Over Nicolas’s shoulder, Marguerite materialised on the dim landing, pale as an apparition. She looked at Charlotte and Nicolas with great puzzlement as she stepped into the room. ‘My brother, madame? Is he with you? But what has happened? There is so much blood.’
The girl moved to the bed and bent over her brother, cooing endearments as she did so. She picked him up and drew aside his wrapping. Charlotte watched as if she were trapped within a dream’s thick amber, unable to act as the girl gasped, then recoiled in shock. ‘Dear God. What happened to my brother? He is dead?’
Coming to her senses, Charlotte detached herself from Nicolas and moved to prevent Marguerite’s escape, but the girl was nimbler than a cat and managed to push past Charlotte and slip from the room. There was the clomp of her feet on the stairs and yelling, followed by voices in the courtyard as she screamed and screamed.
‘Help! Help! She has killed my baby. The witch killed my baby. Help!’
Charlotte hesitated momentarily before grabbing Nicolas by his tattered red tunic and dragging him onto the landing. To judge by the commotion echoing around the courtyard downstairs, it would be impossible for them to make it through the house and onto the street without being caught. They would surely kill them for what she had done – kill them both and burn their bones. She glanced around. A narrow flight of stairs led to an upper room. Nicolas was weeping and muttering. She shoved him in front of her and they clambered up into a tiny attic, where the ceiling beams were so low she was unable to stand upright. She closed the door and bolted it. Then, with Nicolas’s help, she pushed the only piece of furniture – a low bed – in front of it as a makeshift barricade.
‘But what are you doing, Mother? What has happened?’
She looked around. A shutterless window offered a glimpse of the evening where pink clouds and smudges of brown smoke hung in the pale blue sky. Voices drifted up from the street below and there came the clatter of boots on the wooden stairs. Doors slammed, cries and lamentations. ‘Catch them. Call someone. The baby. Dear God, where did they go?’
Charlotte pushed open the dormer window and leaned out. It gave onto a flat portion of the tiled roof that abutted the neighbouring building. She held out a hand to Nicolas. ‘Come.’
‘But we’ll fall into the street, Mother. There is nowhere to go.’
‘There is. Trust me. Quickly now.’
Voices closer now on the stairs behind the closed door. Nicolas relented and they slipped through the narrow window onto the roof. Charlotte had never in her life been so high above the ground and, once on the roof, she stood still for a moment to orient herself to the unnerving sensation. Several men burst into the room behind. Crouching low for balance, almost on all fours, Charlotte and Nicolas scrambled along the lichen-spotted tiles as quickly as they dared, but the flat section of the roof was short and ended in a long drop to the street below. The old slate cracked like pie crust beneath their feet. A wet-lipped woman in a window opposite screamed at them. ‘There! The sorceress. There!’ The entire quarter, it seemed, was yelling and crying out.
Charlotte hesitated, putting a hand to the pitched roof for balance. There was no way they might escape over the rooftops and they would almost certainly not be quick enough to outrun the men who, at that moment, were clambering through the window with daggers and shovels in their hands. Nicolas was sobbing and shaking his head.
The men would be upon them in no time at all. ‘Come down,’ they were saying. ‘Come down now, woman. There is no escaping us. Think of the boy . . .’
Think of the boy. As if she had thought of anything else. Charlotte hauled Nicolas up the steepest part of the roof. It was difficult. Her shoes slipped on the slate. Nicolas, barefoot, made swifter progress and reached down to assist her. They ascended the roof’s peak and clung to a crumbling chimney. The grimy streets and rooftops of Paris spread out in all directions. A crowd had formed in the street below. People cried out in fury. Merchants, a trio of monks, a swineherd with his pigs. Boys were throwing stones and women were jeering. ‘There on the roof! Child-killer. Kill her. Break all her bones. Push the bitch off!’
But Charlotte had stopped listening. These ordinary people, with their meagre words. She smelled smoke from the evening’s fires. She saw a flock of geese and the pale crescent moon. Closer at hand, church bells tolled for evening prayers. Three crows flew in low and landed on the chimney of the neighbouring roof, where they watched her with interest. What did they see, these crows? A woman and her son. What could they know? One of the birds shrugged and turned to its companions, as if to confer on the matter. It was almost dark, but not quite; the time between the dog and the wolf. When all great and wondrous things happen.
With extreme care, Charlotte stood with one foot on either side of the pitched roof. The crowd in the street fell silent and the men below paused in their sinister entreaties. After taking a moment to steady herself, she retrieved the black book from her pocket and held it aloft. She grasped Nicolas’s hand. My beautiful son, at last; his fingers so warm and alive in my own.
Above the racket of Paris, through her skin, Charlotte absorbed the black book’s whisperings. Then she closed her eyes and spoke aloud its incantations. An awful majesty swelled in her breast; her heart was a cathedral, her chest a city, her body the world and all it contained. Delight and murder and eruption and quakes. Babies and fire. Dogs. Mountains. Cities. Language and rivers and trees. Its people, its knowledge, its many winds and vast oceans. Command the elements and they can be yours, Madame Rolland had told her. And this was what Charlotte did.
There was a swirl of wind. She was buffeted, but then became light, as if swelling with air. She felt the slate roof shift beneath her. Nicolas cried out and gripped her hand more tightly. Those in the street gasped in terror and amazement. A woman’s wail of alarm, a prayer. Charlotte opened her eyes and saw the buildings fall away beneath her feet, saw the street thronged with terrified people. Their upturned faces, their furious eyes, their tiny round mouths opening and closing soundlessly like those of baby birds awaiting food. And she laughed with unexpected delight.
On the cool evening breeze she and Nicolas were borne away as if weightless. Over squares and spires and over the river running golden in the last of the day’s sunlight. Over the city’s black, jagged rooftops, its rickety carts and muddy streets. There a man hoisting his basket of apples, there a boy chasing a grey cat. The city made miniature – all its walls and churches, its great prisons and bustling gates, the roads laid out like lengths of pale rope. Travellers the size of ants. She saw lanterns flickering in windows, smelled rabbits cooking in pots. A pair of nuns giggled at a lewd joke, a distant woman sang to her child. She detected the melancholy scent of autumn as it rolled over the land. Spring, summer, autumn, next year’s summer. She heard the distant, bitter laughter of the Wild Horde. She smelled the fragrances of foreign bazaars, of rank battlefields, of oceans and bundles of rags in meadows; of remote cities, those terrible places where they spoke in languages that resembled so many mouthfuls of broken glass.
Other visions she didn’t understand. Vast skies, icy wastes, the severed heads of kings, blasts obliterating entire cities. Multitudes. Everything, nothing. Chaos and beauty, the future and the past, the manifest and the obscure, the sacred and the profane, terror and pleasure, the living and the dead. Yes, she thought. Yes. My eyes are jewels, my bones are of silver and my veins now run with gold.
Your blood, your blood, your blood.