When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing to save the man Jesus and that Jesus was indeed to die to please the crowd, he offered the execution of noble captives, to have the man's wrists slashed with sword and thus causing him to bleed quickly unto death. But from the crowd called up the man Andrew, son of Phinneas the shepherd, who said, Jesus must suffer for his words! Crucify Him! The crowd joined in the mocking call, He must suffer for his words!
Then Pilate went from the crowd and washed his hands, and turned Jesus to the officers and soldiers, who gave unto Him a cross and bearing such went all unto the place of the skull which is called Golgotha:
Where they crucified Him, and two others on either side with Jesus in the midst.
Book of Trials, 7:23-8
Danielle stood against the rough wall, her red eyes turned furiously towards the shrouded figure on the gurney. Marie and Clarice were gone, spun away with dour exasperation and vanished through the small ceiling-high window of the cellar. Their words still echoed in the room like late-season flies caught in a bottle.
Marie: 'He is not Alexandre. He is nothing. He is less than nothing.'
Clarice: 'It's done. Come with us. Sister, take my hand. It stinks in here.'
Marie: 'Look if you must, but be done with it, and then come.'
Danielle had pressed her gloved hands to her ears and shook her head. No .
Marie: a sharp snapping of the fingers as if Danielle were a dog to obey her mistress, and Danielle had simply said, 'Leave me be.' Marie and Clarice had done just that. They thought their companion mad, not a good thing for a creature of the night. Madness could only lead to foolishness and carelessness, and with carelessness, destruction. They had left their mad friend to her own fate.
Danielle stared at the soiled sheet, the sharp protrusions beneath the cloth where the nose and chin were, the feet. Softer mounds of the shoulders, the fisted hands, the groin. Light from lanterns, hung in this subterranean room by the men who had departed here just minutes ago, sputtered from ceiling hooks. Water pipes dripped puddles on to the dirt floor. Spiders and their webs, left in corners by the hasty custodian the day before, held still as if pondering the strange and recent occurrence.
'Alexandre?' Danielle said softly, tasting the cold of her breath as it passed through her incisors, her protruding canines. 'Why can that not be you?' She took several steps forward, her chin dipping down as if her face were dread to see beneath the sheet. So much she had witnessed in all these many years, so much terror and viciousness and death, yet this one was almost beyond her ken.
'Why can that not be you?' she repeated, then touched her own face. 'Is this not me? Am I not still walking this squalid earth in the form of a young woman though I am 117 years of age?'
The sheet stirred slightly. Danielle gasped and put out her hand to find that it was just a current of air passing though the damp brick room, travelling from one ill-hung door to another on the other side.
Was this world not spattered with such as her, existing in conjunction with mortals who most often believed their own reality was the sum and total? And so what incredulous magic could not happen, what damnable curse was impossible?
The room was hot and rancid, foul human scents coiling like smoke from the floor, the walls, the chairs, the gurney. The men who had been here just minutes ago had stunk at first of excitement, and then disgust. They claimed for themselves the crown of civility, yet winced and vomited at the result of their infinite goodness.
'Is this not me?' she repeated. 'Look and see that flesh which you once loved.' She shook her head, warding off the stench, then ripped her gloves from her hands and threw them to the floor. She clutched at the frilly bodice of her dress, and ripped it from neck to waist. Her dagger-sharp nails raked the white skin of her breast as she did, leaving long, bloodless skin-lips gaping silently in the air.
Cursed costume of the modern, nineteenth-century woman! Such prudes, such whores, tied up and trussed and playing at seduction with their prim dress, not knowing what it is to be wholly female! Ah, but she had known! Alexandre had known her femaleness and she his maleness, and had revelled in the wonder of it all.
She tossed the ripped cloth aside. Then she wrenched off the rest of her garb — the leg-of-mutton sleeves, the full muslin skirt, the petticoat, cotton stockings, garters, buttoned shoes. All were hurled away. The hat, the hairpins, the ear bobs. Her auburn hair fell free about her shoulders.
Danielle closed her eyes and caressed her cold skin. She traced the length of her arms and torso, feathering the soft hairs on her chilly stomach, strumming the already healing skin-lips on her breasts.
She had been naked when they had taken away Alexandre from her the first time. Lying in a stall of the weanling barn they'd been, Danielle leaning gaily into the wiry hair of Alexandre's chest and laughing at the prickling straw in her hair and in her back. She had picked up a yellow stem and had ticked his chin and his nose. He had kissed the straw and then her fingers. He had wrapped his arms around her waist and nestled his chin into her neck, his tongue playing easily along the tender flesh there.
'You were tender and true,' she said, her brows knotted and her lips trembling. 'But only one wrong named to you, as any human would have who has lived past infancy. How, then, did this curse come to you?'
Beneath the sheet, Alexandre did not move. Danielle took several more steps, across the uneven and cold floor, and grasped the sheet that covered her beloved.
The handsome, tattered young man arrived at Bicetre on a frosty, late March morning in 1792, appearing like a spectre beneath the shadows of the pear orchard behind Paris's infamous hospital and prison. The sky had rained not an hour earlier, and the rain had been cold and severe, drilling chilly puddles into the ground and knocking branch tips from the naked trees. Shivering droplets hung triumphantly to the fur of the animals in the paddocks and to the emerald leaves of the boxwood shrubs that lined the narrow dirt pathways.
The brick institution of Bicetre was large, dark and filled with most unpleasant business — that of madness, of loneliness, of anger, desperation. Of screams. Of silence. Bright, curious doctors ministered to the sick. Hardened officers tended the miscreants.
In the shadow of the great place, flanking its west side, was a four-acre plot on which animals and vegetables were raised for the use of Bicetre's personnel, patients and inmates. It was called appropriately the Little Farm. Fenced paddocks monitored the cows and sheep and pigs; in a small hutch nested chickens and pigeons. Several gardens bordered with woven vine fences offered up turnips and beans in the warmer months. A tiny grove of pear trees held sentinel near the stone wall where, beyond, the citizens of Paris pounded back and forth in the rhythm of their individual and now collective lives.
