The Book of Shadows (47 page)

Madeleine held my gaze so long I nearly looked away. “What…what will become of
her
?” The corpse lay stiffening on the hard pew. There rose from it a smell I've not the stomach to describe, not now, not with these waves at work beneath me.

Madeleine made no answer, said only,
I'm leaving now, witch. I suggest you do the same. We've the calendar to consider.
Already she was one with the shadows, and gone.

“Pure as you are.” Her words resounded in my head as I moved up the center aisle, out of the church. Indeed, I'd hear those words again and again, hear them as I stole back to the berlin from the cathedral, hear them as we retook the Coast Road to ride into the night.

W
E
'
D BEEN
traveling some days now. Lately, our course was that of the river Loire. It was not the most direct route—indeed, since Angers we'd traveled, as best I could tell, due east. In time, we'd transfer our allegiance to the Rhône, and in so doing take to a directly southern route. Of course, I had little say in mapping our way; Father Louis did that. And though I would sometimes insist on stopping here and there, and sometimes spending a night in an actual bed, it was the lunar calendar that set our pace, for we needed to arrive at the crossroads before the new moon rose; a new moon, I was told, would aid me in my work. And should we miss the coming new moon, we'd have to wait a lunar cycle for its return. This I did not wish to do: if I were going, and I was,
I would go.

And so I would see that we arrived in advance of the new moon in that part of Provence where the elementals had lived their actual, their
mortal
lives. And there, at the suicides' crossroads, beyond a ruined city I will not name, in the darkness cast by the blind side of a new moon, I would do what I could to free Madeleine; and then I would…. In truth, I did not know what I would do then.

…The dream I'd induced beyond Rennes had left me enervated. My breath was labored for a long while, my heart not quite right, and my limbs bore a lassitude that I could only attribute to the exertion of “seeing.” The divining had a disorienting effect. So too did the work I'd done upon Madeleine in Angers, and all I'd learned in Tours. Which is to say, I was unspeakably tired.

I took up a map to try, without success, to situate myself, to find Bourges. I'd no idea what time it was, no idea at all. I saw that the moon was high, and the night deep.
Alors,
I sat so listlessly, contentedly staring out at the play of moonlight on the river, nodding off now and again.

The bright light of the moon lit the land blue, and so it was that I would see Blois—only later would I learn it was Blois; north, and off the expected route—on the bank of the Loire, in a pale and ghostly cast, the facades of its buildings aglow, banks of poplars swaying forward to admire themselves in the silvered river. Narrow streets rose steeply up from the river and wound their way out of sight. Overhanging the city was the great château, bright as a secondary moon. A timbered inn, riverside, tempted me; but no…We drove on.

Looking at my map, now, I see that we would have achieved Amboise before Blois; though the map is irrefutable, that's not how I remember it…. Ah, but the tired hours of that night are so confused in my memory…Confused too was our route, from which the elementals had us stray.

…I do, however, recall Amboise. Indeed, I can
see
the dark mass of its château above the river, its crenellations and platforms and balconies, its niched windows, its shadowed profile cut with
machicoulis
to which tiny cannons would have been wheeled in medieval defense. Seeing it through heavy-lidded eyes, I did not regret rolling on, owing perhaps to a historical tidbit that came back to me then: it was from the balconies of the château at Amboise that the heads of Huguenots had been displayed as the grimmest of ornamentation after the discovery of the long-ago conspiracy at La Renaudie. The silence that night in Amboise as we rode beside the river seemed the silence of those severed heads. Rolling on, I worried that they'd speak in my dreams.

…Eventually, Morpheus triumphed: I felt my neck go suddenly slack and roll heavily this way and that; my hand fell from my lap, heavy as a stone…. Soon I was fast asleep.

When I woke it was to the unmistakable sound of gravel being ground under the large wheels of the berlin. We were driving slowly, owing, I supposed, to a bad stretch of road. I remember hearing two other strange sounds immediately upon waking: a silence which said we were no longer beside the river, and the nearby cry of the raven. Had Sebastiana sent Maluenda, as raven, to watch over me…or was
she,
Sebastiana, watching me through the raven's eyes?
Impossible!
But then again, I'd taken to the raven's eyes in my dream; and hadn't I already learned enough to banish that word—impossible—from my vocabulary?

(Here at sea, aboard this ship, I spy a certain fat black rat in my cabin on occasion. I'll look up from these pages, considering a certain sentence, or perhaps to dip my pen, and there it'll be, staring up at me from over beside the larder. Almost as large as a cat, I'm sure the rat fends nicely for itself on board, but I feed it nonetheless, leaving wedges of cheese and rinds of bacon scattered about. I verily
host
the thing. And sometimes—this is embarrassing—I smile at the rat and tell myself the smile is seen by Sebastiana…. And yes, sometimes I speak to it. I'm sounding like a fool here; and so I'll stop.)

…As I say, there was something about that combination of sounds to which I woke—the gravel; silence where there'd been the steady song of the river; the ravensong—that piqued my curiosity. The gravel was particularly curious—the roads we'd traveled over were, for the most part, smoothly packed dirt, pocked here and there, or else they were impossibly bad, slowing us to a crawl for long stretches. Gravel? No; there'd been no gravel. Only a private drive, one especially well tended, would be covered in a gravel deep and fine enough to grind like this beneath the wheels…

And that's when I sat forward, looked out the window of the berlin, and saw there,
there,
looming ever nearer, a city wrought all in silver!

The sight took my breath away, literally: seeing that city spread before me, the breath rushed from my lungs audibly, as though I'd suffered a blow. And had I had a traveling companion, a
mortal
companion, he or she would have heard me utter an expletive or two, occasioned by awe, once I'd regained sufficient breath to do so.

The very instant I saw the city, my mind began to beat back my imagination, and I reasoned that this was no mythical place, no Camelot or Xanadu, no Atlantis rising from a sea of night, but rather that edifice known to every French schoolchild: the château de Chambord.

We had doubled back from Blois. But why?

I saw outlined against the dark sky the even darker roof: a compilation of cupolas, chimneys, pinnacles, spires, and towers. The walls, rising up out of the disfeatured park, the peasant's landscape, shone like sculpted ivory. The glass of a thousand windows glistened, gave back the moonlight as a prism would. It
all
glistened! It
all
glowed, all four-hundred-odd stone-carved rooms.

The château de Chambord. I will not offer here a detailed description of the place; I haven't the time. I'm told we sail ever-nearer port and I despair of finishing this record. For now, let me offer this, culled from a pamphlet I would purchase in Arles.

Begun under Francis I in 1519, the château bears his imprimatur all over: the flat and fairly plain F, and the royal (and
repulsive
!) salamander. Its luckless, loveless fate seems to have been ordained by Francis, who, it is said, chose the site in the soggy Sologne for no better reason than this: the Comtesse de Thoury, with whom the not-yet-ascendant Francis was smitten, had a manor in the vicinity. Francis's heirs took up the care and construction of the château upon his death; eventually, with Versailles, St. Cloud, Fontainebleau, and St. Germain all within easier reach of the capital, sovereigns were little inclined to decamp to Chambord, in perhaps the least appealing part of the kingdom. In succession, the royal barrack hosted Henri II and Gaston d'Orléans—brother to Louis XIII; and, most markedly, Louis XIV. The adornments and additions made by the latter, the most
decorative
of kings, are easily imagined. There later came the perennially exiled King of the Poles, Stanislas Leczinski, father-in-law to Louis XV, and his queen, Catherine Opalinska by name. The Maréchal de Saxe was given the château after his victory at Fontenoy, in 1745; and at present the sad vastness is unoccupied as the heirs of the Maréchal de Berthier wage a litigious war with the Duc de Bordeaux, whose mother, the Duchesse de Berry, is pressing her son's claim with great voice.

The berlin came to a standstill in the inner court of the château, passing through
La Porte royale
. Finally, I thought, a place whose scale suits this conveyance of ours! I climbed down quickly from the cab, wondering should I dress down Michel for stopping here of his own volition, for not conferring with me, his
master
…. But of course, it was not Michelatop the box.

There sat the smiling priest, holding fast to his own shape. “The driver?” I asked. “What have you done with the driver?”

“Dismissed,” said the priest, “while you slept. Unharmed, newly rich, and…well, just a bit confused.”

I could not help but smile—finally, Michel would get the rest he'd sought back in Angers; and I knew he'd do well, for his was a most adaptable nature. Just then I heard a horrible noise and turned to see an ancient set of iron-hinged doors—not often used, evidently—swing open across the inner courtyard. There stood Madeleine. With a sweep meant to take in the whole of the château, she said, smiling, and with the practiced grace of the greatest of chatelaines,
We thought we'd pass the night here, grandly.

“Grandly, indeed,” said I. Father Louis descended unseen from atop the berlin; and Madeleine came unnaturally fast from across the courtyard. Both their shapes were full, strong; still, the moon seemed to penetrate them and they gave back its light—that is, they glowed; as did the great château.

The château's towers—it is comprised of a larger structure enclosing a smaller, each sporting four towers—…its towers and their adjoining walls rose up all around us, and the sculpted stone, the gargoyles staring down from atop every capital…the many shadows gave to the whole a depth, a texture that made it seem a
living
thing. I stood in that inner courtyard for a long while, turning this way and that, trying to take in the whole magical
mass
.

Madeleine had disappeared, but there she was again, standing in the portal of the vestibule, which she'd somehow, soundlessly opened to us from inside the château.
Shall we?
she asked. So it was that I—like how many queens, how many kings before me?—entered the château de Chambord.

The huge door shut behind me; the clap of cold wood on colder stone resounded for a long while. The light of the moon was lost; an instant later, there flared up before me a flame contained in an oil lamp held by Madeleine. I did not see her strike a match, nor otherwise light the lamp; how she raised the flame I've no idea, but neither did it really surprise me, for it seemed that one comprised primarily of air and water could surely put a bit of fire to purpose.

Led by the light of her lamp, I followed Madeleine. Here and there the moon seeped through a narrow window to augment our light and I'd glimpse a tapestry, see a tall and unwound clock hulking in a shadowed corner. Father Louis was near, I knew, but if he held to his shape he did so beyond the light cast by our lamp. Shortly, Madeleine and I arrived at the foot of the château's famed double staircase, its entwined stairwells designed to allow two persons (mistresses? rivals?) to come and go without encountering each other. There stood Father Louis, three or four steps up the stairway, leaning against the thick handrail, his shape weak but easily discerned. All that night the elementals would appear thin, almost translucent, struggling to draw what sustenance they could from the canal running near the château; they were too far from the Loire to draw on it for strength.

In deference to me, to my mortal limitations, the elementals rode that stairway in standard fashion: that is, step by step. They, in my company, would always walk through doorways rather than walls, light lamps though the darkness was nothing to them, seat themselves on furniture when they might have easily hovered, weightless but for the water they bore. No one spoke; and the silence seemed only to increase the scale of all I saw. There was, in the construction of Chambord, no concession made to the commonness of man's lot. No, the excess of adornment, the
scale
of all I saw bespoke the presence of gods; was, in a word, Divine.

Up we went. Though I was tempted to break from my spirit guides at each landing, to set out and explore on my own, I followed the elementals, wondering why we passed first this level, then that, why we kept to the stairs, climbing, climbing? I had my answer when finally we achieved the openwork lantern that tops the château. There I remarked a large fleur-de-lis of stone, which, in its untouched perfection, called to mind all the scarred statuary I'd seen as we headed south, all the limbless or headless statues on which the Revolutionaries had made their mark. But here this stony flower, the Bourbon emblem, sat in perfect bloom, and I understood that the château entire was but a monument to a tradition, to a system that was once great and might,
might
have remained so.

From these thoughts, my mind and eyes were drawn to the jagged line of the roof, which spread out all around us like a rough sea sculpted of stone and slate and glass. Up a few steps more, a turn here, a turn there, and we achieved the roof itself; nothing but night obscured my view. And the moon quite generously lit two landscapes: the expanse of park and woodland through which we'd driven and the sculpted sea of the roof.

The night air was chilly; it bore the pungent perfume of burning wood. I remarked the mold and lichen that had spread in corners, climbed walls and the insides of arches, slid sideways over wide sills. I must have muttered something about the cold, for moments later I felt fall down over my shoulders the ermine wrap that I'd left in the berlin. “Thank you,” said I, casting the words out into the night, for I did not know which of my friends had so quickly descended to do me this favor.