Work Text:
The glances of women are like certain seemingly peaceful but really formidable machines. Every day you pass them in peace, with impunity, and without suspicion of danger. There comes a moment when you forget even that they are there. You come and go, you muse, and talk, and laugh. Suddenly you feel caught up! It is all over. The wheels have you, the glance has captured you. It has caught you, no matter how or where, by some wandering of your thought, through a momentary distraction. You are lost. You will be drawn in entirely. A train of mysterious forces has gained possession of you. You struggle in vain. No human succor is possible. You will be drawn from wheel to wheel, from anguish to anguish, from torture to torture—you, your mind, your fortune, your future, your soul; and you will not leave the awesome machine until, depending on whether you are in the power of a malevolent creature or a noble heart, are disfigured by shame or transfigured by love. - Les Misérables 3.6.6
1.
The spring before Cosette’s sixteenth birthday, the handsome young man of the Luxembourg Garden returned, after an absence of six months or so, to his habitual walk along the chestnut alleys.
Cosette’s eyes were drawn to him with a persistence that frustrated her. She told herself sternly that the tulips were opening, that the trees were full of finches, that the dresses of the ladies by the fountain were enchanting, and that there was no need to return her gaze to one poor young man. If he was handsome—well, what of it? He had been that six months ago, and he had changed in no particular since then: his shabby black coat might have become even shabbier, his air of abstraction even more profound, but he was clearly the same intelligent and thoughtful and rather noble-looking person; there was no reason at all for her to look at him.
She delivered this rebuke to herself over the course of several days at the garden, accepted it meekly, and then took no heed of it, except to conceive a sense of indignation at the young man for provoking her to ignore her own good advice. Over the larger part of one fine spring afternoon that sense was nurtured and refined, her vague pique at the young man increasing each time he passed her bench, until at last, seeing that his circuit of the path was again bringing him to perihelion, Cosette lifted her eyes to his and perceived, quite definitively, that time stopped.
A stutter, no more. For half a second, probably less, the young man froze, his foot just skimming the gravel, his deep black eyes unblinking, even the play of the breeze in his black curls arrested: waiting, like the statues on the parapet, at the pleasure and the mercy of the elements.
The moment passed; the young man’s foot met the walk and he went on his way. Something had happened which Cosette did not immediately understand—but she thought, obscurely, that it must have something to do with fighting.
She had little sense of what that meant. Such things had formed no part of her education. In the convent, the very word had been suppressed, almost as thoroughly as the word love—and like love, elided even from the books of profane music that entered the school, replaced by débat or wombat, creating enigmas which exercised the imaginations of the big girls.
Cosette giggled over these mysteries with the other girls, but they troubled her; they stirred dim memories of a time Before. Before what? She could scarcely have said; every memory without her father in it belonged to the same hazy Before, and she had only the thinnest scaffolding out of which to construct a history: She had lived with her mother once; she had been fostered in a country village, at an inn; she had lived with Papa, first outside the convent, then in it. To the inn were ascribed all the unplaceable visions of childhood; the phantoms and nightmares that, more and more as time passed, she was certain could not have been real. The missing word—the one that rhymed with sabbat, not the one that rhymed with tambour—belonged to this stratum: some mystery half-screened even in memory by a wall of table trestles and stomping trouser legs, loose bolts spinning across a floor, and a hoarse chorus of voices chanting “A fight! A fight!”
She must have remembered it wrong; some of the other young ladies had been fostered in the country, and they, she was sure, knew no more of combat than of tambour or Pandour. Cosette tried to put away the strange memories, and never offered any interpretation for what might be meant by “the special combinations of the wombat” or why they should be so remarkable.
She had learned no more since leaving the convent, save for some small elucidation of that phrase “special combination,” which Toussaint delivered the first time she witnessed Cosette summoning her father. He was out fetching water when a stray cat got into the kitchen, no doubt fleeing dogs, and, more scared of its new refuge than its pursuers, bolted out again right between Cosette’s feet. Cosette shrieked, nearly as startled as the poor beast, and fell back into the arms of her father, suddenly present. Toussaint had made much of her for it—such a useful special combo Mademoiselle had! And so ladylike as well!
It was not the first time her father had appeared, so, just when needed; but it was the first time Cosette understood that he had done so not by his own power, but by hers; that she might call him again, and on purpose.
That day in the Luxembourg, Cosette’s papa was already sitting beside her, and could hardly be summoned closer. He seemed wholly unaffected by the new power in her glance: whatever had halted the young man had not touched the old one. But the power, Cosette knew immediately, was part of the same thing. She felt it inside her, battering her breastbone from within: something in her that yearned to work its will in the world; one of the mysteries of combat of which she knew little and was meant to know less.
She returned thoughtfully to the house in the Rue de l’Ouest, where Jean Valjean, according to his custom, had come to spend six weeks. The next morning, on waking, she thought of that strange young man, so long indifferent and icy, who now seemed to pay attention to her, and it did not appear to her that this attention was the least in the world agreeable to her. She was, on the contrary, somewhat incensed at this handsome and disdainful individual. A substratum of war stirred within her. It struck her—and the idea caused her a wholly childish joy—that she was going to take her revenge at last.
2.
In the neighborhood of Montfermeil there is a venerable superstition, all the more precious and rare in that a popular superstition in the vicinity of Paris is like an aloe tree in Siberia. We are among those who respect the rare. Here, then, is the superstition of Montfermeil: They believe there that the Devil has from time immemorial chosen their forest as the hiding place for his treasure.
There is a second superstition, a corollary of this: That when you dig for the Devil’s treasure and fail to find it, this is because—logically enough—an animal has been there before you: usually a hare or a rabbit, sometimes a badger, occasionally a weasel, any creature that will dig in the earth. This animal, on uncovering the Devil’s hoard, attains a great size and a human facility for combat. Its limbs extend; it gains speed. Sometimes it summons a familiar, a red-clad demon with the stature of an infant and the mustache of a hussar. And there are its special combinations, moves of which no animal should be capable—it crushes you beneath an iron weight; it runs you over in an iron chariot drawn by spirits.
The good wives of the village call this devil-hare Ponpon, and say that even if you manage to shoot him, the carcass will rot before it can hang, and whoever wears anything made from the skin is certain to drop dead of apoplexy.
There was in Montfermeil in 1823 a certain old road-mender, a Robojean. “An Arbre-Jean,” insisted the village schoolmaster, who had some education. “They were made to be pruners of trees.” But the construct in Montfermeil had never been seen to prune a tree, being employed by the government to repair the road between Gagny and Lagny.
Nevertheless, early in that year it was remarked that the old road-mender had taken a sudden interest in trees, or at least in the woods, for he was suddenly to be seen wandering in the remotest glades as if looking for something. Sometimes he was seen digging a hole; housewives who passed him with his pick and shovel took him first for Beelzebub and then for the Robojean, which was hardly more reassuring. People in the neighborhood claimed to know he had been in prison; he was under police surveillance; he was too respectful, too humble, too quick to doff his cap to everybody; he had nothing in his favor except that he was a drunkard.
Only the innkeeper Thénardier, who was everybody’s friend, had not disdained to strike up an intimacy even with the road-mender. “He’s been in prison—good lord! You never know who’s there, or might wind up there.”
To Thénardier, and to the village schoolmaster, it seemed that the affair might involve, not the fabulous treasures of the Devil, but some more substantial windfall. Eventually, when the talk of the town had somewhat died down and the Robojean had not yet produced a treasure, they put him to the question—that is to say, they attempted to get him drunk.
The Robojean had an immense capacity for liquor and was taciturn by nature; still, by dint of repeated experiments, they were able eventually to learn that he had seen some person known to him in the forest, whose name he could not be induced to reveal; that the person had been carrying a small trunk or chest; that he, the Robojean, had followed; and that he had found neither the chest nor this mysterious old compatriot, but only an abandoned pick and spade; and that in the intervening time he had quite failed to discover any treasures, whether of the Devil or some more earthly source.
He had, however, on at least one occasion encountered the end of a rabbit hole.
Nobody thought any more about it except for a few gossips who said that the Gagny road-mender must have stirred up the Ponpon, and forbade their children to go into the woods after dark.
3.
Her first month in the convent, Cosette had been beset from all sides by novelty; in the flurry of new clothes, new friends, new teachers, new rules, she did not take particular notice of a peculiar incident which occurred in the dormitory. Even when Sister Sainte-Mechthilde finally deemed the girls of her cohort old enough to sing of the mysteries of wombat, it did not occur to her to connect the word to this occurrence.
This was what happened: Her third night in the convent school—the first night she had been too excited to sleep at all, and the second too exhausted to do anything else—she awoke from a nightmare to find her father at her side, where he was not supposed to be, and the sisters in an uproar.
Her father had no explanation—he had been in the gardener’s hut making tea, and then he had been at Cosette’s bedside, with his hands still full of teaspoons. Certainly no one had seen him cross the intervening space, nor heard his knee-bell.
They put Cosette in an empty cell on her own, near the stairs, until she was able to sleep without nightmares—only a few weeks, to the sisters’ great relief—and she did not think again of those nights until they left the convent.
Their first Sunday in the world, her father had taken them to church—not to the parish church of their new house on the Rue Plumet, or to the public church attached to the convent, but to the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, on the edge of the Latin Quarter. The neighborhood around the church was poor and crowded, and the walk was long and made longer by her father’s stopping many times to give alms.
After Mass, he asked her, in the serious way he had, whether there was anything she was lacking; and, when she shook her head reflexively, begged her to consider the question carefully. Cosette dutifully considered. “A reticule,” she said at last. “And a little coin-purse, so that I can give my own alms, whatever I can set aside from the housekeeping.”
Her father had smiled, and the next day a little handbag of net over black satin appeared in Cosette’s room, and a coin-purse with a clasp in mother-of-pearl. She carried it with her proudly next Sunday, with twelve sous inside that she had spared from the laundry budget by sponging her own collars.
When Jean Valjean stopped to give a coin to a wretched old veteran begging by a boundary-stone, Cosette took a step away into the crowd, and then another, looking for the poor mother she had seen by that same stone last week—and then in an instant she realized, at the same time, that she had quite lost both her father and her purse.
She patted her skirts, but her pockets and her hands were both empty.
She looked around at the street, which had only a moment before seemed the stage for a grand adventure—but now, everything the convent had told her about the horrors of the world suddenly returned to her: the windows of the houses seemed so many cold and staring eyes, and the passers-by, who had seemed pleasant or at worst pitiable, now appeared all to be staring straight through her. (As indeed some were, for Cosette had gasped aloud in her surprise and was turning quite pale.)
And then suddenly, her fear plunged deep enough within her to come to ground on something solid. She had heard fear described as a knot in the chest, a weight in the belly; she had not thought that weight would feel so comfortable, of a good heft, like a smooth stone in the hand. She reached within herself to fling it outward, to scatter the staring press of strangers like so many crows—and then her father was at her side.
He put his big arm around her shoulders, just like when she was a little girl, and held her quite close while, in short order, he plucked the young man who had plucked her purse out of the crowd and gave him a silver coin worth rather more than Cosette’s twelve sous.
They did not speak about it. Her father was pensive for some time afterward, but time passed, and Cosette quickly acclimated to the press of the crowd and learned to guard her pockets and purse like a Parisienne.
It happened again, three or four more times over the next few months, as Cosette grew accustomed to the sounds and sights of the city. Even after the incident with the cat, Cosette remained unsure how many times she had actually summoned her father to her—after all, it hardly took a special combination to bring her father to her side on a night of thunder. But once Toussaint put a name to it, Cosette, secure in the knowledge of her own power, had no further need to test it, even unwittingly: The incidents stopped, and had not since recurred.
4.
That afternoon in the Luxembourg, she did not expect to find anything new within herself; and she was not at all pleased to feel the faint outlines of this new power growing atop the old. She had already discovered she was beautiful, and that had been vexation enough, however satisfied she was with the outcome. And beauty—her own, at least—did not pull at her heart from within; it did not demand some new action, some outlet, the nature of which she could not guess, but the want of which she now felt.
If it were not so similar to the thing which called her father to her, she might have thought it was nothing to do with fighting after all—perhaps the mysteries of tambour, which remained unexplained and about which Toussaint had never volunteered any information. But it felt the same—a part of her reaching out into the world, to make it conform to her desire. She could not, it was true, think why she might desire the handsome young man to freeze in his tracks—though it would, she reflected, certainly make it easier to fight him. For whatever reason.
The next day, the handsome young man was back, in a new coat which suited him not nearly so well as his shabby old one. As he approached on the path she summoned all the indignation she could—which was rather a lot—over its terrible stiff skirts and boxy shoulders, and raised her eyes to his.
This time, she held him nearly three-quarters of a second, and he remained still half a second after that in confusion before seeming to realize what had happened.
The following day, the young man encamped on a bench just down the path from their own—and evidently out of the reach of her new abilities, for his gaze crossed hers and moved on, ending on some point above her shoulder and staring fixedly there. Cosette, annoyed by this escalation, jumped up and, proclaiming that it was too lovely a day to sit still, advanced on the young man’s bench. She kept her eyes downcast until they drew abreast; then, quick as a duellist, looked up, directly into her opponent’s face.
The young man was instantly stunned; and her father’s voice, as well, paused mid-sentence. After that Cosette became more careful, finding within herself the knowledge of how to widen and narrow the effect—now holding a little eddy of dust in place around the young man’s cracked shoe; now arresting a moth darting near his shoulder—but always, she thought, keeping her father out of it.
But her opponent was less cunning. He replied to her sortie with a frontal assault on Cosette’s bench—striding past with his chin held high and his hand, like Napoleon’s, tucked into his coat. He held this attitude, eyes forward, looking neither to the left nor the right, and proceeded to pass unmolested—but when he had achieved the end of the path, he could not resist glancing back over his shoulder, and was snared in Cosette’s gaze instantly.
They continued this sparring for some weeks. Sometimes they missed a session, when Cosette and her father came at a different hour, but every day that the young man was present they strove: Cosette to immure the young man in a moment of time; the young man—to free himself, Cosette supposed. Certainly, if he had any corresponding power, she never witnessed it.
Once, she thought he might be about to summon such a thing—he had a white handkerchief, and made a great show of displaying it, out of her father’s line of sight, and of pressing it to his heart—but it did nothing to protect him. She held him one and one-quarter seconds, and contrived to halt the handkerchief mid-flutter as well.
And then one day, her father took them walking in the Champs-Elysèes instead. They did not return to the Luxembourg that day, or the next, or the next—for weeks, they did not return—and when at last they did, the young man was not there.
Cosette had been robbed of her victory.
5.
Over the autumn and winter, Cosette’s health bar began to fall.
Her father asked her, kindly, worriedly, what the matter was; she could not say; she insisted she was well, she was happy—if anything, she was only worried about him, for was he not sad? He seemed sad.
Her father took her at her word; and so she was forced to take him at his, when he insisted he, too, was happy and well.
Even if she had wanted to talk about this thing, she would not have known where to begin. It was wicked to fight; and whatever they had been doing, if not strictly fighting, seemed certainly close enough to be at least a little wicked—certainly not a thing convent-educated young ladies did. She should not miss it at all, let alone enough to pine and sicken over it.
In October, they went to watch the sunrise at the Barrière du Maine, and a strange procession overtook them: Men, or something like men, all in rags, with iron collars at the neck, all connected to a monstrous chain. They rode, in seven great creaking carts—not really carts, just a sort of frame set over equally monstrous wheels, as tall as the soldiers who marched alongside.
The sight of these tall wheels, caked in yellow mud, stirred in Cosette a feeling of wrongness, as though something had been stolen from her. The unexplained pang made a strange, dissonant note against her all too reasonable terror and disgust at the men riding above them.
Each cart had its own character—one was singing, coarse songs and unfamiliar; one was cursing; one was silent and dead-eyed.
One was fighting.
In the center of the vehicle a pair of the ragged men stood. The other passengers leaned precipitously over the edges of the cart to give them room—what little there was to give: they were next to each other in the chain, and could have retreated no more than a few steps from each other without dragging the other along. Their fellows to either side crouched, near standing themselves, to give them what extra play could be found in the chain.
They were trading blows—sharp, cunning jabs of fists and elbows, almost too quick to see. They would feint, miming blows that did not fall; and then all of a sudden one would reel, and you would know that a blow had fallen after all.
As the cart drew abreast of Cosette and her father, one took a heavier blow, swayed, and fell; the collar caught him, half-standing, half-choking—and then all of a sudden he was on his feet, and his hand had swollen to a massive size, all black like iron. He brought it down on the other’s head—surely a blow to crush a man to jelly; but even as Cosette formed the thought the other was rising, impossibly, to his feet and then higher, into the air, the chain pulling his opponent and his fellow after him.
The soldiers, laughing, took hold of the chain and yanked him down, but on his way he landed a kick in the other combatant’s chest, and he collapsed; the floating man was dragged down on top of him.
“Father,” Cosette gasped, “what can that be in those wagons?”
He answered, “Convicts.”
“And where are they going?”
“To prison.”
His voice seemed to come from a long distance away. She hardly recognized the look on his face—a look he wore for several days after. And no wonder, her gentle father! How could a man whose very soul was mildness, kindness, who had never so much as raised his voice to Cosette, understand such a thing as the combat of those wretched creatures?
No—Cosette could not tell her father she wanted to fight the boy from the garden, a boy who had done her no worse harm than to be vulnerable to her strength. Cosette kept silent.
And yet, as her vitality continued to ebb, her power only seemed to grow. She lost sleep; she grew pallid; she picked at her food and moped listlessly about the house—but the farther her health slid toward the red, the more she sensed some new strength that she did not yet know how to wield, slowly taking shape inside her. She did not want it—or so she told herself, repeatedly, after the grim specter of the chain, and sometimes she believed herself—but it did not seem to matter whether she wanted it or not: it was in her. It seemed at times that it was her, the real Cosette, and everything else a sham, or a dream. Certainly, it seemed harder and harder, in the depth of winter, to remember that she liked black damask and strawberry jam; that she took pleasure in Von Weber and squaring up the account books.
And in visiting the poor. The public gardens were empty, at least of the one face she looked for; the barrières and the sunrise were tainted by the vision of the chain; every other pleasure dimmed before the knowledge that her battle had been ended before it could be won—but these were no excuses to cease giving alms and bread and blankets to the poor and wretched. In these excursions Cosette still felt useful, which is to say, happy.
In February, they called at a house whose outside inspired in Cosette a sense of déjà vu strong enough to persist all through the visit with the family. She had begun having these feelings more and more—as if the new thing inside her was not new after all, but something long forgotten. She did not like it; it unnerved her, it made her stomach ache; and she tried to forget it, though she was never as successful as she would have liked.
This time, however, her misgivings were quickly entirely forgotten, as her father returned home that evening with his arm wounded. The wound took an infection, and her father lay for days in a fever, and was a month recovering after it broke.
In the uncertainty and the day-to-day bustle of nursing, which Cosette must now learn for the first time all at once, there was no time to think of anything else—the Luxembourg, the fighting men, the thing inside her were all forgotten. And, too, Cosette was of a nature that plunged deeply into sorrow and came out the other side; she had worried, she had grieved, but as her father recovered and Spring returned to the Rue Plumet, her health bar slid steadily back into blue.
And her power began to ebb: one day, she reached inside to the half-formed thing she had so feared and panicked to find it gone. She gasped; she paled; her health bar dipped toward the red—and her very panic over losing it brought it back, dimly, the outline of it barely sensed, but present after all.
For several weeks after this, her father remarked on Cosette’s moods—they were volatile, now high, now low, as Cosette slowly became secure in the knowledge that, if she truly needed this thing, this unused power, she would have it: her own distress and weakness would summon it to her hand, just as her fear had some time before summoned her father.
With that assurance, Cosette’s natural resilience quickly reasserted itself. Why should she dwell on what was past, when it was Spring, and the garden was lovely, and she was young and the wild joy of life had returned to her?
She began walking in the front garden daily. A lancer came by, every day at the same time, and smiled at her. She smiled back, using nothing of her power, trusting that it would be there if she should need it—though why she would be so silly as to try to fight a lancer, she had no idea.
6.
In April, having recovered from his wound, her father went on one of his trips, and Cosette had a scare which nearly made her summon him back.
The first night of his absence, there was an incident which puzzled Cosette, but did not frighten her deeply nor for long: a sound, late at night, in the garden, like the footsteps of a man walking very carefully. She stole upstairs and opened a shutter in her room, which overlooked the garden: there was no one there.
Cosette was not by nature easily startled. There was in her veins the blood of the barefoot adventuress—she was, it must be remembered, more of a lark than a dove. Still, the incident was on her mind the following night, as she walked in the garden after moonrise, and heard the sound repeated. But, she said to herself, nothing is more like a step in the grass than the rustling of two limbs, and besides, she could not see anything.
She stepped out of the overgrown part of the garden onto the little plot of grass before the steps. The moon, which had just risen behind her, projected her shadow onto this grassy plot before her.
Beside her, equally clear, was another shadow: it might have been a man with a round hat, a few steps behind Cosette.
She stood still, unable for the moment to speak, or cry, or call out, or turn her head—but inside, entirely capable of summoning her father to her side.
She did not. She was, it must be said, a brave and resourceful young lady; but she felt, not merely bravery, but a strong determination to face this shadow alone. It had come, not to her father, but to her; it was in her garden; it was hers to face—hers to fight, if it came to that. And besides, the knowledge that she might still call on her father in an instant lent her courage.
She turned round. There was nobody there. She searched as far as the gate and found nothing. It had vanished like a ghost—but ghosts do not wear round hats.
She told her father when he returned, and he did not reassure her as she expected him to, but searched the garden even more carefully, eventually discovering the shadow of a chimney stack which, it is true, resembled that of a man in a round hat.
But a few days later, another incident occurred.
Cosette was sitting in the garden after sunset. Her father had gone out. The wind was freshening in the trees, and Cosette had been overtaken by that vague sadness in which she could most strongly sense the power in wait beneath the full blue of her health bar.
Even before she had begun to plumb its lineaments, she had cherished the melancholy she felt at the approach of evening. It was the hour she most often perceived around her strange phantoms—not fearsome, as her shadow, but merely sad—and she was in the habit of loitering alone, her heart open and listening, in case one of them was her mother.
The dusk gathered, and Cosette stood and made her final round of the garden. Her feet were wet with dew, and she said to herself she really ought to keep a pair of sabots for the evenings. The thought struck her suddenly cold, far more than the damp night or the whispers of ghosts—there was, in that simple wish, a ghost that roared. She shook her head to dispel it, returned unthinking to her bench, and sat down. As she did she noticed that, dimly visible in the gloaming, the bench was no longer empty: There was a round stone, larger than her fist, sitting next to her, where she had not placed a stone.
Immediately, all thoughts of ghosts were displaced by the knowledge that the bench was very near the fence; that the gratings were wide enough to admit a hand; that beyond the fence was the street, and the street was the world.
Brave as she was, this was too much: Cosette abandoned the field, fleeing inside without touching the stone or even looking back at it. Still, she did not tell her father, nor even Toussaint, what she had seen.
In the morning she returned to the garden, already quite convinced that she had made up the stone to scare herself; that the bench would be empty; that there was no more a stone than there had been a footstep in the garden or a man in a round hat.
The stone was still there. Beneath it, loosely shoved into an envelope and unsealed, was a stack of pages, as from a small notebook; written in a single hand, but in fluctuating shades, now gray, now black, as when the inkwell is refilled over days and weeks.
An irresistible fascination took hold of her. She tried to lift her eyes to the blue sky, the acacias all steeped in light, the pigeons on a nearby roof, but her gaze was trapped, as if she had turned the power of her own glance against herself; she could do nothing but read; it was imperative that she know now, immediately, what message had come to her, to her alone.
She read the whole thing, breathlessly, all at once; and then again, more slowly, stopping where the hand had stopped—for like the ink, the thoughts were clearly the result of days and weeks of the filling and emptying of a heart.
At last she sat on the bench—her bench by the grating, by the street, which now held no fear but only promise—and held the pages to her breast.
Not fighting, then. Not fighting at all, she thought—no, the other thing. The one that rhymed with tambour.
7.
There was no doubt in her mind, even before she read the letter, who had penned it. It could only be one person—and if it was not a fight, certainly there was something unfinished between them.
Still, it seemed that her body expected to resume their battle, even escalate it: all day, pallors swept over her face and vague chills over her body, causing flickers in the brilliant blue of her health bar during which that dormant power, never used, seemed to waken.
In the evening she dressed with unusual care. She tucked the letter into her bosom and went out to the garden. She sat down on the bench. The stone was still there. She reached out and caressed it—it was still warm from the sun, of a smooth solidity and, she knew, a weight that would have a good heft in the hand.
All of a sudden, she knew herself not to be alone. She turned her head and stood up.
It was he.
He was bareheaded. He looked pale and thin. She could hardly see his black clothes. The twilight dimmed his fine forehead and screened his eyes with darkness. Under a veil of incomparable sweetness, he wore something of death and night. His face was lit by the light of a dying day and by the thought of a deepening soul.
Cosette was accustomed to meeting phantoms at this hour; they did not frighten her. Her young man seemed not yet a phantom and yet no longer a man, and she was frightened. Still, she did not cry out—she drew back, for she felt herself drawn forward, but she did not reach for her father, somewhere in the streets nearby, nor for the stone, ready to hand. She drew back until she reached a tree and drew herself up against it, and she lifted her eyes to his, and this time she let him speak.
She had never really heard his voice before; it blended with the rustle of the leaves, another exhalation of the night—thoughts tumbled all over each other like in the notebook, or the way her own thoughts did when her father was away and she had no one to tell them too. He must have been alone for a long time, alone with only a notebook to tell everything that now spilled out in no order, for it was all equally important, the flutter of her hat and the light in her windows and the eternal devotion of his soul all jumbled together, and she thought, If only I had not stopped him he might have spoken, I might have known the sound of his voice.
When he came to a halt, her knees buckled; her health bar flickered as if the thing in her was rattling it down to red, desperate to work itself on the only target it knew.
He caught her in his arms. He held her tightly, though near swooning himself. She took his hand and laid it on her heart, against the pages there. He felt the paper there, and stammered, “You love me, then?”
“Hush! You know I do.” She hid her blush against his shoulder, and felt herself being drawn beside him down onto the bench.
One kiss, that was all. Her eyes were closed; it did not matter—her glance had only ever been a weak reflection of her kiss. She might have stopped the earth on its axis, effortlessly; there was nothing in her but power, a ceaseless fountain—and this, this was its conduit.
She might have held him there forever, save only for this: She was not frightened. She had found the key; she had fit it in the lock; she had no need to turn it. She drew back and looked into his eyes, and gradually—he in stunned half-silences, as if he did not yet know himself unbound by any power—they began to talk.
8.
His name was Marius. He came every night, for all the rest of April and all of May.
Cosette lived for those nights. There were days; she hardly noticed them. Her father was there, Toussaint was there, she heard them talking, it was nothing; she was thinking of Marius.
They talked of everything and nothing. “I thought I wanted to fight you,” Cosette told him one night, and they laughed at that. “To knock you down, I suppose—as if I would know how!”
“I’d have let you,” he said. “I’d have had no choice—the way you looked at me!”
“If I needed to knock someone down, I wouldn’t look at them like I looked at you! I’d summon my father—I did it before, you know, when I was a little girl and afraid.”
He grew suddenly serious. “You should feel lucky to have such a combination,” he said. “If I had had your power, I might have known my father.” And he told her, with great bitterness, of how he had come to know his father only through the memories and writing of others, after his death, because his grandfather had kept them apart.
“My own combinations—I have three, but they’re all the same, only I never saw all of them until the day my grandfather and I quarreled, and that was the last straw.”
“All of them?”
He blushed. “It’s easier to show than to explain—but, you will not be frightened?”
Cosette assured him she would not. She was wide-eyed with fascination.
Marius stood up. “I can always call on them, I don’t have to be injured; there’s a way of dipping into red, staying on the edge of it; I think you must know it too, the way you would trap me in the Luxembourg.” He pressed his lips together, and the skin around his eyes drew tight, and then the ground by Cosette’s feet erupted with bones.
They rose up without disturbing the earth, jabbing their fists up like swimmers emerging from the river in summer. There was one in a red cap and one in a red vest and one with a red cravat bound around his brow, and more and more, bareheaded and in caps, in coats and shirtsleeves and smocks, all of them wound about at waist or shoulder in a sash striped blue and white and red. They were all long-dead, nothing but bones and here and there a lock of hair, their spectral clothes falling into tatters and dust as they swarmed up behind Marius and their bones, when he had no charge to give them, falling away as well. In another heartbeat there was no trace of them.
“Their hands started reaching up out of the floor when I was six or seven,” said Marius, “when Grandfather would chase me with his cane. He praised me for it at first. Then when we quarreled, he insulted my father and they all came up like you saw them, sashes and cockades and all of it.
“He thought they were ghosts of the Emperor’s troops—and for him, that was bad enough. I left; I went to live elsewhere; he’s never seen them since. I wish they were my father’s old comrades; it would be something, to command in death men he commanded in life.”
Cosette, thrilled, rapt, thought it was a fine thing to command one’s own skeleton army, no matter who the skeletons were, and said so.
“I suppose it may be. But—well, you saw them, the liberty caps and the tricolor. I’ve met some republicans—one of them is my friend, Courfeyrac, I’ve told you of him—and, well, I don’t know how you identify skeletons, but some of them are medical students and they assure me that they’re—them. People I know. I did it before all of them once—well, a couple of times, really, until Joly told Combeferre to stop asking me to do it—and they’ve matched all of them to a living person. I guess when you’ve broken a bone, it leaves a sort of scar, inside; and there was a lot of talk about the shape of skulls.”
“And the clothes, I should think,” said Cosette. “There cannot be many men in Paris with a red waistcoat of that pattern. But how exciting for them, to be in two places at once—bodies walking and breathing while their skeletons are fighting with you!”
“I don’t understand how it can be them,” said Marius. “That’s part of why I stopped going to meetings—they all seemed so sure I’d come around to their way of thinking because, well, I have the skeletons. But I don’t know how they can be republican insurgents. I’m a Bonapartist. I love my father.”
Their nights passed in talk of this sort. Wholly absorbed in Marius—and unaware of certain disturbing portents her father had encountered in the streets—Cosette was taken entirely by surprise when her father told her, the evening of the third of June, that they must leave the Rue Plumet, and then leave France entirely.
9.
She begged him to reconsider; he would not be swayed. When Marius arrived that night she was in tears.
At first she could not make him understand; when he finally did, he reeled as though she had finally struck him at last. “But that’s monstrous!” he exclaimed; and then, in a far more feeble voice, “And when would you leave?”
“He didn’t say.”
“And when will you return?”
“He didn’t say.”
Marius arose and said, “Cosette, are you going?”
She raised her eyes; he had used the formal vous, but there was no one else there. “What would you have me do?” she said at last. “If my father goes?”
“Very well,” said Marius. “Then I shall go elsewhere.”
Cosette felt the meaning of this word, elsewhere, more than she understood it; she felt the blood drain from her face; inside, as if it had swallowed the color from her cheeks, her health bar pulsed red. “What do you mean?” she stammered.
Her gaze held his, but with no power behind it but her own pleading expression. Marius looked away, up to the heavens. “Nothing,” he said.
“Oh! How stupid we are—Marius, I know what to do. If we do go, come and join me where I am!”
He could not, he insisted. He had no money—he told her, as if she had not noticed, that his coat was out at the elbows, his boots were cracked, his hat was ruined; he owed money to Courfeyrac; he could not pay for a passport, let alone a sea voyage. He would not let her offer him money; he would not let her offer advice—the thing was impossible and he would believe nothing else, no matter what she tried to suggest.
Cosette began to weep, in grief and frustration. It was impossible to make him listen—impossible to know what else to suggest, when he would not take her own money saved from the housekeeping; equally, it was impossible that they should be parted now, when they had only just found each other again! And impossible above all, doubly and triply impossible, that she should leave her father.
Her health bar plunged—she felt that she might stop it, but let it fall, deep into red. Marius, silent at last, dazed, looked down where she sat in surprise. “Cosette? Cosette, don’t weep.”
“But I’m going away, without you!” Even as she said it, a power inside her answered that she did not need to; that she needed to do nothing unless she wished it.
“Do you love me?” he asked.
“I adore you.”
“Then don’t cry. Tell me, can you do that for me, not cry?”
“Do you love me, too?” she said.
He caught her hand. “Cosette, I have never given my word of honor to anyone, because I stand in awe of my word of honor. I feel that my father is at my side. Now I give you my most sacred word of honor that, if you go away, I will die.”
Cosette felt the chill that is produced by something dark and true passing over. Marius was already half phantom, master of skeletons; she had thought once she wanted to fight him and now, perhaps, she would kill him without laying a hand on him. It was intolerable, it had to stop, it all had to stop—
“Cosette?”
“I have something to give you as well,” she said. She took Marius’s face in her hands. “My special combination.”
He opened his mouth to speak. She kissed it, and he was silent. Her health bar soared up, blue as day, blue as the infinite heaven.
10.
There were often fights in the inn—men drank and got angry; that was how it was—but on holidays, there was fighting. That Reveillon, the Robojean drank enough to take on all comers.
Cosette watched between the legs of the table. That was her lair; she was safe there, or safe enough—Madame might overlook her, if she was lucky; and on nights like this she was sheltered from the pounding of iron feet, the smoke and dust and sparks and gears.
The Robojean took down one patron, then another. When everyone who wanted to go was nursing bruises by the fireside, that was when Monsieur stood up. She had heard him before, telling Madame to be ready if he fought the construct. “Got to keep the bets changing hands, the wine flowing.” Madame didn’t like it when he fought, but she always let him.
Now he farted himself across the room, landing a kick that made cogs fly out the Robojean’s ears, but the Robojean barely moved. Cosette was frightened of the Robojean, but not in the way she was frightened of Monsieur. The Robojean was like the bull in the field or the oaks in the wood—huge and old and unmovable. Even when Madame joined in, landing blow after blow on his iron case, he stood and endured. When he finally laid out Monsieur with one powerful fist, there was no malice in it; he had been still, and then he moved, and that was that.
Cosette wished she could fight like that. She did not understand why the Robojean endured so much punishment when he could end it so quickly. If she were strong like he was, she would never let anyone land a blow on her.
Coins were changing hands, so Monsieur laughed off his defeat. The young ladies ran up to his side, but he leapt up and did a little dance to show he was all right. Ponine was not satisfied. “I want to fight the Robojean too!”
Ponine had gotten into a fight at school with another young lady and thrown a smoke bomb. Madame made much of her that day, cooing about her little girl’s first special combination and pinching her until her bar dipped low enough for her to do it again.
No one cooed over any of the other things Ponine had begun to pull from her pockets. For weeks now she had always been able to whip out an iron nail when she wanted; Cosette tried to steer clear of her in the halls and on the stair, but she had the red marks and half-healed scabs from half a dozen times she’d failed.
Cosette had no special abilities. Cosette could only fight back the way animals do, with her hands and teeth—or plead and lie, as she did when Madame sent her out for water. It did no good. No one ever got their way against Madame, except Monsieur: the best Cosette could hope for was to avoid the strap for another hour. To gain that hour she would do whatever she had: fight, hide, lie. Give in. Take the bucket and trudge out into the cold.
She nearly turned back, a dozen times or more; only the memory of Madame impelled her onward. On her way to the spring, she went in bursts, hurrying when her fear of what was behind her was greatest, and slowing to a halt while it battled with her fear of what lay before.
For the forest was dark, and the darkness was full of things. Not ghosts, or not only—and ghosts did not scare Cosette; they left her alone, for the most part. Something else, inexpressibly sinister, seemed to wait in that great black void.
Cosette achieved the spring and filled the bucket; she nearly lost it in the spring, and drenched herself getting it out again. To the terror of dark was added the terror of cold, more deadly and yet less immediate than the sense, steadily growing, of a presence watching her from the darkness: watching, and meaning her harm. She felt as if she might be compelled to come here again the next night—as if the thing in the dark would not rest until it had found her.
She began to count, over and over, one to ten, pushing down the animal snarl in her throat—and then, through the trees, a single baleful gleam of light fell on the path in front of her, and she could make no sound, animal or human.
The Ponpon had come for her.
It crouched, a black mass against the darkness, and a single eye glinting green. Nothing else but its outline was visible, but in that outline was a tension, the will to pounce and the willingness to wait.
Cosette could only fight like animals did; but there was more than animal cunning in the hare’s eye. It held her in its gaze and reached out with its long, deadly arms.
Cosette dropped the bucket. She threw her hands up in front of her face, she curled in on herself, desperate and small, wishing for the strength of a Robojean, for any strength at all, but there was only the horrible and inexorable slide down into redness.
And then, at the bottom of it, there was solid ground. Cosette reached out blindly with one hand, ready to make a weapon of the first thing she touched—and found another hand, much bigger and warmer, suddenly engulfing hers; and the Ponpon was fleeing under a hail of silver darts; and a warm, kind voice was asking her name.
11.
Marius was quite still. He did not breathe, nor seem to need to. A tear had started down his own cheek; it glistened there, motionless, suspended in time.
Cosette gazed at him for a bit, studying the curves of his face, how the hair curled over his temples, looked her fill the way she could not, when he had his way and could look away and blush; and then she walked a little way away to think.
The situation was still quite intolerable, but it could not be—she would not let it be—impossible.
At some point while she paced in thought, she became conscious of the sounds of a disturbance from the street. She looked out at the fence, though it was quite overgrown and you could not easily see the street: over the top of the iron grating, silver in the moonlight, smoke was drifting, rapidly, though there was no breeze; and then, just as quickly, it dispersed into nothing, into tatters on the air, the way Marius’s skeletons had.
Her stomach felt suddenly hollow. Almost, by habit, she pushed the feeling aside—but she had been weeping all day, and the awful, reeling sensation of déjà vu could make her feel no worse than she already did. Instead, she followed its promptings, swallowing as her stomach roiled, and stole up behind one of the stone columns of the fence.
She peered out from behind it, parting the foliage with her hands. In the street outside, a skinny girl was holding off six men with an iron nail—and, impossibly, Cosete knew her.
For a moment, time stopped for her as surely as for Marius, as half-buried memories thrust up their skeletal hands, demanding her attention; and then she shook her head and put them all aside, if more deliberately than usual.
She looked out at the thing Eponine had become, and the ragged men arrayed in a wary circle against her.
She looked back at Marius, still frozen where she had left him; and still sunken in a despair from which, she thought, she had never actually lifted him at all.
She let herself, for a moment, feel every bit as much fear as she supposed she ought to.
And then Cosette was not afraid at all, for her father was there, and he was going to help her fix everything.