Winning Chapters

Right now, here watching Ana, you are convinced that she is looking for a way out.

She stands on the cliff-face staring out across that stunning wild coastline. Her handsome freckled face is taut with tension. She is oblivious to the slapping and spitting of the spiteful wind and the murderous taunting screams of the gulls on the rocks. She rages at her own stupidity. She breathes in the rhythm of the tide, struggling for control. What had she been thinking when she said she would come? She should leave. Now. She moves hurriedly away along the path, struggling to keep her balance in the growing storm.

Yes, you are right: Ana is looking for a way out, but not in the way that you are assuming as you watch her.

At the next bay you see her pause. She crouches, touches ground, sensing the ghosts slither away. She glances around, sighs with relief, feels a sense of letting go. To her right, a familiar angular rock ascends from the beach twenty of more feet to the sky; a mad-man’s sculpture of babel. Her gaze rests on its ragged careless journey upwards, to the gulls bending, diving, and surfing the bolstering winds. An island of shark-teeth stones paves the way from the beach and furious waves crash behind.

Ana catches a slight motion, a shadow of something on the rocks. Surely not? She squints, focusses in on the movement against the static black. Somehow, unnoticed in the reckless climb to reach there, up the ancient scramble of sharp-toothed piled rocks, a boy stands atop the pinnacle.

He is eight, – ten maybe? – thin, but compact. Curly black locks flail in the wind, his white face luminescent against the grey seas. Like a gambling ballerina, he pitches this way and that in the churning air. Waves roar below and the rocks’ teeth sharpen ready to tear and snap if his balance fails. He slowly he raises his arms to the skies and stretches upwards, victorious. Ana shivers at the sight: the audacity, the danger, as he sways before her, framed by raging nature. She feels a bolt of unadulterated joy at existence. She is enthralled.

Ana stretches her hand to him-out towards the sea and across the vast chasm divide between them -as if she can catch him in the ether, as if he would float down and be carried in the wind across the separation and be gently deposited in her open palm to safety. His tiny body writhes and curves atop the precipice. Her arm remains suspended, begging. She is entranced as the boy slowly turns and he holds her gaze. Seconds pass. Her hand still reaching. Then as they remain locked, his lip curls knowingly. His expression twists, spews disdain, loathing, mockery. He is offering her a repulsive challenge. She feels burnt. Maligned. Condemned. She lowers her hand.

In a bid for reason, to make sense and to take control, she reaches for her camera. She will capture him in her lens. She will trap him in his triumphant dance of freedom -if he exists that is. And if he does, and after he falls – which is surely inevitable – he will be forever hers, caught in this moment. She will own him. It takes Ana mere seconds to remove the case, check the settings, and consider the framing. The lens focusses in to where he stood. Nothing. There is no one there. She checks again. Again: nothing. She scans the summit, the wild sea below. Nothing. Not there on the winding ridges. Not there as a black spot in the angry sea. Nothing. Nothing anywhere. She loudly sucks in air, drowning in anger. Of course. What did she expect? This is what happens when she returns here. She must leave. Now. She must go.

She had returned here on a whim. She had been travelling since the early hours and the sensible thing would have been to continue the drive on the main road, the fastest, the direct and obvious route. But somehow it felt too controlling, a metaphor for his hold on her across the years. The urge to rebel, to avoid him, that house, had been too strong. So, she diverted from what she knew was about to come, from the shrill anxiety – and took the road that spun off to the north, to the wilder places, to this the vast raw horizon and these raging elements: this coast that she had so often longed for. But somehow, in spite of herself – to spite herself – she had arrived at this specific spot: this awful ocean of remembrance.

As Ana turns away, she catches a flash of movement; a glimpse of a hand grasping at rock. A child’s limb fleetingly appears over the other side of the structure. A small foot as it touches down on the crusty surface of the shore. A fragile figure scampering across the beach below. Then nothing. He is gone. But where? Ana realizes she has been holding her breath and slowly releases it. She lowers her camera, bends at the waist and drily retches.

She sits a while as the coast rages at her. No other sign of the boy. She tells herself it had all been her imagination. The sprite’s pirouette a torn fragment of childhood memory. A consequence of what had been and what was ahead. Facing it. Seeing him. It is time to continue her journey. She will do this. She can do this. Weary now, she makes her way towards her car and heads West.

You watch. She is out of your reach now. You can only hope she will return.

……………………………………………………………………………………….

Ana had been at the house less than an hour, but already felt smothered and exhausted. It was as if the very walls pushed in at her. Her mouth was dry and the air felt brittle at each intake of breath. He sat quietly in the corner regarding her, assessing her. He noted that she at thirty-four she still carried her beauty unaware: that fresh face, sharp intelligent eyes, the angular jaw and that innocent sprinkling of freckles across her nose and cheeks and that tumbling chestnut hair that so reminded him of her. He felt helpless. They had chattered away since she arrived, but nothing had really been said as they danced around the old tensions. He was fully aware of the accusations crouching stout and alert in the shadows of their words.

Her arrival had been uneventful. Had any stranger been watching, all they would have reported was a door opening, a light greeting, an entrance. But to Ana, every movement, every expression was seeped in tension and substance. She had originally assumed the door would be opened by someone else. Someone unrecognizable. Faceless, newly employed. However, it had been him. He had taken his time to respond to her knocking. She heard him before she saw him, a shuffling of hard heeled shoes, a loud clearing of his throat, then a long pause. As she recognized the sounds of him, she wondered if he would change his mind and retreat. Or that she would withdraw. She pictured herself turning abruptly from the door, sneaking away, hurriedly sprinting across the driveway and back into the car. In the pause whilst he steadied himself, she imagined herself speedily driving away, onwards, homewards, or returning to that coast and the lost promises of freedom. And then the door had slowly opened, and he stood there: “So, Antigone …you came.”

A statement, not a question. That voice. It punched her.

He was not what she expected. He was reduced: a smudged version of when Ana had seen him last – like a final press of an impoverished printer eking out expensive ink. If she was meeting him for the first time she might have described him as an old man. She forced a sort of smile. She played out the motions of a hugged greeting. To her complete surprise he yielded to the movement, not quite responding, but not resisting, and she had to steady herself to avoid falling into him. He turned and led her along the marbled hall.

“Leave your case there. Someone will bring it up to your room.” A hint of irritation at her hesitation. “I have arranged food for half an hour’s time Antigone, so that you have time to freshen up and…please..” his eyes moved slowly down her body, assessing, frowning: “….please make sure you change”.

And at that instance, the clothes that had been so painstakingly considered, became inadequate and inappropriate. Her teenage-self stood awkwardly in the linen trousers and cashmere jumper that she had so carefully selected that morning after days of consideration. She knew that she had yet again somehow failed. She felt totally crushed. Ana had been found wanting. Here she was again. As had always been the way with him, and – she now thought she knew – would always be the way it was.

“Yes, of course, father”.

And there it was: those words. And here she was once more. And after all these years.

As you watch you are shocked by her expression. As he steps along the corridor held tight and upright, she slowly follows. She glares at his back with loathing. Does he really deserve that? You had not conceived that she was capable of such hatred. You are unsure now whether she should have come. You may need to question yourself and your plans. Time will tell.

………………………………………………………………………

Ana felt well rested and calm when she awoke the next morning. The sense of displacement and disquiet had faded. She washed and dressed feeling a rising wave of good humour. Like everything else since she began the journey that led to this house, she wondered if she was reading too much into everything. There was nothing unusual here. Nothing to scare her. 1997 has been a good year so far; it would continue to be so. Her father appeared innocuous really as he sat across the vast antique oak table at breakfast. His eyes were faded and watery, his grey hair, exuding the cut of class and wealth, wisped faintly around his softened features and sprouted sparsely from his crinkled ears. His age spotted skin softened, his expression appeared benign as he watched over her. She decided it was time to begin; to rip open the parcel and let whatever it contained spill untidily forth:

“You know it was impossible for me to get here.”

A long hard pause, and then, raised brows as he held eye contact, drily:

“So you have said.”

Another weighted silence. She would not have this. She would try again:

“Are the arrangements…was it what you wanted?”

He stared directly at her. The clocks tapping beat seemed to slow, echoing amongst the vast corridors, then sit knowingly at her side, waiting with apprehension.

“What I wanted?…..and what is it that I wanted Antigone? …what? What is it that I wanted?”

Choked with unshed tears, his tremulous voice hung in the air. And stayed there. Time passed. The silence held. She wondered then at her own lack of grief. Her disengagement. She had no answer.

You catch your breath …you can only watch them and wait.

…………………………………………………………..

Later that day, after they had strolled together around the estate, been to greet the staff in the folly house and in the kitchens, Ana decided to visit the local town. She had begun the journey here as an urgent plunge, like a dive into icy seas, and, in her anxiety, she had forgotten to pack some basics. She would not ask him for these, although it would have been easy. Ana would not ask him for anything.

Two o’clock saw her wending her way through the narrow roads that led into the local town. As she maneuvered the car into a small space on the High Street, she felt time had stood still. The town was bustling, lively, familiar: the Victorian shop fronts encased in time, the electric fitted gas lamps, the cobbled backstreets and rambling earth-coloured pantiles and gravity defying chimney pots. So pretty. As a picture. She sniffed. So innately English in every way.

Ana walked down the High street at a leisurely pace. Here it was: the wonderful tea rooms with the windows’ bursting display of caramel chocolate-coated delights, towers of scones, hazelnut meringues, egg custard tarts, meille faille slices, and eclairs. Jewelled jam tarts bulging with fruits resting on cushions of sumptuous creams. Waitresses dressed as Victorian maids with starched pinafores over black dresses and gleaming white collars. Every inch of this place gentile. A woman in her sixties smiled at her as she passed; a hint of recognition, but not sure enough to risk a spoken encounter. Past the butchers that she knew had been there in her great-grandparents’ time, past the groceries and then the bookshop. She stopped to look at the books in the window. She was enjoying the sunshine. She entered the chemist and bought toothpaste, then crossed through the slow-moving traffic, down to the green and sat by the pond and read the paper. The sun soothed her skin and like a well-loved family cat she stretched and unwound, her stomach exposed to the world. She felt content. It was fine. Everything would be fine. She would cope with the big day ahead and those that followed.

As the sun faded, Ana walked back up the High Street towards her car. Guests from the hotel spilled onto the street in front of the broad white pillars. She stayed on that side of the street, acknowledging the man who backed into her, accepting his apologies, moved around him, and continued. A group of people blocked the view of the glass sliding doors of the supermarket. Hardly taking notice of the bodies before her, she moved in that direction, the edge of her conscious noting the form of a woman entering the supermarket, pulling a young boy towards her. And in the fall between two heart beats, she suddenly registered him. The boy. That boy. On the rocks. From the day before. It was him: that defiant free-fall balletic from the stormy coast. The same black curls. The same curled lip. That same thin compact body. How could it be? In that second her conscious marked him, the smirk on his white stretched face pierced her calm. As before: his expression was wild, mocking, scornful. As before: a hateful challenge. She rushed towards his retreating figure– fast through the doors of the supermarket, rushing down each aisle in search of him. She frantically sought out the thin threatening figure of the child as she ran through the store. But there was nothing. No young boy anywhere. Her agitation increased, her breaths sped up and became shallow as her anxiety took hold. She saw the woman she thought had pulled the boy into the shop. But there was no-one with her. No boy anywhere. Desperation. She knew she had seen him. He was there. She knew that he was there. But he was not. Nowhere.

She was shaking when she finally gave up searching. She was aware of the concerned looks of those around her: people sneaking glances, guarding themselves against a potential source of danger and threat. She knew her behaviour had been odd. People had noticed her. She needed to gather herself, present normality to the world. She drove carefully back to the house of her childhood, relieved to be away. She understood that she had imagined him. That boy. He hadn’t been there. He probably hadn’t been on that rock either, and even if he had, it wouldn’t be the same boy. It couldn’t be the same boy. It was impossible. It couldn’t be. She understood that.

Ana enjoyed the drive back along the familiar lanes to the grand entrance of her father’s home. The road widened, fecund and deep, pouring forth towards the abundant and glorious landscape. It was truly a breath-taking view. She slowed her car and sat soaking in the beauty before her. The green banks sculptured and carved, curved and rolled towards the central lily-rich lake. The road split to encompass it, as if giving birth to its waters, then married again to announce the splendour of the Rennaissance stone fountain, and the magnificent house beyond. The lake gleamed in the fading sun. She drove on to stop by the fountain. The interwoven nudes were caught in upwards movement, as if turned to stone in a fleeting moment of ecstasy. That bearded muscular figure, arm trapping the females to his side, had always enthralled her. The water gushing forth from his fingertips into the two pools below. His expression, whilst joyous, was also threatening; he gazed outwards from the front of the house as if warding off marauding unknown past intruders. The house stood magnificent; the Queen Anne stonework a patchwork of beige, brown and pink hues, the vast arched windows inviting light inwards, to reflect upon room upon room of opulence and grandeur.

Ana stepped out of her car. She felt the presence of ghosts, shadows of lives that treaded this driveway, sat on the rim of this fountain, danced and argued across the waters. She perched on the icy stone fountain bowl. Past shadows drifted towards her and rested by her side. She was six years old again and being chased round and round this fountain as she screamed hysterically, full tip to toe of ‘stop it I like it’ glee. As she ran, breaths piercing her side, and the excitement of ‘mightbecaughtanyminute’ corseting her rib cage, she was aware of that same bearded stone God looming protectively above. The sounds of the tumbling water, the smash of shoe leather on rubbing gravel and childish past laughter called out to her.

She remembered how that time it had got out of hand. One extremely hot Summer. She and Shanny had been out in the grounds all day and their skins had a sheen of sweat and dust, hardened orchard juices baked into freckled flesh. It was nearly tea-time and they needed to be washed and ready to sit down with the adults; the alternative of cold leftovers at the long pine table in the kitchens an unattractive prospect. She had wanted to go straight in, but they had stopped at the fountain instead and sat on the rim trailing their hands in the wonderfully sharp water.

“Come on Shanny – we can’t be late” Today again she felt the echo of anxiety in that need to be on time at all costs.

“But you haven’t done what I told you yet” Shanny’s irritation took her by surprise.

“What?”

“The dare – you said you would do it”

“But I…and we have to go..” They mustn’t be late. They’d be in trouble.

“I told you: you had to. You said you would. You have to appease the Gods!” He always seemed taller when he commanded her like that.

“But I..it’s too high…I might…. not…”. She felt again the terror mounting.

“You said you wanted to end the curse” He stood both hands on hips now. A warrior. The Leader.

“But I…”. She knew he would win. He always did.

“The Gods are waiting – look at how angry he is” Shanny pointed to the fierce stone figure. Ana shuddered and stood on the rim of the fountain.

“You do it today or the whole family will be destroyed – I told you!” She no longer hesitated: he had dared her to climb up the statue, to drink from the water that stemmed from the bearded god’s finger-tips to stop the curse – she had to take the challenge. When, inevitably, she fell into the water, she heard Shanny’s screams of laughter as she struggled in the viscous space that engulfed her. The water pushed into her nostrils and squeezed the air from her. She clawed at the stone desperate, struggling to right herself, desperate for some coherence between stone and sky. Whilst Shanny’s victorious shape loomed in a kaleidescope blur of colour and mockery beyond her. Her knee grazed as she hauled herself back out of the gushing water and over the rim of the fountain. Snot blocked her nostrils as air sliced and stabbed the way to her lungs. Shanny looked on unconcerned, amused, taunting:

“eeeeeh it’s the curse of the ugly fountain – ha! see Ana– that’s why you nearly drowned!!.”

And when she started to cry :

“stupid moron – only a baby would believe that crap…its your own fault!”

He left her there, defeated, and raced back into the house in time for tea. She stood in her puddle knowing that she must sort herself, dry out and dress without being seen. She would never tell on him. That was the pact. Her and Shanny. Their bond.

Today, she feels once again the helplessness of the child she had been, those first realisations that this was not a safe world. That bad things happened.

She sits now for a while outside the house gathering herself. She considers driving away again, back to where she really belonged. It is no good, she has to see it through. She has to get through tomorrow and all the awfulness that awaits her. It is going to be the longest day of her life; she knows that. She slowly stands and picks up her shopping.

You watch with increased concern as, with shoulders tight and stooped, she steps slowly to the door and into the house.

Joint 2nd Place

THE POWERS

Elaine Pryce

In 1678, a French widow – Jeanne-Marie Guyon – enters a church for a fateful meeting with its Provost before leaving for Paris. What he reveals will radically disrupt the rest of her life.

She has written and published a book. The book has become widely-read and influential, enough to bring her to the attention of ‘the Powers’ – a powerful ecclesiastical cabal, known as the Inquisition. The Provost warns her she is in danger. She is sceptical, and unconvinced.

In Paris, she discovers she is indeed a focus of ‘the Powers’. She sees her writings publicly burned and she is declared a ‘heretic’ – a serious crime. She becomes a fugitive, finding refuge in the back streets of Paris with her ever-loyal maid, Celeste.

She is captured and taken into custody. The king, Louis XIV, condemns her to imprisonment in the Bastille, without trial and with no prospect of release. Celeste accompanies her into prison. Here, Jeanne-Marie suffers brutal interrogations and no longer knows who to trust, excepting Celeste. Unfortunately, Celeste becomes ill and dies. However, as a Catholic prisoner, Guyon is allowed an occasional priestly confessor – a stranger, who claims to bring her news of support ‘from outside’.

In the prison garden, she meets a mysterious fellow-prisoner whose identity is obscured by a velvet mask. He tells her he is required to wear his mask at all times, on pain of death. He reveals that he is daily caught in a terrible dilemma of choice between life and death. His fate is sealed, as is hers. They form a strange ‘friendship’ and connection. He advises her to trust no one, especially priestly confessors.

However, when all hope is gone, her confessor tells her she is to be given a trial in absentia, arranged by Fenelon, a sympathetic priestly prelate of the king’s court, whom she had once met briefly, and who will defend her. This has been arranged whilst her fiercest antagonist, Bossuet – a powerful member of the Inquisition – is incapacitated by illness. At this trial, she is declared innocent, to the fury of Bossuet. The king, Louis XIV, defers to Bossuet, who opposes her release.

(A sub-theme in the second half of the novel, reveals that Fenelon and Bossuet had been closely involved as members of a semi-secret religious ‘brotherhood’, of which Fenelon had tired, and left. When Fenelon publicly defends Guyon, Bossuet is infuriated that Fenelon should betray the ‘brotherhood’ – and himself – by defending a mere woman. He becomes determined, therefore, to destroy Guyon).

After 3 more years, Bossuet dies and she is freed. On release, she discovers she has become famous as a prisoner of conscience, with many supporters throughout Europe and beyond. In a final denouement, she hears of the terrible fate of the masked man; whilst she embarks on a new life.

Joint Second Place

The Powers

Elaine Pryce

~ 1 ~

In the year of 1678, in a town fifty miles south of Paris, a woman stands at the entrance to the Holy Church and wonders where her life went. To the ordinary observer, she is not as beaten, not as aged, as she felt when she awoke to the chastening sun of another day; nor as ill-fed as she seemed when she counted her parents’ and her children’s shrouds to their graves. Nor as defeated as the time when, glancing in a mirror, she saw the largest bruise on her shoulder had taken the shape of a cloud. Similar to the cloud now hovering in a dank grey mass above this church’s mighty tower. Nor is she as small – if it were to be foretold by an oracle – as she will seem when she stands before a prison’s mighty portcullis awaiting her fate. Fortunately, it is not yet given her to know such things. It is enough for her to know that on some days she feels as taut, as raw, as the tanned hide on her husband’s boots.

The woman hesitates – perhaps a moment too long – before entering the church. Its shadowy depths holds secrets and stories. She knows this. But who is she to decipher them, the sense of them? She is gazing into the past, into an old, misted mirror, cracked and stained by time. Inside, the air is as still, as silent, as a tomb. A faint but familiar scent of stale incense lingers, as if it had wafted to the door on a priest’s robe before refusing its exit to an unholy world. The scent follows her, plays in her nostrils, as she makes her way, black-cloaked and veiled, through the marbled floor of the nave. Her fashionable, thick-heeled shoes – ivory-brocade with red-ribboned bows to the front – beat a measured rhythm as she walks. Like the steady tap tap of a mason’s strike upon his chisel.

The church is empty of people. It is late afternoon in Autumn and they have work to do, harvests to gather, pigs to feed, before the light fades. Her eyes trail upwards. Vast pillared archways stand sentinel to her progress, flanked on either side by high-arched, lead-trimmed windows. These windows she knows well. She knows how their stories, told in rainbow-coloured mosaics of glass, proclaim miracles to the melancholy soul: a resurrected Lazarus here, a storm-stilled sea there, a blind man made to see. A penitent soul forgiven. On sun-filled sabbaths of her childhood, those windows had shone like jewels, adding enchantment to an infant’s wide-eyed wonder.

Though not now, not in these strange times. The glass-bound figures are dull and ashen in the nondescript light; as indifferent, as comfortless, as ghosts. But she is not fazed. She has put childish enchantments away, along with her carefully-folded, iron-locked, trousseau.

In the distance, a familiar golden-amber glow beckons her. The candle-lit altar is a talisman, calling her on. She doesn’t break stride as her gaze sweeps across it and up again. The pillared archways travel to dizzying heights as they meet and inter-cross with other archways in the vaulted hemisphere above. And despite herself, despite her resolute putting away of childish things, here she is, a child again, overtaken by wonder at this mighty spectacle. No matter that her infant’s neck had once ached from its ungainly angle as she gazed into wondrous realms above. Or that her uncertain balance had caused her to stumble and trip, until righted by her father’s strong arm. Because she had seen the place where God hides, secreting himself into spying corners as high as the sky. This God, everywhere and nowhere, invisible as air, watching her, scrutinising her with an unsleeping eye. The archways tower above her still, like the mysterious portals of heaven; and she feels its sensibility overtaking her, even now. With each echoing tang of her heels on the intricately-tiled floor, she could swear she is growing smaller as the space grows larger. She is a child in awe of its magnitude, in fear of its unsleeping eye; an eye always alert, marking the gravity of her sins.

She sees him before he sees her. He is sitting beneath the high pulpit on the first row of a few plain wooden benches, holding her book in his hands. His hands are as veined and knotty as an old wood carver’s, which he once was, and had never quite given up, even for the sinuous learning of the religious life.

She makes the sign of the cross, bowing in the direction of the altar, the Crucifixion effigy above it and the ever-grieving Blessed Virgin, recessive in a side wall. Images all, of her haunted dreams. She turns back her widow’s veil, takes her place beside him. He greets her briefly, his smile almost hidden in the late afternoon’s declining light.

In deference to him, she speaks quietly,.

‘The book, you have read it, Father?’

He nods briefly.

‘I have read it.’

He turns it over, and over again, slowly, as if examining a rare but indeterminate object.

‘I confess, dear Madame, I am quite taken by its learning…a certain insight you have. I find your words have intimations of the blessed saints…Catherine, Therese perhaps, the sensibility of dear Jeanne de Chantal.’

She allows herself a momentary flash of pleasure. Though not overmuch. Had not her mother told her with utmost regularity – pride is the greatest sin.

‘I have read them all,’ she replies, ‘but I would not aspire to…’.

Her words trail into nothing. He is not listening. He continues to turn the book over, passing it from one hand to the other, tapping it gently with his fingers.

‘It is no small thing for a woman in these times, to publish abroad such a book.’

She raises a black-laced, half-gloved hand, to correct him.

‘No, I did not publish it, Father. It was not my choice. I wrote letters to my good friend, the Duchess de Longueville in Paris. She was impressed, she said, with their expression and clarity. Without my knowing, she copied a script from them and sent it to the presses for distribution to her circle. Now she writes that everyone, from Geneva to Paris, is clamouring for a copy. Though I am sure it is an exaggeration on her part…’

His face lights in recognition.

‘The Duchess de Longueville. Ah yes, I know of her and her husband the Duke from many years past.’ He is still turning her book, gazing at it, studying its copper-leather binding, its small gold lettering, Mme J-M Guyon, along the spine. ‘Her circle, as you put it, has much influence in Paris. Her salons have a reputation for free-thinking on matters of State and Church. There are many such groups now, I’m told.’

He glances at her and looks away. But not before she has noticed the shadows, the sagging of years in the folds about his eyes, the light in them darkening as his expression changes. He lowers his voice, his eyes scanning around, as though – even in this empty space – listeners might be lurking unseen. He continues,

‘I advise you to be watchful, my child. I hear things…associates, prelates in the city of Paris. They tell me that people in high places are beginning to talk…poisonous seeds, rumours, are being sown. It is the way of such people…how things begin. You are a woman with knowledge and learning and you are being marked as dangerous, as is the Duchess. She is fortunate, she is protected by the prominence of her husband. But you…’ He raises the book, grasping it in his hand, ‘Tread carefully, Madame, I beseech you, tread carefully.’

She places a hand on her chest. She is confused. What? She? Dangerous? Jeanne-Marie Guyon? A mere woman, only one year a widow? The idea…absurd, surely.

A sudden flash, a jolt in her mind, causes a peculiar shiver, like a random itch travelling through her body. Her husband, red-faced with fury,

‘Ill-minded women such as you are a menace to our God-appointed, mighty nation of France. Insolent witches all of you! You must be prevented with the greatest force.’

Gripping his cane like a weapon, wielding it above his head, although he needed it to support his gouty leg – and, it seemed, the might of his temper. She had borne the bruises to prove it, with only her dismayed dressing-maid as witness.

‘You will not speak of this to anyone,’ she had warned, not just to her maid but to herself.

Consequences were severe for a wife who failed to reserve her tongue against such a well-regarded husband in society, she had known that much.

Her hand falls to her lap. She? Dangerous? To whom, she might ask?

The Provost, this kindly bishop-priest of her childhood and after, idly turning the pages of her book, sighs and closes it. His head drops a little, his shoulders hunching forward, as if the effort of mental focus is a weight he is forced to bear in his advancing age.

He is timeworn now, he knows this much – his stance somewhat bent, the particular timbre of his voice, weaker. As though a river that once surged over rocks in full and confident flow is now reduced to a faltering ripple; a consequence of too many homilies from the high pulpit, he would say. But he is not defeated. He has faith still. Of a kind. Not any longer the revolutionary faith of his youth, with its hot-headed fervour and certainties. No. More the resigned hope of experience, he would say now. A sense that what is left of faith and truth, and what will be in the measure of it, will be anyway, despite the Church and its dogmas. He has learned it, stored it in his soul. Some truths speak of freedom. Others of danger.

He turns the book once more. It is here in these pages, he thinks. Though he doubts she realises the danger of it: that the Powers have already picked up the scent, following her trail like hounds after prey. In his seminary days, they had learned of the woman Porete, how she was condemned for her writings, how they made bonfires of her books in the public square, how she had refused to recant. And how her life had expired in the flames of the Church. Let it be a warning, they were told, of the secret designs of women against the most holy teachings of the Church. Let punishment fit the crime.

He opens the book again, gently flipping its pages. France no longer set women to flames, it is true. But still, the Powers have their methods; how to sear recalcitrant women with the hot irons of persecution, how to silence them in chains of fear. He closes the book and presses it to his chest, holding it to him with one hand, just as he holds a missal preceding the great solemnity of the Mass.

‘He was a man with powers of knowledge and learning,’ he says, ‘but also with a particular knowledge not of this world. He could see with the eyes of the soul, of the inward mind. He was like a tree whose roots are deep in the soil, the fertile soil of the heart and mind, but whose branches reach into realms that only those with such knowledge know. He could more than see. He knew.’

‘I am not sure who…I…are you speaking of our Lord, Father?’

He manages a half-smile. He recollects her innocence and how she was a guileless, ever-questing child.

‘It is true,’ he replies, ‘our Lord also knew beyond all knowing. This made him dangerous to the supervisors, the curators of knowledge, as he walked this earth. It is the same with him of whom I speak – our friend in the Bastille.’

He raises his head, bringing his rheumy, but kindly eyes to rest upon her. Now is the time to speak it, he is thinking, before the moment passes into regret.

‘He knew the power of the Word, the knowing, in the mind, heart and conscience and he knew its danger. You have said you long to see young girls and women educated, then nurture them, Madame, teach them in ways of seeing. Teach them to speak in the voice of truth. The curators will hate that, because it is a power beyond their own understanding. They are too busy jostling for position and prominence in this world, wielding their knowledge like an axe, destroying the true power of the Word. They are the Powers, but not the power.’

He lifts a clenched hand, raising his first finger to emphasise his meaning. He is a titan of his pulpit once again, delivering his sabbath homily.

‘The power, the seeing, is within you; use it. But be warned, if you do, the Powers will become your enemy. Beware the Powers, Madame, beware the secret darkness of the Powers. There is a place especially reserved in the Church for them. They sit in high places – darkness masquerading as light.’

Her blue eyes, as changeable as the sky according to its climate, have turned an indistinct grey in the chancel’s dim light. He watches them widen, searching and querying the cavernous space around, as though some answer might emerge from its vastness. Then, turning to him,

‘All of them? You speak of all?’

He shakes his head.

‘No, dear child, not all. Some remain. Those who have not yet been destroyed. Those still holding to the light, discerning the powers of darkness. But they suffer for it – suffer greatly.’

He unclenches his hand, pressing it to his chest over his priest’s black cassock. He closes his eyes as one to whom weariness is a familiar guest. But not before she has seen it. A distant sadness in his eyes, like a shadow passing over them. It is you, she thinks, it is you, holding to the light. Suffering unsaid, untold, except in your eyes. Just like the holy friar. She begins to stroke her arm. The holy friar…ohh…

She straightens herself, grasping at other thoughts.

‘And you discussed such things with my father?’

He opens his eyes and nods – a slow, hesitant nod, as a man used to withholding ‘such things’. Things he dare not speak, except in the secrecy of long-held trust.

‘Only with your father. Your father understood. He possessed the gift of seeing. He understood its consequences.’

‘And the holy friar?’

‘He knew his time would come.’

He half-turns towards her, his aged hand gripping the back of the bench where they sit. In the resurgent half-light, unruly strands of white hair escaped from his priest’s cap, form a ragged halo about his head. He studies her for a few seconds, as someone raising a candle to better focus its light. When he speaks, his voice has an edge to it, a hint of bitter, like aloes.

‘You must understand, Madame, that Paris is not like this small province where everyone knows who is coming, who is going, who are friends and who are strangers. Paris is a city of dark and perilous places from the highest to the lowest, a city of crowds, a place to become lost in, and worse. You are a lone woman whose name is becoming known in certain quarters. Make no mistake, your writings will be examined closely. The king…the Powers…they are as one. Their spies are everywhere. You will be watched, discussed – letters will be written, words such as ‘heretic’, ‘whore’ and ‘witch’ will be bandied about. And the Powers…the Powers are already here, in this place.’

His tone deepens, just above a whisper. He is marking his words with care.

‘I have to warn you that Father Renard, your late husband’s confessor, is not to be trusted. He has already decamped to Paris from this place. He is a man of many schemes and designs, but stealthy like a fox. He and your husband spent many hours together, dining, taking wine, talking into the night. Many here remarked upon it.’

‘Yes,’ her words are hesitant in the memory of it, ‘I was aware…but I could not speak for fear of my husband…I was in no position…’

He leans towards her a little, nodding, signifying that he understands her meaning.

‘What I am saying is, take great care, my child, but do not be afraid. The Powers are as empty as their pretended knowledge. Those of us who see, call them pissenlits – pleasant enough of flower, but bitter in leaf and poisonous in root. As the blessed Scripture says, they claim to know God, but by their actions they deny him.’

He reaches out and grasps her arm. A warning, he says without saying, a warning you must heed.

‘Trust no one, Madame, no one, unless they prove themselves worthy of your trust. And even then, I advise you – be cautious. Trust only in God.’

He lets go of her arm. He takes her book and cradles it in his lap between the palms of his ageing hands, like a chalice.

She lifts her fingers to her lips in an unthinking gesture and rests them there. She has no words, no questions she can formulate in this chill space. A haze of colour at the high-arched window behind the altar has commandeered the last light of day. Tissue-light glazed figures – saintly men all – lost in a tableau of once brilliant-red, bright-ochre, sky-blue and luminous white, are now receding into the dim cloth of dusk.

This lengthening gloom unsettles her. She dislikes late afternoons in Autumn before the candles are lit and fires stoked for the evening. Its depressing hiatus sits in her bones. She drops her hand into her lap and glances around. Especially so here, in this infinite space, where gauzy shadows are beginning to drape the altar in a veil of grey. Two altar candles, one at either end, cast a paltry light, providing little contest for the gathering dusk. As a matter of course, she raises her eyes. How can she not? It compels her, this figure of the crucified Christ towering over, its thorn-crowned, bloodied head and naked torso transmogrified now in a play of shadow and guttering candlelight. For an alarming moment, she fancies some hollow-eyed, cave-mouthed daemon hangs in its place, a yawling, open-mouthed spectre mutely protesting its torment. She looks away, attempting to banish the image. But the sense of it cleaves to her gut. She had been wed against her will beneath that Cross, had mourned her dead children there after the Pox had taken them.

And, like a further chastening, the holy friar enters her mind – taken, tortured, crumpled and desolate in his prison-cell. Her eyes blur, moistening a little at the memory of him. How he had cherished the freedom of his simple hermit’s hut amongst the trees; how he had venerated like a postulant, the teeming woodland life and wild, open spaces of higher ground at the edge of her husband’s estate. His solace in the quiet solitude of his refuge had tempered every searching moment of her visits to him, every bitter fury at her lot. Though she had never enquired into what she did not know – the mystery of his coming, of his appearing from who-knows-where, in such a place.

She draws her cloak about her, arranging its hood carefully around her up-swept hair. Hair the colour of cinnamon, she would describe it, though omitting to mention that it is mottled now with strands of grey. From habit, she skims her finger-tips across her cheeks. The pitted scars will not let her forget it. She survived the Pox. She shivers and pulls her cloak further about her shoulders. A cold numbness is creeping into her feet as her thin-soled shoes press against the stone floor. It is getting late. She has work to do, arrangements to make. The carriage will be waiting and she has much to occupy her thoughts.

‘I must go now, sir,’ she says, ‘but I will remember your words and heed them in my heart.’

The Provost stirs as if from a reverie, perhaps not unsimilar to hers. He lays his hand on her arm, this time with a long-time pastor’s gentleness. Who is to say but that he might not see her again.

‘I know, dear Madame, I know. May God be with you and protect you on your journey.’

She smiles and returns his touch, pressing her hand gently against his. A small, shared comfort in these times. Rising, she crosses herself before the recessive Virgin and takes her leave. She threads her way through rows of gaping benches pushed aside by worshippers from the town’s perennial poor, eager as always to exit their sabbath obligation. They have patches of land to tend to, scrawny animals and ever-scrawnier children to feed. Sermons don’t fill bellies.

Is there no-one to set things to order, she thinks, as she passes.

On a heavy mahogany table beyond the benches, familiar traditional scrolls of Instructions to Visitors and Pilgrims lie open and uninviting. Most visitors, she knows, do not possess either reading skills or patience enough to wade through such an elaborate verbiage of ancient welcome. But it is well-meant. Hospitality is everything, the Provost would declare often, and he was especially good at it. Many a time he had transformed the vestibule and its furnishings into a bread, broth and ale kitchen for pilgrims and the poorest. All from the bounty of the privileged on a simple promise of entry into Paradise. She admires the Provost for his charity, and the way he uses any means on behalf of the poor. The table bears constant witness to it. His memorial no less, she would have said, chipped, scorched and marked as it is with evidence of his good works. Though she hardly glances at it now. She cannot look at its bulbous legs, carved with fruits of Paradise and the grinning masks of death that so terrified her as a child. Memento Mori, her father used to say. Remember death. Her lips curve into a pale promise of a smile. As if in these times any one of us require such a reminder she would reply, if she could put her feeling into words.

From the corner of her eye, she is aware of the iron-locked charitable box, still manacled to the wall; and over there, covered and sealed, the marble font where her children… But no. She hastens towards the entranceway. The tapping of her heels on stone is the only sound, low, ominous, repetitive. Like the sound of a soldier’s drum before battle. Her cloak billows under a cool rush of air as she approaches the open doorway. She pauses for a moment in its frame. Beyond the graveyard, the first stars of evening glimmer from a silver and sapphire sky. In the smoky distance, a lone dog barks; a horse, somewhere nearby, neighs in a frantic, tumbling song-note. Her eyes, her ears, take in the scene, register its sounds, as though under an imperative not to forget. The surrounding tombs with their carved inscriptions call to her. She knows she must not heed them. They have held her captive for too long.

Beyond the gate, the carriage-driver is lolling sideways as if in a drunken slumber. She thinks to wake him, then decides against it. Let him slather and snore for a while. When she calls to him later to wake up, he will start and jump and deny he was ever asleep. She steps back, sideways-on into the doorway, rests her shoulders against its ancient lintel and closes her eyes. Will she ever know this again, this time, this place? This peculiar, smoke-infused smell of early-evening in Montargis? Outside, from amongst a shroud of trees, she hears an owl-hoot, quietly repeating. Its call touches her, moves her, like a lone requiem for the unforgotten dead. She listens for a while, then stirs herself. At home, the fires will be lit and stoked by now, candles lighted, a table prepared for her last supper – sorrel soup, roast pig perhaps, fish, lentils, pear pie. Wine and new-baked bread. Saliva rises on her tongue. Time to leave. She pauses, facing the interior space, her head poised at its proper height as her mother had taught her. She is Hemera, a goddess of the Greeks, of whom her father had taught her. She is a statuesque silhouette framed against a sapphire and star-borne sky. She is a goddess of fire, a keeper of the light.

The moment is fleeting, expelled on the breath of a disconsolate sigh. Her father had been too caring, too willing to accept her word of assurance regarding her well-being; too unsuspecting of the despair beneath her words. She peers into the darkness, attempting to part the shadows of this once-loved, once-feared, crucible of God. Two points of light stand sentinel, faintly-shimmering on the distant altar-space. The Provost is barely visible, leaning forward in his seat, head bowed, beneath the mutely-tormented Christ-figure. She lowers her fine-laced widow’s veil over her face, standing for a while, watching, breathing, before turning and striding towards the gate.

The carriage-driver is still lolling, his corporeal body in danger of falling from his seat. His mouth is slack and wet with saliva, his hat askew like a drunk and disorderly tavern-man. The horse snorts and stomps the ground, jerking its head wildly in a fit of impatience. The carriage shudders from side to side, bouncing its human cargo like a limp marionette. Oblivious, the carriage-driver lolls further, snoring, open-mouthed, into the cavernous space between himself and the ground. She stands, surveying the scene. An amusement close to mirth rises in her, threatening to convulse her in a spasm of laughter. A delirium quite unfamiliar to her these days, she has to admit.

The horse settles into quiet waiting. The carriage-driver snorts suddenly, licking his slavering lips, poised at an interval between dreaming and waking. The air is still, and silent as a grave. She glances about her. Something…another sensibility, a mood, a strange expectancy, disturbs her. A breath of breeze with a touch of silken feathers brushes her cheek, gently lifting her veil. She cocks her head a little, leaning into it, as if some distant sound is calling to her and she must concentrate. As if some quiet whisper, some internal sibyl, is invoking her attention. She half-turns, looking behind her. Her eyes travel to the darkened doorway of the church, skimming the knee-high tombs. Ivy, bramble and deadnettle are beginning to claim them now. She does not mind. She is glad to leave them covered, protected from the cold and wrath of winter. She resists the urge to visit them, kneel before them, touch them for one last time. Even as she knows it, senses it in that moment. There will be no returning.

She gathers her skirt into her fists, turns, and hastens into the night.