An Embarrassment of Riches (24 page)

“Why dost thee boil thy tools, Fernand?” Uncle inquired.

“It is my belief that infection is caused by what is called ‘bad atoms'—
les particules malicieuse
—that are invisible to the naked eye, but that, unseen by us, are everywhere present: in the air, the water, the food we eat, upon our clothing and furniture, even on our very bodies and our exposed tissues. The mouth is a veritable sewer in this respect. Boiling the instruments kills these tiny creatures, thus reducing the chances of invasion.”

“Tiny creatures…?”

“Have you not looked at a drop of pond water under a magnifying lens,
mon ami
? And seen the little water bears?”

“Yes, but—”

“Do you know there are organisms so small that they compare to a water bear as it compares to us?”

“I have not seen them.”

“Nor did anyone see the water bear until that Dutchman invented his microscope. But I tell you they are there, these bad atoms, and—”

“Ahhgghh!”

In the process of gesturing, LeBoeuf had bumped me with his elbow upon the inflamed side of my jaw. I bellowed.

“Quickly! The patient!” LeBoeuf cut short his theorizing and seized a shiny, pointed silver probe off the adjoining table. “William, will you assist?”

“Of course, but—”

“No experience is necessary. Yago!”

“Milord?”

“More spirits.”

The glass was held to my mouth and the liquor virtually poured down my throat.

“Open wide, Sammy. Don't be afraid. Wider. Come now, young fellow, I'm not going to hurt you. Wider, I say! That is not sufficient. A little more….”

I was terrified, despite the brandy, which had my brain a'reeling. The mere sight of that pointed silver probe in LeBoeuf's bony hand was like seeing the blade of death in the hands of the exterminating angel.

“This will not do,” LeBoeuf muttered. “Hercule! Cerbère!
Plus vite! Saisez son tête!
”

Two of the hulking Choctaws stepped forward and grabbed my head, forcing my jaw open. LeBoeuf slipped a small wooden block into the right corner of my mouth.

“Much better,” LeBoeuf observed. “
Mon ami
, if you will just step behind me and hand me the instruments as I call for them.”

“Whatever thee sayest, Fernand. Courage, Sammy.”

“Achille! Ulysse! Closer!”

The Indians leaned in with the candles. LeBoeuf and his ghastly probe descended. It looked as big as an harpoon. I was too frightened to even close my eyes. Nobody could prevent me from whimpering, however, which I kept up energetically. (I sounded very much like my childhood companion, Ichabod the water spaniel, after his interview with a porcupine.)

“Retractor,” LeBoeuf said. Uncle rummaged indecisively among the implements. “This one,” LeBoeuf turned 'round and grasped it himself. It was a flat silver flange.

“Sorry,” Uncle said.

“You have a tongue like a Smithfield ham, Sammy. See if you can relax the muscle somewhat, eh?”

“Mmmmpphh!”

The probe now entered my mouth. The chink of metal against enamel was audible as LeBoeuf prospected the site gently.

“Aha!” he said. “Here is the rascal. The second molar. Right … here!”

I felt, suddenly, as if someone had driven a tenpenny nail into my tooth, though it was only LeBoeuf inserting the tip of his probe into the offending denticle. Stars wheeled in my brain.

“There is an enormous cavity here, amid the buccal and lingual cusps. Very nasty. The anterior surface is partially collapsed. The pulp is infected. It looks like we shall have to clean it out right down to the roots—”

“Hmmppphhhhh!”

“That's right, Sammy. It is a delicate procedure. But you are very lucky, you know, that the calamity happened here, at Chateau Félicité, where treatment is available. Yago!”

“Milord…?”

“The treadle,
s'il vous plaît
.”

Yago went to the steam-wagon and from a cupboard in the rear produced a strange contraption of wooden armatures connected by silken cables and little pulley wheels, and finally to a foot-operated double-treadle. A telescoping metal crane was raised up at a corner of the steam-wagon, and the armature hung from it.

“Do you like my machine, William?”

“'Tis a marvel, Fernand. What does it do?”

“I call it the Excavator. It is a precision drill, designed and built by myself.”

“Elegant,” Uncle pronounced admiringly.

“Oreste! Man the treadle!” Another Indian sat before the foot pedals and commenced pumping. The silken cords began racing squeakily around the silver pulley spools. LeBoeuf took up the armature. The whole fearsome contrivance swung easily off its supporting crane, as articulate as a human arm. He held the tip like a pencil. “You may feel a slight pinch, now, Sammy,” he warned me and leaned forward with the Excavator.

Ye gods, a pinch! It is a good thing that human beings are equipped with amnesia when it comes to pain. We remember in the abstract only that it was either mild or terrible. What I was subjected to in that velvet chair, therefore, defies exact recollection. In a few words, I wished I was dead.

LeBoeuf reamed me for minutes on end. The brandy was of no avail. I was merely wide-eyed drunk. And though I could not describe the pain if I wanted to, I do vividly remember the odor of burning bone as LeBoeuf guided the Excavator deep into my jaw. Finally, he hung up the awful instrument on its crane and peered inside my mouth. Behind him, Oreste, the Indian, panted at his treadles.

“The rattails, William.”

Uncle looked over the assorted implements, baffled.

“These,” LeBoeuf said, pointing to a silver case the size of a pencil box. Uncle opened it. Within was a set of calibrated wires set into little bone handles.

“What are they?” Uncle asked.

“Miniature files,” LeBoeuf told him. “Let me have the number five please. Ah, good. You see, now that we have reached the deep interior of the tooth with the Excavator, I shall use these rattails to enter the roots and pull out the inflamed nerves—”

“Iiyeeeeeh!” I cried.

“Yes, Sammy, this diseased tissue means nothing but trouble. You are correct to be unhappy about it. In a little while it will all be gone. Why go to all this exertion, you want to know? Well, we always try to save a tooth if possible. I am appalled by what passes for treatment these days. Yank, yank, yank! That's all they think about. Perhaps that is why they call them Yankees, no? Ha ha! Pull a tooth, however, and you invite disaster. All right now, this may pinch a little.”

LeBoeuf descended with his number five rattail. It felt as though someone was driving a red-hot poker through my jaw. How many times he repeated this procedure, I cannot say for certain, but we know from consulting the anatomist's chart that the molar in question has three roots, and he reamed each canal with successively larger calibrations of rattails until he pronounced the whole thing
“proper”
—clean.

Some minutes after LeBoeuf put down his last rattail, I finally swooned into the sweet nullity of oblivion. When next I opened my eyes, I was back in my bedchamber, in nightclothes, and the birds were twitting outside my window in a sickly green-gray dawn.

“How is the patient this morning?” Uncle asked, standing at the foot of my bed, looking as though he were looming at the end of a fifty-foot-long tunnel. It all came back to me in startling flashes, like a display of fireworks and fizgigs in my brain—the Indians, the candlesticks, LeBoeuf's grinning face, the sickening whir of the treadle, the Excavator, the smell of burnt bone, the rattails, the agony….

“Whu…?”

“How art thou this morning, nephew?”

“Ooo, my head.”

“Fernand said thee might feel the devil's hobnails from that brandy. How is thy tooth?”

It was only then I realized that I felt no pain from the savaged tooth. I warily explored the site with the tip of my tongue. It was well again, except for a little soreness around the gum.

“Have a look, my boy.” Uncle proffered a hand-mirror.

I took it and opened my mouth wide, amazed to discover the yellow glint of gold within.

“What's this? A gold plug in my tooth?”

“Verily,” Uncle avouched.

“How in blazes did he put it in there?”

“'Twas formed of a soft amalgam, Fernand called it, of gold dust and quicksilver. By now it should have hardened and be as good as a new-sprouted tooth. Better, in fact, for gold cannot rot.”

“Hmmm,” said I, admiring the work, turning the mirror this way and that.

“His talents seem to know no limit,” Uncle declared.

“Indeed,” said I without further comment, not wishing to promote any great exaltation of the Frenchman's character.

“Have you looked at the
Puya
yet this morning, Uncle?”

“Yes. The ovarian pod doth swells apace, but is not yet ripe.”

Lightning flickered on the chamber walls as a storm broke out on the water. There was a knock on the parlor door without.

“Come in.”

It was Yago.

“Breakfast,” he said abruptly. Two of his minions brought in a tray and a coffee pot. “
Milord
regrets he is not here this morning.”

“Where is he?” Uncle inquired.

“On land.”

“At this hour? Doing what?”

“Business.”

“Why aren't you with him?” I asked.

“I have business here,” Yago said and smiled, showing the two rows of pointed teeth.

“When does he intend to return to the chateau?”

Yago shrugged.

“Come now, Yago, what is all this mystery?”

“You eat now,” the Indian said, and he spun on his heels and strode out of the chamber.

“Insolent rascal,” Uncle muttered. Another peal of thunder resounded outside. Rain nattered on the window.

Breakfast was grim, by the standards of Chateau Félicité: porridge and cream and coffee. Of course, it was a first-rate porridge, and an excellent cream, and capital coffee, and plenty of each—but there was something abstemious about it all the same. And I missed the string quartet too, for the Negro fiddlers were conspicuous by their absence. It occurred to me that life here the past several days—the glorious victuals, the music, the theater—had been a show for our benefit, and now the ordinary routines of life were reestablishing themselves. Or so I told myself. Perhaps it was the stormy weather, which rendered the atmosphere pregnant with baneful effluvia—but taking all the particulars into account, things did not seem quite right.

After the meal, Uncle repaired to the conservatory to resume his taxonomy of LeBoeuf's impressive collection and to study the
Puya
. When he had left, I betook myself once more to Lou-Lou's bedchamber, and still the boy was not there, his bed not slept in for a second night. Where, I wondered, might his sickbed be? Or was he truly in a sickbed? I confess, the allegation of “carbuncles” did not satisfy me, and I had an uneasy feeling in respect to his safety. Perhaps it was this uneasiness that prompted me to pocket several of his locksmithing tools. For if he failed to turn up at supper this evening, I decided, I would press our host for details as to his whereabouts, and if said details were not forthcoming, I would discreetly investigate the floating palace myself. In the meantime, I would retire to the library, there to lounge on the window seat with a book and watch the rain beat down upon the water, as I had fancied myself doing when first LeBoeuf showed us this magnificent room.

I had no sooner closed the door to Lou-Lou's room behind me when I was passed in the hallway by a gang of Choctaws, a dozen in all, hastening at double time toward the main stairway. What their errand was, I could not guess, but they paid me little notice. A moment later they were gone and I could hear the timbers groan as the great house rocked slowly on its moorings in the storm.

Once in the library proper, I found a volume of
Tristram Shandy
, and settled upon the cushioned window seat to lift my spirits with the comedy of Uncle Toby and his misadventures in Flanders. My headache had happily subsided, I had no pressing business, and yet I could not make myself comfortable there. I could not sit still.

I put the volume down, crept over to the door, and peered without. The corridor was as still as church on Monday morning. I closed the door again and stole on tiptoe to LeBoeuf's ornate desk. The temptation to sit in the master's chair was beyond my power to resist, and another moment found me, indeed, established there. Such was the curiosity that next seized me that my fingers seemed to move about as though under a will of their own. They tried the drawer under the baize-covered writing surface. It was locked. They reached into my pocket and sought Lou-Lou's locksmithing probes.

Knowing it was a wicked act, I inserted the tip of a probe into the brass-edged keyhole. A twist here, a turn there, and
voila!
Something clicked. I tried the drawer again. To my astonishment, it slid freely open. My pulse raced.

The drawer was filled with the sort of documents a planter would customarily keep. On top was a bill of lading listing two hogsheads of wheat flour, one of molasses, five hundred pounds of salt, a cask of nails, twelve cases of claret, two hundred yards of linen cloth and one hundred of kersey, four bolts of silk, et cetera. Beneath it were more of the same, plus warehouse receipts from St. Louis and New Orleans. Beneath these, various documents of title, one in Spanish, another in English, dated 1795 and signed
Edmund Randolf, Secy
(of State). It awarded LeBoeuf an imprecise “proprietorship” over a tract vaguely described as laying “south of the Transylvania Military District and north of the confederated Chickasaw grounds, approximately 30 leagues down the Tennessee River….” LeBoeuf was obliged on his part to establish a “station” on the waterway, to “entreat the good will of the aboriginals,” and to “gather intelligences in respect to the Spanish,” whose Floridian territories lay several hundred miles to the south. None of these details was particularly surprising. It was the document below that took my breath away.

It was, apparently, the last page of a multipaged letter. The top pages had become cemented by moisture to the above documents. I was about to pry them carefully apart when I saw, with shock, a red wax seal from which a tricolor ribbon was affixed, and above the seal, the regal initial
N
an inch high. Greedily, I read from the top of this last page. The fragment said (in French, of course): “… in exchange for the boy, the title vice-consul of Louisiana, the residency at New Orleans, a salary of 10 percent of all customs duties collected at the port, and the right to license and regulate commercial traffic on the Mississippi and her tributaries.”

I reread the fragment several times, realizing that here was indelible proof at last of Lou-Lou's true identity—for could “the boy” be anyone other than Louis-Charles, the lost Dauphin of France? Could
N
be anyone other than LeBoeuf's “little Corsican boy,” Napoleon Bonaparte, Consul for Life of the so-called French Republic. Furthermore, here was LeBoeuf's ambition laid bare, a conspiracy to trade the life of the rightful ruler of France for dominion over a territory as large as the United States.

My mind harked back upon that moment, two nights earlier, when we had informed LeBoeuf of our nation's Louisiana purchase. I recalled the shock in his eyes, Madame's stricken look, the cry for brandy. For in those few words of news they must have seen their golden future go up in a vapor. And what of the boy, Louis-Charles, Lou-Lou? Had they kept him here all these years waiting to use him as a token of barter? Their ambitions thwarted, could they conceivably be so cruel as to simply dispose of him? My brain seethed with these questions when footfalls resounded in the corridor beyond the door.

I stuffed the letter inside my shirt, slid shut the drawer, and seized the only book that lay atop the desk. The gilt door knob turned. The door swung open. Framed within stood Yago. Seeing me behind the desk, his stony demeanor became that characteristic serpent's grin.

“Ah, there you are,” he said and strode swaggeringly to the center of the room.

“Here I am, Yago,” I affirmed.

“You are having a pleasant morning?”

“Very satisfactory.”

“You enjoy the marquis de Sade?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The book.”

I glanced downward. The volume in my hands was indeed of the notorious reprobate's writings. What is more, I was holding it upside down.

“I had no idea you were so well read yourself, Yago.”

“My position has afforded many opportunities,” he declared in an evasive manner. “This de Sade—he has a mind like a Choctaw. I would like to meet him.”

“Perhaps you shall someday. I understand he resides in a lunatic asylum outside of Paris. With your connections, and your luck, well, one never knows.”

Yago pretended to laugh and strutted the rest of the way to the desk.

“That is quite a trick, monsieur,” he said.

“What is?”

“How you read: upside down.”

“'Tis an exercise,” said I. “Improves one's normal speed.”

“Ah. Read to me, monsieur.”

“Very well.” I turned the book right side up and drew in a breath. Yago reached across the desk and turned the book upside down again.

“This way,” he insisted.

I put the volume down.

“What is it you want, Yago? Eh?”

“I want to hear you read upside down.”

“I suppose that is why you came in here.”

“No.”

“Then what did you come in here for?”

“To tell you it is time for the hunt.”

“In the middle of a rainstorm!”

“The storm is over, monsieur.”

I glanced over my shoulder out the window. Indeed, the rain had stopped and rays of sun were shining from a break in the clouds.

“After a storm is the best time,” he said.

“I think I shall stay here today, Yago.”

“You miss a great opportunity, monsieur. The lightning brings them out of the forest.”

“Really? Then why don't you go ahead without me and secure us a specimen.”

Yago smiled again, displaying brightly his crocodile's teeth.

“I have other duties,” he said and spun around as if to leave.

“One more thing, Yago.”

“Yes, monsieur…?”

“Where is Lou-Lou?”

“Lou-Lou…?”

“Yes. You remember him, don't you. Plump. Large. With a rather small head. About my age.”

“Ah, Lou-Lou,” the Indian now recalled. He shrugged his shoulders and continued to the door, then departed. I stood up gingerly behind the desk, feeling the precious document inside my shirt. My heart raced in my breast like a little beast in a cage.

Minutes later, I was stealing across the courtyard, on my way to tell Uncle of this most momentous discovery, when who should enter the garden but the beautiful, invidious Madame LeBoeuf. She wore another filmy gown, this one of white cotton, with a high waist and puffy sleeves. On her feet were little black slippers, and upon her head a wide-brimmed straw bonnet tied 'neath her chin with a black velvet ribbon. She carried an oblong basket in the crook of her elbow.

“Good morning, monsieur,” she saluted me and stooped to pluck several peach-colored lilies. “How do you do this morning?”

“Well enough,” said I. “And you, madame?”

“The vapors are unpropitious. We are in for a day of storms, I am afraid.” She plucked a shaggy dahlia, advanced coquettishly toward me in tiny steps, and brushed the ruffed blossom 'neath my chin. “A perfect day for indoor recreation, don't you agree, monsieur?”

Though my errand was urgent, and though I had the gravest apprehensions about her character, I felt my blood rise as she stood before me, her smile mysterious 'neath the bonnet's brim her long eyelashes fluttering, her bosom rising and falling, and the sweet smell of her jasmine perfume tantalizing my senses.