Pam Rosenthal (25 page)

I shall be back,
mignon,
after first turning you over and kissing my way down, down, until I reach the delicate skin at the back of your knees, being most careful not to miss a freckle anywhere on my way.

Perhaps she wouldn’t hide this particular letter away so soon, at least not until it had lost its power to make her tremble. Or until she’d figured out how to pen an equally erotic response.

But so far her efforts in that direction had come to nothing.

It wasn’t that she’d stopped thinking of him that way. Quite the contrary. But it was quite a different thing actually to put her thoughts down on paper. She’d already wasted a precious sheet, trying to tell him what it felt like to have him inside her. But somehow it had come out all wrong—she’d wound up telling him that she’d felt “filled up” and “stuffed” and that he’d been “big as a baguette.” Which was true enough, but hardly created the effect she’d hoped for.

And so she’d finally had to apologize to him (humorously, she hoped) for being unable to express what she felt, and to promise to make it up to him in person when she saw him in a month.

Well, perhaps a month.

It was only two weeks more before the Duc and Duchesse were scheduled to return. And even assuming that they took their time paying her wages, she ought to have her twenty
livres
in hand by the start of the new year.

Louise had explained to her how wages were paid here. The Gorgon liked to make a little ceremony of it: every six months, from when you’d been hired (or whenever the Duchesse decreed she had hired you), you’d be summoned to a small room in the Duchesse’s wing of the chateau. The Duchesse would be seated in front of a big ledger (“as though on the day of judgment”), ready to deliver a little speech about all the ways you’d been inadequate during the last few months. (“She’s got sharp eyes, Marie-Laure; you’d be surprised what she knows. And a sharp tongue, too.”) It was only after bowing your head and humbly promising to do better that you’d receive your money.

Fine. She’d bow her head, promise to do better, and then—money firmly in hand—she’d announce that she was leaving, and that the Duchesse could go hang herself.

Yes, certainly in a month, probably even sooner.

Monsieur Colet had given her a list of likely employers in Paris, along with a letter of introduction. She had only to pack her belongings, take her eighty-three
livres
, pay fifty-six of them for a coach seat to Paris, post the letter she’d already written to Gilles, and
voilà
, she’d be on her way.

It
sounded
like such a happy, exciting plan.

So why wasn’t she happy or excited?

Why (except in the buoyant letters she wrote to Joseph) was she so tense and irritable, anxious and fearful—and absolutely certain that something was going to go terribly wrong?

She, who was usually so patient and optimistic: hadn’t it been she, after all, who’d assured Joseph that two months wasn’t really such a long time to wait? But he’d been right and she’d been wrong; the time since he’d left had seemed endless and she’d begun to feel like an oppressive, sullen presence among the rest of the servants, who were all enjoying their masters’ absence.

“While the cat’s away, the mice dance,” Bertrande had crowed six weeks ago, as she, Louise, and Marie-Laure watched the family coach rattle over the drawbridge and down the hill.

Hugs, smiles, and bawdy jokes were exchanged; Nicolas and Monsieur Colet huddled in consultation, and Nicolas produced some serious calculations in the matter of how many bottles of wine the servants could reasonably consume from the Duc’s cellar, to be accounted for in his ledger under the category headings of “spoilage” and “breakage.”

His double-accounting schemes extended even to the footmen, Marie-Laure surmised from a conversation she’d overheard a week or so later, one night when she’d come downstairs to squirrel away another love letter. Arsène was whispering confidentially to Nicolas that something had been “completely taken care of.”

Neither of them had noticed her at the doorway; she’d shrugged and tiptoed away back upstairs. The men who supervised France’s finances were probably a lot like Nicolas, she thought: subtle, good at details—only not so kind as Nicolas, nor as willing to share the spoils of their cleverness.

Of course, there was still work to be done, even during this little saturnalia. Nicolas was generous, but he wasn’t about to let anyone shirk his or her chores. The Gorgon had left strict orders about what she expected to see accomplished upon her return.

Things did seem to get done, too; it was wonderful what people could accomplish, working at a pleasant, reasonable pace. People relaxed as they ate their meals, joked and flirted and sometimes even danced in the evenings, like Bertrande’s proverbial mice. They made nice fires in the kitchen hearth and enjoyed each other’s company, keeping snug and warm against the autumn rains that had swept down over Provence, and the mistral howling in the hills.

While Marie-Laure tried to keep her bad temper to herself and not to dampen anyone’s spirits.

Probably it was nothing more than exhaustion, she thought. She trudged through her workdays, yawning, rubbing her eyes, swaying on her feet at the washbasin, and one day almost toppling into a pot of bubbling jelly. Guiltily, she accepted Robert’s help with some of her chores, all the while shrugging off Bertrande’s worried inquiries.

“But I’m fine, Bertrande. Really I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”

Of course I’m tired
, she’d told herself. Making passionate love until dawn every night for a month would make anybody tired.

As soon as she got caught up on her sleep, she decided, she’d be good as new. Or at least not so depressed by Joseph’s absence, and not so fearfully envious of his wife. She wished now that she’d encouraged him to say more of whatever he’d been trying to tell her their last night together. Perhaps he would have argued her out of her worries.

Or perhaps not.

For suppose the Marquise turned out to be prettier than she was reputed to be? Or had starved herself into a more fashionable figure?

Not that her looks really mattered. She was still his wife, and still an aristocrat. Aristocrats had to have children; Joseph would be duty bound to oblige in the matter. Anyway, Marie-Laure thought, what woman
wouldn’t
want a child who stood fair to inherit Joseph’s gifts? Of course, only an aristocrat could afford to give such a child the advantages it would deserve.

She squeezed her eyes shut to block out unpleasant images, pressed her fists in front of her eyes to push away unpleasant thoughts.

The pressure made her lightheaded. And the giddiness, when it had passed, left her drained and rather terrified.

Louise was down in the kitchen tonight, dancing jigs with Martin and the others. Marie-Laure had been looking forward to reading snugly under the quilt.

She pushed the book away and blew out her candle. For words—even Shakespeare’s words—seemed to hold no magic for her tonight.

“Sweet are the uses of adversity,” the character in the play had proclaimed.

Oh really?

And she knew another wrongheaded example, too, from another popular writer. It was somewhere in the back of her head, or perhaps on the tip of her tongue. But she was too tired to remember it now…her limbs felt like lead, and…

What
was
that horrible sound, waking her from a deep, almost drugged sleep? It sounded like an enormous voice from the heaven she didn’t quite believe in or the haunted forest the other servants liked to tell stories about. And it seemed to cry
Nooooooooooooooooooo
, as though it were talking to her alone, spitefully informing her that all her hopes would come to nothing.

It was pitch-black outside. She didn’t care. Shuddering, she threw herself at Louise, rudely jostling her out of her own slumbers and drenching her with tears.

“But, Marie-Laure, it’s just the mistral…oh don’t cry, Marie-Laure, of course he still loves you.”

“No, no, he can’t, Louise. Not as I am—angry and exhausted all the time, with my hair all stringy and my belly not flat anymore, and with…a baby coming.” She gulped back her tears and peered anxiously at Louise. This was the first time she’d admitted it to anyone, even herself.

But Louise hadn’t looked the least bit shocked or surprised.

“We wondered how long you’d pretend it wasn’t so,” she whispered, “like Arsène’s—” She clapped her hand over her mouth, eyes very large for a moment. And then, smiling her sweet, misshapen smile, she kissed Marie-Laure gently and stroked the strange new convexity to her belly.

“Monsieur Joseph will love you all the more as you grow,” she said. “You’ll look like a beautiful ripe winter pear.”

And didn’t Marie-Laure know, Louise added soothingly, that men loved babies?

“They pretend they don’t, of course. Well, they don’t like the crying and the messes, but they’re so proud of having made a whole new person. I could see it in my father’s face every time one arrived, though he was never sure how we’d manage to feed it. Don’t worry, Marie-Laure, you’ll see, he’ll be happy and proud. And it’s not such a long time to wait, is it, until you go to join him in Paris?”

Marie-Laure had shaken her head, sniffing back her tears, smiling despite herself, allowing herself to be convinced. It wasn’t such a long time to wait. The Duc and Duchesse would be back in almost two weeks.

One week.

Two days.

Part Two

Chapter Seventeen

Provence

Late December 1783

Bertrande had a less cheerful proverb to offer, the day the Duc and Duchesse’s carriage rattled back over the drawbridge and into the courtyard. “He who laughs on Friday will cry on Sunday.”

Saturnalia was over. The Duchesse summoned Nicolas that very afternoon.

He spent an hour with her, and the next few hours pacing and making notes, trying to parcel her orders into new tasks and responsibilities.

He had new chores to assign, he announced at supper in the dessert kitchen. His shoulders sagged. It wasn’t going to be easy for anyone, he added.

“All right,” Bertrande replied, “but first let us listen to some of Jacques’s stories of Paris, for we’ll need some diversion in our heads, when our backs begin to ache. Tell us about the wedding, Jacques.”

“It was in a cathedral,” Jacques began, “with stained glass windows painting us all with wonderful colors, and…”

He continued on, describing the hubbub of the Paris streets, the wealth and splendor of the Hôtel Mélicourt, the amazing abilities of the girls at the Palais Royale (where, it seemed, the Duc had spent much of his visit—and had even, Jacques added with a leer, shared the goods with his valet once or twice).

And what, someone asked after the envious laughter had subsided, of the Vicomte’s new wife? Terribly plain, Jacques replied, impossible to imagine a gentleman taking her to bed. (Marie-Laure couldn’t help breathing a bit more easily.)

Still, he continued, the Marquise was a good employer; her servants were loyal: you could barely pry any gossip out of them, that’s how well they were paid. She set a good table, too, though she didn’t receive many guests. But those she did receive, he added, were quite interesting, like her actress friend Mademoiselle Beauvoisin (he shot a keen glance down the table at Marie-Laure)—“
O-là-là
,” he said, “I’ve never seen such a beauty.”

He paused for effect. Well,
nobody
had ever seen such a beauty. And she had a reputation, that one…

“All right, all right, that’s enough for now, Jacques. We must all wait until tomorrow to hear more.” Nicolas’s interruption was greeted by groans and catcalls. Jacques smirked and turned back to his supper, while everyone else quieted down to hear the onerous list of announcements.

There would be a banquet and a ball in two weeks, Nicolas said, to celebrate the New Year. So the ballroom must have a thorough cleaning. (He nodded grimly. “And yes, that means every crystal of every chandelier.”)

Menus from the kitchen would have to be reconsidered, he continued, because the Duchesse was finally, miraculously, pregnant. (A few more catcalls accompanied this announcement, accompanied by a few stares at Marie-Laure. “Quiet,” Nicolas snapped.) Anyway, the pregnant Gorgon had informed Nicolas that her appetite was most delicate these days. (Monsieur Colet stalked away in high dudgeon, offended that anything his kitchen produced could be considered difficult to digest.)

The carpenters would be back directly after the holidays, he told them now, to build some sort of new hunting lodge for the Duc, as well as a suite of rooms for the new member of the family.

(“That means scaffolds and drop cloths again.” Bertrande groaned. “And plaster dust everywhere.”)

And of course, Nicolas concluded, the Duchesse’s wardrobe would need extensive renovation, in light of her condition. Her chambermaid wanted help (he nodded to Louise) unpacking the eleven trunks they’d brought back from Paris. Not to speak of miscellaneous boxes of ribbons, stockings, hats, and gloves.

“Oh, and Marie-Laure…”

Thank heaven. At least she’d be getting her money.

“…Madame wants you to serve tea this afternoon, in the library.”