The Worm in Every Heart Page 8

  . . . elsewhere.

  Those enduring wounds which, even now, would—on occasion—break open and bleed anew, as though at some unrecognizable signal; the invisible passage of their maker, perhaps, through the cracks between known and unknown areas of their mutual world’s unwritten map?

  As though we could really share the same world, ever, we two—such as I, and such as . . .

  . . . he . . .

  “What y’have here, Monsewer Sansterre,” Keynes observed—touching the blister’s surface but delicately, yet leaving behind a dent, along with a lingering, sinister ache—“is a continual pocket of sequestered blood. ‘Tis that what we sawbones name haematoma: From the Latin haematomane, or ‘drinker of blood’.”

  There was, the doctor explained, a species of bats in the Antipodes—even upon Jean-Guy’s home island—whose very genus was labeled after the common term for those legendary un-dead monsters Desmoulins had once fixated upon. These bats possessed a saliva which, being composed mainly of anti-coagulant elements, aided them in the pursuit of their filthy addiction: A mixture of chemicals which, when smeared against an open wound, prolong—and even increase—the force and frequency of its bleeding. Adding, however:

  “But I own I have never known of such a reaction left behind by the spittle of any man . . . even one whose family, as your former Jacobin compatriots might term it, is—no doubt—long-accustomed to the consumption of blood.”

  Which concludes, as it ensues, the entire role of science in this narrative.

  * * *

  And now, the parallel approach to Dumouriez’ former apartment—past and present blending neatly together as Jean-Guy scales the rickety staircase towards that last, long-locked door, its hinges stiff with rust—

  Stepping, in 1815, into a cramped and low-hung attic space clogged with antique furniture: Fine brocades, moth-eaten and dusty; sway-backed Louis Quatorze chairs with splintered legs. Splintered armoires and dun-smoked walls, festooned with cobweb and scribbled with foul words.

  On one particular wall, a faint stain hangs like spreading damp. The shadow of some immense, submerged, half-crucified grey bat.

  Jean-Guy traces its contours, wonderingly. Remembering, in 1793 . . .

  . . . a blood-stained pallet piled high with pale-eyed corpses left to rot beneath this same wall, this same great watermark: Its bright red darkness, splashed wet across fresh white plaster.

  Oh, how Jean-Guy had stared at it—struck stupidly dumb with pure shock—while La Hire recounted the details his long day’s sleep had stolen from him. Told him how, when the Committee’s spies broke in at last, Dumouriez had merely looked up from his work with a queasy smile, interrupted in the very midst of dumping yet another body on top of the last. How he’d held a trowel clutched, incongruously, in one hand—which he’d then raised, still smiling . . .

  . . . and used, sharp edge turned inward—even as they screamed at him to halt—to cut his own throat.

  Under the stain’s splayed wing, Jean-Guy closes his eyes and casts his mind back even further—right back to the beginning, before Thermidor finally stemmed the Revolutionary river’s flood; before the Chevalier’s coach, later found stripped and abandoned at the lip of a pit stuffed with severed heads and lime; before Dumouriez’s suicide, or Jean-Guy and La Hire’s frantic flight to Calais, and beyond—back to Martinique, where La Hire would serve as plantation-master on Old Sansterre’s lands ‘til the hour and the day of his own, entirely natural, demise. The very, very beginning.

  Or: Jean-Guy’s—necessarily limited—version of it, at any rate.

  * * *

  1793, then, once more. Five o’clock on that long-gone “August” day, and the afternoon sun has already begun to slant down over the Row of the Armed Man’s ruined roofs—dripping from their streaming gutters in a dazzle of water and light, along with the last of the previous night’s rainfall. Jean-Guy and La Hire sit together at what passes for a table by the open window of a street-side cafe, their tricolor badges momentarily absent from sashes and hats; they sip their coffee, thus disguised, and listen to today’s tumbrils grind by through the stinking mist. Keeping a careful tandem eye, also, upon the uppermost windows of Dumouriez’s house—refuge of a suspected traitor, and previously listed (before its recent conversion into a many-roomed, half-empty “Citizens’ hotel”) as part of the ancestral holdings of a certain M. le Chevalier du Prendegrace.

  Jean-Guy to La Hire: “This Prendegrace—who is he?”

  “A ci-devant aristo, what else? Like all the rest.”

  “Yes, to be sure; but besides.”

  La Hire shrugs. “Does it matter?”

  Here, in that ill-fit building just across the way, other known aristocrats—men, women and children bearing papers forged expertly enough to permit them to walk the streets of Paris, if not exit through its gates—have often been observed to enter, though rarely been observed to leave. Perhaps attracted by Prendegrace’s reputation as “one of their own,” they place their trust in his creature Dumouriez’s promises of sanctuary, refuge, escape—and the very fact of their own absence, later on, seems to prove that trust has not been given in vain.

  “The sewers,” La Hire suggests. “They served us well enough during the old days, dodging Royallist scum through the Cordelliers’ quarter . . . ”

  Jean-Guy scoffs. “A secret entrance, perhaps, in the cellar? Down to the river with the rest of the garbage, then to the far shore on some subterranean boat?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “So the malgre Church used to claim, concerning Christ’s resurrection.”

  A guffaw. “Ah, but there’s no need to be so bitter about that, Citizen. Is there? Since they’ve already paid so well, after all—those fat-arsed priests—for spreading such pernicious lies.”

  And: Ah, yes, Jean-Guy remembers thinking, as he nods in smiling agreement. Paid in full, on the Widow’s lap . . . just like the King and his Austrian whore, before them.

  Across the street, meanwhile, a far less elevated lady of ill-repute comes edging up through the Row proper, having apparently just failed to drum up any significant business amongst the crowds which line the Widow’s bridal path. Spotting them both, she hikes her skirt to show Jean-Guy first the hem of her scarlet petticoat, then the similarly red-dyed tangle of hair at her crotch. La Hire glances over, draws a toothless grin, and snickers in reply; Jean-Guy affects to ignore her, and receives a rude gesture for his politesse. Determined to avoid the embarrassment of letting his own sudden spurt of anger show, he looks away, eyes flicking back towards the attic’s windows—

  —where he sees, framed between its moth-worn curtains, another woman’s face appear: A porcelain-smooth girl’s mask peering out from the darkness behind the cracked glass, grub-pale in the shadows of this supposedly unoccupied apartment. It hangs there, empty as a wax head from Citizen Curtuis’ museum—that studio where images of decapitated friend and foe to France alike are modeled from casts taken by his “niece” Marie, the Grosholtz girl, who will one day abandon Curtuis to the mob he serves and marry another man for passage to England. Where she will set up her own museum, exhibiting the results of her skills under the fresh new name of Madame Tussaud.

  That white face. Those dim-hued eyes. Features once contemptuously regal, now possessed of nothing but a dull and uncomplaining patience. The same wide stare which will meet Jean-Guy’s, after the raid, from atop the grisly burden of Dumouriez’s overcrowded pallet. That proud aristo, limbs flopped carelessly askew, her nude skin dappled—like that of every one of her fellow victims—

  (like Jean-Guy’s own brow now, in 1815, as he studies that invisible point on the wall where the stain of Dumouriez’s escape once hung, dripping)

  —with bloody sweat.

  His “old complaint,” he called it, during that brief evening’s consultation with Dr. Keynes. A cyclic, tidal flux, regular a
s breath, unwelcome as nightmare—constantly calling and re-calling a blush, or more, to his unwilling skin.

  And he wonders, Jean-Guy, just as he wondered then: why look at all? Why bother to hide herself, if only to periodically brave the curtain and offer her unmistakable face to the hostile street outside?

  But—

  “You aristos,” he remembers muttering while the Chevalier listened, courteously expressionless. “All, so . . . arrogant.”

  “Yes, Citizen.”

  “Like . . . that girl. The one . . . ”

  “At Dumouriez’s window? Oh, no doubt.”

  “ . . . but how . . . ” Struggling manfully against his growing lassitude, determined to place the reference in context: “How . . . could you know . . . ?”

  And the Chevalier, giving his version of La Hire’s shrug, all sleek muscle under fine scarlet velvet—

  “But I simply do, Citizen Sansterre.”

  Adding, in a whisper—a hum? That same hum, so close and quiet against the down of Jean-Guy’s paralyzed cheek, which seems to vibrate through every secret part of him at once whenever the blood still kept sequestered beneath his copper-ruddy mixed-race flesh begins to . . . flow . . .

  . . . for who do you think it was who told her to look out, in the first place?

  * * *

  In Martinique—with money and time at his disposal, and a safe distance put between himself and that Satanic, red-lined coach—Jean-Guy had eventually begun to make certain discreet inquiries into the long and secretive history of the family Prendegrace. Thus employed, he soon amassed a wealth of previously hidden information: facts impossible to locate during the Revolution, or even before.

  Like picking at a half-healed scab, pain and relief in equal measure—and since, beyond obviously, he would never be fully healed, what did it matter just . . .

  . . . what . . .

  . . . Jean-Guy’s enquiries managed to uncover?

  Chevalier Joffroi d’Iver, first of his line, won his nobility on crusade under Richard Coeur-de-lion, for services rendered during the massacre at Acre. An old story: Reluctant to lose the glory of having captured three hundred Infidels in battle—though aware that retaining them would prevent any further advancement towards his true prize, the holy city of Jerusalem—the hot-blooded Plantagenet ordered each and every one of them decapitated on the spot. So scaffolds were built, burial pits dug, and heads and bodies sent tumbling in either direction for three whole days—while the swords of d’Iver and his companions swung ceaselessly, and a stream of fresh victims slipped in turn on the filth their predecessors had left behind.

  And after their task was done, eyewitnesses record, these good Christian knights filled the pits with Greek fire—leaving the bodies to burn, as they rode away.

  Much as, during your own famous Days of September, a familiar voice seems to murmur at Jean-Guy’s ear, three hundred and seventy-eight of those prisoners awaiting trial at the Conciergie were set upon by an angry horde of good patriots like yourself, and hacked limb from limb in the street.

  Eyes closed, Jean-Guy recalls a gaggle of women running by—red-handed, reeling drunk—with clusters of ears adorning their open, fichu-less bodices. Fellow Citizens clapping and cheering from the drawn-up benches as a man wrings the Princess de Lamballe’s still-beating heart dry over a goblet, then takes a long swig of the result, toasting the health of the Revolution in pale aristo blood. All those guiding lights of Liberty: ugly Georges Danton, passionate Camille Desmoulins . . .

  . . . Maximilien Robespierre in his Incorruptible’s coat of sea-green silk, nearsighted cat’s eyes narrowed against the world through spectacles with smoked-glass lenses—the kind one might wear, even today, to protect oneself while observing an eclipse.

  Le Famille Prend-de-grace, moving to block out the sun; a barren new planet, passing restless through a dark new sky. And their arms, taken at the same time—an axe argent et gules, over a carrion field, gules seulement.

  A blood-stained weapon, suspended—with no visible means of support—above a field red with severed heads.

  We could not have been more suited to each other, you and I. Could we—

  —Citizen?

  * * *

  1793: Blood and filth, and the distant rumble of passing carts—the hot mist turns to sizzling rain, as new waves of stench eddy and shift around them. Dumouriez rounds the corner into the Row of the Armed Man, and La Hire and Jean-Guy exchange a telling glance: the plan of attack, as previously determined. La Hire will take the back way, past where the prostitute lurks, while Jean-Guy waits under a convenient awning—to keep his powder dry—until he hears their signal, using the time between to prime his pistol.

  They give Dumouriez a few minutes’ lead, then rise as one.

  * * *

  Crimson-stained sweat, memories swarming like maggots in his brain. Yet more on the clan Prendegrace, a red-tinged stream of sinister trivia—

  Their motto: Nous souvienz le tous. “We remember everything.”

  Their hereditary post at court: Attendant on the king’s bedchamber, a function discontinued sometime during the reign of Henri de Navarre, for historically obscure reasons.

  The rumour: That during the massacre of Saint Barthelme’s Night, one—usually unnamed—Prendegrace was observed pledging then-King Charles IX’s honor with a handful of Protestant flesh.

  Prendegrace. “Those who have received God’s grace.”

  Receive.

  Or—is it—take God’s grace . . .

  . . . for themselves?

  Jean-Guy feels himself start to reel, and rams his fist against the apartment wall for support. Then feels it lurch and pulse in answer under his knuckles, as though his own hammering heart were buried beneath that yellowed plaster.

  * * *

  Pistol thrust beneath his coat’s lapel, Jean-Guy steps towards Dumouriez’s door—only to find his way blocked by a sudden influx of armed and shouting fellow Citizens. Yet another protest whipped up from general dissatisfaction and street-corner demagoguery, bound for nowhere in particular, less concerned with destruction than with noise and display; routine “patriotic” magic transforming empty space into chaos-bent rabble, with no legerdemain or invocation required.

  Across the way, he spots La Hire crushed up against the candle-maker’s door, but makes sure to let his gaze slip by without a hint of recognition as the stinking human tide . . . none of them probably feeling particularly favorable, at this very moment, toward any representative of the Committee who—as they keep on chanting—have stole our blood to make their bread . . .

  (a convenient bit of symbolic symmetry, that)

  . . . sweeps him rapidly back past the whore, the garbage, the cafe, the Row itself, and out into the cobbled street beyond.

  Jean-Guy feels his ankle turn as it meets the gutter; he stumbles, then rights himself. Calling out, above the crowd’s din—

  “Citizens, I . . . ” No answer. Louder: “Listen, Citizens—I have no quarrel with you; I have business in there . . . ” And, louder still: “Citizens! Let . . . me . . . pass!”

  But: No answer, again, from any of the nearest mob-members—neither that huge, obviously drunken man with the pike, trailing tricolor streamers, or those two women trying to fill their aprons with loose stones while ignoring the screaming babies strapped to their backs. Not even from that dazed young man who seems to have once—however mistakenly—thought himself to be their leader, now dragged hither and yon at the violent behest of his “followers” with his pale eyes rolling in their sockets, his gangly limbs barely still attached to his shaking body . . .

  The price of easy oratory, Jean-Guy thinks, sourly. Cheap words, hasty actions; a whole desperate roster of very real ideals—and hungers—played on for the mere sake of a moment’s notoriety, applause, power—

  —our Revolution’s ruin,
in a nutshell.

  And then . . .

  . . . a shadow falls over him, soft and dark as the merest night-borne whisper—but one which will lie paradoxically heavy across his unsuspecting shoulders, nevertheless, for long years afterward. His destiny approaching through the mud, on muffled wheels.

  A red-hung coach, nudging at him—almost silently—from behind.

  Perfect.

  He shoulders past the pikeman, between the women, drawing curses and blows; gives back a few of his own, as he clambers onto the coach’s running-board and hooks its nearest door open. Rummages in his pocket for his tricolor badge, and brandishes it in the face of the coach’s sole occupant, growling—

  “I commandeer this coach in the name of the Committee for Public Safety!”

  Sliding quick into the seat opposite as the padded door shuts suddenly, yet soundlessly, beside him. And that indistinct figure across from him leans forward, equally sudden—a mere red-on-white-on-red silhouette, in the curtained windows’ dull glare—to murmur:

  “The Committee? Why, my coach is yours, then . . . ”

  . . . Citizen.

  Jean-Guy looks up, dazzled. And notices, at last, the Prendegrace arms which hang just above him, embroidered on the curtains’ underside—silver on red, red on red, outlined in fire by the sun which filters weakly through their thick, enshrouding velvet weave.

  * * *

  1815. Jean-Guy feels new wetness trace its way down his arm, soaking the cuff of his sleeve red: His war-wound, broken open once more, in sympathetic proximity to . . . what? His own tattered scraps of memory, slipping and sliding like phlegm on glass? This foul, haunted house, where Dumouriez—like some Tropic trap-door spider—traded on his master’s aristocratic name to entice the easiest fresh prey he could find into his web, then fattened them up (however briefly) before using them to slake M. le Chevalier’s deviant familial appetites?