The Wave Theory of Angels Read online

  He turned to find his small daughter pointing to the scrap of hide he had stitched to the tip of one lank wing. He looked at her. Saw the seriousness in her face. He would not lie to her. ‘It says, ‘‘Fear of the Angel’’.’

  A threat. She knew, not by the words, but by the hard line of his mouth.

  He didn’t know how much she had understood.

  Most birds need a square foot of lifting feathers for every half pound of weight. A swan weighs twenty-five to thirty pounds. That low, undulant flight requires a wingspan of eight feet. Do you see? At even one hundred and fifty pounds, an angel would require a wingspan of forty to fifty feet. To support the force of such wings, its sternum would need to be a colossal trunk of bone; its shoulders two terrifying crossbeams; its spine a disfiguring outcrop. An angel, he told Christina that morning, could only be monstrous.

  He dumped the swan, huge and bloody, at the bishop’s door. Later, Christina led him by the hand to the water trough behind the market and washed his hands and arms of the blood, as if she were the parent and he the child who needed only calming.

  On the day of her long sleep, he found a half-eaten apple in a recess in the wall by the door. He saw her eating it only the day before. He left it there. A trace.

  There were others.

  The fireweed in the jug, still fresh.

  The garnet ring in the water trough. She’d searched everywhere.

  The impress of her toes on the soles of her clogs.

  Bees stray in the house.

  She could not have left them. He would not allow it. He would not allow it for he could not bear it. Christina was the life of the house. And she knew his nature and forgave him it.

  3

  When the priest left, l’Ymagier said, ‘There’s no time.’

  Marguerite thought of Christina dead in the next room, laid out on their bed with a linen sheet over her. She kept expecting her to appear, sucking honey from a spoon and treading down the backs of her slippers. She needed her. How could she cope with their father on her own?

  Marguerite? Are you asleep? Marguerite?

  She’d heard her sister in the night but she hadn’t opened her eyes. If only she had. If only she’d turned to her and said, ‘You’re hot. I’ll fetch water.’

  She didn’t tell her father she’d seen Father Joseph blowing into Christina’s mouth and touching her ears with his spittle. Or that she’d seen him check her throat and wrists.

  When she was alone with Christina again, she crawled into bed beside her sister’s cold body and cried into her hair.

  Sssh, Marguerite. Go to sleep now.

  For a moment, he hesitated. The two of them lying there together. As if the day hadn’t started. As if he himself had only dreamed Christina’s long dream.

  When he woke Marguerite, she’d slept so deeply for a moment she didn’t know him.

  He told her what she must do. ‘There’s a good girl.’

  At the back of the monastery she found them: the skeps and her sister’s wicker veil. As she lowered it over her head, a monk in the rabbit pen across the yard raised his hand, thinking she was Christina.

  She turned away, her stomach in spasms. She worked quickly, finding the heaviest of the skeps and plunging them, one by one, into the fish pond until a city of bees floated dead to the surface. She took the net, skimmed the surface clean, raised the skeps and harvested the honey, leaving it outside the larder door as Christina had always done. Then she ran – a relief to run at last, to be gone from the place – she ran, the buckets of creamy comb knocking at her legs.

  At home, l’Ymagier broke off hexagons of wax and melted them over a low fire. He oiled Christina’s face. He spoke quietly but with ease. He had bought a vigil-cloth of purple and gold for her laying out, and would Marguerite pluck her sister’s hairline and eyebrows? To show the smoothness of her brow for the mass.

  She stared. She could feel arcs of sweat spreading under her arms.

  ‘Do you think Father Joseph will be denied the opportunity of a death, Marguerite?’ He dipped a brush into the warm wax and applied it to Christina’s face. He was making a mask, to preserve the image of her, she who was the image of their mother.

  Marguerite could only say, ‘Why is there a straw between her lips?’

  ‘So she can breathe.’ He looked up, studying his second daughter’s face. And, as if to clarify: ‘So there is no danger of suffocation.’

  That afternoon, Marguerite moved to her father’s instructions like a startled automaton on a pulley at a Twelfth Night feast. She stripped her sister of her shift and soaked her body in an alum bath to whiten the tan of her skin.

  Later he laid her on the flags, and Marguerite painted her from head to toe from a kettle of wax. To stall the marks of time, he said. Layer upon layer. And she remembered clearly: she saw no bruises, no signs of struggle. How could there have been? Hadn’t she lain beside Christina as she slept?

  The Egyptians were known to preserve their loved ones in caskets of honey, and the Church too, their ‘special dead’: saints, holy men, those whose bodies yielded not to rot but to the sweet odour of sanctity. Too difficult, l’Ymagier had concluded, though it had not escaped his consideration. The wax would suffice.

  Marguerite wanted to snap her fingers before his face. She wanted to seize his arm as he peeled the mask from her sister’s face. She wanted to say, Let’s stop this now. I will weep for my sister. You, you too, must weep for her, or she will die all over again at the dearth of your tears.

  When the final application had cooled into a translucent shell, she drew the vigil-cloth over her sister’s nakedness, and l’Ymagier lifted her from the cool stone floor and laid her upon the bed. The effect was unsettling, for wax holds the light, and in the late-afternoon sun Christina seemed to take on a glow, a static brightness, that unsettled her sister.

  Immutability is a terrible magic.

  Brother Bernard had not been difficult to persuade. A girl, l’Ymagier had reminded him, would be quieter, less curious in the scriptorium. Brother Bernard had nodded – he did not need add that Marguerite’s ignorance would be her chief asset. And l’Ymagier, for his part, felt it unnecessary to tell Brother Bernard that he himself had taught Marguerite to read both Latin and French.

  So a page turner was employed to serve the ageing theologians and encyclopedists in the monastery’s scriptorium. Privilege. Palsy. It was all one in the end. L’Ymagier told his daughter only: ‘If you remain standing as you work, it gives the appearance of servitude. And your eyes are sharp.’

  From her unique vantage point, by the elbow of Brother Vincent of Beauvais, Marguerite studied maps of the world. Imago mundi. Over meals with her father and sister, she’d sketch sticky copies on the table with honey, marking east at the top, then the locations of Paris, London, Oxford, Purgatory and Paradise. Or she’d tell Christina and l’Ymagier about the monstrous races that lived at the edges of the world: the Acephili who wore their faces on their chests, the Panotii with ears so large they used them as blankets by night, and the ones that always made Christina laugh, the Sciopods, a one-legged people with a giant foot which doubled as a canopy when they lay down in the sun.

  Sometimes too Marguerite delivered adjurations from Books of Secrets for their entertainment. ‘I adjure you, O speck in the eye, by the living God and holy God, to disappear from the piteous eye of this servant of God, whether you are black, red or white. May Christ make you go away!’ Then l’Ymagier would leap up, blinking and crying all at once, and the three of them would clap and praise Christ.

  But there are secrets, and there are secrets. Every Thursday between lauds and prime, Brother Vincent requests a series of volumes that are kept, not in the stacks, but in a set of wooden cages at the back of the scriptorium. Each volume is fastened by a thick metal clasp, for which Brother Vincent produces a key from a ring in the calfskin pouch at his waist.

  Watch her now: Marguerite lifts out the heaviest volume from behind the wooden bars. Pica
trix. Inside, its letters are strange, unreadable. Letters like the claw prints of birds in the snow. Then too there is Oneirocritica. On Dreams. A Latin translation. Beneath it, Macrobius’s Commentary on the Dream of Scipio and its classification of all dream types. She gathers the three into her arms.

  At the desk Marguerite knows she is to turn the heavy vellum page when Brother Vincent taps it with the finger that is missing its nail. But she knows more. She knows the monks amass accounts of dreams behind the monastery walls. She knows that theories of dreams trouble their book-strewn, vellum-yellow sleep. She knows that the scriptorium of St Germer is a rampart in the Church’s defence against the overreaching hands of the university radicals at Paris. She knows that the Church purchases rare Islamic volumes and translations at huge expense from itinerants in the north of Spain. Not so they will be read, but so they might never be read again.

  Reading over the outcrop of Brother Vincent’s shoulder, Marguerite fattens with the contraband words she collects, like sugar almonds in her mouth. Paradrome. ‘Agent of restless sleep.’ Leliourian. ‘A Shining One.’ ‘A being that inhabits the sphere beyond the moon; that, by the use of imaginative action’ – phantastikos, phantastikos, she repeats – ‘acts upon mortals to provoke images in their minds.’ Incubus. But here Brother Vincent’s elbows obscure and confound. ‘Authors of urgent vision, at times by sudden and violent terror.’ ‘A single nightly encounter can leave . . . afflicti et debilitati.’

  The old monk slowly rubs the pink crown of his head, weary for the world.

  But the world is not weary. In Boulogne a man passed a calf from his bowels. In Lyons a plain girl fell down a well and was lifted out a beauty. In Pierrefonds a priest was cursed with a second skin after battling an intractable demon. He sweats uncontrollably now, so that even his holy vestments are a burden.

  ‘Paradrome,’ Marguerite would repeat to Christina in the night. ‘Leliourian,’ they whispered behind their hands at mass.

  4

  Christina’s long sleep began in the early hours of Friday morning. As Marguerite wakes, tired, anxious, on Sunday, she remembers what her father told her the night before. ‘Christina’s nails are growing.’

  She can’t think. She can hardly hope. There’s knocking at the door. Father Joseph and the nun they call Sister Paul step inside. Marguerite leans outside and shouts for her father in his atelier but Father Joseph will not wait. He walks through to where Christina lies, covered by the vigil-cloth. Sister Paul follows. Marguerite hovers nervously at the threshold. Will her father never come?

  ‘Asleep in Christ, as you can see,’ says l’Ymagier as he enters at last, smacking sawdust from his knees. He will play their game if need be. He will feign piety.

  Yet he is brought up short. Grief suddenly wells in his throat. He feels the ache of it in his jaw. He beholds his daughter as the old priest does. He sees her dead.

  Father Joseph fingers Christina’s waxen forehead but does not refer to it. He merely nods to Sister Paul.

  She is calm, resolute. ‘Your sister, Marguerite, kept the hives at the monastery.’

  The sound of her own name startles her. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘she was good with bees.’

  ‘Good with them?’ She motions Marguerite into the room.

  ‘She understood them.’

  ‘Tell me. What is there to understand?’

  (Christina’s finger pressed over her lips. A secret. She had a secret. What is it, Christina? Please, she begged. Tell. I know there’s something. I’ve seen you . . . Then, Christina opening her mouth just wide enough to let the queen bee fly straight out.)

  ‘Marguerite, what is there to understand?’ The nun smells of goose fat and old cloth.

  ‘It was something she used to say.’

  Father Joseph is impatient. ‘You shared this bed with your sister?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you notice anything out of the ordinary on Thursday night? No, look at me, Marguerite.’

  ‘There was lightning. Summer lightning.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Nothing else.’

  ‘Your sister died beside you but you noticed nothing?’

  ‘She was very hot. She couldn’t get comfortable.’

  ‘Did she remove her shift?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did she talk in her sleep?’

  ‘She has since we were small.’

  ‘That night. Did she talk in her sleep on Thursday night, Marguerite?’

  She wants her sister to wake up and answer for herself.

  ‘Marguerite, when I visited you last, on Friday morning, you told me you woke in the night.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Your sister woke you, did she not?’

  (Marguerite? Are you asleep? Marguerite?)

  ‘The tanner’s dog was barking.’

  ‘As the tanner had tied him in the yard for the night. Yes. But you woke again. Before dawn, you said.’

  ‘As the bell rang for matins. I often wake with it.’

  ‘And when you woke, your sister was restless beside you.’

  ‘She often half wakes at the bell.’

  ‘It disturbs her.’

  ‘She has always tossed and turned.’

  ‘Why do you think that is, Marguerite?’

  ‘It is her nature.’

  ‘When she is restless, she speaks aloud?’

  ‘At times.’

  ‘What did she say? That night. What did she say?’

  ‘I can’t recall.’

  ‘We’ll come back to it.’

  ‘It was nonsense.’

  ‘You remember then. That’s good.’

  ‘Night jabber. That’s what our mother used to call it.’

  ‘Nevertheless.’

  ‘ ‘‘You’re hurting me.’’ I thought she said, ‘‘You’re hurting me.’’ ’

  ‘Yet you were not concerned?’

  ‘She was fast asleep again in moments.’

  ‘Was she, Marguerite?’ He folds his hands across his middle, regarding her. ‘Was she truly?’

  Later, alone with Christina, Sister Paul will fold back the vigil-cloth, spread Christina’s legs, and discover with three fingers the openness of her body, for already the machinery of the Church’s authority is in motion.

  ‘You must understand, Monsieur l’Ymagier,’ intones the priest. ‘In cases of sudden or violent death, the deceased will make every attempt to discover a means, through the divine agency of the mass, to make his or her cause of death known to the assembled mourners. I can assure you that the Church is dedicated to upholding this, your daughter’s ‘‘bier right’’. The newly departed soul is unusually vulnerable, especially in cases such as hers. She will therefore have our every attention. It will be a requiem mass. The bishop is quite clear. This is an extraordinary loss, and you will not be alone in your grief. His Grace asks that you are mindful of that.’

  L’Ymagier meets his eyes. ‘It is a comfort, of course.’

  5

  Late August. Yet l’Ymagier leaves the door open much of the day.

  At first, he was afraid of the fresh air, of direct sunlight, of the late-summer heat. He surrounded her with wormwood, myrrh and pieces of white quartz.

  Until he realized there was no need. She was as ever.

  That morning, after the priest’s departure, did he not observe her eyelids pulsing below the wax? He called out to Marguerite, but by the time she came in from the garden the movement had stopped.

  Did he shout at her for being so slow? He cannot recall.

  When his daughters were small and tearful, l’Ymagier would cajole them with magic tricks. Out of sight, he’d hide a frog in a scooped-out loaf of bread and make the loaf jump across the table, a thing possessed, as they tried, without success, to break bread. He could make a dead fish dance to life on the plate. He could turn a white rose red. He could make an egg float in mid-air. Their favourite. He’d take an egg from the chicken run, hold it before them – ‘A p
erfectly ordinary egg, you can see that, can’t you?’ – then flip his hand over as if he’d decided, on a whim, to let the egg fall to the floor and smash. But the egg did not smash. It floated below his palm like a moon in the vault of the night.

  Much later, Christina worked it out. He’d blown the egg clean and attached to it a white-blonde strand of Marguerite’s hair.

  In those days when Christina lay lifeless on their bed, strange in her waxen shell, Marguerite used to think about that suspended egg, and she’d find herself looking twice when her father took his hand away from her sister’s brow.

  He was fond of Plotinus. ‘Every action has magic at its source, and the entire life of the practical man is a bewitchment.’

  Did Christina merely dream below her father’s willing hand?

  ‘Asleep in Christ,’ her father had lied to the priest. The good death as sleep. The eternally comforting metaphor. One finds it labouring still in clumsy epitaphs: ‘Here lies Mary Small, who fell asleep on May the 6th, 1981, in the company of family and friends. May she rest evermore.’

  Then, too, there is sleep, the eight-hour death. The well-loved face made other, taken away from us, in sleep. Our own face strange to us in the snapshots which catch us napping. Where were we in that sleep? Can we say?

  We spend an average of twenty to twenty-five years of our lives asleep and five to six years of that sleeping life in dream, or ‘paradoxical sleep’ – so called because the brain is as active, if not more so, as it is in waking. Yet we lie as if paralysed. The only muscles which retain tone are the eyes, the diaphragm and, oddly, the genitals – for there is, unaccountably, an increase in blood flow to both the penis and the vagina. Dream, you see, is not only the stuff of counted sheep and river-bank languor.

  Open the cover of a bestiary, that medieval encyclopedia of the natural world. Here you’ll find the yale, an animal with the jowls of a boar and the tail of an elephant; and the griffin, which boasts the body of a lion and the wings of an eagle. Behold the beaver, which, pursued by man, will bite off its testicles and throw them into the path of hunters to evade capture; and the hyena, a hermaphroditic beast that lives in the graves of dead men and feeds on their bodies. Turn the page. The cubs of the lioness are born dead and remain so for three days until the father blows in their faces to waken them to life.