breasts. Solomon said it most sweetly-Thy breasts are like unto two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.