The Heiress (20 page)

‘Not at all,' de Tallieu smiled. ‘I can arrange the details of the introduction. There are a number of people who would be glad to help if they thought it would harm the Dubarry. But you must choose the girl, my dear. You must go there and explain to the creature who owns the place that you have a special friend in mind; none of her ordinary little pock-marked whores will do. This must be a virgin, and worthy of her destiny. Madame Grand'mere will understand. It will cost you a fortune, but I beseech you do not haggle or she will palm you off with something that won't do at all.'

‘I have money,' Louise said. ‘I can pay anything she asks.'

‘Good, good. Disguise yourself, of course. You have a great deal to do, my dear, and not much time. Go to the Quai d'Orée tonight and take a couple of strong fellows with you, armed in case of trouble. It's not a savoury part of the city.'

‘I know where it is—it's in the beggars' quarter, where every thief and prostitute and murderer in Paris lives,' Louise said. ‘Won't you come with me? You'd know better who to choose.'

‘Ah no,' the Comte shook his head. ‘I will play my part here, and you must play yours. Besides, I have no idea what kind of woman appeals to men. I abhor the creatures myself.'

‘I'll go alone, then,' she said. ‘I'll buy one of these girls and keep her hidden. Then what must I do?'

‘Give money to the lackeys you took with you and send them out of Paris. There must be no witnesses, no gossiping. I will arrange for you to bring the girl to the King's private Cabinet tomorrow night. That much I promise you. If you have chosen wisely you may ask for your
lettre de cachet
before the morning, and I swear you'll get it. It's been done before at such an hour. No one will ever know. How you apply it and where you place Madame for safe keeping is up to you.'

‘I know where I'll send her,' Louise whispered. ‘I've thought of nothing else all night. Why are you doing this?' she asked. ‘Not just to help me, surely?'

‘I told you,' he giggled his soft laugh. ‘Pure mischief. I'm bored and I get restless without some little intrigue to pass the time. I have a score to settle with Madame, remember. I told you she'd pay for snubbing me like that. And if I can help replace the dear Dubarry I shall have grateful friends in the highest places. If your find is a success she may stay on, who knows. One last word. Look for a girl with breeding and intelligence, if such a one exists. Otherwise I suggest you insist on the bizarre. Come, it is late and we must go. The Quai d'Orée, and ask for Madame Grand'mère. Such a clever name for an old procuress, don't you think?'

Charles had been to Paris that night, but not to see his wife. As a boy he had suffered from fits of restlessness that drove him out in search of trouble, in search of women as he grew older, even into picking drunken quarrels. It was a long time since the urge to lose himself in some debauch had attacked him as violently as it did that evening, and it hounded him as it had done his Scottish ancestors long ago, sending them out on cattle raids, burning and kidnapping and killing for the sheer pleasure of it.

A few friends went to the capital with him, the young Vicomte de Renouille, the companion of that fatal game in which he lost his money to de Charlot and when the whole unhappy train of events began nearly a year before, and a Captain of musketeers with more money than sense or morals. It was the Vicomte's idea that they should visit a certain courtesan who kept a fine house near the Tuileries where rich young men were welcomed and provided with amusement. By two in the morning they had settled down to gamble; his friends were hilariously drunk, but Charles, with more wine and brandy in his stomach than any of them, was deadly sober and in an evil mood. Luck ran against him, and he pursued it savagely, losing with every hand. He already owed the mistress of the house a thousand louis, and the Captain of musketeers five hundred more. Madame Boileau was a handsome woman in her thirties who had advanced from common prostitution on the streets to the semi-respectable status of a kept woman, protected by several rich men of middle class. The house was the parting gift of the last of them and she was wealthy enough now to run her own establishment with a select clientele of young noblemen and officers and a choice of half a dozen girls. Madame had developed taste since her youth; there was nothing sordid or vulgar about her house. She catered with elegance and she charged accordingly, and in her own way she was not ill-natured.

‘Come, Monsieur Macdonald, you've lost enough for tonight,' she said. It would never do to let the young fool run into debts he could not pay; it would give her place a bad name among his friends. ‘Leave the cards for tonight; they're not going to run in your favour. Come upstairs with me instead.'

He looked up at her, hesitating for a moment. He knew the whores in the upper rooms; in his time he had sampled all of them. ‘You'll be paid, Madame,' he snarled. ‘No matter what I lose. De Renouille, deal another hand!'

The Vicomte shook his head. ‘Too drunk, my dear Charles. Too drunk to play now … Did you suggest a trip upstairs, Madame? I think I can just make the most of it if we go now.… Poor Charles here is in a devilish state, aren't you, friend? His wife has left him and he's lost a fortune.… Come on, Madame, see what you can do to cheer him up.' He was half on his feet when Charles's fist caught him in the mouth; he fell backwards, upsetting the table, and lay without moving on his back. Madame put her hand on Charles's shoulder.

‘He deserved that,' she said quietly. ‘Come to my rooms, we'll leave the girls for tonight. That's not what you need.'

‘Tell me,' he sneered, ‘what do I need, then? What do you suggest?'

Madame's suggestion kept him until the dawn broke, and when he left her bed the note for a thousand louis had been torn up, and Madame lay sleeping peacefully, as handsome as one of Boucher's voluptuous goddesses, on her satin pillows. She was capable of such acts of generosity at times; it was worth the money to prove that she was still better at her art than the conceited strumpets she employed who were only half her age. As the dawn came up over the city Charles spurred his horse on the road to Versailles, and as he rode he cursed. He had never felt worse in his life. If he had met his wife along that road he felt he would have killed her and on his soul he could not understand why he should hate her so. It was not as if he had ever loved her for a moment.

‘Madame, I beg you, let me send word to the Comtesse de Mallot. Let me send for Madame Macdonald!'

‘No,' Anne said. ‘No, Marie-Jeanne, I forbid you to tell anyone about this. The doctor says I'm perfectly well. It will be time enough to tell them when we're back at Charantaise. I couldn't bear to have them fussing over me. If anyone told my husband I should never forgive them.'

‘But, Madame,' the little maid's eyes opened wide, ‘he'll have to know!'

‘I see no reason why he should,' her mistress said. ‘That's all over now. The child is nothing to do with him.'

She got up and walked away, repressing the tears which threatened. If Charles were told he would imagine it a trick to get him back. She was done with making those attempts. And now the matter was beyond her; her father-in-law had written to say he was consulting a lawyer to arrange a final settlement and begin the case of a separation once they had the King's approval. This request must be delayed because the King's bad humour made him capricious where petitions were concerned. It struck her as doubly ironic that the cousins who had been so anxious to arrange the match were taking so much trouble to bring it to an end. And now she was content to let them. All her life Anne had been strong and independent; she had fought with tenacity and courage to win Charles's love, sacrificing pride and honour and deeming both well lost. Until the night of that fatal ball her hopes had still run high, but those few words had crushed them finally.

‘I don't think you know the Baroness de Vitale. Louise, my charming wife.' Even when the words themselves had slipped into confusion, when she was an old woman and past looking for love, she would remember that dark face, so full of mockery and cruelty, and the light eyes gleaming down at her in triumph. It was all she could remember of him now. Pregnancy had sapped her strength; she was weak for the first time, weak and painfully vulnerable. If she could not have comfort, she shrank in horror from the thought of cruelty, and cruelty of the kind at which Charles was so expert. If he came near her, if she fell victim to his mockery, his callousness, she would be broken, and she knew it. The child must be kept secret; it would be all she had to live for, all that remained of the absolute ruin of her life.

‘He's taken everything from me,' she said suddenly. ‘If I have a son, he shan't grow up to be like him. He shan't take my child too. And he would, Marie-Jeanne, he would. I know that now. That would be his ultimate revenge on me for marrying him.' She swung round. ‘No one is to know, you understand, no one in the world. In two more weeks we'll be at Charantaise and we'll be safe!'

‘Thank God, Madame,' the maid said quickly. She waited a moment; the intimacy which had grown up between them was still new, and she blushed.

‘Madame … what about Captain O'Neil? You said we would be going to Metz.'

‘That is no concern of yours,' Anne answered more sharply than she meant, and, seeing the girl's flushed face, she instantly relented. ‘I didn't mean to snap at you, my child. I haven't forgotten the Captain. Anyway, if I were going there it would be no place for you.'

Marie-Jeanne curtsied and said no more.

The Quai d'Orée was a dark, winding street in the heart of the city; the houses leant across the narrow cobbled way until the roof-tops seemed to touch. It was a place of darkness and stench, riddled with alleyways and passages like a stinking rat-run, and Louise had been forced to abandon her coach some way back and go on foot, protected by the two armed lackeys. Both carried a torch in one hand and an iron-tipped cudgel in the other. Creatures, scarcely indentifiable as human, watched them from the black doorways and the alley mouths and scuttled away. Once a beggar approached them, horribly deformed in both legs, crawling along on rough crutches, whining and whimpering for alms, until the servants drove him off. The language which followed them down the dark street made Louise feel sick.

‘We should turn back,' the senior lackey said. ‘This is madness, Madame. The place is crawling with cut-throats and thieves!'

‘Hold your tongue,' his mistress snapped. ‘This must be the house—there, where a lantern hangs outside the door.'

De Tallieu had given her directions, and this must be the place. It was the only one which had a light; the light was only a tallow candle, guttering and spitting in its glass frame, and it swung to and fro in the cold wind blowing in from the Seine. She was covered from head to foot in a cloak and her face was hidden by a silk half mask. Most of Madame Grand'mère's clients came to her incognito. If she guessed their names, she had no proof and wanted none. Money was her only interest. Blackmail would have quickly ruined her trade and banished her to prison. Some of the most powerful people in the kingdom slipped into the house on the Quai d'Orée.

When the door was opened to Louise, the smell was almost worse than the stink of refuse in the streets. There was a scented pomander hidden in her muff and she raised it quickly to her face. A man in dirty rags led the way down a dank passage, lit here and there by more tallow candles, and finally showed her into a little room. The lackeys stayed outside the door. The room was furnished with a chair and a table and it was empty. The creature who had escorted her made a low bow. He had great thick arms and shoulders like a wrestler, and the black hair hung down almost to his eyes.

‘Sit down, Highness, Madame Grand'mère will be here in a moment.' A few moments later the door opened again and an extraordinary apparition came hobbling through it supporting herself on a stick. It was impossible to guess the woman's age, or even to be sure it was a woman. The painted face, daubed with scarlet rouge, its sunken eyes outlined with black, was almost sexless; the mouth was a red slit, and it parted showing gums and isolated teeth in a hideous travesty of a smile. On the head there was set a black wig, covered in shiny black curls, with a mob cap on top of it. A black woollen shawl and a lace apron, now so dirty as to be part of the fusty dress she wore, completed the appearance of the infamous Madame Grand'mère. Rumour had insisted once that she was actually a man; it was not so. The monster was indeed a female one. Too unbelievably ugly to sell herself, she had started early in life selling others and now she was undisputed mistress of the frightful trade in vice that flourished in the city. Bastard children were sold to her, girls who ventured into Paris from the country without protection were often kidnapped and delivered to Madame Grand'mère, where they were soon beaten and starved into submission and sent out on to the streets or loaned to clients for a night or two. The children were the most profitable part of her trade; if they grew up to be pretty girls and handsome boys, she fed them and trained them with an eye to her special customers like the Comte de Tallieu. Those who proved impossible to sell into prostitution because they were ugly or defective, were either murdered or brutally maimed and sold to the beggar fraternity where they were put out to work the streets. The brute who had shown Louise to the room was one of Madame's little band of disciplinarians who kept the merchandise in order and tamed the spirits of the new recruits.

Many a noble lady or a well-off middle-class matron who yielded to the temptation to put our her bastard child to fosterhood, actually gave it into the keeping of Madame Grand'mère and never heard of it again. Madame dropped a curtsy to her new client; the darting black eyes noted the expensive stuff of her cloak and the ermine muff. In spite of the mask she was sure she had never seen her before, not even when parties of ladies and gentlemen visited her after an evening's entertainment when many were the worse for wine. It was easy to sell them anything then: non-virgins, boys who had been caught picking pockets on the streets … This great lady, nervous and sniffing at her scented muff, had not entered Madame Grand'mère's house before.