Paradise for the Damned. - 20. Chapter 20

Instinct was what he needed, Jean-Baptiste had said to Claude. Two hundred lunges at dummy a day would yield him the caninely perfect instinct that would hone his fencing skills. But in the middle of his thirty-seventh lunge, Claude brooded on instinct being useless, rather instinct was the wrong aim. The formalities of a duel robbed a man of the suzenrainty of the transgressed moment, robbed him of the might and right to expound the most deserved judgment. Alas, dueling, he deemed, a sissy’s game. No amount of practice would give him the skill to best Guy, but Betrada could deliver him from Guy’s bloodlust.

An inchoate plan was built in a brick by brick, not with directed concentration, but in the secretive moments—as he turned a page, as he washed a pot, as he spread the sheets on the bed. The very chance of salvation was almost infinite to bear. The very cause for hope was like the precious gem that one was too afraid to admire, and so all you could do was hide it under the bed, in the linen closet, under the bed again. The absence of Guy only made him more frightful of brazen thoughts. And deep down already, there was a calumniating of sentiments. Betrada might refused to help him, or worse, deliver him wholesale to Guy’s hands. But one had to try at the very least. If not Betrada, then some other enemy might do.

Meanwhile the days turned and roasted in his fitful calculations. The cottage had acquired a numbing sedateness in Guy’s absence. Lutes were not strummed. Voices did not bray. Wenches did not swoon at the appointed hour of fornication. Outside it was just as rebarbative. He sauntered by the oppressive insistence of the stream gushing, the oaks bleary and black; and where the stream veered north and the path continued eastwards, villagers edged by him in stony silence despite the incipient cheer of Christmastide.

Twelve days of Christmas. Twelve days of wine frothed with milk, the pastries passed from black-toothed wives to soot-faced wenches to mewling babes, the querulous caroling by unrough youths, black sleep and black silence on Guy’s whereabouts. Twelve French days of Montaigne: of idleness, of cowardice, of fear, of idleness, of cowardice, of fear... The feast of the Epiphany brought an end the farcical plays of boy bishops consorting with girl queens and at long last, Christmastide. Sanity should be assured until Shrove Tuesday. Claude was at loss to divine what teleological principle gnawed at him to buy Amaline a book.

A book had been Guy’s idea, perfect idea like he was perfectly formed. Worry stole more sleep than horror on Montaigne’s long-windedness. It was decided, a book. Yes, Montaigne. The funereal essays would suit Our Lady of Doom. Getting her the book should also make up for breaking Alphonse’s nose, defaming Sabrine a thick cow in the church square. At the very least, it should lift him one level higher in hell. Toulouse might have an Occitan translation, and he would have to go find it.

And so it would be to Toulouse Claude thought as he looked over the linen table and its sterile orderliness: the bone comb, the brass garters, the venetian-carved chest glimmering of lucre. Claude reached into the chest too hastily and counted out what was needed for the journey. Amidst the clinks of coin, the idea of finding his old friends in Toulouse again filled him warmly, as well as the thought of a wealthy lord needing his carnal services. But Guy would hate it if he did that, no matter what the tutor would claim of not caring about his filthy habit. Sadly too, he would not care for such things any longer because it would all too well fit what Sabrine claimed of him. The fundamental fussing with what people, beastly or human, would care of him, dumbed him and numbed him to desuetude. He had decided that evening after breaking Alphonse’s nose, never do his own way, and not care what these people wanted to of him. And now the idea of a book was oddly constricting and desultory. Amaline did not seem to want anything from him, but he, certainly, needed something from her

Queasily indecisive, Claude waded across the dim common room and to the door. But when he opened, a visitor stood in the confluence of light and the wind of dry leaves. A flower budded from within a hooded cloak.

“The demon has yet to take you.” Amaline eyed him as though he were a tree inching taller and taller still.

With a sprint in his heart, he leaned over the door and sought relief in her refulgent eyes. Those wakeful hours ruminating and ruminating over Sabrine’s poisoned tongue, he saw now in a flush of ignominious self-reproach, as useless.

“I was thinking of a good wedding gift for thee,” Claude said.

A smile flashed on her face, but fell in her hurried stance to aloofness. She moved past Claude without meeting her eyes with his; it left Claude a little unsettled about Martis’ reputed brash possessiveness.

She peered at the unlit hearth, rubbed her hands expectantly but remained her gaze over the dusty poker and ash-grey remains of the cold embers.

“Let me light a fire.” Claude walked over to the hearth, knelt by her scent of perspiration and tilled earth, and prepared with the striker.

After a few abrupt movements for a flame, she asked, “What were you thinking of?”

“On the gift?” Claude said, momentarily winded on fire needs. “A reticule, methought. Guy suggested a book.”

There’s a low look in her eyes as she looked over the hut, then she picked her steps to the bench, and sat down, gifts or books evidently not on her mind.

“Truly the Dona has entered a convent?” she asked with a mousy small air.

The question seemed to trigger an uprising of crackles and flames amongst the logs in the hearth. Claude backed away, breaths winding up at the auspicious phenomenon, and tarried in answering.

“It is as my tutor says,” he said resolutely, deciding quietly to attend to bread and olives to take his mind off the noisome Sabrine.

“Have you seen the sea?”

“No.”

“I neither. No one in Aurin has seen the sea either.”

“Perhaps your husband may take you to the Bordeaux or Carcasonne …. Mayhap in a better future, I see the sea,” Claude said, half in thought over the chestnut loaf that could be shared as he rummaged through the larder. “But not now.”

“Methinks a scholar ought to know and feel of real things, not lettered imaginations.”

Her tone struck Claude something of an old rusted brittle thing. He glanced back to Amaline now seated at the table, in flowing creases of browns and duns, an inapproachable distrait air supporting her high-backed pose. He gulped, pictured ferociously of Sabrine’s illicit lessons.

“There’s a season for study and a season for travel,” he said cautiously.

Drumming for an upbeat feeling, he jumped back to the larder and the musky smells of dry fruit. Throughout his domestic peregrinations, Amaline was silent. Somber shades colored the window view and leaned upon the quietude slagging and tearing, a precarious feeling of autumn, an irrefrangible twilight.

Claude endeavored to buzzing cheer as he placed loaves and olives before her eminence. “Methought, I would get you a book for your wedding.” His voice strained for a good high tone.

“What good is reading to a peasant wife?” She turned away from the grey brick of the loaf and narrowed her attentions to the something mysterious, blackly fascination, perhaps foreboding Claude thought, upon on closed door. He sighed, thought defeatedly that she was being the dour lady of doom again, and in something intricate fashion, he had been the cause of it. And it was too much and too depressing for him to understand. He went forward and broke the loaf for her, smiling big to her firm sculpted lips.

“Please eat something.” He sat across from her, tasted an acerbic tart olive, deemed it toothsome. “You know a kiss on the perfect places might change Martis’ mind to your fancies.”

A bright doily of red flashed her cheeks as she wobbled a little in embarrassment. She grabbed a piece of bread, stuffed her mouth, then an olive and another olive. Smiling smugly, Claude leaned on the table, leering rakishly into her trembling eyes. This was the old Amaline he remembered, rough, naïve, and irrepressibly amiable.

“What a bland wife you would make,” Claude teased. “Fret not. His good kisses shall turn you bright and wild—”

“Come away with me to see the Seine.” Her eyes widened then fell precipitously as though she had saved up all her mettle for those few words, and now spent and sallowed at its disbursement.

Claude looked away, awash in inchoate impressions. The impropriety in the request, the morass of quandaries, the muddled logic, the tangled matters of reputation, were all drained into his cauldron of fears. The moments were laid to the silence of private reproach, and then he rose in feeling. “You are to be a woman married.”

She shifted in her seat and pointed here eyes determinedly at his. “Dona Lefevre said it was a sad thing for a maiden to be married without trying a half dozen kisses first.”

Ah Dona Lefevre, Claude oohed to himself. Sabrine had done more damage than he had thought. “Then kiss me a dozen times and put aside rashness.” Rushing a loaf to his mouth, he just as soon regretted his offer, and then continued more staidly, “I would not take a maiden away from her good day.”

“What care you for good manners? You broke Alphonse’s nose.”

“He impugned on my name,” Claude said hotly.

“Hah! Would I that I return blood and bravery for your black words. You would have more than broken noses.”

Claude laughed away ludicrous thought of Amaline being violent. “Deo Gratias. God has seen fit to make you a woman and I a man.” He paused to recalibrate to the seriousness her request demanded. “If Martis pleases you not, ’tis a simple thing to refuse his hand.”

Her eyes withered upon the Claude’s face. “And?”

A great chance was staring at Claude. The whole of France lit up before his eyes in renascent splendor. Take her, find a paradise in the mountains of Cevennes, in the flatlands of the lower Garonne, or over the wrinkled vastness of the sea? But as the pride of adventure flushed in his breast, the thought of Guy jarred.

“I am not the man for you.” Words balled in his throat, heavy, tight. “Martis had more wealth, more standing, more honor than I. You shall do good here. You will be close to everything you hold dear. My cup holds no surcease for you…” His words failed to sight of her lips twitching and twisted. The table rumbled and with it, Amaline, the back of her hands deep in her eyes, arose and swept wrathfully to the door.

“Come now Amaline, I shall get you a fine book for wedding gift, Montaigne—”

“Verily, an unfeeling beast. Say you despise me and be done with your blade.” The flash of her brown skirts brushing against the door was all that blotted the white daylight, then she was gone.

The room still quivered with Amaline’s words, and Claude struggled within its reverberations of reproach. Her voice approximated Antoine’s voice chiding him. Beast, she had called him. Beast—the word molded the idols of horns, fangs, broken bones, not his mortal self. But those vines grew thicker and heaviness burdened, and ere long he darted out the door. The cold startled him. The sun, shining palely through the haggard trees, was playing tricks upon him, for its light seemed to have swallowed his lady. His gaze swept from sky to ground, east to west for the nucleus of something disorientingly alive. There was a figure, brown, broken, plodding beyond the dip in the road; immediately his heart roared, his body shook to action.

“Amaline!” She stopped, threw back a frightened look at him, chilling to him to the bone, before hiking up her skirts and scampering away. She was running away from him, Claude thought, running away from the pestilent dark of himself, just like Serge had done so long again. Christ’s blood! His heart shredded into all manner of madness. He bellowed, “Come back!”

He gave chase. The silvery line of the stream rushed by him, and the leavless blur of branches; and still Amaline hobbling away, shrieking for him to stay back and leave her alone. Disorienting, damning, Claude’s thoughts blared louder within the hard confines of his skulls. His blood boiled in his limps, driving him to run faster and catch up with her long hair unraveling from her coif. He had to tell her, it was his fault, not hers. He had to explain he was no beast, just a man alone and barren with no hope of salvation.

When her shoulder was but a few paces from his arm’s reach, she turned back, and her teary face was welted with horror. “Keep from me,” she screamed and drove harder on her heels. There was a mad zigzag over the grassy path, which terminated in her falling blindly into the broad back of someone else. They both tumbled to the ground. After a few moments of rolling and stumbling and tearful desperation, Alphonse’s face arose from underneath her sleeved arm.

Alphonse looked warily at the weeping Amaline sitting on her heels and then nastily at Claude. He had naught to say. Amaline had naught to say. But Alphonse looked the none satisfied as he dusted harshly the bits of grass and twigs from his hose. Still, a calm stole in amongst them with the cold gale from the north.

“Forgive me,” Amaline said to Alphonse, “I was not myself.” Careful to avoid Claude’s pleading eyes, she sniffed weakly, and tidily and gracefully, rose to her feet and floated down the path till the light washed her to whiteness. And Claude turned away from the hideous sight of Alphonse’s broken nose, foolish and forlorn.