The Wave Theory of Angels Read online

  Her temper was quick to spark, yet she was eternally patient with wounded things: the three-legged dog who foraged in the streets; the old parakeet seller who was both mad and deaf; the dancing bear cub whose nose oozed blood where it had been pierced by the red-hot hoop.

  She cried all day when they found the aborted baby in the river.

  Acolytes light the tapers on the altar. Try as you will, Marguerite thinks, you will not make a penitent of my sister. Wasn’t her body open? They say so in town. Janua diaboli. Gate of the devil. Her sister’s womb. ‘You’re hurting me,’ Christina had mumbled to the night, but she was laughing in her sleep – surely she was laughing? – and there were no bruises, no marks.

  Her sister has hair like their mother’s. Sometimes red, sometimes yellow. Always changing with the light.

  The soles of her feet are tough as resin.

  Her laugh was like a summer downpour, sudden and easy.

  And Marguerite can’t remember enough. Already, she realizes, she cannot remember exactly the sound of her own sister’s voice.

  A stone hit me in the chest, hard. I squinted into the dripping trees, and this time I saw you – crouching on the balls of your feet. You thought I’d run, that I’d abandon the hive.

  The wood was steaming. You reached for another stone. I moved towards you. You stood, took aim. ‘Are you human?’ I said, and the sound of my voice stopped your arm.

  ‘Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy.’

  The priests intone the Kyrie eleison. In the sanctuary, Father Joseph lifts the evergreen branch, dips it in the font and sprinkles the altar, himself and the acolytes with holy water. He dips it again, moves towards the bier and sprinkles the body of Christina.

  Inches from you, I reached out and wrapped your fist in mine and its stone in my fingers. I held your hand, and your eyes, still black with suspicion, filled. ‘Don’t hurt me,’ I said. ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘Brethren, we will not have you ignorant concerning them that are asleep, that you be not sorrowful, for if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them that have slept through Jesus. For this we say unto you is the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who remain unto the coming of the Lord, shall not prevent them who have slept.’

  Marguerite punishes her own hopes. She tells herself, My sister died in her sleep. Though she was not ill. Though she did not soak the sheets with fever and urine, like our mother as she lay dying. Though she talked – of everything – only hours before. How she was hungry, how they should go outside to watch the lightning, how bears will try to make love to women because they mate on two legs, not four. She said all this. Yet this is my sister’s funeral mass.

  Marguerite hears shuffling behind her. She can feel the breathy expectation of the congregation, hot at her neck. She wants to shout, ‘Leave us be! Do you think she will sit up and talk for you?’

  Yet, in truth, it is her father she mistrusts above all. She observes him now as he bows his head. She thinks at him: You keep only yourself alive. Yourself and no one else. You threw your voice and I almost believed she talked in her sleep. You filled your lungs; I woke and thought I heard her breathing. You dreamed she was dreaming, and I thought, yes, of course, sleep heals. Sleep is restorative. Her lungs, her heart, need only rest to recover. As she lay in our bed, I whispered to her, ‘You’re out of the woods, Christina. You’re out of the woods.’ Yet she never came out of the woods, Father. Deceiver. Ymagier.

  From the threshold, Athalie watches. She and her son wait like thieves outside the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre. They listen through the doorless portal, just out of view.

  ‘You will have to wait for the last Gospel,’ l’Ymagier instructed her. ‘The priest will kiss the Holy Book and, vested only in a black cope, he will come down from the altar and move to the bier. He will position himself at her feet. Yes? He will be attended by his deacon. A sub-deacon will hold the processional cross. On either side of him, you’ll see an acolyte bearing a candle. He will read over her in a loud voice. That will be the final contact. It must be after. Some time after they have returned to the altar. You will have to choose your moment. And it must be a commotion, Athalie. Not an interruption. Not a distraction. It must be a commotion at the far end of the choir. The priests must come down from the altar. They must walk towards the main portals. Every mourner in that cathedral must turn around to see.’

  ‘You believe in my magic after all,’ she smiled.

  ‘In merciful forgiveness look down, O Lord, upon the soul of Christina, thy servant, for whom we offer up to thee the sacrifice of praise and the Holy Offering which we do humbly lay at thy feet, in atonement for her transgressions.’

  It was like a wild root. When I took it in my mouth, I sucked as I had once sucked at my mother’s nipple, drawing you to life. Afterwards, you pressed me to you, so hard I thought you’d crush me.

  That’s how it was. A wild root, and my mouth, my maidenhead, the bloom of you. A fragile pairing.

  In a lifetime each of us will cry some 1,850,000 tears. That’s sixty-five litres. Six to ten buckets full. Each tear is in itself nothing – water, salt, a little sugar and antiseptic. Yet, in Beauvais, no one has yet cried a tear for Christina.

  Stay where you are. Bow your head. Even if noticed, you will not be remembered. Those gathered here are not so much mourners as spectators who hold their breath. For in 1284, the new aesthetic of death has almost upstaged the thing itself.

  The twelve hired pleurants move soundlessly in their grey hoods and cloaks. They are faceless, eyeless. Each takes up a position by a soaring pillar, and their moans, belly-deep, rise up, making of everything an emptiness. Marguerite looks up. The vaults are midnight blue, and fecund with golden stars that draw everything silently, inexorably, towards resurrection.

  The nuns stare at her back. She knows they do. Sister Paul is among them. She does not dare turn around.

  They are waiting for the sign, the sign that Christina is to make through the grace of God. The sign that will point to Giles of Beauvais, Ymagier.

  Who killed his daughter by enchantment.

  Or, who made of his house a demon’s portal.

  Or, who sucked her breath from her lips as she slept.

  Marguerite wants to soar, high as the cathedral keystone, flapping her arms like the black wings of an avenging angel. She wants to roar, ‘Have you eyes? She is cold! Her corpse will not sing for you!’

  Instead she murmurs the responses.

  . . .

  ‘And with thy spirit.’

  . . .

  ‘We lift them up to the Lord.’

  . . .

  ‘It is meet and just.’

  First, it is a shadow from behind, only dimly sensed as it spills through the cathedral’s main portals. Then, high overhead, it is a strange pitch, just audible over the sonorous grief of the pleurants.

  Father Joseph looks up, squinting at the blot that slips and slides against the brightness of stained glass – yet another dark spot on his patchy vision. He blinks. He wipes his eyes. But that sound, that sound. A drone. An urgent hum. His spine tenses. He silences the pleurants and trains his ear on the unknown. What terrible chant is this?

  The congregation, too, clenches in readiness. The drone descends, louder and louder, until it takes form, a sudden storm cloud in the sanctuary, a cloud that bears the frenzy of 20,000 bees.

  The sub-deacon waves the processional cross, trying to chase the dark mass from the altar. Father Joseph retrieves the evergreen bough and raises it, a feeble weapon against insurgency. An acolyte runs from the altar, genuflecting wildly. Another shakes the censer in an effort to smoke out the colony, but he only disperses it, so that thousands of bees fly like bright sparks among the mourners.

  Several land on Christina’s face. Children and old folk wail as bees become trapped in clothing and sting soft flesh. Two nuns, awaiting revelation, faint.

  Marguerite wants to run to her sister and brush away the bees that crawl ov
er her face, but l’Ymagier reaches for her hand and stops her. She turns to protest but the words don’t come. For he alone, she realizes, is contained.

  And afterwards you reached into the hollow, high into the top of the comb, and, scooping honey in your hands, you fed me.

  13

  The mourners clamber into the blank daylight, swatting bees. ‘Ite missa est,’ Father Joseph intones. ‘Go, the mass is over.’ Only the nuns remember to pause at the kissing board for Christ’s bleeding feet.

  Christina’s body is brushed of bees and carried on the litter back into the shelter of the chapel. The sacristan apologizes and informs l’Ymagier that only when all is quiet again, only when the congregation has calmed itself, will the pallbearers enter from the side and bear her litter out of the chapel, through the choir and out of the main portals. Only then, he explains, will the burial procession begin. The elderly man nods sagely at the measure of his own words and guides l’Ymagier out of the choir and into the morning light.

  Suddenly l’Ymagier understands: Athalie has won the confidence of the sacristan. There is a connection there, something he, l’Ymagier, can only guess at. The sacristan’s brief smile says as much as they step together through St Pierre’s broad portal. For in all this uproar has Christina not been left alone in the darkness of the chapel? Is there not more than enough time for Athalie and Ahmed to gather up his daughter and leave the effigy in her place?

  He breathes deeply. Athalie has been true to her word.

  L’Ymagier is the only principal mourner, for women and girls are not permitted to walk behind the body of the deceased. He will follow his daughter’s likeness through the town streets, accompanied by the priests, the pleurants and the men of Beauvais. They will circle back to the open grave. Marguerite will remain on the cathedral steps.

  Outside, people talk of the Sign of the Bees. Bees originated in paradise. They are creatures of sweetness and light. Didn’t Christ eat honey at the end? An angry swarm in the sanctuary, what did it mean?

  Marguerite stops listening. She watches François smear his youngest daughter’s inflamed cheek with cool mud from the open grave. The child howls. A breeze rises over the morning heat. Marguerite can smell the old pilgrim from Toulouse, buried less than a fortnight ago.

  She sits down on the dusty step, dazed.

  Marguerite? Tell me about the men who can wrap themselves in their own ears.

  She looks up. Athalie the gypsy is suddenly on the steps among the women. She stands too close. ‘Marguerite,’ she asks, ‘where is your father?’

  It is a stupid question. Marguerite points to the procession as it moves off just ahead. The sun is strong. Her eyes water. Only the last of the pleurants is still in sight, a mystery in a grey cloak and hood. A thirteenth figure, at the back of two lines of six. Pull the hood close. Don’t turn around.

  It is dark, suddenly quiet. Sometimes, in the absence of the world, I almost forget myself.

  My name is Christina. I keep bees. My sister is Marguerite. She works in the scriptorium. My father is Giles of Beauvais. Ymagier. Free mason. He can bring even granite to life.

  He has demons, it’s true. Their faces trouble the masonry of the new cathedral. A goat that dances on its hind legs. A horned man. A griffin, its beak stuffed with grapes. A weeping devil, exorcized. Remember? ‘And the devil wept, saying: ‘‘I leave thee, my fairest consort, whom long since I found and rested in thee; I forsake thee, my sure sister, my beloved in whom I was well pleased. What I shall do, I know not.’’ ’ The Acts of Thomas. From the Apocrypha. Marguerite found it in the scriptorium and copied the tale when no one was looking. My mind wanders.

  ‘It is a good likeness?’ Athalie had asked.

  ‘You don’t know my work?’ L’Ymagier had smiled.

  ‘And the hair?’ There was no time for banter.

  ‘Faded, but it will serve. In the morning light, and raised high on the litter – ’

  ‘It must not be heavy, this body. We can use the barrow on the cart track, but remember, Giles, at the cathedral itself, we will have only our arms.’

  ‘Wood then, not stone. There was an ash tree down behind Tibideau’s slaughterhouse last month. It’s in my studio, already cured and roughed. It will be manageable.’

  ‘The derelict camp on the edge of the wood. Do you know it?’

  ‘The ashmen’s old lodge?’

  ‘There.’

  It is disrespectful for a pallbearer to look at the body as he raises the litter to his shoulders. Moreover, it is bad luck. L’Ymagier is well aware.

  High above the pleurants’ grey hoods, the hair of his dead wife lifts on the breeze.

  Marguerite hears Marthe whispering to the bathhouse woman. The priests watch her father.

  ‘Every action has magic at its source, and the entire life of the practical man is a bewitchment.’ That’s what he used to say.

  Of course they watch him. Of course he’s suspected.

  She suspects him herself, of what she can’t say.

  Beneath her, on the cathedral step, the volume. She sits on it to hide it.

  She wants to go back to the days when she could love him for turning a white rose red; when the stories he told them by candlelight with the shadows of his hands seemed the entire world.

  You lived rough, without even words most of the time. When I told you my name, it was useless birdsong to your ears. But you would breathe deeply of me. Your nostrils were wide.

  We ran at the sight of anyone, laughing as we went. Others seemed so slow, so stupid on their feet: charcoal burners, bark pullers, pig herds, ashmen. They knew us only by the skirmish of our passing and the hair on the backs of their necks. Both of us, of a middle nature.

  The stench from the communal grave marks the end of the procession. In the distance l’Ymagier can see Marguerite, solitary on the cathedral’s highest step. Below her, women in black drift like ash.

  Soon, soon, he thinks, they will be three again. In no time Christina will be safe at Athalie’s. In a few days, perhaps less, he and Marguerite will leave for Paris. On the road they will overtake Ahmed in his tumbledown caravan, with Christina its hidden cargo. Ahmed will take them as far as the outskirts of Paris. If the Church should blacklist him from working, and it is likely it will, he will sell the Avicennan volume, priceless though it is, to the underground at the university. He will if he must.

  The ritual at the grave is familiar. How is it twelve years? Twelve years since he buried his wife in the mud of a wet October. He watches carefully as each of the pallbearers at the front raises a blind hand to ease the vigil-cloth over the face. The purple-and-gold tissue flutters for a moment, then falls, covering the wooden likeness of his daughter.

  The litter is lowered to the ground. The mourners bow their heads as Father Joseph chants the song of death. The four bearers bend and take hold of the wide flaps of the winding sheet, letting them fall over the body. The moment has come. L’Ymagier bows his head too. Each bearer takes in his hand a length of the sheet’s linen bindings. One man, the sexton, nods to the other three, and the wooden form of his daughter is raised up, free of the litter, and wound for the grave.

  To touch the body is forbidden.

  You spun me round and round under that oak tree till I was giddy. When you let go, I fell hard.

  We were not happy again. You watched me. You asked half questions. Your face clouded at my words, at my laughter. You listened for my footfall, impatient for it and of it. Sometimes, your pupils shrank to almost nothing.

  ‘Who?’ I’d demand. ‘Who could there be?’ You smelled me for the sweat of other men. You laid traps.

  You understand me. The baiting. Other times, the pretence of ease.

  ‘Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto.’

  And for the first time, l’Ymagier is afraid.

  Is it possible he vivifies his daughter’s body with nothing more than the force of his own need? Is it possible that Athalie, even now, is bearing his daughter a
way in her barrow – dead in spite of him?

  A breeze rises. Grit from the grave blows into his teeth as he mouths the responses.

  It is all right. He will trust the voice within. He must. And Marguerite has found the volume. His ancient touchstone. Their assurance, come what may.

  Ashman’s son, I think you did not mean to kill me. Only the need of me.

  How many nights ago was it that I jabbered to Marguerite in our bed? I thought, I can will myself free – from you, from the clobbering wood. I can will myself into the bright world again. But you found me even in my dreams. You climbed on top of me. Again, the weight of you. I’d missed you so. I touched your arms, your chest, but you wouldn’t take your hands from my face, and even my heart faltered.

  As Marguerite waits, she is aware of the coiling curiosity of the women of Beauvais. She wants to be gone from this place. She wants Christina dead and buried. She wants to spit the truth at them. ‘There were no marks of any kind!’

  But it is a truth of which she should have no knowledge. The semblance of innocence is all that protects her now in the world.

  L’Ymagier watches the pallbearers move to the edge. He flinches, in spite of himself, as they lower the carving into the grave. He thinks of Marguerite. He sees in his mind’s eye the volume under her arm. Soon, they will be safe.

  He stares.

  Through the corner of the winding sheet, something. A bare heel. A waxy foot. Separated toes. The half-moons of nails. The crookedness of her second toe.

  My father is crying.

  That is the sound of my father crying.

  *

  His shouts break the day. Marguerite stops running only when she reaches the sexton’s hut, only as her father comes into view.

  It is as they say. He is over Christina’s body. He is stripping the winding sheet from her as if she is on fire. He is slapping her dead face, her dead arms. He is calling her name. He is shouting that, by the gore of Christ, her foot did move.

  It is not possible. He is not possible.

  She runs headlong. She pushes through the huddle of pleurants and priests.

  She is not yet at the grave’s edge, her feet are sinking in a mound of earth, she is about to denounce her father, to show everyone the stolen volume, to do anything that will make everything stop, when she beholds her dead sister sit up.