The Black Veil

The Countess Elise of the Rocher des Falconieres had descended from her castle to the town in the valley once every year for the past forty nine years with the sole purpose of proving to the world that she was still alive. The annual occasion was the Thirteenth Day of June, Feast Day of Saint Anthony of Padua, the patron of lost things. The once minor observance had been transformed by the Countess’s ritual appearance into a festival that drew not only the townsfolk but gawking pilgrims from around the region. They came to see the mysterious lady of the rock, a woman whom nothing - neither revolutions, wars, religious tumult nor the inventions of modern science - had stirred from the isolation of her mountainous nest.

Every year the Countess’s ancestral carriage with its peeling gold leaf heraldic crest drew up outside the Abbey Cathedral and she alighted in her dress adorned with black lace and strings of misshapen pearls, gliding like a ghost in the black veil that fell almost to her waist. Her maid spent all morning dressing the Countess like a doll in a fashion that had died with the 1830s, with tremendous gigot sleeves that billowed like sails as she walked; the wide lace collar that accentuated the broadness of her shoulders; the overly elaborate curls of her straw coloured hair and the broad rimmed hat with blue ribbons tied around the chin; the bustle that kept everything at several feet in distance so that she appeared to float in her own ocean and sitting seemed like a miracle; the long silken shawl wrapped around her like an apron. Each year the throngs of pilgrims grew larger and more raucous, kept at bay by the ambit of her skirts as, blasphemously, they reached out their fingers in an attempt to brush against the hems of her dress as if she herself were a holy relic as she entered the cathedral to pray for the return of the husband she had lost in 1836. Only a few old women alive could remember when, during their youth, the countess had graced the finest houses and the mayoral dances every weekend of the summer. ‘Never fall in love if you can help it,’ the town’s eldest matriarch advised her granddaughters futilely, ‘unless, like the Countess, you wish to spend the rest of your lives in mourning over a dream!’ Rumours swirled and grew every year, and people whispered to each other about the imagined glimpses of her face behind the veil that she wore every day. The Countess, blessed with an almost supernatural auditory faculty, heard every whisper in the cathedral. She did not care what was said, only that they proved that she was real and once again the centre of the little world she had occupied in her days of love.

On the morning of the 13th of June 1885, a small crowd of beggars gathered by the gates of the castle, where they jostled each other aggressively to reach the front before the moment when, on the Countess’s appearance, they would drop humbly to their knees. They had come for the handfuls of silver coins the Countess tossed from her carriage window as she departed. It was an annual custom she had devised with precision. Silver was not enough to cause a major stampede, but to attract those with the stamina and desperation to climb the hour long winding path from the valley to the rock’s Gothic gatehouse. By the numbers at the gate, the Countess could tell with precision the state of the country and predict revolutions, wars, and famines. She had refused to read a newspaper or to have one read to her since the overthrow of the July Monarchy of 1848, declaring that imbibing bad news had the same effect upon the soul that eating bad food had upon the body. For thirty three years, the only literature permitted within the castle walls were the scientific and philosophical subscriptions she had inherited from her father and which she maintained only so she would better know the enemy she was called to defy. She preferred to spend her days reading in absolute silence about science, botany, medicine, and unusual inventions that she would never permit within the castle walls. It was the Countess’s view that a telephone could only hasten the arrival of unwanted news, and as for gas lighting - she preferred to do as she always did and set her time by the sun and the seasons. She savoured the smell of candle wax in the evenings and of log fires in winter on the great hearth where generations of her ancestors had warmed their feet and their hands. She accepted telegrams into her study only as an improvised form of letter, but always sent her reply by the post. A good thing is always worth waiting for, she declared, and no gain is made by hurrying the bad.

On this morning as she flung her antique coins from velvet gloved hands she saw a young man who alone did not fall to his knees to recover them.

He was not dressed as a beggar, but wore a loose white shirt in the style she remembered from another time, so that at first she started at the ghost of her husband. But he also wore the tight grey waistcoat popular among the youth; at his neck, a bright red cravat was tied, and his hair was not gold but black, his staring eyes not blue but dark.

‘Did you see a young man standing there?’ she asked her Spanish maid.

‘No, Madame,’ Aida answered, surprised that her mistress could see anything at all through her veil. Aida had tried vainly in her early days to introduce her mistress to fashion magazines. Now, in her middle age, she found herself also wearing aprons and ribbons, accustomed to seeing the world through her mistress’s hazy vision as if it were a dream.

‘No doubt he came to gawk at me,’ the Countess surmised, half insulted and half pleased.

‘No doubt, Madame,’ Aida repeated.

The new mayor greeted the Countess stiffly when she alighted at the Cathedral steps. At once, she identified him as a Radical, but with all the men now wearing perpetual mourning suits and absurd top hats like barrels, it seemed increasingly impossible to her to tell the children of light from dark. Every time, the mayor seemed to become younger and younger, until the Countess felt sure the county was being ruled by boys. ‘It was so generous of you to meet me,’ she declared graciously. He nodded stiffly in reply, and touched his charcoal hat, ‘Good morning, Madame.’

The abbey was bursting with the throng of pilgrims. The Countess gestured to Aida to move ahead and clear the way for her through the crowd. It was no longer clear whom they had come to venerate more - the saint of the lost, or she who was lost. This was as Elise had secretly wished in an age before. Serenely, the Countess walked along the aisle of the austere stone church, crossed herself and bent her knee a little awkwardly before the marble altar with its golden crucifix in its halo of light, kissed the white velvet hand of the bishop, and at last sat in the space reserved for her at the front row of the timber pews that seemed to become harder every year. She knew all the Latin prayers and the hymns by heart. Even the vernacular sermon she could predict with near perfect accuracy at the opening of each line, so that she silently finished each sentence with invisible lips.

At last the bishop stepped forward to end the service, as he did every year. Instead he made an announcement. A new work, he told the congregation, had been dedicated to the Saint and to the Abbey’s patron the Countess, by a musician who had travelled far to take command of the organ for this special piece. The Countess was scandalised, and sat frozen in her seat as she watched the young man with long hair bow to the congregation as if it were an audience and stride to the instrument that would be his plaything for the next interminable twenty four minutes and fifty five seconds.

When the blasphemous performance was over, the Countess stood in open condemnation, meaning to storm out of the cathedral, but instead of decently getting out of her way, the congregation followed her example and surged to their feet around her. Thus she found herself leading an accidental ovation and flinched at the unholy sound of applause in a house of God. When the composer turned to look at her with a ready smile, she was struck by recognition.

‘It is the young man from the gatehouse,’ she hissed.

‘Then he must have flown from the castle gates to get here, Madame,’ Aida remarked. ‘He doesn’t look at all bothered, even after such a performance!’

‘That noise? What was it?’

‘Modern music, Madame.’

‘It should be banned!’

As swiftly as she could through the heaving mass of pilgrims, and without looking back, the Countess returned to her carriage and the castle, determined to forget at once the insult she had suffered, that was, she reasoned, more of an insult to the Saint than to her. The bishop had exposed himself as a Radical, and she resisted the temptation to buy a newspaper or to ask Aida to break her promise never to tell her any news of the world. She reflected instead that perhaps the world had changed so much that even the once-sacrosanct rituals of a holy saint’s day could no longer protect her from it. ‘I do not think I will go to the town next year,’ she reflected openly.

‘But Madame, what would the people say? They expect it.’

‘Let them say what they want.’

The Countess thought that she would have peace again for the next twelve months, but the following day after breakfast, her secretary Ferdinand handed her a note informing her that the upstart composer was at her gate. At last, her assailant had a name. ‘Arnaud Helois’, read his card in spidery black letters. The Countess considered the calling card to be a hideous invention of the nineteenth century and flung it at once into the cold fireplace. ‘Tell him, thank you for the dedication of his piece, the approval of which I can only leave to the holy saint. But I have no time today for guests. Write it on a card, so it seems official.’

Arnaud Helois received the message with good grace and pocketed the card from the servant in his waistcoat. ‘Tell the Countess thank you for her kind words. I will come tomorrow, when she may have more time.’

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ Ferdinand told him, ‘It is the Countess’s way of telling you to go away and not come back!’

‘But I am a republican,’ Arnaud grinned, ‘I don’t speak in code, but the language of men!’

‘Will I tell that to the Countess as well?’

‘If you wish!’

The following day, Arnaud presented himself as promised at the castle gate. When Ferdinand informed her, the Countess shook her head in annoyance. As she had donned her veil in the morning with her own hands as she did every morning, she could not shake the memory of his unusual face and figure - not as she had seen him striding flamboyantly to the organ in the cathedral, but curious, unbending and quiet, as he had appeared to her that morning staring through her carriage window as she emerged from her castle. ‘Let him stand there as long as he likes,’ she said, ‘what would I want with a composer? This isn’t the court of Prince Colloredo and he is certainly no Mozart!’ Despite being turned away a second time by the doorman’s silent shake of his head, Arnaud climbed the steep and narrow path up the rock of the Falconiers every morning for the next five days, even on a day when it was raining, to ask the confounded doorman if the Countess was yet ready to see him.

‘Why does he torment me so?’ the Countess demanded to Aida in the morning. The young man had not yet appeared, and she had ordered Ferdinand to cease even informing her of his arrival, but she had woken with an infernal tune in her head that she could not shake. When she hummed it, Aida recognised it at once as the unholy tune they had heard desecrate the abbey cathedral.  

‘Perhaps if Madame sees him, he will finally go away.’

The Countess waited in the large whitewashed room that was the trophy chamber of her ancestors, illuminated by the morning light through pointed windows, beneath the gigantic candelabra constructed entirely out of stag antlers and skulls. All four walls were covered with nine centuries of butchery - stag heads and their crowns, reaching from the walls like hundreds of clawed hands. Upon the floors sprawled the flayed skins and furs of bears. Every item of furniture, including the chair upon which she sat upright, was woven out of the bones and antlers of generations of deer. The only item of furniture not made of animals was the marble table top upon which the Countess had ordered to be spread her morning coffee and the silver platters of her breakfast pastries - but even this rested upon legs carved out of elephant  thighs.

Now that the Countess saw the young man more closely, she saw he had an unusual face in which every part was either too large or too small but taken together, the impression was of an interesting, almost handsome man in the bloom of youth. He had tied his tawny hair at the back of his head with a black ribbon, as if he knew how much she hated men’s hats, but she suspected people who scorned conventionality as much as she hated conventions. She could not help but be reminded of the thickness of the locks of her husband’s head, who had been about the same age when he had vanished from her life. Her fiancé had been fair and rosy, blue-eyed rather than dark, and flawlessly proportioned - or at least this was how she thought she remembered him. After so many years she could no longer be certain. She had tried to limit her experiences so as to never crowd out with new and unwanted memories, the image in her mind’s eye of her first and only love. She saw at once that she had made a mistake ever to admit the composer into her castle, but dignity now demanded she humour him as if he were a welcome guest.

Arnaud wore the same taut grey waistcoat and loose white sleeves, with a freshly starched collar and cuffs. Deer eyes regarded her above the blood-red cravat tied about his ivory neck. The Countess felt suddenly ashamed of her display, as if, in his silence, the young man noted that their meeting place had been chosen to impress and overawe him.

‘My husband loved this room,’ the Countess remarked, throwing the words down like a gauntlet.

‘Which one in this room is his trophy, Madame?’

‘What should I accuse you of, to ask such a question - naivety or wit?’

‘Pure curiosity.’

‘A more dangerous sin.’

‘I haven’t heard commandments against it.’

She drew herself up. ‘The whole Bible is against it.’

Arnaud paused with a gentlemanly nod and regarded her more carefully. ‘The Old Testament forbids many things that are permitted in the New.’

‘Your grasp of theology is as modern as your study of music.’

‘Thank you.’

‘My father once said that a man who takes insults as compliments is either too stupid for his own good, or too clever.’

‘I plead ignorance in many things that Madame might teach me.’

‘And what are those?’

‘The story of Madame’s love is famous in at least two countries - France, and Spain. It is only a matter of time before the Germans hear of it! I have come because there is no greater muse than tragedy, and the loss of your husband, and the way you have kept his spirit alive, has made you an example to the Romantic movement, whether or not you know it. I have come, hoping to be the first, but not the last, to throw myself at your feet and learn what true love must be, to suffer so greatly for so long.’

As he spoke, the Countess felt her cheeks blush and her hands shiver.

‘I will not have any man throw himself at my feet.’

‘I mean so only metaphorically. I am a republican, after all.’

‘I did not know republicans believed in love. Or anything for that matter.’

‘I never said I was an atheist, Madame.’

‘Hah!’ Came the Countess’s singular laugh from behind her veil. ‘I think you are a wit after all.’

‘I believe, too, in art. Its ability to transgress, to transfigure, to bring men to the sublime …’

‘Young men take to big words like children take to toys,’ the Countess said, ‘but ideas are just that - noise and fury - like your so-called music!’

Arnaud blushed. She saw she had gone too far. The young man spoke and strode about like a warrior on a stage, but he had an artist’s over-sensitive heart, and a young man’s pride - in this too, he recalled her husband’s impetuosity. She did not know yet whether she wanted to use him, to mould him, or to save him, but she could not bring herself to eject the young man as she had once intended. She had spent so long without knowing resistance or argument, she confessed to herself that she not felt so alive in many years.

‘Madame seemed to like my music in the Cathedral. I had hoped …’

‘It was not like the songs I am used to,’ the Countess said, ‘Is all modern music like that?’

‘The old music was about ideas - modern music is about sentiment.’

‘Let’s stop these word games.’ The Countess demanded, ‘and tell me what you really want.’

Arnaud told the Countess that her love had all the dramatic qualities of legend. Once he dedicated his first Symphony to her, together, they would become more famous than Wagner and Prince Ludwig of Bavaria. The tragic romance of the Countess Elise of the Rocher des Falconiers would become known throughout not only all of France and Spain, but all of Europe and the world, penetrating even to the jungles and deserts, in all the corners of the globe where its civilisation was penetrating every day. The young man’s ambition reminded the Countess of her lost husband’s grand schemes, dreams whose details she could no longer recall, that had been long buried in those alien mists, jungles, and swamps.

To everyone’s surprise, who did not remember the vanity of her youth, the Countess accepted each of the upstart composer’s requests. She installed him in the room at the top of the castle’s round tower, that stood opposite the square keep occupied by the Countess’s own apartments. This was the tower where all the relics of the noble house were collected, like a museum or, as the Countess declared, like a garbage heap of the past that she had no choice but to preserve. In exchange for this lodging, surrounded by the ruins of the Falconier dynasty, he would have one hundred days to compose a symphony that would immortalise the love between its last Countess and her lost husband forever. The only money she granted to him was to purchase and convey a modern pianoforte from Marseilles. His ultimate request was that the Countess would see him for an hour at least once a week, to let her sorrow be his muse, as a queen might pose for a portrait in oils.

The pianoforte arrived within the fortnight, boxed in several parts and hauled up the rock in a large black carriage engraved with the golden letters of the famous ‘Boisselot’ piano manufacturers. Each of its parts had to be carried up the narrow spiral staircase to the room at the top of the tower, where the company’s two most expert technicians assembled and tuned it. Only when they had finished did the Countess climb the steps, followed closely by Aida. As she did so, she revisited in her mind each step, the same as she had seen it on a day decades before when she had been followed instead by the cautious steps of her fiancee, his feet wrapped in the ridiculous court shoes that she would fling in triumph out of the tower window. Now she regarded the strange three-legged beast that squatted in the middle of the room where the most precious and hated relics of her house lay abandoned. Among the treasure trove, a simple cot had been set up for its guest, and a desk by the window with its cracked panes and a view of the valley. On the floor was rolled out the red and gold Ottoman carpet where the Countess imagined the stains of love making that suddenly seemed as ancient as its woven thread.

‘It is much larger than a harpsichord.’ She observed in a tone Arnaud took for distaste.

Arnaud sat down and began to play his fine fingers across the keys.

The Countess listened for several bars.

‘What is that?’ She asked.

‘Tchaikovsky, Madame!’

‘I hope your symphony will sound better than that.’ She said, and turned to go.

‘Stay, and I will play the whole piece. It is not very long.’

The Countess told him, ‘I am a tolerant woman, but I will not take orders from my subordinates. You may be a republican ...’

‘Only in art. Politics does not interest me.’

‘And this Tchaikovsky …’

‘When I first heard his music, I knew I must meet him.’

‘And did you?’

‘Not yet Madame …’

‘So this symphony will be for him, rather than me, your patron.’

‘It will be for eternity!’

‘Very well, I do not follow fashions. How can you be so sure this style is not one of them?’

‘Can’t you feel it? The human heart, the soul - these things never change. Ideas - they are nothing - cold! Only sentiment is truth…is heat and life!’

‘Sentiment is all I have lived for,’ the Countess mused, but now she heard the words from the young man’s lips as his fingers danced, a doubt suddenly troubled her.

‘Come down before lunch,’ She told him when he had finished, ‘and I will show you the falcons.’

That morning the Countess, followed everywhere by her maid, showed the young man the twelve falcons and how each one was handled, as well as the conservatory with the exotic plants she had ordered from every corner of the globe whenever she saw one that intrigued her in the botanical journals. Arnaud was particularly fascinated by the pitcher plant and the Venus fly trap, each with their own unusual way of luring and trapping witless insects into their green and pink bowels. She introduced him to the bird keeper, and to the gardener, and at lunch time summoned the chef from the kitchen. They took their lunch in the hall between the two towers, where the Countess had, at her coming of age, desecrated the banqueting hall of her ancestors with furnishings more fit for a French Empire drawing room, with Egyptian Revival furniture and Chinoiserie silk brocades.

As they ate, the Countess barely revealed her dark painted lips and her pointed chin to nibble at white sandwiches and sip hot chocolate beneath her veil. Arnaud ate eagerly, and told her of his poor childhood in Seville, the port of Spain. He told her his father had been a sailor, and his mother a maid from Verona. The Countess imagined Seville to be some incredible Gomorrah, further tainted by the associations she had learned in history books of the routes to the demonic and tantalising New World, whose plants she collected as evidence of its primitivism. She regarded Arnaud with renewed interest, looking for some sign of the primordial forces that had swallowed her husband whole. Arnaud had left his family, he told her, to become the apprentice of the Cathedral organ. Yes, the Countess knew of the Cathedral of Seville, the greatest Gothic church in all Europe, fashioned from a Moorish temple.  It did not surprise her to learn from his own mouth that he was an unruly student, bucking against the demands of restraint and the church’s combre music. Arnaud was sixteen when the waves of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake crashed over him where he stood transfixed in the standing-room stalls of the  concert hall. When the church organist arrived before the next Sunday service to find the young man abusing the holy organ with a thunderous rendition of the Finale Andante that shook the vaults and terrified the old women and children, he delivered his final ultimatum. That evening, Arnaud abandoned the church as he had his parents, determined to go at once to Russia and worship at the feet of a new god.

Arnaud’s impetuous feet got him as far as the harbour before realising that his meagre savings were insufficient to the task of purchasing a place and provisioning a voyage to the nearest Russian port of Sebastopol.

‘That was when I heard of the Countess of the Rock, a woman who has surrendered everything to preserve the memory of her pure love, and I knew that I had found my muse.’  

‘You have left out many parts to your story’ the Countess remarked, ‘for though there is a gulf in age between us, I can still tell you are some years off sixteen, even for a well advanced youth.’ She admired his good teeth instinctively, studying her guest for a moment with a keen eye as if he were a horse she were buying for the stables. ‘You may be slender, but you have not suffered great deprivations. You have the hands of an artist, not of a worker, and the shoulders of a well-fed man, not of a beggar.’

‘Some would say there is not so much difference between artists and beggars.’

‘Hah. Wouldn’t it be more politic, and boost my confidence in my investment, to tell me you had at least earned your living through your music?’

‘I will not lie to you, but some things are also best left a mystery.’

‘That is true enough.’ The Countess continued, ‘But like the teacher you abandoned, I believe that order is the first rule of life.’ She did not add what she thought, that it to abandon parents and teachers so easily, however trying he found them, demonstrated an alarming lack of discipline in a young man.

In the evening, the Countess looked out of her own window across the gulf above the castle battlement to light in the round tower, whence occasionally the wind carried the dull sound of notes carried randomly off the pianoforte. Aida broke with her silence to caution her mistress as she laid out the Countess’s nightgown of black silk upon the brocaded bed.

‘He is handsome, charming, but his music is dreadful.’ Aida said, ‘One can only imagine how he has been making a living until now … that story he told.’

‘Do not worry. I have asked Ferdinand to make inquiries about our guest in the places he has been.’

‘So you will not leave these things a mystery after all?’

‘I agree that a woman should know the kind of secrets she is keeping in her house.’

The Countess kept to the terms of their unwritten contract, that Arnaud should spend an hour with her each week. They walked again in the Conservatory to talk more about the plants.  In the stables, he accompanied the Countess as she supervised the grooming of the black Friesian horses - she loved to brush the curling mane of her favourite horse herself and watch in the great yard as they were exercised. On the third Monday, before breakfast, the Countess summoned Arnaud with the dawn and the young man appeared, his hair unkempt and his face unshaven and his cheeks blushing as if he had raced down the tower to see her. The Countess for her part, never removed the veil that protected her.

‘This morning we will go falconing, as I loved to do with my husband.’ She told him.

The hillside above the castle’s jutting rock was awash with gold in the morning sun. Here and there, thickets of dark green oaks clustered around boulders where the mountain springs rose close to the surface, and the rivulets ran in winter. The only paths were the ancient terraces whose builders were long forgotten. Among the rocks, the Countess led them like a black ghost., in a saddle that had once carried the Counts of the Rock into Medieval war. The falcons reeled in the sky and plummeted like arrows. By noon, the falcons’ bloody talons gripped their leather gloved arms, and the Countess’s groundsman followed them with saddlebags stuffed with the corpses of rabbits and pigeons.

‘The pigeons will be good with rosewater and honey,’ The Countess said, ‘And the rabbits will make some good pies.’

‘Who will eat so many?’ Arnaud asked, ‘it is said in the town that you never host banquets any more, but you have never cut back on your provisions or changed a single order since the day ...’

‘My servants are the best fed in France.’

‘Tell me how you met your husband,’ Arnaud asked at last, ‘I had hoped we would talk of him on this ride, but you have barely said a word to me.’

‘You told me how much you hated words, Arnaud. Surely you do not need them.’

But Arnaud persisted, until the Countess told him about the moment she had stolen with Guillaume - how strange that name sounded now upon her lips - on the feast day of St Anthony of Padua.

‘Our love was forbidden.’ She said, ‘My father forbade it, because Guillaume was a nobody - the son of a tailor.’

‘Even though my father was old and I would soon be the Rock’s mistress, I was impatient. I smuggled him into the castle, during one of my father’s ridiculous balls that he liked to crowd with aristocratic suitors for my hand.’

The Countess stopped and felt unexpectedly hot, remembered suddenly how, that day long ago she had burned with impatience to run her hands through his golden hair and had brought him to the tower where the composer was now camped. My lion, she had called him, and other things!

‘We married against my father’s wishes,’ the Countess continued, ‘My only fear was allowing another day to come between me and my love. My impatience, my father’s arrogance, the combination cost the boy his life - along with his own naivety. He felt like he had to prove himself, to be a hero, to be rich. So he went to the Empire of Brazil on a fool’s expedition of discovery, hoping to return greater than he was.

‘My father barely disguised his relief when Guillaume was declared dead. He thought I would come to my senses and marry again - after all, my husband would be a count and his children inherit this glorious rock, but I kept to my mourning dress to defy him as well as to grieve. When the Count died, I had no reason to change my habit …’

‘Defiance!’ Arnaud exclaimed, ‘It is the final theme lacking from my symphony! The defiance of love against everyone and everything …’

The Countess fell silent. She struggled to remember her husband’s voice. When she recalled it now, she found that all she heard was the sound of the composer.

It was not long before the Countess summoned Arnaud every morning just to look at him through her veil as they ate. Like all young men, he was the one who liked to talk, and it did not bother her in the least that she could not tell what was fiction or truth in his outlandish memoirs. Aida, for her part, was plunged into the role of dutiful and silent chaperone for a mistress three times her age. Her cautions and criticism soon stopped, as she too, despite her better judgement, was pulled into the orbit of the artist’s burning star. She didn't even pay attention when Ferdinand passed to the Countess the letters that contained the fruits of his delicate investigations. These letters, the Countess left piled neatly and unopened upon the corner of the desk in the study.

It was the first day of Autumn, and the seventy-seventh day of the symphony’s composition, when the Countess asked Arnaud for a report on its progress. Arnaud replied that only a poor sculptor would allow an unfinished and misshapen piece to leave the workshop.

‘You are neither a sculptor nor a painter,’ the Countess insisted. ‘You must have some bars that are finished … if not whole movements by now!’

Arnaud acquiesced. That afternoon the Countess, accompanied by Aida, mounted the hundred and fifty steps to the composer’s chamber where he welcomed them with a bow. He sat at the piano nervously, as the Countess descended like a phantom upon the ancient divan of faded red bathed by the afternoon light, her head regarding the piles of pencilled musical sheets and paper that had covered almost the entire floor with incomprehensible notes and scrawls. Aida stood apprehensively by the door. ‘This is, of course, but a transcription of the principal melody for the painoforte,’ he explained. ‘There will be strings, and percussion, and wind …’ With a flourish of his hands, Arnaud began an allegro he claimed was a portrayal of youthful love. He skipped to the largo dedicated to loyalty, and then slid to the movement he called his pathetique - the strings of eternal grief with its long finishing and defiant chords. The final notes of the defiance he had promised sounded hollowly in the Countess’s ears. As Arnaud beat his fingers upon the beast of her torment, the Countess felt for the first time the terrible insincerity of her own grief after so many years - it had become, like this cacophony of sound, merely an empty performance, repeating itself out of habit rather than truth. In Arnaud’s ernest melody, it revealed itself to her as an idea without reality. Her feelings, beaten and abused, were nothing more than its slaves. Clasping at her heart, she felt the full distance of forty nine years between herself and the first love whose scent and sound she could no longer remember. Now, within this gulf, she saw Arnaud, shrouded by her veil.

He stopped, and looked towards the face that was hidden from his sight, not knowing if her silence was approval or disdain. He looked at the Countess’s hands, which were clasped at her breast.

‘Madame,’ he said, with some frustration, ‘has never shown me her face.’

Aida gasped.

The Countess did not move. Her voice, when it came, was hoarse, but the words sounded hollow.

‘I have never lived a day without my veil since my husband was declared dead.’

‘Forgive me, Madame.’ Arnaud advanced to the middle of the room. Though he could not read her face, he stood and dropped his arms helplessly as if he sensed the emotions within her and he were a spectator at a battle he could not see.

The Countess motioned to Aida to leave them. Aida hesitated. ‘Go!’ the Countess barked. Aida retreated, leaving her mistress and the composer alone. The Countess listened to her maid’s feet descend the tower steps until they were left in silence.

Delicately, the Countess lifted her gloved hands to her veil. Frozen, Arnaud watched as she revealed her secret. A mist lifted from her vision and she blinked in the blaze of afternoon colours. Her clear blue eyes met his from the fair and unblemished face of a woman of twenty one - for she had aged no more than forty nine days in as many years - one for each hour she had descended from her rock to the Cathedral for the service of St Anthony.

‘Defiance … even against time itself,’ he whispered, as if he beheld a saint whom his god - sentiment - had transformed against the commandments of nature itself.

Tentatively, Arnaud approached her, stumbling across the music sheets. He sat upon the end of the divan and took her right hand in his. He paused, and blinked. She let her hand rest in his. He was trembling. Slowly he peeled back her glove, revealing the shining skin beneath.

Elise recalled the day fifty years and ninety eight days ago when she had listened to her husband’s feet bound down the stair for the last time. She had commanded him not to leave her, told him that he was a fool, and worse - a man blinded by his pride; one who had everything, but would not let himself believe it. These images and words she had burned in her mind’s eye through their repetition slipped through her grasp. It was she, she reflected, that had been a fool. Her hands, so long cold, felt the sunshine of summer and the kiss of the air. The shaking hand that held her own sent a warmth through her that she had forgotten. She felt the blood in her cheeks and saw Arnaud blushing too. The Countess seized her gloves from his fingers and flung them upon the carpet of music. ‘You have kept many things hidden from me too,’ She said, ‘But first, I insist you examine the rest of my body with your own hands.’

His fingers trembled as he fumbled with the ribbons of her bodice, his face flushed like a boy’s. For a moment in the late afternoon light, she thought his hair looked gold. She laughed, and told him he need not pretend to be a novice with her. Understanding, he smiled, and lifted his shirt over his head so that she could admire the contours of his barrelled chest. As he pressed his lips to her own, she suffered a momentary shock of recognition - not of her husband’s forgotten taste, but of her own breath. How quickly, she realised, the shudder of current pleasure chased away the ghosts of the old.

Arnaud’s tongue, his hands, the friction of his flesh, all sent a heat through her body that broke down the last walls of her frozen grief, as if he were an angel of forgetfulness come to destroy the reverie of her nostalgias. For a moment, in the midst of their passion she stood upon the precipice of the rock and saw with living  eyes the gulf into which she was leaping - the abyss of life and of death. The youth’s sweet sweat and intoxicating scent enveloped her. Freed from her memory, she revelled in discovery. Lost in the drumbeat of their breathing, she grew dizzy and fell in the apogee of bliss.

‘Elise!’ Arnaud cried the name she had not been called since a time she no longer remembered.

When Aida returned, she found the Countess’s body motionless upon the divan. Arnaud had pulled the woolen blanket from his bed and covered her nakedness, but the face that stared at them in an expression of frozen beatitude was the face of a seventy-year old woman, her hair thin and her complexion wan and wrinkled. The hand that rested above the coverlet was spotted and creased. The young man, his hair dishevelled and his clothes flung on recklessly, was still shaking, his eyes wide and weeping.

‘Did you know?’ He asked Aida repeatedly like a madman with a question to which he would never know the answer. ‘Tell me, did she know?’

Aida shook her head. She could not believe it. She lifted the black veil from the floor and made to place it over the Countess’s head, but Arnaud, in a moment of clarity, grabbed her arm.

‘No!’ He said, taking the veil from her hand. He went to the window and threw it into the bright air outside.

© AK Paul 2017