Judith Merkle Riley Read online

  “Over there, my goddaughter. I knew it was heaven sent when I heard you were hexed. The Great Nostradamus himself. I seized the opportunity, you may imagine.”

  “Yes, I do imagine,” he said, his voice prim, as he put his bony pink foot back under the covers and motioned for his robe.

  “I find myself simply flying since I left my house full of ghosts. Opportunities present themselves at every corner. And I take them! Life! Splendor! All around me! The rose-embroidered slippers, for example. I bought two pair. And then, of course, you.”

  “Ranking only slightly behind shoes. I am honored, Madame.”

  “Think nothing of it,” said Auntie, waving her hand as if shooing flies. I wanted to die. “My Sibille is being followed by an obnoxious mummified head in a vulgar silver-gilt box. See? There it is, forming up on your nightstand.” Nostradamus looked alarmed, and I distinctly saw him shudder. “Since you know the Secrets of the Ages, I thought you might know how to get rid of it. It wakes her up at night with its gibbering, and keeps offering to grant us our heart’s desire. It also comments rather rudely on my housekeeping. I’ve tried throwing it in the river, but it always comes back.”

  “Madame Tournet, I have seen that thing once before, in the possession of an old friend, now deceased. It is the quintessence of evil. I take it that she opened the box and looked it in the face?”

  “Exactly what happened.”

  “It must have been ownerless at the time. It attaches itself like a leech to the first person who opens the box and offers to give him his heart’s desire. But each wish it grants leads to another, every one with worse consequences than the first. The horrified victim becomes enmeshed in a web of evil deeds, wishing and mending, sleepless at night, sick with remorse, yearning for death. But the box won’t pause in giving its victims their innermost desires until, through their continual wishing and the damage it has done, it has sucked them into the grave and eternal damnation.”

  “Worse than I thought,” said Auntie. The box made an evil, whistling sound. “You in there, shut up! I’m consulting the wisest man in the world! Have a little respect, will you!” She gave the box several sharp raps with her walking stick.

  “I told you not to do that,” said the thing in the box.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said Nostradamus, his voice mild, but his eyes full of a kind of admiration mixed with shock.

  “You out there. It’s Michel de Nostre-Dame, isn’t it? That French puppy who thinks he knows everything. The only worse one is that fool, Scalinger. Are you still hanging about him, Michel, you dotard? Has your beard gone gray since we first met? I imagine you’re getting old. Wouldn’t you like a few more years for your studies? Just think of the good you could do. Michel de Nostre-Dame, savior of France—no, savior of the human race! It could be you, Michel. But it all takes time, you know. I can offer you the Secret of Eternal Life. It’s authentic. Egyptian.”

  “Scalinger and I have parted company, Menander. And as for wishing for anything from you again, I wouldn’t even consider it. I’ve tasted the bitterness of the cup you offer. And I heard what you did to Josephus.”

  “Bitterness? I gave you exactly what you said you wanted. You must not have thought things out right. The art of divining the true future, right? And didn’t you get it? And then you were so low as to cheat me in the bargain. But for you, an old friend, I could give you another wish, and you could get it better next time. Next time—well, just think, if you lived forever, you could see if your prophecies in the Centuries come out.”

  “Again, you are in error. Fortunately for myself, when I at last discovered the Secrets of the Ages, I opted to study the Secret of Happiness first, and from that I found not only how to escape you, but that I do not need to live forever. Just look at yourself, crammed into that box, no longer master of your fate, and doomed to repeat forever and ever the mistake you yourself made, when you asked for immortality and didn’t specify the conditions.”

  “I didn’t make any mistake at all. And I’m very happy whenever someone repeats the words, and I give them their heart’s desire.”

  “And that desire is filled with poison, the twisting agony of regret, and of grief unending.”

  “I told you it made me happy,” said the thing, and fell silent.

  “Just plain malicious,” said Auntie.

  “You haven’t made any wishes, have you?” asked the great prophet.

  “Not a one. Neither of us. I suppose that’s why it follows us around, instead of staying at home, decently, on the shelf.”

  “That’s how it kills, you know. One’s desires are never perfectly expressed. And it is very cunning and literal. You wish for money, a beloved relative dies and leaves it to you. You wish for love, it is the cloying adoration of some lout you are soon dreaming only of getting rid of. You wish to mend the wish, and it gets worse. The victim is overtaken by despair and horror, sinking gradually, knowingly, into damnation. Sometimes they go mad and throw themselves off high places, set themselves on fire. Eternal torment, first in this world, and then the next. It is a dreadful way to go.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Auntie. “It’s more or less as I thought. And Sibille and I were having such fun shopping.”

  “The Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians. It has left a trail of wreckage through the centuries,” said Nostradamus. “For a while, it disappeared in the sack of Rome—”

  “That was one of my best jobs,” said the repulsive object in the box. “I combined six contradictory wishes into one—it took a lot of thought—”

  “Then, when I saw it, it was in Constantinople. After that, I heard that it had gone to Venice in the possession of Josephus Magister. I was hoping it would never find its way to France.”

  “I tried the hex powder on it,” said Auntie.

  “With what result?” asked the seer.

  “I told you, don’t ever try that again,” said the thing in the box.

  “It made him sneeze,” I said.

  “Have you any idea what it is like to sneeze in a box?” said Menander the Undying. “Open this thing up, I want to see what the great Nostradamus is looking like these days. Older, I imagine.” I started for the box, but the old man said:

  “Young lady, you are in the greatest danger. It is willing to lie in wait for you for years. It will prey on your weakest spot, which in your case is not greed, or lust for power, but sympathy. You pride yourself on it, don’t you?” Silently, I nodded. “Then that is the avenue through which it can tempt you. You’ll feel sorry for it, or for someone else, and that is when it will offer you the bargain you will be too weak to refuse. One little wish, the best-meant wish in the world, and hell’s gates will open and you will be sucked down in agony, bit by bit, and all through your own doing. After all these centuries of satisfying the greedy, the envious, and the vengeful, it will doubtless be amused at the novelty.”

  “Shut up, Michel,” said the thing.

  “But—but I can’t help it. I’m just naturally sensitive and sympathetic. My poetic muse, you see—” There was a wicked chuckle from the thing in the box. Old Nostradamus just shook his head.

  “Harden your heart,” he said.

  “But how do we get rid of it?” asked Aunt Pauline.

  “You might try giving it away. Preferably to someone you don’t like, who is going on a long sea journey. No one knows how far it can travel on its own—” Nostradamus paused, and sighed. “But mind you, I have never heard of anyone able to give it away, either. It seduces its owners like a lover; they can’t resist the powers it offers. But you have resisted it so far. Give it away, get someone else to look directly at its face, and you may succeed in scraping it off. That’s the only thing I can suggest.”

  A vast sigh, a regular mistral, swept through Aunt Pauline’s body. “Who is their right mind would want an accursed, mummified head in a box?” she said.

  “You’d be surprised,” said the head.

  “Get me my slippers, Léon,
I am feeling much better, thanks to this good woman’s efforts, and would like to escort my guests to the door,” said the old prophet.

  “Oh, no,” said Léon, as he searched under the bed. “Look—” he pulled out one well chewed sole and held it up tragically.

  “Mademoiselle, your hound has eaten my slippers,” said Nostradamus, his face a study in irritation as he inspected the sad remains. Gargantua, with that sense that all dogs have when they are being talked about, looked pleased with himself, and then rolled on his back and made that huffing sound he does when he wants his stomach scratched. Absentmindedly, I began to scratch his big, freckled stomach with one hand, but stopped suddenly when I saw the warning look on Nostradamus’s face.

  “We’ll go immediately and get another pair. Sibille, shall we send for that dear man with the cobbler shop where we stopped to come and take Doctor Nostradame’s measure? No, that will take too long. We need something already made up—let’s see, there’s a place I recall seeing yesterday with the best bargains in morocco leather—”

  “No embroidery,” said the prophet. “I am a plain man, with simple tastes.”

  Thirteen

  Cosmo ruggieri had borrowed a somewhat paint-spotted brown velvet doublet with threadbare sleeves from his younger brother the painter, by way of a disguise, and set off for the Hôtel de Sens to try to discover for himself just what had gone wrong with the victim of his death-spell. But at the main gate to the residence, he found himself nearly elbowed to death by a crowd of people all clamoring to be admitted to see Nostradamus and have their fortunes told.

  “No more today,” shouted the guard. “He’s having a nap to restore his powers.”

  “Tell him Madame de Bellièvre wants him to read her horoscope.” A royal page, frantic and dusty, pushed his way through the crowd at the door.

  “Admit me at once, I am a page for the king.”

  “I have an appointment,” said Ruggieri, hoping to trail in behind the king’s page.

  “He has no consultations scheduled for today.” Blessings on my brother’s old clothes, thought Ruggieri. “My appointment is not for a horoscope,” said the devious sorcerer, “it is to take his portrait at the queen’s command.” Glancing at the spotty doublet, the tattered plumes set in his cheap, gaudy hat, and the worn cloak of made-over green wool, the guard took Ruggieri’s little case of poisons and spell-casting equipment for a painter’s box, and let him pass in the wake of the king’s page.

  Slinking through long corridors and oozing through doorways to unfamiliar rooms, he at last came to the chamber where Nostradamus had taken up residence, only to find that the dusty page who had come in ahead of him was still hammering on the door. The door half-opened, and the figure of a servant blocked the way in. Ruggieri could hear the prophet’s voice from within.

  “What’s the matter, king’s page? You are making a lot of noise over a lost dog. Go and look on the road to Orléans, and you will find it there, being led on a leash.” I swear, thought Ruggieri, he never even looked at the boy, or heard what his business was. No, it can’t be—it’s all a parlor trick. As the awed page turned to go and look for the valuable dog from the king’s kennel that he had lost, the voice came again. “Quit lurking outside my door, Cosmo Ruggieri the Younger. The spirit told me you would come and pester me today. Either leave, or come in and introduce yourself properly and sit down. I believe you want to know why your death-spell didn’t work.”

  “I can’t imagine what you mean, Maestro,” said the sorcerer, accepting the invitation.

  “Ah, so that’s how you got past the guard,” said Nostradamus, eyeing Ruggieri’s tatty disguise. “It was very impolite of you to cast a death-spell before you had even paid a courtesy visit.” The old doctor was seated in a high-backed chair beside a table littered with natal charts and divining equipment. His gouty foot was propped up on a cushioned stool.

  “How did you know it was me?” asked Ruggieri.

  “My clairvoyant powers,” said Nostradamus calmly. “You’d be hard to mistake—you look a good bit like your father did at your age. And it’s you who would be displaced should I become the queen’s official astrologer—so who else would wish me dead?”

  “That wretch Simeoni,” said Ruggieri hastily. “You have no idea how envious he is.”

  “Simeoni can’t predict rain when the sky is cloudy. Did you ever hear the story of how he got the Duke of Milan’s moon in Jupiter because of an ink blot?”

  “Ha! That’s Simeoni, all right,” said Ruggieri, all the while thinking, draw him out. Get him talking. He’ll boast and give away the secret. They always do. “An infant could best him—but me, no one beats me in prediction—or in sorcery—” Ruggieri could see Nostradamus eyeing him, measuring him. Now he’ll tell, thought the cunning Italian sorcerer, he won’t be able to resist.

  “I’m afraid I have bested you. But of course it was simple—I had the help of Menander the Deathless.” Nostradamus smiled a secretive smile calculated to drive Ruggieri wild.

  “You have it—you have the box. It’s—it’s mine. I sent for it. Give it to me.”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t got it,” said the old doctor. “It’s in the possession of a young woman who doesn’t know what she has.”

  “Has she opened it?”

  “Of course not; she can’t get the catch open. She brought it here to me to find out what was inside with my clairvoyant powers, and I told her she needn’t bother, it was valueless.” Looking at the ceiling, as if musing, the cunning old doctor said, “You know—I imagine she’d sell it to you, if you asked. She’s staying at a rather expensive inn, at the sign of Saint-Michel, and I’m sure at the rate she’s shopping, she’ll soon be out of money.” As Ruggieri scurried away without even saying thank you, Nostradamus said to his servant:

  “Léon, hurry over to Madame Tournet’s and tell them to leave that box out in plain sight somewhere, and hide their jewelry. The queen’s astrologer will be over to steal it shortly.”

  “I thought you said, Master, that he could buy it.”

  “If he is anything as stingy and crafty as his father, he wouldn’t think of it. It would undermine his pride to do it the simple way. No, I have no doubt he’ll climb in the window at night, or lure them out on a ruse. Anything to save a sou, that man. Hurry now, I don’t want them surprised or harmed.” As Léon hastened away, shutting the door behind him, a figure composed of dark blue, filled with twinkling little whirly shiny things, stepped from its hiding place in the shadows.

  “Well, Anael, let’s get back to work; that’s my good deed for today,” observed Nostradamus, picking up his wand from the table. “With one stroke, I have relieved those silly ladies of temptation for a while, given Ruggieri a means by which to wish himself into a well-deserved oblivion, and, with any luck, aborted the demoiselle’s writing career, thus saving France from some measure of the increasing burden of bad poetry that spews forth daily from the printing presses of Paris and Lyons.”

  “Quite neatly done,” observed the Spirit of History.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know how it comes out, would you?” asked the old prophet.

  “I thought I’d found it the other day, and I was saving it for you, but now I’ve gone and misplaced it,” said the spirit, ruffling his dark wings.

  ***

  On the Pont-au-Change, not far from the high-towered stone gate that separates the bridge full of shops from the Cité, passersby stopped to behold a curious sight. A gaudy, curtained litter, slung between two handsome gray hackneys, had paused before a goldsmith’s shop. A woman’s hand, covered with rings, gestured from behind closed curtains, and a footman in livery, one of a half dozen accompanying the litter, hurried to assist someone out into the doorway of the shop.

  A tall, dark, sharp-featured young man in a black velvet doublet with two buttons undone and one missing paused to join the onlookers. There’s no crest on the litter, he thought. The mistress of some great courtier, out shopping. A hand e
merged, an arm in a slashed silk sleeve, then a foot—rather large, and quickly covered with a discreet velvet-trimmed hem, and the man saw the tall, regal figure of a slender young woman step onto the paving stones. Suddenly his heart stopped. It’s her, he thought. I’d know her anywhere. My tragic, aristocratic beauty, driven into a sinful alliance with some corrupt, ancient nobleman by a harsh world.

  All around was noise and bustle: a peddler of old shoes and boots, pushing a cart, a woman selling eel pies, and beneath it all, the hard rush of water between the piers, and the continual rumble and vibration of the mill wheels beneath the bridge, grinding the grain for the bakeries of Paris. But to the man, a curious golden stillness surrounded the moment. The young woman seemed, for a second, to be surrounded by something that glowed, some trick of the light that made her appear luminous. God strike me for a sinner, he thought, she’s even more lovely, more desirable than the first time I saw her that time in the courtyard of the Bishop’s residence at Orléans. Look at her there, her aquiline profile set off against her black velvet hood—an eagle, a falcon—her posture, so noble, her walk—a doe at sunrise—A queen, no, an empress. Nothing is good enough for her—and yet, oh, unspeakable, she’s settled for dishonor and a courtly connection. Then curiosity grew in him like some huge, overpowering vine that can cover houses and barns in a night. I have to know who is keeping her, he thought. I’ll follow her. I have to know who she settled for. I can’t be content giving her up until I know her reasons.

  But just as an astonishing hatred for the vile, putrid roué who had stolen her youth was beginning to grapple his heart in iron claws, his mood was broken by an astonishing sight: the hugest woman in the world was being levered out of the litter by four grunting footmen. Astonishing! thought the young lounger, as his eye was overwhelmed by the very vastness of the woman, surrounded by an even vaster array of petticoats and a dazzlingly ornamented skirt made even larger with the swaying wooden hoops of a Spanish farthingale. Then there was the amazing powdered and rouged complexion, that had clearly never seen a ray of sun, the immense, fantastically shaped yellow silk headdress, sparkling with beads, the crinkle and rustle and glitter that accompanied every step. What an astonishing duenna, thought the man, this is the oddest and most mismatched pair of ladies I’ve ever seen. He could feel the itch to spy on them redoubling itself. Walking very slowly, peering at shop sights and pretending to survey the passersby, he paused several times before the window of the jeweler’s establishment, catching glimpses of the transaction within. It was curious—the older woman, the duenna, seemed to be the one selecting things, not the younger. As they left the store, chattering together happily, he caught the phrase “—Señor Alonzo’s crucifix couldn’t be set off better with that chain—you really have to display it to advantage, dear—” Señor Alonzo. A foreigner’s mistress. What’s worse, a Spaniard. Rapidly, he envisioned some ambassador’s aide’s little pied-a-terre, a heart paid for and broken—for the honor of France, I must find him and call him out, thought the man. I’ll disgrace him on the field of honor and send him packing back to his kennel beyond the Pyrenees. An intoxicating sense of mission overcame him, erasing all lingering feelings that spying out a lady’s movements might be a bit disreputable.