As though Drozde’s words were a signal, the shapes coalesced from the darkness on all sides. They clustered around her, much more densely than any living crowd could because their immaterial nature allowed them to overlap and interpenetrate. They were not like the ghosts she’d known before. They were like Magda, entirely human in appearance and as animated in their manner as any living people Drozde had met. And like Magda, they called her name as they advanced, hailed her, wished her well.
She braced herself for their touch, but they did not touch her. They stopped a few feet away from her on all sides, respectful of her person, and smiled in welcome. It seemed that Pokoj had its own population, its own economy. It was a republic of the dead, and it was offering her citizenship. She wasn’t minded to accept.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “And how do you know me?”
“We are as you see us,” one dead man said. “Poor souls left shipwrecked here when the boats that were our bodies foundered. As to how we know you, that might be a question better left until later. The way we see these things . . . It’s not easy to explain to those who haven’t experienced it for themselves.”
“I don’t understand,” Drozde said.
“No.”
“I mean, I don’t understand how it can be hard to explain. I don’t know any of you, but you all seem to know who I am. So tell me where we met before. Or have you spied on me without letting me see you? Did you follow me here?”
She knew as she said it that it couldn’t be true—that it was no explanation at all. She saw the ghosts as well as they saw her, so how could they have watched her without being noticed in their turn? And in any case a dead man didn’t move about. He stayed where he’d died, as though his death was a stake driven into the ground and he a dog tied to the stake.
“We wouldn’t watch you if you told us not to,” a woman said, her downcast eyes full of reproach. Though she had already seen it in Magda, Drozde was amazed all over again at this—that the faces of the phantoms were clear enough to show expressions. Most ghosts looked like freshly painted portraits left out in the rain, the details running together into abstract splotches of colour.
“But you won’t tell me the truth?” she demanded.
An unhappy murmur passed through the crowd.
“You,” Drozde said to a handsome man of middle age with a forked beard. “Do you know me?”
“We are all friends here,” the man said.
“Answer my question.”
“Yes. I know you. Everyone here knows you, as everyone here knows everyone here.”
She gave him a warning look. “Are you going to tell me that I’m your Drozde?”
“Lady, I would not presume to such intimacy.”
“Good. Tell me this, then: who are you?”
This time the question got a very different answer—perhaps because this time Drozde addressed it to a single person. There was a quickening of excitement among the ghosts as a whole, while the one she was speaking to seemed to draw himself up a little higher and to come into an even clearer focus.
“You want to hear my story?” he asked, with more emphasis on the my than seemed to Drozde to be warranted.
She wanted no such thing, but she felt by this time that she was in a situation she didn’t fully understand, and it troubled her. So, “Yes,” she said. “Go on. Tell me your story.”
The ghosts shifted and reformed, like the glass beads in a kaleidoscope. Abruptly, they were facing the bearded man and turned inward upon him.
“My name,” the man said, “is Samuel Gelbfisc.”
I was born a Jew, in the city of Koszalin in Poland, under Casimir Jagiellon but before the Nieszawa statutes (may the paper on which they were written run with boils like diseased flesh!) deprived me and the rest of my race of so many of our rights and freedoms. In that time it was still possible to be a Jew in Poland and to pursue a trade—as I did, working and learning under my father and then upon his death inheriting his thriving business as an apothecary.
I was born a Jew, I said, and in many respects I am a Jew still. Not in respect of religion, however. I renounced my faith when I was twenty years old. This was out of love for a woman, and I learned from that experience how little such loves really mean. Also, how inveterate is the hatred of some people for anything that is different from themselves. Her parents did not accept me as a putative son-in-law, for all that I had kissed the feet of Christ. They sent my Josie away to school in Tarnow, and when she returned she was betrothed to another.
Enough of that. I make no complaint, for I was too young then to understand what I desired and we were unlikely to have made each other happy. I found love enough later, with women and men alike, but never stayed long with any of them. That early disaster with Josie had made me mistrustful of human affections—at least, of their durability. I preferred a fire that burned very hot and died all the quicker for it.
It might be supposed that I had reverted by this time to the faith of my forebears. But it was not so. The God I believed in cared nothing for the vestments, the trappings of religious ritual. He was to be found as easily in the droning Latin of the Catholics as in the ecstatic swayings and intonings of the Chassidim. In fact, I found Him most often in solitary prayer, and went to church only because it was expected of me.
But church was, I must admit, a boon in business. I met many customers in chance conversations at the church gates, and was often recommended to others through acquaintances I’d made in the course of what was only nominally an act of worship. I wasn’t alone in this. Jesus may have chased the moneylenders from the temple, but I guarantee you they crept back again as soon as His back was turned. That’s the way of it, and always has been.
In 1492, just after John became king, I decided to go on a pilgrimage to see the scarred Madonna at Jasna Gora. Again, this wasn’t primarily a matter of piety. It was a pleasance first, and after that a commercial speculation. The Nieszawa statutes were law by then, and it was harder now for a Jew to trade from fixed premises. As an apothecary I was able to adapt to this better than most, but by consequence I’d become an itinerant, seldom staying in one town or city for more than a few days at a time. A pilgrimage suited me nicely, allowing me to visit suppliers and former clients in many places across the country.
My fellow pilgrims presented a great diversity and variety, from the very amiable to the very aloof. I made no secret of my origins, since my name—which I had not changed—already marked me out as a Jew. To those who asked, I told my story. To those who stood by, purse-lipped and hard-eyed, I said nothing.
With one group in particular I became close friends. They were the Lauzens, a family of four from Kalushin. Alojzy Lauzen was a merchant, most of whose trade was in wines and spirits. He enjoyed life and liked those around him to enjoy it too. He had come on the pilgrimage for the sake of his wife, Etalia, who had been unable to conceive again after the difficult birth of their first child—Tomas, now twelve—which had lamed her. She thought that the icon of the scarred virgin, which was said to be particularly responsive to the injuries of women, might restore her and make her fertile again. The fourth member of the family, and the most recently acquired, was a cow, Erment. Her presence on the pilgrimage was explained by Tomas’s weak constitution and a recommendation from a physician in Kalushin that he should drink a great deal of milk.
I liked Alojzy and Etalia very much, but I liked their son better than either. Tomas was a child of uncommon intellect and open, ingenuous spirit. This was his first experience of the world outside his hometown, and he was devouring it as a monkey eats fresh fruit. To see a hump-backed bridge with Tomas, or a campanile, or even a haywain, was to see it for the first time. He took such pleasure in the unfamiliar, he made the banal lading of the world into gaieties and festivals.
It goes without saying that Tomas was fascinated by the apothecary’s art. He was fascinated by everything! When I began to explain to him how I worked, mixing minute amounts of potent pharmaca with exquisite care, he besieged me with a thousand questions. From where did I source my potions and powders? How did I know what concentrations to use, and which simples had which effects? Since the relative volumes were so crucial, what about the metal of the vessels I employed, or the mortars and spoons I ground and stirred with?
I answered all these questions as well as I could, and also showed him how certain rudimentary tinctures could be brewed. Under my instruction he made a simple from andrographis, poplar and bee balm, which he mixed into the milk of the cow, Erment, and served to his mother to ease the pain in her hip. It gave her a great deal of relief, and the boy no less pride.
Our southern progress was leisurely, to say the least, and my friendship with Tomas grew each day. I demonstrated for him a great many minor mysteries of the art—such as are not profound but produce a great spectacle when they’re performed. I showed him the fire that continues to burn when submerged, the kettle that pours potions of different colours on command, the sea-stone that flows like water and yet becomes still and solid at a touch. These things are really no more than the tricks of mountebanks, but their explanation touches on deeper truths, and Tomas would not rest, after seeing each such marvel, until he had learned all the whys and wherefores of it.
I have said we made a slow and casual progress. I should say, besides, that we broke our journey each night in conditions of relative comfort. Only seldom—two or three times, perhaps—did we sleep by the road, at risk from footpads and at the mercy of foul weather. More usually our guides contrived to stop in the evenings at a post inn or hostelry, or if none was close enough they would beg lodging at a monastery or abbey, pleading the pious purpose for which we travelled.
And so we came here to Pokoj, not by design but by chance. It was an abbey then; we passed it on our way to the village of Narutsin, where we intended to seek a place to stay. It had rained heavily for some days before, and as sometimes happened the rain had made the Mala Panev break her banks at Ortzud. The spate cut us off from Narutsin, and although it might have been shallow enough to ford, we didn’t want to take the hazard. We turned back to the abbey, which lay just half an hour behind us, and asked for shelter there.
The monks of Pokoj were Benedictines, and they gave us courteous but cautious welcome. The lay brothers would see to our needs, of course, but the abbot himself, one Father Ignacio, came into the refectory to greet us. We were introduced to him one by one, and when he came to me and heard my name, his nose wrinkled as though at the smell of a fart.
“A Jew?”
“Yes,” I said. “But converted, Father, to faith in the Messiah.”
“You can’t change a Jew,” Father Ignacio said, his face still twisted into a caricature of disgust like a carved gargoyle. “If you could, Christ would have made his ministry to them.”
Historians know, of course, that this is exactly what Christ did. It was only after His death that Paul took His teachings out to the Gentiles. But I did not say this. I only smiled and reminded the father abbot that Jesus had counselled the forgiveness of our enemies.
“It’s not my forgiveness you stand in need of,” Father Ignacio growled. And having thus identified himself as my enemy, he walked on down the line to speak with the other pilgrims. He did not stay with us for the meal, but only said once again that we were welcome to such hospitality as his house could offer. He looked at me as he said this, as if he would dearly have liked to make an exception, and then he retired. I hoped that this would be the last I saw of him, but alas something happened that night that brought us into disastrous contact with each other.
The boy, Tomas, fell sick. He retired early, complaining of a malaise. Something he had eaten, he said, must have taxed his stomach. I was the last—apart from his mother and his father—to say goodnight to him. Afterwards, before I retired myself, I gave Etalia a digestive powder, which I told her to give to her son if the gripes worsened.
The next morning Tomas was not at breakfast. I asked Meister Lauzen how the boy had passed the night, but he shook his head and turned away without a word. Grief and fear sat heavy on his brow. Tomas had not slept well, Etalia told me. The pains in the boy’s stomach had persisted—if anything, they’d worsened. She’d mixed my powder in a little milk and given it to him shortly after the abbey bells rang for lauds. It had not seemed to help. This morning Tomas had barely stirred. He seemed sunk in a terrible lethargy from which he woke only to moan and whimper and then fall back at once into fitful slumber.
I asked if I might be permitted to examine him. “Certainly,” Etalia said. “We would be grateful, Meister Gelbfisc.” She led the way to the room that had been assigned to them, close by the calefactory. I knew the acuteness of the boy’s affliction as soon as I entered the room, first by the sharp smell of his sweat and his vomitus and then by his pale, sweating face.
I knelt beside his bed and put a hand on his throat. Etalia yelped in alarm—the gesture is a strange one, and easy to misinterpret. I explained to her that I was feeling the movement of his humours, whose vigour is a broad indicator of health or sickness. And I reassured her that the passage of vital spirits through the canals of the boy’s chest and gorge seemed promisingly rapid and forceful.
I might have suggested a phlebotomy, but forbore to do so. I had read widely among classical sources, if not deeply, and was aware of how contentious bloodletting had been to the ancients. Only in our own day had it become unquestioned orthodoxy.
Instead, I examined the vomitus more closely. I found black threads there, in among the remains of food and the boy’s natural effluvia. Melancholia must be the natural diagnosis, and yet that tended to progress over a period of weeks or months. The violence, the sudden onset of the boy’s symptoms suggested some other, more proximate cause for his current crisis. I asked Etalia what Tomas had eaten the night before, and she gave me a most exact account. Only what everyone around the table had eaten, she said. The bread and the smoked oscypek cheese and a small bowl of barley groats. And what had he drunk? Only water. Not even the small beer that was on the table, though Alojzy had offered him some.
At this point we were interrupted by the arrival of two of the lay brothers. They entered in haste, and told us that the abbot required our presence in the great hall. He had heard of Tomas’s affliction and wished to speak with us about it.
It was apparent from the first that Father Ignacio had an agenda, and that it concerned me. He asked the Lauzens how much contact I had had with Tomas both on the road and then once we had arrived within the abbey itself. He took particular interest in the digestive powder I had given to Frau Lauzen to administer to Tomas, and raised his eyebrows when he heard that I was the last to say goodnight to him.
In short, as you’ve probably guessed, he accused me of poisoning the child. When I asked him why he thought I would do such a thing, he answered that I was a Jew. A Jew would commit any vileness against Christian folk for no other reason than innate wickedness and perversity.
I appealed to fact and to reason—two crutches that would not carry me. I reminded the father abbot that I had renounced my religion. And I pointed out that Tomas had begun to show the symptoms of his illness before I gave the nostrum to his mother. Before I said goodnight to him, for that matter.
“But you sat opposite the boy at table,” the abbot responded, glaring down on me from the eminence of a joint stool set on a wooden dais. It was a pathetic throne indeed, and I almost laughed at his pretension, but the threat to my person was far from amusing. Father Ignacio had already sent word to the local landowner, Count Kurnatowski, requesting that one of the count’s reeves come to Pokoj to sit on the matter. At such a hearing the abbot’s word would carry a great deal of weight, and mine none at all. And against the reeve’s arrival, he ordered me confined to one of the monks’ cells with the door barred from the outside.
Here at least I was able to assert myself against his authority, by reminding him that it had limits. He was a functionary of the church, not of the state, and though his influence was vast his temporal power was circumscribed. If I had sworn myself to the order, he would have power over my body and my soul. I had not, and he did not. I refused to surrender myself into the brothers’ hands, and being mostly aged men of a peaceful and meditative bent, they did not press the point.
Yet I was conscious as I walked from the hall of my fellow pilgrims’ eyes upon me. There was a muttering where I passed, and some two or three spat upon the ground as men do when a hearse goes by to make Death look the other way. Even the Lauzens wouldn’t meet my gaze, and when I tried to speak to them they turned away.
I have said that I had little time for the doctrines of the church, or indeed any religion. Common sense prevented me from seeing the hand of God in a world so disordered and arbitrary as the one I saw around me every day. That same common sense told me now that there was no good way for this to end. Even if Tomas rallied and made a full recovery, the wheels of church and state had been set in motion. They were unlikely to stop until they’d run their course.
I had been thinking about the boy’s sickness, coming so soon after our arrival at the abbey. Its abrupt onset suggested food poisoning, but he had eaten nothing at table that had not also been eaten by others. Unless—which was always a possibility—his mother had lied to me.
I made a circuit of the abbey grounds. They were not extensive, and I had a clear sense by then of what it was I was looking for. In a secluded corner, close to the stable yard, there was a patch of weeds whose flowers grew in tight, white clusters like the explosion of sparks from damp wood when it finally catches fire. Apocynum. Dogbane. Dimly, I began to see a way of saving myself. Not with the innocence of the dove—though I was free from any taint of blame—but with the wisdom of the serpent.
I lingered in the stables a little while longer. Then I returned to the abbey and gave myself into the hands of the brothers, saying I was ready to be judged.
But they were not ready yet to judge me. For all that he hated me, Father Ignacio wished to adhere to the forms of law. He had me committed to a cell to await the reeve’s arrival. The door did not lock, but two men guarded it constantly in case I should change my mind and attempt to leave.
Several hours after my incarceration I heard shouts and running footsteps, which persisted for some time. It seemed that a further outrage had been committed. Erment, the Lauzens’ cow, had been slaughtered in her stall. The guards outside my door were questioned as to whether I had left at any point, but they were able to say that I had not. Possibly, they hazarded, I had killed the cow in the afternoon before I surrendered myself into captivity.
In the morning I was brought before the reeve, Meister Ruprecht Ganso. It was in the refectory, the largest room in the abbey. The space was needed in order to accommodate the audience, which consisted of most of the brothers and all of my fellow pilgrims. The tables had been removed, the benches set out in rows. Tomas was there, in the front row between his parents, wrapped in a frieze blanket. The stare he bestowed on me was full of fear and uncertainty.
The reeve set out the terms of the accusation. The Lauzens and others testified that I had sat close to the boy on the night when he fell ill, and had plentiful opportunities to add poison to his food. Etalia added that I had given her a powder (she said sold, not given, which perhaps hurt me most of all) and that she had stirred this simple into a glass of milk and given it to Tomas in the course of the night.
The reeve asked me whether I denied any of this. Not a word, I assured him.
“Then have you any evidence to offer in your own defence?” he demanded.
“None.”
A babel of voices arose in the wake of this word, most of them demanding a judgment. The reeve raised his hand to stem the tumult, and I spoke again into the silence that followed.
“I ask for an ordeal.”
“An ordeal?” The reeve was somewhat scandalised. “How will an ordeal serve when your guilt is already clear?”
“If I’m guilty, it will serve me not at all. It will merely remove all doubt.”
“There is no doubt!” Father Ignacio proclaimed. But other voices called out for fire and water to be brought. Some of the pilgrims were on their feet now, shaking their fists and stamping their feet upon the floor. The reeve saw which way the wind was blowing and gave order for a fire to be lit and a cauldron set upon it.
This being the refectory, the order was swiftly obeyed. The fireplace, indeed, was already set for the evening and only needed the stroke of a tinderbox. An iron trivet was brought by one of the cook’s boys, and then a cooking pot big enough to make pottage for a great multitude. As they set the trivet on the fire and the pot on the trivet, the audience moved the benches around to face this new spectacle.
Then this same serving boy filled the pot with water from the well in the abbey grounds. I stepped forward before I was even told to, and took my place before the fire. But before I put my hand into the water, I turned to look at the Lauzens. The parents, first. And then the boy.
“Tomas,” I said. “Do you believe I tried to harm you?”
“It matters nothing what the boy believes,” Father Ignacio cried, perhaps genuinely indignant or perhaps trying to drown out any answer.
Tomas Lauzen shook his head, his eyes on mine.
“Your faith will give me strength,” I said. “And in the face of your innocence, all evil will find itself abashed.”
I thrust my hand into the pot. My hand and half my forearm, for it was very deep.
“The water has not boiled yet!” Father Ignacio sneered, as though I was trying to cheat in some way.
“Then let us wait it out,” I said.
A watched pot, they say, never boils—and surely no pot was ever as closely watched as this one. Yet it warmed quickly enough, and steam began to rise from it. I swirled the water around with my hand, as though I was stirring a bath, and let my gaze travel across the faces of my accusers. For by then, with one exception, there was nobody in the room who doubted my guilt.
They began to doubt, perhaps, as the steam started to rise from the water and my face remained calm.
When the water boiled, people gasped and cried out. But I kept my hand in the fire for a good while longer, not moving at all—except for my eyes, which now found the father abbot. He was staring at me in fear and consternation.
Finally, I withdrew my hand from the roiling water and displayed it to the crowd. It was whole and unburned. It was not even red from the heat.
“Am I innocent?” I asked.
“He needs to be fully immersed,” Father Ignacio pro-tested. “Not just his hand, but his whole—”
“Whose court is this?” I bellowed over him. “My question was for Count Kurnatowski, represented here by his reeve, Meister Ganso.”
Sensible of the abbot’s slight, the reeve nodded. Sensible of the abbot’s status, the reeve made answer to him, not to me. “You agreed to the rite of ordeal, Father Ignacio, and so you must abide by it. The Jew is found innocent, and these proceedings are concluded.”
There was a great noise and perturbation in the hall, which rose to a crescendo and then subsided as I raised both hands—the wet and the dry—and shook my head. “It is not concluded,” I called out. “Unless the count’s law says it is enough to exonerate the innocent. What of the guilty?”
“What of them?” the reeve asked me testily.
“They must be found,” I said, “and punished. Someone tried to poison Tomas. Whoever this was, they sat at table with him and broke bread with him. Someone in this room is—by will and intent—a murderer. God forbid we should rise before we find him.”
Murmurs of assent came from the pilgrims, and even from some of the friars.
“I can’t question everyone here,” the reeve protested.
“No,” I agreed. “But the fire can.”
The reeve gasped. “You suggest . . . putting everyone to ordeal?”
I shook my head emphatically. “Not everyone. Only until one is found to be guilty.”
The reeve and the father abbot looked at one another. It could easily be read in their faces that they felt they were losing control of these proceedings. “Masters,” I said, “hear me out. These others”—I gestured to the pilgrims—“are little versed in matters of law and religion. They see a fire, and a seething cauldron, and they fear it. But you’re different. You know that God finds out the truth and makes it manifest.”
“Indeed he does,” the father abbot agreed, nonetheless giving me a look forked with enmity.
“Then put your hand into the fire,” I told him, “and show them the way.”
The abbot was stupefied at this suggestion. “My innocence is not in question!” he yelped. “It does not need to be tested!”
“No?” I said. “What of your faith, Father Ignacio? Does that not need to be tested either? I would have said otherwise. If I, a Jew, didn’t fear the flame, why should you?”
“I do not fear it!” the abbot roared.
I took a step back from the fire, and with outspread arms invited him to approach it. “Show us,” I said.
I meant only to humble him, but I had reckoned without the stern and stony virtue of the man. Full of hate he might be, but he was full of belief too. He hated Jews for scriptural reasons he thought impeccable.
Ignacio rose, and stepped down from the dais.
He rolled up the sleeve of his gown with finicky care, staring the while into the steam that rose from the rolling water.
Having exposed his flesh, he stood where he was for a few moments in total stillness. Everyone in the room seemed seized with the same paralysis. Nobody even breathed.
Then Ignacio thrust his hand into the pot.
I watched the face rather than the hand. I know too well what boiling water does to flesh. I saw the shock on the father abbot’s face—the realisation, blossoming in sudden agony, that his faith was not strong enough nor his innocence unblemished.
His shriek as he wrenched his hand back rose every echo of that ancient room in appalled protest. His sleeve, flopping down again, caught the rim of the cauldron and upended it, so that those nearest had to retreat hurriedly from the boiling water that slopped across the floor.
Two of the lay brothers led Ignacio—carried him, almost—away to his rooms. He was hugging his hand to his chest and his face was slack with shock. The reeve, almost as shaken, declared the proceedings at an end, but forbore to pronounce on the abbot’s guilt or innocence. There are, of course, two different dispensations for Christians and for Jews—and for the church and the laity.
There’s little else to tell. I parted company from the pilgrimage that day and took another path. I did not speak to the boy Tomas again or even see him, although he wrote to me some years later and we entered into a brief correspondence. His mother I did see, when I went to fetch my horse from the stables. She was washing with well water the pail in which she had formerly collected the milk of the cow, Erment, for her son’s libations.
I gave her a nod, which she returned, and it seemed we would leave each other’s lives with no more said than that. But as I led my horse out through the doors she called out to me, and I turned. “I’m sorry, Meister Gelbfisc, that I suspected you,” she said, “and that I spoke out against you. It was wrong of me.”
I shrugged. “It was your grief and concern for your son that spoke. You don’t owe me any apology.”
She wiped her eyes with a trembling hand. “I thought . . .” she said. “I didn’t know what to think. Was it the abbot, then? Did he try to poison Tomas so as to have an accusation to throw against you?”
“Is that what people are saying?” I asked.
Her answer was only a look, but it was an eloquent look.
I might not have spoken even then. But there was such misery in her face. I could not leave her in a world like that when I possessed the truth that would free her from it. “There is your poisoner,” I said. And I pointed to the patch of weeds beside the stable wall.
“I don’t understand,” Frau Lauzen said.
“That’s dogbane, madam. It’s a very potent pharmacon. The oil of dogbane twists the entrails and blinds the eyes. And it collects in the milk of those animals that feed on it, becoming even stronger through the titration of the animals’ own guts. It would have killed Erment eventually—my slaughtering her was a mercy in more ways than one—but until it did, her milk was killing Tomas.”
Frau Lauzen’s face became a mummers’ show in which many different emotions were successively portrayed. “Would have killed . . . ?” she echoed me. I made no further answer but left her to her musings.
“And that’s the story?” Drozde demanded. “It seems unfinished.” Gelbfisc held up a hand as if to entreat her patience.
It was seven years later that I received Tomas’s letter. I had all but forgotten these events, or at least I did not think of them very often. Its arrival surprised me for many reasons, not least because it must have taken him some effort to find my address.
He told me in the letter that his father and mother were both thriving. His father, not so young as he was and failing in strength, had taken Tomas on as an apprentice, but it turned out Tomas had no head for trade. He had entered the church instead, and was prospering there as the priest of a small parish in the municipality of Reshen.
But science, and chiefly chimick, was his hobby. Was it not true, he asked me, that certain oils, themselves boiling at higher temperatures than water, might when combined with water produce an immiscible compound that boiled at a much lower temperature? He had heard that the oil of indigo, for example, had this property. And, this being the case, was it not also true that if a man secreted up his sleeve a cake of such oil, and thrust his arm into a cauldron, the water might reach a full boil without ever becoming hot enough to hurt him? But that afterwards, the oil being sublimed away, the water would reach its proper temperature and the natural order of things be restored?
I wrote back, briefly, to wish Meister Lauzen joy and good fortune in his chosen career. The church, I told him, needs prelates of open and enquiring mind, and I was sure he would do much good in his life and bring credit to his family.
Yes, I said, in answer to his query. Such tricks could be performed—not with indigo, which would make a difference of only a few degrees to the boiling point, but with other tinctures not dissimilar. But I reminded him that God watches all, and will not permit base stratagems to prosper unless it be his will.
I added that I was only sorry for the cow, which was a dumb beast and guilty of nothing more than pursuing its natural appetites. Father Ignacio, being a man and therefore possessed of wit and conscience, deserved no such consideration.
A divine irony: I have told you how, during my stay in Pokoj, I outfaced the threat of death with nothing but brazen rhetoric and parlour tricks. Yet it was in this very same abbey that I met with death again, and this time in a form which I could not avoid. It was much later in my life, and I was passing through Narutsin, a common enough occurrence on my commercial journeys, when on the sudden I became grievously ill. There being no hospital nearby, the monks took me in for the second time, to tend to me in what (it soon became clear) was my final illness.
Ignacio had passed away long before; the father abbot presiding in Pokoj upon my arrival was none other than Tomas Lauzen, now risen in the church and much loved and respected. My second stay in the abbey was brief, and Tomas remained with me constantly, nursing me with simples and soothing balms just as I had once nursed him. He tried on several occasions during those last days to take my confession, uneasy at the thought that I might die with that old sin on my conscience, but I could not repent and therefore saw no point in confessing. Perhaps that is why I remained here after death—in this house that now stands where the abbey used to stand, instead of journeying on to God’s house.
But God’s house stands everywhere. Who knows?
There was a respectful silence after the ghost finished his story. His voice, which had been growing in animation throughout the telling, had swelled to fill the room and seemed to have woven his audience into a state of enchantment.
Then as the applause broke out—soundless, because the hands of ghosts can’t disturb the air—he bowed deeply, pleased at the impression he’d made. Some of the dead now looked back over their shoulders at a gloomy shade who seemed somewhat less pleased. He was a tall, gaunt man in the robes of a monk.
“I don’t think it was clever or honourable how you tricked me,” this one muttered.
“I wouldn’t have been able to trick you if God had taken your part,” the Jew retorted.
The other man—presumably the father abbot of Gelbfisc’s tale—seemed inclined to argue further, but the little girl stepped between them. “You know Drozde’s rules,” she said sternly.
“No arguments between us,” the shade of an elderly woman took up. “No taking the teller to task for the facts of the tale. It’s not in the facts we live, but in the memories.”
“Like birds in the branches of a tree.”
“That any loud noise might scatter us.”
The words came from all quarters, like the words of a liturgy. The abbot subsided at once. Several other phantoms had come between the two men, giving warning looks to both, but they had turned from each other and retreated from the confrontation. And by ones and by groups the other members of the strange assembly faded back into the shadows in the corners of the room, until all were gone saving only Magda and Drozde herself.
“They get so carried away sometimes,” the ghost girl said with childishly exaggerated annoyance.
She laughed, made a face at Drozde, and then began to dance. The twists and turns of the dance were bizarre and extreme, and ended with the girl dropping to the floor, one leg stretched out in front of her and the other behind. She arched her back to look at Drozde with her face upside down.
“You had to come,” she said. “You had to let there be a telling. But I like it better when it’s just the two of us.”
Once again Drozde had no answer to this. It was late and she was tired, and none of the ghosts had come close to giving her the explanations which she sought. The unreality of the last few hours had left her feeling frayed and irritable.
“Good night, Magda,” she said bluntly. “I’m going to bed.”
The girl made a sour face. “Do you have to? All right, I know you do. But it’s so nice to see you like this!”
“Like what?”
“You know. Like this.” She swept her hand up and down, gesturing emphatically to the whole of Drozde, from her head to her boots. “This is a special time, and it’s so short. Please come and talk to me again soon. Promise. Promise you will.”
Drozde considered. She could avoid the ballroom entirely if she wanted to, but she was bound to run into Magda again, and she could already imagine the look of reproach and sadness on the girl’s face if she simply ignored her. Besides, it wasn’t as though she disliked the child. it was just that this whole situation was unfathomably strange.
“Soon,” she said, keeping her face neutral.
The girl hugged her. Another first for Drozde, to be embraced by a spectre. The feeling was again like the passage of air across her body, but the girl smiled beatifically as she wrapped her arms around the woman’s waist. “I love you,” she murmured.
And was gone.