7: Green Glass is not an Emerald
Certes, pierre d'aÿmant
Ne desirre pas fer tant
Con je sui d'un douz samblant
Covoitoz.
J'ai a nom Mescheanz d'Amors.
(Indeed, a lodestone
No more desires iron
Than I am of one sweet glance
Desirous.
I am named Unlucky in Love.)
Gillebert de Berneville, De moi dolereus vos chant (13C)
Pierre guided Esméralda – stunned, half-fainting – down the winding stone stairs.
Mother Sibylle, who had been seeing the surgeon out of the house, was waiting for them below, hands on hips and gaze disapproving. "Have you been disturbing my patient?"
"No, he was sleeping," said Pierre. "We were worried when we heard… He was my teacher, you see. It's… just been quite a shock, seeing him like that."
She scrutinised Esméralda's wan face. "Indeed."
"He fell, didn't he? From the cathedral?"
"Yes. Five broken ribs and both shoulders pulled out."
"But his chest?"
"The gashes were much neglected and mortifying. He must have had weeks of fever and delirium. He was dying, but Maître de Saint-Loup says he'll mend now the hurts are clean. But we don't want a scandal, Messire Gringoire: you do understand? Knives and priests – especially one of his standing! His reputation must be protected."
"Indeed, Mother," he said calmly enough, but she had only increased his concern. Knives – and Dom Claude?
Sibylle looked at the wilting girl. "Ask Sister Geneviève to make your wife a chamomile tisane: she seems quite overcome."
"Suffering distresses her."
"No doubt. Tell me," she asked sharply, "is it Agnès or Esméralda?"
"Agnès. The other's just a nickname, on account of her necklace."
The widow gave a thin-lipped smile. "Ah. I see."
Pierre took Esméralda out into the yard for some fresh air, while Geneviève prepared her drink.
"I can't stay here any longer! I don't feel safe!"
"Not safe? He's bedridden!"
"But you must protect me from him! You're my husband!"
Pierre took a deep breath. When it suits you, he thought. He said nothing.
"But you're supposed to protect me!" she insisted.
He spoke quietly, rather sadly: "And if it had been Phœbus lying there – what was I supposed to do then?"
She did not answer. She was impulsive by nature, thoughtlessly kind – as when she had saved Pierre or had given water to Quasimodo – but just as thoughtlessly cruel. She had simply assumed he would go along with her wishes: that was what other people did – what they were meant to do – to mirror her own moods and desires. Sullenly, she threw herself down on the dusty yard at her mother's feet, alongside Djali.
Pâquette glanced up from her cassock-sewing. "So it's not your Captain Phœbus, then?" she asked with feigned innocence: in fact, she had been listening attentively.
"No," Pierre replied. "It's Dom Claude."
She shrugged. "I daresay this is his, then, from the length… I've nearly finished the buttons. Djali's been a good girl, and hasn't eaten any – have you, my poppet?" She ruffled the goat's silky ears.
"Mother, I told you what he tried to do!" said Esméralda.
"Yes," Pâquette said sharply. "But if you'd said 'Yes' to him in the first place, a lot of trouble could have been avoided." She asked Pierre: "How is Monsieur the Archdeacon?"
"He was near death from wound-fever and a bad fall – but they think he'll live now."
"Good… He used to talk to me at my cell window, sometimes. So troubled… He'd ask me to pray for him." She remembered him standing at the public breviary, when he told her that Esméralda was to be hanged; remembered the wildness and torment in his great, dark eyes – surely from this fever – when he had delivered the girl into her hands. If she had his cassock, he must be in his chemise and braies; or, more probably, stark naked, she thought, smiling to herself. In years past, she had flogged herself senseless for thus picturing him (and, indeed, many other young men, lay and clergy alike).
"Do you think I could go back into sanctuary?" Esméralda asked. "At least Quasimodo knew how to protect me! Or home to the Cour des Miracles?"
"Thanks in part to Quasimodo, there is no more Cour des Miracles! At least, not in the way it was," said Pierre acerbically. "They're dead – Clopin and all the dukes and lords of Little Egypt! So there is no safety there!"
She sighed. She had grieved for her friends among the truands, but not over much. "Or what about our cousins, the Pradons? Why don't we go to stay with them, mother? Anywhere but here!"
"I'd rather face them with a bit more flesh on my bones and better clothes on my back. They're decent people, and we have to reclaim our property from them. So we ought to look less beggarly, for we're not begging them for it."
"Property?" asked Pierre, impecunious but ever optimistic.
"One field, but they've been looking after it for me since Uncle Mathieu died last year. One of them came to see me in my cell at the time."
"Well, that's something!"
"But we need to find somewhere else to stay!" Esméralda insisted.
"'We'? Well, I'm happy here, so is Djali," Pâquette said. "We have a roof, a bed, and food. Pierre has that snoring old man to share with, but otherwise…"
"But I'm frightened to sleep here now! What about when he gets well enough to walk? To manage the stairs?"
"From the look of him, " Pierre said, "that's months away, if ever."
Pâquette absent-mindedly stroked her daughter's hair, much as she had fondled the goat's ears. "And with us in the one bed, he'd have to get past me first…"
"So you would protect me then?"
She smiled beatifically, like a Reims statue of a far more virginal mother. "Yes, my darling." But that was not quite what she had meant.
Sister Geneviève poked her head around the door into the yard. "I've some good, fresh chamomile ready for you now, dear! You'll feel much better for it!"
Still one matter regarding his master's condition preyed on Pierre's mind: knife-wounds. It made no sense, given what he knew of the archdeacon; but then, what Esméralda had told him – of Claude stabbing Phœbus, making advances, even trying to rape her when she was in sanctuary – ran counter to all he knew of the man. But he knew, from his own experience, that if Esméralda felt her virtue threatened, she would draw her knife. She had been arrested for stabbing one man, although she denied the crime; and yet here was a second who had pursued her, who had also suffered wounds. Had she wounded one of them – or both? He realised that he scarcely knew her at all. She was his wife merely in name, by a questionable, temporary gypsy rite – and only since January; indeed, for half the time since they had been apart, with her in prison or in sanctuary. He had to admit that the case looked bad.
He decided to broach the subject on one of the rare evenings they were alone together. Pâquette was in the kitchen, on the fireside settle with old Geoffroi. She was reading (extremely) aloud to him and Sister Geneviève from a French translation of de Voragine's Legenda Aurea. Pierre encouraged her to practise her reading: indeed, he had been impressed that she was literate, but then, her family had been decent enough at one time. The good sisters prided themselves on owning three or four books, all pious works; and he thought that the lives and martyrdoms of the saints should at least prove morally and spiritually edifying.
After a day's juggling, he had found Esméralda perched, dainty as a songbird, on a clothes-chest at the foot of the bed she shared with her mother. She had been rummaging through it, looking in vain for anything gaudy enough to make into a new costume for dancing. She always made him feel awkward, with her natural grace, even in the drab clothes she currently wore. He was conscious of his own gangly physique, all sharp elbows and knees jutting through threadbare doublet and hose.
He smiled at her. "I'm glad you decided to stay: there really is nothing to fear."
"Not yet."
"Not for months. We should be out of here by then."
"Good."
"There's just one thing I don't understand about Dom Claude's illness."
"What's that?"
"How did he get himself cut up so badly in the first place? I've known him for seven years – since I was your age. I've never seen him drunk, and he doesn't get into brawls; in fact, before you told me of all your trouble with him, I'd have said he was insufferably virtuous. I just can't imagine him in a fight! For a start, he'd look completely ridiculous!"
"He wasn't in a fight." This she said almost casually.
"So you know?"
She turned her head away. "I don't want to talk about it."
"Esméralda, what happened?"
"I want to forget."
Pierre stared at her.
"What? Why are you looking at me like that?"
"Because I'm frightened now."
"Why? Surely you don't think I…?"
He gulped. He hated himself for saying it, but he could not put it from his mind. "I don't know; I honestly don't know."
"Why do you say that? How can you think it?"
"You threatened me with a knife on our wedding-night!"
"That was different!"
"Then there was the Phœbus business, and now Dom Claude… Well, did you do it?"
"No! You know me, Pierre! You know I'd never –"
"No, I don't know. And I don't know you. You fought me off: you said you'd sworn to stay a virgin. All well and good: I trusted you. Then what happened? I saw you on trial after being arrested, half-naked, in the lowest whorehouse on the Pont Saint-Michel, with some officer stretched bleeding at your feet! What was I to think? Whom should I believe?"
"Me, of course," she said simply.
"I want to, Esméralda. But if it wasn't you – who did?"
"He did it to himself. Just as he stabbed Phœbus. He even showed me."
Pierre grew even paler than usual. "Pasque-Dieu…"
"You know I said that when I was in prison, he visited me and offered to help me escape? Well, he told me that while I was being tortured, he had been watching, listening; that every time I cried out, he tore himself with a knife… He bared his breast. It wasn't even bandaged: when he pulled his robe and shirt away, it was oozing blood and pus! Even in a dungeon, the stench of it –!"
"But that was at least a couple of months before he fell."
"Yes. So?"
"So, ever since then… If he'd let his wounds get so bad, for so long – Mother Sibylle was right: it must've nearly killed him! No wonder he's been doing strange things!"
"Strange? Worse than strange! He's a – a demon, not a priest! God, when he crawled all over me that night in sanctuary! His body was like a furnace!"
"That would be the fever."
"Does it matter?" Esméralda did not want to think of Claude Frollo as merely a desperate, desperately sick man, unhinged by delirium. He was her enemy. He was the devil and, as such, she wished she could forget seeing him lying upstairs, so pathetically human.
"I trusted you; I trusted him; and both…" He was thinking: and both of you broke that trust in different ways. And yet, in different ways, he still loved them both dearly.
She shrugged. "Who cares about him, anyway? Horrid old priest!"
Pierre looked back across seven years to the kindly, earnest young man who had taken him in and educated him, asking no payment save occasional help in shelving and sorting his numerous books and manuscript rolls. He had learned French, Latin, some Greek; philosophy, scripture, some law and a little science: wonders of which he, a street-urchin of sixteen, had never dared to dream. He winced at Esméralda's words.
Claude was making steady progress. He was fully conscious now: indeed, without the recurrent fevers that had plagued him since he had injured himself, his mind was clearer than it had been for months. His ribs still ached, but the knife-wounds were slowly healing and his bruises were fading from black and purple to muddy colours, through to blues and greens. The sisters rubbed his shoulders with soothing salves to ease the damaged muscles, but both arms were still very weak.
Mother Sibylle realised that he was recovering in spirits when she tried to feed him some of Sister Geneviève's mutton broth.
"Before I touch any of that, could you please tell me what day it is, Mother?"
"Why?"
He narrowed his eyes. "Is it a fast day?"
She sighed. "Well, it's Wednesday."
"Then it's a fast day." And he refused to open his mouth for the spoon.
She glared at him. "I know, you'd liefer be on bread and water, never mind fish or vegetables, but you need building up! You've been far too sick, and your weight –"
"But if you knew the weight of my sins…"
"– Beside the point at present! You know perfectly well that the sick are excused fasting!"
"As archdeacon, I can report you to the bishop!"
She thrust out her chin, determined. "No, I shall report you to the bishop! I'm writing to him once a week about you as it is! He's very concerned, but then you've been a pet of his these ten years and more! I don't want him blaming me if you make yourself ill again!"
He frowned, and let her feed him, while she muttered under her breath about "young folk these days" and something about him being a "silly, stubborn boy".
There were still gaps in his memory, at the times when his fever had been at its height. Of the hours before his fall, he retained only hazy impressions: the sound of fighting in the Parvis; a boat on the river; a dream – surely it was a dream? – of Esméralda embracing the gallows, and the claws of the hag in the Trou-aux-Rats emerging from the darkness between the window bars to seize her. He remembered the cool air against his burning skin as he had stood on the gallery of the tower, straining his eyes towards the Grève, seeking out a white shape. And then – nothing until the fever had broken, leaving him helpless in this bed.
But this he knew: he had desired a woman, which was forbidden. He had struck down a man for her – a shallow swaggerer who meant her ruin – but had left her to bear the blame of it. And so he had made her pain his, as with every cry she gave, he had gashed open his breast, and made ready to strike to his heart… A mortal sin, but for her sake…
And neither awake nor sleeping, but somewhere between, he had seen and heard her again in the torture-chamber… His wounded breast had been on fire; and so was he, with pain and with desire. Hallucinating, he had taken the key to the Red Door; had gone, like a sleepwalker, from his rooms in the cloister into the cathedral; up the stair. He had reached her bed; had touched her, kissed her; had been in a frenzy of longing, not knowing what to do next. He had woken only when having his lights punched out by Quasimodo. He saw the girl standing over him, with a short sword gleaming in her hand…
Always, always his dreams had ended thus: with him at her feet, in desperation and despair, sweating, sobbing, aroused – and in hopeless, virginal ignorance.
He did not know if she were living or dead; if they had hanged her after all. If only he could be sure that what he remembered of the Place de Grève was merely a fever-dream. Something white at the gallows…
He had been unable to confess even to Father Thierry, when he brought the sacrament and the latest gossip from the cathedral. He had tried, but was assured that any sins preceding his accident that were still troubling him had already been absolved. And so he confessed only minor sins of impatience and frustration at his illness, and left the worst unspoken. He certainly could not tell these kindly matrons. No, he must bear his guilt as his cross, with the pain of his wounds: he shared it only with the crucifix above his bed, with its painted blood and contorted limbs.
Sister Catherine shaved his beard (to his relief, as it itched, and he could not easily scratch it because he had to rest his arms), and tidied his tonsure, taking great care not to cut his scalp with the razor. "It's a bit of a shame, really," she said. "It's not as if you've much hair to spare, is it?"
"A family trait, I'm afraid: my father went bald young, too." He recalled his father as a tall, reserved man, much like himself, always wearing a coif to keep his head warm. To a child, he had seemed old, but he must have been about his own present age in those days; he had died in his forties. It grieved him still that, by just a few months, his parents had not lived to see his ordination – which they had made the whole object of his life since his childhood.
"Well, we've got to make you look proper because you're getting a visitor, dear," Sister Isabeau said. She rearranged the mound of bolsters and pillows so he could sit comfortably without aggravating the pains in his ribs and shoulders. "Mother thought you were quite well enough to have someone in to see you."
"Is it my brother?" He missed Jehan, and was vaguely fearful for him: there had been some conversation he could not quite recall, in a boat; besides, the lad kept such bad company. But he was not sure that he was strong enough to cope with his presence. He recalled their last meeting: telling him to go to hell, and throwing his purse at him from the window. The boy must have spent all of that by now, and was probably in debt again.
"No, it's a friend – an old pupil of yours, Messire Gringoire."
"I see." Her husband, after a fashion… Claude shivered involuntarily.
"Have you got a chill, dear? I'll get you another coverlet!"
"No, thank you; I'm all right."
The sisters let Pierre in. "Master?" he asked nervously, then his face brightened as he saw that Claude was awake and sitting up. He looked more like himself now, his former student thought: still pallid and hollow-cheeked (almost as bad as the crucifix on the wall), but clean-shaven, and healthier than when he had last been on his feet.
He managed a weak smile. "Gringoire – it's good to see you!"
"Mother Sibylle said you were well enough for a little company. – Ladies, would you mind leaving us?"
"Very well; if you need anything, just give a shout."
They closed the door behind them. Pierre wondered if they would try to eavesdrop: he hoped not, because there were personal matters he had to discuss.
"How goes it, master?" he asked.
"I mend slowly, but still I mend. How is your wife? Alive and well?"
Pierre looked nervous. "Yes, she is." Small thanks to you, he thought, but it would have been cruel to say it.
"Is she safe?" Claude's eyes widened. They still appeared far too large in his gaunt face, but at least they had lost the unnatural brilliance of fever.
"Yes."
"Thank heaven! I had feared I had – I had feared they had hanged her! Oh, my friend, such horrors and fancies have plagued me! I was near madness!"
"Madness?"
"Or delirium. Tell me – honestly – have I been behaving at all oddly?"
Pierre was torn between honesty and diplomacy: "It depends. And since when?"
"Since Esméralda was in prison."
That confirmed what Esméralda had said, he thought. "Well, at the For-l'Evêque you surely looked as if you'd strayed from the Danse Macabre at the Innocents, and then, that night we got her out of the cathedral, the night of the battle, just before you…"
"That's not what I asked. What have I been doing?"
He flinched. "Esméralda would be a better person to ask, but she – she doesn't want to see you."
The priest's heart leapt: "Is she here?"
He avoided a direct answer. "What I mean is, she's afraid to see you."
"Afraid of me?"
"Yes – and I can understand why. I trusted you with her, master – with her safety. I trusted you as a friend, but you…"
"Oh dear God…" Claude closed his eyes and turned his face away. "Fever-dreams… I thought it was all fever-dreams…"
"You were ill: I keep telling her that. It was the wound-fever. If she had known you before, known you as I do…"
"It began before my wounds. Did she tell you how I got them?"
Pierre nodded. "But you were much worse thereafter. She said… she said… well, that you tried to deflower her."
"I think I went to her bed one night, yes…" He sighed deeply, and tried to ignore the pain it sent through his side. "But I swear on Our Lady's own chastity, there was little danger…"
"How so?"
He blushed faintly beneath his pallor. "Because I don't know how."
Pierre, already shocked, tried not to look even more so. Claude was a priest, yes, and inclined to asceticism; but he had, after all, been a student first, and everyone knew what they were like. "But surely at university…?"
"Never. And when I studied medicine, I avoided anything… incompatible with my vocation. Yes, I have frightened her, I know. I have wronged her. I have near killed her for it. But" – and he glanced up at the gruesome polychrome crucifix above him – "as Christ suffered on the cross for us, I have loved her! I have loved her to distraction! And I would have pulled down the world to ruin for her and gladly burned in Hell with her and for her!"
Pierre looked perplexed: in the same way that some sounds audible to dogs lie beyond the range of human hearing, so such vehement passion was beyond his own emotional spectrum, affectionate in nature though he was. And in so many ways, Esméralda, pretty as she was, struck him as an unlikely object of devotion for a man like Claude. "But why? You're a great scholar, a philosopher, but she…"
Claude went on, relieved at last to have someone to trust, to whom he could unburden his soul: "At times, she appeared to me as a sorceress, a devil, a succubus to tempt me, such as came to Saint Antony in the desert. At others, she seemed the embodiment of all perfection; of philosophy itself. I believed that, through her, all the secrets of the universe, the operatio solis – the work of the sun – would be revealed to me."
The poet blinked in astonishment. "This is the same Esméralda we're talking about, who dances with a tambourine and a singularly gifted goat? Not Hypatia or Catherine of Alexandria, or Héloïse of the Paraclete?"
He nodded. "She is the Tabula Smaragdina incarnate."
"The what?"
"The Tabula Smaragdina – the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus! Her name tells us so – don't you see? La Esméralda! You've seen the emerald she wears around her neck!"
Pierre took a deep breath. "You do know it's not her real name?"
It was Claude's turn to look shocked and puzzled. "No, I don't."
"Her name's Agnès: Agnès Guybertaut. Her mother said so."
"What mother?"
"When you left her with Sister Gudule, because she hated gypsies for stealing her child – well, it turned out Esméralda is her stolen child. They had matching little shoes, made of pink satin. Small world, isn't it? So she's not even a real gypsy: Gudule – or Pâquette, which is her real name – is just a scrawny old doxy from Reims."
"God's blood…!"
"And as for that 'emerald' that gave her her nickname – it's merely a green glass bead."
"Glass?"
He nodded. "In short, master, la Esméralda is a fake – as fake as a glass emerald."
Claude did not know whether to laugh or cry: either would make his ribs hurt hellishly. Suddenly he saw his situation in all its absurdity. His goddess of philosophy, half-angel, half-demon, had not merely feet of clay, but was made of it entirely: the basest, most commonplace prima materia, not transformed by alchemy, but merely masked superficially by the illusion of her art and by his own capacity for self-deception. He had made a fool of himself, marked his immortal soul for damnation – all for a street-dancer with a glass amulet…
But he was not alone in this: he recognised the bitter edge to Pierre's voice. "And yet you, too, love her?"
The younger man nodded. "For my pains, yes. Though I can't say I'd be fool enough to tear down the world for her. Still, it's ridiculous, isn't it? She's only ever cared for that popinjay Phœbus! Pasque-Dieu! – What's he, compared to either of us? We are men of erudition and culture, but he –!"
"– Is a satyr in burnished plate," the priest suggested.
"Very finely put! – Did you stab him, by the way? She says so."
"Yes, I did: he was about to debauch her."
"Unfortunately, she rather wanted to be debauched! Which is the whole trouble."
"I wish I had killed him."
"At times I wish you had, too! Horns suit Djali far better than they do me, I tell you plain!"
"But I thought you preferred the goat?"
"Well, yes, but no – I mean, not that way!"
"That's a relief! I was beginning to worry about you!"
"What?"
"One comes across such things in the penitentials: one has to know what to say if people confess such sins. I was becoming a little concerned!"
Pierre laughed. "I daresay I'd be happier if that were true! Djali may be caprine, but she's far less capricious than her mistress! Far cleverer, too!"
"But she is a goat. You must always remember that."
"Alas, yes! But Agnès-Esméralda… Even if she is a fake emerald…"
Claude nodded, with a wistful smile. Come to think of it, did they not say that the Elixir, the Philosopher's Stone, could only be attained through purifying the coarsest prima materia? Was it, perhaps, possible that she could be purified, ennobled into something finer? Quod est Inferius est sicut quod est Superius, said Hermes: the lower and the higher are one and the same. And yet – so far she had already cost him his health, almost his life, his self-respect… Why did his brother never have these problems with women? He was only Esméralda's age…
"Have you seen Jehan about at all while I've been ill? I sent him away with a flea in his ear, but he must have run out of money again by now!"
"No, he –" He pulled himself up sharply. "You've forgotten, then?"
"What is it? Has something happened to him?"
"You remember there was the fighting at the cathedral, don't you – all that night, before you…?"
"A little. The fever was upon me."
The poet put his head in his hands. "I'm afraid Jehan was caught up in it, among the truands. He… fell."
"Wounded – or killed?"
"Slain. I'm so very sorry." He could not tell him that Jehan had been the lad whose brains he had seen Quasimodo dashing out against the Gallery of the Kings… Some things were best left unsaid.
Claude groaned. He had had a vague recollection of being in a boat on the river at night, with Pierre, Esméralda and the goat. Pierre had said something, but he could not quite remember what, his mind fogged by fever and the painful spasms that the action of rowing had sent across his inflamed and infected chest.
"I told him to become a truand, and threw the purse from the window… 'Quid fecisti? Vox sanguinis fratris tui clamat ad me de terra…'"*
"It's my fault, too," Pierre said, reflecting on the strategy that had misfired so terribly. He had not expected the bell-ringer to misunderstand so badly – to be so deadly a foe to Esméralda's friends.
"For sixteen years – ever since our parents… God forgive me, I was meant to protect him… And now I have no brother…" He began to break down.
Pierre clasped his hand. "That's not true," he said firmly. "While I live and breathe, you will always have a brother."
* "What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood cries out to me from the earth" – Genesis 4:10, Vulgate Bible (Latin translation attributed to St Jerome and used throughout the Middle Ages).
To be continued: Three women's hearts, differently made
