The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [96]
“A rosary? Oh, the beaded necklaces people are buried with, yes?”
“Oh. Yes, those.” Manuel supposed people were buried with them. “Like that. Good. I’ll make it look like a rosary on the wall, no problem there. Now turn sort of toward Mustache, him with the flute and drum? Gooooood. Now look away. No, not your head, just your eyes. So face forward, eyes away? Perfect! Fuck, that’s perfect, Awa … no, don’t smile, look … concerned, very concerned. Death’s right fucking beside you, isn’t he, but you don’t want to look, right?”
“I suppose not.” Awa fought with her face, the battle made all the harder by the admonishment to stay serious.
“Thank you,” Manuel said at last, stretching his arms and straightening up. Awa relaxed, too, the process not nearly as thrilling as she had hoped once the initial excitement waned. “Wish I’d known you were game, I’d have had you bring another set of clothes.”
“Tonight is a fortuitous night for Niklaus Manuel Deutsch of Bern,” Awa said with a wink, and before he could protest she had squirmed out of the nun’s habit, revealing the hand-me-down dress Katharina had given her. Its yellow coloration looked jaundiced in the moonlight, and the red ribbon bow dangled lower than it ought to at her waist, and it was still so large that the ribbon-trimmed bodice and puffed sleeves hung down in a fashion that a less fatherly pair of eyes might have thought of as provocative. “What say you, Manuel? Another sketch?”
“Let’s have the king pose with you,” said Manuel, gesturing to the skeleton with the hat.
“Why is he a king?” asked Awa as she had the boneman stand beside her.
“His crown, for one,” said Manuel, “which will look more like a crown once I’m done with it, and the scepter in his hand.”
“Oh, that?” Awa took the toy from the corpse and waved it at Manuel. “His hands are busy, so let’s put it somewhere more visible.”
“Busy? Visible?”
“Here.” They had needed to affix a chinstrap around the skull to get the hat to stay on the slick bone, and Awa jammed the haft of the scepter through this strap, so it jutted up beside his crown. This pleased her immensely, and she nodded at Manuel knowingly.
“What are his hands busy with, then?” said Manuel as he got his plank into place.
“Me, of course,” said Awa, having worked toward this, or something like it, all evening. She still had not recounted her farewell speech to Manuel, but as they had drunk and laughed as quietly as they could in the churchyard a deep, breath-snatching guilt had come over her for even thinking of saying a fond farewell and leaving him with false pretenses. She realized that she needed for Manuel to know just how wicked she was, just how fucked up and crazy. She had tricked her friend into being her friend, had acted normal and kind instead of like the beast she knew she was.
Somehow the words had not come, though, all night they had secreted themselves away from her tongue. In the morning she would be gone, would probably never see him again, and she owed this fine friend the truth, so that he would not miss her or remember her fondly. Then she would return to the brothel and tell Monique the same thing, and then she would be done lying to people, to friends, done with leaving out the nasty truth of who she was, of what she had done. Then she would go back south, to Paracelsus—if there was one person who would not care if she had raped the dead it would be the mad physician, who probably would not mind if she raped him so long as she disclosed her necromantic secrets.
Manuel was staring at her, mouth wide, and then she felt the finger bones she had guided to her chest worm their way under the edge of her bodice. She smiled a crazed, too-wide smile as she looked at Manuel, and linked her right arm through that of the king of the bonemen. His skull came ever closer toward her cheek, and she batted her eyes at Manuel. Now he would cast down his plank, demand to know what was, no,