The Diviner's Tale (3 page)

Shaver and I didn't have to wait long. The two men returned in no time. By the look in their eyes I could tell something was awry.

"Nothing there, Casper," Niles quietly said.

How jarring his pet name sounded then, no matter that it went all the way back to our childhood together.

"That can't be right."

"You'd better come and show us where she is. We don't find anything."

Hurriedly we made our way in single file through the tall foliage. I was slipping into a panic because I didn't want to see the hanged girl again. But I knew I couldn't leave her out here unclaimed for another minute. She needed to be taken down from her gibbet, wrapped in the rolled tarp Bledsoe had carried in for the purpose, and taken home to her mother and father and family. I was soon enough running and had left the others behind when I emerged from the undergrowth to stand breathless and gasping at the edge of the woods just where I'd stood hours earlier.

There was no barefoot girl in a floral print blouse and denim skirt hanged with a rope by the neck. Everything looked exactly as it had that morning except for her not being there staring at me with those quizzical eyes.

I wheeled around and shook my head as Niles came up behind me with a face full of questioning. I turned toward the wooded cove again. Nothing. I walked swiftly to the very spot where I had held her in my arms, light as gossamer, but nothing remained of her. This wasn't possible. Niles was saying something about how we must not be in the right place, and I desperately wanted to agree with him and even began to say so. But when I glanced down, I saw my divining rod lying there among the leaves just where I had dropped it when I first saw her earlier, gazing ahead, so impossibly familiar.

O
NE OF THE EARLIEST
known female diviners in recorded history was something of a wild woman. Her name was Martine de Berthereau, the Baroness de Beausoleil. She was on my mind that afternoon, flickering in and out of it like the light through the budding trees as we climbed back out of the valley and I was driven home. Deep into the evening I couldn't shake the thought of her and what it sometimes meant to be a diviner.

Headstrong and wily, Martine was as tireless as a migrating hummingbird, fluent in several languages, a gifted mineralogist, an aristocrat who had no fear of dirt under her fingernails. A formidable character, she also had a weakness for alchemy, astrology, and dramatic flair. There have been other female diviners down the years, even famous ones. Lady Judith Milbanke, the mother of Lord Byron's wife, was well known for her gifts as a water witch. But to my mind none matched Martine de Berthereau. Her story has always fascinated and terrified me.

She made what some dowsers consider her most significant discovery the very year before Galileo claimed the Earth revolved around the sun, an idea that landed him in front of an outraged Inquisition. Theirs were heady times, the roaring twenties of the seventeenth century. Shakespeare's generation had only recently passed, and Francis Bacon was a rising star. Fresh, untamed ideas and their creators, like exotics freed from a zoo, were suddenly running free, many of them threatening to storm the papal walls. And the Baroness de Beausoleil was seen by some as one of those very escapees. A unicorn, maybe. Or a female griffin.

She had been traveling through France when her son fell ill. While he slept off his fever behind the louvered windows of their room in the Fleur de Lys, an inn not far from the central square of Château-Thierry, she set out on foot to explore the village and surrounding landscape. Her actions would not have seemed out of the ordinary, except that rather than taking her parasol to protect herself from the sun, she carried something the locals had never seen before. Wherever she went, Martine took a trunk carefully packed with all manner of dowsing rods, known as virgulas, made of hazel and forged metals, an astrolabe, and other curious divination instruments. Followed by a few smiling children and scowling adults, she walked the narrow cobblestone lanes behind her virgula, speaking to no one. As a crowd grew, she retraced her steps and circled back to where she'd begun. There in the courtyard, as onlooking villagers murmured, the diviner announced that right beneath their feet ran an underground stream of mineral water, fortified by green vitriol and pure gold, with fantastic healing properties.

A local doctor, Claude Galien, bore witness to what happened next. Some questioned her; some denounced her. But rather than run to the relative safety of the Fleur de Lys, the baroness demanded that the villagers form a committee of their most respected elders. The mayor, the apothecary, the judge. Let them dig at just the spot she had chosen and discover for themselves whether what she claimed was false or true. The hole was dug and waters rich in minerals were found, as promised. Galien was so impressed he was moved to write a treatise about the incident, which was published in Paris, in 1630:
La découverte des eaux minérales de Château-Thierry et de leurs propriétés.
Though he suspected the baroness might have noticed the green discoloration on the courtyard stones and deduced that seepage water leaching up to the surface would necessarily be high in ferrous sulfate—my mother the science teacher might say she used accurate data to reach verifiable conclusions by falsified means—he admired her strength of conviction.

For myself, I always believed Galien's eyewitness account of this miracle should have been the first step toward Martine de Berthereau's beatification, toward Rome's sanctifying her as St. Martine, patron saint of dowsers. How nice it would have been for me to point to her in my defense whenever Rosalie found fault in my divining. Instead, as the baroness and her husband dowsed many more mines on behalf of the royal house, and presented their findings to the court of Louis XIII and in particular to the infamous Cardinal Richelieu, her life began to spiral downward.

She had traveled the world—Scotland to Silesia to Bolivia, not to mention every corner of France—in search of ore deposits, silver, gold, iron, and other treasures hidden inside the Earth's bowels, and had discovered some hundred and fifty mines. More often than not her work went unpaid and discoveries unprospected. But when the good cardinal read in her reports that the deposits—many of which would later prove to be rich and viable—had been located using a forked wand, she was in for a fall. Accused by him of witchcraft, Martine de Berthereau, the baroness of "beautiful sunlight" as her name would have it, was remanded to the lightless state prison of Vincennes. There, with her daughter to whom she'd taught the art of divining, she would die in abject misery, separated from her son and husband, himself condemned to live out the rest of his days behind the iron bars of the Bastille. Not a pretty ending for what was otherwise such a strangely modern life. A woman of science. A world traveler, an adventuress. A working mom. An independent thinker willing to tread way outside the beaten path. Martine was what I always intended to name my daughter, had I ever given birth to a girl. I liked her nervy spirit, and before I knew much of anything about the dark days of the Inquisition, I hated Cardinal Richelieu for his cruel narrow-mindedness. If that was how religious men behaved, I didn't want anything to do with them.

Divining was always a bone of contention in our household. My mother and Nep, who was ten years her senior—forty to her thirty the year I was born—agreed to disagree early on in their romance about the scientific merits, or lack thereof, of the gentle art of divining. I always found it ironic that she who espoused verifiable facts was devoutly religious, while he who inhabited a world embraced by both postmodernist spiritualists and God-fearing old-timers wouldn't be caught dead darkening the doors of a house of worship. He could talk about the role diviners played in the Bible until he was blue in the face, but my mother would not be budged off her firm opinion that dowsing was a pagan practice at best.

— But what about Moses getting water out of a rock on Mt. Horeb? Nep might ask.

— That was a holy miracle, not dowsing, she would counter.

— How would the Israelites have lasted all those years in the desert unless Miriam was a diviner?

— Miriam's well was a gift of Jehovah and had nothing whatsoever to do with traipsing around in the sand with a magical wand.

— What about
Thy rod and thy staff shall comfort me?
If that rod isn't a diviner's rod, what in the world is it?

— It's a rod to smite atheists like you. Your father probably knew the old adage
Spare the rod and spoil the child.
More's the pity he didn't know one rod from another.

Naturally, they endorsed opposing ideas about what I should do when I grew up, and I failed neither of them. Few if any make a living at divining. So I followed my mother's footsteps as a teacher, substituting in social studies and geography, though I could lead an even better class in Greek and Roman classics if needed. And, as well, I took what our friends considered the unusual step of assuming the diviner's mantle in the grand tradition of the family patriarchs. Usually I felt fortunate to be born into a century when diviners were allowed to practice their art. You might be derided but never damned, laughed at but not locked up. But given where it had taken me today, fortunate was the last thing I felt.

Yet my father, whom I revered even more than the great Martine, had never betrayed any concerns about his own divining, or bringing his children into the guild. Divining was just part of his life and never bore with it the threat that always seemed to shadow me. The first time I tagged along with him on a dowsing job I couldn't have been more than eight, a redheaded beanpole of a kid. A summer morning, the year after my brother was gone, Nep knocked on my bedroom door.

— You got anything going on today, Cassiopeia? he asked.

— Nothing much.

— Now you do. Get dressed, and put on your shoes for once. Wear clothes for a walk through brambles. We're going to look for water that's clever at hiding.

As we drove in the orange sunrise, I knew I was entering a world I'd figured would never be mine even to visit, let alone explore with my father. Not a little terrified, I was given a forked stick fresh-cut by Nep, who took some pains telling me just why he picked the tree he hewed it from—in this instance, a single-seed fruit tree—and precisely how to whittle the Y-shaped rod. He also showed me other tools of the trade.

— This is an L-rod, he said, reaching into a worn leather duffel and handing me a pair of television antennas bent at ninety-degree angles. —Some people call them elbow rods. You hold them out in front of you like so, having me grip them chest-high in my fists, their glinting tips pointed forward parallel to the ground.

— What do they do? I asked, trying to keep them from wobbling in my unsure hands.

— I let them show me which way the water runs when I'm bird-dogging a stream. You can make them out of whatever's lying around. Coat hangers, any kind of metal. My dad had a set forged out of solid brass, real nice.

— Why don't we use those, then? I asked, only to be told that wouldn't be such a good idea since my grandfather had been buried with them.

Next, Nep showed me what was called a bobber, a flexible wand weighted on the end that responded by living up to its name, bobbing up and down, or wagging side to side. —It's best for asking the stream yes or no questions like, You drinkable? Ready to be tapped? Water is smart, Cass. Doesn't like the words
maybe
or
why. Why
is a word for philosophers and water is wiser than philosophers. Got that?

— Yes, I said, trying my best to stay with him.

— Never insult water or anything else you're dowsing for by questioning it, Are you sure? Once you get good at it, the right answer's the first answer every time.

He told me that diviner's tools are all extensions of yourself and nothing less. He finished by saying everything you divine is a reflection of yourself, and this, the only lecture he ever gave me, came to an end as he put all the paraphernalia except for the fresh rod back in the truck.

Then he set out with me, marching across some pale hay fields and through a thicket, listening for vapors' voices that rose from the earth to be heard and interpreted by us only. Whenever I saw his dowsing rod quiver, jerk harshly downward, drawn by subterranean forces, I did my best to mimic his every gesture. I watched his unmoving hands. Studied his face as it pulled into pucker-lipped focus. I heard him moan a bit, give what later I came to think of as an almost erotic sigh. I walked in his wake while he circled the site he'd figured was most promising. After handing me his rod, he pulled a pendulum out of his back pocket, a heavy hex nut soldered neatly to a length of jewelry chain. I noted his head move left and right as he gathered confidence that this was it, the mother lode.

— Dig here, he told the neighbor who had hired him to dowse, after several deep percussion drillings by the professionals had turned up nothing but pulverized crusher run and sulfuric air. —Hundred and forty-two foot, he said, emphatic as natural law.

I waited, quiet and full of admiration, not quite knowing what I was witness to here.

— That's all the deeper we got to dig? the man asked.

— Strong vein, too.

— But we drilled the better part of a thousand foot in other spots.

— Makes you feel short, don't it.

This was the dairy farmer down the road, from whom we would get free fresh milk and guano-dappled eggs and home-cranked lamb sausage in perpetuity, thanks to Nep the local water witch—I'd later wonder why they weren't called water warlocks—having discovered the plentiful underground stream in his otherwise dry upper pasture. He's dead and buried now, is good Mr. Russell. He was the one who gave me that little white pony who was a hobbler but as smart as a quirt.

S
TARRY NIGHT, THE DIPPERS
high above. And the moon rising, bleaching the evening air so the grass looked like it had been dusted with bone meal. Moon reminded me of a peach pit. It was chilly out. Cold enough for me to see my breath, like a bit of March in May.