The Secret Book of Paradys (71 page)

“Good Lord, don’t worry about that,” said Chorgeh, flustered for an instant. It seemed likely the women would reckon him in some way responsible for the girl’s faint. Metaphysically, was he not?

Then the pharmacist came, and after a cursory examination of the girl, declared she was feverish and must go home at once.

Chorgeh stood there with his heart beating violently, in the presence of the insanely wicked and bizarre. Evil was a palpable entity in the shop, bending to the women, its tattered wings and skull face glaring intently and specifically above Olizette. It was as if Chorgeh had invoked it, by his arrival, his quest, his query concerning Julie d’Is, Angel of Pestilence.

“Oh, how am I to get to my room?” said Olizette, made childish by her weakness. “Oh dear, oh dear, what shall I do?”

And Chorgeh rushed out to fetch a cab, into which he and a woman of the shop next bore Olizette, who was now touchingly crying from embarrassment and feebleness.

Every bump of the wheels and hoofs on the journey caused the poor girl to gasp and moan.

“There, there, Olizette,” reiterated the useless woman. “She’s
never
ill,” she added to Chorgeh over the dark, drooping, flowerlike head. “A country girl. Two years, and never a sniffle, never once a migraine or a fainting fit. And I myself, well I’m a martyr to them, monsieur.”

They reached Olizette’s room (set predictably in a conglomeration of chimney and flowerpots, rambling steps, skylights, and lopsided balconies, near the old corn market). Chorgeh paid off the cab. He then went to summon a doctor, taking all responsibility on himself. It was his fault.

“I don’t like the look of this,” the doctor said to Chorgeh, on the landing. “You are the young woman’s protector?”

“If you like,” said Chorgeh, disdaining the explanatory truth.

“Then someone must be got in to look after her, a nurse. She must have fresh fruit, broth; cream and eggs as she improves.”

Thus it was not cakes that Chorgeh presented to his mother. It was a plea for an increment upon his allowance.

“If you must know, I have a girl. I must give her a present, mustn’t I, now and then?”

“I’m not interested in the silly details. Is she clean? Does she love you? I trust that you do
not
love
her
? Very well.”

During the month of Olizette’s illness, Chorgeh visited her once a day, in the afternoon. He brought flowers, fruit, and later boxes of confectionery – she did not like cakes. Her plumpness had melted from her, and the paleness and
slightness of her debility made her ethereal. Although he did not in the smallest degree “love” her, Chorgeh was very taken with her, had become fond of her, as one may with a docile and pleasing invalid one has chosen. Their words were affectionate, and soon familiar, but quite decorous, and the nurse was always in the room with her tatting, or just along the way making soup.

Chorgeh’s mornings were spent on quite another woman. It was not that he made any contact with Julie d’Is, of course, only that he had begun to spy on her movements, and to question, in a carefully blatant style, her neighbors, of whom she had several, all at a distance.

Both activities, the caring visits to the pastry seller, the observation of a poisoness, were united, being two halves of a whole.

He learned a great deal more of Julie than of Olizette. Olizette told him everything he wanted to know, and her entire simple life was soon before him, lacking all complexity. But Julie’s life was if anything more simple, there was no information to be had solely because nothing happened to her. From the comments of those in her vicinity, who seldom any way saw or noted her, and from his own scrupulous view of her doings in the quiet and normally deserted street, Chorgeh was quickly privy to her existence. She ventured out, this viper, about twice a week, to purchase groceries and feminine articles (he followed her where he could). Sometimes after these excursions she also took a turn in a park nearby. Her face was always blank as a stone. She must surely be frustrated, maddened by this solitary limbo, her lack of volition, yet quite inarticulately and hopelessly, for she seemed to
want
to do nothing more than she did. She did not, when indoors, ever appear at her window. (He had soon located her address, her room – which had no flowerpot, no lamp, and which on the few evenings he had overseen it at dusk, turned to dusk also, and lit no light – did not alter. Even once at midnight he had passed, and there it was, a black oblong, empty. It was as though, on entering her domain, Julie d’Is ceased to be alive or actual. And perhaps this was so.)

As the “uncle” had said, to poison must represent her only passion. All she lived for, dreamed of. And yet, visiting those same places where she made her purchases quite regularly, Chorgeh found no such startling evidence of her malignity as he had in Olizette’s pastry shop. Evidently Olizette had been unlucky, perhaps because she had been alone with Julie for several minutes. Possibly too the murderess did not strike on her own territory, but always outside it.

Meanwhile long leading conversations with the latest victim gave no clue as to
how
Julie had managed her work: Olizette herself was ignorant of having been practiced on, and Chorgeh naturally did not enlighten her. He was legitimately afraid of how such knowledge might affect Olizette, for even while she improved, on some afternoons there were lapses; he would find her
very white, trembling, saying that she ached from head to toe, or that the mild winter light troubled her eyes. The doctor had already ceased calling,
he
was sanguine, but Chorgeh treated the girl with caution. For the doctor had not understood the case at all. In answer to Chorgeh’s probing, the doctor had remarked on the foolishness of young country girls in the City, infected by its fumes, living on cakes, neglecting their well-being in favor of unsuitable romances.

Chorgeh had one image. He nurtured it. It involved the stone-faced serpent Julie d’Is leaning slightly forward to take her pastry, and scratching the fingers of Olizette with the underside of a thin silver ring. By now Chorgeh had glimpsed such a ring on Julie’s finger. (Had not the Borgias used a similar device to cart off whole table-loads of enemies?) By the time he had noticed the ring, however, he could find no cut or scrape on the smooth hands of Olizette, though he examined them meticulously, telling her he would read her fortune. Obviously, so slight a wound would have healed by now. He had been lax, too late. Another black mark.

“Good gracious, Chorgeh! It isn’t suitable. After all these years! Mother will think you’ve come to court me.”

“Your mother is far too sensible, Sandrine, ever to think that.”

Like a butterfly, Sandrine hovered over the ornate and overdressed drawing room, in a tense powdery light. He had not seen her, it was true, save at a remote distance – across salons, at the end of fashionable avenues – for five years. She had improved visually, but not necessarily in any other way.

“Well, sit down. You shouldn’t be here. Mother will be out for hours.”

“During which time we can get up to the most scandalous activities.” Sandrine giggled. Encouraged, Chorgeh said, “Tell me everything you know about Julie d’Is.”

“Who is Julie d’Is?” asked Sandrine, in such a voice that he knew she recalled perfectly.

“A dear little girl,” he said, “with whom you used, once, to play. Now a woman, looking I’m afraid a great deal older than you or her years. In rather impoverished circumstances. Retiring.”

“I remember …” said Sandrine. “… Julie d’Is.” She went slowly very pale. Chorgeh watched, interested. “I haven’t seen her since I was ten.”

“But your playmate.”

“
Never
,” said Sandrine vehemently. She shuddered. “Even now, at the very thought.” She got up, paced over the room, and back again, and standing there before him said dramatically, “That child was a beast, a hobgoblin. Ugh! We were all terrified of her. She could make you die. She’s done it. She never said so. She never said anything. To the adults it was all
May I
and
Thank you
. When she was with us, she would just sit there. She
was
older. Her eyes were down. She had horrible eyes, small and sharp, cold and colorless. And long lashes, not beautiful, but like a sort of fence, as if to stop anything getting by. Then her mother would call for her, such a poor silly woman. We had a rhyme – how did it go? I can’t think – but it was about Julie d’Is whisking you down to Hell if you didn’t watch out.”

“How did you know she was a hobgoblin? Apart, of course, from her eyes.”

“Because the kittens died. And then Alyse, and Lucie. Surely you’ve heard?”

“But why a hobgoblin? Wasn’t she just a poisoner?”

“A
child
who poisons?”

“Why not?” said Chorgeh. As a child, he had once or twice considered the method.

“There was a story,” said Sandrine, at the fireplace where the dried flowers still stood petrified, stiff on their stalks as she now was on her stalk of dress. “Julie d’Is was a
changeling
.”

“Ah,” said Chorgeh.

“You can laugh” (he had not) “but when they were in the East, the silly mother offended a sorcerer. He was an old man who came to the kitchen door in rags, and she had the servants chase him off. But he was powerful, it was all a test or prank. If she’d been nice to him he would have blessed her, but she wasn’t, so he exuded a curse. Madame d’Is was carrying two babies, twins. But when she gave birth, one baby vanished. And the baby that was left was changed. It stopped being wholesome and like a baby. It became this awful cold-eyed stony little toad. It became Julie.”

“Yes,” said Chorgeh. “But what about the other twin?”

“I suppose Julie killed it,” said Sandrine flatly, “and they wrapped it in a shawl and the nurse took it and threw it in a reedy swamp. They couldn’t tell anyone. It was too disgusting.”

“Yes,” Chorgeh said again. He imagined the two little girls lying in their cradle under the mosquito net on some veranda, the one child in the stasis of death, the other in the static condition of concentrated being that Julie d’Is so oddly evidenced. And then from Sandrine’s facile and foolish words he contrived the exact perfect image, the nurse-woman with eyes of slanting slate, bearing the dead bundle, casting it in like a failed Moses, for the gurgling mud to have, and the frogs chirruping and the strange orient pearl of the moon watching from the trees. Through its curiosity this last picture was made to seem true. He believed it, even though knowing how and why he was convinced.

“How is it you suppose she manages her crimes?” he said to Sandrine.

“Oh,” she said, simply, “it’s Julie herself, isn’t it. She’s poisonous. Like certain substances – if you’re near them, they can kill you. Julie is like
that
.”

They had little cakes, and he thought of Olizette, and that he would be late to see her today, but never mind, he would stay with her until dinnertime. He had seen some bright flowers for sale, to his townsman’s eye fresh from the country, and he would take her those, and perhaps some wine. He was growing faintly bored with Olizette, in the most gentle and patient of ways. After all, she was almost well, and had yielded no clues, and what could they talk about?

When he was sufficiently bored with Sandrine, which happened fairly soon after the cakes, Chorgeh made charming excuses and left. Sandrine seemed disappointed, and he realized with surprise that she had really not believed in his mission at all, she imagined Julie d’Is to have been only an impulsive ploy to visit.

With Julie d’Is he was not bored at all. He felt for her a wild sheer loathing quite novel to him, quite energizing.

When he reached the apartment house of Olizette, among the pots and steps, the sun was on the edge of the City, hesitating for a moment. The shape-changer light of dusk already flooded the street. Chorgeh saw the doctor’s carriage there in it, like a stone in a river. Somehow Chorgeh was not startled by this. He felt a sinking in his belly, but it was neither alarm nor regret.

He went up, and met the doctor again on the landing. The doctor regarded him with dislike, resentful of an added burden. “You must prepare yourself, monsieur, for very bad news indeed.”

“She’s dead,” said Chorgeh.

“A sudden relapse. The woman called for me as soon as she saw what went on.”

“Did the girl have a priest?” Chorgeh asked anxiously, for he had learned enough of Olizette to realize she would have wanted one.

“Yes. He is there now.”

Chorgeh went into the room, and when the priest glanced up Chorgeh said directly, “Please understand, Father, that the young lady was befriended by me, nothing more,” for now getting the facts of her chastity straight seemed imperative for her sake.

She looked shrunken and elderly as she lay in the bed. Worse, she looked like nothing at all, like discarded washing, an old dress.

Chorgeh stared at her with heartbreaking sympathy.

The priest began to try to comfort him, and Chorgeh, perturbed, went away at once. It seemed there was a brother-in-law who had been summoned, and all the arrangements now were in hand. Even the priest had known
Olizette, her character and means – there had not needed to be, after all, any embarrassing explanations.

On reaching home, Chorgeh found his mother had filled the house with guests. They were everywhere, like a plague of well-dressed mice, squeaking and waving their paws. Of the writer “uncle” there was no sign, however, and Chorgeh was consumed by the detestation of a man whose last bolt hole had been soiled and overturned.

“Good evening, dear. Do change your clothes and join us.”

He wanted to seize his mother by the throat, shouting in her face that she had ruined him, how dare she – But she had all the rights, and he none.

“I’ve a terrible headache,” said Chorgeh. “I must lie down. If I’m better, I’ll make my entrance later.”

He went to his room and locked the door from the outside, to mislead anyone who came to seek him. Then he removed to his father’s study and shut himself in there.

There was a faint odor of leather, tobacco from a sacred jar. The room was protective of Chorgeh, securing him. In a closed drawer, skillfully negotiated, Chorgeh found what he was looking for. Prior to dying, the father had initiated the son into a number of the male mysteries. If he had lived, possibly they would not have got on at all, but death had flung a glamorous veil over their parting and their relationship. Everything that Chorgeh’s father had ever said to him or taught him, Chorgeh remembered vividly.