Three days later, the villagers filed into the cottage and said their prayers over Michel Picot’s body before they arranged themselves on the low bench along the wall to mutter and pray. It was late afternoon. At times the dark cottage overflowed with the earnest sounds of devotion, and this comforted Charlotte somewhat. When the cottage became too crowded, the village men gathered outside in the warm breeze, smoking their pipes and talking in low tones. The women stayed indoors, moving around unhurriedly like murmuring ghosts.
Charlotte listened vaguely to their condolences, to their assurances as to Michel’s entry into heaven, of the friends and relatives he would surely encounter there. His children, his parents, God himself on his great throne. Think, also, of the suffering he would no longer have to endure. No hunger or sorrow. The curé, Monsieur Larouche, who had not been able to come over from the church in time to hear his last confession, sprinkled holy water over Michel and prayed loudly. He felt certain, he said, that Michel’s soul had been in good order before he died. Charlotte sensed this to be true; although the parish church was some leagues away, she and Michel and Nicolas had attended Mass there almost every Sunday.
Late in the day, the villagers left her and Nicolas alone to finalise preparations for Michel’s burial. As was the custom in their country, Charlotte leaned close to her husband’s face and said his name three times to offer him a final opportunity to prove he was alive.
‘Michel,’ she said. ‘Michel. Michel.’
No response, of course. No flicker of eyelid, no warmth of breath, no pulse of blood. A thick and empty body. Dry teeth. Michel’s mortal suffering had ended, but never again would he press his face to a horse’s mane or bite into an apple. He would not pause a moment in the day to watch his son wrestling with friends or playing a game with the other boys of the village, never gaze upon her as she undressed for him. A drop of holy water glistened on his temple, like a dead man’s tear. Sorrow, then, was the price of this life. With a finger she wiped away the drop of water and put it on her tongue.
How difficult it was to believe there was no one behind that waxen mask. Where had he gone? They all said to heaven, and yet it was tempting to imagine her husband somewhere deep inside his own body, as if in a labyrinth of vast caverns, becoming ever smaller and fainter as he journeyed away. Charlotte pictured this miniature version of Michel hearing her voice calling his name and pausing momentarily to ponder its echo before continuing onwards, downwards, until he was finally out of earshot. For a long time she observed his face for any sign of such fanciful interior activity, then placed her palm to the cool, dry skin of his forehead. No. He was gone. The dead, at least, cannot die again; this was some consolation.
As she had done for each of her children when they had died, she took up a knife and gently cut off a curl of her husband’s dark hair. Michel’s hair was coarser, naturally, and as she rolled the lock between her fingers, she was overcome. Her own tears dripped from her eyes and bloomed momentarily dark on the white linen of the winding sheet before they dried. Her husband had been quiet, dependable, kind. Yes, she had loved him in her way.
When she had composed herself, she tied this lock of hair with a short length of twine and deposited it in an envelope of paper with the others. She took out her needle and twine and began to sew the winding sheet closed. The tiny pock and draw of the thread was the only sound in the cottage; Nicolas was quiet, even the stove burned silent. She concentrated, took her time. This final act of tenderness she performed most diligently, pinching the sheet well clear of her husband’s chest, his throat, his chin. Skin slack, his plum-coloured mouth, silver bristles. Nicolas shifted impatiently on the bench behind her.
Earlier today she and her son had washed Michel’s body with a damp cloth and dressed him for burial in his wedding clothes, softly and superstitiously explaining their movements to him as they worked, so that he might find no reason to object to their ministrations were he able to hear them. There, your arm in the shirt like so, Father. Your best shoes. Your hands are cold, my dear. Remember when we were married, the storm that night so loud?
Into his nostrils they had stuffed plugs of cloth. She could see the blood already pooling under the skin at his shoulders, along his thighs. His body lolling as they moved him, arm flopping at an awkward angle, eyes stubbornly open but unseeing. The only purpose of a corpse was to display the boundaries of life.
And now her husband, the only man she had ever known, was gradually being sealed away, as if inside another skin.
Nicolas broke the silence. ‘What do you think it’s like?’
Charlotte paused, one hand in the air holding the needle. She cleared her throat. ‘What is what like?’
‘For my father.’
‘What can you mean, Nicolas?’
‘What does he – I don’t know – what can he see?’
Charlotte considered the sheet in which they had wrapped her husband. His milky eyes and the blackened mouth that had been locked open so hard they had been unable to force it shut, try as they might. Beneath his earlobe was a tiny speck of dried blood they had missed. She restrained herself from wiping it away.
‘Louis once told me that he saw a woman having her head cut off and after it was done, her eyes were still wide open in her head. While it was on the ground. And that the woman looked at him and spoke.’
Charlotte had heard this kind of fantastic story before – and many others like it. It seemed they were living in an age of terrible wonders. She had heard of nuns who spat nails from their mouths, of men who could fly through the air on greased sticks, of the woman with cat’s paws instead of hands hidden beneath the sleeves of her gown. These tales she didn’t quite believe, but nor did she discount them altogether.
She turned to her son. ‘And what did this headless woman say?’
As if to ensure they were not overheard, Nicolas glanced around before speaking. It was clear this was something he had long wanted to tell her but had been too fearful to – until now.
‘She said: “It’s getting late, my child. I see dark halls and so many vast underground chambers. It is surely time for you to go home for the night.” This was while her body was still tied to the chair. Then she blinked because there was blood in her eyes, blood all over the ground. Her own blood. Then she died.’
Nicolas watched Charlotte intently to gauge her reaction to his anecdote. Firelight played over his ruddy cheeks. She remembered vividly the night he was born nine or so winters ago – the forest wolves howling at the scent of her fresh blood, snow banking up around the cottage – and felt a surge of love for the boy, her only child still living; the only son, now, that she would ever produce. The love for one’s child, she thought, was forever braided with an intense fear of his loss. It was an inescapable fact that the birth of a child meant disquiet for the mother.
Charlotte coughed into her hand. ‘Well. I don’t know if we should trust the stories of young shepherd boys like Louis. I’m sure your father is by now in heaven. You have been listening to the curé, I hope?’
‘And what’s it like in heaven?’
This son of hers, always full of questions, convinced there might actually be an ultimate answer to everything. The first word he uttered – why – would doubtless be his last.
‘I try not to think about it,’ she said eventually. Which was a lie, of course; it was impossible, in these fevered days, not to think of death and what might be beyond. Brood on it she did, and often. But, in order to forestall further interrogation, she added: ‘You have heard what the curé has told you, have you not? He knows what it is like there. He knows all there is to know about such things.’
Nicolas shrugged.
‘It’s beautiful in heaven,’ she continued. ‘It’s sunny and there is always enough to eat. All the people you have ever loved will be there. Which is why you must always try to be good, so you can meet them again.’
‘My sisters? My brother?’
Charlotte took a moment to answer. ‘Yes,’ she murmured at last. ‘And there are angels playing beautiful music. Green fields, sunlight. Lovely sweet wine.’
‘My father would enjoy that, at least.’
She was uncertain if this was intended as a joke, for Nicolas was not renowned among his fellows for his sense of humour. She smiled for the first time in days and felt ashamed for doing so. ‘Indeed he would.’
A sudden gust of wind skittered down the chimney and nudged a glowing coal from the grate. The coal landed on the dirt floor, where it throbbed several times with orange light before expiring.
But, of course, the boy’s interrogation was not yet complete. ‘What did you say to my father? Before, you leaned over him and spoke with him. I saw you.’
Charlotte was sad and weary and this conversation was only making her more so. ‘I wished him well on his journey and said that I would see him again in heaven one day. That’s all I said.’
Nicolas sniffled. ‘Should you not have said a prayer for him?’
‘I did, Nicolas. And I prayed for us, too. God has a lot to do in these times, I think, and we need his help. Your father’s time had come. He has left us. He has gone from this earth.’
Nicolas sniffed, wiped his eyes. ‘He won’t come back?’
‘No.’
‘We must have done something terrible to be visited by such things,’ Nicolas said. ‘My father dead. My brother, my sisters.’
Charlotte shook her head, eager to finish this conversation. ‘Your father died of the fever, there’s nothing more to it than that. Like my own mother. And your sisters . . .’ She swallowed a sob, tried to dispel the image of the corpses of those she had loved piled in a corner of her mind. Her girls and her infant boy, forever young, their bleak smiles, stony eyes in their sockets. Gone. Barely formed before they were taken from her.
‘Death visits everyone,’ she said.
‘Not the way it comes to us.’
‘Yes, Nicolas. Exactly like it comes to us. There is no order to it. Remember Ann Waites’s people? The Blois family? They are all gone. The dead are many. They surely outnumber us by now.’
‘Mother?’
She put down her needle and twine. ‘What now?’ she asked, trying, unsuccessfully, to keep exasperation from her voice.
‘What is hell like, then?’
Her son waited, staring up at her, one of his fingers tracing a complex pattern of his own design on his knee. Like a drunk surprised by his reproachful wife, the candle beside him on the bench buckled at the waist, weaved, then managed to halt its collapse. She glanced around the cottage – at the torn curtain hanging across the window, at the rickety table, the shelf warped and corroded by years of use. As always, the place smelled of tallow, of smoke, and of ash.
Charlotte turned again to regard her husband’s unmoving face, the only part of him yet to be sealed away. She ran a finger along the seam she had already made in the winding sheet. She had done a good job; it would hold for a long time. Much longer than his skin would hold his bones. Sorrow flared in her throat, and was gone.
Probably like this, she thought, although she said nothing. Hell is probably like this. She took up her needle and bent wordlessly to her wifely duty.
Soon afterwards, three men of the village came and lifted Michel’s body away in his sheet for burial. By this time it was almost dark. Charlotte took up a lantern and she and Nicolas walked behind them. The other villagers followed silently. Footsteps, the crack of twig, some low murmurs. The grave had already been dug and Michel was laid gently in it, the clumsy farmer Samuel Garance stumbling and swearing at the edge of the hole as they did so. The curé offered some final words. ‘Pater noster, qui es in caelis . . .’
When the men started to shovel the dirt back in, the sound of soil hitting the taut linen winding sheet had nothing of the living about it. It was unbearable to Charlotte’s ears and she turned away weeping. Nicolas clung to her dress, for her unspoken anxiety as to what would happen to them now had communicated itself to him. When at last she opened her eyes, all she saw in front of her was the dense and complicated forest darkness. The villagers had trickled back to their own hearths. Doubtless they had muttered consolations to her and patted her shoulder as they passed, but of these actions she had been unaware.
Night fell. Charlotte sensed a lurch in the atmosphere, the wind changing direction, as she stood with one hand pressed to her lower back, the other resting on a spade’s rough wooden handle. It was a clear night and the rising June moon was as full and low as a monk’s belly. She paused to listen to the last gossiping sounds of robins and the hiss of the wind through the oak trees, their slow-creaking limbs, the rattle of ivy that clung to their trunks. It was only the forest muttering its difficult speech. It was a language she had heard her entire life, but it never failed to imbue her with fear and melancholy, as if it were reminding her, perpetually, of some malevolence close at hand, of sprites and other unknown vermin scuttling about in the dark. There were stories, after all, of an odd man in the forest who became a wolf at night and tore people’s bodies to pieces. Other things, too. Ghosts, demons, spirits.
Charlotte’s chin was crumbed with dirt. Her cheeks and neck were pitted here and there with half-a-dozen scars from her childhood pox, as if she had long ago been splashed with hot oil. There were other less visible scars scattered across her body. Fifteen of them; Michel had insisted on counting them every so often. To make sure none have escaped, he would chortle as he crouched over her stomach, her thighs. They used to call her Fever Girl in the village, on account of these scars – although there were plenty of others nearby similarly afflicted; such blemishes were hardly rare. Of course, most who contracted any one of the many fevers – her daughters, now her husband – died of it. This fact of her survival she hoarded like a mysterious talisman to take out and ponder in private, fondling its indentations in the hope its meaning would eventually reveal itself. It calmed her somehow, this intimation of destiny.
Nicolas tugged at her dress. Absent-mindedly, Charlotte ran her hand through his hair and pulled him against her hip. She scanned the other side of the valley for signs of smoke or soldiers, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. She swept aside her hair and crouched to smooth over the ground as best she could with the flat of her spade. Once this had been done to her satisfaction, she took up the cross Nicolas had fashioned from two sticks tied together with twine and jammed it into the earth. Like those for her daughters and her infant son who were all under the ground, there were no words on the marker, no flowers for the grave. Death was the final word. What was there to add? More family under the ground than walking on it, she thought as she got to her feet. She made the sign of the cross across her chest and muttered a prayer. ‘In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen. Goodbye, my husband.’
‘Come on, Mother. We should go indoors. It’s getting dark.’
She stared at the rough ground, breathing hard, suddenly afraid. A worm that had been sliced in half by someone’s spade writhed about on the freshly turned earth like the pink, waggling finger of a miniature creature otherwise hidden beneath the soil. The sight of it disgusted her; it took vast effort not to mash the vile thing utterly with her spade. Eventually, she took the whimpering Nicolas by the hand, and together they picked their way back across the uneven ground to their cottage.
The village goats complained as they were shoved indoors for the night. There came the hoot of a bird. Coughing, soft words, latches falling into place in the houses around them, then silence.