Revenant Eve (38 page)

Within half a page, Aurélie clapped her hand over her mouth, trying not to laugh.

When Jaska looked her way, she begged his pardon.

“Was it the text or how I said it?” he asked. “I’m teaching myself this language. I was trading lessons with the English courier last fall, and as I don’t want to lose what I learned, I’m puzzling out meanings by virtue of this dictionary, but it doesn’t tell me pronunciation.” He plunged his hand into another pocket, and there was a very battered copy of Johnson’s dictionary. “
Peste!”
he exclaimed. “‘Through.’ Is this said
thruff
, or
throw? Throff?”

Aurélie tried not to laugh as she corrected him.

“
Threw
?” he exclaimed, a hand raised in protest. “Why is
through
said
threw
, but
though
is
thoh?
All one does is remove the R. But if one then removes the H, the word becomes
tuff
. So why is the first one not
thruff
? And this one.” He coughed. “Is
c-o-u-g-h
said
coo
or
cow
?”

Aurélie muffled a snicker.

Jaska waved the book. “If
gh
is to be
f,
then is not
ghost
properly pronounced
fost
?”

Aurélie smiled as she gave him the correct pronunciation.

Mord pulled his spectacles from his pocket and regarded Jaska to see if he was kidding. A quick, sideways look at Aurélie, then he snatched off the glasses as if he’d been burned. “It appears that this language was fashioned by a madman. I like that,” he added thoughtfully as he folded his spectacles again and slid them inside his coat.

Jaska grinned. “Have you read this book, René?”

“My cousin and I were taking turns reading it aloud as we sewed, the winter before we left for France. But we only got as far as London before my aunt took it away and scolded us mightily, saying it was written only for men.”

Jaska looked surprised. “Is that English custom, then?”

“It depends upon the household. Another female cousin had read it.”

“Will you help me learn these words?” he asked.

“In trade, will you teach me German? I know you know it. I remember you and Mord speaking it once or twice, on our journey to Paris. The nuns
I am to visit will probably speak Latin, and everyone says French is universal, but I would prefer to speak the language of the country I am in.”

“Agreed. How is this? Mornings, we spend in English, and afternoons in German. I have in my haversack two fine novels, one by Goethe and one by Richter. Do you have a preference?”

“Not if it’s
The Sorrows of Young Werther
,” she said. “It sounds horrid. Madame Bonaparte told us that it’s the First Consul’s favorite book, so I do not want to read it. Is the other one amusing? I like comical novels.”

“I’ve only the first volume of
Titan
, which is quite new. It was given me by a courier from Prussia, but he had none of the rest of it. We might find other volumes where we are going. In the meantime, I assure you, there will be plenty to discuss. And to laugh over, for Richter loves a good joke.”

“And I discover in myself a desire to learn a language where one cannot tell by spelling if one is hacking with a cold or warbling like a dove,” Mord observed. “I foresee endless amusement.”

So that’s what happened.

On the first Friday night, Mord vanished before the sun set. He returned well after dark without saying where he had been. The next morning, they found him standing in the common room, head bowed.

“My knee pains me,” Jaska said. “Let us not travel today.”

Mord turned a smile his way, then vanished outside again. To Aurélie’s quizzical expression, Jaska replied, “I think when he goes off to play in that solitary manner that he’s making
Hitbodedut
, that is, devotions. And last night, when he vanished coincided with the start of the Sabbath. But if he does not wish to tell us that he is making devotions, our part, I believe, is to pretend we don’t notice.”

After that, they halted for the Sabbath by mutual accord. And Jaska needed the rest. He never complained, but the difference between his stiff gait of a Friday and the freer walk when they pushed forward again was apparent.

Eventually they crossed from Lunéville to the forested, hilly territory west of Strasbourg. The secluded timberland seemed to bring darkness
earlier, and they sought shelter earlier, especially when the thick woods echoed with the howl of wolves. They often practiced shooting as they walked, which kept their weapons in shape and also scared off lurking predators.

Aurélie told me that she hated the loudness of the noise, the stink of burnt metal and powder, but she was determined to so refine her aim that she could wound the hand raised to strike her or hit the knee bent to lunge without destroying the attacker’s life—even the life of someone bent on evil.

“There are too many deaths in my dreams,” she said to me one night, when cleaning her pistol and reloading it before she went to sleep.

Early stops meant rehearsals, to which the locals listened with interest. By now they were a musical trio of professional quality, but even so, the listeners almost invariably leaned by increments toward Mord, whose playing continued to achieve extraordinary range and power. But he never seemed satisfied.

Aurélie began having nightmares again. I’d thought those had ended when we arrived in Paris. Jaska looked with concern at her heavy eyes on those mornings, but when he asked why she didn’t sleep, she only said, “Nightmares.”

The day before we reached Strasbourg, she took everyone by surprise. “I have a new song,” she said, as she sat down to the village’s single fortepiano. “It is called ‘Miyyah fi Miyyah.’” She worked it out with determined fingers, as Jaska picked up the melody on his flute. And to me, in English, she murmured, “It came in last night’s dream. The woman in the dream was Spanish. If I have to have nightmares, then at least they can give me music.”

She turned away, yawning so hard that her eyes watered. She did not see the long, thoughtful look that Jaska gave her.

Strasbourg revealed the familiar depredations of the Revolution, the oddest, the gigantic Phrygian cap still covering the spire of the vandalized cathedral. On either side, French mixed with German voices. When she heard the latter, Aurélie lifted her face with a delight I recognized. It’s
cool when the indecipherable patterns of a foreign language begin to make sense.

That night, having located an inn with a resident spinet, they offered to play. After an early dinner, they were going about setting up their instruments—reeds, tuning, Aurélie getting the touch of the spinet—when a loud clattering outside the inn caused an abrupt drop in voices and a tense shift of attention to the door.

In strode a captain and two attendant guards, muskets at the ready. The captain unrolled a piece of paper and read, “By order of the first consul, war has been officially declared against the British for their refusal to obey the terms of the Treaty of Amiens. All English are to be arrested. If you see any of the following, you are to report them immediately to the local prefecture.”

He then read out names and descriptions of persons suspected of being spies against the Republic of France. Most of them were men, and then:

“Going by the name of Aurélie de Mascarenhas, female approximately sixteen to twenty years of age, petite, black eyes and hair, Mediterranean complexion, dressed as a court lady.”

T
HE CAPTAIN ROLLED UP HIS PAPER,
turned with a self-important air, and walked out followed by his guards, who had scrutinized the adult males in hopes of nabbing a spy and gaining a promotion. They’d looked right past the young boy hunched on the stool at the spinet, hat jammed low on ‘his’ head.

As soon as they were safely gone, the innkeeper said mournfully, “My dear fellow citizens, I have little respect for the
roasbiffs
, but even an English spy would know that England lies to the north and not to the east?”

This heavy-handed joke at the expense of the English received appreciative chuckles as a round of wine was served out to re-establish the proper festive atmosphere, and the innkeeper gestured impatiently for the musicians to play.

Aurélie’s hands trembled, causing a false note or two. But she flexed and shook her fingers, then pounded the keys until she recaptured the rhythm.

The next morning, she waited until they were well away from the inn, and exclaimed, “They think I am a spy!”

“Yes,” Jaska said, his expression wary. “This should not be a surprise.”

“But it
is
. I remember Minister Talleyrand warning us, but that was months ago. I have never done anything to warrant accusation.”

Mord kept broody silence as Jaska said mildly, “Apparently Madame
Bonaparte said nothing about your departure so, effectively, you vanished the day after receiving a letter from the islands. That must have raised suspicion, if no other of your actions did.”

“That letter came to my hands
months
after it was written. Surely the
mouchards
read it many times first. A child could see that the seal had been broken and reheated.”

“All true,” he said. “But it could have been in a code. Such things often are.”

“A letter from my mother?”

“How are they to know that?” Jaska asked. “It was conveyed through English diplomatic channels, and if there is now a state of war…” He sobered. “As you predicted.”

“Kim predicted it. My duppy.”

“That is true, I am corrected,” Jaska said. “Perhaps we ought to get well away from the city before we discuss this subject any further?”

Aurélie looked around with startled eyes at the shoppers and travelers on the busy street. She bit her lip and said nothing more.

Later in the day they reached the outskirts of the city and started up the road, but the subject of Aurélie as a spy was not revived.

Nor was it during the following days. Aurélie never introduced it. I think, from the wary way she regarded Jaska if he began a question, that she was dreading interrogation about her origins.

After a long tramp spent translating the second volume of
Titan
and practicing German, they traded the serried vineyards of Charlemagne’s empire for the Hapsburgs’: the many castles with their carvings of angels and heraldic devices, the Gothic spires and reaching arches, jutted upward from beyond the increasingly rough hills. Late in the day, lamplight shone through stained-glass windows in martial or saintly scenes, beckoning gemstones for the tired traveler.

Mord commented one day that the news about the war declaration had probably gone to French forces via semaphore within a day but had taken longer to spread to ordinary people, and then make its way into the empire. They could tell when the empire had heard because the signs
of military preparations were evident in the increased patrols, the many soldiers marching hither and yon in towns and villages.

They jigged north from Kiel to ancient Baden in order to avoid a climb, then cut south of fortified Stuttgart and down into Württemberg, where the duke would shortly make himself a king.

Those winged beings showed up again, drifting like vaporous clouds along roads, through trees in dark forests, over the heights of the many castles. It was the end of March, and spring had loosened the last of the snow underfoot in the deeper valleys. The world was full of the trickle, tinkle, gurgle, and rush of water as winter snow melted, added to intermittently by rain.

The weather was as vile as the roads, but sometimes a wagon stopped to give them a ride. By now Jaska and Aurélie were chattering regularly about reading in their new languages. Sometimes (usually when least expected) Mord would put in a word or two. During the early days, while they were still in French territory, Mord, the ferocious warrior and moody musical genius, revealed a lamentable taste for puns; the worse they were, the more he would shake with silent laughter. But as they reached deeper into the Austrian empire, his whimsical moments were replaced by a wary—even bitter—silence.

They’d finished reading
Tom Jones
, the reading lengthened by much discussion of Fielding’s opinionated, frequently funny introductions to the various subsections. Their next morning book, found in a narrow printshop on a street that looked unchanged since the 1400s, was
Orlando Furioso
.

“I do not know Italian,” Aurélie said.

“Tchah,” Jaska scoffed. “It’s the next thing to Latin. I promise, you will like this one, and why not learn yet another tongue?”

They pulled discussion of that into their ongoing talk about
Titan,
once they located volume three. There was no personal talk. It was all wider subjects: chivalry, romanticism, republicanism, extreme philosophies of any kind, what they meant in human terms, and what I would call political terms: the responsibilities of kingship and power.

Mord either stayed silent, or sometimes he’d interject a trenchant quote in Yiddish, German, Polish, French, and once, in Latin: “
Qui male agit odit lucem,”
he said on a day when a cold wind rushed and roared through the new leaves.
He who is evil despises light.