Not long after his return to Martinique, Jean-Guy had held some brief discourse with an English doctor named Gabriel Keynes—a man famous for spending the last ten years of his own life trying to identify the causes of (and potential cures for) that swampy bronze plague known as Yellow Fever. Bolstered by a bottle or two of good claret and Keynes’ personal promise of most complete discretion, Jean-Guy had unfolded to him the whole, distressing story of his encounter with the Chevalier: Shown him the mark on his wrist, the marks . . .
. . . elsewhere.
Those enduring wounds which, even now, would—on occasion—break open and bleed anew, as though at some unrecognizable signal; the invisible passage of their maker, perhaps, through the cracks between known and unknown areas of their mutual world’s unwritten map?
As though we could really share the same world, ever, we two—such as I, and such as . . .
. . . he . . .
“What y’have here, Monsewer Sansterre,” Keynes observed—touching the blister’s surface but delicately, yet leaving behind a dent, along with a lingering, sinister ache—“is a continual pocket of sequestered blood. ‘Tis that what we sawbones name haematoma: From the Latin haematomane, or ‘drinker of blood’.”
There was, the doctor explained, a species of bats in the Antipodes—even upon Jean-Guy’s home island—whose very genus was labeled after the common term for those legendary un-dead monsters Desmoulins had once fixated upon. These bats possessed a saliva which, being composed mainly of anti-coagulant elements, aided them in the pursuit of their filthy addiction: A mixture of chemicals which, when smeared against an open wound, prolong—and even increase—the force and frequency of its bleeding. Adding, however:
“But I own I have never known of such a reaction left behind by the spittle of any man . . . even one whose family, as your former Jacobin compatriots might term it, is—no doubt—long-accustomed to the consumption of blood.”
Which concludes, as it ensues, the entire role of science in this narrative.
* * *
And now, the parallel approach to Dumouriez’ former apartment—past and present blending neatly together as Jean-Guy scales the rickety staircase towards that last, long-locked door, its hinges stiff with rust—
Stepping, in 1815, into a cramped and low-hung attic space clogged with antique furniture: Fine brocades, moth-eaten and dusty; sway-backed Louis Quatorze chairs with splintered legs. Splintered armoires and dun-smoked walls, festooned with cobweb and scribbled with foul words.
On one particular wall, a faint stain hangs like spreading damp. The shadow of some immense, submerged, half-crucified grey bat.
Jean-Guy traces its contours, wonderingly. Remembering, in 1793 . . .
. . . a blood-stained pallet piled high with pale-eyed corpses left to rot beneath this same wall, this same great watermark: Its bright red darkness, splashed wet across fresh white plaster.
Oh, how Jean-Guy had stared at it—struck stupidly dumb with pure shock—while La Hire recounted the details his long day’s sleep had stolen from him. Told him how, when the Committee’s spies broke in at last, Dumouriez had merely looked up from his work with a queasy smile, interrupted in the very midst of dumping yet another body on top of the last. How he’d held a trowel clutched, incongruously, in one hand—which he’d then raised, still smiling . . .
. . . and used, sharp edge turned inward—even as they screamed at him to halt—to cut his own throat.
Under the stain’s splayed wing, Jean-Guy closes his eyes and casts his mind back even further—right back to the beginning, before Thermidor finally stemmed the Revolutionary river’s flood; before the Chevalier’s coach, later found stripped and abandoned at the lip of a pit stuffed with severed heads and lime; before Dumouriez’s suicide, or Jean-Guy and La Hire’s frantic flight to Calais, and beyond—back to Martinique, where La Hire would serve as plantation-master on Old Sansterre’s lands ‘til the hour and the day of his own, entirely natural, demise. The very, very beginning.
Or: Jean-Guy’s—necessarily limited—version of it, at any rate.
* * *
1793, then, once more. Five o’clock on that long-gone “August” day, and the afternoon sun has already begun to slant down over the Row of the Armed Man’s ruined roofs—dripping from their streaming gutters in a dazzle of water and light, along with the last of the previous night’s rainfall. Jean-Guy and La Hire sit together at what passes for a table by the open window of a street-side cafe, their tricolor badges momentarily absent from sashes and hats; they sip their coffee, thus disguised, and listen to today’s tumbrils grind by through the stinking mist. Keeping a careful tandem eye, also, upon the uppermost windows of Dumouriez’s house—refuge of a suspected traitor, and previously listed (before its recent conversion into a many-roomed, half-empty “Citizens’ hotel”) as part of the ancestral holdings of a certain M. le Chevalier du Prendegrace.
Jean-Guy to La Hire: “This Prendegrace—who is he?”
“A ci-devant aristo, what else? Like all the rest.”
“Yes, to be sure; but besides.”
La Hire shrugs. “Does it matter?”
Here, in that ill-fit building just across the way, other known aristocrats—men, women and children bearing papers forged expertly enough to permit them to walk the streets of Paris, if not exit through its gates—have often been observed to enter, though rarely been observed to leave. Perhaps attracted by Prendegrace’s reputation as “one of their own,” they place their trust in his creature Dumouriez’s promises of sanctuary, refuge, escape—and the very fact of their own absence, later on, seems to prove that trust has not been given in vain.
“The sewers,” La Hire suggests. “They served us well enough during the old days, dodging Royallist scum through the Cordelliers’ quarter . . . ”
Jean-Guy scoffs. “A secret entrance, perhaps, in the cellar? Down to the river with the rest of the garbage, then to the far shore on some subterranean boat?”
“It’s possible.”
“So the malgre Church used to claim, concerning Christ’s resurrection.”