The Secret Book of Paradys Read online

  Conrad and another man caught the door-boy asleep at the stairfoot, hammered him on the head for fair measure and left him sprawled there. At the fat woman lying by the mouse-trap with her legs wide, some of them were tempted. They thought her only dead drunk. Her keys were taken. One mounted her. She quaked under him, gurgling, oblivious, and so was reckoned secure.

  Upstairs the gang ransacked the house, Jehan having informed them of what might be expected. Everything was found, even the chamber-pot, and the casket of jewellery, which last had only been inserted in the mattress, a common recourse.

  Thereafter, Conrad and others slung their arms about the neck of Jehan, and crowned him with a gold chain from the casket, and poured a cup of white wine over his head to christen him in their fellowship, when once the wine-barrels had been got at. They remained, throughout the acts of carnage and celebration, quiet.

  The house, so staid and safe without, was now inside a shambles. Only the kitchen had remained lit, and here at length they repaired, draped in the bed-curtains, toting their spoils, to drink about the laundry heap of the drugged woman.

  There was time enough. The City gates would not part until the dawn, still an hour or so away. Even if the old fellow returned, he could not get in the City till after sunrise, and by then they would be gone. What a surprise they had left him.

  “How Dwarf will cuss, how Fero will bite himself, when he learns what he missed!”

  On the floor the fat woman breathed only in jerks and gutterings. Her face was grey and her lips slaty. The herbs had been generous in amount.

  But the wine was good, and, not able to port it, they did not see why they should leave so much of it behind. The drinking went on, and in the middle Jehan sat on the table, looking under her or his lids, not speaking, scarcely-tasted cup set down.

  Then the dark that came in at the alcove chink turned to a deep grey light. They roused to be going. They did not want to be seen.

  As they stuffed the handy pouches in cloaks, surcoats, loincloths, with loot, there came sounds out of the speechless night. They were the hoofs of a mule that clucked along the cobbles, indeed, of two mules going in tandem.

  “Not here,” said Conrad, “God’s tail, not here.”

  But the mules picked delicately on, coming closer, coming to the door, and were there reined in. And now voices spoke outside the front of the house. A respectful mutter, an old man’s pedantic drone.

  “He’s rich,” said Scar-Nose. “He’ll have paid the gate crew to open the postern. Back early, rot him.”

  “When he’s in he’ll start a do. The world will come running.”

  “Then when he’s in,” said Jehan, “we must stop his mouth.”

  “I hear two of them, the old rat, and a young.”

  “Both mouths stopped,” said Jehan. She moved from the kitchen towards the front of the house and its large door. “This has a lock. Be ready.”

  When the large key turned in the large door, the inner space was waiting, lined by flesh.

  The old man came through, calling irritably to the porter-boy by name, his grizzled skull and fur-lined garment, his old body, creaking by a few inches from Jehan beside the door. Then, in the gloom, someone whacked him. The blow seemed to split his head across, blackish liquid spurted, and he fell into the vortex of finished deeds without a cry.

  Outside, in the twilight, the servant was giving his mule water from the trough by the well.

  Jehan called to him softly. “Sieur, sieur.” He turned, hearing a girl’s voice addressing him so politely. Puzzled, not dismayed, he came towards the door and found it empty and unlit. He was a young man, strong and comely. He stood framed against the dusk, as all their eyes, unseen, fastened on him. Then he moved inside.

  Two of the thieves took him at once. But he was not such easy meat as the old one. For some reason he did not shout as he evaded them, but his fists lashed out, his feet. The gang closed with him, and the walls seemed to totter, grunts were audible, now something went over with a thud, and there were oaths. As the battle swung, Jehan moved through it. She lifted her arm, with the knife Conrad had given her, she stabbed the servant in the belly. It was a death blow, but not quick enough. Dazed, amazed, he was sucking in his breath to scream and wake the dead. But Scar-Nose, an able hand, reaching over the young man’s shoulder, cut his throat before his voice could sound.

  Clambering across bodies, the thieves filed into the street and shut the door neatly. Conrad locked it tight with the key. Glancing at the mules, they rejected them, for they were over-ridden and besides conspicuous. The gang then broke in twos and threes or ones, and fled with bold strides away across Paradys and down, to the river, and over into the warrens beyond, losing all of itself as intended, Jehan with the rest.

  The young nun stood in the yard, and coming from her sleeping cell, Jehanine discovered her. The face of Marie-Lis was grave and pure, but had none of the smug melancholy of a true Madonna.

  “You weren’t in your bed at sunrise, Jhane.”

  (Jehan smiled under Jehanine’s skin. Why, did you come seeking me there?)

  “I was about early, sister.”

  “Yes.”

  “I was in the garden.”

  “You came from there. With a bundle of clothes.”

  “A piece of washing I’d forgotten, sister.”

  (Careless on this occasion, she had returned late. She had seen the ghostly shapes of two lay-sisters bending over the refectory well, and the phantom nuns wafting in a dawn mist from the church. Now, under her gown, a golden chain, and on the chain a little golden cross set with a topaz.)

  “But you roam at night, Jhane,” said Sister Marie-Lis.

  “Some nights, when I can’t sleep. How do you know, sister?”

  “Where do you go to, Jhane?”

  (Over the wall, into the blackness, into the night. You spy on me, but not enough.)

  “To the chapel. Or sometimes I sit in the garden.”

  “The nights are cold.”

  “My cell also is cold.”

  “We must endure, Jhane. We are not worldly, here.”

  “No, sister.”

  (And I washed off a dark stain in the dew. I thought of creeping to the other well, but it stinks, there must be a dead cat in it. And at the hostel’s well under the lemon trees you might find me. Why are you drawing so much water, Jhane? Dew was best.)

  “We know almost nothing about you, Jhane. The Mother has never interviewed you. It’s customary, after a time, to inquire if you have come to feel any yearning for the life of a Bride.”

  Jehanine lowered her eyes.

  “I haven’t, sister.”

  “Gaze on the window, Jhane, the Great Light, its petals of saffron and snow. Our Lord fell in his beauty, a shooting star. He brought light into the world. He asks only love.”

  Jehanine frowned. She said, “You told me, it’s never demanded. I won’t be a nun.”

  The air filled with shrieks. In a fashion, Jehanine had become accustomed to outcry. She did not respond, as did Sister Marie-Lis, who whirled about and spun away. Through the arch she went, into the churchyard. The noises came from the garden. Slowly, cautious now, Jehanine followed. She had a vision of the fat woman erupting in at the nunnery gate, rushing through, to stand screeching of villainy under the bare fruit trees. But Jehanine suspected the fat woman might be dead, that all of those at that house, like Pierre, might be dead. She felt neither satisfaction nor distress. She was mostly indifferent, except to a certain tidiness that all the deaths together seemed to present, like duties performed.

  The shrieks had ceased. Tawny fox-robes milled about the garden, clotted near the stinking ancient well. Across the turf the Mother was stalking. The nuns parted before her. She towered beside the well, imperious, ever a Queen Bee.

  “What is it? Why does this well stink so? Pah! What’s in the bucket?”

  A murmur. The Mother drew back. She crossed herself and touched her fingers to brow and heart. She did no
t look in certain health.

  Jehanine wandered close, and saw into the inner circle.

  “I drew up the bucket, Mother, to look … I thought some animal might have died in the well.”

  Jehanine had now approached near enough that she was able to look inside the bucket herself. She saw that it contained some murky water, and in the water a long pale fish with five fingers.

  “Merciful Lord,” said the Mother. “One of you run and kindle a lantern. It must be lowered. We must be sure.”

  Two of the nuns fainted, one setting off the other. Yet another hastened away to a withered bush, into which she vomited. The Mother stood like a statue.

  The lantern came, and they lowered it on a rope. And then there was a terrible wailing of lament and disgust.

  The Mother drew aside quickly from her scrutiny. She said, “I’ve seen the drowned before, from the river. This is not drowning. It is not a suicide. I must think. She must be raised.”

  When the Mother departed, and the nuns fell away into groups, Jehanine went to the well and looked down where the lantern still hung. Beyond the fearful stench and beyond the light, a girl’s body was wedged far down in the shaft. The water, and time, had acted on it, but also it seemed to have been subjected to fire, and to some cutting weapon: blasted and partly disembowelled it stuck there, mindlessly looking up with the remains of the face of Osanne.

  The body was not to be raised. It fell to bits and its entrails poured out.

  The Mother, kerchief pressed to her nose and mouth, instructed that logs be thrown in, then oil, and the whole set on fire. She was of course obeyed. At first, dampness seemed likely to wreck the scheme, but then the wood caught. A merry blaze leapt for a while from the chimney of the well, and a ghastly smoke gouted from it.

  “I have written to the Father of the order,” said the Mother. “Everything is explained. No suicide. I believe our daughter Osanne was struck by lightning. She bore the marks of it. God has gathered her home. We shall make a marker for her, and place it with the tombs of others who had died here in faith.”

  When the blaze sank, earth was shovelled into the well, and finally stones.

  “Thanks be to Christ,” said the Mother. She muttered some other brief prayer. She said, “We will pray for the novice Osanne.”

  All went to the church and prayed for Osanne.

  Late in the afternoon it rained, water after fire. The smoke still hung low in the garden, and the evil of the stench remained in pockets.

  Supper was a loathsome meal, for which very few had an appetite. The Mother did not appear. The young nun Marie-Lis lifted the cover of a book, not the Bible, but a theosophical work. She began to read to the silent and mostly motionless assembly.

  Behind the screen, Jehanine, hungrily eating her black bread and soup, heard the beauty of the voice of the young nun.

  “Why then did God so punish His formerly peerlessly beloved Son, made by Him an angel, a winged being of such power and beauty they are to men as men are to the little worms?

  “It was in a rage that God did so, as when a favourite child has gone against the parental edict. What will you do? God had asked him. I will create a universe, I will make men in the image of the angels, replied the errant Son. For this, his Father flings him from the sky.

  “For in his enormous wisdom, God knows that a world of men created must suffer, firstly the choice of good and ill, and the guilts and torments that attend upon both, and nextly must learn grief and disease, despair and death. God sought, in His compassion, to spare mankind, to deliver it from its very self. But our Lord said, Let them choose. And so he made the earth and peopled it. Then God said, If that is your wish, you I will exile. Go you into the very pit of that which you have made. And for the rest, let there be darkness on the face of the earth forever, that they may not be afraid, through seeing what they are, and what they are at. So God made darkness and it hung on the face of earth. But the Lord, our Saviour, said again, Let there be light. He stole then one flame of the seven divine fires of Heaven. And with this he fell, burning, like the morning star. The sun was lit from his flambeau, and all the stars, and the moon, and all the lights of the firmament. And when he had cleaved through the earth and fallen to the deepest depth of it, that pit too became fire, a furnace that warms the earth’s heart – a cleansing flame, the light of knowledge – until the world shall end.

  “And for this gift of fire, men loved him. And when he saw their love, the love of those he had created, Lucefiel in turn loved them.

  “Later, others of his brethren rallied to the banner of this Prince. They too exiled themselves from Paradise, and fell to earth and under it. From these he chose his captains, and on them his aegis lay as sternly as on his own self, and besides that, the furious censure of God. But to men the Lord gave only one commandment: Know what you are. But they forgot.”

  When the reading was done, and the chores of the evening were done, Jehanine slept until the bell of Matines. Then she was Jehan, and she ran over the plains of the nunnery, got over the wall, and was gone into the rain and darkness.

  Day by day the rain nailed heaven to earth. In the wintry night, the rain sighed and rushed and stamped. It was a curtain of disguise and a deflection of all other noises. It cleaned the spillings from the stones of Paradys, whatever they were.

  At the Imago now, the dwarf sat sometimes on his table in the upper room. He sorted through the sumptuous trinkets and the coins, and petted the clever thieves, though never Jehan, the cleverest, their leader in his default.

  “Jehan is a demon sent to guide us by Prince Lucifer,” said Conrad. “Jehan is one of Lucifer’s fair knights, a fallen angel. Sulphur hair and cat’s eyes. Pretty as a girl, sweet voiced as a girl. And charms the girls, too.”

  They gave the dwarf all their news, while Jehan sat by, yellow cat-eyes cast down. The dwarf gave them their news back again.

  “Three wicked murders at a house near the building Church. An old rich man and his servant in their blood, and the housekeeper poisoned, and every bit of wealth plucked from the place. The little boy can’t remember a thing, but he says he thinks a handsome youth knocked on the door and the woman let him in. But the boy’s wits are addled since the blow the murderers gave him.” Restrained, tense as dogs who have done a cunning trick and wait for bones, the thieves listened and said how bad a matter this was, a shocking state the City must be in when a rich man could be killed for his riches. “And another tale has it, a girl was honey-talked into letting in a young man at her window, but he brings his friends too, and while some have her down, others open the father’s coffers. Many drunkards have been waylaid coming from the Snake-Cock or the Blacksmith’s Inn, or on the South Bridge. Beaten senseless and their purses, their very boots taken.” Oh, a shocking state of affairs, yes, yes.

  The nights had been busy. Jehan was full of Mercury and went before them. (Remember how he stabbed the servant in the rich man’s house, not faltering?) Oh, they had known him for years, their Jehan. He was one of their own, and theirs, but polished brighter.

  Conrad twitched. He had a powerful lust for Jehan. One night Jehan might kill him for it. You may eat the apple but not twine the serpent with the maiden’s face.

  “Well, Dwarf, you like our antics?”

  But the dwarf said, “I’m thinking. Fero, fero. It will be a hard winter. The snow will fall. The river may freeze. Then Yule. And the year’s turning. The Janus festival, the Feast of the Ass.”

  The dwarf stared at Jehan. He had never, plainly, told Jehan’s secret. That Jehan had breasts and carried no dagger but the one in her belt, that Jehan lived by day in a nunnery, scrubbing the flags and sweeping the yards. Sometimes she slipped herbs into the drinks of their victims, opium, man-dragoras. The thieves did not suspect Jehan of that, only of witchcraft. Jehan was fey, lucky, a shining thing of Hell. They did not ask him where he went away from them, or where he came back from – he put on animal shape, or wings and flew behind the stars as they went o
ut. He sprang from the ground at the sun’s setting. Winter, the time of dark day and long night, that was Jehan’s country. They expected great events.

  There was no more Jehanine in any case. There was only Jehan by night and Jhane by day, which two names were one, only a letter differently set, if he-she had been able to read or write and had known it.

  Yet, as Jhane went about her work, always dutiful to the nunnery, modest and hard-working, again and again the young nun might be noted, standing observing her, or coming near she might say, “Search your heart, Jhane.”

  “For what must I search there, sister?” asked Jhane meekly. Jehan smiled and waited. In the interim, absconding, Jhane took care to leave during the offices, when Marie-Lis was in the church.

  “Come over the river,” said Jehan to the thieves. But of this they were wary.

  “The watch is fly-thick there now. Since our first visit.”

  “Follow me then,” said Jehan.

  The rain clattered like tin pans.

  Some glanced at Fero the dwarf to see what he would do. But the dwarf did nothing save finger the columns of coins, an earring of canary beryl. One voice, an equal share – a fraternity, honour among thieves. While, beyond that cross he had taken and not thrown into the communal pile, and the chain Conrad had hung on him for a garland, Jehan took nothing.

  All the robber band followed Jehan into Noah’s night.

  “We must build an ark, quick,” said the fat man.

  “Agreed. Let’s us wicked be saved this time.”

  Near the South Bridge they beheld a party of tipsy gallants with torches in the rain.

  “What now?” said Conrad.

  Jehan singled out a young man, blond as the old man’s servant had been. Alone, she approached him, and drew him aside from his friends who, in wine and rain not properly aware of his loss, went on over the bridge.

  He seemed to believe, when the gang surrounded him, that he had been in conversation with an importunate girl. They took his money and stripped him to his tunic and drawers, like a Roman, and the rain had stopped. The resin torch still burned on his cringing, their jovial circle – his purse had been full, and the coins beamed too.