Leonie (21 page)

“I didn’t know that!”

“I just heard it last night. I meant to tell you, but I forgot.”

Caro pushed back her chair and hurried to the door. “I’d better see if she’s all right, Alphonse. After all, she is my friend.”

Léonie fluffed up the pillows and lounged back against them, arranging her lace gown so that it sat demurely high against her collarbone, tying the virginal white satin ribbons in a large bow at her neck. Julie, her maid, had already arranged her hair, and for the first time in her life it remained in place, caught back simply with a matching white ribbon. It knew when it was beaten. What, she wondered, should she do today? It was her first day without Monsieur. He’d left early, while she was still asleep. She looked around the room,
her
room—that is, until they found a house. He’d suggested buying an apartment, but Léonie had insisted on a house—anything could happen to mere buildings, they could burn down, but the land would always be there. Meanwhile, this room would do very nicely, although she really preferred her room at the inn. Bébé in her diamond collar had already ripped her pretty lace pillow to shreds and adopted the blanket, although she didn’t look nearly as decorative on it.

The suite was all blue; the immense deep blue Chinese silk carpet was bordered with flowers, and the Louis XIV bed had gilded finials and blue damask upholstery with a painted oval of elegant courtiers taking a stroll by a blue lake. The windows were draped with the same blue damask fabric and the sofas, of the same period, were in blue velvet with tasseled edges—even the lamps were blue, though, thank heavens, they’d had the sense to use peach-colored shades.

It was more than just a suite; it took up half a floor of the Hôtel Crillon on the place de la Concorde, and it was very,
very
smart. There was a large salon for entertaining, and a small salon just for her, a large
and
a small dining room, a study, kitchens, dressing rooms, and a separate bedroom for Monsieur, bathrooms, and
even rooms for the servants. “What can I do with all these rooms?” she wondered aloud.

“Madame.” Julie offered a card on a silver salver.

“Carolina Montalva,” she read. “Caro … it’s Caro! Oh, how wonderful, send her in, Julie, no, wait a minute.” Pushing aside the tray, she rearranged herself. “Does my hair look all right?”

“Perfect, madame.”

“Then send her in.”

The door swung open and there she was, in a sapphire dress, her black hair shining and glossy, and her eyes sparkling with pleasure. “Oh, Caro.” Léonie leapt from the bed and hurtled across the room. “Oh, Caro, I’m
so
happy to see you.”

They hugged each other so tightly they couldn’t breathe. “I knew everything would be all right once I saw you,” gasped Léonie.

“Of course it’s all right, but are you?”

Caro took stock of her. “You’ve grown up,” she said accusingly. “You’re sophisticated and glamorous. What happened to the little girl in Baden-Baden?”

“That was such a long time ago—really another lifetime. Caro, tell me, have you heard from Rupert?”

Caro hesitated. Should she tell her? If she didn’t, someone else would. “He’s married, Léonie. It was inevitable, his family needed it.”

Léonie’s shoulders drooped under the lace gown. “If only he’d written to me, Caro,” she whispered, “he should have written.”

Caro said nothing. Of course he should have written. And why hadn’t he? Rupert wasn’t cruel; it was very odd.

“This is all very grand,” she said, shrugging off her coat, “although it’s a bit
blue
, isn’t it?”

Léonie burst out laughing. “Caro, tell me, what do beautiful mistresses of rich men do all day?”

“What do they do? I’ll tell you what,” replied Caro. “They have
fun.
”

“Will you help me to have fun?”

“We’ll start today! First we’ll visit Worth, then we’ll have lunch, then we’ll go to Cartier, and then, let me see, do you need a house or an apartment?”

In the south the air had been soft as though summer longed to linger. The sun had warmed the sea for them to swim and the
breezes had been welcome, fluttering leaves and skirts gently, but in Paris the autumn trees were already bare, feeling the icy grip of an east wind that made Caro and Léonie quicken their step as they paced arm in arm along the Bois de Boulogne.

Léonie had needed to talk and Caro had wanted to listen, and the Bois, with only the wind to catch their words, had seemed the most private place for such confidences.

Caro listened in silence, not wanting to interrupt the flow of words, the torrent of truths that poured from Léonie, flinching as she described Rupert’s desertion, wondering about the letters that never arrived, and shedding tears alongside a dry-eyed Léonie as she described how she had wanted to die, until Bébé had adopted her and become her only friend. And then she had met Gilles de Courmont. Caro heard in amazement of his sympathy, his nightly dinners with her, his gift of the inn—without strings—and their incredible lovemaking.

“If you find me different,” said Léonie, “it’s not simply that I’m beautifully dressed and have learned how to behave in smart restaurants, although Monsieur taught me that, too. It’s his lovemaking, Caro. He’s changed me. Sometimes when I’m in his arms, I don’t recognize myself and then afterward I’ll look in the mirror, searching for traces of what I had felt only an hour before, and thank God there are none.”

Caro was stunned. It wasn’t the confession of a woman in love, they were the words of a woman enthralled. “But you loved Rupert.…”

“Yes. I loved Rupert—but Rupert left me. He never wrote, Caro. He said he would come back—all those weeks waiting, just
waiting!
—and all the time he was planning to marry Puschi. He lied to me!” She turned to face Caro, her lovely face as bleak as the sunless light filtering through the naked trees. “I swore that I would never be put in that position again. Caro, I want to be so secure that
no one
can destroy me. I made a bargain with Monsieur—a contract. He will make me a rich woman, but not just by giving me money, paying for me. He will teach me how to
make
money. I’m going to increase my capital so that I can buy property. Giving me the inn started something that I can’t explain. Land is the ultimate security and I want acres of it, parcels of it—fields and streams and corner plots.” She sighed with satisfaction. “Gilles de Courmont is the key to my independence. You’ll see, one day I’ll be my own woman.”

They huddled next to each other on a cold bench staring at the dry copper leaves scudding before the wind in a desperate final rustling of life before they were changed to anonymous brown mud by the winter rains. “Then you don’t love him, Léonie?”

Léonie’s eyes met hers. “It’s a sort of love. It’s not what I felt for Rupert, but it’s
our
sort of love, Caro, mine and his. And it’s what I want.”

They began to walk again, hurrying before the wind, trying to get warm. “Aren’t we supposed to be having fun?” demanded Caro. “Come on, let’s go to the Brasserie Lipp for lunch.”

“Wait.” Léonie paused, staring at a ragged poster, torn by the wind and faded by rain, the last remnant of a summer circus long since departed for warm winter quarters in Spain. She ran her fingers down the names, wondering if she would
ever
be able to pass a circus poster without checking. “I always think that perhaps my father’s name might be there,” she said, in reply to Caro’s questioning face, “but of course it never is.”

Maroc hunched his shoulders against the wind, staring at the whirlpools of dust eddying down the alley, thinking about the homeland he had left long ago, where it must surely always be warm.

“Do you have a sandwich to spare for an old friend?” The voice was familiar.

It was Léonie! It really was Léonie! Different—glamorous and sparkling—but the same. She threw her arms around him, laughing as he swung her off the ground with a shout of joy. “Why didn’t you write to me?” she demanded. “I thought we were friends?”

“How could I write when I didn’t know where you were?”

“But
I
wrote to
you
—with my address, explaining everything!”

Maroc shrugged, grinning happily. “I never got any letters, but it doesn’t matter because now you’re here. What’s happened to you? You look wonderful.”

“It’s a long story, Maroc, but for now this will be enough.
I
, my
dear
Maroc, am a rich woman. I am buying a house in Paris, and I want you to be my butler.”

“Your butler!”

“Just what I said, my
butler. More
than my butler, you will be what’s known as a majordomo:
you
will run my household.”

“But I don’t even know what a butler does,” he protested.

“Then you’ll learn very quickly. After all, look at me, haven’t I learned?” She twirled in front of him, laughing at the amazed expression on his face.

“I have a lover,” she announced, “who adores me and I can have anything I want. And I want you, Maroc, as more than just a butler, as a friend.
Please
say yes.”

“Won’t I be the youngest butler in Paris?”

“So, we’ll set the style. You’ll see, everyone will want a
young
butler. And you’ll be the most fashionable butler in Paris, your tailcoats will come from London and your shirts will be specially made. Other women will try to tempt you away from me to work for them, there’ll be offers that’ll be hard to refuse!”

He laughed at her vivid flights of imagination. “You’re crazy, Léonie.”

“I’m on top of the world, Maroc, and I like it there very much. Throw away the turban and the feather and come with me.” She held out her hand, smiling at him.

“I can’t wait to see Marianne’s face when I tell her.” Maroc laughed.

–
• 17 •

Gilles de Courmont pushed back his chair, propped his feet up on the desk, clasped his hands behind his head, and thought about Léonie. The blueprints of the design of the proposed de Courmont cars lay neglected in front of him.

Léonie was there, he thought, in the suite at the Crillon, probably just having her breakfast by now. She’d be wearing that lace robe that he liked so much; her hair would be freshly brushed and her cheeks pink with the morning bloom of youth. He felt almost content, imagining her there like that, waiting for him. He remembered Marie-France; even in the beginning he’d never thought of her once he was away from her—except, of course, on the days his children were born. His boys. It was time they went away to a decent school, despite what Marie-France thought. He had been sent to school at their age and it had been good for him, but then he didn’t have a mother like Marie-France. There wasn’t really much to choose between being at home and being at school—except that at home there was more food—it certainly wasn’t the presence of his mother, or his father. For all he saw of them, they could have lived in another country.

How he had hated that dark, silent house in the country. It only came to life when
they
arrived on one of their rare visits, and then the servants would run around getting everything ready for Madame la Duchesse. The whole house would be in a turmoil. He remembered the gardener arriving with plants from the hothouses and great armfuls of cut flowers; the maids lighting fires in the enormous grates and fueling them constantly with great buckets of coal so that the vast frozen rooms glowed into warmth; the butler polishing the silver to a final sheen; and the chefs busying themselves in the smokerooms, selecting pink-fleshed hams. Sometimes he’d creep after them into the vast cold rooms where
the hooks hung waiting for the new season’s grouse and woodcock and where wild geese and ducks from the home farm sat plucked and trussed, ready for the oven. He’d hang around watching the pastry chef weave strands of spun sugar into little baskets, ready to be filled with some mouth-watering dessert that he would never taste. The preparations seemed endless, building his excitement. It was like waiting for Christmas Eve, only better.

And then at last came the day of the arrival and he’d be up at dawn, climbing from his narrow bed in the old nursery to peer from the window to check the weather. It was always misty when they were coming for the shooting, but later it would burn off and be bright and clear, so that the targets of the massacre stood little chance of escape. He’d been often with Monsieur Talbert, helping to scatter the grain that fed the little birds, and he felt sorry for them.

He could remember, even now, the feeling of the cold water he splashed on his face in a sketchy attempt at a wash, and throwing on his clothes, making sure to brush his hair properly. His hair was like hers, thick and dark and crisply curling, and he had her eyes, they said.

The carriages would bowl briskly up the drive—he’d see them in the far distance from his vantage point at an attic window, they’d come past the woods and through the parklands, a dozen of them with liveried attendants and the coachmen in top hats—and they’d curve to a halt in front of the west portico, and
she’d
be there. His mother. The most beautiful woman on earth, and he adored her. They’d pile out of the carriages laughing and chattering, the women all so beautifully dressed, and the men checking on their guns with their handlers. The guns were wonderful; he’d sneak into the gunroom in the evening and the bearers would let him hold them, stroking the beautiful stocks inlaid with silver and the sleek lethal barrels. “It’s time your dad let you out with the shoot,” they’d tell him with jolly laughter, “you’re old enough to hold a gun at six.”

He remembered the last of these occasions so well. She had swept into her great house calling to her friends, throwing commands to the servants as she went, complaining about the chill despite the enormous fires that had been burning in every room in the house for a week, day and night. “How I hate this place,” she had cried, hurrying up the marble staircase to change, “I so much prefer Moulins”—their other house in the Loire Valley—and then
halfway up, she remembered. “Where’s the boy?” she’d called, and he had come forward from his hiding place behind Nanny and run up the stairs toward her and she had bent down to inspect him, smoothing back his hair with a soft hand. She’d been so close he could smell her perfume—he could recall it now with perfect clarity—a base of jasmine with some other more earthy tone.