Judith Merkle Riley Read online

  Then everything seemed to happen all at once.

  Someone slipped a long, thin knife through the crack between the shutters and slid up the catch. Moonlight flooded into the room, showing a masked man climbing over the sill, almost exactly in front of the muzzle of my mighty weapon. Laurette screamed and leaped up, waking the others. At the very same time, I pulled the trigger, and there was a hiss of powder, sparks flew from the wheel, and there was a huge boom! Too late I recalled the stories of gunners blown up by their own weapons, and as I was thrown to the floor I was sure that I would awaken in the other world. If the screaming had not awakened the household, the explosion would have. The room was full of the stink of gun-powder. As people poured into the room, I realized I was still in this world and stood up. The face at the window was gone. Vengefully, I lunged toward the open window and pushed the ladder over onto the huddled figures below. For in that very split second before I had pulled the trigger, I had recognized the greasy collar of the leather hunting coat and the narrow, malignant mouth beneath the mask. It was Thibault Villasse.

  “Thieves, thieves! Downstairs! Catch them!” was the cry. I watched from the bedroom window as servants poured out into the moonlit courtyard. But the men below the ladder had gathered up their burden, flung him across a waiting horse, and shouted dreadful vengeance as they vanished at a gallop through the open courtyard gate into the dark. I watched from above as the bobbing torches moved hither and thither in the dark, held by the servants searching the courtyard. One by one the lights illumined the corpses of the mastiffs lying dead in the dust, poisoned.

  “It’s Nero, dead.” I heard the voices below. “What a crime. There’ll never be another like him.”

  “Oh, no, not Belle, too.”

  “Look,” came another voice, “one of them’s still moving.”

  “It’s the most useless of the lot. Gargantua, the greedy gut. He ate so much of the poison bait, he threw it all up.”

  “Vincent, where is Vincent?” asked mother. We helped her downstairs. There she sat, bolt upright in father’s big chair, a Turkey shawl on her shoulders over her nightgown, her nightcap close over her graying blond hair. Sick, unclad, her fine features somehow stronger in the candlelight, it was clear who was in command. Power radiated from her steel spine, her suddenly fierce eyes.

  “Madame, he appears to have fled with them,” said a valet.

  “Traitor,” she said. “My father would never have retained such a false steward. He poisoned the dogs so they would not give the alarm, then opened the gates to them. I see it all clearly.”

  “Mother—Mother,” I stammered. “I—I know who it was. The man in the mask. I’m sure it was Thibault Villasse.”

  “I’m not surprised,” she said, her voice calm. “But you must get away before dawn, before they think to send anyone for you—if they dare.”

  “B-but, why? Why did he do it?”

  “Why? If your father is found guilty, all our property will be seized by the church, and he will lose his vineyard. If he had succeeded in carrying you off by force and marrying you before the verdict, he would keep his claim. I am not surprised that he would try such a thing. He has official connections, you know, and I suspect he may have heard how the verdict will go with your father. It is a bad sign, his haste—it means a person of great power covets our estate, and intends to make sure your father is found guilty in order to take possession of our property.”

  “I shot him, Mother. I killed him.”

  “It is hardly regrettable. I never cared for him,” she said. “But of course, you have no proof of who he was.”

  “B–but, I’m sure—”

  “Nonsense. You just imagined who it was. Your mind was disordered. Such worries. They lead a girl to fantasy. The men who came were robbers, and the authorities should pursue them and hang them. Imagine, trying to attack innocent young virgins in their own bedroom! No doubt they heard the lord of the house was away, and hoped to steal our silver plate. Have all of you heard that? That is what I wish you to say if anyone comes to question any of you.” Mother’s commanding eye swept the family and servants that crowded into the hall. “Not that I imagine they will,” she added, her face cold and hard.

  “Mother,” I said, “you act so—so experienced.”

  “I am not unacquainted with the aftereffects of murders,” she said, her voice with that even and distant tone that means one can never ask why. ‘‘Sometimes things come around in a circle. But it seems that the circle never ends in quite the same place, now, does it?” She looked about her, as if she were in some sort of strange reverie, to the desk, to the front door still open, where the faint starlight showed the outline of a boy pulling the dead dogs away by their feet. “I see the stars fleeing the dawn out the front door, my daughter. You must dress and go.”

  “But where? What shall I do?”

  “Where? Why, to Pauline, of course,” said mother.

  “Father would never forgive me—”

  “Your father? He will not be able to forgive anyone unless he is more fortunate than I imagine. But I see you were writing a letter on the desk. Your candle is quite burned down. It is a great waste to write by candlelight. You know we must economize.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “I imagine you had conceived a plan of writing to the Bishop, whether or not I wished it. Am I right?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Then take the letter with you. It will explain to the world why you have left so suddenly. It might even do some good. Pauline will know what to do. I have not been permitted the pleasure of seeing her for many years, but I trust her implicitly. Now, help me back to bed. I am very weary.”

  Within the hour, I had put on my mourning gown and departed my father’s house on the little packhorse, with an armed valet at the bridle. But once over the bridge and past the trees, as I turned to say a last farewell to home and family, I saw a lolloping hound, nearly as big as a calf, running in pursuit. His tongue was hanging out, and his great, ugly, spotted face was frozen in an expression of foolish eagerness and utter adoration. It was Gargantua.

  Five

  March 16, 1554

  My wife will lose her best shawl two days before next Michaelmas. It will be taken by a new maid hired next month after Marie elopes with that tinsmith who has been insinuating his way into the kitchen with his pots and pans. Remind Anne not to hire any maids missing a front tooth. I told her we did not need the laundry boiler mended. But when do women ever listen?

  ***

  Last Tuesday completed my son Cesar’s natal chart. What truth to the saying “the shoemaker’s children go bare”! The boy is almost a year old. What promise! He will become a distinguished historian, looking backward in time as I have looked forward. Perhaps his will be the safer path—no, tyrants and patrons want their pasts as tailored to their desires and fancies as they desire their futures. Ah, God! Only saints do not want this kind of flattery—and saints do not patronize either historians or fortune-tellers. I plan to dedicate my great work, The Centuries, to him, if the All Bountiful spares me the time to complete it.

  ***

  Ordered a face cream compounded for Madame de Peyrés. Told that wretched apothecary I would take my business elsewhere if he did not make better speed. Madame’s son does better from his catarrhus, after anointing his head with my balm of oil of lilies, rue, dill, and almonds, and the employment of a clyster of my own secret composition, which I did send to expel the hurtful humors. Ha! And all this after that false physician from the Faculty of Paris ordered blood to be taken from the liver vein! Had he read my book instead of adhering to the so-called wisdom of his wretched masters, he would have known it is a cure only for the pleurisy, which the fool could not tell from a winter rheum. Having failed in the cure, he has crept back to his kennel by the Seine. I say, bleed them with their own lancets, dose them with their own false remedies until they cry mercy to heaven for their sins.

  ***

  Myself�
��a long, unpleasant journey to the north, at royal command, in two years’ time. A man of my age gets tired of being sent for like some dressmaker. I see little profit and much irritation in this trip. Must consult again with Anael.

  Entry no. 126, vol. II.

  the secret journal of nostradamus

  Nostradamus had not planned to be on the Paris-Orléans road that golden-dusty day in August when he met the solitary lady in black at the wayside watering spot. Indeed, the good doctor had intended to remain at his comfortable house in Salon de Provence, surrounded by his numerous and agreeable family, from whence he conducted a prosperous mail-order fortune-telling business, in addition to publishing a lucrative series of farmers’ almanacs and various self-help medical books. He disliked travel; with his gray beard had come gout, and commuting to meet the needs of his rich local patrons and the requirements of his chair on the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Montpellier was as much as he desired these days. Once it had been different; stunned by the death of his first wife and children, his practice in ruins, he had wandered across the face of Europe and Asia in search of the Secret of Life. He studied at the feet of magicians, philosophers, mystics. What he found was—well, whatever it was, it led him to return home to his own sunny land, marry a wealthy and good-tempered woman, and settle into a cozy house increasingly populated with offspring.

  But it was the product of that old journeying which caused Fate to send him on this most recent trip. He had seen it two years previous, with some irritation, in the engraved brazen water bowl that sat in a tall wooden tripod in his secret study. “Damn!” he said, as he saw the image of himself on horseback, looking for a decent inn. The Spirit of Past and Future History, whose name was Anael, leaned over his shoulder and chuckled.

  “Serves you right, for bothering me at these odd hours,” he said. It was a blustery midnight in March of 1554, two years before his long and trying journey to the north. Wind rattled the shutters and made eerie whistling sounds, and the house timbers groaned.

  “I asked you for a vision of the End of Time, and you sent me this.” Outside, rain-filled clouds scudded across the pallid face of the moon. A perfect night for calling spirits, if a bit chilly.

  “It can’t be helped,” said Anael. “I keep everything in a jumble. It’s you folk who organize history into tidy categories after it’s happened. Then you write it all up, and it makes sense to you, but not to me. You keep history your way, and I’ll keep it mine. So there.” Rain began to batter on the roof above them, and blow in gusts against the attic shutters. Against the midnight cold and damp, the master of the occult wore a fur-lined bathrobe under his sacred white linen diviner’s robe. Furry slippers and his doctor’s four-cornered hat, silk-lined and horsehair stiffened, with button, completed the outfit. The latter was for authority. Spirits need to be kept in their place.

  Nostradamus took out his little green notebook, the secret one he saved for predictions about himself and his family, and wrote, “a long, unpleasant journey to the north—”

  “—at royal command,” prompted Anael, putting a translucent finger, dark blue and swirling like smoke, at the place in the book where the old doctor’s pen had paused.

  “Royal command? Then maybe I’ll make some money on it,” said the doctor, visibly cheering up.

  “Don’t count on it,” said Anael.

  “Vile and disobedient spirit,” intoned Nostradamus, sprinkling a bit of water from the brazen bowl in the direction of Anael, “bend unto my will, I conjure thee by the Four Words which God uttered with his mouth unto his servant Moses, Josata, Ablati, Agla, Caila—”

  “Very well, if that’s how you want it,” said the spirit, drawing himself up to his full height, which just brushed the ceiling of the study, and folding his arms. Anael was a very attractive spirit, as supernatural phenomena go. For some reason known only to a jesting God, he was not only the keeper of past and future history, but also of the planet Venus, in all her epicycles and influences. In appearance, he had the figure of a young man, quite bare, with long, unruly hair. He was completely translucent, of a dark midnight blue color with little twinkly things inside that swirled about when he was annoyed, as he was now. An immense pair of wings, raven black, iridescent with blue and purplish lights, folded about him like a cloak. His eyes, strange, yellow, and somewhat terrifying, seemed to penetrate to the beginning and end of time. He also possessed a charming, sarcastic smile and a rather perverse sense of humor, as the course of both history and love have repeatedly shown us.

  “Reveal unto me, O spirit, a vision of the End of Time,” said Nostradamus, putting away the little green notebook, and taking out the big, brown, embossed leather one. It was full of the predictive visions the spirit had sent him: wars, deaths, conquests. It was going to be his masterwork, the almanac of almanacs, suited to guide the monarchy of France until the Second Coming and the world triumph of the Catholic faith. It required only a rousing vision of The End to complete it before it could go to press. When he first explained it to the spirit, Anael had laughed wickedly. Then the spirit had stirred the waters and shown him a vision of a pallid little fat man getting his head cut off in some sort of machine in front of a large, bad-mannered and vulgar crowd. Michel de Nostre-Dame had grown several new white streaks in his beard that night, upon which his wife commented, suggesting that he give up his hair-raising hobby of calling infernal spirits at night.

  “Nonsense, my dear. It’s bread and butter on the table. Besides, I want to see how it comes out,” is what he had told her. She sighed. Such a splendid man, so wise, so dignified and good-looking, such a good father. I suppose this magic thing is better than a mistress, she thought. Mother always told me that the best of husbands has a flaw. That evening she made him his favorite dish, and told him that she only wanted to see him happy. The spirit did good work that time, when it showed me which woman I should marry, thought the old doctor as he reminisced, waiting to see what answer the spirit would give him this time.

  But Anael’s upper half had vanished. There were thumping and clattering sounds, as if he were rummaging in some large, untidy armoire. “Seem to have mislaid it,” came a voice floating out of nowhere. “Would you like an Antichrist?”

  “What do you mean, an Antichrist?” said Nostradamus, his flesh beginning to creep.

  “Oh, and here’s another you might like…” Suddenly, the old man felt weary.

  “Just serve them up. It’s late, and I have to attend the baptism of the son of the Sieur de Granville tomorrow. His brother’s ordered up a horoscope as a gift, and I still have to finish copying it out.” The upper half of the spirit reappeared, his arms folded, his face impenetrable, his glowing yellow eyes inscrutable. Nostradamus stirred the waters in the brazen vessel, then stared into them a long time. Slowly, colors and forms coalesced in the waters as they stilled.

  A vision of a crowded hall, filled with men and women in rich, alien robes. The Pope, in full regalia. He is placing the most curious crown, not a royal one, but one like the golden laurel wreaths of the ancient Roman emperors, on the head of a short little man with a shrewd, hard-bitten face and penetrating eyes. Suddenly, the man reaches up, taking the crown from the Pontiff’s trembling hands. He crowns himself.

  “An usurper,” whispered Nostradamus. “He has compelled the Pope himself. What else has he done?”

  A voice like a sigh breathes into the old man’s ear. With the caution born of a brief brush with the Inquisition, Nostradamus encoded the syllables, mixing them up. Let who will decode them when the time comes: “Pau, Nay, Loron.” Napoleon.

  “Will the One True Church conquer before the end?” asked the old prophet.

  “Always, you ask the wrong questions,” said the spirit softly.

  “How many Antichrists are there?”

  “As you define them, three,” whispered the spirit.

  “When will you reveal them to me?”

  “Never mind, they’ll turn up. They’re in there somewhe
re. I’m really very careful, you know. Never lost anything yet. Things are just a little mixed together. Don’t you want to see the other image I’ve found?”

  The vision vanished from the waters. There was no sound in the room but the scratching of the prophet’s quill in the brown book. Then the old man paused, putting his hands over his eyes for a while to rest them. The candles in the seven-branched candelabrum on his work-table flared suddenly, and the old man started, opening his eyes. A fine tremor ran through his whole body. As he touched the water with his wand, he saw his hand was shaking. The image began to form beneath the ripples, and he realized he could recognize the faces, the costumes. This one is close in time, he thought. And I can hear everything that’s going on clearly. And—yes—they’re speaking French. Can I not be spared the sound, at least, O spirit?

  A vision of a burning barn, surrounded by mounted troops. Men, women, and children dressed in plain, dark clothing are fleeing through the open door. Horsemen swoop down on them, slashing them to the ground. Shouts, hoof beats, the dreadful scrape of steel, screams of horror. Children’s bodies, lying dismembered and bleeding, women trampled to death over the bodies of infants. Books, dropped by the dying, lie smashed into the mud and gore. The barn is a heap of smoldering timbers now. Two men on horseback ride up to inspect the damage, the bodies. The commanders. The old doctor knows their faces. Two brothers, with similar narrow, pointed faces and hard eyes. The Guise brothers. The oldest has a huge, depressed scar in one cheek, the bone smashed in from an old wound. François, the Duc de Guise, called Le Balafre—The Scar. The younger, his clerical garb sacrificed to half-armor, is the Cardinal of Lorraine, the Grand Inquisitor of France.

  “That’s one more nest of heretic devil-worshipers gone,” says The Scar. This time, there is smell, too, Nostradamus notices. A penalty of the closeness in time. He smells horse sweat, and blood, and the Duke, who has not washed in some time.

  “Hand me that book of Satan worship,” says the Cardinal of Lorraine to a foot soldier, pointing to where a lone volume lies in a puddle of blood, its pages fluttering forlornly in the wind. His eyebrows go up in surprise as he leafs through the fat little volume. “Why, it’s a Bible.”