The Book of Shadows (59 page)

Quickly now…(For I've just taken up this pen again, having risen from my tiny table to spy, through my cabin's sole, rounded window, that distant shore that we are fast approaching: it is, yes, the port of Richmond, in the state of Virginia. Of this city I know nothing, and of the state I know only that Th. Jefferson calls it home.)

…Without the berlin, I'd have to find another way to Marseilles. And I did so without difficulty, securing passage on a diligence that would leave Arles proper at nine the next morning. Its route would not be direct, but no matter. The new moon come and gone, my calendar was clear.

I returned to my two rooms in the early evening, flush with success, having dealt with the fat man, and despairing at not coming across Arlesienne. I was loaded down with booty culled from that city's booksellers. Two new suits were to be delivered that very night by the son of a most amenable tailor I'd discovered down an alley; he, at that very moment, was working double-quick for double-pay. I was tired, but excited too. Blood
rushed
through my veins, and I doubted sleep would come that night. I had still to make the morning trip to Marseilles and, again, the thought of sailors and sea travel chilled my rushing blood. (Strange that now, with the crossing nearly over, I know it to be nothing. Indeed, I enjoyed it, the rhythm and the roll of it, the silence of the sea…But still I sympathize with my former self, the sea-wary one.)

That night in Arles I sent the innkeeper's boy out for some brandy; and I was most appreciative when the hostess herself brought the bottle up to my room along with a crystal snifter that was almost clean. Less delectable was the slab of salt pork she proffered, along with a chunk of black bread that I had to soak in a cup of broth before I could bite it unreservedly, without fear of losing a tooth or two in its crust. I opened my windows to the quieting sounds of the city. The waxing crescent of moon shone none too brightly. I heard shutters closing against the night and its coming chill.

I ate. And I breathed deeply, for this can sometimes calm me. Tired as I was, that night in Arles, I could not resist thumbing through some of the books I'd bought—histories and random tracts, most of them touching in some way on our “dark arts.” I'm glad I haven't the time, for I'd be embarrassed to account for the pleasure I took in those books…cutting the unread pages with a silver blade I bought for that purpose, fanning the thick, stiff pages so that the aroma of knowledge rose up to rival that of the brandy….

Finally, and I've no idea what hour it was, my eyes grew tired; they teared as I tried to read. My eyelids were impossibly heavy; sleep would have its way, no matter the interest I took in the books before me, no matter my ceaseless wondering and worrying.

I left the books piled on that room's small table, which I'd pushed nearer the open window, and I left there too the remains of my supper—a tableau, it occurs to me now, very like the one in that lesser library at C——. I rose from the table and went to ready the bed, to fluff the flat pillow, and turn the coarse linen down over the thin mattress.

It was then I discovered, under that pillow, a dirtied pair of short pants, dyed indigo blue. I knew instantly whose they were; and in that same instant there came the chill I knew well.

I turned and there he stood, before the open window, his beauty defined by the lambent light rising from the lanterns just lit in the street, falling from the stars and the moon…. Roméo. It was Roméo.

An instant passed—and if only there'd been a way to hold to that instant, so fleet, so fine—and then I knew it all to be illusory.

“Why?” said I to Father Louis; for it was, of course, the incubus who stood before me in the shape of my Roméo. My eyes welled with tears that would not fall, so stubborn, as though refusing the truth in favor of the illusion. “Why?” I asked of the incubus. “I've told you, Louis, I've no interest in—”

“To thank you,” said the priest, borrowing the boy's voice, Roméo's voice. Naked, he came to me and held me in Roméo's arms and kissed me with purloined lips and…. And I could not help but respond.

“I should have known you would not give up,” I breathed. His thick neck was cold, yet the coldness seemed to fire my lips as I whispered, as I kissed and playfully bit his ear…. “Use his voice,” I whispered, with a measure of shame.

“Yes,” said Roméo, “you should have known.”

There'd be no refusing his favors.

We made love. Or, as the priest would indelicately put it, “We fucked.”

But the very nature of the elementals, succubus and incubus alike, was such that…well, I imagine loving sex with a mortal is rather more
tender
. If Madeleine had been mischievous, directing Roméo and me in the bath, now Father Louis, as Roméo, was flatly fiendish; for sex was but the means to an end, and the end was control, simply. Again—and was it not the priest himself who told me this?—one cannot fault one for doing what it is in one's nature to do. And so…his every touch fell upon me either icy or aflame, so that I lurched down that dark and unknown lane of pleasure as a drunk stumbles from the tavern, unsure of the way that might open before him. I would revel in the cold touch—far more accustomed was I to the cold than the hot—I would revel in his cold touching of my breasts, only to recoil, or try to recoil—in truth, he held me fast—when his kneading, rough touch turned hot, so very hot, and his lips, like pincers—the fire-red pincers for which every sister must bear an ancestral fear—fell upon my blood-thickened nipples. I cried out. Muffling me with his icy clamp of a hand, he laughed, and drove into me deeper…. But I could not get angry, for in his way he
was
sincere, this I knew; too, the pleasure was never far behind the pain. Worse, I trusted him, trusted him to lead me safely home to my self when his show of pleasure and pain was through; and, yes, still I clung to the illusion of Roméo, Roméo before me, atop me, within me. But I took care to not show too much pleasure, too much pain, for then, certainly, the incubus would change tack; again, it is control that such a one seeks,
control
. But my wiles were no match for his; and so soon I abandoned myself to him, as a marionette might to its master. And not long after, he was done; and I was spent in every way,
every
way, with little but welts, spiderish bites, and welling bruises to show for my efforts. And indeed I did make an effort, for after the elementals, and Roméo, and Arlesienne, I can love…rather, I can take to the act of sex with some measure of confidence. Love eludes me still…. Ah, what I mean to say is this: that with Father Louis, in Arles, it was not love at all.

It was, at once, everything and nothing. Splendid and sad. It was and was not
my
Roméo. The essence of the boy, that very thing that, like the much sought philosopher's stone of the alchemists, might have made golden the relative dross of our…our acrobatics, that
essential
Roméo the incubus could never contain, never control…. And so, if the question is this: Was my love for Roméo requited that night?—the answer is, emphatically, sadly, no…. But I am thankful at least that I had not wanted the boy so very long, for that wanting, and the waiting, would have grown richer with time, like wine; and then the taste I took from the incubus would have disappointed all the more.

But I say again, the priest was sincere in his effort to thank me; sincere, yes, and therefore ardent in his…
attentions,
the receipt of which I do not regret. And I believe it was
not
the demon I knew that night, not truly, just as it was not my Roméo; it was, I believe, the essential, long-dead Father Louis. It was the sweet priest Madeleine had known in life. It was the one-time man of God; and the act, that night, seemed to me…sacramental,
graceful
in the truest sense.

…As we lay some time later on that mattress, uncovered, my arms linked around the weighty cold of the incubus's, he spoke. He held still to Roméo's shape, though when he spoke the voice was his own. He was answering the question that had slipped from my lips. “What will you do?” I'd asked.

The incubus whispered his response, his lips to my ear; there was no discernible exhalation as he spoke and I could not but remark the absence, the
utter
absence of warmth when, sadly, he said: “‘Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies.'”

I knew the line. It is, appropriately enough, from Marlowe's
Dr. Faustus
. I knew too, instantly, as soon as the words were spoken, that Father Louis was saying good-bye. I'd known the moment would come, and I thought it was what I wanted. (Never once did I imagine him sailing with me. Never did I see him beside me in my New World.) But once the words were said, and the good-bye implied, well, it seemed my very self was rent: part of me was sad, terribly sad, and part of me grew fearful, for I was finally and undeniably alone.

The incubus rose off me. Only then, naked but for the blue shorts with which I demurely, foolishly, and ineffectively tried to cover myself, only then did I grow bone-chillingly cold. I maneuvered on the mattress, desperate to get beneath the one woolen blanket…. When last I saw the incubus he was walking toward the open window, Roméo's shape growing ever fainter, fainter…At the window he turned and bent double in a deep and courtly bow; and then he vanished, and I lay smiling at the air. My hand was raised as though to wave, but I found I could not execute that simple act, and my hand fell fast to my side.

…The next morning I boarded the diligence at the appointed hour. I had only the half-filled
nécessaire,
which the trap's two drivers—brothers, or cousins, to judge by their excessive and changeable familiarity—loaded. There were three other passengers from Arles, in whose company I pleasured.

As had happened near the crossroads, I was struck again by the moribund aspects of the secondary cities of the Rhône, the names of which escape me. (I've packed away the map: I haven't recourse to it right now.) We stopped in one such nameless place, its market crowded with the silks of Lyon, leatherware, and baled hemp; the bound wheat of Toulouse; wines of the Languedoc; sea salt from the Camargue; soaps of Marseilles; and casks of olive oil.

…Yes, after Arles the weary Rhône slows and eventually splits into
les deux Rhônes morts,
the “dead rivers,” which crawl across the Camargue Delta. As we made our way thusly, slowly, to Marseilles, I took from my companions all they offered of the area. They laughed when I shrieked at the sight of flocked flamingos rising up in a roseate wave; of course, I said nothing when I saw what had occasioned their sudden movement: Maluenda, as raven, flew among them, black among the red and the blushing pink, ever watchful of me. Wild geese abounded, too. By the bright light, eagles and buzzards and pelicans patrolled the ivory sands. It was a herd of swift white horses—of the Saracen strain, I was told, useful in bullfighting—it was the horses, pale among the paler dunes, that occasioned my tears. The beauty of the land, its corn- and vine-covered plains crawling to the sea, its marshes spotted with half-wild cattle…the land affected me bodily. The beauty of it. I hadn't known Nature to be capable of such.

Later in the day we reached Marseilles. The calm of the Camargue only heightened my instinctive dislike and distrust of cities. And so, quickly, I secured passage on the
Ceremaju,
a smallish clipper owned by the Liverpudlian firm of Lloyd and Vredenburgh, slated to sail the next day and arrive in America some four or five weeks later—depending, of course, on conditions, which, thankfully, were good: easy seas and steady wind.

The
Ceremaju
—due to quarantining—sat still off the coast of “Dead Marseilles.” (Sometime in the last century, a plague of the city claimed fifty thousand of its inhabitants in just two years; fully half the population. These days the fear is of yellow fever, said to be ravaging Spain….
Enfin,
all ships are made to anchor in the quarantine harbor, Dieudonné, off the isle of Pomègues.) The
Ceremaju
would sail from Marseilles as soon as her hold could be emptied of its store of tea, tobacco, and corn and reloaded, I was happy to hear, with empty oil casks; it was owing to this buoyant cargo that the
Ceremaju
was, according to its captain, unsinkable.

Now I've considered not adding here, to this Book, to
my
Book, the following fact—but I will add it; it may amuse you, Reader, as it did
not
amuse me. See, the
Ceremaju
was, indeed
is
what's known as a hermaphrodite brig; that is, it is a two-masted vessel, square-rigged forward and schooner-rigged aft. Imagine my state when, acting my manly best to secure passage on said ship, it was so described to me by its captain, who, I was certain, was enjoying himself at my expense. But then he spoke of money, and I knew he was serious. And when he spoke of money, of the price of passage—there, amid the bustling crowd, with men of every description speaking all the world's languages, engaged in their dangerous work—I was greatly relieved; so relieved and eager I made the mistake of drawing out my money far too early in our negotiations. The ship was full-up, said its captain; my passage on it was an impossibility. (“We aren't fitted out for fine travelers,” said my first American.) But he baldly stared at the wadded notes in my hand. Then again, said he…just maybe…. Finally, though this and that law and custom would require circumvention, which in turn required cash, he took me on. I paid a price that I will not record here, for on that occasion my bargaining skills, which I thought I'd honed on the man with the pickled green monkeys, quite deserted me, and I handed over to the captain…well, allow me to say it was “an excess of coin,” little of which, I'm sure, will clink into the coffers of the Messieurs Lloyd and Vredenburgh.