Beast (26 page)

It was not as if Charles couldn't be honest about the particulars of his own appearance: His coloring was dark. It spoke of the Spanish kings in his bloodline, a line invaded here and there with Arab blood: his hair was as black as a fakir's. This hair was fine and thick and so straight—and with so much a mind of its own—that it might have stuck out directly from his head had he worn it short. Thus he wore it long, a shaggy, wild shoulder-length of shiny black, baby-soft hair, the fineness of which made it flutter in the wind now like long strands of ostrich feathers. He had a broad jaw, a high cheek, the strong bones of the ancient, invading Franks, the thin, straight nose of the Romans. All in all, not an unattractive man.

Until—he admitted—one tried to look him in the eye.

Immediately this was difficult. He had a faintly off-center way of regarding people that came from his having to turn his head slightly so as to get a clear sight past the bridge of his nose. Then, once met. his good eye could stop a person cold—it was a deep, unearthly blue as vivid in color as the Mediterranean itself.

His blind eye became a kind of parody of this, a light, opaque blue faded to the paleness of verdigris, as if the iris had oxidized. There was no pupil, only the eerie blankness of a disease-scarred eye. The lid of this eye bore an additional disfigurement, a healed cut that drew a sharp line upward, leaving a bare swath through the end of his eyebrow and giving this side of his face a look of perpetual blank surprise—a look that Charles could furrow into a fiendishness, if he chose. When younger, he had worn a patch over his unfavored eye. Then he had thought of the patch as debonair, mysterious. Now he thought of it as cowardly; he no longer indulged in such hide-and-seek. The bad eye was his, part of what he looked like, part of what he was: half god, half devil. A fitting metaphor for the human condition, he thought. Besides, he'd found there to be certain advantages to casting, with just a frowning turn of his head, a glance that could terrorize.

As to the rest of him, he was tall, well-proportioned, and elegantly turned out. Charles thought of himself as, if not handsome, at least something to behold: like a sleek, stately piece of architecture with a few gargoylelike flourishes for decorative effect.

Louise gazed at his marred face a moment and smiled vaguely. Not impressed; but neither was she horrified. She seemed completely unaffected. She looked away.

Charles didn't know quite what to think.

His cousin Henri, somewhere at his elbow, whispered something about "you crafty old dog" and "no wonder you made us all tie ourselves into knots."

Someone else off to the side of them directed a question toward the bride herself. Charles didn't hear the particulars. He only knew that Louise responded graciously, lifting her chin to look at those around her and, by this, again took him aback.

She spoke startling French—a near-perfect, very upper-class version of the language: no extra elisions, every proper one made, every
R
rolled on the tongue (unlike Charles's own fat
Rs
in the throat); no slang, no
tutoyering
familiarity, and no American accent. It was Academy French, probably straight from a textbook, but it nonetheless was a variety of the language one seldom heard except in the company of the bluest blood of Paris. Charles was mesmerized. The sound of his language on her tongue filled him with both a horrible pride and a galling, unfamiliar awkwardness.

"Your Highness, let me make formal introductions." It was Vandermeer, his hand on Charles's back, speaking his anglicized version of the same language, making hash of what his daughter made into aria.

Charles glanced at him. "Don't do that," he said.

"Do what?"

" 'Your Highness.' We don't use that. 'Monsieur' is fine." He had mentioned this before to the Americans, yet they were relentless. Now was the time to stop their royal fantasies, to remind them that France was a democracy with an aversion to such pretensions.

"Well, um, that is, ahem…" Vandermeer was going to argue.

Charles looked at him, narrowing his eyes into what he knew to be an unpleasant expression. When this left Vandermeer speechless, Charles let a smile steal back crookedly onto his face. He offered an appeasement. "'Charles,'" he said. "Please call me 'Charles.'"

Vandermeer looked unsettled, mollified yet bewildered and unhappy, no doubt feeling the loss of the princely form of address for his daughter.

Well, they would have to be satisfied with the rest, everything real and of substance that belonged to the Prince d'Harcourt.

Subdued, Vandermeer muttered, "May I present my daughter, Louise Amelda-May Vandermeer." He nodded toward Charles. "Charles Harcourt, the Prince d'Harcourt," then added, "and grandson to the late King Louis Philippe."

Charles didn't bother with more narrow looks and protests. The fact was true enough at least.

The lovely Louise glanced sideways, at someone or something else said. Comments, chatter flew. In response to it, she smiled almost shyly, prettily, then couched her face. As he stood nonplussed, Charles caught a bit of what was going through the crowd. People waited for him to do something, say something.

"Well, the prince is dumbstruck," someone said behind him.

Someone else called, "All he does is beam at her."

"Who wouldn't?"

Another quarter added, "I'd say, he likes his bride quite well."

He took his cue, bowing before Louise, a bow that was perhaps just a degree more sweeping than he'd intended. He rose, trying to recover; he found his tongue. He said in French loud enough for anyone nearby to hear, "If his bride is half so sweet as the sight of her, he shall be privileged to walk beside her till the last days of his life."

Her bland countenance swung around and up. Her demeanor changed. Louise's very lovely visage frowned deeply into his, her scrutiny affixing on him with an intensity that made his face run cold. She'd recognized his voice. She knew, he thought. Hell was going to crack the earth this instant and rise up between them, all his pathetic, over-lofty plans for their future together collapsing before they'd begun.

But she looked at him a moment, then apparently decided she recognized nothing. Staring at him, her expression faded to a faint melancholy, then went blank completely. Her eyes became remote, her thoughts elsewhere as her gaze shifted to settle on a boat coming into the harbor.

A huge relief spread through Charles, like the sun coming out. He warmed as she accepted the flowers he offered. The dog began to sniff' and eat them where she set them into the hat. Then the lovely Louise put her hand innocently into the crook of Charles's arm, and he thought he would die there a happy man as she began slowly, to allow for his gait, so as to walk beside him toward the carriage.

The ancient Chinese named ambergris "dragon's spittle perfume," because they believed it came
from the mouths of dragons who, while sleeping upon rocks at the edge of the sea, drooled this
fragrant sub stance down into the ocean.

Charles Harcourt, Prince d'Harcourt

On the Nature and Uses of Ambergris

Louise managed an amazing feat. She glided through her first eight or so hours in France without contemplating her future husband, barely looking at him in fact for more than a few seconds at a time.

She was able to keep him—his tall, long-coated presence—at the periphery of her awareness. Which, considering, every moment of these eight hours had been by his arrangement, at the expense of his hospitality, and, like her future itself, dependent on his goodwill, was a fairly daring act of neglect on her part.

It was just that he seemed so bizarre, so unpredicted. she simply didn't have the energy to make sense of him; not yet.

And there was so much else going on. At the hotel, she found herself dropped straight into a midday garden party of almost two hundred people, most of them strangers. Overwhelmed (and exhausted from lack of sleep), she barely saw any of these people, most of whom seemed content that she simply smile and look pretty—the easy trick she'd performed for most of her life.

Beyond this, when Louise's mind had any clarity or focus, it tended to drift into thoughts of her Pasha Charles, of how and where he had gone off to so quickly. Was he here in Marseilles? Or was he on another boat already, crossing the sea to his home?

Louise stole glimpses toward this sea over rooftops, between heads and shoulders, over trayfuls of local delicacies: wedges of chickpea pancakes, raw vegetables dipped in some sort of herb-fragrant, creamy-thick condiment, and fresh ripe olives that she thought at first were rolled in salt but, when she bit into one, discovered to be rolled instead in grain-fine garlic.
Manger sur le ponce
, her strange, black-haired host called it. To eat on the thumb. Snacks. Most of these novel tastes were strong to her palate.

Her Charles, again he'd been right: France was interesting but boggling on first acquaintance. She felt lost in among so much newness, even when it came to something so simple as getting her hunger satisfied.

She couldn't imagine the bother of doing anything more complicated. Nothing was as it was back home.

In greeting, everyone kissed everyone else, including men kissing men sometimes on both cheeks. The carriages looked different. They seemed lighter, quicker. Automobiles, though only a few here, were faster and louder than the ones in New York; there were slightly more of them. French toilets were also louder; they flushed violently and were in their own room, separate from the bath. And the
new
, like motor-carriages and flushing toilets, lived side by side with an
old
Louise was unaccustomed to. From the coach on their way up the ridge to the hotel, she'd glimpsed steep, narrow streets that seemed of another century entirely. The hotel where they settled, in order to await their train, had stone sections built in 1607, a year the locals referred to as "recent." Marseilles, claiming to be France's oldest city, had a heritage that dated back to the Greeks.

In addition to coping with an unfamiliar ambiance, while smiling and nodding and trying to remember the names of a hundred strangers, the logistics of Louise's first hours in her new country were insane.

Baggage was transferred, shifted about from carriage to hotel, then transferred again to the train station.

When she wanted to change, she found that the trunk with her afternoon dresses hadn't made it to the hotel but had been sent straight along to the station. So had all her toiletries. There was a mix-up—an
emmerdement
, as the prince's uncle called it, which she suspected by its root word to be cruder than a mere mix-up and more annoying than the man acknowledged.

He was a rare bird, this Uncle Tino, a small, wiry man of forty or fifty or sixty, there was no telling. His age was as impossible to pinpoint as the age of a thin, adult monkey. His French was guttural and not always easy to understand. He liked to do everything himself, but then got so many things going he couldn't control it all. He was a self-professed expert on everything—baggage, train schedules, parties, music; he loved John Philip Sousa and imagined all Americans did too, since the music was—
eh bien,
non
?—American.