Following the death of her husband from the plague, Charlotte sets off on a journey with her son, Nicolas, to find refuge in Lyon. Ambushed by a troop of slavers, Nicolas is abducted and Charlotte seriously wounded and left for dead. She awakes in the cave of Madame Rolland, the so-called Forest Queen, a healer and witch who practises ‘simple magic. Old knowledge.’ Madame Rolland offers Charlotte a black book containing magic that she believes is powerful enough to summon a demon who might help her to find Nicolas.

Monsieur Lesage is meanwhile released from captivity in Marseilles, where he has been brutally treated as a galley slave as punishment for crimes of impiety and sacrilege dating back to his time in Paris as a magician and fortune-teller. The pair meet on the road to Paris and begin a curious relationship. Charlotte believes Lesage to be summoned from hell, and therefore in her service. Lesage believes himself newly free, although, following a series of strange occurrences, he is soon alert to Charlotte’s power. Importantly, as a reader, we aren’t sure whether these unusual events, and those that follow, are the result of magic or coincidence. This ambiguity is no mere narrative device, however, and suggests the depth of Womersley’s awareness of the complexities of the period. We know from histories of the subject that belief in magic or superstitious rituals – what Schopenhauer later called practical metaphysics – played a meaningful role in the lives of people of all classes, serving the important function of explaining sometimes unlikely causal relationships. Charges of witchcraft often turned on moments of unlucky coincidence. As Madame Rolland explains, her mother was executed for being a witch after her neighbour’s milk curdled. This representative story reflects a time when premature death was common, and when life often entailed a constant cycle of disease and suffering, as suggested by the use of the saying ‘happy as a corpse’ in Charlotte’s home village. When there was no obvious explanation for misfortune, blame still needed to be apportioned; one common explanation was that of the curse or the malign spell.

Chris WomersleyWomersley displays a playful attitude towards magic but is also mindful of its cultural power. Charlotte is a reluctant witch, practising a form of magic that she feels in her newly awakened senses, whereas Lesage is something of a rogue, an opportunist who is honest about the limits of his powers and the role of magic as a means of fooling the gullible, although his fears are real. He has witnessed the form of diabolic witchcraft carried out in Paris, so different from Charlotte’s nature-based rituals, the tone and the consequences of the witchcraft changing with the context when the pair arrive in the capital. The narrative tension of the story derives in large part from uncertainty about what fate will throw at them in their world of ‘terrible wonders.’

Lesage is a creature of the city, intoxicated by its chaotic energy and mystery, its ‘lusty theatre of the street’, whereas Charlotte is all at sea. Fearing that her son might be sold to those who use children for sexual pleasure or diabolic ritual, Lesage renews old acquaintances in the Parisian underworld. There are dungeons and convivial public executions; there is grime and ordure, madness and brutality. Womersley doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects of this world, but he doesn’t revel in them either – these are terrible realities essential to understanding the period and the people. It is also in Paris that Womersley’s gift for the telling image is used to its fullest effect, in particular his distinctive facility for the startling aural image. Lesage observes a carriage rumble past, ‘leaving in its wake a drift of woman’s laughter, like petals strewn along the road’, whereas alone in her room, burdened by grief and sadness, Charlotte listens as a brandy seller sets ‘up his cup and flagon in the street. A man called out something to his animal or wife before his laughter shattered like glass into ever smaller pieces and trailed away. In the courtyard a chicken clucked. Somewhere a woman wept. It seemed there was always a woman weeping.’

Written at a cracking pace without neglecting anything in the way of significant historical detail, City of Crows is another beautifully written book from a master storyteller.