A Calculus of Angels (11 page)

They rode between stone gateposts grown over with ivy, across ill-tended gardens to a manse in the style of two centuries before. There, liveried servants hurried out to meet them, and Crecy was borne off by a pair of soldiers to where d’Argenson assured her a doctor waited.

D’Argenson dismounted and then offered to help her down, but she had already taken her son beneath one arm and thrown a leg over the saddle. She grinned ruefully at his extended hand.

“I have not been in the company of gentlemen in a long time,” she apologized.

“That is the loss of gentlemen everywhere.”

“You are gallant. I know what my appearance must be.” Her hair was a rat’s nest, her stolen dress in tatters.

“A diamond is always a diamond.”

Suddenly embarrassed, she looked away from eyes not as cold as she had thought on first glance, and waved at the manse. “Are you the master of this place?” she asked.

“Not I,” d’Argenson answered. “I suppose I am something of the prime minister. No, yonder comes the master.”

Adrienne blinked. In the light of a single fitful alchemical lanthorn, she saw approaching a fair-haired boy, perhaps some thirteen years old, outfitted in riding clothes.

D’Argenson stepped up and bowed. “Sir, may I present to you Mademoiselle de Mornay de Montchevreuil.”

The boy smiled broadly and bowed, then approached to take her hand. “It is an honor,” he said softly, “to meet the betrothed of the late king of France.” He A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

kissed her hand lightly. “I am Francis Stephen, duke of Lorraine, and if there is aught I can do for you, please name it.”

“I…” She suddenly felt very tired. “A bath?”

“The servants shall see to it,” the boy replied.

Reclining in the bullhide tub, it came to her that there could be no civilization without hot water. For two years she had lived like some wild beast—living in filth, washing only in cold, dirty pools. It had made her brain like an animal’s, uncaring, thinking only of survival.

One taste of hot, soapy water on her skin changed all, changing her nature from beast to human. She reminded herself how illusory it was, how a week on the road would prove to her again that the society and works of man were silly ephemera, and yet, for the moment, it did not matter.

And the room was warm, too. There was a toilette with perfumes and powders, and laid out on the bed were three dresses such as she had not even seen since fleeing Versailles. She chose a dark green manteau, the least ostentatious but the most comfortable of the three.

As she was dressing, a girl of perhaps twelve came in, a pretty thing save for a few pockmarks on her face.

“Perhaps I could comb Mademoiselle’s hair?” she asked.

It took a painful hour to get the tangles out, but with each stroke of the brush, Adrienne came more alive, felt her skin going from stone to flesh. She would regret that, when she needed stone again, but in her last days at Versailles she had learned that the world would harm you whether you were prepared or not.

Pleasure was a rare fruit that should be tasted when it came one’s way.

“Where is my son?” she asked the girl, suddenly, as it came to her that he was not in the room.

“He is with a nurse,” the girl replied.

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“A nurse.” She had never been apart from little Nico, save for an hour here or there, and then Crecy had been his guardian. And yet, for the space of half an hour, she had not even missed him.

But of course, her child was a part of that cold, dirty life in the fields. He did not fit here. But with some luck, he would. As she woke from the dream of cold roads to one of hot baths, she would bring him with her, the way she had brought herself a new hand from the land of dream and ghosts.

She studied the hand absently as the girl combed her hair. It
looked
like a hand, until you peered closely and saw that it had no pores, no trace of hair.

Until you realized, over the months, that its nails never grew, that briars never scratched it. But it could feel, and grasp and sometimes—sometimes it seemed capable of doing other things, as well, vague and frightening things.

Her hand had been burned off by an angel, and somehow had been replaced.

How? She had thought about this before, but she had never really puzzled at it.

She hadn’t cared. Now she cared, and the remains of a formula danced in her brain, the fragments of a great proof that, in a dream, she had once known entire.

The girl answered a knock on the door, and a moment later returned to Adrienne.

“The duke requests your presence, milady,” she said.

“First I will see my friend,” Adrienne replied. “Do you know where she has been taken?”

“Yes, milady, but—”

“Then please take me there.”

The girl bowed.

“And have my son brought to me, please.”

The physician attending Crecy was a slim young man with little in the way of a A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

chin. “She must rest,” he insisted, when she entered.

“Will she live?” Adrienne murmured, nestling a sleeping Nico against one shoulder.

“She should not, but she may,” he replied. “Her constitution is very strong.”

“She is my dear friend, sir. I will be very much in your debt if she lives.”

He shook his head. “Not in my debt, but in God’s. I have done little here, for there was little to do save remove the balls and sew shut the holes.”

“Nevertheless,” she replied. “May I look at her?”

“If you like.”

Crecy was always pale, but now she was as translucent as finest porcelain. Her hair fanned on the pillow like a halo of flame. Her chest rose and fell only slightly.

“Be well, Veronique,” she whispered, bending to place a kiss on her friend’s cheek.

Two slivers of blue ice suddenly appeared, as Crecy’s lids opened. A hissing cough escaped her lips, flecking them with blood. Holding Nico in one arm, Adrienne knelt at Crecy’s side and took her hand, but it did not grasp back.

“We have found you,” Crecy rasped, in a voice like a knife on whetstone. “We have found you.”

And then she closed her eyes again.

Adrienne felt her strange hand tremble, then almost hum. She suddenly realized that she had gripped Crecy’s fingers with it. She let go of her friend, a terrible icy chill working up her arm and into her spine. Suppressing a cry, she backed from the room.

Nicolas woke as she fled to her room, staring at her. Before reluctantly A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

returning him to the kind-faced nurse, she sang him a lullaby, trying to escape Crecy’s strange words. They were no doubt simple delirium, and yet there had been something utterly un-Crecylike in her eyes and tone.

Un-Crecylike, or perhaps Crecy
par excellence:
the cold-eyed stare she usually hid, the remorseless tones she commonly draped in the silk of emotion and care—an actress not acting.

Adrienne loved Crecy, but even now she did not trust her. Even now she feared her.

“Mademoiselle, the duke…”

The girl had followed along, fidgeting restlessly.

“Thank you, my dear. I would be honored to see the duke now.”

Neither the duke Francis Stephen of Lorraine nor Hercule d’Argenson seemed much put out by her late arrival. They sat at the table, wine and soup untouched, awaiting her, conversing in low tones. When she was shown in, both rose.

The chamber was quaint, almost antique, though it was brightened by an alchemical lanthorn in the form of the moon depending from the high ceiling.

A tapestry of men pursuing a stag draped one wall, the Lorraine crest another.

A haunch of venison lay steaming on a platter, and Adrienne understood suddenly how very hungry she was.

“Mademoiselle, please join us,” said the young duke.

Adrienne sat, her frame vibrating with appetite, but she waited until the duke began to sip his soup before touching hers. A lifetime of etiquette had been swept away in the dark months after the fall of the comet, but now she understood just how entrenched her training had been.

Once she actually tasted the soup, however, her will broke, and she gobbled at the meal like a starving dog, never pausing to touch the utensils near her plate.

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The duke smiled brightly. “I take it you are unused to good meals, Demoiselle?”

Adrienne nodded, speaking between mouthfuls. “It is true, Your Grace. I have not eaten meat in—” She counted. “—more than a month. And then it was not nearly so good as this.”

“Mutton?”

“Dog.”

“Oh, dear!” Francis of Lorraine laughed again. “We shall try to keep you better fed than that.” He glanced at d’Argenson. “Though I fear we shall have to put you back on the road quite soon.”

Adrienne looked up.

“He means with us, not to your own devices,” d’Argenson clarified. “We must abandon Lorraine, I fear. We have not the men to hold it against the Muscovite force.”

“This is all strange to me. I have lived…” How much did they know about her?

Did they know that she and Crecy had tried—and failed—to murder the king?

Probably not, or she would not have this reception. Or if d’Argenson had been a friend of Nicolas d’Artagnan, perhaps they did know but did not care. “I have lost touch with things, I fear.”

“So have we all, my dear,” d’Argenson said. “After your abduction, as you know, the great flame fell from the sky, and the world went mad. Much of the coast was drowned, Versailles and Paris burned and then soaked in the hundred-night rain. The king, you understand, died.”

Adrienne nodded. That much she knew.

“What became of you and your friend?” the duke asked.

Adrienne frowned, and decided to lie. “Our kidnappers took us to the Midi; but as you say, flame and flood washed out roads and bridges. Torcy and d’Artagnan were killed, and the rest fought amongst themselves. They then A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

met with ruffians rougher than they.”

“Those men we found you with?”

“No. Crecy and I escaped, you see, and fled to stay with an acquaintance of hers.” Half truths. The truth was that there had been no kidnapping. They had all fled Versailles together after trying to kill the king. “We stayed with this friends—Madame Alaran—for some months, but as you know the weather only worsened. Her servants turned on her, in the end, and we barely escaped with our lives. We wandered, but the whole country had fallen into barbarism, like the days of the Goths, and everywhere there were bands of evil men. We finally were captured by Le Loup—the captain of the brigands you saved us from. We had no choice, so Crecy lent them her sword arm. As evil as they were, they were our only protection.”

“I am sorry that we killed them, then,” d’Argenson said.

“No, do not be. They were not good men. Soon they would have raped and killed us both, I am certain. No, Monsieur, you have saved our lives.”

“It was a privilege, as I said before. And so you know nothing of the state of France?”

“Rumors only, and undependable ones at that.”

D’Argenson took a long draft of his wine. “There are three kings of France now, or perhaps a hundred, depending on your reckoning. Many of the noble houses have simply declared themselves sovereign, or formed pacts of mutual protection, effectively carving France to bits. Worse, the duke of Orleans has declared himself king, though he really rules little more than Paris. Philip of Spain, of course, claims all France, and has of late sent troops inward to secure the southern portion—”

“Ah! We met many fleeing that army.”

“Just so. The third king is the duke of Main, whose whereabouts are presently unknown, though some say he has gone to New France.”

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“Who controls the army?”

“No one—everyone.”

Adrienne nodded. “Many of the gangs on the roads and towns were once of the army, but surely some remain loyal.”

“Yes. Some to Orleans, some to Main, others to their old commanders, who do with them as they see fit. Orleans has had to split his forces—half to defend against the Muscovites coming from Flanders, half to defend against Philip in the south, though Philip claims, of course, that he is only coming to aid France against the Muscovite foe.”

“The Netherlands?”

“Holland drowned; the dikes were broken and the sea came in. Tsar Peter sent thousands of men and ships to their aid. Much rebuilding has been done, but now the Muscovite grip on the Netherlands is strong, and he marches on Lorraine and Paris—a long front, but he has the men and weapons to sustain it. Terrible weapons, even more fearsome than those we saw used in the Flanders War.”

“And so now we must flee my duchy,” the duke broke in.

“But I will return for it, one day. Those bears will not dance in Nancy and Metz forever!”

The young duke sounded more excited than chagrined at the prospect of losing his duchy, she noticed.

“Where, then, shall you go?” she asked.

The boy’s eyes shone. “It shall be a grand adventure, I promise you, Mademoiselle. My army and I shall march to the east—through Muscovite and Turk—and we shall offer ourselves to the Holy Roman emperor in Prague.

And, God willing, with our aid, we shall free Vienna besides!”

Adrienne asked, “You have a large army, then?”

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“Almost two thousand souls!” Francis of Lorraine said, raising his glass. “To the empire and the glory of God!”

“The empire!” d’Argenson echoed.

Adrienne wondered if she had just fallen from one foe into another.

7.

At Court

Karl VI, the Holy Roman emperor, was the first monarch Ben had ever seen, and now as at that first meeting, he found himself far from impressed. Eyelids drooping, jowls pendulous, ringleted wig falling like gigantic, floppy ears, Karl more resembled a mournful hound than the heir to a lineage said to date back to Aeneas. Today he seemed more melancholy than usual.

It was an informal audience, and while Ben preferred those to formal ones, he still found them anything but relaxed. The room—one of the smaller galleries in the palace—was nevertheless crammed with gaudily dressed halberdiers, the Gentlemen of the Golden Key, the Gentlemen of the Black Key—all of whom Ben thought of as merely “the old men”— assorted courtiers, advisers, and servants. And, of course Sir Isaac, Sir Isaac’s valet, and Sir Isaac’s apprentice. Newton himself wore a vermilion coat embroidered in gold, while Ben wore the comparatively somber black coat and waistcoat chosen for him by the maid.