A case of curiosities Read Online Free Page B

nethermore parts. Claude giggled.

    "You will not laugh when I tell you that while wotk in Hispaniola is fatiguing, in the Pompelmoose Atoll it is death. Do you remember the criminal who was caught for bringing down an ax on the aged carter in Vornet?"
    Claude nodded.
    Madame Page said, "The carter's daughter found his nose in a bandbox under the bed."
    "And the poisoner of Passerale?" the Abbe asked.
    "Six children orphaned by a wolfsbane potage," she said.
    As the docket grew to include infanticide and immolation, Fidelite and Evangeline moved to the side of the box bed, and Staemphli appeared to turn the pages of his medical treatise with diminished frequency, though he would never admit to listening.
    "These criminals all ended up" — the Abbe paused to look around the room — "in the penal colony of the Pompelmoose Atoll, where punishment is determined by the class of crime committed. I will explain. Lesser reprobates transported to the Pompelmoose are forced to work the fields, cutting long stalks into short stalks and short stalks into still shorter ones. The days are longer than long. From the cacophonic caw of the cockatoo" — the Abbe mimicked the cry of the tropical bird — "until the sun gives off its last, dusky sparkle on the waves of the surrounding sea, the prisoners are forced to harvest cane. And that, my friends, is considered a light sentence."
    "Lighter than your own," the surgeon mumbled. He was suspicious of eloquence.
    "Pickpockets and shoplifts are transported — and, actually, you can add your better grade of thief to the list—for periods of ten to fifteen years. But the harshest sentences are given to the meanest criminals, which brings us to poisoners and ax-men. They, along with rapemasters-general and souls insensitive to the beauty of things well made, are banished to the island's sugar mines. There they work their sticky picks, knocking out boulders of crystallized sugar that are hard as diamonds. In caverns where a single candle reflects off a thousand sutfaces, the criminals are forced to satisfy our Continental desires. (Among the residents of your Republic, my dear surgeon, the annual consumption is put at fourteen pounds a head.) Once brought to the surface of the sugar mine, usually by convicted highwaymen, cullies, and conny-catchers, the big crystals are shattered into smaller rock candy, the kind given on feast days to the deserving.
    "The chain of penal dulcitude continues indoors. That is where the female criminals are kept." The Abbe looked at Claude's two sisters. "Yes, that is correct. The fair sex is not immune to the punishments of the Pompelmoose Atoll. Women caught pursuing unmentionable but well-imagined acts are given a most appropriate chore: refinement. Only it is refinement not of themselves but of sugar in the baker's drying room, which Ar-buthnot tells us is heated fifty-four degrees beyond that of the human body. The heat is such that it will kill a sparrow in two minutes. Here they must toil to make pastries, their breasts dripping in the syrupy heat. That is why, incidentally, they are called, in England anyway, tarts."
    The cottage's occupants were all ears (especially Fidelite) as the Abbe confected his convicts' chronicle, describing callused hands, screams, and cries for salt in a world of bitter sweetness. He beguiled with great seriousness, mixing the terrors of the valley with the mysteries of distant lands, and in so doing offered up a story that satisfied listener and teller alike.
    The Abbe wrapped up his tale as neatly as the piece of demi-royal that had inspired it: "So when someone asks you if you want a taste of sugar in whatever form, whether in cane, rock, or refined, remember the source of the sweet that tempts you. It bears the labor of street thief, murderer, whore."
    The sugar and the story had served to comfort Claude. Combined, they acted as an analeptic, restoring and renewing the spirits. Now that he no longer had either treat, however,