The Confusion

An Abandoned Church in France
MARCH 1696

“I DO HOPE YOU’LL RECONSIDER, now, all of the unpleasant things you have had to say in the past about Satan.” This was how Anne-Marie de Crepy, duchesse d’Oyonnax, greeted her cousin when his eyelids-which had been closed, three days ago, by a Jesuit father in Versailles-twitched open.

Father Edouard de Gex looked up at a black sky, framed in the aperture of his coffin. It was an uncommonly plush model, for a Jesuit. The brothers of his order had loaded him at first into a Spartan pine-plank box. But Madame la duchesse and her entourage had appeared just in time, and put a stop to it. “Imitation of Christ is all well and good during life, but my cousin is in Heaven now, and nothing prevents me from treating his earthly remains with decent respect; besides, I must accompany him all the way home, and I’d have the casket well sealed.” And she had caused to be brought in to the sick-room a coffin so heavy it took four men to lift it: a coffin of oak, lined with lead, and cushioned better than most of the beds that courtiers slept on in Versailles. And so cunningly had it been wrought that even the pallbearers who carried it and its contents out to the street and set it on a flower-strewn gun-carriage would never have guessed that not only was it not sealed, but ventilation-slots ran all the way round the lip where the lid overhung the sides.

Oyonnax was now waving a phial of smelling-salts around under her cousin’s nose. He tried to fend it off, but his arms were sluggish, and pinned to his sides by the overwhelming cushions. Finally he sat up, or tried to and failed and regretted it all in the same instant. The contraction of his abdominal muscles had ramifications as far down as the wounded thigh. The pain must have been desperate, for it brought him out of his stupor better than any smelling-salts. He managed to get an elbow under him, and Oyonnax reached in and rearranged cushions to prop him up. Then he was able to relax and look about himself. He could not have seen this from the satiny depths of the coffin, but: the gun-carriage, with him and the coffin on it, had been dragged up the aisle of a burnt-out church. The servants of Oyonnax had lifted the coffin up and set it crosswise on the altar-a granite plinth with all of its decorations burnt, weathered, gnawed, and looted away. The stone walls of the church stood mostly intact, though smoke had rendered them charcoal-black. The great beams of the roof had crashed to the floor as they’d burnt, and still lay there, like so many charred pews strewn around a floor that was knee-deep in shards of roof-tiles. Though from place to place, especially nearer the altar, wicker mats had been laid upon the burnt timbers so that well-dressed persons could sit upon them without soiling their fashions. Around the altar itself, the floor had been shoveled and swept clean, creating an open space where a pentagram had been daubed out in something that had dried to a thick brown crust. The altar, and de Gex, stood at the center of the pentagram.

“Holy Jesus, what I have I done-” said de Gex, and tried again to move; but the pain in his leg nearly killed him. He fell back and crossed himself.

Oyonnax laughed indulgently, and reached out to cradle her cousin’s head in her hand. “I wondered how you would react.”

“I had to escape from Versailles,” said de Gex. “I was an imbecile before-it took me so long to understand the enormity of this conspiracy. Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon, of course, is at the center-but she is in league-always has been-with L’Emmerdeur. The Baron von Hacklheber was her enemy, but is now her friend. She operates with the Juncto hand-in-glove. Newton-the recoinage in England-all part of the same conspiracy! What could I do? D’Avaux displeased her, and was sent packing to Stockholm! Lucky he was not poisoned-or harpooned, as I was!”

“This sounds,” said the Duchess, “like a little speech that you memorized, before you swallowed my sleeping-draught, so that you could recite it to St. Peter if you never woke up. I am not St. Peter, and this is the gateway to Hell, not Heaven. But if it pleases you to recite the speech anyway, pray continue.”

“You must understand, cousine, that if there was nothing more to the conspiracy, I needn’t have troubled you. For my Order is not without resources of its own; and when conjoined to the Office of the Holy Inquisition there is little in heaven or earth that could not be accomplished. But that was before I came to understand that she had seduced none other than Bonaventure Rossignol himself!”

“As much as I loathe her, I must admit this was a master-stroke. For who, other than le Roi himself, could be a more powerful ally for a subtle and conniving bitch like Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon?”

“Just so! I realized, then, that I was trapped like a fly in her web. For there is nothing that I do in this life that is not observed by hundreds of courtiers, all of whom gossip, and many of whom write letters. In consequence Rossignol must know everything I do, and must pass it on to Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon while they are fornicating! I then saw myself to be helpless, as long as I remained in this life-in this world. The failed assassination had given me-praise God and His mysterious ways-a convincing pretext for dying young. Hence the request I whispered into your ear-which must have struck you as very strange.”

“Look about yourself, having been resurrected in this of all places, and tell me what is strange,” said Oyonnax.

“Our Savior, having died on the cross, descended to the very pit of Hell before ascending once more into the light,” de Gex remarked. “Still, I must know, cousine, if you invoked any of the Fallen ones-if my death and resurrection were effected by d?monic necromancy or-”

“D?monic necromancy is so tedious, and fraught with unintended consequences,” said Oyonnax, “when syrup of poppies does the job perfectly well. It is all a question of dosage-tricky to calculate, especially for one like you who was weakened.”

“Why did you choose to bring me around here of all places, then?”

“It was ever my plan that if I were to miscalculate the dose, and if I opened the coffin to find you dead in fact as well as in appearance, then I should employ the arts of the necromancer to bring you back to life.”

It took de Gex some moments to absorb this.

“But, cousine, I had always believed that you had only affected an interest in the Black Arts, when it was fashionable, years ago, when you were young and foolish. That you considered it all perfect nonsense.”

“You have been furious at me, Edouard, for deeming it all nonsense! For to call Satan a figment of man’s phant’sy is but one step from saying the same of God, is it not?”

“Indeed, cousine, I should rather you were a sincere Satanist than a pretend one; for the former recognizes God’s majesty, and may be reformed, while the latter is an atheist, and doomed to the Lake of Fire.”

“Then look about yourself, and draw your own conclusions.”

“I see the relics and signs of the Black Mass, the candles still burning, the inverted cross. I conclude that there is hope for you. But I do not know yet whether there is hope for me.”

“What do you mean, Edouard?”

“You have been strangely reticent on the question of whether I was alive or dead when the lid came off the coffin; whether, that is, I am alive now because of smelling salts, or because you used necromancy on my corpse.”

“Perhaps I shall tell you one day,” said Oyonnax. She lifted a bundle of clothes off the floor and dropped it into his lap. “Change out of those Jesuit weeds and into these.”

It was too much, in too short a time, for the opiated mind of de Gex. “I do not understand.”

“Understand this: You ask too many favors of me. Perhaps I’m not as different as you phant’sy from Eliza. She is a businesswoman-she does nothing for free. You, cousin, have put me to an immense amount of trouble and expense. I have given you death, a splendid bespoke coffin, resurrection, safe transit out of Eliza’s web, and now a new identity.” She patted the bundle: it was a clerical robe, but light gray, not the black of the Jesuits. “You are now Edmund de Ath, a Belgian Jansenist.”

“A Jansenist!?”

“What better disguise for a Jesuit than to become a Jesuit’s nemesis? Put these on, shave your beard, and the transformation is complete. You can go on your quest to the East a new man. I’m sure the Jansenists in Goa, Macao, Manila, will be glad of your company!”

“The disguise should serve,” said de Gex. “I thank you for it. For it and for all the rest.”

“Have I not done much for you?”

“Obviously you have, cousine, but-”

“Then shave, put on your new garments, and let us be on our separate ways.”

“I want only to know whether it was a chymist’s receipt, or the Powers of Darkness, that brought me back to life!”

“Yes. You have already made that plain.”

“And-?”

“And I thought I made it clear to you, Edmund de Ath, that I do not wish to answer your question at this time.”

“But it is a simple thing for you to do! And it makes all the difference.”

Oyonnax smiled and shook her head. “You contradict yourself-how like a Jansenist! Because it makes such a difference, it can never be simple. Edouard, apply your Jesuitical logic for a moment. If I brought you to life with necromancy, it means you belong to the Legions of Hell now-and that I am a necromancer-which means I believe that both Satan and God are real-and therefore have hope of redemption, if only I agree to switch sides. Am I correct so far?”

“Indeed, cousine, you have reasoned as soundly as any man.”

“On the other hand, if I did it all with drugs from the apothecary, then your soul belongs to God as it ever did. These trappings-” she indicated the pentagram, the candles “-are stage-props, nothing more-fetishes and relics of a ludicrous pseudo-religion that I hold in contempt, which I trotted out only to throw a fright into you-much as priests frighten peasants at church by prating about hellfire. In which case I am a cynical atheist. Am I correct?”

“Yes, cousine.”

“And so one of us shall go to hell, the other to heaven. But we cannot both end up in the same place. I know which, you do not. I have the power to tell you, but I choose to withhold the knowledge. You may embark, whenever you feel ready, on your quest to recover the Solomonic Gold, but you’ll do so not knowing the answer to your question.”

De Gex shook his head, too a-mazed to feel the horror of his predicament. “They say necromancers hold in thrall those whom they have brought back to life,” he said, “but I never thought it would work this way.”

“To me a more apt similitude is the way a priest enslaves the minds of his parishioners,” said Oyonnax. “But that is neither here nor there. I have lost count of the number of times some courtier has minced up to me and claimed he was enthralled by my beauty, wit, or perfume; of course it always turns out in the end that they are not enthralled at all. Still and all, I have often wondered what it would be like to have a thrall; and as you have so much hectored me, ever since we were children, about the prospects of my immortal soul, I can’t think of anyone who more deserves it. Know that your empty coffin shall be interred with all due ceremony in the family mausoleum at Gex. Where Edmund de Ath shall lie one day, there’s no telling; and where his soul shall end up is my secret.”