The Porcelain Dove (42 page)

Next evening, she ordered me to make up my bed in her dressing-room.

She'd taken to drinking sweetened wine before she retired, and that night emptied nigh on a full bottle of the vile stuff before crawling drink-sodden into bed. I fell asleep to a snoring like a rusty winch, and awoke some hours later to a terrified moaning. I don't know why—old habit, perhaps—but without thinking I leapt up and took her to my breast.

She pushed me away, her eyes wide with horrors only she could see.

"Beggars," she whispered. "Famine. Pestilence. War. Death."

I felt a prickling down my spine, as of tiny claws—it could equally have been fury or fear I felt, and in truth, with me the two are closely allied. None too gently, I took her wrists and shook her.

"Madame has had a nightmare," I said when sense returned to her eyes. "Little wonder, after the great quantity of wine madame drank before she retired."

She lifted cold hands to her ashy cheeks. "Very like," she said in a child's voice, then, "I have soiled myself, I think."

I scolded while I changed the linen on her bed, scolded while I built up the fire and heated water, scolded while I cleaned her and clothed her afresh, scolded while I emptied the slops out the window. She drank like a salt-merchant, I told her, and ate like a honey-bird. She'd grown lazy and gluttonous and forgotten all the good advice Dr. Tissot had given her. When was the last time she'd ridden Fleurette? I inquired. When was the last time she'd done anything at all?

If she'd answered me, we might have quarreled. I might have said the unforgivable at last, she might have sacked me, and angry as I was, I might even have gone. My tale would then have been a different one, and I no longer alive to tell it.

There are times when I regret that night, when I wish with all my heart that I had gone forth from Beauxprés to live, and to die, like ordinary folk. Eternity has made a philosophe of me, who am all unsuited to the role. Once, looking at the White Cat's dog Toutou asleep in her glass and rosewood case, it came to me that Beauxprés itself was such a case, and we the curiosities protected and imprisoned by its transparent walls. What collection are we part of? I wondered. In which Heavenly mansion are we stored? And then I laughed, for I had a fancy, like a vision 'twas so clear, of an angel's eye upon me and an angel's face lost in wonder at the art that had preserved me here so long.

Well. Think me mad if you will. Jean has called me mad, yes, and ungrateful, too. Had I gone out into the world, he says, my body would be cold clay by now, and my soul annealing in the flames of Purgatory. Confess, he says, his gesture encompassing silver fountain, unfading flowers, Sèvres sky, Colette playing at ball with a pair of bodiless hands, a yellow-haired demoness loitering at the garden gate—confess that this is better than dying.

Than dying? Of a certainty.

Than death? I cannot say.

CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH

In Which Brother Justin Goes Questing

By the spring of 1784, nearly three years had passed since the vicomte had set out on his quest, and a full year since his—or rather Reynaud's—last request for money. Monsieur had given up hope of him. Oh, he
said
nothing—adversity had not changed him so much as that—but when Just Vissot and Claude Mareschal began to plant corn-seed in their fields, monsieur began to plant hero-seed in M. Justin. He'd have had more success planting peas in a rose garden and having them grow into rose bushes. I suppose the boy had seen men grasp the hilts of a sword and wave the sharp end in the air, just as he'd seen men grasp the stilts of a plow and dig the sharp end in the soil. But he'd no more aptitude to one thing than to the other, which is to say none at all. As for skills useful for questing, he could ride—providing the horse walked slowly. And he could tell north from south—providing he had a compass. He could endure a prodigious lot of discomfort in the way of hunger and cold, and he was astonishingly persistent.

In a fairy tale, of course, his faults wouldn't have mattered. Either he counted as the youngest son, in which case he'd inevitably achieve the quest. Or else he was only the middle child, in which case he'd inevitably fail. In neither case would his ability to stick to a horse or wield a sword weigh in the balance. But monsieur (when he wasn't chasing after chimerical doves) was a man of reason, and reason told him that an adventurer is likely to survive longer and go further in the
world than a monk. Justin must therefore learn to be an adventurer. Q.E.D.

Once the original impossible premise had been accepted, monsieur's regimen seemed sensible enough: wrestling, swordplay, geography, tactics, ornithology (to help Justin keep the Dove alive once he'd found it), dancing (to make him light of foot), riding, hunting, and rock climbing. The stone-eyed tutors kept the boy at it from dawn to dusk. Whenever I chanced to look into the stable-yard, there he'd be, stripped to his shirt and gutting a rabbit or hacking his sword at a stick, his face white and set as cold porridge, while his tutors watched him with the indifferent patience of cats at a mouse hole.

Such scenes, though painful to behold, were easily enough avoided by avoiding the stable-yard. Far worse were the dancing lessons administered by M. le duc in the Miniature salon; those, I had no choice save to witness. The progress of those lessons seemed to unfold in tableaux, like a series of etchings in the style of M. Hogarth of England, for example. I imagine them bound in red calf and untouched for a century or more, the edges stained from being much handled when new. There are four plates in the series. We may call it "The Minuet."

The prints' common setting is a noble salon furnished in the highest style of the last century. A sofa and a rolled-up carpet weight the left-hand side of the composition. A satinwood clavichord, painted with dogs coursing a deer, balances it on the right. The curtains of the salon are drawn, and the walls are hung to the ceiling with miniature portraits whose variously gay and grave smiles give them an air of bystanders at a public spectacle.

The first plate is titled "Révérence à la presence." A pretty woman sits at the clavichord, frowning short-sightedly at the music before her. A slightly older woman stands beside her and behind—her maid almost certainly, from her plain cap and look of bland disapproval. Her hand hovers by the music, ready to turn the page. In the middle foreground, a young man and a girl address themselves to the dance. The young man bows, leg thrust forward, hand on heart, face a mask of politesse. The girl is sunk in a graceful curtsy, her thin face a feminine mirror of her partner's, her eyes, like his, upon the central figure of the dancing-master, who commands both his pupils' attention and the composition: a tall, upright, hawk-faced man in an outdated peruke, holding a long, beribboned cane in one hand and a copy of Rameau's
Le maître à danser
in the other.

In the second plate, "Pas balancée," there has been a collision.
The girl reels against the sofa; the young man steadies himself on the clavichord. The pretty woman stretches her hands beseechingly towards master and pupil, who eye one another like the archer and St. Sebastian. The maid has covered her mouth with her hand; 'tis impossible to tell whether her fingers conceal a gasp of horror or a smile.

The third plate shows the young man fallen to his hands and knees. The dancing-master stands above him with the beribboned cane held high like a flail and his face contorted with rage. The girl, one hand upon the salon door, casts an unreadable look behind her. The pretty woman has buried her face in her hands. The maid bends to the sheets of music, which have fallen to the floor. This plate is titled "Temps de courant et demi-jeté."

In the fourth and final plate, called "Contretemps de minuet," the centerpiece is the book lying open at the dancing-master's feet under the broken pieces of the beribboned cane. To the left, two large men bear the unconscious young man from the salon, his arms drawn over their necks and his feet dragging. Their attitude is solicitous, almost tender, but their faces are the faces of devils attendant upon the damned. To the right, the pretty woman has fainted in the arms of her maid, who stares past her at the dancing-master. He, in turn, stares after his pupil. From his face, you'd swear that he was afraid.

An unpleasant subject, to be sure, though no more unpleasant than a Rake's Progress, and the work is very fine. See how the engraver's needle has caught each expression—the young man's martyred look of endurance; the girl's narrow face locked tight as a dungeon door upon her emotions. He conveys the tall man's rage in the curl of his nostril and lip, reveals his fear in a slight widening of the eye. And the pretty woman, when you examine her closely, is not so pretty after all, the delicate skin around her eyes ruched up by tears, the full mouth deeply tucked at the corners.

Ah, bah! What good is it, dragging such scenes of Hell into Paradise? I'll shut the portfolio now, and put it away. I don't expect I'll look at it again.

The spring of 1785 came at last: wet, cold, and grudging. The driest thing about the place was my mistress' cough, and the greenest was the mold on the scullery floor. In the village, everything was scarce: wine, clean water, straw, clothing, hope. The only thing there was plenty of was mud, which couldn't be eaten and couldn't be burned,
but could be flung over the powdered heads of the duc de Malvoeux's few remaining lackeys, and was, whenever one chanced to show his face in the village. In the château, we neither starved nor froze, yet we suffered from hunger and cold and moody starts. M. Malesherbes fretted over losing flesh; I fretted over Pompey.

I was sure he was alive, less sure that he was safe and warm and fed. I imagined him holed up in the Forêt des Enfans like a wild animal, sharing a den with a bear, perhaps, or lairing with wolves. Anything seemed possible to me, except that he was dead. Yet there was no rumor of him in the village or among the servants, and after much agony of imagining and wondering, I concluded that I must consult with Mlle Linotte. Why I thought she'd have news of him, I'm sure I don't know, unless it was that I'd grown so accustomed over the years to thinking of her and him in the same breath. In any case, I went to seek her out.

"Seek out" I say, though finding her was always more a matter of luck than diligence. Whatever the time, whatever the weather, Mlle Linotte was as likely to be out as in, and never where you'd expect a duc's only daughter to be. I looked in her apartment. No Linotte. I looked in the cabinet des Fées. No Linotte. I looked in the library, the stables, the formal garden, the aviary, the kitchen. No Linotte. At last I remember thinking, distractedly, Pompey'll know where she is, then sitting down upon the Unicorn stairs and weeping as I hadn't wept since I was a child.

I don't know how long I'd been there when a small, cold hand touched my shoulder. 'Twas a measure of my misery that I wasn't even startled.

"Dear Berthe," said Linotte cheerfully. "You miss him terribly, don't you?"

Hastily, I blew my nose and mopped my eyes upon my apron. Linotte sat down beside me. I remember there was a glow upon her cheeks and a small, secret smile upon her lips: if she'd been only a little older, I'd have said she had a lover. About her lingered a smell of clean woods and rain, electric and ticklish. I sneezed. "You do not," I said.

The smile grew a hair more wide and a world more sly. "No."

Fury blossomed within me. "Vixen," I cried. "You're the daughter of your devilish father. You care for nothing."

Harsh words. And not only harsh, but unjust, as you will see. I'm
sorry for them now. To do myself justice, I was sorry almost at once; but the harm was done. I saw the glow upon her sharpen and harden into a glittering wall between us.

"You are young," I said by way of apology. "I am not. When my heart is wounded, it does not quickly recover."

"No," she said. "No more does mine."

And she was gone.

Linotte never forgave me, I think: the Maindurs are not a forgiving race. Oh, she was always courteous, and kind in the manner of a great lady being kind to a beggar-woman, but she no longer trusted me. Ah, the tortures of hindsight! Had I held my tongue, had I waited a heartbeat to hear what she was preparing to tell me: how different would my tale be then!

How different, indeed? Whether I knew her secret or not, Linotte would undoubtedly still have learned sorcery, found the Dove, removed Beauxprés from the circle of the world. Had she trusted me, might she have asked my advice? Had she asked, would I have known what to say? Ah, well. Two hundred years of pondering these questions has yielded no answer, nor (says Jean) is it like to.

But at least I might have had two more years of Pompey. And I needed him sorely, for the village women had taken to looking at me squint-eyed. Even Nicola Pyanet did not greet me so freely as she had, taking my offering of scraps and crusts with a new air of sullenness. I did not blame her, you understand: servants lie warmer on winter nights than peasants; servants eat in times of famine; servants are clothed and shod when common folk go ragged and barefoot. When times are good and the seigneur not exigent in matters of triage and lod et vent, servants may strut their thick waists and their stout buckled shoes before their former neighbors without attracting anything worse than a few jeers. But after a winter harsh enough to claim at least one life in every family, 'tis not in the least astonishing if the peasantry take offense at the very sight of a gold-braided coat.

Jean reminds me that he was as welcome in the village that year as he'd ever been. And that, though true enough, means nothing: Jean was Jean, who could go anywhere and say anything, and folk would only laugh and slap his shoulder as if he were the village fool. Now, Jean's no more a fool than the miller's godson, who was clever enough to lead the Devil to vespers. What Jean is, is a storyteller, and a storyteller, unlike a lackey or even a groom, is welcome wherever he goes, particularly if he's been to Cathay first.

I imagine him sitting at the inn of an evening, laborers and farmers sitting around him open-mouthed as suckling babes, forgetting their rumbling bellies and their weeping children in tales of golden dragons and palaces of jade. He told those tales up at the château, too, in the back kitchen over furtive, watered-down tumblers of brandy-and-sugar. Tales of mist-shrouded mountains and temples filled with saffron-robed monks who could die and come to life again. Tales of flower-faced women with feet small as a child's, and whispers of amorous practices that would make a she-wolf blush. On the whole, we preferred Jean's tales of Cathay to the more familiar hearth-tales of ogres and wolves and brave peasant boys with which we'd once comfortably beguiled the long, dull evenings. There's little joy in the story of Chaperon Rouge when you're abroad in a forest with wolves all about you and no safe harbor, not even your grandmother's house where the wolf has been before you. Expect the worst. Trust no one. In 1785, we needed no hearth-tale to teach us these truths.