Black Light

What have I done? the girl shouted. Her cheeks flushed as she tossed her head furiously. I have done nothing, you know that I have done nothing—

—We reserve to ourselves the authority to reduce these penalties or absolve you, in whole or in part, as we may deem best…

With a cry she whirled, to turn accusatory eyes upon the hooded figure whose quill moved unrelentingly across his parchment. But the scrivener did not look up, and the girl quickly turned back to her questioner.

Please, she cried, I am needed here, my cousin Ilario is ill—

But already there was the scraping sound of the barn door being pulled open behind them. Sunlight slashed through the narrow stall, blinding her; a few yards away the horse whinnied again in excitement. Two barefoot young men in the soiled brown robes of cenobites stepped uncertainly through the doorway, frowning when they saw the girl.

—This one, Father?

The inquisitor nodded. He gestured dismissively as he strode past them, his robes sending up more dust as he tugged his domino from a gaunt face slick and reddened from the heat.

—Yes, he said brusquely, and fanned his cheeks. In the doorway he paused, waiting until the two men had dragged the struggling girl past him and out into the courtyard. Sunlight made a ragged halo about his black-clad figure, dust-motes a rain of golden coins about his shoulders as the inquisitor gazed at the scrivener in the room behind him, slowly gathering his things. After a minute the inquisitor spoke.

—She did not betray you.

The scrivener bent to retrieve a leather satchel. He shrugged without lifting his head. The inquisitor continued to stare at him. Finally he asked,

—Is she Malandante?

The scrivener stooped, silent, beside his bag and little wooden traveling-desk. He shook back the domino from his face, blinking at the sun.

I do not know, he lied. But the villagers say she has the sight.

The inquisitor gazed down at him, his expression cool. —If that is true, you might have brought her to us. His mouth twitched into a bitter smile. We could have found a place for her, Balthazar. Better that she serve us than another master. A word from you could have saved her.

He turned and walked out into the courtyard, light swirling around him like flame. Balthazar watched him go, his eyes burning; then suddenly drew his hand to his face.

Giulietta.

He closed his eyes, opened them to see about him the familiar lines of his study.

“Giulietta,” he repeated, and buried his face in his hands.

4. No Fun

THERE WAS SOMETHING ELSE strange about Kamensic, and that was its suicides. Some of these had taken place so much before my time that they had the solemn, dingy aura of ancient myth. But by the year I started high school there had been ten or twelve of them: deaths by hanging, by jumping off Darnell Bridge into the reservoir, by drug overdose, by gunshot, by carbon monoxide and straightedge razor. Almost all of them were teenagers, although the mother of my friends Giorgio and Nastassia Klendall killed herself when we were in high school, climbing to the roof of their four-story village Victorian and jumping off. The note she left in the kitchen, weighed down by an empty wine bottle, read only

Th-th-that’s all, folks!

The deaths were seldom spoken of, but they were not hushed up. They were treated as normal deaths, as normal at least as dying in your bed at the age of ninety-seven with a hooded peregrine falcon on your breast, as Gloria Nevelson did, or expiring of lung cancer after smoking three packs of Kents a day for thirty-four years, like Clement Stoddard. And there was certainly no religious distress or stigma attached to the suicides. Despite the presence of its century-old Congregational Church, Kamensic was not what you could call a religious place. There was no minister affiliated with the Congo Church, which in any case was used almost constantly as an informal rehearsal space. Occasionally out-of-towners would arrange to be married there—it looked so charming, tucked in amidst the maple trees with the Muscanth River meandering in the background and all those eccentric, theatrical villagers mowing their lawns!—but they brought their own clergy or made arrangements with the justice of the peace.

The only time I ever saw the church used for something like its intended purpose was at funerals. And I never realized how bizarre, even disturbing, these must seem to outsiders, until I was much older and attended a funeral down at Sacred Heart in Yonkers, with Irish Catholic relatives of my father who wept while incense burned and an Irish tenor sang the “Ave Maria” in a voice so pure that I wept myself, though I scarcely knew the deceased.

It was not like that at home. In Kamensic there was solemnity but no real grief; no service save for readings from Shakespeare or Aeschylus; no music until the very end. The church’s rough-hewn wooden pews would be draped with ivy and evergreen boughs, even in midsummer, and the lovely, stellated wild tulips that grew in rocky crevices on Muscanth Mountain. All of the casement windows would be opened, no matter the weather, and the doors as well; but no coffin or casket ever entered the building. Only as the brief ceremony of readings ended would someone commence playing on a flute in the back of the church, and those gathered would leave, to reconvene at the cemetery a few hundred yards away. The music was always the same, a haunting, repetitive melody, not filled with sadness so much as longing and a strange, almost exhilarating intimation that something was about to happen.

But what that was, I never found out. Nor did I ever learn who played the flute: I never saw anyone, either in the back of the church or in that tiny choir-loft where choirs never sang. At the cemetery a plain wooden coffin would lie on the ground, its top strewn with poppies and anemones; in winter, there would be the poppies’ dried seed-heads, ivy, and holly. Beside the coffin was the grave, freshly dug, the soil protected from rain or snow by spruce boughs, and beside the grave the women would stand in a line. Usually someone would say a few words, but it would always end with my mother standing at the head of the grave and reciting in her fine clear girlish voice—

“Down with the bodie and its woe,
Down with the Mistletoe;
Instead of Earth, now up-raise
The green Ivy for show.

The Earth hitherto did sway;
Let Green now domineer
Until the dancing Sonbuck’s Day
When black light do appeare.”

Then the unadorned box would be lowered into the grave. This was always done by women; never men. Sometimes it would take only four of them, sometimes six or even ten, as when Chubby Snarks, an old