The Porcelain Dove (48 page)

A spell must have been on me—perhaps the beggar's or even Colette's. Why else would I have done what I did next? Why else would I have forgotten the peasants and Artide and my mistress' danger? Why else would I have laid the document case on the dressing-board—only to get rid of it, you understand—gone to the first press, bent, and tried the lid? Naturally, it would not open. I set down my lantern and tugged with both hands; the lid flew open upon a fugitive, shadowy glistening. I took up the light and held it close. The glisten was a layer of ancient cloth of gold hummocked over something hard and lumpy.

Gently I drew aside the costly, rotting stuff. Did it cover coins? Ancient plate? A hoard of barbaric jewels?

Bones. White and clean as if newly boiled, laid neatly in rows. Long bones and thin bones and curved bones and round bones, dis
articulate and sorted in order of size upon a bed of yellowed linen.

Seeing a bony circlet like an irregular crown, I tried to lift it, whereupon it fell into three blade-shaped parts. I turned back the linen and discovered another tri-lobed circlet somewhat larger than the first; then another, smaller, and so on down for several layers. I carefully replaced them, tucked the cloth of gold around them, lowered the lid, sat back on my heels, and pondered. What manner of collection was this, so lovingly preserved? The care and arrangement showed a Maindur's hand, though 'twas not like a Maindur thus to hide his pride and joy under a bushel. Bien sûr, the bones were gruesome, but no more gruesome than the withered paws and foxes' masks in the Hunt closet. The collections of Beauxprés must include a thousand bones of bird and beast, clearly labeled and open to view. Why were not these among them?

In pursuit of an answer, I opened the next clothes-press, and the one next to that, and so on until I'd examined the contents of each. There were twenty-four in all: plain wood, iron-bound. Twenty of them (as I soon ascertained) were filled to the top with neat layers of bones. The twenty-and-first was packed with round objects wrapped each in fine linen.

Before I unwrapped the first, I knew it must be a skull. Nevertheless, when I peeled back the last shrouding fold to lay the grisly thing bare, I gasped and dropped it to the flags, where it shattered into dust. Perhaps I'd hoped 'twould prove the skull of some beast—a fox, perhaps, or at worst, a monkey. But when it sat grinning in my hand I could not deny that the skull was human, and the bones also; by the size of them, the bones and skulls of children.

Well, I confess I sat shaking for a space before gathering the courage to open the three remaining presses. Two of them were filled with skulls. The last contained grimmer stuff: a case of thin knives, iron hooks, coils of rotted rope which shed, when I touched them, a faint brown powder that clung to my fingers. There were also a crusted mace, four sooty irons with their handles wrapped in leather, and a brace of heavy, long knives such as a butcher might use to disjoint a pig. Separate from all this, in a compartment of its own, I came upon a tarnished silver casket like an ancient jewel chest, cunningly wrought in high relief with la sainte Vierge in glory, surrounded by angels. A reliquary? Among so many bones, what use was a single reliquary?

Within were—bones, of course—shrouded in brittle silk. This skeleton differed from the others in being entombed complete, skull
and all, each separate bone polished to a dark ivory gleam with wax or much handling. Tears started to my eyes as I unwrapped them: the leg bones no longer than my forearm; the tiny, nameless bones of finger and toe; the bald skull that was like a wig-maker's form but for its grin and empty sockets.

Dark eyes glowed up at me, a soft mouth drooped, wryed, writhed over the perfect teeth. I dropped the skull in my apron and clamped my own teeth over a startled scream. The shadows fluttered; I bit my lip to blood. The lantern flame dipped and swirled.

The oil, the oil burns low, I soothed myself, and fumbled the bones back into their casket as quickly, and as reverently, as my shaking hands would allow. As I tucked the silk around them, my fingers found a wad of something dry and slick.

Parchment, said my mind even as my hand recoiled. I pried out the thick, crackling wad, unfolded it, and held it up to the lantern. A faint, crabbed writing covered it from edge to edge, indecipherable as Russian in the flickering light. The word "Maindur" caught my eye, and further down, "Beauxprés," and there, "enfant." French then, could I only unriddle the hand and the antique orthography.

The back of my hand came to rest against the hot lantern-hood. I jerked it away, silently cursing the pain and the lantern whose sullen smoking threatened to leave me benighted in this dreadful place. Hastily I crammed the parchment into my apron pocket and in a rising panic stumbled back the way I'd come.

Not until I'd reached the foot of the stairs did I recall the peasants and their pitchforks. Stay or go? I asked myself. Artide and his troops, or bones and bats?

Neither choice having much to recommend it, I stood and dithered until the lantern went out and the black air rushed in upon me, weighing on my lungs and ears and eyes, stopping up my senses as though with grave dust. Nothing stirred in the guard room, nothing leapt out or gibbered at me, and yet that darkness was more frightful to behold than a child dead of the plague, that silence more grating on the ear than the screams of a man drawn and quartered.

In the laundry, all was chaos—light, heat, the growl and snap of fire. I saw that the hedge around the laundry-yard was in flames, red-gold tongues licking the donjon as high as the windows of the vicomte's chamber of Eros. A wild desolation seized me and hurled me into the kitchen and up the back stairs into the vestibule, which, astonishingly, was dark and still as the dungeon. No smoke. No flames. No signs of
life. Only furniture overturned, glass cases opened and rifled, curtains torn from windows, paintings torn from walls and an echo of shouts from the château's far reaches. No bodies. No blood. No answer to my frantic calling, though I screeched as I ran like a demented parrot: "Madame! Madame! Madame!"

A demon—black and red and horrible as death—sprang up before me, seized me by the shoulders, and shook me until my cap fell off.

"Stupide!" growled the demon. "Are you tired of life?"

"Madame!"

"She's safe enough, your precious madame, and her precious daughter, too. If you'll stop screeching, I'll tell you where to find them."

By now I'd regained enough wit to recognize Artide, to jerk myself from his grip and beat at him with my fists. "Judas," I cried. "Traitor. Have you turned your coat again?"

He bared his yellow teeth at me, raised his hands to my neck, and dug his thumbs, strong with much polishing of silver, into my throat. My breath began to fail. I remember thinking of madame, and my mother, and of the marquise de Bonsecours. How she'd scold me for my ill care of her sister, I thought, and through the roaring of my blood, I beseeched her, and le bon Dieu's, forgiveness.

"Foutre," said Artide violently, then, "I've no quarrel with you, Duvet. But you must not call me names." He released me, and I slid heavily down the wall. "Ho, you in there! Here's another little pigeon escaped from the cote. Come put her in with the others."

There'd been a prodigious smashing of glass and wood going on all this time, though I didn't really hear it until it stopped at Artide's shout. A second demon—this one thin and angular as the hoe he carried—popped up beside Artide.

"Put her in thaself, Desmoulins, if tha wants her put," said the demon irritably. "D'ye think she knows where them damned papers are?"

Artide looked down at me, blank-faced as Pompey at his most statuesque. "No," he said at length. "A femme de chambre wouldn't know a thing like that, would you, Duvet? Keep out of the way, now, and you won't be hurt. The girl and her mother are in the Cameo apartment. We're not like the nobles—we don't make war on women, unless they be whores like the Austrian, God rot her long nose. As far as I know, you're all of you chaste as nuns." His tongue wormed wetly over his lips. "Chaster."

The demon spat impatiently. "Never mind the nuns, nor the queen neither. Just ye find them papers tha promised, or we'll send thee after Sangsue to ask where he put 'em." He disappeared from my sight and began smashing things again. Artide cast me an unreadable glance and decamped.

Painfully I pulled myself to my feet. By the light of the fire outside, I saw I was in the gallery of Depositions, not far, I told myself, from the cabinet des Fées and the Cameo apartment, from madame and Linotte and safety. Three rooms separated me from them, only three rooms, and none of them long or wide to cross. Artide hadn't hurt me, at least not mortally. I could walk, and I did walk, somewhat unsteadily to be sure, the length of the gallery and into the Fan room.

Here was more desolation: cases thrown hither and thither, fans torn and scattered on the floor. Their wood and ivory sticks cracked like bones beneath my feet, and I couldn't see to avoid them, stepped I never so delicately. In the Snuff-box antechamber, a candle left burning on the mantel illuminated a sad litter of dismembered legs and twisted frames, shards of porcelain, glass splinters, gilded clips. I bent to a glitter—a small sapphire from one of the jeweled boxes—and next to it, the top of a fairy-tale box, reduced to a pair of blue eyes, a broad white brow, clustering golden curls, a crown. Good fairy or beautiful princess? Who could tell?

The door to the cabinet des Fées was ajar, and within I heard a cacophony of bangs and angry shouts. I should have been afraid, I suppose, but what with the dungeon and the bones and Artide nearly strangling me, I was sated with terrors. In any case, I walked into the cabinet as if 'twere the parish church. And there I found some four or five filthy men smashing glass cases and mère Boudin poking through the debris with a pitchfork.

"Don't touch anything, neighbors!" she was crying. "These're magic things. Ye don't know how they're bespelled, and no more do I. Unless ye've a taste for pond water and flies, don't touch 'em with bare flesh. Cold iron should keep 'em quiet."

One man—Just Vissot, by his paunch—yelped and glared at the steel coach of the Princesse Printanière. A purple rat had bitten him to the bone, and stood now on its hind legs, chittering furiously. He sucked the finger, then got a good hold on his iron spade and brought it down on the rat, which squeaked once and was silent.

A voice I knew—Yves Pyanet's—said, "Here's something looks about right," and held up his pike with a great leathern satchel dangling
from it. The satchel bulged around an ungainly oblong just the size and shape of the document case I'd hidden in the dungeon.

Without wanting to, I gasped. They all turned to me.

"Ah, Duvet. Ye know this satchel, do ye?" Mère Boudin's piggy eyes glittered balefully. "No, don't deny it now—your face betrays ye. Noble's whore!" She hawked and spat. The men murmured, fingered their forks and hoes, and looked murder at me. After a moment, mère Boudin shrugged and pulled a little flask from her apron pocket, and they crowded around her like cows around a manger, leaving me free to creep towards the Cameo apartment.

"Holy Water, a Host, a nail—what're ye afeard on?"

"I don't know, and if ye do, Yves Pyanet, now's the time to say. Men!" said Boudin with fine scorn. "Babies!"

The man holding the torch waved it, sending the shadows darting. "Shut up and get on with it, ye old hag. I came for my deed, and my deed is what I want, and no dawdling."

"Patience," said Boudin. "
Ave Maria, gratia plena
. . . . "

I tapped at the door of the Cameo apartment, put my lips to the crack and whispered. " 'Tis Berthe, madame, thine own Berthe come to protect thee. For the love of God, let me in."

A pause, and a long, painful scraping as a chest was pushed from before the door. The lock-wards fell with a click and the handle dipped just as mayhem broke out behind me with a roaring and crack of blows. I rattled the handle, but the door had been relocked. I can't blame them—had I been safe within, I'd not have opened that door —no, not if Nôtre Sauveur Himself had stood without.

For mère Boudin had opened the satchel. She'd much better have let it alone—a magic bag in a magic room, and not so much as a wise-wife to advise her. Years ago I'd seen Pompey pull gold from this same satchel, and strange, hairy fruit and spicy black sausages. Linotte only got porridge from it, and monstrous gluey porridge at that. What mère Boudin and the mutins got from it was a stick, a stout wooden cudgel with a knob at the end and a life and will of its own. And life, will, and knob all three seemed set on beating the shit from the sackers of Beauxprés.

How the stick flew! Here a thwack on Pyanet's arse, there a poke in Boudin's belly, yonder a pounding across Vissot's shoulders, and everywhere such a rattling around everyone's ears as to set the whole rout of them dancing and howling like scalded cats. I laughed until I wept, laughed until my face ached and my belly quivered, and still the
cudgel belabored the peasants, and still the peasants swatted at it with their shovels and pitchforks and yowled with pain.

At last Just Vissot found the door and stumbled out; one by one, the rest followed, groaning and blaspheming, mère Boudin louder than the rest. Then they were gone.

The stick took a last circuit of the room. I was still chuckling and hiccuping, but I sobered quickly enough when it came and hovered before me. Though a piece of wood has neither eyes to see with nor brow to wrinkle, I swear this same stick looked me frowning up and down before dismissing me as harmless and scudding back to the satchel, which opened to receive it and closed again with a soft, leathern slap.

Well. If I could not believe my eyes, neither could I disbelieve them. The sight of mère Boudin, leaping and squealing, her chins a-dance and her cockade bouncing, had been too grotesque for mère fantasy. Once more, laughter rose in me, wild and irrepressible. I closed my eyes and teeth upon it, quaked and quivered with the effort of keeping it down. Then the door opened behind me, and for the first time in my life, I fainted.