The Oracle Glass (11 page)

“My God, yer the cool one,” said my driver as he handed me out of the fiacre and assisted me to the door of La Trianon's little laboratory. “You led him off this house as if you was born to it. You even sounded just like a little bit a' girl from a linen shop in the rue Aubry-le-Boucher. Now I know what she sees in you. Keep it up, keep it up, and you'll be queen yerself someday.” Queen? Queen of what? I asked myself, storing away the information for later use.

The news did not please my hostesses, who wrung their hands. “You'll have to tell
her
; she has to be moved at once,” wailed La Dodée. “She may have brought us straight to—great God—Desgrez himself!”

“
Shh
. No more than necessary,” whispered La Trianon fiercely, with a glance in my direction.

“Calm yerselves, I tell you. She led 'em off. He took her for the apprentice of a
lingère
. I'd swear to it on the cross. She's a clever one, she is.”

“I suppose we'll have to take his word for it,” said La Trianon glumly over a cold supper that evening.

“We'll know in a few days. La Reynie never lets things drag out. They might even be here tomorrow. From the arrest to the gallows—it can be only a matter of days with him.”

The name I had copied into my notebook from Grandmother's dead hand. La Reynie. “Who is La Reynie?” I asked.

“La Reynie?” La Trianon answered. “Why, he is the new Lieutenant General of Police. The most dangerous man in Paris, because he is the most incorruptible. He answers to Louvois and to the King only.”

My mind raced in several directions at once. Grandmother had written a mysterious letter only moments before her death. She had written to the head of the Paris police, and the letter had been torn out of her hand and destroyed. What had happened to Grandmother, there in that room alone? I tried to remember any strange detail, but I could think of nothing, except the remembered rustle of taffeta outside the room as I entered to find her dying of a seizure. What were my hostesses doing, that they knew so much of the mysterious La Reynie? Surely, it must be more than brewing love potions and telling fortunes. I had to find out what it was.

“…it's not as if a person could earn an honest living in this city,” La Dodée was complaining. “But at least rounding up beggars and imprisoning prostitutes keeps that policeman much too occupied to bother
us
. But still, why shave a girl's head and lock her up for doing just what the great ladies do and get rewarded for? The King's whore lives in splendor, and her children all have titles. What gives
him
the right to be keeper of morals for the nation?”

“The King does, my dear,” responded La Trianon, “and never forget that.”

“Then we must be grateful for the royal family,” announced La Dodée, “especially Monsieur.” Monsieur, the Duc d'Orléans, the King's younger brother. Monsieur wore rouge and patches and went to balls dressed as a woman; his male lovers had poisoned his first wife. While Monsieur lived, the King did not dare to carry out the law and execute those who lived like him. The hint was enough. I looked at my hostesses with new eyes. So that was it. A single word from a passing stranger could betray them to their deaths for the way they lived together. It was almost disappointing that they were so ordinary. From all the tales I had heard, I would have expected them to have beards, or wear strange clothes.

“You're…um…?”

“Nice girls don't know about things like that. I thought you were better raised,” sniffed La Trianon.

“I wasn't raised to be a nice girl. You're thinking of my sister, who's pretty and blond.”

“Isn't that always the story, now?” said La Dodée. “My, you're looking odd. Is there something you want to ask us?”

“Well, um…ah…is it true that h—, well, you know, can have babies without, well, a man?” Both women broke into shouts of laughter.

“Only the Blessed Virgin did that,” said La Dodée.

“Yes, it's all just lies, you know. Just because they call us hermaphrodites, it doesn't mean we are made in some strange, abnormal way. We're really just women who can do without men, and that does upset them! Have another boiled egg. You're looking rather pale, for all that those people across town painted you up.”

“It's the corset they sewed me into. My back feels as if it's on fire. And I'm so stiff, I'm afraid of falling and breaking my bones.”

“Well, it does look much straighter already. Definitely an improvement,” said La Trianon.

“Yes, we would have said so before, but we didn't want it to go to your head,” added La Dodée.

“They said I'd have to sleep in it, and I swore I would. I'd do anything to be pretty like other girls, but now I hurt so much I wish you'd cut me out.” It had been a hard day, with many shocks. I found the tears running down my face for no reason at all.

“Oh, don't do that. Give it a try. We make something right here that ought to put you right to sleep. Just promise you won't take it in the daytime.
She
would never forgive us if it spoiled your talent for water reading.” La Dodée always seemed sympathetic.

“Tell me—You asked a question, now I get one,” said La Trianon. “You speak so well, you must come from a good family. Why are you here alone? What makes you want to suffer pain and dishonor to join a world you know nothing about? You could be reading to your old father, or embroidering in one of those comfortable convents for rich girls…” Her words brought it all back to me, and I couldn't answer for a while. Then I looked at her—her stiff, narrow face, her hair pushed under her white cap—and into her dark, too-old eyes.

“Revenge,” I said. “There is a man I hate.
She
has promised to make me strong enough to destroy him.”

“Only one?” observed La Trianon. “My, you are young.”

***

After supper, they compounded something from several of the bottles on the shelves and poured it into a glass of cordial. Seated in their little reception parlor, among the astrological charts, I felt the stuff go to work. A delicious limpness crept over my body; my brain felt all damp, and my thoughts became slow and dreamy. The pain left as if it had all been a fantasy.

“How are you feeling now?” they asked.

“Lovely. What was in that stuff?”

“Oh, this and that. But mostly opium. Remember, not in the daytime.”

“I never noticed before…your parlor looks so nice. See how the candle flames each make a little circle of light around themselves…almost like faces…”

“And that's the girl who talked Desgrez out of following her home. She certainly seems different now.”

“Desgrez. Who is he, really?”

“Him? He's the head of the officers of the watch, and La Reynie's right hand, but La Reynie doesn't mix in with the low-life. La Reynie gives the orders; Desgrez does the arresting. Beware of him, if you ever see him again. Of course, he may not look the same. They say he's fond of disguises.” La Trianon's face looked serious.

“Just see the way the smoke goes up, like a little blue thread. The candles could be hanging; perhaps you should put garlands in your parlor. They'd look so festive—black is so plain.”

“It's not our business to look festive. It's supposed to be mysterious in here. That's what keeps the clients coming back, buying our potions and horoscopes. That little
frisson
of fear, that they are stepping into another world, the world of the occult. What we really need is a skull. Or maybe a skeleton. Yes, a skeleton would give the place a certain tone. It would add to business no end.” La Dodée looked speculatively at a somewhat barren corner beside a little niche with a curtain drawn across it, which a skeleton might fill nicely.

“Tell me,” I asked, feeling all warm and lazy inside, “is La Voisin secretly one of you—a hermaphrodite?”

“Her? Hardly.” La Dodée snickered. “A new man every day, that's what she has. Picks 'em up like melons in the market and parades them home in front of that silly old husband of hers. Everyone, from titles down to nobodies. Just now she likes magicians, but for a while it was alchemists—and then she has an affair going on with the executioner. But I suppose you'd count that as business…”

“You should show more respect,” La Trianon interrupted her. “Her ears are everywhere.” She looked at me and seemed relieved to see whatever it was she saw in my face. “If you were not already aware, you soon enough shall be. We all belong to one great society, but not all are chosen for initiation into our true mysteries. Some remain forever in the outer circle, weaklings who are content to eat the scraps from our table. But
she
has placed her hand on you, and so this I can tell you. We of the Ancient Ways are rulers of life and death in this city, and Catherine Montvoisin is the greatest of the witches among us. She is our queen.” La Trianon's face grew hard, exalted, with these last words, and I felt suddenly that I had been drawn into a whirlpool of insanity. My little notebooks, a frail raft of reason, could never save me from drowning in it.

That night I had strange dreams. I dreamed I was being pursued by a faceless man. Mother was in it somehow, but she had become huge and hideous. The streets of Paris had twisted into an endless maze, and I ran frantically through them in search of something precious I had lost, the faceless man hard on my heels to steal it from me if I found it. Just as it was there—what was it? A house? I turned to see the faceless man looming above me, a knife in his hand. As I shuddered and my eyes fluttered open to stare into the dark, I realized I was lying on iron bars, strapped in tight. The pain was soaking through my crushed bones like acid. I fumbled by the bedside and found the half-full bottle they had left me and slid back into the sea of eerie dreams.

***

The next day I was delivered by La Voisin's own carriage to a new address, where I should stay for a week or so until my patroness was sure that Desgrez had been thrown off the scent.

“After all, my dear,” La Dodée said as she bundled up my notebooks with a generous-sized jar of the sleeping syrup, “you are not really one of us yet.
We
have taken a blood oath and trained ourselves against torture, so that we will not betray one another. But
you
can't even stand a tightly laced corset.” It was true. The dull ache spread through my body, sitting or standing. The tall shoe wore blisters on my twisted foot, and the muscles of my legs, unaccustomed to the new way of balancing, burned like fire.

The new place was a room under the eaves of a big old house in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. There I was to stay with a dismal old sorceress called La Lépère, whose occupation had something to do with whatever unsavory activities went on downstairs. I never saw the one-eyed coachman again. Later I heard he'd been sent out of town and established with a concession in hired chairs at Rouen. A seamstress visited me in the new rooms with a secondhand gown in bottle green wool with vulgar yellow satin trim more suited to the Italian comedy than the street. I hated it beyond measure. This she altered to fit me, and the telltale gray dress vanished. La Lépère observed it all, saying, “My, she does set a store by this venture, Madame High and Mighty! Playing games with the gentry. High-class customers she wants; more, more, more! And me, I work so hard and never make a penny at it. I sez a prayer for every one of 'em, and pays the sexton a bit of something to see them rightly buried in a corner of the churchyard. But her—everything she touches turns to money!” She squinted at me as the seamstress knelt at my feet, marking the hem of the hideous gown for turning up. “At least she's paying me proper for keeping
you
, Miss Fancy! Where you from, that you speak so high, and look so low?”

“From out of town,” I said, annoyed at her.

“That's what they all say. Don't see why you'd be any different, now that I think about it.”

It was a great relief to at last escape the complainings of the most unsuccessful witch in Paris and to be out again, under the high, clear December sky, bundled into a
vinaigrette
with the unspeakable green-and-yellow dress decently hidden beneath an old homespun cloak. The cold wind whistled between the buildings on the narrow streets and rattled at the chimneys. With one hand I clutched a bundle of my few possessions and with the other I held on to a vast hat, which, with a heavy scarf that muffled my face, was sufficient to maintain my anonymity. The man in the shafts of the
vinaigrette
had the family shoes on; his wife, who pushed from behind, her skirts tucked up about her powerful calves, had wrapped her feet and legs in rags. Beggars who staggered across the frozen cobblestones to extend their hands were stopped by her pungent string of insults, which always ended with “Why don't you try working for a living, eh, you street louse?” The streets were full of women with baskets and servants in livery, for there were feasts to prepare, candles and wood to be bought, messages and invitations to be extended. Now and then a passing carriage would push everyone to the walls, for there was no place in the narrow streets to walk safely. Chairs were popular in this season, for the bearers could carry them straight up the stairs and into the house, so that callers did not have to risk their satin slippers in the icy mud.

As we passed Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs, I saw a man in a fur-trimmed suit emerge from the church, in pursuit of a lady in a scarlet cloak with a white fur muff. A carriage drew up, and the lady, without a backward glance, allowed herself to be assisted in. As the carriage pulled away, I recognized the arrogant profile of the Chevalier de Saint-Laurent. Uncle. Monster. Oh, if there were a just God, He would have blasted him there where he stood! Uncle turned on his heel, and for a moment, his scornful gaze rested on the
vinaigrette
. I turned my head away, but for a moment our eyes met, and fear and humiliation raced through me. Stop this, I told myself fiercely. He doesn't recognize you. He can't. When I looked back again, he was gone.