The Wave Theory of Angels Read online

  There were, too, in a large chest, holy relics from questionable sources. ‘In truth,’ she’d once laughed, ‘they conceal the volumes my father left me.’

  He has seen the wares. A piece of shinbone from the leg of St Vitalis. A shoulder blade of St Affia. A molar of John the Baptist. A rib of St Sophia. A phial of the Blessed Virgin’s milk. And, Athalie’s latest and greatest find, a Holy Foreskin of the Infant Christ. ‘The bishop himself couldn’t resist a visit. Would you believe? And your master mason. He knows I am Egyptian – you masons and your folly for sun gods and phalluses. You fool no one. He stared at it as if it were a piece of the cock of Osiris himself.’ She laughed, then remembered herself. ‘Giles, forgive me.’

  ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘You grieve and I smile.’

  ‘I do not grieve. Not as you think.’

  ‘It’s true then.’

  ‘What is true?’

  ‘I hear talk.’

  ‘Of?’

  ‘Of a young woman, full of life, who dies in her sleep. Of a father who refuses the physic, who scorns his priest’s offices, who shows no grief. People will poke at a mystery as they will a loose tooth. I worry for you.’

  ‘I confess I do as well.’ L’Ymagier smiled, shyly. ‘I’m watched,

  it would seem. There are shadows outside the atelier.’

  ‘Are you guilty?’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of too much love, perhaps?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘Why are you here, Giles?’

  ‘My daughter isn’t dead.’

  ‘A moment, please.’ Athalie motioned to her son. There was a ripple of muslin, a sliding of a bolt, and they were alone. She seated herself on the battered trunk that held her father’s books. ‘All right. She is not dead.’

  ‘They will bury her.’

  ‘A problem. I see that.’

  ‘You humour me.’

  ‘You credit me with too much interest, Giles. Don’t misunderstand me. I am sorry for your daughter, dead or alive, and I am sorry for you. We have long been fond, have we not, and, yes, I make my living by tawdry magic. But you know me for the fraud I am. Everything else is the meditation of a lifetime. I cannot stop a funeral.’

  ‘You and Ahmed are the only citizens of Beauvais who will not be in that cathedral on Monday morning.’

  ‘There are the monks, too. And the leper, Yvain. Did you know I once knew his mother, and she swore to me she did not copulate during her menses? For her sake, I think I will one day help him to take his own cruel life. He can almost bear the priests no longer.’

  ‘Athalie.’ He stopped her. ‘Athalie, you must help me.’

  ‘Ah, Giles,’ she sighed. ‘I feared as much.’

  Marguerite raised her hand to the nail in the beam. The wreath of her mother’s hair was missing.

  As the wife of l’Ymagier lay in bed, burning up with sickness, the physic had told him that her hair must be cut; that it depleted the only reserves of energy that remained to her. As it slid to the floor in thick, coppery streams, her two small daughters gathered it, like spun wool, from the floor. Then they sat at the table, plaiting it with gold thread into a wreath for her to see when she was well again.

  When the priests came, l’Ymagier held her. He noticed again the length of her fingers, the openness of her palms, the rough skin at her elbow, the pretty arch of her feet. He checked the details of her, as if she’d only just come new into the world. He ran his fingers over her shorn head. He touched the softness of her earlobes. He opened her eyes and tried to name for himself the blue of her eyes, but he couldn’t find the word. He couldn’t find the word, and still he’d let the priests take her.

  She’d had no peace from the time she fell sick, and when she was taken from the house, his peace went with her.

  ‘I can’t remember the colour of your mother’s eyes,’ he said, looking now at the far wall where the nail jutted from the beam.

  Marguerite stared at him. ‘Blue. She had blue eyes.’ Why did he always pretend he couldn’t remember? Why did he not say something instead about the wreath? Sometimes red, sometimes yellow, depending on the brightness of the hour. Twelve years it had hung in the one place, all the life of her that remained to them: her hair still changing its colour in the sun.

  ‘Mother’s wreath,’ she made herself say. ‘It’s not on the wall.’

  He didn’t look up.

  ‘Where is it? It’s not on its nail.’ She refused to conspire.

  He heaved himself out of his chair. ‘Before first light, Marguerite. Yes? You will go before first light. You have not forgotten?’

  She would never be the one to make her father speak straight and clear. She would never be the one to understand his meaning. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I have not forgotten.’ First her sister, now her father – both slipping beyond her. And with each went the safe and solid world.

  Athalie had been clear: ‘The derelict lodge on the edge of the wood. Do you know it?’

  ‘The ashmen’s old place?’ He’d come upon it once, looking for a good piece of felled oak.

  ‘Exactly. There is nowhere else. When do they come for her?’

  ‘Tomorrow evening. Before the curfew.’

  ‘Then you must get the carving out of your house and to the lodge before that. Before they come.’

  ‘I need more time to work. There are details.’

  ‘You’re not thinking, Giles. What if they search your atelier?’

  ‘On what grounds?’

  ‘When has a priest needed grounds?’

  He scowled. ‘Christina is all the evidence they’re after.’

  ‘Hope to God you’re right, or all is lost.’ She closed her eyes, concentrating. ‘Daybreak, then, on Monday. Before the bell rings for matins. Before the town stirs. If you leave it any later, if you insist on perfection, Giles, someone will see you, no matter how quietly you go.’

  ‘You worry too much.’

  ‘And you are too confident. I swear it will be your downfall.’

  ‘Perhaps. But it will not be my daughter’s. The carving will be in the lodge before daybreak on Monday. What then?’

  ‘I’ll go for it as the bell tolls for her, as the congregation gathers. I’ll avoid town. I’ll take the cart track by the river.’

  ‘And you won’t . . .’

  ‘I won’t . . . ?’

  ‘Have second thoughts?’

  ‘Tenth thoughts, Giles, yes. Second thoughts, no.’

  ‘Because I would understand if – ’

  ‘You fool yourself, Giles. You would not understand. How could you? Even so, it is as I’ve said. Ahmed and I will wait with the carving outside this side chapel you describe. We will be there before they break the bread at her mass. You are sure there are no doors? No keys to keep us out when the moment arrives?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Then why do you frown?’

  ‘You will think of something?’

  ‘I’ve told you. It will come to me. There is time yet.’ She folded her arms across her breast. ‘It is the best – it is the only – assurance I can give.’

  ‘I’m grateful. Don’t think I’m not. And it is all I can do to get the carving right by Monday morning. But, Athalie, I beg you. Don’t let me coax you into merely saying what I need to hear. I know I have taken advantage of a better nature than mine. I know you must be afraid of drawing attention. I know Ahmed is wary. Yet even so I’m asking you: Can I depend on you?’

  ‘You will have to, Giles.’ Beneath the smile, her face was stoical. ‘You can depend on no one else.’

  11

  By night, outside, Marguerite watches her father, a dark mass against the translucent horn of the atelier windows. In the next room her sister will neither wake up nor die.

  Marguerite wants mealtimes and three bowls. She wants ‘spoons face down to keep out the devil’, and the words to be nothing more than her mother’s old saying, and her mother’s before her. She want
s fresh air and old women nodding to her again at market. She wants the unbroken peace of the scriptorium. She wants to be telling Christina the tales of the world she lifts from the pages of Brother Vincent’s books.

  By day, she tests the door of her father’s atelier. She presses her face to the crack where the fit is bad and smells the sweetness of chipped wood from within. It makes her uneasy. Sometimes she observes his hands, nicked by an urgent determination she can’t explain.

  She follows him through town. He stops at the lodge, by the cathedral’s west wall. He speaks to the master mason. Pleasantries. Condolences, she assumes. Her father has always remained aloof from the lodge – no time, he claimed, for passwords, allegories, demiurges and secret handgrips. Yet she sees it is the older man, the master mason, who is uneasy with her father, and not the other way around. He surveys Giles of Beauvais like he might a magician’s sleeve, as if to say, What will come next? Finally, at the sign of the eye in the flaming heart, she watches her father disappear into the gypsy’s house.

  *

  She wakes before first light on Monday morning. In the yard behind the house, where the hides are scraped, the tanner’s dog barks at no one. It is the day of her sister’s burial, and the whole world is suddenly false: the jaundiced moon; the absent stars; the blank-faced earth, careless of Christina’s return to it.

  Marguerite? Are you asleep?

  She has no choice. She pulls on her gown, tunic and clogs, runs across town and over the muddy footbridge, her heart – and a heavy key – banging at her chest. St Germer lies on the other side of the Avelon. As she approaches, light spreads furtively from the east. She has never seen the grounds of the monastery so still. Only a thin breath of mist clings to the place, like the expelled dreams of the men who sleep within.

  She passes Christina’s bees. The gloves and wicker veil are where she herself left them on Friday. She remembers the monk in the rabbit pen waving to her, mistaking her for her sister because old men see only youth.

  The bees are neglected. There are too many stray in the air. She avoids the kitchen, her usual entrance. Jerome may be there, sweeping out the grates. She slips off her clogs and enters by way of the common room. At the back is the door that opens on to the corridor. At the end of that corridor, the scriptorium.

  The common room is empty. The morning light edges across benches and the scattering of woolsacks. It settles, here and there, into the impressions of bodies departed. Marguerite feels as insubstantial, or would were it not for the key around her neck. It beats out a reminder of the day; of where she is; of what she is about to do. In the whole of the monastery, only the scriptorium door is locked.

  Is it for this that her father persuaded Brother Bernard to allow her to work here all those months ago? To be his eyes? To steal a heretical volume? Was he in touch with radicals in Paris? With Aquinas dead, there had been yet more unrest. Her father said as much himself. And as a free mason, he travels at will. He’s one of the elite. He can gain entry even to the university if he chooses.

  But why now? Why has he insisted on the volume this morning of all days?

  Will she be cast out of the scriptorium now that suspicion gathers around her father? Will even tomorrow be too late? Already in the town it is known that the bishop watches him. Father Joseph fools no one: a requiem mass for a girl who kept bees, for a girl whose father tolerated the clergy at best?

  Only the bishop would have the authority. And what does the bishop know? What does he await? Will her dead sister indeed sit up on her bier and point a cold finger at their father?

  The key stutters in the lock and turns.

  She locates the volume, or rather a single fragment of it, with relative ease. It is as her father remembered: uterine vellum. Beautiful to hold. Risala fi’l – Mala’ika. And below it, in Latin: Epistle on the Angels. Avicenna.

  Her heart lurches. Footsteps. In the corridor. The first to rise for matins. She slips the epistle back into the cage, covers it with other illicit works, and crouches behind.

  Until the steps recede. Back down the corridor.

  She has now only to negotiate the common room. Her body does not so much relax as slacken. A sudden indifference.

  For life has ceased to mean. The fear that comes only with a sense of urgency, of necessity, is, for Marguerite, draining away.

  She lifts the lid, reaches for her father’s prize a second time, fits the lock and replaces the key for the cage in the hole in the masonry. She walks through the scriptorium, past Brother Vincent’s desk, back up the corridor, and through the common room once more. She carries the volume lightly under her arm. She can hear Jerome at the kitchen grates. She no longer cares. She is a page turner. She goes unnoticed in the world.

  12

  When she arrives home, there’s little time. She runs out the front door, through the alley, behind the house and into the courtyard. She rattles the door of the atelier, and it opens unexpectedly.

  ‘Father?’ The room is empty. Swept bare. The carving horse has been returned to its corner. And he’s gone.

  She runs back into the house, the volume still in her hand. She wants only to be rid of it. Yet where would her father have her hide it? Surely it must be hidden? Already it is hot. She wipes her face, smoothes her hair and covers her head in a wimple.

  Her scalp itches below it as she walks. In the meagre shade, dogs thump their tails. L’Ymagier is nowhere in sight. She presses the stolen volume to her breast. Her fingers sweat against the vellum.

  She does not know that he is already with Christina, watchful as her sister is borne on a litter from the side chapel to the choir. Nor does she know that he carries a white lily to Christina’s bier which will serve as a token of their love for her. He will lay it upon his daughter’s breast. He will close her hands upon its thick stem. No detail, no stagecraft, has been overlooked. For he has carved and painted even the lily’s wooden-bloomed likeness – a flower as finely hewn as the wooden hands that clasp it. Does he not have a talent for bringing things to life?

  At Bartot the wine merchant’s house, Marguerite stops abruptly. Everything is unreal. Her sister is holding her breath, her father is gone, and monks are running amok in the topiary, their faces transformed oddly by expression. Several wave their arms. Three or four hold long muslin nets. One climbs an apple tree.

  Marguerite looks up. Christina’s bees are swarming. How many hives did she keep? They cluster now, trembling masses on heavy branches.

  But the voice of the single bell drowns their hum. It sounds in her intestines.

  She moves on. Past the burial ground and the communal grave, open now. A flash of winding sheets, soiled and rotting.

  Marguerite? Are you asleep?

  She crouches in the empty street and is sick.

  When she spots him at the top of the cathedral steps, she feels no relief, no gladdening of her heart. Did he not leave her, alone and anxious, on the morning of her sister’s funeral? Did he not insist she put herself at risk today of all days? Does he not forget that she, she, is alive?

  It is time. He smiles at the sight of her with the volume under her arm. They walk in together, seemingly as one.

  A sea of cathedral light rolls over her as they move up the centre aisle. People nod, row upon row tossed back upon her: dozens of pilgrims, many barefoot; the tanner and grumpy Marthe who scrapes the hides; the woman who keeps the bathhouse; the oneiromancer from the arcade. Row after row. The young physic who pronounced Christina dead; the prosperous shoemaker; François, the crucifix and knife maker, and his eight sharp-eyed children; Roland the smiling embalmer; masons from the lodge; Bartot the wine merchant, unaware of the monks in his topiary; three of her father’s patrons and their families; a legion of nuns; at the front, perhaps a dozen hired pleurants in their wide grey hoods.

  She cannot know that you also are here. Both outside the scene and in it. Don’t turn around.

  The bishop has spared no expense. There are six three-pound beeswax tap
ers on the altar and one to be borne by each of the four acolytes. There are four more by her bier.

  Far above, the vaults of the choir seem to rest on a flood of morning light. Marguerite is dizzy. L’Ymagier steadies her, his hand on the small of her back. He tries to relieve her of the volume she carries, but her arm does not relent. ‘My psalter,’ she lies.

  The pleurants groan under their grey hoods. In the sacristy, behind the screen, the priests mumble the exorcism of the water and salt. ‘That there may be banished from the place in which thou hast been sprinkled every kind of hallucination. Let no spirit of pestilence or baleful breath abide therein. Let all the snares of the enemy who lieth in wait for us be driven forth . . . In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.’

  At last, belatedly, Marguerite makes herself look.

  Her sister rests on the litter that will bear her away. Her bier is draped by the linen of the winding sheet. In the vast light of the day, her hair is ablaze.

  She faces east, the direction of paradise, so that her soul will find its way. Her body is covered only by the vigil-cloth, for one goes naked to the grave, in humility.

  Someone, Marguerite notices, has folded her hands across her breast, upon which she seems to clasp a lily. Something flares within her – Christina hated lilies.

  Does no one know her? She liked fireweed. She has freckles on her back. A red birthmark on the curve of her hip. The lines on her hands are clear and deep. Her eyes are blue. They used to catch the sun like a wolf ’s – she and Christina once saw a wolf stretched out on the tanner’s rack, its head intact and its eyes still looking. The soles of her feet were always dirty. Each night Marguerite would tell her she couldn’t get into bed until she washed her feet.

  She was greedy for wild strawberries, for festival mayhem, for Marguerite’s tales, for their father’s love. She’d pull faces whenever a priest went past, to make l’Ymagier laugh. She would even do Father Joseph’s fretful walk.