The Worm in Every Heart (8 page)

Much the same advice Jean-Guy remembers giving himself, not all so very long ago. Back when he lay enveloped in that dark red closeness between those drawn velvet curtains, caught and prone under the stale air's weight in damnably soft, firm grip of the Chevalier's upholstery.

But: “Citizen Sansterre!” A slap across the jaw, jerking his too-heavy head sharply to the left. “Are you tranced? I said, we couldn't find you.”

Well . . . you've found me now, though. Haven't you—

—Citizen?

The Chevalier's murmuring voice, reduced to an echo in Jean-Guy's blood. His hidden stare, red-glass-masked, coming and going like heat lightning's horizon-flash behind Jean-Guy's aching eyes.

He shakes his head, still reeling from the sting of La Hire's hand. Forces himself to form words, repeating:

“ . . . the Committee.”

“Gone, Citizen. Scattered to the winds.”

“Citizen . . . Robespierre?”

“Arrested, shot, jaw held on with a bandage. He'll kiss the Widow tomorrow—as will we, if we don't fly this stinking city with the Devil's own haste.”

Gaining a weak grip upon La Hire's arm, Jean-Guy uses it to lever himself—shakily—upwards. His mouth feels swollen, lips and gums raw-abraded; new blood fresh and sticky at one corner, cud of old blood sour between his back teeth, at the painful root of his tongue. More blood pulls free as he rises, unsticking the left panel of his half-opened shirt from the nub of one nipple; as he takes a step forward, yet more blood still is found gluing him fast to his own breeches, stiff and brown, in that—

. . . unmentionable area . . .

And on one wrist, a light, crescent-shaped wound—bruised and inflamed, pink with half-healed infection. A painfully raised testimony to dream-dim memory: The Chevalier's rough little tongue pressed hard, cold as a dead cat's, against the thin skin above the uppermost vein.

I have set my mark upon you, Citizen.

Jean-Guy passes a hand across his brow, coughing, then brings it away wet—and red. Squints down, and finds himself inspecting a palm-full of blood-tinged sweat.

“Dumouriez,” he asks La Hire, with difficulty. “Taken . . . also?”

“Hours ago.”

“Show me . . . to his room.”

* * *

And now, a momentary disclaimer: Let it be here stated, with as much clarity as possible, that Jean-Guy had never—hitherto—given much credence to those old wives' tales which held that aristos glutted their delicate hungers at the mob's expense, keeping themselves literally fat with infusions of carnal misery and poor men's meat. Pure rhetoric, surely; folk-tales turned metaphor, as quoted in Camille Desmoulins' incendiary pamphlets: “Church and nobility—vampires. Observe the color of their faces, and the pallor of your own.”

Not that the Chevalier du Prendgrace's face, so imperfectly recalled, had borne even the slightest hint of color . . . healthy, or otherwise.

Not long after his return to Martinique, Jean-Guy had held some brief discourse with an English doctor named Gabriel Keynes—a man famous for spending the last ten years of his own life trying to identify the causes of (and potential cures for) that swampy bronze plague known as Yellow Fever. Bolstered by a bottle or two of good claret and Keynes' personal promise of most complete discretion, Jean-Guy had unfolded to him the whole, distressing story of his encounter with the Chevalier: Shown him the mark on his wrist, the marks . . .

. . . elsewhere.

Those enduring wounds which, even now, would—on occasion—break open and bleed anew, as though at some unrecognizable signal; the invisible passage of their maker, perhaps, through the cracks between known and unknown areas of their mutual world's unwritten map?

As though we could really share the same world, ever, we two—such as I, and such as . . .

. . . he . . .

“What y'have here, Monsewer Sansterre,” Keynes observed—touching the blister's surface but delicately, yet leaving behind a dent, along with a lingering, sinister ache—“is a continual pocket of sequestered blood. ‘Tis that what we sawbones name haematoma: From the Latin haematomane, or ‘drinker of blood'.”

There was, the doctor explained, a species of bats in the Antipodes—even upon Jean-Guy's home island—whose very genus was labeled after the common term for those legendary un-dead monsters Desmoulins had once fixated upon. These bats possessed a saliva which, being composed mainly of anti-coagulant elements, aided them in the pursuit of their filthy addiction: A mixture of chemicals which, when smeared against an open wound, prolong—and even increase—the force and frequency of its bleeding. Adding, however:

“But I own I have never known of such a reaction left behind by the spittle of any man . . . even one whose family, as your former Jacobin compatriots might term it, is—no doubt—long-accustomed to the consumption of blood.”

Which concludes, as it ensues, the entire role of science in this narrative.

* * *

And now, the parallel approach to Dumouriez' former apartment—past and present blending neatly together as Jean-Guy scales the rickety staircase towards that last, long-locked door, its hinges stiff with rust—

Stepping, in 1815, into a cramped and low-hung attic space clogged with antique furniture: Fine brocades, moth-eaten and dusty; sway-backed Louis Quatorze chairs with splintered legs. Splintered armoires and dun-smoked walls, festooned with cobweb and scribbled with foul words.

On one particular wall, a faint stain hangs like spreading damp. The shadow of some immense, submerged, half-crucified grey bat.

Jean-Guy traces its contours, wonderingly. Remembering, in 1793 . . .

. . . a blood-stained pallet piled high with pale-eyed corpses left to rot beneath this same wall, this same great watermark: Its bright red darkness, splashed wet across fresh white plaster.

Oh, how Jean-Guy had stared at it—struck stupidly dumb with pure shock—while La Hire recounted the details his long day's sleep had stolen from him. Told him how, when the Committee's spies broke in at last, Dumouriez had merely looked up from his work with a queasy smile, interrupted in the very midst of dumping yet another body on top of the last. How he'd held a trowel clutched, incongruously, in one hand—which he'd then raised, still smiling . . .

. . . and used, sharp edge turned inward—even as they screamed at him to halt—to cut his own throat.

Under the stain's splayed wing, Jean-Guy closes his eyes and casts his mind back even further—right back to the beginning, before Thermidor finally stemmed the Revolutionary river's flood; before the Chevalier's coach, later found stripped and abandoned at the lip of a pit stuffed with severed heads and lime; before Dumouriez's suicide, or Jean-Guy and La Hire's frantic flight to Calais, and beyond—back to Martinique, where La Hire would serve as plantation-master on Old Sansterre's lands ‘til the hour and the day of his own, entirely natural, demise. The very, very beginning.

Or: Jean-Guy's—necessarily limited—version of it, at any rate.

* * *

1793, then, once more. Five o'clock on that long-gone “August” day, and the afternoon sun has already begun to slant down over the Row of the Armed Man's ruined roofs—dripping from their streaming gutters in a dazzle of water and light, along with the last of the previous night's rainfall. Jean-Guy and La Hire sit together at what passes for a table by the open window of a street-side cafe, their tricolor badges momentarily absent from sashes and hats; they sip their coffee, thus disguised, and listen to today's tumbrils grind by through the stinking mist. Keeping a careful tandem eye, also, upon the uppermost windows of Dumouriez's house—refuge of a suspected traitor, and previously listed (before its recent conversion into a many-roomed, half-empty “Citizens' hotel”) as part of the ancestral holdings of a certain M. le Chevalier du Prendegrace.

Jean-Guy to La Hire: “This Prendegrace—who is he?”

“A ci-devant aristo, what else? Like all the rest.”

“Yes, to be sure; but besides.”

La Hire shrugs. “Does it matter?”

Here, in that ill-fit building just across the way, other known aristocrats—men, women and children bearing papers forged expertly enough to permit them to walk the streets of Paris, if not exit through its gates—have often been observed to enter, though rarely been observed to leave. Perhaps attracted by Prendegrace's reputation as “one of their own,” they place their trust in his creature Dumouriez's promises of sanctuary, refuge, escape—and the very fact of their own absence, later on, seems to prove that trust has not been given in vain.

“The sewers,” La Hire suggests. “They served us well enough during the old days, dodging Royallist scum through the Cordelliers' quarter . . . ”

Jean-Guy scoffs. “A secret entrance, perhaps, in the cellar? Down to the river with the rest of the garbage, then to the far shore on some subterranean boat?”

“It's possible.”

“So the malgre Church used to claim, concerning Christ's resurrection.”

A guffaw. “Ah, but there's no need to be so bitter about that, Citizen. Is there? Since they've already paid so well, after all—those fat-arsed priests—for spreading such pernicious lies.”

And:
Ah, yes,
Jean-Guy remembers thinking, as he nods in smiling agreement.
Paid in full, on the Widow's lap . . . just like the King and his Austrian whore, before them.

Across the street, meanwhile, a far less elevated lady of ill-repute comes edging up through the Row proper, having apparently just failed to drum up any significant business amongst the crowds which line the Widow's bridal path. Spotting them both, she hikes her skirt to show Jean-Guy first the hem of her scarlet petticoat, then the similarly red-dyed tangle of hair at her crotch. La Hire glances over, draws a toothless grin, and snickers in reply; Jean-Guy affects to ignore her, and receives a rude gesture for his politesse. Determined to avoid the embarrassment of letting his own sudden spurt of anger show, he looks away, eyes flicking back towards the attic's windows—

—where he sees, framed between its moth-worn curtains, another woman's face appear: A porcelain-smooth girl's mask peering out from the darkness behind the cracked glass, grub-pale in the shadows of this supposedly unoccupied apartment. It hangs there, empty as a wax head from Citizen Curtuis' museum—that studio where images of decapitated friend and foe to France alike are modeled from casts taken by his “niece” Marie, the Grosholtz girl, who will one day abandon Curtuis to the mob he serves and marry another man for passage to England. Where she will set up her own museum, exhibiting the results of her skills under the fresh new name of Madame Tussaud.

That white face. Those dim-hued eyes. Features once contemptuously regal, now possessed of nothing but a dull and uncomplaining patience. The same wide stare which will meet Jean-Guy's, after the raid, from atop the grisly burden of Dumouriez's overcrowded pallet. That proud aristo, limbs flopped carelessly askew, her nude skin dappled—like that of every one of her fellow victims—

(like Jean-Guy's own brow now, in 1815, as he studies that invisible point on the wall where the stain of Dumouriez's escape once hung, dripping)

—with bloody sweat.

His “old complaint,” he called it, during that brief evening's consultation with Dr. Keynes. A cyclic, tidal flux, regular as breath, unwelcome as nightmare—constantly calling and re-calling a blush, or more, to his unwilling skin.

And he wonders, Jean-Guy, just as he wondered then: why look at all? Why bother to hide herself, if only to periodically brave the curtain and offer her unmistakable face to the hostile street outside?

But—

“You aristos,” he remembers muttering while the Chevalier listened, courteously expressionless. “All, so . . . arrogant.”

“Yes, Citizen.”

“Like . . . that girl. The one . . . ”

“At Dumouriez's window? Oh, no doubt.”

“ . . . but how . . . ” Struggling manfully against his growing lassitude, determined to place the reference in context: “How . . . could you know . . . ?”

And the Chevalier, giving his version of La Hire's shrug, all sleek muscle under fine scarlet velvet—

“But I simply do, Citizen Sansterre.”

Adding, in a whisper—a hum? That same hum, so close and quiet against the down of Jean-Guy's paralyzed cheek, which seems to vibrate through every secret part of him at once whenever the blood still kept sequestered beneath his copper-ruddy mixed-race flesh begins to . . . flow . . .

. . . for who do you think it was who told her to look out, in the first place?

* * *

In Martinique—with money and time at his disposal, and a safe distance put between himself and that Satanic, red-lined coach—Jean-Guy had eventually begun to make certain discreet inquiries into the long and secretive history of the family Prendegrace. Thus employed, he soon amassed a wealth of previously hidden information: facts impossible to locate during the Revolution, or even before.

Like picking at a half-healed scab, pain and relief in equal measure—and since, beyond obviously, he would never be fully healed, what did it matter just . . .

. . . what . . .

. . . Jean-Guy's enquiries managed to uncover?

Chevalier Joffroi d'Iver, first of his line, won his nobility on crusade under Richard Coeur-de-lion, for services rendered during the massacre at Acre. An old story: Reluctant to lose the glory of having captured three hundred Infidels in battle—though aware that retaining them would prevent any further advancement towards his true prize, the holy city of Jerusalem—the hot-blooded Plantagenet ordered each and every one of them decapitated on the spot. So scaffolds were built, burial pits dug, and heads and bodies sent tumbling in either direction for three whole days—while the swords of d'Iver and his companions swung ceaselessly, and a stream of fresh victims slipped in turn on the filth their predecessors had left behind.