L.

[6.] Lover's Words

[Author's note: I recognize that in this time in history, the chapter may seem somewhat topical, and I regret that. I wrote the plague part of this chapter, no joke, over a year ago. In fact all of it was written over a year ago, and a lot of the details that may seem to come from life in fact came from research on 1300s Northern France. Reading it over and seeing that there is little different defense I find chilling.]

I found myself in a situation that I could not control, and I told no one how I really felt. But I had started to remember the senses of former lives. It is not that I had ever forgotten who I had been and what I had done, but somehow, being with Leis, I began to remember so clearly. 

I often found myself walking out, and went alone to former places. In Montmartre, we were near where the Grand Chatelet, the prison, fronted the butchers'. A place I had often been in former times, before my little doves, my Dasius and my Nicky. In those days, hundreds of years past, I had often waited out front of the Chatelet for news of friends, my hands clasping and unclasping with anxiety for their fates. Praying to my Lord on behalf of my Gabriel, or Arsene, or any of the others, who had news to hear from court. Sure, we had friends who were heretics and prostitutes, inside of there. The smell of animals dying on the other side of the street.

From Leis's side in our Montmartre house, remembering my Gabriel and Arsene, I went with the breeze on my back across the river to the old palace, and I sat on a bench, dazed. Some bench. I wore Dasius's hat and sat quietly. In our old neighborhood of Le Marais, in 1407, now three hundred years gone, Burgundy's men hacked the Prince to pieces in the street. Blood ran in the dirt. The smell of brain and panicked, wild horses. Pieces of men. Our water-carrier whispered of witnessing it to my Arsene, light of afternoon filtering in through the cracked door. Arsene told it to me later. My smart, kind Arsene. The second son of a silversmith. Old enough to talk to me about the women he might have married, had he any inclination toward the fairer sex, and how they were all grown old now. His fingers twining with mine, blue eyes twinkling. He would have been ruined by the fumes of silverworking. I pressed my cheek against his rough, pock-marked skin. He always hugged me tightly, as if worried that I would not know he was there. I had met him in some month of 1210. We were natural lovers.

It was in Montmarte, in the 1230s, walking in the night, that I found my butcher Gabriel, pissing against a wall and cussing at nothing. He took a look at me and asked me the time. "You look like a man who has a watch on your person." "You look like a man without a place to be." "Oh, I am meant to be at your place," he said. "Don't you remember?" You would think a man like him would be very rough, but he was not. Careful, asking questions. I bought him a pair of spectacles and he often read by candlelight, asking me about history. He was delighted to learn history. He was excited by the wars. He wanted to hear about sword-swinging aristocrats, who struck a contrast between soft chatting at dinner in silks and killing on the field in mail. He liked to kiss  my fingers and called me "Sweetheart." He believed completely in Christ and taught me my catechism. He kissed Arsene as if Arsene were a swan, with a long neck and a tender belly. He hooted when he laughed.

We loved each other. It was like a storm. I created them new selves, and we stayed the same for some two hundred years. We moved our house north, where I had often lived in other ages. They learned to converse in a mixture of French, German, and Dutch. We went between Rouen and Lille. We found creatures who suited us. A Dutchman we called Ceel who Arsene adored, very good at card and coin tricks.  Arkady, then, a rough little thief with a commanding voice, hardly more than a child, whom Gabriel worshiped as if he were John the Baptist reborn. Then there was a city councilman of Lille named Guillame on the run for embezzlement who amused us at first, but who we came deeply to adore. He refused to kiss with us, and we thought it was funny how he looked at us. But he loved to hold me at night the most, always grabbing me and touching my hair. He loved to show me things in the natural world, flowers and small animals, and every day for him was its own blessing. He and I held hands like children and talked in the night.