Paradise for the Damned. - 21. Black Sleep

At least there was no need to fetch Amaline a present, Claude thought as he sank ponderously and morosely upon the bench. The quietness quivered and breathed fetor. The fire at the hearth was still steady, still bright, projecting dancing wispy blades on the wall. The dark framed the one window overlooking the front yard. On the table, the half-eaten craze of loaves and olives were littered. In times like these, Claude affirmed shakily, a thousand lunges was best.

But resolve did not quicken Claude to rise, the sudden cold gale did. He was listless and shivering by the window. The night was incomprehensibly black and vast. He thought there was still time to reverse his stubborn stance. Amaline’s request could be considered a call to action, the chance to seize his freedom. Mayhap Guy had freed him by his absence. But the idea of freedom—Claude narrowed at its alarming thrill. Whatever freedom was to be had in sightseeing oceans it was no more certain nor palpable out there in the gnarly dark. He remembered that foul-smelling day in one of the narrow streets that fed Le Rue de l’Empire, the half-moon helmets of Gaillhard’s guards, the hands clenching the hilts of their blades, the precipitous tumble in his heart. They bellowed, “Claude Severin,” but apprehended Antoine, with much ease in fact because in Claude’s haste to scramble away, he pushed the stunned sissy towards them. And he fled with one word emblazoned in his mind—Freedom.

The foretaste of freedom now was flavorless, dry, for as his vices were unnatural, freedom without the promise of godly retribution was unnatural. The judgment cradled him, loosened him to smile at the chestnut tree of shadows in the front yard. And he was firmer against Amaline becoming soiled and dishonored due to half-thought peregrinations. Goodness and happiness would be Amaline’s. Guy and perdition was his portion. One did not comingle flesh and spirit, but then one did not turn a woman’s request for company.

For the next few days, Claude was roiled with a storm of whipping thoughts. Bread tasted like sand, reading became an unending theatre of his worries, and still that question gnawed at him: should he or should he not fetch Amaline a present? On the fourth day, with the steady force of the morning light stealing in from underneath the bedroom door, the pitifulness of his isolation astonished him. He leaped out of bed and muttered madly, “She deserves not my concern.” His voice thinned out through the loneliness of the bedroom; the silence seemed to echo, to smell faintly of his fetor.

The day unfolded with the dull quivering like water dripping constantly inside his chest. He stamped his hands to his forehead and for an incomprehensible moment, hoped for Guy’s ignominious face to appear from wherever eldritch of blood drinkers.

If a man had happened upon Claude, they would be frightened of his heavy face, the eyes like black bitter olives, and perhaps remarked how a lad not yet two and twenty be could this viciously afflicted. What sorrow, what woe, what desolation could have broken his shoulders? But Claude, himself, could not take himself aback, as he pictured in weepy detail Amaline looking so dejectedly at him. Suddenly it made sense to him: women were such romantic mystical creatures. Surely with the same caprice with which she invaded his still, she would decide on the morrow to be sensible, to be the good woman and forget the thrills of travel. The thought resumed a wellspring of warmth within Claude, so much so that he could leave the window and skip lightly to his seat. A book, he affirmed again. He would haste to Toulouse to find a book, and in no time this awful, awful day would be all but forgotten.

But the following Sabbath, Claude was about to enter the church when the burly Quentin barred the way and demanded the whereabouts of his daughter.

***

“Amaline, Amaline,” yelled those voices in the granary, the sacristy, the bell tower, at the bakery oven, over the buckets of lye at the stream, while peddlers hustled tonics against winter agues. Amaline, Amaline rang, like Angelus bell shredding the lull of the afternoon. Neither the hibernating squirrels nor the lone stoat gave answer; neither abundant imagination nor selcouth dreams could provide a reason for the disappearance. Not the demons who spoilt wine, nor the bolus-eyed protestants, nor vagrants were to be seen. In various pockets of the newly seeded fields, black-shawled women congregated in threes and fours, sibilating the damned antiphon, “Ah the wench had run away and showed her true pestilent self.”

The woodcocks and stray dogs turned to Claude askance as he stood sentry over the night grading to dawn and the querulous fibrillations in his mind. Duty was somewhere about the four winds. West was Toulouse. East was Carcasconne. The south was Palmiers, the north Beziers. Amaline could be anywhere. And Guy? The imp was somewhere bathing in a fountain of valorous blood.

He would hare to the northern edge of town and shamble in a circular arc about Aurin, as though expecting to recognize Amaline among the black-toothed crones, the haggard dogs, the rough-humped steeds or in those damned wasps spoiling his view of cold sun. A full revolution later, his eyes and heart dimmed to the cruel brightness of the sky, he sighed away duty to the four winds. He had done right by refusing Amaline her mindless request. It was not his place to steal her innocence and introduce her to his morbid game with Guy, even if the cost was estranging himself to her. And he owed her nothing, certainly not the tonitruous pangs

But his eyes would limp towards the east, the blood-rimmed horizon, and Sabrine and her threats. Live bones and warm flesh were no bane against the undead. Amaline was impressionable, eager for something gaudy and glittery to blind her from the profound boredom of peasantry. God help him if Sabrine had something to do about her disappearance. He would, he would… His hands would tremble against the hem of his doublet. He would feel perspiration tickle his neck. The ridiculousness of this feeling on a threat that he could neither fight nor defend was made apparent, he marched for the empty succor of his cottage. The morning, now, was noisy, stupidly so with the birds cawing and quacking, with men insisting on God and His good morning. And Claude would doff stiffly his hat with a smile too lights to perk up his lost eyes. Perhaps after the third or sixth greeting, he would stop unexpectedly and feel the leaden dross of his legs, then he would remember the man he had abandoned, the man of whom he had no right to call his brother: Antoine.

The utter absurdity of comparing the man valiant and warm to the doltish girl made him splutter in rage. Antoine was brave against the guards of the Senechaussée while Amaline ran away because she wanted to see The Seine. If he he owed Antoine nothing, doubly so he owed her nothing. The morning would have ended with him stomping and stammering for his door, but today was different for Claude standing lone and barren at the church square.

“If she did not look as a wretched Mary Magdalene herself, God strike me,” said a hoary voice. “You profaned her, Spoilt her and turned her out. Oh would Martis know of your baseness.”

Claude turned incredulously to Antoine and his broken nose. His lips twitched as with the flutter of heartbeats and pulsating vessels. “Your tongue is ever full of lies. Mayhap, I rip it out.”

Perhaps Claude should have been more conciliatory to Alphonse because the next day, Aurin was abuzz with Antoine’s insinuations. The sneer from the old Berta at the communal backery who used to lovingly ply him with chestnut loaves, he took as the sign to leave for Toulouse. Peace was there. University was there. And perhaps a new future for the new Claude.

He did not delay. A few books, Guy’s good clothes, ten livres in Guy’s bottomless chest of coins should keep him till he arranged something with the rector of the university. He felt a surge of curiosity, a new dawning in his life. Just like when he at a lad of thirteen sojourned from Palmiers to Toulouse in search of a life free nags and scolds of his widow mistress. A better life in Toulouse? He fell in with Antoine, moved in with Serge, surrendered virtue for victuals, saw his friend die a dog’s death and caught himself in a snare with a demon. Claude held his breath passed a moment in want of sanity. His human mark on the cottage, the clean hearth, the arranged cellar and its hanging roots and herbs, the clean inner chamber and its neat bed and neat dressers, he snorted at its stark ephemerality. But he took a moment to let the quietness within the familiar walls to impinge on his heart and emboss a small seal to nostalgia.

Claude flicked away the qualms, the febrile trembling in his digits and merrily flipped plans for a new beginning. Then he closed the door on the cottage for what he hoped would be the last time. Heaving his knapsack, he looked to the wind brushing his hair to the west. However, men seeded from the far copse of oaks and billowed towards him. Men with uneven beards, with straw hats, with hoses differing colors, with eyes cracked and black: Quentin, Leo, Martis, Alphonse… Paire Dennis, the village chief?

Claude snorted regretfully upon the muddy walkway of the cottage. He should have left last night. Unease loomed. He eyed uneasily the free right side for a needed exit. “God keep you, Quentin,” he called out.

“Where goes you, stranger?” Quentin said.

Claude twitched a smile, for now was not the time for icy feelings. “My tutor has called me to Toulouse.”

“Ah the tutor—the rake you mean,” Alponse said.

Claude looked down at the misshapen nose, his broken beauty and grunted, “And the coward defames a man when he is absent.”

Martis jostled to the front, yellow teeth baring, angular brows and all. “Alphonse swears you ravished her and then turned her out.”

“She spoke at length of her sweet heart towards you,” Leo said testily.

And thus the whore-starved peddler sticks his knife? Claude brooded, chewed a lip, gave a downward eye to the squirrel hiding behind the pear tree. “She saw me midweek. I told her to return to her father’s house. I take no man’s wife.” But he would take a wife’s husband.

"You knave—” The proud face was what was needed to break Martis’ tenuous composure. The man rushed Claude and would stamp hairy paws on his neck but Claude caught the hand midair. Eyes locked eyes, snarls marched snarls as they twisted and grunted for the upper hand.

“Quentin, ’tis you to blame. She cared not for his crooked smile, and you would marry her to him still,” Claude jeered as Martis grabbed a fistful of his colloar

With his other hand, Martis grabbed a fistful of collars. Claude grabbed his wrist and both of their hands were locked in a struggle. “Martis, she would rather turn whore than share your bed.”

“How dare you!” Leo circled him from the back and kicked in Claude’s shins. And the two men descended on the student. Alphonse scrambled gleefully to the melee, gave his own special kick to the blond head. Quentin recounted the omens of the evil scholar. Paire wailed the signs of a reprobate wolf in student’s clothing. And in the daze of their muddy kicks and sweaty punches, Claude smiled to the thought Guy being despoiled of his prize, and with that a large object obscured his vision and mauled him into a black sleep.