Beast (7 page)

Meanwhile her mother, who was shy of sexual references to anything, least of all to herself, pretended Louise's windy catalog of complaints had never been spoken. She said. "Never mind. Montreal is behind us. We must move forward."

Reluctantly her father fell in with this lead. He muttered. "Yes, chock it up to experience. You are young.

Just remember, as you explore life, to be a little more cautious."

Yes, oh, yes
, Louise thought.
To explore life. Let us drink a toast to that
! But she only picked up her day fan and fringed shawl, murmuring meekly, "I'm going to breakfast now. I hope you both feel better."

Louise realized as she left her parents' room that she had become a trial. She could almost hear them consoling each other over her. She wanted to scream, to cry. Until recently, she had always thought of herself and her parents as getting along well. Now, though, they acted as if she didn't know what was expected of her. which she did; as if she hadn't always accepted it, which she had.

It was just that everything was happening so fast. At what was supposed to be the happiest time of a young woman's life, she often felt fidgety, impatient, at times even depressed. As if a hundred things she had intended to do were left undone—except she could think of nothing she wanted to do specifically that she wasn't doing. She could think of no plans for herself but those that were unfolding: a brilliant marriage, children, a respected place in society, a rich, beautiful life. So what could possibly be wrong?

Nothing. She kept her discontent to herself, that is, she tried to until it occurred to her that she wished she were somewhere else, like Montreal. Or France.

In this, she supposed, she and her parents had achieved some of their old harmony: She knew they were only too glad to marry her off to a foreign title who would not have had a whisper yet of her less than sterling behavior. For them, her marriage to the Prince d'Harcourt made the most of her good qualities, attaching an envious moniker to the family while not paying a single tithe to her odd quirk for heading off to foreign cities.

While Louise herself was happy enough to be on the move again. No one knew her in France. She liked to take readings off strangers, off their first impressions of her.
Who are you
? people always asked in one way or another when she arrived at a new destination. Yes, she wanted to know this too: Who am I?

Not this silly creature, surely, who says the right things, knows the right people, reads the right books, then shops and fixes herself all day so she can impress all night the same people she has been impressing

since she was an infant.

Rich Dutchmen and Englishmen have eaten ambergris on eggs for breakfast.

Charles Harcourt, Prince d'Harcourt

On the Nature and Uses of Ambergris

The walk wasn't long from her parents' stateroom to the dining saloon, both being at midship. Yet the going was slow. Louise held to the brass handrail, her shoulder occasionally brushing up against the mahogany paneling. At one point the lilt of the ship pulled her away from the rail to do a slow, inevitable stagger to the railing on the opposite wall. In this manner, she swayed and lurched her way through the short mazework of carved panel corridors to the grand staircase that led down into the first-class dining area.

From the top of these wide, sweeping stairs, Louise looked down into an opulent room. The dining saloon spread the full width of the ship, extending upward through three decks and lengthwise a hundred yards. White Ionic columns embellished with gold supported a high ceiling of arching coffered panels.

These rose into a central overhead dome painted with a mural of the open sea, sunny and sparkling, with the seven continents represented around its border. The dining-room walls were carved Spanish mahogany, inlaid with ivory. The vast space—with its ceiling lights of oxidized silver set with cut-crystal bowls, its mirrors and flowers, its long elaborately set white-linen tables, these lined with armchairs upholstered in blue, figured frieze velvet—looked more like the hall of a palace than the steel enclosure of a ship. This hall teetered, however. Most of the seats, on swivels and bolted to the floor, were turned out, empty. Only about a third of the passengers had apparently ventured out to breakfast today.

From among one little cluster of breakfast diners, her cousin Mary waved and called out from the center of the room, this greeting making several dozen faces turn. As Louise began down the stairs, an increasing number of people turned to gape at her.

She was accustomed to this. Stares followed her pretty much everywhere, a common—and democratic—phenomenon. Everyone tended to look at her, then gawk. Strangers, friends, servants; friends' servants, servants' friends; magnates, children, postal clerks, charwomen. Louise knew herself to be beautiful in this way. She halted traffic in the street. Her entrance into a room made young men lose their tongues in midsentence. When she was younger, this had made her shy; she had felt like a circus freak. Now she accepted her looks for what they were: both a kind of power over people as well as an obstacle, to one degree or another, to meeting, knowing, and being liked by them.

Another woman with the party at the far end of the room's central table motioned for her to join them—she sat across from cousin Mary and next to Gaspard de Barbot, a polite enough young man who treated Louise perfectly civilly—as if she were a normal human being. There were several others Louise didn't know. The waving woman made Gaspard move over so as to make a seat for Louise between them, a friendly gesture that attracted, since Louise's presence among other women didn't always engender warmth.

Louise headed toward these people, rather like a pinball rolling through a tilting game surface, everything affixed to the floor but her and the dishes and vases—these slid occasionally with people stopping them, laughing with determined good cheer. There was too much laughter in the room, nervous and brave. The storm was beginning to tell on everyone.

"Here is a place for you right beside me," said the friendly woman as Louise came up. The woman was small and slender, with reddish gold hair and a wide, mobile mouth—and circles under her eyes. She had a piece of plain, dry toast on her plate. Catching the direction of Louise's gaze, she said, "I'll be fine. I niched some of my husband's seasickness medicine this morning—he's
really
under the weather." She rolled her eyes, eyes emphasized by a fine line of kohl about them, their lashes blacked. Her cheeks were artificially pinked; she penciled her brows. By Louise's standards, a lot of face paint, though it was artfully applied. The woman added, "I've never had such a bad crossing, have you?"

"This is my first." Louise sat down just as the steward came to remove the fruit course, bowls of melon.

She nodded, letting hers go.

"Well, they are much nicer than this usually." The woman held out her hand. "I'm Pia Montebello, Roland Montebello's wife, the American plenipotentiary minister to France. If we can be of any help, you must say so—I understand, Miss Vandermeer, you are taking up residence in the very nicest part of France."

Louise stared blankly. "I shall live near Nice." Before she could accept the offered hand, it was withdrawn. Mrs. Montebello required both hands to catch her plate as it slid toward her lap.

The fish course arrived: raw oysters with drawn spicy butter. Mrs. Montebello refused these, shaking her head with a tiny groan, then turned away and covered her mouth with her napkin. She emitted a loud, rather unladylike belch. Laughing weakly, she said, "I may just need a dash more of Roland's medicine."

Louise liked oysters, though for the sake of the delicate stomach beside her, she quelled any obvious enthusiasm. She speared a little fellow, sliding him out of his pearly shell into the cup-bath of butter on her plate, then ate him whole, her mouth full when Mrs. Montebello said, "I understand you are soon to be married."

"Mm," was all that Louise could say at first. She nodded yes.

"How exciting for you."

Louise looked at her. The woman wanted something. Her friendliness had a purpose. "Yes," Louise said, then popped another oyster into her mouth.

Mary volunteered, "She's marrying a real prince. Isn't that romantic?"

Louise eyed her cousin, then asked, "Have you been to the kennels today, Mary?"

"No."

"I went early, and I can tell you, someone brought aboard fleas. I killed two on the Bear this morning."

"The Bear" was the name Louise used for her new puppy, until a real name came along for the little bugger. (She had named him Bugger for a day. until her father found out.)

"Oh, no!" Mary all but leaped up from the table. "Poor Cayenne! She's so sensitive." Cayenne, Mary's cat, became scabby and bumpy if she was bit by a flea.

"Cayenne is fine. I tucked her under my coat and sneaked her into mv room, where I bathed her and left her asleep on my bed. You can see her after breakfast." Mary, in the same suite as her parents, wouldn't dare bring her cat into the room.

Mary settled into her chair again, relieved. "Oh, thank you, thank you…" Then looking about the table, she broke into rhapsodic descriptions of the antics of her cat—successfully diverted from talking about Louise to overly friendly strangers.

This conversation segued into another as omelettes and grills of tomato and Oxford sausage arrived, a sumptuous breakfast over which even Mary was something less than eager. Louise seemed to be the only one at the table whose stomach blithely answered to hunger. Mary, meanwhile, made up for her poor appetite with a gluttony of chatter, from pets to school friends to lip colors that could only be found in Paris. Louise lost interest.

Less boring, she noticed Lieutenant Johnston down the table. (The ship's officers were encouraged to spend their free time in the public rooms among the first-class passengers, since many first-class parties were short of men, well-off fathers tending to stay home to watch over their businesses while the mothers, aunts, and daughters scoured the Old World for titled bachelors.) There he sat, her mistake from last night, smiling and nodding in her direction. She had felt such a nice little ping of interest yesterday evening.

For a brief time, Louise had felt alive, enjoying the company of someone she had thought gallant, suave, a soul mate—a feeling not unlike the hopeful thrill she had felt on her way to Montreal—only to arrive, so to speak, at the sad destination of a gushing, revering, oafish dolt.

The entirely inappropriate lieutenant winked at Louise, as if they shared something between them. She made a pull of her mouth and shifted her attention to her grilled tomato collapsing around its mound of stuffing. Lieutenant Johnston remained, without a doubt, one of the finest looking young men on the ship, yet his handsome exterior clearly bred disappointment—which in turn bred an inexplicable yet increasingly familiar anxiety, the hum of a small, unnamed panic that tightened Louise's chest.

The feeling compounded a sense of urgency. For there was another newly revealed disappointment waiting for her, with little she could do about it directly. It hadn't occurred to her for an instant that her parents would marry oft their "beautiful treasure" to a man who was scarred, blind in one eye, and lame.