Chapter 4 Drawn to the Edge #2
Dacia rolled her eyes, as if I were joking, and I wished desperately for the power to change her fate.
“If I stay much longer,” she said, “I’ll die here.
I’ll be in so much debt I’ll never be able to leave.
I think I could be happy as a nun. To serve one God instead of many who long to be.
I know you didn’t like it, but you were a child and … ”
“Salomé,” Josef barked behind us. “You owe me for the pitcher you broke last night. Clumsy woman.”
I had to tell myself to unclench my hands before I added a broken bowl to my debt. Since leaving the convent, I hadn’t had any outburst, excepting a tendency to be clumsy with pottery.
Dacia gave me a commiserating glance, her sentence lingering unfinished in the air. Together, we stood.
Rainy days were busy. Especially in the cold, as the soldiers and farmers looked for comfort.
“Salomé,” Christine called to my back as if calling her servant. “I told Lorraine you would let her borrow the old pink silk that the priest gave you. She is too afraid to ask.”
“Why did she send you?” I asked, foot on the stairs.
I didn’t care about the silk. I just didn’t like being ordered about by anyone.
Christine had the air and stature of a lady, but her face had something horse-ish about it—as far as I could tell, men liked playing at both lord and rider.
Since the Baron’s arrival, Christine’s demand rose to a level none of us anticipated—both from villagers and his soldiers. In my opinion, it had gone to her head.
“Oh, let her. She won’t spoil it,” Dacia interjected, tucking her hair under her cloak.
“Where are you going?” Christine asked, eyes narrowed. “Confession again?”
“I’m running an errand for Cook. I won’t be long.” Dacia shot me a glance as she turned. As if I were supposed to know what she was doing. She was out the door before I could ask.
Christine cleared her throat. She clearly did not care that Dacia was going out alone.
“All right,” I said with a sigh and marched off to grab the silk, trying to shake off my worry. Dacia would be fine.
“Salomé, was that story Cook told me true?” the new girl asked, sitting at the bottom of the stairs with her face as white as a sheet.
“No, but what’s true is that Josef will punish you if he catches you sitting around. Go on,” I said, nodding her up ahead of me.
The brothel had three narrow levels, but only in the highest confines of the attic were we able to keep anything of our own.
Up in our small quarters, I picked my way through the clothing and rumpled bedding to my few belongings hidden alongside Dacia’s, digging out the pink silk.
Two of the girls were talking as they dressed, the same strains of village gossip we’d all been told the night before.
All the chatter was the same these days—nobody talked of anything but the Baron or the bandits.
Carpenters came back from his estate, describing his furnishings brought all the way from Italy, walnut and oak inlaid with ivory and gold and cushions made of velvet.
Farmers spoke of his fields, fallow and rich.
Masons shared the details of his home—forty rooms and built entirely of a delicately blue-veined granite quarried from the Vosges.
The Baron’s soldiers boasted of their time in the emperor’s court, complained of our backwater looks and food, and regaled us with stories of how he’d been an ardent supporter of the young Joan who had led the French armies at Orleans.
“Was he at her execution?” Dacia asked once.
The men had all just blinked, as if they’d forgotten that part of the story.
I dressed quickly—my patched hose, long tunic, and a veil over my long, black hair. It was a bit pointless; the farce of modesty only seemed to work for women like Dacia and Christine, whom men could fantasize about ruining and possessing.
“Salomé, you look like a dour frau,” Josef yelled as soon as I stepped foot downstairs.
I was about to reply something that would surely have gotten me in trouble, but Dacia opened the door and swept inside. Where had she gone, that she returned so quickly? I shoved the silk into Lorraine’s hands. “I’ll change,” I said to Josef and followed Dacia right back up the stairs.
“Where did you go?” I asked quietly. The room was empty now, much to my relief.
“To get this,” she said, handing me a wrapped bundle. “I know you don’t believe as I, but I’m worried. I want you to stay safe. I thought …” She trailed off, her cheeks suddenly flushed with embarrassment.
Her demeanor unnerved me. Dacia was normally as calm as a forest pond. With trembling fingers, I hastily unwrapped the cloth. Inside the small bundle was a silver medallion adorned with a woman’s painted face.
“Mary Magdalene,” Dacia explained. “She was a prostitute who was with Jesus.”
Of course I knew this. But I couldn’t say anything in response.
It took all I had not to cry. I couldn’t recall ever getting a gift, but especially not one like this.
I clutched the medallion in my palm and the longing I kept so carefully buried threatened to crawl up my throat and break free.
I tried to say thank you, but it came out as a whisper: “I wish we could run away.”
The silence stretched long and heavy. I almost thought she hadn’t really heard me. But then she said, softly. “It’s to keep you safe. I don’t need you to be taken away from me, not even by Lord Death.” She gave me a nervous smile and twisted her hands.
I longed to reach for her and tell her how much the gift meant, but I heard as a sister in the silence, and so I could only stare helplessly at the medallion.
Suddenly, instead of Mary’s serene face, I saw Rochelle, screaming as she slipped between the trees.
Valerie, in agony, in the hands of the dark, unburning figure.
I saw my mother, drowned. Everyone I had ever loved, dead or gone.
Whether Dacia knew it or not, between us was the divide between what was good and what was evil, what was holy and what was profane. I was not just a whore who saw spirits or could find an egg in the yard, but something deeper and darker, something irredeemable, cursed from the moment of my birth.
I would not plunge her into the depths with me.
“Thank you,” I managed, my voice cracking. I closed my fingers around it. “I will wear it always.”
She exhaled a clear sigh of relief and gave me a sad smile. “When I leave, I want to know you’ll remember me.”
“I could easier forget my own name,” I said. Then, before she could speak, “Josef said I look like an old frau! And I’m freezing. Help.” I made my voice rather pathetic. The medallion burned against my palm.
Dacia laughed, and the moment moved on, other girls joining us in a flurry of preparation and gossip.
Downstairs, the rain sluiced in dark rivulets as the men began to arrive, someone singing drunkenly about the exploits of the Bandits of Molsheim.
Josef yelled, the young girl was now earnestly retelling the story of the giant and the lantern to a farmer who had her in his lap, and Cook caught the meat on fire.
I lingered as close to the warmth of the hearth as I could.
Smoke filled the air, mixing with the spirits the men brought and creating a strange blue miasma.
In that swirl of spirit and smoke, the usually dull-faced spirits seemed to stare at me.
But whenever I looked back, their faces went slack, and it was only a trick of the light.
I watched it all with a strange feeling, as if I were slowly waking from a dream and every breath I took was on the knife’s edge of waking or sleeping.
It was in this shifting world that, unbeknownst to me, my true nature determined to reveal itself.