Judith Rock - The Rhetoric of Death

When they reached his rooms, Charles pushed Pernelle through the door, shut it, and dragged the heavy carved linen chest in front of it. They collapsed onto the chest and wiped their sweating faces.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” he said in her ear. “Listen, this isn’t a busy passage, but you can’t let yourself be heard. When you have to talk, murmur, whisper.”

Pernelle nodded, dropped the costume on the floor and took off her hat with shaking hands.

Charles got wearily to his feet. “If anyone tries to come in-” He measured the bed’s height with his eyes. “I think you can squeeze under the bed. It’s not long till supper. I’ll bring you something. There’s water in the pitcher there.” He picked up the costume. “I’ll take this back to the classroom.”

Pernelle stood up, too. “It will be all right, Charles.” She smiled at him and the knot of fear in his chest suddenly didn’t matter.

When Charles reached the refectory, he saw that Pere Guise, who had not been at dinner, was also not at supper. And immediately began to wonder where he was. No, he admonished himself. He had, as the rector had kept warning him, let his dislike of Guise lead him astray. Let La Reynie do his own work now, at least until the show was over. Charles turned his attention resolutely to the beef stew and when he was finished, wrapped bread, cheese, and a peach in his napkin and slipped it into the bosom of his cassock. On his way out of the refectory, Le Picart stopped him. For an anxious moment Charles thought he was going to be questioned about the stolen food.

“Is all well with the show, maitre?” Le Picart said loudly, and drew Charles aside to the wall. Without waiting for an answer, he dropped his voice and said, “You saw that Pere Guise has not been at meals today. In case you are trying to make too much of that, I want you to know that I had a message from him. He was called to Versailles early this morning. To confess a very ill woman who has been failing for weeks now.”

“Ah.” Charles nodded, remembering Moulin’s acid portrait of Guise galloping off to save the soul of a sick old penitent at court. “Is there any news of Mme Doute?”

“None. M. La Reynie was here this morning to ask if I had heard anything. He is beside himself over her escape.”

“Well, I pray God-” Charles stopped, thinking of the unborn child and M. Doute and Antoine. “I hardly know what to ask of God, mon pere.”

“Nor do I.” Le Picart crossed himself.

Charles followed suit and made his escape.

He found Pernelle safely in his chamber, gazing pensively out the window. When she had eaten, he pointed to the bed.

“You have that, I’ll make a bed in the study. No, don’t argue.”

“We’ll take turns with the bed.”

He felt himself go hot at the thought of both of them in the same bed, even if not at the same time. “Fine.” He took his cloak and the extra blanket from the chest. “The pot is under the bed. I’ll use the latrine downstairs if need be.”

“Good night, Charles.” Her dark eyes gleamed in the shadows falling over the room.

“Good night.”

The Compline bells rang out, Charles said his prayers, and quiet settled over the college. But the prayers didn’t bring their usual peace and he lay awake far into the night, listening to Pernelle’s soft breathing from his bed.

Tuesday dawned gray and still, the air thick with damp. Charles roused Pernelle at first light and got her safely out to the stage. Pere Jouvancy was already there, fiddling with his beloved seven-headed Hydra, and Charles introduced the “boy” as Jean, Mme LeClerc’s stage-struck nephew-mute, but with good ears and wits-who wanted to learn to build stage machinery. Well disposed toward anyone who would take an interest in machines like his beautiful Hydra monster, Jouvancy said that since Mme LeClerc would be watching Antoine during tomorrow’s festivities, indulging her nephew was the very least they could do. So far, no one had given “Jean,” still enveloped in the flopping hat, a second glance. So far, so good, but Charles was finding the strain unnerving.

By late morning, he was supervising the last stage details, fanning himself with his list of things to do as he watched Frere Moulin crawl out of the Hydra and hand the clanking tool bag to the listless Frere Fabre.

“You did well,” Moulin told him, “I didn’t check all the mouths, only the last two you worked on. No offense, but I’ve been at this stage business longer than you.”

“Good, I thank you both,” Charles said, going to the front of the monster to look at its mouths, forced open wider now, so as to belch more smoke over the audience.

Moulin and Fabre dropped through the trapdoor to the understage. As Charles spotted Pernelle, coiling rope around a capstan, the dinner bell rang out and the rest of the stagehands streamed toward the lay brothers’ refectory. When everyone else was gone, Charles went below stage and found her sitting cross-legged against a huge coil of rope.

“All’s well?” he asked softly.

“Well enough.” She smiled and flexed her sore arms. “I never knew making theater was so much physical work!”

“I’ll bring you some dinner.”

“Good! I could eat a horse.”

“We don’t run much to horse, thank the bon Dieu-and the bursar-but I’ll do my best.”

By the time dinner ended, the humid heat trapped under the huge canvas awning felt like a foretaste of hell. By dress rehearsal time, sweat runnelled the actors’ makeup as they took their places and stung the musicians’ eyes and made them miss notes in the overture. In the prompt wing, Charles moved a little away from a taut-faced boy in painted canvas armor. If God sent them a breeze tomorrow, he hoped it wouldn’t blow the costumes’ ripening scent straight up the audience’s nose.

The overture ended and Charles and the soldier traded nervous grins as heels clacked on the other side of the curtain. Jacques Doute spoke the prologue, and Freres Moulin and Fabre, hidden from the audience, parted the halves of the curtain to reveal a forest whose green leaves seemed to flutter in the shadows cast by the candles fixed to the side flats. Jacques’s blue satin back shimmered in the candlelight as he bowed in the direction of the audience and swept offstage. Charles sent up a prayer that all would go smoothly below stage, where Pernelle would be leaning manfully into the gear wheels that moved the stage machinery.

Clovis conquered his way through the first act and the ballet cast took over. De Lille-Hercules had surprised everyone but Beauchamps by evolving into a thoroughly convincing hero. He slew the Nemean lion with panache, cut through the obstacles of three more entrees, and arrived triumphantly in the Hesperides. Clovis and his minions returned and Charles hissed occasional prompts from the tragedy script and scribbled frantic notes, licking his quill’s end when it threatened to dry, spattering ink as he dipped it in the little inkwell on the stool beside him.

As the next ballet entree began, he thrust his head around the flats to see how Maitre Beauchamps was faring. Wigless and bowing a full-sized violin, the ballet master directed his musicians with furious swings of his head, his flying silvery hair making him look like he was playing in a cyclone. Charles drew back into his downstage wing. The music, the dancers’ passion burning their movement into the air, the actors’ voices rolling Jouvancy’s beautiful Latin off their tongues-the beauty of it all wiped everything else from his mind and filled him with a piercing happiness.

When the ballet’s last entree began, everyone was riding high on a wave of success. On cue, the trap opened and the gloriously horrible seven-headed Hydra rose towering from hell. Glistening black and poison green, it rolled downstage toward its foes, red smoke belching from its yawning mouths as the lay brother crouched inside blew mightily up a cluster of long pipes. But only six mouths were belching smoke. Charles frowned and made a note. As he looked up, a pipe poked a hole in the monster’s canvas neck and a puff of smoke drifted toward Charles. The dancers didn’t notice. Feet flickering like hummingbirds, they bounded around the beast and thrust their spears at it. As Hercules balanced on the ball of one foot, his spear poised for the final blow, a pair of boots fell from the smokeless mouth and landed at his feet.