Sewn Into the Shroud

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

ImaReadFolio 02 — 02

Close view of hands stitching heavy canvas over a shrouded form on a plank bed, single low lamp burning, stone wall in engraved shadow. — He stitched his friend into the burial sack with a sailmaker's concentration; in the dim light it resembled a man asleep under a blanket.

Small wet figure rising from a black sea beside the dense crosshatched silhouette of Château d'If, a ribbon of moonlit foam at his shoulders, torn sack-cloth trailing, face turned toward the open horizon on the right. — He broke the surface in a thin sheet of moonlit foam; behind him the Château d'If stood black against a slightly less black sky.

The old man's breath stopped somewhere in the small hours, with the lamps still burning and the calculations unfinished. Edmond sat across from him as the silence thickened, and he did not weep, and he did not call out, and he did not kneel. He inventoried. He measured the length of the body against the width of the passage. He estimated the weight. He folded the manuscript pages into the lining of his shirt with the patience of a man packing for a journey he had rehearsed a thousand times in the dark. Grief would come later, or it would not come at all; in the meantime, there was a door, and the door was a dead man.

He performed the work without haste, because haste was a luxury that had been taken from him along with his name. He dragged the body across the floor. He undressed it. He dressed himself in its clothes. He stitched his friend into the burial sack with a sailmaker's concentration, the needle moving in and out through the heavy canvas as if he were mending a torn net rather than sealing the only witness to his education. When he lifted the sack onto the plank bed, it resembled, in the dim light, a man asleep under a blanket — a counterfeit so close to perfect that he allowed himself, briefly, to admire it. He lay down inside his own cell. He rehearsed the apology he would not need to make. He rehearsed the stillness of a corpse. Somewhere above him, a guard coughed, and the cough sounded like the turning of a page.

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The men came with the indifference of long practice. One made a joke about the length of the burial; another complained about the smell, which was, in fairness, considerable. They lashed the iron weight to the sack's feet with the unhurried competence of men who had done this many times and expected to do it many more. They carried the bundle out into the passage. The door clanged. The bolts slid home. Edmond heard the ropes creak against the parapet. He heard the order given in a tone that might have been used to order wine. He heard, after a small and immeasurable pause, the canvas strike the sea — a sound like a slap delivered at a great distance, muffled, final, and utterly indifferent to the thing it had swallowed. Then he was falling, and the air went out of him in a single sharp syllable that was not a word, and then he was in the water, and the cold of it was so absolute that for one clean second he forgot that he had ever been warm.

The knife had been waiting against his chest since the sewing began. He had placed it there himself, blade inward, handle at the collarbone, and now his fingers found it with the sureness of a man greeting something familiar in the dark. The sack resisted; the canvas, wetted, clung to him like a second skin. He worked in measured strokes, the way he had been taught to work in a different life, when the hands beside his had been the hands of sailors and not the hands of gravediggers. The seam opened. The pressure changed. He slid the cannonball away from his legs with a motion that was almost tender, almost grateful, as one releases a creditor one has no intention of repaying. He kicked once, hard, toward the light he could not yet see, and the sea accepted him, and the sea released him, and he rose. He broke the surface in a thin sheet of moonlit foam. The air entered his lungs in a single violent gulp, and it tasted of salt and of iron and of nothing he had earned in fourteen years of patience. Behind him the wall of the Château d'If stood black against a slightly less black sky, and every window of it was a sleeping eye. Ahead of him there was only the moving water and the long coast of France, and beyond that coast, men who had forgotten his name, and a grave bearing it that he intended, in time, to empty. He turned his face toward the open horizon and did not look back. The Count of Monte Cristo had not yet been born; the man who would become him floated for a moment between two worlds, breathing, breathing, breathing, like a clock that has been wound at last and intends to run a long, long time.