Outlander Novella [01] The Space Between Page 8

  “Oh, bouillabaisse tonight!” said Mercy, under her breath. “Délicieuse!”

  “What is bouillabaisse?” Joan whispered back.

  “Fish stew—you’ll like it, I promise!” Joan had no doubt of it; brought up in the Highlands during the poverty-stricken years following the Rising, she’d been staggered by the novelty, deliciousness, and sheer abundance of the convent’s food. Even on Fridays, when the community fasted during the day, supper was simple but mouthwatering, toasted sharp cheese on nutty brown bread with sliced apples.

  Luckily, the salmon was so huge that Sister George arranged for the fish seller to deliver it to the convent, along with the other briny purchases; thus they had room in their baskets for fresh vegetables and fruit and so passed from Neptune’s realm to that of Demeter. Joan hoped it wasn’t sacrilegious to think of Greek gods, but she couldn’t forget the book of myths that Da had read to Marsali and her when they were young, with wonderful hand-colored illustrations.

  After all, she told herself, you needed to know about the Greeks if you studied medicine. She had some trepidation at the thought of working in the hospital, but God called people to do things, and if it was his will, then—

  The thought stopped short as she caught sight of a neat dark tricorne with a curled blue feather bobbing slowly through the tide of people. Was it—it was! Léonie, the sister of Michael Murray’s dead wife. Moved by curiosity, Joan glanced at Sister George, who was engrossed in a huge display of fungus—dear God, people ate such things?—and slipped around a barrow billowing with green sallet herbs.

  She meant to speak to Léonie, ask her to tell Michael that she needed to talk to him. Perhaps he could contrive a way to visit the convent … But before Joan could get close enough, Léonie looked furtively over her shoulder, as though fearing discovery, then ducked behind a curtain that hung across the back of a small caravan.

  Joan had seen gypsies before, though not often. A dark-skinned man loitered nearby, talking with a group of others; their eyes passed over her habit without pausing, and she sighed with relief. Being a nun was as good as having a cloak of invisibility in most circumstances, she thought.

  She looked round for her companions and saw that Sister Mathilde had been called into consultation regarding a big warty lump of something that looked like the excrement of a seriously diseased hog. Good, she could wait for a minute longer.

  In fact, it took very little more than that before Léonie slipped out from behind the curtain, tucking something into the small basket on her arm. For the first time, it struck Joan as unusual that someone like Léonie should be shopping without a servant to push back crowds and carry purchases—or even be in a public market. Michael had told her about his own household during the voyage—how Madame Hortense, the cook, went to the markets at dawn to be sure of getting the freshest things. What would a lady like Léonie be buying, alone?

  Joan slithered as best she could through the rows of stalls and wagons, following the bobbing blue feather. A sudden stop allowed her to come up behind Léonie, who had paused by a flower stall, fingering a bunch of white jonquils.

  It occurred suddenly to Joan that she had no idea what Léonie’s last name was, but she couldn’t worry about politeness now.

  “Ah … madame?” she said tentatively. “Mademoiselle, I mean?” Léonie swung round, eyes huge and face pale. Finding herself faced with a nun, she blinked, confused.

  “Er … it’s me,” Joan said, diffident, resisting the impulse to pull off her veil. “Joan MacKimmie?” It felt odd to say it, as though “Joan MacKimmie” were truly someone else. It took a moment for the name to register, but then Léonie’s shoulders relaxed a little.

  “Oh.” She put a hand to her bosom and mustered a small smile. “Michael’s cousin. Of course. I didn’t … er … How nice to see you!” A small frown wrinkled the skin between her brows. “Are you … alone?”

  “No,” Joan said hurriedly. “And I mustn’t stop. I only saw you, and I wanted to ask—” It seemed even stupider than it had a moment ago, but no help for it. “Would you tell Monsieur Murray that I must talk to him? I know something—something important—that I have to tell him.”

  “Soeur Gregory?” Sister George’s stentorian tones boomed through the higher-pitched racket of the market, making Joan jump. She could see the top of Sister Mathilde’s head, with its great white sails, turning to and fro in vain search.

  “I have to go,” she said to the astonished Léonie. “Please. Please tell him!” Her heart was pounding, and not only from the sudden meeting. She’d been looking at Léonie’s basket, where she caught the glint of a brown glass bottle half hidden beneath a thick bunch of what even Joan recognized as black hellebores. Lovely cup-shaped flowers of an eerie greenish-white—and deadly poison.

  She dodged back across the market to arrive breathless and apologizing at Sister Mathilde’s side, wondering if … She hadn’t spent much time at all with Da’s wife—but she had heard her talking with Da as she wrote down receipts in a book, and she’d mentioned black hellebore as something women used to make themselves miscarry. If Léonie were pregnant … Holy Mother of God, could she be with child by Michael? The thought struck her like a blow in the stomach.

  No. No, she couldn’t believe it. He was still in love with his wife, anyone could see that, and even if not, she’d swear he wasn’t the sort to … But what did she ken about men, after all?

  Well, she’d ask him when she saw him, she decided, her mouth clamping tight. And ’til then … Her hand went to the rosary at her waist and she said a quick, silent prayer for Léonie. Just in case.

  As she was bargaining doggedly in her execrable French for six aubergines (wondering meanwhile what on earth they were for, medicine or food?), she became aware of someone standing at her elbow. A handsome man of middle age, taller than she was, in a well-cut dove-gray coat. He smiled at her and, touching one of the peculiar vegetables, said in slow, simple French, “You don’t want the big ones. They’re tough. Get small ones, like that.” A long finger tapped an aubergine half the size of the ones the vegetable seller had been urging on her, and the vegetable seller burst into a tirade of abuse that made Joan step back, blinking.

  Not so much because of the expressions being hurled at her—she didn’t understand one word in ten—but because a voice in plain English had just said clearly, “Tell him not to do it.”

  She felt hot and cold at the same time.

  “I … er … je suis … um … merci beaucoup, monsieur!” she blurted, and, turning, ran, scrambling back between piles of paper narcissus bulbs and fragrant spikes of hyacinth, her shoes skidding on the slime of trodden leaves.

  “Soeur Gregory!” Sister Mathilde loomed up so suddenly in front of her that she nearly ran into the massive nun. “What are you doing? Where is Sister Miséricorde?”

  “I … oh.” Joan swallowed, gathering her wits. “She’s—over there.” She spoke with relief, spotting Mercy’s small head in the forefront of a crowd by the meat-pie wagon. “I’ll get her!” she blurted, and walked hastily off before Sister Mathilde could say more.

  “Tell him not to do it.” That’s what the voice had said about Charles Pépin. What was going on? she thought wildly. Was M. Pépin engaged in something awful with the man in the dove-gray coat?

  As though thought of the man had reminded the voice, it came again.

  “Tell him not to do it,” the voice repeated in her head, with what seemed like particular urgency. “Tell him he must not!”

  “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women …” Joan clutched at her rosary and gabbled the words, feeling the blood leave her face. There he was, the man in the dove-gray coat, looking curiously at her over a stall of Dutch tulips and sprays of yellow forsythia.

  She couldn’t feel the pavement under her feet but was moving toward him. I have to, she thought. It doesn’t matter if he thinks I’m mad.…

  “Don’t do it,” she blurted, comin
g face-to-face with the astonished gentleman. “You mustn’t do it!”

  And then she turned and ran, rosary in hand, apron and veil flapping like wings.

  * * *

  He couldn’t help thinking of the cathedral as an entity. An immense version of one of its own gargoyles, crouched over the city. In protection or threat?

  Notre Dame de Paris rose black above him, solid, obliterating the light of the stars, the beauty of the night. Very appropriate. He’d always thought that the church blocked one’s sight of God. Nonetheless, the sight of the monstrous stone creature made him shiver as he passed under its shadow, despite the warm cloak.

  Perhaps it was the cathedral’s stones themselves that gave him the sense of menace? He stopped, paused for a heartbeat, and then strode up to the church’s wall and pressed his palm flat against the cold limestone. There was no immediate sense of anything, just the cold roughness of the rock. Impulsively, he shut his eyes and tried to feel his way into the rock. At first, nothing. But he waited, pressing with his mind, a repeated question. Are you there?

  He would have been terrified to receive an answer but was obscurely disappointed not to. Even so, when he finally opened his eyes and took his hands away, he saw a trace of blue light, the barest trace, glowing briefly between his knuckles. That frightened him, and he hurried away, hiding his hands beneath the shelter of the cloak.

  Surely not, he assured himself. He’d done that before, made the light happen when he held the jewels he used for travel and said the words over them—his own version of consecration, he supposed. He didn’t know if the words were necessary, but Mélisande had used them; he was afraid not to. And yet. He had felt something here. The sense of something heavy, inert. Nothing resembling thought, let alone speech, thank God. By reflex, he crossed himself, then shook his head, rattled and irritated.

  But something. Something immense and very old. Did God have the voice of a stone? He was further unsettled by the thought. The stones there in the chalk mine, the noise they made—was it after all God that he’d glimpsed, there in that space between?

  A movement in the shadows banished all such thoughts in an instant. The frog! Rakoczy’s heart clenched like a fist.

  “Monsieur le Comte,” said an amused, gravelly voice. “I see the years have been kind to you.”

  Raymond stepped into the starlight, smiling. The sight of him was disconcerting; Rakoczy had imagined this meeting for so long that the reality seemed oddly anticlimactic. Short, broad-shouldered, with long, loose hair that swept back from a massive forehead. A broad, almost lipless mouth. Raymond the frog.

  “Why are you here?” Rakoczy blurted.

  Maître Raymond’s brows were black—surely they had been white thirty years ago? One of them lifted in puzzlement.

  “I was told that you were looking for me, monsieur.” He spread his hands, the gesture graceful. “I came!”

  “Thank you,” Rakoczy said dryly, beginning to regain some composure. “I meant—why are you in Paris?”

  “Everyone has to be somewhere, don’t they? They can’t be in the same place.” This should have sounded like badinage but didn’t. It sounded serious, like a statement of scientific principle, and Rakoczy found it unsettling.

  “Did you come looking for me?” he asked boldly. He moved a little, trying to get a better view of the man. He was nearly sure that the frog appeared younger than he had when last seen. Surely his flowing hair was darker, his step more elastic? A spurt of excitement bubbled in his chest.

  “For you?” The frog seemed amused for a moment, but then the look faded. “No. I’m searching for a lost daughter.”

  Rakoczy was surprised and disconcerted.

  “Yours?”

  “More or less.” Raymond seemed uninterested in explaining further. He moved a little to one side, eyes narrowing as he sought to make out Rakoczy’s face in the darkness. “You can hear stones, then, can you?”

  “I—what?”

  Raymond nodded at the façade of the cathedral. “They do speak. They move, too, but very slowly.”

  An icy chill shot up Rakoczy’s spine at the thought of the grinning gargoyles perched high above him and the implication that one might at any moment choose to spread its silent wings and hurtle down upon him, teeth still bared in carnivorous hilarity. Despite himself, he looked up, over his shoulder.

  “Not that fast.” The note of amusement was back in the frog’s voice. “You would never see them. It takes them millennia to move the slightest fraction of an inch—unless of course they are propelled or melted. But you don’t want to see them do that, of course. Much too dangerous.”

  This kind of talk struck him as frivolous, and Rakoczy was bothered by it but for some reason not irritated. Troubled, with a sense that there was something under it, something that he simultaneously wanted to know—and wanted very much to avoid knowing. The sensation was novel, and unpleasant.

  He cast caution to the wind and demanded boldly, “Why did you not kill me?”

  Raymond grinned at him; Rakoczy could see the flash of teeth and felt yet another shock: he was sure—almost sure—that the frog had had no teeth when last seen.

  “If I had wanted you dead, son, you wouldn’t be here talking to me,” he said. “I wanted you to be out of the way, that’s all; you obliged me by taking the hint.”

  “And just why did you want me ‘out of the way’?” Had he not needed to find out, Rakcozy would have taken offense at the man’s tone.

  The frog lifted one shoulder.

  “You were something of a threat to the lady.”

  Sheer astonishment brought Rakoczy to his full height.

  “The lady? You mean the woman—La Dame Blanche?”

  “They did call her that.” The frog seemed to find the notion amusing.

  It was on the tip of Rakoczy’s tongue to tell Raymond that La Dame Blanche still lived, but he hadn’t lived as long as he had by blurting out everything he knew—and he didn’t want Raymond thinking that he himself might be still a threat to her.

  “What is the ultimate goal of an alchemist?” the frog said very seriously.

  “To transform matter,” Rakoczy replied automatically.

  The frog’s face split in a broad amphibian grin.

  “Exactly!” he said. And vanished.

  He had vanished. No puffs of smoke, no illusionist’s tricks, no smell of sulfur—the frog was simply gone. The square stretched empty under the starlit sky; the only thing that moved was a cat that darted mewing out of the shadows and brushed past Rakoczy’s leg.

  * * *

  Worn out with constant walking, Michael slept like the dead these days, without dreams or motion, and woke when the sun came up. His valet, Robert, heard him stir and came in at once, one of the femmes de chambre on his heels with a bowl of coffee and some pastry.

  He ate slowly, suffering himself to be brushed, shaved, and tenderly tidied into fresh linen. Robert kept up a soothing murmur of the sort of conversation that doesn’t require response and smiled encouragingly when presenting the mirror. Rather to Michael’s surprise, the image in the mirror looked quite normal. Hair neatly clubbed—he wore his own, without powder—suit modest in cut but of the highest quality. Robert hadn’t asked him what he required but had dressed him for an ordinary day of business. He supposed that was all right. What, after all, did clothes matter? It wasn’t as though there was a costume de rigueur for calling upon the sister of one’s deceased wife, who had come uninvited into one’s bed in the middle of the night.

  He had spent the last two days trying to think of some way never to see or speak to Léonie again, but, really, there was no help for it. He’d have to see her.

  But what was he to say to her, he wondered, as he made his way through the streets toward the house where Léonie lived with an aged aunt, Eugenie Galantine. He wished he could talk the situation over with Sister Joan, but that wouldn’t be appropriate, even were she available.

  He’d hoped that walking
would give him time to come up at least with a point d’appui, if not an entire statement of principle, but instead he found himself obsessively counting the flagstones of the market as he crossed it, counting the bongs of the public horologe as it struck the hour of three, and—for lack of anything else—counting his own footsteps as he approached her door. Six hundred and thirty-seven, six hundred and thirty-eight …

  As he turned into the street, though, he abruptly stopped counting. He stopped walking, too, for an instant—then began to run. Something was wrong at the house of Madame Galantine.

  He pushed his way through the crowd of neighbors and vendors clustered near the steps and seized the butler, whom he knew, by a sleeve.

  “What?” he barked. “What’s happened?” The butler, a tall, cadaverous man named Hubert, was plainly agitated but settled a bit on seeing Michael.

  “I don’t know, sir,” he said, though a sideways slide of his eyes made it clear that he did. “Mademoiselle Léonie … she’s ill. The doctor …”

  He could smell the blood. Not waiting for more, he pushed Hubert aside and sprinted up the stairs, calling for Madame Eugenie, Léonie’s aunt.

  Madame Eugenie popped out of a bedroom, her cap and wrapper neat in spite of the uproar.

  “Monsieur Michel!” she said, blocking him from entering the room. “It’s all right, but you must not go in.”

  “Yes, I must.” His heart was thundering in his ears, and his hands felt cold.

  “You may not,” she said firmly. “She’s ill. It isn’t proper.”

  “Proper? A young woman tries to make away with herself and you tell me it isn’t proper?”

  A maid appeared in the doorway, a basket piled with bloodstained linen in her arms, but the look of shock on Madame Eugenie’s broad face was more striking.

  “Make away with herself?” The old lady’s mouth hung open for a moment, then snapped shut like a turtle’s. “Why would you think such a thing?” She was regarding him with considerable suspicion. “And what are you doing here, for that matter? Who told you she was ill?”

  A glimpse of a man in a dark robe, who must be the doctor, decided Michael that little was to be gained by engaging further with Madame Eugenie. He took her gently but firmly by the elbows, picked her up—she uttered a small shriek of surprise—and set her aside.