The Porcelain Dove (44 page)

"He shall not touch me," she declared wildly. "I shall die if the duc de Malvoeux touches me!"

"Madame's husband has not set foot in the château for days. He cannot touch madame unless madame seeks him out in the aviary."

"No, Berthe. You don't understand. His hands and his lips, they run with blood. The children, the children whisper—ah!—such things as 'tis madness to know. No, Berthe. I will have the door locked at night, and you shall sleep beside me."

What could I do but agree? Mad she might be; maddening she most certainly was. Still she was my mistress, and I either must obey her or quit her service.

Two hundred years' reflection has shown me that I might have refused her, that I had a power over her that I never felt even while I exercised it, blindly, day by day. If she was my torment, then I was hers—courteous, obedient, emptying her chamber pot, washing her feet, measuring out her laudanum, powdering her breast, brushing her hair, all with the same care I might give to sorting her gloves and no greater tenderness. And all the time I was hating the power she held over me, she who was as weak as water, who wet everything she touched, just as water does. Look at me, said I to myself, soaked through to the heart with weakness and unable to stir a step without she gives me leave.

The first night I was to sleep with her, I saw her into bed, then retired to the dressing-room to strip off my gown, my petticoats, my stays, and to pull a clean white bedgown over my head. I remember
I was shaking so from the cold I could hardly tie the string at my throat. I have sworn to be honest. Though the room was in truth cold, my shaking was eagerness and disgust and fury. We two were no more, it seemed to me, than leech and patient, dog and flea. And for my life I could not say who fed upon whom.

"Berthe?" my mistress called me, petulant as a spoiled child. She was not a child; she was a woman grown and she would have left me upon the forest road for the brigands to rape and tear. Except that she did not. Except that the brigands had been children.

Sighing, I came around the screen. The chamber was dark save for my candle and the glow of the dying fire. A shadow flickered, sourceless. I heard a whistle from near the hearth, a mournful twitter. Starting, I dropped the candle, which went out. My teeth clacking, I groped to the bed and slipped under the coverlet, where I lay all cold and quivering like a struck bell. A warm foot touched my ankle.

"How cold thy feet are, Berthe. Come close and let me warm thee."

I melted, of course. Not at once, but over time, my bitterness, like bloody snow, thawed, puddled and dried up, to leave only a faint stain of betrayal behind. In our bed, madame would murmur and weep and cling to me, not to be awakened short of a slap. I rested badly at night and little during the day. For one thing, madame was seized with a fever of letter-writing—to Mme de Hautebriande, to one or two of her Parisian admirers, to Mme Réverdil, to her sister de Poix in England and her sister de Bonsecours in Versailles. While we waited for answers, she found a thousand little tasks to keep me by her side. And when Mme de Bonsecours wrote chiding her for her long silence and telling her of the changes in the mode, there was her wardrobe to be turned out, and sleeve-ruffles to be remade into ruched cuffs, and skirts to be shortened to the ankle, and her hair to be curled and tousled into a fashionable disorder, if she felt up to sitting before the dressing-mirror so long.

No one else answered at all, not even Eveline Réverdil. But the marquise wrote again, and again, regularly, two or three times in a month over the next four years. Madame answered these letters herself when she felt able, begged me to write in her name when she could not rouse herself to hold a pen. And in this correspondence at second hand, with my mistress a transparent fiction between us, I thought for a time that the marquise and I would achieve that equality she had offered in the vestry of the Church of Sainte-Catherine. Sitting at a
gilded écritoire, dipping my pen in a gilt-bronze inkpot, folding the heavy, costly paper and sealing it with the ducal crest, I could almost imagine that we were in truth Hortense and Berthe, two women of an age exchanging our thoughts on friends, modes, politics, books, plays. 'Twas her account of M. Beaumarchais' play
Le Mariage de Figaro
revealed the everlasting chasm between us.

       
We went to see
Figaro
at the Théâtre Française. I'd read it, of course—is there a person of fashion left in France who has not?—and thought it the cleverest thing that has ever been written: excepting, perhaps, the works of M. Voltaire. But to see it! O ma soeur! I was dazzled! Astonished! Not a single unity left unbroken, and not a single moment of boredom in four hours' performance. How we laughed when Figaro plotted against his wicked master; how we clapped and cheered when he railed against him! At every damning line, I saw great nobles slap their own cheeks, laughing at themselves and—what is even more curious—making others laugh, too. A strange humor, that laughs at a poisoned dart, though it has pierced to the very heart.

She sent the play as well. I did not laugh when I read it, my life falling so far wide of its art as to infuriate rather than delight me. If monsieur was not so lecherous as the comte d'Almaviva, madame was not so lively as his comtesse, nor any lackey in the household so nimble of wit and tongue as his dashing manservant Figaro. Only in plays is the conversation of lackeys so like an épée: so light, so polished, so sharp that its victim is pricked to the heart before he knows he's been touched. In life, the grumbling of malcontent lackeys is more like a bludgeon: heavy, coarse, and without finesse. And Suzanne was not like me any more than Figaro was like Artide. They were nothing more than nobles in livery, and I thought the marquise a fool not to recognize it.

By the summer of 1787, monsieur's household was reduced to a mere embattled handful of survivors: myself, of course; two kitchen-boys, Jean and Artide, Philiberte Malateste (who hardly counted); three, or perhaps four, lackeys whose names and faces I have forgotten. Oh, and M. Malesherbes.

Yes, M. Malesherbes was still with us. Though he threatened daily to leave, his melancholic disposition made change a terror to him and
uncertainty a very hell. Furthermore, he was now upwards of fifty years old and no longer au courant with the mode in sauces. Yet even the most timid hare may lose his fear when the dogs are at his throat.

One day, coming down the back stairs, I passed Sangsue holding a bloody cloth to his head and showing his long, pitted teeth in what might equally have been a grimace of pain or a smile. I ran down the steps with a foreboding of tragedy that was amply fulfilled by the scene in the kitchen. 'Twas like the last act of
Mithridate
, with broken crockery and bent iron-mongery strewn broadcast, and in the midst of the carnage, M. Malesherbes on an overturned cauldron, upheld by Artide and a chorus of scullions.

"Ah, Berthe," Malesherbes greeted me. "I am an artist, me! The prince de Conti has been wooing me ever since he tasted my riseau de veau at madame's Turkish supper in '76. The king himself has begged me to come to Versailles and raise the royal table to new heights. I am famous. I may bite my thumb at letters of character. I may sneeze upon references. I am an artist, a great artist, and I go where I will!"

Artide snorted. "You'll go to the galleys or the almshouse with every other vagabond, Malesherbes. Even artists are not exempt from branding when the gardeloups catch them wandering the roads like common mendicants."

"Hold thy peace," I said. "Canst not see the man's distracted?" To Malesherbes, I said gently: "M. le chef de cuisine, you shall have your letter of character if I must write it myself. Would you not rather stay? Without your light custards, Mme la duchesse will surely starve. And I shall miss your omelettes sorely."

The little chef deflated like a fallen soufflé. "A letter would be a great kindness," he said. "In truth, I must go even if I have none. After such words and pots as I have hurled at Sangsue, I dare not stay." He drew himself up with a forlorn dignity. "In any case, begging upon the roads is not so demeaning as a life of cooking porridge at Beauxprés."

Artide began, "You say that only because you've never begged, never known—" I snatched up a stray saucepan to shut his mouth for him, and he raised his hands in surrender. "Peace, vixen; I'll hold my tongue. But if M. le chef goes to Paris, I wager he's more likely to end up cooking mutton stew in a common inn than ris de veau in a prince's kitchen, letter of character or no."

As it happened, I did write a letter for M. Malesherbes. I was not called upon to provide one for Philiberte Malateste when he, too, left Beauxprés.

'Twas the last week of September, I remember, a real Saint-Michel's summer, and I was taking advantage of the warm sun to bleach madame's chemises in the drying-yard below the old donjon tower. The air was very still, the yard quiet as a grave now that Clauda had moved her tubs and her gossip down to the village washhouse. No doubt that is why, when I heard the crying of a child, my belly leapt for my throat, my toes put down roots, and my eyes froze wide.

What horror did I expect to see standing by the hedge? In truth, I know not, but certainly I did not expect to see Marie Malateste in a red Sunday apron, balancing on her hip a furious baby not long out of swaddling clothes. I gaped at her—it had been, after all, a good nine years since we'd exchanged a word.

"Good day, Duvet," she said briskly. "Malateste has finally saved up enough silver for the livery stable he's had his eye on these five years and more. You remember the inn at Pouligny?"

I shut my mouth, opened it again, failed to think of anything to say, nodded instead.

Marie set the child on the ground, took a chemise out of the basket and spread it on a hedge. Shrugging, I took another, and we worked silently together until the basket was empty. Then she eased herself onto the bench, laid back her head against the tower's weathered gray stone, closed her eyes against the sun, and sighed from her toes.

I sat gingerly beside her. "So, Mme Malateste. That's a fine child you've got there."

Marie snorted. "My youngest daughter," she said. "The latest filly of the Malateste stable."

The child glared up at me; I glared back. "A fine, healthy child," I repeated. In fact, she was indecently stout for a babe born in a lean winter, and I noted without surprise her lordly Roman nose like a goose and her unchildish, knowing air. I thought she favored her grand-dame and wondered what Pompey would have said she smelled of, apart from piss and stale milk.

Marie turned a less than doting gaze upon the infant, who was now industriously eating dirt. "My children will be the death of me."

Her voice didn't ring with iron bells, yet I recognized the true
voice of prophecy. Peasants spit to avert omens. I said, "Ah, bah! Even the grandchildren of mère Malateste can't be so bad as all that."

"What do you know of it, hein? I labored with the twins for two whole days. And when this one entered the world, she nigh brought my womb with her. 'Tis held in my belly with bandages and prayer. Why, whenever I squat, I expect all my guts to come out with the shit and leave me the shell of a woman, skin and bone and hair and rags like that baby of the beggar-woman's, do you remember, when Jean and I were courting?" She shook her head and sighed. "Jean's a good man, knows how to pleasure a woman without exacting a nine-months' penance. I should have married him and taken my chances on the road or else remained unwed and contented myself with laundry. Remember how you once said there was not a blanchisseuse in Paris could touch my way with thread-lace?" She opened her eyes and smiled at me. "That was kindly said, Berthe."

Sudden tears pricked my eyes, for all the world as though I were sitting by Marie's deathbed and not in the sun with her baby playing in the dirt at our feet. After all, she had the womanly treasures she'd so longed for: a man to warm her bed, children, a house in which she was mistress. Yet, as I looked at her, it seemed to me that she'd paid dearly for them. At forty, she was thick at the waist, thin and wrinkled at the neck and breast. There were dark circles beneath her eyes and a shadow upon her face. Madame's mirror told me that my eyes were still clear, my cheeks unlined, and my breasts still full and fair. I was two years Marie's senior.

"Ah, bah," I repeated, then: "Mère Charreton is very well, but another midwife may know more than she. And when all's said and done, I doubt Jean could've kept to a single mare. You're better off as you are."

Marie shrugged and rose painfully to her feet. "When I welcomed thee to Beauxprés, I embraced thee as a friend, and although thou hast stood both friend and enemy to me since, we have loved one another, I think." Dry-eyed she embraced me and kissed me upon the mouth. "Adieu, Berthe."

I wept then. But only a little, for I was less impressionable than I'd been at eighteen.

"There's no need to say more than à bientôt," I said when I'd wiped my eyes. "Our next journey to Paris, Carmontelle will change horses in Pouligny, and I'll tell you all the gossip." My voice rang
bright and false. "So. I'll carry the bébé Malateste, and we shall walk to the top of the path together."

Marie put her hand on my shoulder. "Do not trouble yourself, Berthe. I'd say farewell to Jean ere I go." She looked about her, sighed impatiently. "Now, where'd the little she-devil get to?"

Indeed, the drying-yard was empty, save for a wet spot in the dust and a heap of pebbles. "She can't have gone far," I said soothingly. "Look there in the dirt, Marie; she's crawled towards the laundry. Jean is in the stables, I think. I'll fetch her out and bring her to you there."

So Marie made for the stables and I followed the serpent's path the infant had draggled in the dirt.

She wasn't in the laundry. An angry howling led me to the room beyond where the laundresses had once stored the tubs of soap and lye. The empty tubs were still there, standing waist-high, supported on wooden planks. Marie's daughter was beating on one with her small hands and fairly screaming with rage.