Pam Rosenthal (40 page)

The other policemen were leading him away now. He stopped in front of Marie-Laure for a moment.

“She was afraid to tell me that she was pregnant.” His eyes, in his crumpled face, were dark and half-dead with awful guilt. “But I wouldn’t have minded,” he said. “I would have forgiven her, I would have cared for her and the baby too. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, Arsène,” she answered. “I know that absolutely.”

He turned and allowed them to lead him down the corridor.

Flanked by the Marquise and Mademoiselle Beauvoisin, Joseph stood with the inspector in the center of the room. It seemed that he’d figured out the story for himself, in the Bastille, after Jeanne’s last visit with (he glanced at the inspector), with her new footman.

“I have to arrest you again, of course,” the inspector told him, “for escaping. Cleverly done, by the way—they’ll have to do something about the inadequacy of their procedures.

“And you’re damn lucky you didn’t kill that fellow, Monsieur le Vicomte, because his confession will quickly get you off.”

“I was frantic when I realized my sister-in-law was bringing him to Versailles,” Joseph said. “My plan was to come and warn you, Jeanne, so you could keep Marie-Laure safe. But then I saw the vines, growing up the wall to Marie-Laure’s room and…” He grinned. “She and I have rather a tradition of late-night visits, you see.

“I’d have killed him for sure”—the grin half disappeared into the handkerchief Joseph held against his bloody cheek—“if Marie-Laure hadn’t screamed not to.”

“But you’ll have to excuse me for a moment, Inspector,” he said now, “while I’m properly introduced to my daughter.”

He peered down at Sophie, but she’d fallen back to sleep, and he had to content himself with a few shy kisses on the top of her head, gently wrapping his arms around mother and baby both.

The solidity of his body was overwhelming. She pressed against him, almost horrified by the thrill of arousal that shot through her belly and thighs even as she wept.

The Marquise seemed to have ushered everyone else out of the room.

“Shhh, shhh,
mon amour
,” Joseph murmured, “it’s over, it’s all over.”

But it wasn’t over.

Don’t kill him!
Everyone would think how clearheaded she’d been to warn Joseph not to kill the man whose confession would prove his innocence. Only she would know that at that moment she’d had no thought except to protect poor Arsène.

It goes deep, she thought, this solidarity with common people like yourself—and this resentment of aristocratic privilege.

Could it go deeper than love?

She stood alone with Sophie in her arms, long after the tears had dried and the inspector had taken Joseph away.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“Stop fidgeting, Marie-Laure,” Mademoiselle Beauvoisin scolded her. “Just hold your arms out, to get them out of the way,
oui, comme ça
, while Claudine reties the bows down the front of your gown.”

She spread her arms obediently, wondering whether she could raise them higher than shoulder level and finding that she couldn’t. The stays Claudine had laced her into were too constricting, compressing her waist and shoulders while they lifted her breasts like cream cakes on a tray.

She surveyed herself in one of the blue bedroom’s tall mirrors. At least one lifelong wish had been granted her. Her freckles had quite disappeared; the layers of powder and rouge had transformed her face into the cool, pleasant countenance of a doll.

A more interesting wish was soon to come true as well. She was going to meet Ambassador Benjamin Franklin. Well, if he really showed up at the reception the Marquise was giving this afternoon. He’d promised to try his best to attend, if his gouty leg and the stone in his bladder were not too painful.

The party was for Joseph, who was due to be released from the Bastille today. The state had withdrawn its case against him, but he’d still had to go through a small trial and acquittal for having escaped. The Marquise thought he’d be home by early evening, to join the celebration.

“We’re going to invite everybody,” she’d proclaimed, “who is anybody. And everybody we like as well. We’ll begin in the late afternoon,
we’ll have a good, light supper, and then fireworks in the garden.”

But Ambassador Franklin would outshine even the fireworks—or
Doctor
Franklin, as people liked to call him in Paris, in deference to his scientific achievements. The flirtatious ladies who surrounded him wherever he went also liked to call him Papa. Marie-Laure thought of her own papa. How thrilled he’d have been to meet the great man, she thought. And how amazed by the gown she was wearing. If you could really say she was wearing it; perhaps the complicated construction was wearing
her
.

Mademoiselle Beauvoisin had announced a few days ago that she was dissatisfied with the light silk ensemble she’d ordered.

“The apricot color does strange things to me.” But perhaps Marie-Laure would like to try it. Marie-Laure supposed this was as tactful a way as any to supply her with clothes for the reception. Or perhaps simply to keep her busy, so she wouldn’t expire of the fidgets while awaiting Joseph’s release.

She’d already spent two hours under the hands of the hairdresser, part of the time with Sophie at her breast, while he gushed over the Rousseauesque charm of coifing a nursing mother.

“And your
hair
, Mademoiselle…”

He’d have given anything, he told her, to arrange it in one of the grand high styles of a few years ago, when he’d used a portable ladder to get to the top of the soaring edifices he’d erected upon women’s heads. Ah, the accessories, such a shame that they were no longer
à la mode
—the plumes, the flags, the clipper ships riding high atop towering waves of hair; he remembered with particular pride a lady who’d carried an entire village at the crest of her mountainous coiffure.

He swept some of Marie-Laure’s hair up—not too high, he assured her, merely a little tease, a hint of nostalgia,
une bagatelle, une petite plaisanterie
—in
order to set off the long curls around her neck and shoulders. Very
jeune fille
, girlish and ingenue, he declared. A veritable milkmaid’s coiffure: the Queen herself was wearing just such simple styles these days. “So fresh, so naive, so…” he hesitated, pondered, gave a final, expert twist to one last flirtatious spiral of hair and brought his fluttering hands down to rest at his sides.

And as he’d clearly exhausted his store of adjectives, he concluded by repeating the very first one he’d used. “
Voilà
, Mademoiselle, it’s so, so very…Rousseauesque,
n’est-ce pas
?”

Mademoiselle Beauvoisin had pronounced the “milkmaid’s coiffure” a great success. And perfectly in keeping with a gown that might seem monstrously elaborate to Marie-Laure but was actually quite a bit simpler and more girlish than last year’s styles.

At any rate, the dressmaker had endeavored to create that impression. The apricot silk opened below the waist to reveal cascades of dazzling white ruffled underskirt, with only a whisper of embroidery at the bottom to echo the blue of the big floppy bows that closed the bodice.

“Just what every milkmaid in France tosses on in the morning,” Marie-Laure murmured, “when she sallies forth to bid the cows
bonjour
.”

She turned carefully in front of the mirror. The blue satin slippers pinched just a little—hardly enough to distract her from the iron constriction at her waist and belly—but she adored their high spool-shaped heels and delicate buckles.

“I
do
look nice,” she marveled, “and not so dwarfish as usual. But what a lot of work it took.”

“Too much work,” the Marquise appeared in the doorway, rather grim-faced under her own layers of rouge and corseting, but imposing in deep green silk with a faint pink Oriental print woven through it.

“I’ve got to attend to the food,” she said, “which is much more rewarding than all this tiresome primping, but I wanted to see how pretty you looked before I went down to the kitchen.”

“And I’m going to be late,” Mademoiselle Beauvoisin interjected, “unless I simply toss on my own gown. Come help me, Claudine. No, don’t feel guilty, Marie-Laure,” she called over her shoulder. “An actress can always dress quickly.”

Marie-Laure smiled shyly at the Marquise, who was studying the details of her attire with unusual interest.

“Very nice indeed. But you need something bright at your neck.”

Something winked and sparkled between her fingers. “Try this. It was a gift from Joseph’s mother.”

Marie-Laure stared at the finely wrought chain and its graceful pendants of starry diamonds, cloudy opals, and sapphires like the sky an hour before dawn. “Oh no, Madame,” she whispered, “I couldn’t.

“I mean,” she added, trying to turn her confusion into a joke, “do you think it accords with the simple
jeune fille
effect I’m supposed to be creating?”

“
That
, I couldn’t possibly tell you. But I think it accords extremely well with the depth and resolve of your character. So you will please oblige me by wearing it.”

“Of course, Madame,” she turned, bending her head so the Marquise could fasten the clasp. “Thank you, Madame.”

“It’s yours, Marie-Laure, in exchange for what you’ve taught me about love.”

Of course she couldn’t really keep it. Still, it was a thrill even to borrow such a necklace.

Alone in front of the mirror, she took a last, long, appraising look at herself. How lovely to be slender around the middle again. Her waist rose from the profusion of silk skirts and petticoats like the stem of a flower. It seemed almost too narrow, too delicate to support the swell of her all-but-bare breasts, the jewels blazing coldly at her throat, the copper curls spilling down her naked shoulders to her ruched and ruffled sleeves.

Cinderella dressed for the ball. She shrugged her shoulders (the tightly laced stays allowed one to do
that
, at any rate) and grimaced at her fanciful idea. She might imagine herself a Cinderella, but she’d never marry her prince.

Because life wasn’t a fairy tale—nor were wishes granted in threes. She’d been given a day without freckles and a chance to meet the ambassador, but as for happily ever after (
Don’t kill him, Joseph!
)—well, the truth (Gilles’s truth, Arsène’s truth) was achingly clear.

And the truth was that it wasn’t enough simply to love someone. Not when so much hatred and injustice stood like the walls of the Bastille between the two of you.

She smiled sadly into the mirror. Tomorrow was going to be difficult. But she’d think about tomorrow…tomorrow.

“Monsieur de Calonne. Madame Helvétius. The Abbé Morellet and the Marquis and Marquise de Lafayette. Monsieur Caron de Beaumarchais. Monsieur and Madame Lavoisier… May I present my houseguest, Mademoiselle Vernet.”

The introductions rolled on; amazing that the famous names had actual faces and bodies attached to them. It was fun to smile, to murmur modest replies to compliments, even to flirt a little.

She helped the Marquise usher people into the grand salon with its murals painted from mythology. Chairs had been set up in conversational groups; footmen served glasses of champagne and cups of tea, in deference to Doctor Franklin’s preference. But neither the ambassador nor Joseph had arrived yet.

An argument about taxation broke out among bankers, statesmen, and economists. The Marquise stepped in to smooth things over, suppressing an all-too-evident desire to fan the disagreement into raging controversy.

“Come over here, Marie-Laure,” Mademoiselle Beauvoisin called from the midst of a different group: handsome, rather over-dressed people whose mobile faces and extravagant gestures seemed to demand adulation. Actors, some of whom were appearing in the wildly successful
Marriage of Figaro
.

“And so,” Mademoiselle Beauvoisin concluded her story with a flourish, “she faced the Baron Roque’s murderer alone, in this very house.” The actors applauded, but the sound of their clapping was drowned out by a sudden hubbub at the door.

Papa!

L’ambassadeur!
Doctor Franklin!

One mostly heard the delighted squeals of young ladies. But formidable older ones glided quickly across the room as well. The Marquise hurried to greet him.

The American ambassador would have disappeared completely in a sea of lace and silk and kisses if he were not so tall. Surprisingly upright for a man of seventy-eight, he wore an unadorned dark red coat, his sparse gray hair falling to his shoulders, his famous spectacles worn low on his nose. You wouldn’t suspect that he had gout, Marie-Laure thought, if it weren’t for the attentive young man at his arm—his grandson and secretary, one of the actors said.

“Would you like to be introduced to him?” the playwright Caron de Beaumarchais turned to her.

“Oh yes,” she breathed. “Oh, please, Monsieur.”

As the whole room seemed to be moving in Franklin’s direction, they made slow progress. The playwright took Marie-Laure’s arm and drew her into line with the others waiting to greet the ambassador.

“Aristocrats,” he murmured, casting his eye over the crowd that surrounded them, “are a bunch of big children in search of ceaseless amusement. I created Figaro’s lecherous master, so you can take my word for it. But
I
am an adult: I purchased the
de
in my name and I know the value of a
livre
—and of a woman. So when your Vicomte tires of you, please consider paying me a visit.”