Judith Ivory (27 page)

Christina was declared the only one who could silence Philippe de La Fontaine. He murmured profuse apologies. “
Excusez-moi! madame. Je manque d’égards, de prévenances.
I am a thoughtless, old fool. You must forgive me.” He, with the rest of the men, bore witness: If she had managed to keep a shred of dignity to her, it was vitiated by the paroxysms of nausea that followed. It put an end to all argument. It seemed to express aptly—too aptly—what everyone felt. She was sick for half an hour.

At three in the morning, Christina lay awake in bed. The house was still. If she listened, there remained a thin drone of conversation in the front room. But this registered only peripherally now and then, like the noise of an insect, a mosquito.

Vaguely, Christina was aware that she was hungry, but she was too disinterested in her own hunger to do anything about it. Sleep wouldn’t come. She had been waiting for that for more than an hour.

Bored with staring into the dark, she sat up and lit the lamp by her bed. A book had been placed on the table beside her. Absently, she picked this up, paged through it. Childbirth. In French. She wanted to laugh. She missed the table as she set it back. The book fell on the floor, where she left it. A moment or so later, there was a knock on her half-open door.

Adrien’s grandfather appeared just inside. “I may come in?” He held a tray with soup and tea. “For you.” He held it out, meekly awaiting permission to give it to her.

She accepted it. He smiled broadly. He grabbed hold
of a chair by its back and dragged it toward the bed: As if her nod had included this, his company. The chair gave him trouble. It was heavy, high-backed. When he finally sat, the large piece of furniture dwarfed him. He looked like a little old monkey, a grotesque macaque; or a gargoyle.

The tea and soup Christina had set on the bedside table. Philippe de La Fontaine leaned forward and nudged the food a bit closer to her; translating, in any language, that she should eat. Then, again like a circus monkey, he disappeared, head over knees. He came back up holding the book from the floor. This he proferred, in a palsied reach toward her. By contrast, his eyes were very steady, direct. They were a clear lake-blue.

Christina was not up to even cursory politeness.

When she didn’t take the book, he pushed it onto the bed beside her, nudging it until it lay against her thigh. Then, he leaned back in the chair, as if all this had been enormous activity for him.

“Since circumstances did not permit an introduction…” His teeth clicked in his mouth. “I am Jean-Charles Joseph François Philippe de La Fontaine.” He had a heavy accent, but seemed willing and capable of English.

“I know who you are.”

He smiled, a curve of closed lips, then tilted his head. His eyes were full of unmasked curiosity. As if she were truly another species from him. “You are his Christina?”

“My name is Christina, yes.” She sat back into her pillows, “Someone has drawn all the curtains. Would you open them? On your way out?”

He made a short, abrupt laugh, then a moue of disappointment. “I am to leave then?”

She slid a look at him: That was precisely what he was to do.

Again, he laughed. “And I thought he cowed them all into simpering little toadies.” He stood up. But he hesitated. He opened his palms. “I am bored out there.” He made a shrugging plea for sympathy. “And I do not like those men. Englishmen meddling where they haven’t the first notion…In what is none of their business in any event…. Besides, I am feeling a little overwhelmed. I wish”—he hesitated, looking for something, the right word, the right sentiment—“for Adrien.”
Ah-dree-ehn.
Christina almost didn’t recognize the sound. It was a French name, she realized; a French spelling. “I would rather be with someone,” her visitor continued, “someone with whom I had at least one thing in common.”

When she didn’t invite him to sit down again, he tilted his head to one side. “Are you really not going to be friendly? My acquaintance lends a certain—what?—authenticity, don’t you realize? Adrien doesn’t”—he was looking for a word—“mix,” he selected, “he doesn’t mix me in with many of his ladies. I’ve only met a few. All of whom have been most willing to be kind to me….”

He took her silence for acquiescence. He sat. He made no further attempt at conversation, seeming to content himself with moving his false teeth around in his mouth. Christina ate the soup, drank the tea, then settled back into her pillows again. For a time, there was the soft, sporadic click of M. La Fontaine playing with his teeth. Then quiet; he went to sleep in the chair.

Somewhere near dawn, the outer room became more noisy. Shuffling feet. Jingling belts. Voices taking on a murmuring intent. Christina awoke to these sounds. She had apparently dozed.

Philippe de La Fontaine was already awake. His eyebrows lifted toward her, offering speculation. He got halfway through a few words in French, then changed to, “Something in the wind?”

Christina rubbed sleep from her eyes, arched her back. She’d lain in a bad position. She threw her legs
over the side of the bed and braced her belly. She lumbered to a sitting position.

“Did you think he would marry you?”

She looked at Adrien’s grandfather, surprised.

The little man was studying her again. “Did you get pregnant,” he clarified, “thinking he would marry you?”

“No.” She frowned as she bent to hunt her shoes. “I believed I wouldn’t get pregnant.”

“Ah. A surprise then. Have you accommodated yourself to the notion of a child?”

“More or less.”

“Adrien seems very pleased.” He nodded to the book on the bed. “I helped him get that book for you.”

“Thank you.” She didn’t know what else to say.

He smiled. “He tried to bribe me with that child of yours. He said I could visit it whenever I wished, watch it grow….” His tone was once more asking permission; would she approve?

She frowned, then averted her eyes for fear he could read her intentions—that neither he nor Adrien should watch the child grow.

He sighed. “You really don’t like me?”

“I like you well enough.”

Silence. With slow dawning,
“Ah, ce n’est pas moi, alors.”
He wanted it confirmed. “It’s Adrien?”

The noise in the parlor moved to the entranceway, the sound of coats and hats and scarves being put on. Christina started past M. La Fontaine, but he took her arm; a surprisingly firm hold. “Don’t be too hard on him. Or on the child. He does not make a bad father. And he is delighted by this child; one can see this in his face when he speaks of it. He really does have some right, you know. And obligation.”

“‘He who bulls the cow’?”

He made a face. “I am sorry for that. But still—”

She shook her head. Then Sam Rolfeman, wrapped in
his greatcoat and scarf, was at the door. The sound in the entranceway began to travel outside. On the other side of her window, was the rattle and crunch of men, heavy boots and gear, moving in the snow. To this, was added now the approach of horses being brought from the rear of the house.

“He should have been here by now,” Sam said to her. It was a parting phrase. He was carrying his hat. “Le Saint will stay with you. The rest of us are going back after him.”

Christina felt a sinking in her belly. Sam, the last optimist, looked tired and sleepless. “Perhaps you should wait just a little longer—”

He shook his head. “It’s been long enough.” He tried to be light—with the awful result being the sort of tone and demeanor one used at a wake; he forced a laugh. “If he comes while we are gone, he’ll be furious we’ve broken from his plan. Tell him to make it a good lecture; it’s one I will enjoy. Oh, and someone will check back in a day or so just to see if we miss him coming or going.” He paused. An impatient voice called to him from outside. He looked at Christina. “Take care. We’ll let you know—” He waited for better words, then gave up.

Christina followed him to the front door, then stood there leaning against it after they’d gone.

“He has always been in trouble. He thrives on it.” M. La Fontaine was in the hallway. “He was born when I was fifty. Fifty years of quiet organized sanity. Then chaos. I’ve lived the last thirty-five years in perpetual terror of what he’d do next. Shall we go into the salon? We could share the fire.”

“Will you tell me about his wife?”

This jarred him. “No.” He reconsidered. “Perhaps,” he said more gently.

Le Saint could be heard in the kitchen as she followed the small Frenchman into the parlor. “There is not much to tell,” M. La Fontaine said. He sat in a chair
by the fire. Christina sat opposite him. “Adrien married his cousin. He was nineteen. She was seventeen. By the time he was twenty-four they were separated.”

“Divorced,” she said.

His smile corrected her politely. “An English divorce. I mean you no injury, my dear, but here you associate with a married man.”

Christina looked into the fire. “Why did they separate?”

He made a face; he wasn’t going to discuss this. “Who knows? I raised him. Did you know that?” he offered. Again he allowed her quietness to mean he should proceed. He settled back. “His father sent him to me after his mother died. So I had him when he was very young.” He looked down at his hands. He made folds in his trousers. “Very sweet. Precocious. My wife had just died. We were two.” He held up two fingers pressed together. “And he,
très cher,
how do you say?,
comme la prunelle
—not
prunelle
to you—
de mes yeux?
”

“Apple.”

“Oui.”
He smiled, a fond satisfaction. “The apple of my eyes. Then when his father died—Adrien was eleven—I lost him. For a time. His uncle put him in an English boarding school.” He sighed, “One must allow: an English education for an English lord. I couldn’t contradict. Besides, the uncle was his legal guardian, and I was but a foreign grandparent. But I missed him.” He frowned. “And I did not like where he went.” There was a pause, as if he were not going to explain any further. Then he added, “A very severe place. From which he eventually escaped by being equally, severely bad; they threw him out.”

“Why?”

“Disruptive,” he said, “and ‘resistant’ to correction.” He gave a small burst of laughter. “That, I already knew. I rarely hit him.” He made a dubious look. “Perhaps this is his trouble.” He reconsidered this with an
affectionate nod—” But I think not. When I did hit him, he was always so outraged, extraordinarily so. It used to amuse me, the amount of dignity he had, even when he was very young. His father and I used to joke about it. The only child in England and France who escaped a whipping for simply being above such things. Though his father, I suspect, always worried he was secretly weak for not beating him.” He sighed. He shook his head; what could one do? “The uncle made up for it, though. But that is the English way,
n’est-ce pas?
“There was a brief look of disapproval. “An English education is accomplished at the end of a cane.” He snorted. Then he brought a finger up, in a single knowing wag. “There is where he learned about power—and what it meant to be wretchedly without it. An English upper-class education. The schoolmasters chastising the boys, the boys growing up to be little schoolmasters practicing on each other. He has never been quite the same boy since. Though who is to say…” One could sense that the old man was trying to make strong feelings less strident, more conventionally acceptable.

He frowned. “This is not what I started to say,” he said. “
Ah, oui,
I was telling you. I raised him. I lost him.” He grinned. “Then I got him back: They threw him out of that school; then another, then a third. His English uncle threw up his hands.

“He was seventeen when he arrived this time—and I took one look at him and could see part of the problem immediately. He had shot up more than a head taller than myself, and was filling out alarmingly unlike the men of my family. He reminded me of his English uncle….

“And
this
Adrien,” he continued, “
Mon Dieu,
he turned the house upside-down. Willful. Self-centered. Difficult. And entirely too clever, including too clever in getting around adults. He did precisely as he pleased. And Marie-Madeleine”—he shook his head—“his
cousin, took one look at him and thought she had met the handsomest, wisest, most courageous fellow on earth….” His voice trailed off.

He got up slowly to drop a log on the fire. He squatted there, playing with the fire, stirring it like memory, staring.

It was just after this that they heard the sound. Soft, with seeming intentional quiet, something—someone—was stealing up on them outside in the snow.

Where was Le Saint? Christina wondered. She no longer heard him. She looked at her only other ally, the slight, eighty-five-year-old Frenchman. Then she heaved herself up, belly first, and reached for the iron poker.

Coming up over the ridge, Adrien had seen the light. Like a beacon. A mirage. As he came up to the house, though, it didn’t feel so much warm or comforting as…unreal, impossible. He had been so long out in the dark, out in the snow. He was so cold. The light coming from the little house seemed more like rays coming from a tiny alien sun; life on another planet. Adrien came up to the door. It opened. He stepped in. Then stopped cold.

He was greeted by a woman brandishing a poker. He laughed. Her feet were so tiny, her belly so large. Yet she held that poker with a resolve that made the veins on her slender wrists stand out. There was very real danger in her intent. She menaced him with surprising mobility, despite the obstacle of her enormous and perfectly round belly.

She stared at his eyes—there was little other hope of recognition since he was wrapped from head to foot in woolen rags. Then she came a step closer. She scrutinized and frowned. Then closer still. An uncertain recognition flickered in her face. The poker came down a degree.

And he was attacked by a wave of vanity. Numb from cold, the threat of being bashed in the head with an iron poker yet a possibility, suddenly all Adrien could think of was how awful he must look and smell. He was muddy and soiled. Smelling of garbage and worse. Completely covered in scraps of rags, all but for his eyes. A mummified derelict, perfumed by the back passages of Paris.

“Easy, Christine.” He raised his hands slowly, lest she hit him out of sheer uncertainty. “It would be too ironic to have you succeed after eluding this end all day.”

The poker clanged on the floor. “Adrien!”

Her arms were around him, her hands pulling the rags at his face.

“Don’t. You’ll get yourself filthy.”