To Play the Queen of Hearts

by Daniel Stride

Wrists and legs bound in hempen shackles, I sit in the back of the cart. I stare out at the jeering crowd.

Filthy little monkeys.

The masses have revolted against God and Reason, and ushered in an Age of Terror and Anarchy. They shall pay for this, I tell you, from the most wizened crone to the smallest milk-guzzling babe. They shall know privation. They shall know damnation. They shall lose all they hold dear. My ghost shall haunt their dreams.

They know not what they do, Father Dumont once told me.

Hah. Yesterday, I sat at my prison window and watched the blade sever souls from bodies. Dumont’s own head thudded into the basket, and blood geysered from his corpse. The crowd cheered the sweet demise of another Enemy Within.

Dumont’s pieties be damned. They know exactly what they do, the beasts.

A mouldy head of lettuce hurtles out of the crowd. Like a cannonball, it flies straight towards our cart and slams into the back of the Marquis’ head. My companion curses and struggles against his bindings. But the rope holds him fast.

“Now, now,” I tell him. “You’ll just give them more satisfaction. Besides, better lettuce heads than coal lumps.”

That’s the thing about commoners. They’re flies. They feed on dung, breed faster than is good for them, and have no sense of decorum. And they swarm. Swatting one is no long-term defence against the rest. One must hate with the politeness of long-suffering silence, even as raw and naked fury burns in one’s breast.

But flies do not run off with diamond necklaces. That sin requires the agency of man, and I shall never forgive that grubby serving maid for pilfering my jewellery box.

Ah, yes. Little Sophie.

Good for nothing save thievery and fucking the prettier stable boys. We should have thrown her onto the street, but, alas, we could get no better. Hard to find decent servants even before the Revolution–it’s impossible now. I don’t know how people manage.

The Marquis mutters. I cannot catch his words. Prison has disagreed with him–his face is too gaunt, and they’ve stolen his wig. He is bald and prematurely grey.

How the mighty have fallen.

Lest one forgets, the Marquis was a charmer in his time, full of Molière quotes and saucy anecdotes. Well-endowed, and passingly good in bed, but I wouldn’t fuck him now, and neither should you. Not even after a bottle of Chardonnay. Though I might still do him, one last time, to spite the shade of my late husband. Now there was a man with a special talent for ruining one’s day. Just ask the Revolutionaries. The fellow had a fatal heart attack on the steps of the Guillotine.

The cart halts in the shadow of the Machine.

I stare up. So large, so imposing. So hideously smelly. And the blood-spattered platform is something else.

Would it kill them to clean it more often?

I swear, I am happy to go first, if only to spare my nose. The flies are buzzing, getting their share of the spoils. Blowflies and plebeians: why, they’re kindred spirits.

But Providence toys with me like a kitten with string. The Guards unlock the cart, and one clambers aboard. A greasy fellow, rotund and stupid, with breath reeking of onion. You know the sort–you find them on every street corner, affecting sophistication by staring at the newspapers. That lot cheered King Louis with the same energy they now cheer the Republic, and they’ll cheer whoever comes after, too. The Revolution is built on sand. Quote me on that.

The oik waves his bayonet in my face before thinking better of it. The Guards drag out the Marquis instead. Feet first.

His chin quivers, poor pathetic fool, but at least the Marquis doesn’t cry on his way up the steps.

Never cry. Tears just egg on the commoners. Doesn’t matter whom they are watching die, crowds love when a prisoner blubs for mercy. The more embarrassing you are, the more they’ll joke about you in the taverns and penny-brothels afterwards.

Remember my advice, dear friend, if you ever find yourself dancing with Madam Guillotine–dying well is an art.

One chop of the falling blade, and the Marquis’ head tumbles into the wicker basket.

Thud.

I wait for the Guards to display him to the masses, but they do not. Not infamous enough, perhaps. A rare twinge of sympathy beats in my breast. The Marquis’ scandals are well-known among the nobility, but they clearly have not filtered down to the crowds.  

The dirty urchins, the crones with their knitting needles, the ale-soaked, pox-ridden sodomites of this New Revolutionary World… they see him as yet another deviant aristocrat, interchangeable in Ancien Régime villainy. Defloration of a Duc’s thirteen year-old daughter might anger the Duc, but unless you whip your servants and levy your tenants into penury, the masses do not care. The Marquis talked a grand game, but at the crunch he was too nice. Scandal without cruelty is not enough for infamy.

My turn.

I shuffle myself off the cart–I will not be dragged. Not by such as this.

A Guard shrugs and slices my leg-bindings.

They hope to hoist me over their broad shoulders and lift me to my doom amid tears and screams. Fools. They know nothing. Just as they are beneath my dignity, so is fleeing. That way lies death with mockery, and I shall not be mocked.

I stride up the steps to meet my fate. God willing, I shall haunt many a dream in the years to come.

I do not suppose you have ever had your head sliced off.

It is not an experience I recommend. There is a rush of air, followed by a moment of torment, and then the sensation of falling. Then agony gives way to inky Tartarean blackness. Like falling asleep, only the dreams that come… let us not talk of them.

Not here.

The Priests have their descriptions of the afterlife. None are anything like my own experience. Not that they’ll listen. Or even care. Priestly vestments–even Bishop-robes–often hide the most confounded atheists, once you scratch beneath the pious pomposity.

Passing out of dream into the realm of waking life, I find myself upon a table.

Or at least my head is upon the table. The Revolution removed my body, and I have never found it. Thrown into the Seine, I imagine, to become bloated and water-logged. Food for fishes. I would slay every fish, from here to Dover, even unto the seventh generation, for the sin of eating my flesh and drinking my blood.

Fish or man, you probably still have your body.

How fortunate. How despicably fortunate. Envy is a sin, even a deadly one, but since I no longer have a heart, I shall lay it bare. I would exchange places with anyone, even the lowliest. Even a fish.

You sound surprised, and I despise you for it. Do you not know, when one has only a head, there is no space for anything save self-pity and hate? Read Plato and think not that tyrants are happy.

But a table is my fate. I see copper wires and glass beakers. Against the far wall are books. Great stacks of books, in Greek and Latin. Maybe even Arabic. Enough to torment scholars from Lisbon to Warsaw with the pitter-patter temptations of petty Envy.

I know this place.

I have fallen in with an alchemist.

Scratch a Priest and find an atheist. Scratch a bored and bookish Lawyer and find an alchemist. Many fortunes are squandered on the Art, until the practitioners run out of other people’s money. Denis did not go in for it, thankfully. Even dullness has its virtues, and our Estate needed the funds for entertainment.

Our Estate.

Memories flood back, sweet and uninvited. Head that I am, I shed a tear for our lost Château, and the crystal chandeliers and feather beds I shall never see again.

If you have never owned a Château, I loathe you. You can never know what I have lost. Would that I could burn your hovel to the ground and laugh like a demon from Hell amid the ashes of your life. Maybe, dear friend, I shall.

Footsteps. Footsteps in the distance. I essay to turn but cannot. My poor severed neck cannot manage it, and I surrender. A thousand curses are on my lips, for I tire of silence and politeness.

The footsteps grow louder. They stutter and hobble.

A lame alchemist has ensnared me. Ignominy piled upon ignominy, a base blasphemy against my birth. Such is the Revolution, that monument to human folly.

I protest, dear friend. I protest and condemn. I shall not be turned into a grotesque object for experimentation. Especially not by those whose Faustian lust for knowledge is exceeded only by their disrespect for Reason and Law.

This is an old man, bent and wrinkled with age and deviance. His beard, whiter than my very skin, hangs long and unkempt. He walks with a silver-tipped cane.

He stares at me, silent. Then he hobbles over and prods my nose with a finger. An alchemist prodding my nose. Of all the descriptions the Priests give of Hell, I cannot think of any like this. Give me the fiery lake. Give me the thunderous Judgement. But do not force me to sit, helpless as a kitten, as an old man prods my nose.

“It is as I feared,” he mutters. “I have been foolish.”

He grasps my hair. My beautiful ringlets, lush and golden, are clasped in his claws.

This is too much. This humiliation shall not be borne, not in ten thousand years. I let loose a terrible cry, high and piercing. 

The alchemical beakers shatter. Myriad glass shards splinter across the table and tinkle upon the floorboards. I do not know if I have ruined his windows. I pray that I have and that repairs drive him into penury.

Alas. There is no justice in this Fallen World, poetic or otherwise. My scream is vanity, and the old man does not heed me.

He carries me towards the door and thence into his labyrinthine scholar’s hovel. I cease my shrieks, resigned to whatever fate awaits. Another reason to curse my lack of body. I miss it more than any Château. By all the saints, I would trade Versailles itself for my body’s return, were it ugly and bloated as sin. Give me maggots, if I could but move for myself.

We pass through a series of dimly lit corridors, devoid of painting or sculpture. There are cracks in the walls. He’s bunged them up with putty, of course. I have never yet met an alchemist with the barest smidgeon of class. They are worse than Priests in their tastes, and just as lazy, with even less excuse. High, narrow windows frown down upon the street, but in my glimpses I catch no inkling of my location.

A staircase without barrier or railing spirals downwards into unknown depths. I wonder indeed if I am on the path to Hell. 

Then a black cat bounds into view, running up the stairs after some imagined sprite.

Right under the alchemist’s feet it patters, swift as a bullet. Such are cats. Creatures beyond human ken, fickle as Dame Fortune.

The old villain totters and stumbles. He drops me as he reaches out to steady himself. My head thuds onto the floor. I bounce twice and lie stunned, too numb to think. But my captor trips down the waiting stairs. Thumps and shouts, and calamity follows until I hear, from far below, a terrible and sickening crunch. 

I have no time to celebrate. Raw nausea overwhelms me, and I succumb once more to the dark and perilous paths of dream.

How long I wander those roads, I do not know.

I awake to candlelight. Soft, gentle candlelight.

Christmas Mass.

No. There are no Christmas Masses, not in this new world of Sodom and Gomorrah, where the Château burns to ash, and all is blood and flies. Where alchemists prod the noses of the mighty, and where Reason itself is mocked.

I look down from a shelf, seeing a hundred ornaments and curiosities. Vases and music-boxes, deer antlers and viols, snow globes and tankards, jewelled rings and ivory-handled daggers, paintings and children’s toys. This is not the home of my alchemist captor.

This is a shop.

I hate shopkeepers. Beady-eyed lesser-lives who presume to imprison their betters with golden fetters of trickery and debt. It matters little if they are Jew or Gypsy or English by blood. They all look the same to me. All have the same gleam in their eyes, the same smile as you hand them their contractual due. They are not flies, of course. Plebeians and peasants do little but eat and breed and read newspapers, if they can read at all. Shopkeepers are altogether cleverer and more dangerous. I dare say they are the true authors of the Revolution. Curse them all. Curse their blood-soaked shrines to Mammon.

A tinkle of a bell, and a man in a coat enters, carrying a shopping bag. His hair is trimmed short, and he wears an unfashionable moustache. Spectacles perch on the bridge of his nose. He is not a shopkeeper, but a man of the middle class. A burgher, we called them of old.

I hate him already.

The man lifts a music box from a shelf below mine and cautiously opens it. The box chimes and tinkles in a facsimile of charm. The burgher listens with an inane smile, tears beading in his eyes.

The fool waxes sentimental. He misses the time when everything was simpler and less cruel. A time when everything was given, not earned, and where he readily believed every lie.

It is all so contemptuous, I nearly cry out. Such a man is a child. When confronted with troubles, he retreats behind plaster walls of make believe. I have never made that mistake, dear friend. I never cry over sweet days that never were, and sweeter days that never shall be. But I am merely a head and cannot flee from fools. Alas.

He snaps the music-box shut and replaces it on the lower shelf. Then his eyes drift upwards. Slowly, agonisingly slowly… until his gaze meets mine.

I have him.

Take me home with you. I smile. We have much to do.

My new servant flees the shop with me, without paying. The more the mischief, the better the sport, and I care little that I am stuffed inside a shopping bag, jolted this way and that as the burgher hurries home.

You think my standards are falling. A noblewoman, of impeccable breeding, carted down the street in a bumbling burgher’s bag. Am I Lady or lettuce?

Sitting in one’s study with a cosy log fire and an exquisite glass of aged brandy, it is easy to criticise. I would do it myself, were I in your velvet slippers, and I did my share of judging before Dame Fortune taught me humility. Now, I am nothing if not a paragon. Had I my body, it would be clad in sackcloth and ashes. So let us speak no more of this.

Friends and wise men can keep secrets.

Doors open and close. The steady tread of leather shoes. We are descending, not into Hell but into hope. Burghers have their place in this world, and so long as they know their place, there is no damage done.

Alas, knowing one’s place is a rare quality, rare as maidenly virtue in the court of Louis XV. There are simply too many temptations. That’s the story of all that is wrong with the world: always has been.

At last, we halt. The burgher pulls me from the bag, and places me on a table.

I am in a candlelit cellar. No books, just sloppily arranged wine bottles and shelves. The man is insufficiently interesting for alchemy, and too boring even for a wife.

Perfect.

I desire a body. Bring me one.

He nods, pale as a sheet and completely under my power.

Bring out the Chardonnay, the caviar, and the violinists, and let us make merry until the break of dawn. Prodigal Reason has returned.

Old man, or child, or leper, he digs them up at night, under the cover of the New Moon or cloudy skies, and he smuggles them from graveyard to cellar. I do not know how he evades the Law. Bribery, probably. The Law proves surprisingly supple, given the right payment. Remember that maxim. It saved our friend the Marquis often enough, until the Revolution came. Why, it even saved Denis once, but you’ll already know about that beastly little affair.

I must chastise my servant for his foolishness.

I am neither old man, nor child, nor leper. And whereas once, in the clutches of despair, I was willing to countenance the return of a damaged body, an ugly, mutilated, water-logged thing, covered in a myriad of maggots… I despair no longer. Freedom is in my grasp, and my expectations have grown.

Now? I shall have only the best, and if my old body had its flaws, this new body shall be without blemish. A small token of recompense for my suffering.

All this, I tell the burgher. His head sinks in submission.

Excellent.

It takes many days and feels longer. The Priests say Patience is a Virtue, but then so is Chastity, and we all know how many of them bother with that. I’ve known Bishops who would make Casanova blush.

I lash my servant with my tongue as he offers up his feeble excuses. There is no corpse that meets my standards… and so on. The burgher bears it well. His shoulders slump, and his words grow grovelling until he is the very model of the beaten peasant cur.

And then one night…

Shirtsleeves rolled up, sweat beading on his face, the burgher heaves a new corpse down the stairs.

This is the body I must have.

Fair beyond measure, skin as white and smooth as silk, breasts pert and firm, this is a girl I would have envied even during the noontide of my youth. With my brains and her body, I could make a new life, even in this tawdry Revolutionary world. A trip to Tuscany looms, for the Marquis had several good friends there, with even better wine-cellars.

My servant lays the corpse upon the cellar floor.

“I have done as you command, my lady.”

Slice off her head, and sew mine onto the neck. Take care the stitches do not show.

He nods and fetches a hacksaw. When he returns, I see his face has grown pale, as if he is about to faint.

“I cannot do it, my lady. To sever that head from that neck would be to smash the stained-glass windows of Notre Dame.”

I recall his tears over the music box. But I do not fear his rebellion. My will shall crush this lurid sentimentalism.

Enough of your snivelling. Do it.

His paltry will against mine.

Slowly, agonisingly slowly, he crouches down beside the body. I smile. There is much catharsis to be gained from punishing rebellion. I dare say a whiff of grapeshot upon that fateful tennis court would have saved us all much trouble. King Louis, like the Marquis, simply lacked the stomach for power.

But I do not.

The burgher places the hacksaw-blade upon the milk-white throat… and stops. He bends forward and kisses the dead girl’s forehead. A chaste kiss, out of one’s forgotten childhood, or out of the virginal Middle Ages. Let the troubadours sing of it.

So small, so simple an act, and yet the fool takes me by surprise.

The hacksaw clatters to the floor. My servant is on his feet. His eyes flash behind the spectacles. I have seen that look before, and just for a moment I shudder. Memories of being torn from one’s bed linger in the mind, a scar as enduring and accursed as the Guillotine itself.

“No,” he says. “I shall not do it. You are dead… why won’t you die?”

I am not dead. I live. I command you.

But he flees up the stairs, taking them three at a time.

My servant never returns to the cellar. I still imagine a thousand different fates for him, each more gruesome than the last.

Maybe he rushed out into the street, his madness ending beneath the hooves of a passenger-coach. Maybe he hanged himself in his own parlour. Maybe he angered the Revolutionaries and danced with Madam Guillotine. Maybe he fled across the Channel to England, only to die of the pox in a London alley.

He deserves all that, and worse.

The beautiful girl-corpse is gone, of course. Eaten by flies and maggots. Thank the saints, I cannot see i–the candles burnt out long ago, leaving me in pitch-darkness–but I know it is there, and I know its fate.

Thus ends my New Life, stillborn.

I curse. Better the bodies of the old man or the child than this. Better the leper. With them, I still might have achieved much.

In the bleak night of a burgher’s cellar, I gnaw the madness of hope. The hope that one day I shall return to the merriment of yore.

And yet, there shall be no returning.

The world moves on, the Revolution turns on its infernal axis… and still I wait, haunting nobody’s dreams but my own. I live the darkness on the other side of the Guillotine, and it pains me more than the blade itself. Better hated than forgotten.

Dear friend, I have been too quick to judge.

Too quick to Envy and Hate.

Forgive my hasty and haughty words, and remember me as more than a tyrant.

In the coming years, if you should pass this way, take pity on this long-suffering woman. Pity and Mercy, twin virtues even the Revolution cannot extinguish.

I would be honoured if you paid me a visit.

We shall have much to discuss, and much to do. We have so much in common.

The cellar stairs are treacherous in the dark, rotten with time and thick with dust. Bring a candle or lantern, and fear not if you find a grinning skull upon the floor. It cannot hurt you. 

I shall be waiting.

Oh yes. I shall be waiting.