“Frankie,” Edie said after a long moment, “my name is Edith and I am a female person.”
Frankie Fossoyeur nodded, puzzled. “Yes,” she said, “I know. The ratio of your hips to your head is inconsistent with maleness. Also, the formation of your voice, while the note is quite deep, is not indicative of the presence of…” She waggled her fingers and then leaned closer, touching Edie’s throat at the midpoint.
“Adam’s apple,” Edie Banister said, after a moment.
“Yes! Exactly. Also the skin, the eyes, the odour of the body, the hands… these are not mathematical observations, by the way. They are qualitative…” She had not removed her fingers. Edie could feel the second one, resting on her neck just to one side of the first. If she stepped forward, she would feel the third, then the little finger and eventually the palm and the thumb, then the forearm, and then all of Frankie at once.
“Just so that we’re clear,” Edie said. She shifted her weight. Frankie’s nails grazed her skin.
“We are,” Frankie said. “Quite clear.”
How long they stood there Edie was never sure. At some point, they began to kiss, and the distance to Marseilles seemed very short. Undressing, Frankie announced sternly that she did not believe in exclusive love, which was a ludicrous construction of the Judeo-Christian Patriarchy. Edie agreed, never having thought about it, and wondered distantly whether the Judeo-Christian Patriarchy was a plot to which she should alert Abel Jasmine, or one he had perhaps created. Certainly, she wasn’t going to argue about it now.
The journey was easy, but arriving was hard. Frankie’s home was burned out. A pair of tweezers and a copper pot lay broken on her old hearth, beside a single, charred shoe. She asked about her family, her relatives, but once they knew who she was, the remaining local people would not talk to her. The young ones looked ashamed and the old ones turned away and muttered. A soldier said he thought it likely they’d been denounced as traitors to Vichy.
“They did a bit of that,” he said, looking out at the town. “Pointed the finger at those they didn’t like. People who were too rich or too pretty. All over occupied Europe, belike. Here for sure.” He shied a pebble at a man pulling a handcart. “Half the world at war with the other half and good French lads fighting in the shadows to set ’em free, French soldiers in England readying for the day, and these buggers down here were just settling old scores. Bollocks to ’em, is what I say. Still… they had to live somehow, I suppose.” He showed them a pile of belongings, dug up from the town dump, and Frankie moaned, clutched an ugly beaded necklace of her mother’s from the pile.
Edie walked her away from town, followed a narrow track to a tree stump on the shore of a mucky lake.
“They hate us this much…” Frankie whispered, between gulps of horror. “My people. Because we are witches. Hakote. Children of the Sea. Webbed feet and shadow. Because we see the world, my mother said.”
“I don’t understand,” Edie confessed into her lover’s hair, because she knew already that when Frankie needed to talk about human things and life, you had to give her the cues or she became convinced you weren’t listening.
Frankie swallowed. “Numbers,” she said, after a moment. “Always numbers. We are born with numbers as you are born with sight. Do you see? So we are witches.”
“Because you can count?”
“Non, not exactly. It is like that, but it is more than counting, and less. It is… Alors… Suppose I am a crude peasant girl—which I am, but suppose it is Louis XIV’s time. I see a waterwheel. I see the rotation and the angle, and I know that in thirty to forty rotations, it will wear away and collapse. I do not know why I know. How can I express periodicity when I have never learned to write? When I have never needed a word for ‘rotation’? But I run, anyway, to the miller and I say to him to stop the wheel. Now, the miller is a rich man and he did not get that way by listening to foolish girls. He does nothing. The wheel breaks and a man dies. Now I am a prophet! A witch! It is all my fault! Do you see?”
“Hakote.”
“Sorceress. Yes. So they make up stories. Lies, embellishments. And my mother’s house is a ruin and my… everyone I loved is gone. Because people are too stupid to know the simple truth when they hear it, and believe the most outrageous lies.” And then something else which Edie could not quite hear, but which sounded like: Please let them have escaped. More family, more vulnerable witches. More targets.
Edie beside her, Frankie made inquiries from anyone who would speak to her. She discovered her mother and uncles had been put into one of the Vichy French camps quite early, and had died. Two more relatives—Edie wasn’t sure who—had perhaps escaped over the hills to the coast, but been in a convoy which was sunk by U-boats.
The following day, they travelled on into Germany. It was not like seeing a fallen knight or the corpse of a monstrous wolf. It wasn’t even the way Edie had imagined it, with burned-out tanks and beaten, thankful people.
It was like the aftermath of bad surgery, or a pit fight in Calcutta.
Lady Germany had taken a knife to her own face. In a strange, bewildered frenzy, she had cut off her proud, Semitic nose, and skewered her brown Romany eyes. And then came her violent rescuers, no more subtle than herself: they beat her, burned her, stabbed her, and then finally could not agree which of them should own the mess, so split her Solomonically (yet more bitter irony to which no one paid attention) and both parties were now having their way with the remains. A truly befitting European tragedy. Fossoyeur: it means gravedigger.
In the rain amid the mud and twisted metaclass="underline" Frankie Fossoyeur was crying, water from her eyes as if they were the very Möhne and Eder dams themselves. Slick-cheeked and open-mouthed, she stared as if seeing the whole of Germany spread out below her on a table. The country had undone itself as much as it had been undone.
“More dead of lies. More millions.”
Leaning on Edie Banister, Frankie choked out horrors and sucked in air which was half mud.
Back home at Edie’s flat in Marylebone, Frankie bawled and wailed and stared into space. Germany had been her enemy, but France had betrayed her. France was dead to her. She would never visit the Louvre again. She would never take Edie to the Orangerie to see Monet’s water lilies. Monet was a bastard, and his style was evidence of a myopic condition, not of genius at all. No genius ever came out of France. None. Not even Frankie. Frankie was not French. She was Hakote, and that was all. She would work.
She would work. The Apprehension Engine, yes. The truth would come out. Everyone would see. The world would become honest, mankind would be better off. No lies, ever again.
Edie took her to bed and kept her there for most of a week, and by the end she wept only occasionally. Edie bought her oil pastels and paper from an art shop in Reading, and Frankie sketched faces Edie did not recognise over and over again, and touched her hand and said “I love you,” which she had never done before. Occasionally, she stopped sketching and wrote numbers on the wall, and other symbols Edie had never seen, symbols which expressed things for which spoken language had no name. Warmed and lit by the single bar of an electric fire, Frankie Fossoyeur drew the faces of the beloved dead, and surrounded them with wild, dangerous comprehensions no one else on Earth could have understood. It was the first time Edie heard her speak of her book, in the ghastly lethargy which took her between bouts of mania.