Arc d'X

8

WHEN THE BLOOD STOPPED, after he’d taken her many times over the weeks that followed, he didn’t wash her with the rags anymore. It was the hemorrhaging of his conscience to which Thomas tended. If he couldn’t quite forgive the way he fucked her, he accepted it as the dark thing that allowed him otherwise to be good.

Toward the end of the year, when he thought Sally was strong enough, Thomas brought a doctor to the Hotel Langeac to inoculate her for the pox. For several days and nights Sally lay in bed with terror and pox coursing through her; it was left to Patsy and James to care for her. They silently brought her food and, in the same silence, mopped her brow. Their eyes burned with hate. When the fourteen-year-old girl felt how she was banished from the heart of her own brother, her loneliness was without horizon.

Thomas, of course, didn’t come to her during this time. So at first Sally was grateful for the fever. But finally she would have gone through anything to be free of it, and in her spells and exile from everyone around her, she imagined that the white spillage of her dark god might cure her like a potion. Feeling his rejection, she even heard herself call for him. When the fever of the inoculation finally passed and she’d spent another couple of days in bed recovering, she crept to the hotel kitchen one night and smuggled out a carving knife. She told herself she would lop off her tongue before she ever allowed it to call his name like that again.

Thomas and Sally didn’t speak of what was happening. He wouldn’t have chosen to speak of it, and there was no one for her to speak about it to. She was shunned by everyone as the living black secret that spread through the hotel and down its stairs, out its door and into the street. There this secret took the form of the heads of dead deer and the carcasses of dead rabbits stuck on gate tops and pinned to doorways, draping the pillars of the Pont Neuf and lining the walls along the rue St-Lazare. By the end of the first day the stench of dead animals was as political as the cognac and sex that Thomas had smelled on his arrival in the city two years before. The people in the streets said the dead carcasses were a protest against the law that made it a crime to kill the game of the aristocracy. But Sally knew the carnage had emerged from her uterus in the gush of his afterflow, beasts with their fur slicked by semen dashing crazed into impalement on the spires of Paris. The heads of people would be next.

The heads of people will be next, she whispered to him on the first night he came to her after her fever had gone. He’d taken her and then fallen asleep by her. Now at night there was always torchlight through the crescent-moon window above. I called you from the fever, she said to his sleeping face, drawing the carving knife out from beneath her pillow, because I’m so alone, and for that moment I would have rather had you up inside me than been that alone: that’s what you’ve done to me, she said. That’s the worst thing, that you’ve made me actually long for your defilement. Next time I’ll cut off my tongue first. He was sleeping in the light of torches. She looked down to between his legs and an idea gripped the knife in her hands; instead she pressed the blade to his throat. Her own face was inches from his. She had the feeling he wasn’t asleep at all. Something about his breathing was different; she put her eyes right up to his as though to look in. “Master,” she said, “we’ll carve your head and put it on a pike outside, with a rabbit. Your head on a rabbit’s body, and a rabbit’s head on yours. That’s how Patsy and James will find you tomorrow.” She wanted to goad him now out of his pretense of sleep. It would be just like him, she thought, to die without anyone’s ever knowing whether he’d been awake for his own death. How godlike. She put the knife away and lay back on the pillow, waiting for a lion to emerge from her and crash through the hall, down the stairs and into the foyer, spearing itself on the iron poker with which the ashes of the fire below were stirred.