Angelique - Part 5. The Court of Miracles Chapter 2 - Read online

“DON’T BE AFRAID,” said Calembredaine.
He was sitting on a stool before her. His enormous hands were propped on his knees. A candle in a beautiful silver candlestick on the ground struggled against the wan daylight.
Angflique moved and saw that she was lying on a litter on which an impressive quantity of cloaks of all kinds and colours were heaped. There were sumptuous velvet cloaks with gold braid, such as young noblemen wear when they go to play the guitar under the windows of their mis¬tresses, and others in rough fustian—travellers’ and merchants’ comfort¬able coats.
“Don’t be afraid . . . Angelique,” the bandit repeated.
She stared at him wide-eyed. Her mind was unhinged. For he had spoken in the dialect of Poitou and she had understood him.
He raised his hand to his face and at one stroke tore the fleshy protuber-ance from his cheek. She could not help uttering a nervous cry. But he was now tossing back his dirty hat which took with it a wig of bushy hair. Then he untied the black patch he wore over his eye.
Angelique now had before her a young man with rough features, whose short black hair curled over his square forehead. Deep-set brown eyes under bushy brows were gazing at her. She put her hand to her throat; she was choking. Her cry was stillborn. At last she mumbled like a deaf- mute who moves her lips and does not know the sound of her own voice:
“Ni . . . cho . . . las.”
A grin broadened the man’s lips.
“Yes, it’s me. You’ve recognised me?”
She glanced at the awful disguise that lay scattered on the ground by the stool: the wig, the black eye-patch. . . .
“And it’s . . . you who are called Calembredaine?”
He stood up and fiercely struck his fist against his chest.
“That’s me, Calembredaine, the Illustrious Scamp of the Pont-Neuf. 1 have made my way, haven’t I, since we last saw each other?”
She looked at him hard. She was still stretched out on the litter of old coats, unable to move. Through the barred loop-hole a fog thick as smoke was penetrating into the room in slow wreaths. Perhaps that was why this tattered personage, this Hercules in rags and a black beard, who was striking his chest saying “I am Nicholas. ... I am Calembredaine,” seemed to her like an unreal phantasy.
He began to walk up and down without taking his eyes offher.
“The forests are all right when it’s warm,” he said. “I worked with the salt-smugglers. And afterwards 1 found a band of men in the forest of Mercoeur: former mercenaries, peasants down from the north, escaped galley-slaves. They were well organised. I got in with them. We held up travellers for ransom on the road from Paris to Nantes. But the woods are all right only when it's warm. When winter comes, you’ve got to make for the towns. Which isn’t so easy. We did Tours, Chateaudun. That's how we got to Paris. Oh, we had the devil’s own time with all those beggar- and rogue-chasers at our heels! Those who got nabbed at the gates had their eyebrows and half their beards shaved off and—hop, back to the country, .back to your smoked-out farmstead, your plundered lands and your battlefield. Or else off you went to the General Hospital or even to the Chatelet, if you happened to have a piece of bread in your pocket which the baker’s wife gave you because she couldn’t do otherwise. But I discovered good spots for slipping through cellars that communicate from one house to another, the sewer holes that end in the ditches, and, as it was winter, the ice-bound barges all along the Seine from Saint-Cloud. Skipping from one barge to the next, believe it or not, we all sneaked into Paris one night, like rats. . . .”
She said listlessly:
“How could you fall so low?”
He winced, then bent over her, his face contracted with rage.
“And what about you?”
Angelique gazed at her tom dress. Her untied, dishevelled hair was escaping from her linen bonnet.
“It’s not the same thing,” she said.
Nicholas’s teeth gritted and he snarled like a savage dog.
“Oh yes, it is! Almost the same thing . . . now. D’youhearme . . . slut?”
Angelique stared at him vaguely with a sort of distant smile. ... It was he all right. She could see him again as he used to be—Nicholas upright in the sunshine, with his big hands full of wild strawberries. And the same nasty, vengeful expression on his face. ... It all came back to her mind, gradually. He would bend over like this. ... A more awkward, rustic Nicholas then, but already out of place in the warmth of the little wood in springtime. . . . Passionate as a quivering animal and yet putting his arm behind his back in order not to be tempted to seize and abuse her: “I want to tell you . . . there was never anyone but you in my life . . . I’m like something that doesn’t belong and that keeps wandering here and there without knowing why. . . . The only place I belong is with you. , . .” Not too bad for a peasant’s proposal. But in fact liis real place was where he stood now, terrifying, insolent: a robber chief in the capital. . . . The place of good-for-nothings who’d rather take from others than trouble to work for themselves. That was already evident when he deserted his herd of cows to go and steal the snacks of the other little cow-herds. And Angelique had been his accomplice.
She sat up with a sudden jerk and looked at him with her green eyes.
“I forbid you to insult me. I’ve never been a slut with you. And now give me something to eat. Гт hungry.”
In truth, the hunger that gripped her was churning her stomach to the point of nausea.
Nicholas Calembredaine seemed stunned by her attack.
“Don’t move,” he said. “I’ll take care of that.”
Seizing a metal bar, he struck on a copper gong that gleamed on the wall. Immediately there resounded in the staircase a gallop of clogs, and a man with a half-witted look appeared in the doorway. Nicholas turned to Angelique, motioning towards the newcomer:
“Let me introduce Jactance. One of my cut-purses. But above all an outsize imbecile who found a way of getting himself put in the stocks last month. So I’m keeping him here to do the cooking until the customers of the market forget the shape of his nose a litde. After that we’ll put a wig on his head, and out with the scissors: look to your purses! What’s cooking today, good-for-nothing?”
Jactance sniffed and passed his sleeve under his wet nose.
“Pig’s feet, chief, with cabbage.”
“Pig yourself!” Nicholas bawled. “Is that suitable food for a lady?”
“I don’t know, chief!”
“It’ll do,” said Angelique impatiently.
The smell of food made her almost faint. It was really very humiliating, her feeling so ravenous at the most important and dramatic moments of her life. And the more dramatic they were, the more hungry she felt!
When Jactance returned, carrying a wooden bowl brimming over with cabbage and jellied giblets, he was preceded by the dwarf Barcarole. The latter cut a caper, then addressed a courtly salute to Angelique. His tiny plump legs and enormous hat rendered the gesture grotesque. His mon¬strous head was not lacking a certain handsomeness. Perhaps that was why, despite his deformity, he had immediately struck Angelique as likeable.
“I have the impression that you are not displeased with your new conquest, Calembredaine,” he said, casting a wink at Nicholas, “but what will the Marquise of the Polacks think of it?”
“Shut up, louse,” growled the chief. “What right have you to come into my den?”
“The right of the faithful servant who deserves a reward! Don’t forget that I was the one who brought you this pretty piece whom you’ve been ogling for ages in every part of Paris.”
“Bringing her to the Innocents! That was a bright idea. It was by sheer luck that the Great Coesre didn’t appropriate her and that Rodogone the Egyptian didn’t filch her from me.”
“It’s only right that you had to win her,” said the minute Barcarole, who had to throw his head back to look up at Nicholas. “What kind of a chief wouldn’t fight for his marquise? And don’t forget, you haven’t yet paid the whole dowry. Has he, my pretty one?”
Angelique had not listened, for she was eating greedily. The dwarf gazed at her tender-eyed.
“The best part of the pig’s feet are the little bones,” he said amiably, “it’s good to suck them and fun spitting them out. To my mind, apart from the little bones, you can have the rest.”
“What do you mean, the dowry hasn’t been paid?” inquired Calem- bredaine with a frown.
“Faith! What about the fellow she wants put out of the way? The cross-eyed monk. . . .”
The chief turned towards Angelique.
“Is that true? Is that what you want?”
She had eaten too quickly. Sated and filled with a dull apathy, she was stretched out on the coats again. To Nicholas’s question she replied with closed eyes:
“Yes, it must be done.”
“It's only right!” roared the dwarf. “Blood must sprinkle the paupers’ wedding. Ho! Ho! The blood of a monk. . . .”
He uttered horrible blasphemies, then, at a threatening gesture from his chief, fled down the stairs. Calcmbredame slammed the badly-joined door shut with a kick. Standing at the foot of the strange Utter on which the young woman was recUning, he gazed at her for a long while, with his fists on his hips. She opened her eyes.
“Is it true that you’ve had your eye on me in Paris for a long time?”
“I spotted you at once. With my men all over the place, you can imagine I am quickly informed of all newcomers, and I know better than they do themselves how many jewels they have and how one can get into their homes when midnight strikes from the belfry of the Place de Greve. But you saw me at‘The Trois Maillets’. . . .”
“How loathsome!” she murmured, with a shudder. “Oh! why did you laugh as you looked at me?”
“Because I was beginning to reaUse that you would soon be mine.”
She looked at him coldly, then shrugged her shoulders and yawned. She was not afraid of Nicholas as she had been afraid of Calembredaine. She had always dominated Nicholas. You don’t fear a man whom you have known as a child. She felt increasingly drowsy. She put one more question, vaguely:
“But why . . . why did you leave Monteloup?”
“Now there’s a question!” he cried, folding his arms over his chest. “Why? Do you think I felt like having old Guillaume impale me on his pike . . . after what happened with you? I left Monteloup on your wedding-night . . . had you forgotten about that, too?”
Yes, that, too, she had forgotten. Under her lowered eyelids, the memory of it came back with the smell of straw and wine, the weight of Nicholas’s firm body upon her and the unpleasant sensation of hurry and anger and of something left unfinished.
“Oh!” he said bitterly, “it certainly looks as if I did not take up much space in your life. And, naturally, you have never thought of me during all these years?”
“Naturally,” she confirmed casually. “I had better things to do than to think of a menial.”
“Slut!” he shouted, beside himself. “Be careful what you say. The menial is your master now. You are mine. . . .”
He was still shouting when she fell asleep. Far from upsetting her, this voice filled her with the sensation of a brutal but benevolent protection. He stopped short.
“And there we are,” he said in an undertone, “just as in the old days . . . when you used to fall asleep on the moss half-way through our squabbles. Ah well, sleep, my sweet. You are mine, anyhow. Are you cold? Do you want me to cover you up?”
She gave an imperceptible nod with her eyelids. He went to fetch a luxurious cloth coat and threw it over her. Then, very gently, he passed his hand over her forehead, with a kind of awe.
This room was really a very strange place. Built of enormous stones like the ancient dungeons, it was round and gloomily lit by a barred loop¬hole. It was filled with an array of multifarious objects, from dainty mirrors mounted in ebony and ivory to old iron scrap, work-tools such as hammers and picks, and weapons. . . .
Angelique stretched herself. Only half awake, she gazed around with astonishment, got up and went to look in one of the mirrors. Its reflection showed an unknown face: that of a pale girl with wild, staring eyes, like those of a ferocious cat watching its prey. The evening light added a sulphurous glint to her tousled hair. She threw the mirror away, fright¬ened. This woman with the hunted face of an outcast could surely not be she . . . ! What was happening? Why were there so many things in this circular room? Swords, pots, caskets filled with baubles, sashes, fans, gloves, jewels, canes, musical instruments, a warming-pan, piles' of hats— above all, coats, which, thrown one on top of another, composed the bed on which she had slept. A single piece of furniture, a dainty chest of drawers with inlaid wood from the West Indies, seemed quite out of place within these damp walls.
Inside her belt she felt something hard. She pulled at the leather hilt and withdrew a long, tapering dagger. Where had she seen that dagger? It had been in some deep, distressing nightmare, during which the moon had juggled with skulls. The man with the swarthy skin had held it in his hand. Then the dagger fell and Angflique had picked it up in the mud while the two men had wrestled and rolled on the ground. That’s how she came to hold in her hands the dagger of Rodogone the Egyptian. She slipped it back into her bodice. Her mind assembled confused images.
Nicholas. . . . Where is Nicholas?
She ran towards the window. Between the bars she caught a glimpse of the Seine, rolling its slow, wormwood-coloured waters and its incessant traffic of boats and barges under the cloudy sky. On the other bank, already swathed in dusk, she recognised the Tuileries and the Louvre.
This vision of her former life gave her a shock and convinced her that she was mad. Nicholas! Where was Nicholas?
She rushed towards the door and, finding it closed and double-locked, she hammered on it wildly, screaming, calling for Nicholas, tearing her nails against the rotten wood.
A key creaked, and the red-nosed man appeared.
11 What in hell arc you bawling for, Marquise?” inquired Jactance.
“Why was this door locked?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where is Nicholas?”
“I don’t know.”
He gazed at her, then made up his mind:
“Come down and have a look at the fellows, that’ll cheer you up.”
She followed liim down a winding stone staircase which was damp and dark. She was greeted by ?n increasing din of shouts, roars of laughter and children’s cries.
She emerged into a large vaulted hall filled with sundry characters. She caught sight of Wood-Bottom placed on the big table like a piece of beef on a dish. At the far end of the hall a fire was glowing, and Lightfoot was seated on the hearth-stone watching the pot boil. A big woman was plucking a duck. Another younger woman was holding a half-naked child between her knees engaged in the unsavoury occupation of debus¬ing him. Lolling all over the place on the straw thrown on the flat-stones there were old men and women, covered in rags, and dirty, tattered children fighting for food-scraps with the dogs. Some men were sitting around the table on old barrels, playing cards or smoking as they drank.
At Angflique’s entrance all eyes turned towards her and a comparative silence fell over the wretched gathering.
“Come forward, my girl,” said Wood-Bottom with a solemn gesture. “You are our chief Calembredaine’s woman. We owe you consideration. Come on, move aside, boys, and make room for the Marquise!”
One of the pipe-smokers nudged his neighbour with his elbow.
• “Nice bit, she is. Calembredaine for once has picked almost as well as
ii
you.
The other walked up to Angelique, and raised her chin with a gesture that was at once friendly and peremptory.
“I’m Pretty Boy,” he said.
She slapped down his hand with ill-temper.
“That’s a matter of taste.”
A roar of laughter shook the entire audience.
“That’s got nothing to do with it,” said Wood-Bottom, hiccuping with laughter, “it’s his name, Pretty Boy, that’s what he’s called. Here, Jactance, give the wench something to drink. I like her.”
Someone placed before her a long-stemmed glass which bore the crest of a Marquis whose house must have been visited by Calembredaine’s gang on some moonless night. Jactance filled it to the brim with red wine and made the round of the other goblets.
“Your health, Marquise! . . . What’s your name?”
“Angelique.”
The coarse, foul laughter of the bandits broke out afresh under the vaulted roof.
“Why, that tops it all! Angelique! ... Ha! Ha! Ha! An angel, fancy! There’s never been anything like it here. . . . But why not? After all, why shouldn’t we all be angels too! Since she’s our Marquise. . . . Your health, Marquise of the Angels!”
They roared, slapped their thighs; the din resounded like a baneful, whirling roll of drums around her.
“Yourhealth,Marquise! Goon . . . drink!”
But she remained motionless, gazing at the bibulous, bearded and ill- shaven faces all around.
“Drink, slut!” yelled Wood-Bottom, with his terrifying voice.
She faced the monster without answering. There was a threatening silence, then Wood-Bottom sighed and looked at the others with a dismal air.
“She don’t want to drink! What’s the matter with her?”
“What’s the matter with her?” came the chorus of the others. “Pretty Boy, you know all about women, try and do something.”
Pretty Boy shrugged his shoulders.
“Bunch of rats,” he said scornfully, “are you too blind to see that you can’t tame this one by yelling at her?”
He sat down next to Angelique and stroked her shoulder softly.
“Don’t be afraid. They aren't bad, you know. It’s just an air they put on to frighten the burghers. But not you: we already like you. You are our Marquise. The Marquise of the Angels! Don’t you like that? The Marquise of the Angels! It’s a pretty name, though. And it suits you, with your beautiful eyes. Come on, drink, little one, it's good wine. Comes out of a barrel from the port of the Greve; it has come waddling on its own feet right to the Tower of Nesle. That’s how things happen here. It’s the Court of Miracles.”
He raised the glass close to her lips. She responded to the sound of this caressing, male voice. She drank. The wine was good. It suffused her frozen body with a cosy warmth and suddenly everything became simpler and less terrible. She drank a second glass, then propped her elbows on the table and began to look around her. The stunted cripple gazed at her dismally like some monster of the watery depths. Was he instructed to watch over her? She felt no desire to run away, though. Where could she go to anyway?
Nightfall brought back to their lair the beggar-men and -women who lived under Calcmbredaine’s rule. Among them were many women who were carrying in their arms invalid children or babies wrapped in rags, whose shrill cries never ceased. One of them, whose face was covered with purulent pimples, was handed to the woman sitting by the hearth. The latter, with a deft hand, tore all the crusts off the baby’s face, passed a towel over it, and the little face was smooth and sound again. Then she put the child to her breast.
Angelique had been unable to suppress a shudder. Wood-Bottom grinned and commented in his raucous voice:
“You see, with us people get cured quickly. No need to go in pro¬cessions to see miracles. Here they happen every day. At this very moment there may be some lady devoted to good works, as they say, who is telling a friend: ‘Oh, my dear! I saw a child on the Pont-Neuf today, so wretched! Covered with blisters. ... Of course I gave its mother some alms . . .’ And they are quite pleased with themselves, the smug old cows. And yet it was nothing more than a few pellets of dried bread smeared with a little honey to attract the flies. Why, here’s Rat-Poison coming in. You’ll be able to leave. . . .”
Angelique gave him a questioning, surprised look.
“Never mind trying to figure it out,” he grumbled. “Everything’s been arranged with Calembredaine.”
The man called Rat-Poison was an emaciated Spaniard, so skinny that his pointed knees and elbows had pierced his garments. A sorry survivor of the battlefields of Flanders, he none the less affected swashbuckling airs, with his long black moustache, his plumed hat and, over his shoulder, a rapier on whose blade the corpses of five or six big rats were impaled. In the day-time the Spaniard wandered through the streets, selling products to kill these rodents. At night he supplemented his meagre income by hiring out his talents as a ’duellist’ to Calembredaine.
With much dignity, he accepted a goblet of wine, gnawed a turnip which he pulled out of his pocket, while some old harridans wrangled over the spoils of his hunt; he sold a rat for two sols. After pocketing the money, Rat-Poison gave a salute with his rapier and put it back in its sheath.
“I am ready,” he declared pompously.
“Go!” Wood-Bottom said to Angelique.
On the defensive, she was on the point of asking a question, then thought better of it. Other men had risen, the drilles or narquois, one¬time soldiers with a taste for pillage and battles whom peace-time had reduced to idleness. She saw herself surrounded by their gallows-birds* figures. They wore battered uniforms from which there still dangled the trimmings and gold braids of some princely regiment.
Angelique raised her hand to her side, under her bodice, to feel the Egyptian’s dagger. She was determined, if necessary, to sell her life dearly.
But the dagger had disappeared.
Rage overcame Angelique, whom the wine had excited and pulled out of her lethargy. Forgetting all prudence, she yelled:
“Who has taken my knife?”
“Here it is,” Jactance said at once in his drawling tone of voice.
He handed her the weapon with an innocent look. She was dumb¬founded. How had he been able to remove this dagger from under her bodice without her realising it?
Meanwhile, the same uproarious laughter, the horrible laughter of the beggars and bandits, burst out again—a laughter that would haunt Angelique for the rest of her life.
“A good lesson, my pretty one,” Wood-Bottom exclaimed.* “You’ll get to know Jactance’s hands. Each one of his fingers is more skilful than a magician. Go and ask the housewives in the market square what they think of them.”
“Nice blade, this is,” remarked one of the narquois, grasping it.
After examining it closely, he flung it back on the table, visibly scared,
“Hey! It’s the knife of Rodogone the Egyptian!”
With a mixture of respect and alarm they all gazed at the dagger, which gleamed in the candle-light. Angelique picked it up and slipped it into her belt. She had the impression that this gesture established her in the eyes of these wretches. They did not know in what circumstances she had got hold of this trophy of one of the gang’s most formidable enemies. A mystery hovered about it, surrounded her with a slightly perturbing halo.
Wood-Bottom whisded:
“Hey, hey! She’s smarter than she looks, the Marquise of the Angels.”