Mary Gentle (86 page)

M.
Rochefort lived to a good old age: he was a little over seventy when he died. I was in my mid-forties. I took off my breeches after the funeral and have worn nothing but petticoats since.

A little later, I married again, it being a matter of use to my family, who accepted me back without a word. My second husband, to our mutual surprise, gave me a child—a daughter. To become a mother was unnerving, and a betrayal. It seems to me that I was someone else, then, for upwards of sixteen years, until she married. I held fashionable salons in Paris and other cities, ostensibly for conversation on science and philosophy, but in fact to cover my association with the other members of the Rosy Cross. In all that time, while I directed them, and had the care of young Arcadie, I neither thought of, nor spoke of, Rochefort and our time together.

No, that is a lie. I swore to myself I would not lie here. Time is short, and I do not have the time for falsehoods. I missed M. Rochefort every day of my life. Thought of him every day. Hurt, like an aching tooth, in my heart. I surveyed the upbringing of my child, and coupled with my married husband, and ordered the affairs of the Rosy Cross, and none of it helped the pain.

I cherished it, in truth. It proved to me that I had once been alive.

The skills I had learned in my forty years, I kept in practise, also, in more domestic fields—it is not difficult, as a matriarch, to control much of the family wealth; as well as the power and position of the family into which my daughter married. This was done coldly, on my part. I am afraid either that she will have been discouraged by my example from doing this, or else that she will take to it also in a cold fashion, when I am gone—not knowing that scheming must be done hot, in the full joy of one’s talent, to be worth the doing.

When she had gone to live there, and our families were linked, I occupied some time in mourning for my wedded husband. He died at sixty. People said that I must have loved him more than I showed, so terrible was the grief here. I mourned, of course, for Rochefort, as I had never had the chance to do before. It eased something in me. Although I still grieve, the pain is no longer as sharp as a stone. It is sadness, and worse, in a way—I weep for him, and for me, that we are no longer together.

When my grandchildren began to approach an age of reason, I left off my mourning and began, suddenly, to teach them what I had learned in seventy years.

There are six of them, two girls, four boys. Of the boys, two are worth something. I have hopes for one of the girls. Of course, the others may surprise me. It is too early to despair of any of them.

M. Rochefort was both right and wrong when he said that I would want children. I did not want children. I did not—I can say this only here—did not love my daughter, although I trust I did honourably by her. My grandchildren are loveable, but I would love them were they no blood relation to me at all.

He was wrong. I did not want children. He was right. I only wanted his children.

That I could never have: he was correct that he could not sire a child. That was a relief to me, since a pregnancy would have been a sad interruption to our life together. I always imagined I would hate being with child, and indeed, when I was, I did.

That did not stop me, sometimes, wondering what we might have had. A bright-haired boy, perhaps, with wicked eyes, and a way of charming himself into anything he pleased. A girl with the look of
Spain
about her: lost, honourable, enviable, loving. I would have loved them, I think—although it would have made me no better a mother, so perhaps it is just as well.

They would have been a substitute to me, and what they would have substituted for was Rochefort’s presence after he was dead. And what is the use of that?

It was his wisdom I loved him for, and how he was at once so much older and so much younger than I. He would rock me to sleep in his arms; he would kneel at my feet, imploring me to rescue him. And he would, simply, look at me—I recall his face, as if I had his portrait, when he merely sat and looked at me, his chin on his hands, slightly smiling.

You are my punishment,
he would say, at such times.
I am scourged by you, daily. I should thank God daily, if I did not think that the Devil sent you
.

Grief. He never mentioned that when he swore, sobbing, that we should not be together but he could not leave. That was not one of his reasons. Why should it be? We were both likely to die any time this twelvemonth, being duelists. And later, when, apart from service in the Rosy Cross, we gave some assistance to the little Bishop who became the great Cardinal—then, also, we assumed life both cheap and short. Who of us thought, then,
what will the other do when one is gone?

I thought of killing myself, of course. That is a sin. I spoke in veiled terms to my confessor—a priest not much liked by his local bishop. This was a few months after I had returned, and wore skirts, and was dutiful to my still-living father, a man a year or so older than M. Rochefort. To the priest, I said, “If a person loved so much that they could not endure to be without the other, and that other was dead, would they not be right in following them?”

The priest, who before then I had not much noticed, said, “If you intended to die, Madame Arcadie, you would have stayed in Paris, in breeches, and died on some young idiot’s sword-point—would you not?”

That rocked me. I knelt in the confessional, thinking dazedly how odd it felt to be addressed as
Arcadie
. And he was right. Of course he was right. Although I would not have found a man capable of killing me in a duel unless I fought to lose.

“What am I to do, then?” I whispered, at the age of forty-six.

The priest, who looked nothing more than a meek boy in daylight, spoke in the shadows of the church.

“You have been a man. Why not try being a woman, madame?”

And, when I remained silent, stunned, he added, “Why not? There is nothing else that men do that you have not done, except father a child and a dynasty, and that is beyond even Mlle Dariole. If you intend to stay alive with your grief, you might as well. God may have surprises for you yet.”

Some short time after that, I married, and took with me to my husband’s home my private confessor, thereby saving the young man from a disturbing quarrel with his bishop. It is true I regarded him with some wariness, ever after. I am not accustomed to be spoken to in that manner. After a little reflection, I smiled.
I have become M. Rochefort,
I thought.
Who also was not accustomed to be spoken to in such an impertinent manner, but who dearly loved it. And who knew wisdom when he heard it.

If neither child nor dynasty, the Rose Cross might stand as my monument, I decided, if so stony a word can be applied to so formless an organisation.

Shortly after that, Chance surprised me with a pregnancy.

I am sorry now that young Arcadie was only a means of bringing about my grandchildren. If Rochefort were here, he would have told me to do better by her. But we cannot control where the heart goes, only do what is honourable if there is no affection there.

I am an old woman. I am not sorry I lived this long. I miss him every day, still. There is nothing to be done about that. A proverb of the Spanish says,
Take what you want, and pay for it.

If I believed in God and a life afterwards as my little priest does, I would hope to find myself young again in it. In good health of mind and body. And—vanity being what it is—with all my old skills.

And I allow myself to imagine sometimes that it is so. For hours at a time, sitting by this latticed window, prayer book in my lap, looking out at the gardens which I have planted, in small, in the fashion of the gardens of the
Luxembourg
. For hours, I make believe that there
is
an afterlife, and that M. Rochefort and I meet there, in a garden. While my children believe me at my prayers, I stare out of the window and imagine I am in carnal intercourse out of doors with the man I love.

My second husband was a man pleased to have mistresses, and a wife who wanted him for procreation and no more, and who was otherwise a faithful friend to him. I was fond of my husband. I was
fond
of my dogs. No man has disturbed me since Rochefort went, unless it is that sexless priest, so much my junior.

I allow myself to hope, wickedly, that I disturb him; that something rises under that cassock when he hears me whisper in the dark of the carnal sins of the young M. Dariole. I doubt it. Men of age are distinguished. Women of age are disgusting. I shrug. If I knew I would have grown this old, I would have tried harder to die young.

I am old. M. Fludd is long dead, a year or two before that civil revolt he desired to stave off, and from which Caterina foresaw such liberty arising. I did visit Fludd, on pretence of journeys to my English relatives, while we were about the business of the Rosy Cross; and if I was never at ease with the man, I could at least tolerate him. He was a colleague of M. Rochefort; a friend to him, in his way. And if we could speak of nothing else, he and I, we could speak of Messire Rochefort. We could speak of him.

Still, now, I am in no hurry to die. When the light of self goes out, there will be no man nor woman left who remembers Valentin Rochefort as I do.

My hands hurt. I will take down my sword from the wall. I will sit holding it. I will look out from this high place, down at the dusty road that leads to Paris, and I will remember him.