SUSAN KAY
Phantom
Madeleine
1831 - 1840
It was a breech birth; and so, right up to the very last moment of innocent ignorance, I
remained aware of the midwife’s boisterous bawdy encouragement.
“Just the head now my dear ... almost there ... your son is almost born. But now we must take
great care. Do exactly what I say – do you hear me, madame? — exactly!”
I nodded and drew a panting breath, clinging to the towel that had been hung on the wooden
bedstead behind my head. The candlelight threw huge shadows up to the ceiling, strange, leering
shapes that were oddly threatening to me in the mindless delirium of pain. In that last, lonely moment
of thrusting anguish it seemed to me that there was no one left alive in the world but me; that I would
be suit up for all eternity in this bleak prison of pain.
There was a great bursting, tearing sensation and then peace ... and silence; the breathless
hush of stunned disbelief. I opened my eyes to see the midwife’s face – rosy with exertion only
moments before – slowly draining of color; and my housemaid, Simonette, backing away from the
bed, with one hand pressed against her mouth.
I remember thinking: It must be dead. But sensing even in that confused split second before
I knew the truth that it was worse than that ... much worse.
Struggling to sit up against the damp pillow, I looked down at the bloody sheets beneath me
and saw what they had seen.
I did not scream; none of us screamed. Not even when we saw it make a feeble movement
and we realized that it wasn’t dead. The sight of the thing that lay upon the sheet was so unbelievable
that it denied all the power of movement to the vocal cords. We only stared, the three of us, as
though we expected our combined dumbstruck horror to melt this harrowing abomination back into
the realm of nightmare where it surely belonged.
The midwife was the first to recover from her paralysis, swooping forward to cut the cord
with a hand that shock so badly, she could hardly hold the scissors.
“God have mercy!” she muttered, crossing herself instinctively. “Christ have mercy!”
I watched with numb detached calm as she rolled the creature in a shawl and dropped it into
the cradle that lay beside the bed.
“Run and fetch Father Mansart,” she told Simonette in a trembling voice. “Tell him he had
better come here at once.”
Simonette wrenched open the door and fled down the unlit staircase without a backward
glance at me. She was the last servant to live under my roof. I never saw her again after that terrible
night, for she never came back even to collect her belongings from the attic bedroom. When Father
Mansart came, he came alone.
The midwife was waiting for him at the door. She had done all that her duty required of her
and now she was impatient to be gone and forget the part she had played in this bad dream; impatient
enough, I observed detachedly to have overlooked the matter of payment.
“Where’s the girl?” she demanded with immediate displeasure. “The maid, Father ... is she
not with you?”
Father Mansart shook his graying head.
“The little mademoiselle refused to accompany me here. She was quite out of her senses with
fright and I could not persuade her otherwise.”
“Well ... that doesn’t surprise me,” said the midwife darkly. “Did she tell you that the child
is a monster? In all my years I’ve never known anything like this ... and I’ve seen some sights, as you
well know, Father. But it doesn’t look very strong, I suppose that’s a mercy...”
I listened incredulously. They were talking as though I weren’t there, as though this dreadful
thing had rendered me some kind of deaf and mindless idiot who had forfeited all right to human
dignity. Like the creature in the cradle I had become an object of horrified discussion; I was no
longer a person...
The midwife shrugged herself into her shawl and picked up her basket.
“I daresay it’ll die. They usually do, thank God. And it’s not made a cry, that’s always a good
hopeful sign ... No doubt it’ll be gone by morning. But at any rate it’s none of my business now, I’ve
done my part. If you’ll excuse me, Father, I must be getting along. I promised to look in on another
confinement. Madame Lescot – her third, you know...”
The midwife’s voice trailed away as she disappeared out into the darkness on the landing.
Father Mansart closed the door behind her, put his lantern down on the chest of drawers, and laid
his wet cloak across a chair to dry.
He had a comfortable, well-lived=in face, tanned and leathery from walking in all weathers;
I suppose he must have been fifty. I knew that he had seen many terrible things in the course of his
long ministry; nevertheless I saw him recoil involuntarily with shock when he looked into the cradle.
One hand tightened on the crucifix around his neck while the other hastily made a sign of the cross.
He knelt in prayer for a moment before coming to stand by my side of the bed.
“My dear child!” he said compassionately. “Do not be deceived into believing that the Lord
has abandoned you. Such tragedies as this are beyond all mortal understanding, but I ask you to
remember that God does not create without purpose.”
I shivered. “It’s still alive ... isn’t it?”
He nodded, biting his full underlip and glancing sadly at the cradle.
“Father” – I hesitated fearfully, trying to summon the courage to continue – “if I don’t touch
it ... if I don’t feed it ...”
He shook his head grimly. “The position of our Church is quite clear on such issues,
Madeleine. What you are suggesting is murder.”
“But surely in this case it would be a kindness.”
“It would be a sin,” he said severely, “a mortal sin! I urge you to put all thoughts of such
wickedness from your mind. It is your duty to succor a human soul. You must nourish and care for
this child as you would any other.”
I turned my head away on the pillow. I wanted to say that even God could make mistakes,
but even in the depths of my despair I could not quite find the courage to voice such blasphemy.
How could this horrible abomination be human? It was as alien to me as a reptile – ugly,
repulsive, and unwanted. What right had any priest to insist that it should live? Was this God’s
mercy ... God’s infinite wisdom?
Tears of exhaustion and outraged misery began to steal down my taut face as I stared at the
striped wallpaper before my eyes. For three months I had struggled through an unending maze of
tragedy, following the one candle that burned steadily just beyond my reach and beckoned me on –
the small, flickering light of hope contained in the promise of new life.
Now that the candle had been extinguished there was only darkness; darkness in the
bottomless, smooth-sided abyss of the deepest pit in hell. For the first time in m life I was alone. No
one was going to shield me from this burden.
“I think it would be wise if I baptized the child at once,” said Father Mansart grimly.
“Perhaps you would like to give me a name.”
I watched the priest move slowly around the room, a tall shadow in his black habit, collecting
my porcelain washbasin and blessing the water within. I had meant to call a son Charles, after my
dead husband, but that was impossible, the very idea quite obscene.
A name ... I must decide upon a name!
A sense of unreality had descended upon me once more, a numb, unthinking stupor that
seemed to paralyze my brain. I could think of nothing and at last, in despair, I told the priest to name
the child after himself. He looked at me for a long moment, but he made no comment, no protest,
as he reached down into the cradle.
“I baptize thee Erik,” he said slowly, “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit.”
Then he leaned forward and placed the muffled bundle in my arms with a determination I
dared not fight.
“This is your son,” he said simply. “Learn to love him as God does.”
Collecting his lantern and his cloak, he turned to leave me and presently I heard the old stairs
creaking beneath his heavy tread, the front door closing behind him.
I was alone with the monster that Charles and I had created out of love.
Never in my life had I experienced such fear, such utter misery, as I did in that first moment
when I held my son in my arms. I realized that this creature – this thing – was totally dependent on
me. If I left it to starve or freeze to death it was my soul that would burn for all eternity. I was a
practicing Catholic and I believed only too seriously in the existence of hell’s flames.
Fearfully, with a trembling hand, I parted the shawl that covered the child’s face. I had seen
deformities before – who has not? – but nothing like this. The entire skull was exposed beneath a
thin, transparent membrane grotesquely riddled with little blue pulsing veins. Sunken, mismatched
eyes and grossly malformed lips, a horrible gaping hole where a nose should have been.
My body, like some imperfectly working potter’s wheel had thrown out this pitiable creature.
He looked like something that had been dead a long time. All I wanted to do was bury him and run.
Dimly, through my revulsion and terror, I became aware he was watching me. The misallied
eyes, fixed intently and wonderingly upon mine, were curiously sentient and seemed to study me
with pity, almost as though he knew and understood my horror. I had never seen such awareness,
such powerful consciousness, in the eyes of any newborn child and I found myself returning his
stare, grimly fascinated, like a victim mesmerized by a rattlesnake.
And then he cried!
I have no words to describe the first sound of his voice and the extraordinary response it
evoked it evoked in me. I had always considered the cry of the newborn to be utterly sexless –
piercing, irritating, curiously unattractive. But his voice was a strange music that brought tears
rushing to my eyes, softly seducing my body so that my breasts ached with a primitive and
overwhelming urge to hold him close. I was powerless to resist his instinctive plea for survival.
But the moment his flesh touched mine and there was silence, the spell was broken; panic
and revulsion seized me.
I dashed him from my breast as though he were some disgusting insect sucking my blood;
I flung him down, without caring where he fell, and escaped to the farthest corner of the room. And
there I cowered like a hunted animal, with my chin pressed tightly against my knees and my arms
wrapped around my head.
I wanted to die.
I wanted us both to die.
If he had cried again in that moment I knew I would have killed him – first him then myself.
But he was silent.
Perhaps he was already dead.
Deeper and deeper into the shelter of my own body I huddled, rocking to and fro like some
poor, unhinged creature in an asylum, burrowing away from a burden I could not face.
Life had been so beautiful until this last summer; too easy, too full of pleasure. Nothing in
its brief, cosseted length had prepared me for the tragedies that had rained relentlessly upon me since
my marriage to Charles.
Nothing had prepared me for Erik!
The only child of elderly, doting parents, I had been a little princess, the center of every stage
on which I performed. My father was an architect in Rouen, a successful but eminently whimsical
man who loved music and was delighted by the aptitude I showed for that art. From an early age I
was regularly trotted out in company to display my voice and my moderate skills on the violin and
piano; and thought Mama sent me to the Ursuline convent in Rouen for the sake of my soul, Papa’s
sights were set on more worldly ends. Singing lessons were arranged, to the disgust of the nuns, who
considered a girl’s voice to be a source of vanity and affectation, and every week I escaped to the
professor who had been told to prepare me for the stage of the Parisian opera house. My voice was
good, but I never discovered whether I had the talent or self-discipline to conquer Paris. When I was
seventeen, I accompanied my father to a site meeting with a client in the Ru de Lecat; and it was
there that I met Charles and simultaneously abandoned all thought of a glorious career on the stage.
Fifteen years older than myself, Charles was a master mason who’s work my father sincerely
admired. Papa always said it was a privilege to place plans in the hands of a man who had such a
deep, instinctive feel for the artistry fo building, a perfectionist who was never satisfied with second
best. Between Charles and my father the average client with an eye to economy had a hard time of
it. Perhaps it was because they were so totally in accord professionally that it seemed natural for Papa
to welcome Charles into the family once I had made my preference clear. Perhaps he remembered
himself as the struggling young architect, with no commissions, who had been obliged to fight
Mama’s family all those years ago. Perhaps he was simply determined – as he had been throughout
my cosseted existence – that nothing would mar the happiness of his only child. If he was
disappointed at my decision to throw away a promising future as a prima donna, he said nothing.
As for Mama – she was English, with all the characteristics that word implies. I think she
would rather have seen me respectably – if rather ingloriously – married, than on any Parisian stage.
Charles and I went to London for the honeymoon, at Papa’s expense, armed with a list of
architectural sites that “must be seen.” We didn’t see much. It was November, the most dismal of
all English months, and for most of our three-week stay the city was shrouded in a thick yellow fog.
It was a good excuse to stay inside, exploring the wonders of God’s architecture, in our neat, discreet
hotel bedroom in Kensington.
On the last day of our visit the sun streamed mercilessly through a chink in the heavy curtains
and lured us guiltily from the sheets. We couldn’t go home without seeing Hampton Court – Papa
would never forgive us!
It was early evening when the landau deposited us outside the hotel steps. While Charles
struggled with the unfamiliar coinage and an unhelpful cabdriver, I went into the foyer to collect our
key.
“A letter for you, madam,” said the bellboy, and I took the envelope absently, tucking it into
my muff as I turned to watch Charles enter the foyer.
I still caught my breath at the sight of him, just as I had that first day in the Rouen; he was
so tall and so unashamedly good looking. And when he saw the key in my hand, his smile mirrored
my thought.
We ran up the wide, richly carpeted staircase, laughing and bumping heedlessly into two
elderly ladies who were descending with all due English dignity.
“French!” I heard one of them say disdainfully. “What else can you expect?”
Charles and I only laughed even louder. Charles said we should pity the french, really. They
were all as stiff and cold as Gothic gargoyles – none of them knew what love meant.
Two hours later, as I lay in Charles’s arms like a contented, lazy cat, I suddenly remembered
the letter in my muff...
It was only after our hasty return to France that I came to realize I had conceived my first
child in the same week that both my parents died of cholera.
There was no general epidemic.
An old acquaintance of my father’s, visiting from Paris, was taken ill in the course of
convivial evening at my parents’ house. Papa would not hear of a friend returning home to be nursed
by servants; and that natural, generous hospitality of his killed the entire household.
I could not settle in Rouen after the tragedy. The city had become for me a vast architectural
museum, a mausoleum dedicated to my spoiled and happy childhood. The baroque chapel of the old
Jesuit college, the Place St. Vivien, the elegant Rue St. Patrice with its splendid seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century houses hidden behind heavy portes cocheres ... No, I could not continue to live
in a city where every street corner and every fine old building evoked a memory that gave me pain.
It was a month before Charles would permit me to enter my father’s home for fear of
contagion. We were by then quite certain that I was pregnant and Charles was fiercely and absurdly
protective, determined that nothing should place his precious wife and child at risk. He was behaving
as thought I was the first woman in the world to have a child and his overanxious caution made me
curious, slightly amused, and just a little afraid that if ti was a girl I should be jealous.
“You shouldn’t be so anxious, Charles. Women have children all the time.”
“I just want you to take care,” he said solemnly. “I don’t want anything to go wrong.”
I put a hand on his sleeve, oddly disturbed by his intensity. My father’s death had evidently
affected him far more deeply than I had thought and I was ashamed that, in the selfishness of my own
distress, I had failed to realize how he, too, was mourning the loss of a good friend.
“This baby is very important to you, isn’t it?” I said slowly. “Anyone would think you were
afraid we won’t have any more.”
He laughed and drew me into the shelter of his arm.
“Of course we’ll have more. But there’s something very special about the firstborn, don’t you
feel that, Madeleine? Creating for the first time in your own image. It makes me feel like God.”
“Oh, you!” I said affectionately. “You are an artist! Papa always said you should have been
a sculptor as well as a master mason.”
“I thought of it,” he admitted, “quite seriously, in fact, as a boy.”
“What stopped you?” I demanded curiously.
“The idea of dying in poverty.” He grinned. “Now, be a good girl and come to bed. It’s late
and my son must have a good rest.”
While Charles slept I lay awake, seeing the picture that he had painted for me of this very
special child. I imagined the sign of the cross made with holy water upon the smooth, rounded
forehead of a flawless baby ... and the first fashioning of our great love. Charles had promised me
perfection and I believed in his vision without question; I had no doubts, none of the normal
anxieties that beset an expectant mother. Within the magic circle of our love our happiness seemed
safe and assured, protected by foundations that could never be shaken by misfortune.
Everything came to me, of course ... the lovely old seventeenth-century home in the Rue St.
Patrice and the income from my father’s many sensible investments.
“You are a woman of independent means,” Charles told me pensively, and I sensed his vague
unease. He didn’t want anyone saying he had only married me for my money. For the first time I
...
Ettariel