Seven Stones to Stand or Fall Read online

  Dear Lord Jesus, don’t let me be sick!

  A small shuffling noise beside her made her open her eyes, to find Michael Murray regarding her with some concern.

  “Are ye all right, Miss Joan?” He smiled a little. “Or should I call ye Sister?”

  “No,” she said, taking a grip on her nerve and her stomach and drawing herself up. “I’m no a nun yet, am I?”

  He looked her up and down, in the frank way Hieland men did, and smiled more broadly.

  “Have ye ever seen a nun?” he asked.

  “I have not,” she said, as starchily as she could. “I havena seen God or the Blessed Virgin, either, but I believe in them, too.”

  Much to her annoyance, he burst out laughing. Seeing the annoyance, though, he stopped at once, though she could see the urge still trembling there behind his assumed gravity.

  “I do beg your pardon, Miss MacKimmie,” he said. “I wasna questioning the existence of nuns. I’ve seen quite a number of the creatures with my own eyes.” His lips were twitching, and she glared at him.

  “Creatures, is it?”

  “A figure of speech, nay more, I swear it! Forgive me, Sister—I ken not what I do!” He held up a hand, cowering in mock terror. The urge to laugh made her that much more cross, but she contented herself with a simple “mmphm” of disapproval.

  Curiosity got the better of her, though, and after a few moments spent inspecting the foaming wake of the ship, she asked, not looking at him, “When ye saw the nuns, then—what were they doing?”

  He’d got control of himself by now and answered her seriously.

  “Well, I see the Sisters of Notre Dame, who work among the poor all the time in the streets. They always go out by twos, ken, and both nuns will be carrying great huge baskets, filled with food, I suppose—maybe medicines? They’re covered, though—the baskets—so I canna say for sure what’s in them. Perhaps they’re smuggling brandy and lace down to the docks—” He dodged aside from her upraised hand, laughing.

  “Oh, ye’ll be a rare nun, Sister Joan! Terror daemonum, solatium miserorum…”

  She pressed her lips tight together, not to laugh. Terror of demons—the cheek of him!

  “Not Sister Joan,” she said. “They’ll give me a new name, likely, at the convent.”

  “Oh, aye?” He wiped hair out of his eyes, interested. “D’ye get to choose the name yourself?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  “Well, though—what name would ye pick, if ye had the choosing?”

  “Er…well…” She hadn’t told anyone, but, after all, what harm could it do? She wouldn’t see Michael Murray again once they reached Paris. “Sister Gregory,” she blurted.

  Rather to her relief, he didn’t laugh.

  “Oh, that’s a good name,” he said. “After St. Gregory the Great, is it?”

  “Well…aye. Ye don’t think it’s presumptuous?” she asked, a little anxious.

  “Oh, no!” he said, surprised. “I mean, how many nuns are named Mary? If it’s not presumptuous to be named after the mother o’ God, how can it be highfalutin to call yourself after a mere pope?” He smiled at that, so merrily that she smiled back.

  “How many nuns are named Mary?” she asked, out of curiosity. “It’s common, is it?”

  “Oh, aye, ye said ye’d not seen a nun.” He’d stopped making fun of her, though, and answered seriously. “About half the nuns I’ve met seem to be called Sister Mary Something—ye ken, Sister Mary Polycarp, Sister Mary Joseph…like that.”

  “And ye meet a great many nuns in the course o’ your business, do ye?” Michael Murray was a wine merchant, the junior partner of Fraser et Cie—and, judging from the cut of his clothes, did well enough at it.

  His mouth twitched, but he answered seriously.

  “Well, I do, really. Not every day, I mean, but the sisters come round to my office quite often—or I go to them. Fraser et Cie supplies wine to most o’ the monasteries and convents in Paris, and some will send a pair of nuns to place an order or to take away something special—otherwise, we deliver it, of course. And even the orders who dinna take wine themselves—and most of the Parisian houses do, they bein’ French, aye?—need sacramental wine for their chapels. And the begging orders come round like clockwork to ask alms.”

  “Really.” She was fascinated: sufficiently so as to put aside her reluctance to look ignorant. “I didna ken…I mean…so the different orders do quite different things, is that what ye’re saying? What other kinds are there?”

  He shot her a brief glance but then turned back, narrowing his eyes against the wind as he thought.

  “Well…there’s the sort of nun that prays all the time—contemplative, I think they’re called. I see them in the cathedral all hours of the day and night. There’s more than one order of that sort, though; one kind wears gray habits and prays in the chapel of St. Joseph, and another wears black; ye see them mostly in the chapel of Our Lady of the Sea.” He glanced at her, curious. “Will it be that sort of nun that you’ll be?”

  She shook her head, glad that the wind-chafing hid her blushes.

  “No,” she said, with some regret. “That’s maybe the holiest sort of nun, but I’ve spent a good bit o’ my life being contemplative on the moors, and I didna like it much. I think I havena got the right sort of soul to do it verra well, even in a chapel.”

  “Aye,” he said, and wiped back flying strands of hair from his face. “I ken the moors. The wind gets into your head after a bit.” He hesitated for a moment. “When my uncle Jamie—your da, I mean—ye ken he hid in a cave after Culloden?”

  “For seven years,” she said, a little impatient. “Aye, everyone kens that story. Why?”

  He shrugged.

  “Only thinking. I was no but a wee bairn at the time, but I went now and then wi’ my mam, to take him food there. He’d be glad to see us, but he wouldna talk much. And it scared me to see his eyes.”

  Joan felt a small shiver pass down her back, nothing to do with the stiff breeze. She saw—suddenly saw, in her head—a thin, dirty man, the bones starting in his face, crouched in the dank, frozen shadows of the cave.

  “Da?” she scoffed, to hide the shiver that crawled up her arms. “How could anyone be scairt of him? He’s a dear, kind man.”

  Michael’s wide mouth twitched at the corners.

  “I suppose it would depend whether ye’d ever seen him in a fight. But—”

  “Have you?” she interrupted, curious. “Seen him in a fight?”

  “I have, aye. BUT—” he said, not willing to be distracted, “I didna mean he scared me. It was that I thought he was haunted. By the voices in the wind.”

  That dried up the spit in her mouth, and she worked her tongue a little, hoping it didn’t show. She needn’t have worried; he wasn’t looking at her.

  “My own da said it was because Jamie spent so much time alone, that the voices got into his head and he couldna stop hearing them. When he’d feel safe enough to come to the house, it would take hours sometimes before he could start to hear us again—Mam wouldna let us talk to him until he’d had something to eat and was warmed through.” He smiled, a little ruefully. “She said he wasna human ’til then—and, looking back, I dinna think she meant that as a figure of speech.”

  “Well,” she said, but stopped, not knowing how to go on. She wished fervently that she’d known this earlier. Her da and his sister were coming on to France later, but she might not see him. She could maybe have talked to Da, asked him just what the voices in his head were like—what they said. Whether they were anything like the ones she heard.

  NEARLY TWILIGHT, and the rats were still dead. The comte heard the bells of Notre Dame calling sept and glanced at his pocket watch. The bells were two minutes before their time, and he frowned. He didn’t like sloppiness. He stood up and stretched himself, groaning as his spine cracked like the ragged volley of a firing squad. No doubt about it, he was aging, and the thought sent a chill through him.r />
  If. If he could find the way forward, then perhaps…but you never knew, that was the devil of it. For a little while, he’d thought—hoped—that traveling back in time stopped the process of aging. That initially seemed logical, like rewinding a clock. But, then again, it wasn’t logical, because he’d always gone back farther than his own lifetime. Only once he’d tried to go back just a few years, to his early twenties. That was a mistake, and he still shivered at the memory.

  He went to the tall gabled window that looked out over the Seine.

  That particular view of the river had changed barely at all in the last two hundred years; he’d seen it at several different times. He hadn’t always owned this house, but it had stood in this street since 1620, and he always managed to get in briefly, if only to reestablish his own sense of reality after a passage.

  Only the trees changed in his view of the river, and sometimes a strange-looking boat would be there. But the rest was always the same and no doubt always would be: the old fishermen, catching their supper off the landing in stubborn silence, each guarding his space with outthrust elbows, the younger ones, barefoot and slump-shouldered with exhaustion, laying out their nets to dry, naked little boys diving off the quay. It gave him a soothing sense of eternity, watching the river. Perhaps it didn’t matter so much if he must one day die?

  “The devil it doesn’t,” he murmured to himself, and glanced up at the sky. Venus shone bright. He should go.

  Pausing conscientiously to place his fingers on each rat’s body and ensure that no spark of life remained, he passed down the line, then swept them all into a burlap bag. If he was going to the Court of Miracles, at least he wouldn’t arrive empty-handed.

  JOAN WAS STILL reluctant to go below, but the light was fading, the wind getting up regardless, and a particularly spiteful gust that blew her petticoats right up round her waist and grabbed her arse with a chilly hand made her yelp in a very undignified way. She smoothed her skirts hastily and made for the hatchway, followed by Michael Murray.

  Seeing him cough and chafe his hands at the bottom of the ladder made her sorry; here she’d kept him freezing on deck, too polite to go below and leave her to her own devices, and her too selfish to see he was cold, the poor man. She made a hasty knot in her handkerchief, to remind her to say an extra decade of the rosary for penance, when she got to it.

  He saw her to a bench and said a few words to the woman sitting next to her, in French. Obviously he was introducing her, she understood that much—but when the woman nodded and said something in reply, she could only sit there openmouthed. She didn’t understand a word. Not a word!

  Michael evidently grasped the situation, for he said something to the woman’s husband, which drew her attention away from Joan, and engaged them in a conversation that let Joan sink quietly back against the wooden wall of the ship, sweating with embarrassment.

  Well, she’d get into the way of it, she reassured herself. Bound to. She settled herself with determination to listen, picking out the odd word here and there in the conversation. It was easier to understand Michael; he spoke slower and didn’t swallow the back half of each word.

  She was trying to puzzle out the probable spelling of a word that sounded like “pwufgweemiarniere” but surely couldn’t be, when her eye caught a slight movement from the bench opposite, and the gurgling vowels caught in her throat.

  A man sat there, maybe close to her own age, which was twenty-five. He was good-looking, if a bit thin in the face, decently dressed—and he was going to die.

  There was a gray shroud over him, the same as if he were wrapped in mist, so his face showed through it. She’d seen that same thing—the grayness lying on someone’s face like fog—seen it twice before and knew it at once for death’s shadow. Once it had been on an elderly man, and that might have been only what anybody could see, because Angus MacWheen was ill, but then again, and only a few weeks after, she’d seen it on the second of Vhairi Fraser’s little boys, and him a rosy-faced wee bairn with dear chubby legs.

  She hadn’t wanted to believe it. Either that she saw it or what it meant. But four days later, the wean was crushed in the lane by an ox that was maddened by a hornet’s sting. She’d vomited when they told her, and couldn’t eat for days after, for sheer grief and terror. Because could she have stopped it if she’d said? And what—dear Lord, what—if it happened again?

  Now it had, and her wame twisted. She leapt to her feet and blundered toward the companionway, cutting short some slowly worded speech from the Frenchman.

  Not again, not again! she thought in agony. Why show me such things? What can I do?

  She pawed frantically at the ladder, climbing as fast as she could, gasping for air, needing to be away from the dying man. How long might it be, dear Lord, until she reached the convent, and safety?

  THE MOON WAS rising over the Île de la Cité, glowing through the haze of cloud. He glanced at it, estimating the time; no point in arriving at Madame Fabienne’s house before the girls had taken their hair out of curling papers and rolled on their red stockings. There were other places to go first, though: the obscure drinking places where the professionals of the court fortified themselves for the night ahead. One of those was where he had first heard the rumors—he’d see how far they had spread and would judge the safety of asking openly about Maître Raymond.

  That was one advantage to hiding in the past, rather than going to Hungary or Sweden—life at this court tended to be short, and there were not so many who knew either his face or his history, though there would still be stories. Paris held on to its histoires. He found the iron gate—rustier than it had been; it left red stains on his palm—and pushed it open with a creak that would alert whatever now lived at the end of the alley.

  He had to see the frog. Not meet him, perhaps—he made a brief sign against evil—but see him. Above all else, he needed to know: had the man—if he was a man—aged?

  “Certainly he’s a man,” he muttered to himself, impatient. “What else could he be, for heaven’s sake?”

  He could be something like you, was the answering thought, and a shiver ran up his spine. Fear? He wondered. Anticipation of an intriguing philosophical mystery? Or possibly…hope?

  “WHAT A WASTE of a wonderful arse,” Monsieur Brechin remarked in French, watching Joan’s ascent from the far side of the cabin. “And, mon Dieu, those legs! Imagine those wrapped around your back, eh? Would you have her keep the striped stockings on? I would.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Michael to imagine that, but he was now having a hard time dismissing the image. He coughed into his handkerchief to hide the reddening of his face.

  Madame Brechin gave her husband a sharp elbow in the ribs. He grunted but seemed undisturbed by what was evidently a normal form of marital communication.

  “Beast,” she said, with no apparent heat. “Speaking so of a Bride of Christ. You will be lucky if God himself doesn’t strike you dead with a lightning bolt.”

  “Well, she isn’t his bride yet,” Monsieur protested. “And who created that arse in the first place? Surely God would be flattered to hear a little sincere appreciation of his handiwork. From one who is, after all, a connoisseur in such matters.” He leered affectionately at Madame, who snorted.

  A faint snigger from the young man across the cabin indicated that Monsieur was not alone in his appreciation, and Madame turned a reproving glare on the young man. Michael wiped his nose carefully, trying not to catch Monsieur’s eye. His insides were quivering, and not entirely from either amusement or the shock of inadvertent lust. He felt very queer.

  Monsieur sighed as Joan’s striped stockings disappeared through the hatchway.

  “Christ will not warm her bed,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Christ will not fart in her bed, either,” said Madame, taking out her knitting.

  “Pardonnez-moi…” Michael said in a strangled voice, and, clapping his handkerchief to his mouth, made hastily for the ladder, as though seasick
ness might be catching.

  It wasn’t mal de mer that was surging up from his belly, though. He caught sight of Joan, dim in the evening light at the rail, and turned quickly, going to the other side, where he gripped the rail as though it were a life raft and let the overwhelming waves of grief wash through him. It was the only way he’d been able to manage these last few weeks. Hold on as long as he could, keeping a cheerful face, until some small unexpected thing, some bit of emotional debris, struck him through the heart like a hunter’s arrow, and then hurry to find a place to hide, curling up in mindless pain until he could get a grip on himself.

  This time, it was Madame’s remark that had come out of the blue, and he grimaced painfully, laughing in spite of the tears that poured down his face, remembering Lillie. She’d eaten eels in garlic sauce for dinner—those always made her fart with a silent deadliness like poison swamp gas. As the ghastly miasma had risen up round him, he’d sat bolt upright in bed, only to find her staring at him, a look of indignant horror on her face.

  “How dare you?” she’d said, in a voice of offended majesty. “Really, Michel.”

  “You know it wasn’t me!”

  Her mouth had dropped open, outrage added to horror and distaste.

  “Oh!” she gasped, gathering her pug-dog to her bosom. “You not only fart like a rotting whale, you attempt to blame it on my poor puppy! Cochon!” Whereupon she had begun to shake the bedsheets delicately, using her free hand to waft the noxious odors in his direction, addressing censorious remarks to Plonplon, who gave Michael a sanctimonious look before turning to lick his mistress’s face with great enthusiasm.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he whispered, and, sinking down, pressed his face against the rail. “Oh, God, lass, I love you!”

  He shook silently, head buried in his arms, aware of sailors passing now and then behind him, but none of them took notice of him in the dark. At last the agony eased a little, and he drew breath.

  All right, then. He’d be all right now, for a time. And he thanked God, belatedly, that he had Joan—or Sister Gregory, if she liked—to look after for a bit. He didn’t know how he’d manage to walk through the streets of Paris to his house, alone. Go in, greet the servants—would Jared be there?—face the sorrow of the household, accept their sympathy for his father’s death, order a meal, sit down…and all the time wanting just to throw himself on the floor of their empty bedroom and howl like a lost soul. He’d have to face it, sooner or later—but not just yet. And right now he’d take the grace of any respite that was offered.