The Cross and the Black Page 9

  Chapter Six

  It was the Monday after Palm Sunday, and Dona Bonace came to Serge’s house. Her eyebrows were plucked clean. A white lace coif covered her curly hair, and its straps outlined her gaunt cheeks. Her face looked as if the skin had been evilly stretched over the mask of her skull.

  She was more interested in the dust defiling secret places than answering Serge’s concerns about the wedding feast. She felt every surface for dust: the crevices on the mantelpiece, the inner edges of the doorframe, the whorls of the bedpost. Her impatient fingertips would turn up empty, and she would ask Serge about Claude. Eventually battered and conquered by the fruitless questions, Serge bellowed, “Claude Severin, a servant for three years, hails from the Pyrenees. Now, how many capons do you deem sufficient?”

  “You trouble me. My Mireille would not do with coarse men.”

  Her fingertips laced the roof of a window tabernacle of Christ crucified then rubbed against each other in the air. Her slanted eyes sparked then drooped. Empty.

  Always a step behind them, Claude snickered and mimed after the crone. At the visit’s end, he was the happy servant, and his master the red plum of righteous irritation. Serge had been deliberating with the Dona at the door when Guy’s imperial bulk blocked the exit. Lacteal white teeth. The lovely toque atop his black head, speared with a plume of metallic brilliance. And more news of Sabrine refusing to kiss his illustrious manhood.

  Claude’s chest convulsed, contracted, clenched as he crammed down on himself to remain silently polite in Dona Bonace’s presence.

  Guy removed his hat and clasped it to his chest in the pose of a dejected sinner. “Claude, you ruined me,” he intoned, “Sabrine would not drink from my fount.”

  “The Virgin’s cunt! Thou gelded harpy!” Claude exploded.

  The Dona’s face was cast white, white like Guy’s teeth. Guy pressed on, lamenting his parched manhood. His hands waggled over the pristine ears of the aged Dona or Serge’s face deforming into a bear’s.

  Claude stamped his paws on Guy’s hard shoulders, shoving hard and shouting, “Out of the way, you damned hellion,” but the simian boulder would not be moved. Guy insisted that Serge and the Dona had to see his parchment of vividly drawn lessons for Claude: ‘a, b, c,’ arse, balls, cock. Any man, especially of Claude’s persuasion, could learn the first three letters of the alphabet.

  Guy pushed his text into Claude’s chest and strode away. “I shall return.”

  Long after frenzied apologies, long after Serge harried the Dona away from his bad, bad servant, Claude transfixed on the sky, so blue, so unhelpful against misfortune.

  Later that evening the apprentices grumbled for fish over the poor Lenten porridge of sprouted barley and rye. Serge munched noisily but not gratefully. Claude ate too merrily, eager to forget the aftertaste of bile left over from the afternoon. He had spent the last few hours spinning a spool of misery over God’s sudden attentions on him. When suppertime came, there was no more thread to spin; cheer it would be by God or by might. Claude praised the heavens for food and the remaining scraps of his sanity.

  Luc pushed his plate to the side. “The porridge is thin.”

  Henri stabbed his knife at the table. “The porridge is bland.”

  Claude whisked the earthen saltcellar at the end of the table to the center. “Here is salt. Eat or I shall dish your food to the beggars.”

  “Are you the lord and master of this table?” Serge demanded.

  Luc and Henri grabbed their plates and ate in greedy swallows. Serge’s pox marks were known to multiply when he was angry.

  Claude bent over his food as well. He chose to think Serge needed a swift fucking. Alas he would have to wait till his wedding day. Mireille would offer the gift of virginity; Serge would offer the gift of a month old erection and an all-too-short ravishing.

  Serge cleared his throat no less than three times then gathered himself gruffly. “I met Seyr after leaving Dona Bonace. He will take you in tomorrow.” Serge waited for Claude to stop slurping. “Your rogues would bother me no more.”

  Now Claude stopped slurping and began to gather fresh wool to spin over his particular bad luck. He had not expected so quick a change in plans. Easter was to be celebrated, deflagrating in ribald revelry in the arms of the apothecary who had been particular about abstinence during Lent. He gulped, dismissing plans for a joyful Easter, made fresh plans to gouge out Guy’s precious, precious cock.

  “Who would prepare supper tomorrow?” Henri said.

  Serge grunted and took a heaping scoop of porridge. He had not thought that far ahead. “You two will. Keeping a servant, a conniving servant, was a luxury.”

  “I am no cook …” Luc’s voice faltered.

  Claude was happy for once to be the longsuffering servant to ever-hungry apprentices. “Yes Serge—”

  “You do not call me by name!”

  The apprentices’ face swung towards the master of the house. A strange disease had taken hold of the man whom they had always called by name in private.

  Serge shifted his chair back. The pox marks had indeed spawned numerous children on his lupine face. “I almost lost Mireille today because of your miscreant lout. How dare you?”

  “I see not what care you have for Mireille,” Claude mumbled cavalierly.

  The table quaked and rocked in time to the fury of Serge’s hands jostling its wooden board. Claude dared to look up from his pewter plate and face the eyes glowering. One way or another it seemed an ugly truth would be spilled over supper.

  Serge regarded the apprentices a twitchy moment and then Claude, before reaching for wine. “Tomorrow, Claude, you shall be gone.”

  Claude wailed the mental anguishes to the wretched afternoon. He concentrated on bland barley and rye, snatching up wild morsels of bread and dabbing them into the sop. His tidy spirit would nigh unravel over something of which invariably, there was no more to be said.

  Outside the streets yielded nothing edifying either. The murmurs of the passersby had died. Twilight was full and darkness had fallen. Tomorrow, he would leave.

  After supper, he cleaned up with a mechanical weariness. The apprentices sallied upstairs to bed, grumbling, always grumbling. After the last crumb was cleaned from the table, the last cup emptied and washed, the shadow of Serge was still sprawled on the chair like a king over none. Claude should be pleased to be rid of the rule of the man who had the temerity to find a wife and spoil his life. He should be full of cheer but could only give a plaintive sigh.

  He went to his room and retrieved a cloak, humming to fan positive feelings for the night’s expected serenities. He stepped out and into the short hallway illuminated by tallow candles hanging on the wall. A pallid image of Serge idled at the bottom of the stairs.

  Serge paused and turned his head bafflingly at Claude. “Where are you going?”

  “To St. Cyprien,” Claude said, scooting by him to head for the wide opening to the common room. There was one last free night to enjoy before God would shut the door on his licentiousness.

  But hands from behind grabbed Claude’s shoulders.

  “Serge what—” The hand that steadied wood during the day had muffled his mouth, stifling his breath. Serge’s forearm hooked under his chin and pressed his neck against the clavicle, crushing his larynx. In the panic of pain and the violent odor of leathered fingers under his nose, Claude jerked under the hold and kicked off the stair railing to wrest himself loose. The man strengthened by years in the shop was immovable, his shackles unshakable on Claude’s thin body.

  Laughter blundered through the closed door of the apprentices’ room upstairs, sweeping away the last of Claude’s hope of a good evening.

  Momentarily, he let himself construe Serge’s violent warmth as pleasant. Triumph seemed the appropriate response while Serge dragged him off into the dark cell and dumped him onto the bed. Claude’s head was knocked against the wall, and the dark room sparkled stars. Oc, triumph. He gathered himself dru
nkenly off the bed, searching for the feeling of triumph and the appropriate way to celebrate. Sounds whirred in his head, and triumph was naught over the holy carpenter succumbing to temptation.

  Serge banged the door shut against the corridor light.

  Claude looked up in the dark to the corrosive sounds of panting and heaving from the mountain of need. No triumph there. It was going be another unholy, unpleasant night.

  He could at least try to make the night more agreeable to himself, and so he kicked off his shoes, shed his cloak.

  The sound of something heavy thudding against the door piqued Claude to smile at the brute being pensive.

  “You parade your sodomites in my house.” Rancor etched the low voice

  “Guy is no one. I tried to steal his hat. Alas—”

  “Stealing? Thieving, whoring, you have less honor than a leaky ass.”

  Claude wagged his knees in anxious thought over the names and insults and the requisite bravado to fight back. His hands clenched to the instinctive hardness to defend himself. Not tonight. Serge could have the high ground of being the one with honor, being the one assured of heaven, and he would settle for one last night of loose cares. Now if only Serge would remove himself from the door.

  “I let filth into the house my parents left me,” Serge sounded like a despoiled widow.

  “I cozened no one. It was you who took for me a gudgeon. You were to teach me a trade, but you told me lies about guild restrictions on apprentices.”

  “And you became the chamber pot for all of Toulouse?”

  “Now it riles you? Not when you plied me to live with you?”

  “Christ’s blood, see what you’ve become,” Serge groaned. “Antoine corrupted and defiled you, and I let it be.”

  Claude felt cold, more than cold, dead. He squeezed his eyes in a desperate gesture to contain himself as Antoine’s doleful moan clawed his mind. He was supposed to have been Antoine’s guard. What a poor guard he had been.

  He sighed the long desolation of the past. Serge still was at the door, slumping and dragging to the ground.

  Leaning an elbow on his knee, Claude fingered on an ugly wight within himself, which grasped for inchoate need, or would paint the fallen trunk with a shade of languor. As always when feeling might begin to bend Claude, an irritation itched in his throat. He fell back into the bed and yawned and wondered if sex might happen tonight.

  “Serge—”

  “You will not call me that.”

  The insistence on formality had Claude waxing foolishly for even thinking that Serge might have preferred to sit by him rather than on the floor.

  “Oh yes Master?” Claude said mockingly. “Master needs servant for his bed?”

  Serge bounded from the door, with his furious arms and wild fangs intent on Claude’s willowy person. “Be thou silent!” Kneeling on one foot, he had Claude by the scruff of his tunic and angled a high left fist over Claude’s face, but Claude clasped the hand gripping his clothes and stroked the hardened sinews weakly.

  “Why hit me? Kiss me.”

  Serge’s arms went slack and fell listlessly over the sides of his legs. For a moment, all was quiet, all was fervidly still, then kisses, a torrent of kisses from the carpenter. Claude laughed under its featherweights, laughed as Serge kissed a line along his neck, laughed at Serge’s hands wriggling impatiently through his tunic for his bare chest.

  “God help me. You’re the cursed morning star. God help me,” Serge moaned like a penitent begging desperately for grace.

  “Tomorrow, you may confess and say you looked a woman wrong.”

  “I was blind. I let you grow into a dark fruit under my roof. I could have saved you.” Serge’s voice grazed off the edge of life.

  “No one can save anybody.”

  “We could have been close.”

  “We’re close now.”

  “We could have loved each other.”

  Claude considered it a moment. Love was quite irrelevant in the eternal view of things. Utterly irrelevant. A renewed vigor quickened his hands to sweep onto Serge’s hirsute chest and down to the waist. “Hush. You’re like me.”

  Serge flinched. “I'm not like you.”

  In the split moment to choose between a disdainful laugh and indignation, Claude seized Serge’s erection. Thick. Firm. The promise of a good night even if it must be steeped in self-denial. A wonderful Easter he would have. Heaven. He turned Serge’s lifeless face towards his. Serge yielded with as much a lament, and then a plosive grunt.

  And God said it was good.

  “I am not like you,” Serge mumbled.

  Claude gripped a mass of hair on the back of Serge’s head and pulled him closer, breaths swirling over heated lips. “You, Antoine, we’re all headed to the same place, and it isn’t heaven.”

  Serge shuddered, shook his head violently and freed himself from Claude’s hold. “I am not like you.”

  “Yes you are.”

  The Virgin’s toe.

  Heat fled from Claude’s loins, and he cursed the Virgin for her meddling. His night, his joyous night would be no more. He expelled a short and embittered breath.

  Serge had folded his knees to himself and muffled his ears as if to hide from the all-seeing eye of truth. Then he rolled away from the bed, more like an animal scrambling away from its trap. Claude lashed out for Serge’s hands but just as violently contained himself and held off still. He, Claude Severin, begged no man.

  “Tomorrow, you’ll leave, and I shall be no more tempted to your perdition,” Serge wiped his face and straightened his chemise, patted on his arms and thighs.

  Amidst the rustling of clothes, Claude was shaded with wistfulness. “You’d just leave?”

  “You delight in a man stumbling in weakness. Antoine, however corrupted he might have been, would never do that. You’re wrong, very wrong. We may be damned, but you are destined to a deeper, darker circle in hell.”

  “By the Virgin, ’tis not I who crumbles with need.”

  Serge held the door, stopped from opening it. “I aim to love my wife and keep a good life. You should do likewise.”

  “Thou gelded knave.”

  The door banged, and Serge had escaped into the cleansing light of the corridor.

  Serge thudded against the door and stared into the filigree shadows quavering on the walls. No noise tumbled from the apprentices upstairs. All was quiet, save for his heart pounding to a deafening clamor. His loins still retained its heat, and he was damned with the thought of never finding grace. He felt Claude to be right, this boy who could not know the meaning of anguish that could flay skin, this lad with leonine eyes and a warm luscious tongue. Serge smacked his head and again.

  But more than his dread of God or his need of propriety, it was loneliness that condemned him now. Tomorrow, Claude would move on and feel nothing, but he would be forever trapped in a prison of adoration.

  Mayhap it could have been different if he had treated Claude as someone to love rather than a creature of the flesh.

  Serge snuffed out the light and began the wearisome climb up the stairs. Life sloughed off him on each step, surrendering to the earth with a ponderous squeaking of the wooden planks. He entered his room. The pallet bed stretched before him in the dark like a mauve, calm ocean. He slipped out of his clothes, and a faint joy stirred in him. He had prevailed and kept himself pure. He had only need to love his wife, and he would be set free.

  Naked now, he smiled, crossed himself before the window tabernacle of the Virgin, and then fell into the bed, like a corpse cut loose from the gallows.