The Porcelain Dove (15 page)

The curtain would rise on a summer-house or a private salon, discovering me seated upon a sofa or a rustic bench, reading. Enter a handsome marquis or chevalier, who, upon seeing me there, would clutch his breast, fling himself at my feet, and reverently embrace my slippers.

"Thou art more beautiful than an angel," he'd exclaim. "Only let me hope, and the meanest of thy jewels shall be a chain of gold and amber."

Withdrawing my feet from beneath his brow, "Monsieur," I would reply. "Beg no more, I pray. Twenty golden chains would not suffice to draw me from my mistress' side, who has all my service and my love. You mean kindly, monsieur, I'm sure. But no." Then I thought
I'd give him my hand to kiss, and perhaps a tiny lock of hair pour mémoire.

Such nonsense! But I remember being moved to tears by my imagined lover's despair and my own noble chastity. Is there any greater fool than a virgin of twenty bung-full of sentiment and champagne on Christmas night?

After her morning-sickness passed off, madame's pregnancy proceeded without incident. She was only eighteen years old, after all, and (thanks to the meat and oporto) in stout health. So stout, in fact, that by March, Marie had let out her waists as far as they would go, and it became apparent to all that 'twas high time for Mme de Malvoeux to retire to the country. Accordingly, back to Beauxprés we posted, as soon as the roads became passable.

Once more monsieur disappeared into his aviary, and this time madame was glad enough to see him go. The more her belly and her ankles swelled, the more moody she grew, and snappish, and prey to odd fancies and hungers. One week, she desired all her dishes to be garnished with pickle even though mère Malateste warned her that such a diet must make the child hot-tempered. Then she took a fancy to be bled, and fretted until mère Malateste consented to put a leech to her arm and draw off a gill of blood. Though the treatment made her weak and more peevish than before, the witch-wife repeated it twice or thrice, saying 'twas likely to keep the baby small and the labor short, which would be all to the good, she was sure.

My part in all this was more work than a month of court presentations and far more tedious: back-massaging, foot-bath carrying, posset-fetching, listening to madame's endless speculations on the infant's sex, its name, its character and future prospects. I took some little comfort, however, in monsieur's continuing absence and in madame's need of me, which grew more anxious as her confinement approached. From the time she rose in the morning until she lay down at night, I must be by her side, keeping boredom and fear at bay. To be sure, 'twas no more than I'd prayed for only a year past, but now I found myself a little lonely and not so indulgent of her moods as I had been. And I missed Pompey, whom mère Malateste had forbidden madame's sight until she be delivered, lest monsieur's heir be born with a darker skin than is usual among the French nobility.

Madame's pangs began one sweltering August night, when a full moon hung swollen and red above the far hills. I ran to fetch mère Malateste with sweat running down my face and such a stitch in my side that almost I felt as though I too labored.

"It's begun!" I gasped, flapping my apron at the witch-wife's hissing geese. "Oh, pray make
haste
, mère Malateste. Madame dies with pain."

"Hmph." Very leisurely, mère Malateste began to pack bunches of herbs, an earthen jar, and a small jug into a basket. "Mme la duchesse had best accustom herself to pain," said she. "First babies are a mortal long time coming. I've known a girl labored three days and more, and brought forth nothing at last but dead meat and blood." Horrified, I stared at her, and she laughed. "Never tha fear: I've the delivering of this babe. Thy mistress'll bear a living child; I have sworn it. But don't tha be thinking 'twill be easy."

Indeed it was not easy. For upwards of sixteen hours mère Malateste, two old grannies from the village, Marie, and I sat in murk and heat while madame groaned and sweated under a featherbed. They'd called for it when they came in, as well as a knife, a comb, a bottle of brandy, a pot of water and the fire built up to a midwinter roar. The knife went under the bed to cut the pain, the comb was dragged through my mistress' hair to keep its tangles from binding the child in her body. When the pot of water boiled, "Nothing like heat to draw out a reluctant child," said mère Malateste, and put scalding clothes to madame's belly while I fed her warm brandy and one of the grannies rubbed her privates with a foul-smelling unguent mère Malateste swore would make the baby pop from her, when the time came, like a pea from its pod.

As the day wore on, she massaged madame's belly while the grannies enlivened our waiting with tales of infants strangled by their own birth cords, of midwives who had torn a foot or an arm from a babe while drawing it forth from the womb, of monstrous litters of hedgehogs or tiny devils that had leapt from between their mothers' thighs to scurry madly about the floor before flying up the chimney, blaspheming.

Towards late afternoon, while the grannies were bouncing her vigorously on their knees "to encourage the brat," madame gave a great moaning cry. Mère Malateste groped inside her, shook her head, and poured herself a tot of brandy. My mistress began to sob weakly, and I ran from the room like a madwoman. As I ran, the grannies'
tales chased themselves through my head. Devils, hedgehogs, hooks, knots. Hedgehogs, devils, pepper, knives. Hooks, devils, knives, knots. Knots.

No longer enlightened, certainly no longer reasonable, I swept through the château from the Alchemical attic to the wine cellar, opening doors, smoothing fringes, unloosing knotted draperies. Why, when I found Dentelle mending a rent in monsieur's hunting-jacket, I snatched the work from him, ripped open the seam, and boxed his ears for good measure. 'Twas the Lace antechamber stopped me at last. For a moment, all I saw was thousands upon thousands of knots keeping madame's baby from being born, and then I saw Pompey curled like a dog in a corner with his hands over his ears and his eyes screwed shut.

At the sight of a pain I'd power to assuage, my madness drained from me. I knelt and rocked the boy in my arms. " 'Tis nature," I soothed him. "The child will come, in spite of mère Malateste. And when 'tis done, madame will forget all her pain—le bon Dieu has ordained it thus. Take comfort, little cabbage. All will be as it was."

"Never the same," he sobbed. "Oh, mistress, I'm sorry."

A strange thing for the child to say, to be sure—sufficiently strange for me to have recalled it through all the brouhaha that followed, and to have mulled it over. Years later the answer came to me. Having sniffed out M. Léon's character in his mother's womb, he must have been trying to keep the little limb of Satan from leaving it. Perhaps he did not realize, child that he was, how 'twould make his mistress suffer thus to frustrate nature, fate, and mère Malateste. In any case, he hastily uncurled himself, removed his hands from his ears, and clung to me a moment, then released me with a push. Moved and woefully puzzled, I kissed him and returned to madame's bedchamber.

Madame was propped at the edge of the bed, held there by the two grannies. Past screaming, she looked piteously on me when I entered, and I thought her lips shaped my name. The grannies exchanged wise looks over her head and mère Malateste grabbed my wrist with a bloody hand.

"Now, Duvet," she said. "Tha'rt a city wench, weak as water. That mare's turd Marie is weaker yet, and I must trust thee, foreigner or no. Climb up on the bed, kneel under her hips, grasp her so, under her breast, and squeeze when I tell thee. Do as I say, and we'll have her delivered ere the Devil can spit."

Thus it was upon my knees that the heir of Malvoeux was born,
screaming lustily even as he emerged blood-smeared from between my mistress' thighs. He thrashed at the vinegared water as mère Malateste washed him, fought the swaddling bands with an energy that astonished us all, and never left off howling until one of the grannies gave him a teat of cloth soaked in warm brandy to suck.

"Behold the little demon!" mère Malateste said indulgently. "He'll sleep now, and when he wakes, Boudin should be here. He's one'll bite sooner than suck—I'd best make her up a salt-paste to toughen her paps. Duvet," she continued, turning to the bed. "We're not done here. M. François will want to see his duchesse and his son, no doubt, and his duchesse, at least, is not yet fit to be seen."

At last it was over. The afterbirth was fetched out and burned, madame washed in wine and milk, the sheets changed, mother and son sunk in a sleep of utter exhaustion. The grannies departed with Marie, who looked very pale and thoughtful. Mère Malateste followed.

After a few minutes, monsieur entered. Without a glance at the bed, he strode to the lace-hung cradle, thrust back the shutters, flung open the window, and scooped up his son. Cradleboard and all, he held up the infant to the light and gazed hungrily upon his son's tiny, folded face.

"Léon Philiberte Jorre Guillaume Maindur," he said at last. "Vicomte de Montplaisir. Heir of Malvoeux." He laid the child back among its pillows, and I thought I saw tears glitter in his black eyes.

For wet nurse, mère Malateste had chosen Guyette Boudin, she whose husband Marie had once told me was good for nothing. He'd been good enough to quicken her, however, for she'd been brought to bed a week or so before madame, though the baby had died on the eve of madame's confinement, making Boudin the best—in fact, the only—wet nurse in the district. Guyette Boudin was a bolster-shaped woman with round scarlet cheeks, and her chief virtues were the richness of her milk and her stolid indifference to the young vicomte de Montplaisir's furious screaming. She'd a strong conceit of her place in the household as nurse to the heir of Malvoeux and demanded white bread and veal and the best Bordeaux with every meal. But M. Léon thrived and grew fat on her milk, and monsieur often remarked that her family had been tenants of Malvoeux for so long that it seemed to him that the vicomte must be sucking Beauxprés itself from her breasts. So we were forced to abide her.

Madame's milk dried within a week, and her fever being past,
she rose from her accouchement five weeks later, fully recovered if a little weak. Monsieur, delighted with the lusty infant she'd produced, became prodigiously attentive. He could hardly bear to be parted from her, even for an hour, and went so far as to abandon his birds to sit with her, mère Malateste having temporarily forbidden my mistress the aviary. He hung the China apartment with cages of canaries and lovebirds and sweet-voiced redpolls, and as soon as ever his old nurse gave him permission, returned to her bed.

Thus Justin Victor Antoine Nicolas de Malvoeux was born in July of 1765, barely eleven months after his brother.

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

In Which the Sorcerer Maid Is Born

When, in later years, M. Léon grew to be a libertine and his brother Justin a monk, my friend Mme Pyanet told me 'twas not to be wondered at. Bad crows lay bad eggs, she said. There was never a Maindur born knew the meaning of moderation. As for the bent of their intemperance, why, Mme la duchesse had only herself to blame. While carrying M. Léon, had she not disported herself in Paris? Had she not, although warned, consumed great quantities of pickled onions? And had not
he
, the cursed one, drawn his first breath when a blood-red moon rose over the chimneys of Beauxprés? These things being so, what choice had he save to be choleric, luxurious, and criminally disposed? And his brother was fish-natured by reason of his mother's remaining at Beauxprés all the course of her pregnancy, drinking milk-pap, and bearing him just as the moon sank under the horizon.

Although I'm sure I did not accept Mme Pyanet's explication without comment, I am equally sure I did not mock it. After all, there was no denying that madame's pregnancies had been conducted as Mme Pyanet had described. Nor was there any denying that Justin was a weak and doleful infant who wailed like a vielle day and night or that M. Léon was from birth an imp of Satan. Something—chance, mischance, curse, or fate—had cast their natures in just such a way as to wound their mother's fragile heart.

With her two sons, at least, my mistress was so far before or behind the mode as to trouble herself with her children beyond the
bearing of them. In the face of mère Boudin's disgruntled mutterings, she insisted that her sons be brought to her apartment every morning to be dandled and cooed over for an hour or so, or until she could no longer endure their tantrums. Whatever she did with them—sing, prattle, dandle them on her knee—they'd yowl like tied puppies and squirm and push her away. Mère Boudin disdained to advise her, of course, and what did I know of the care and amusement of infants? I did venture, once, to suggest that M. Léon might not scream and struggle when she embraced him if only she would not squeeze him so tight or weep so loudly in his ear.

"No," she replied sadly, "he does not love me. Nor Justin neither. I do not know what I have done to deserve such unnatural children, to hate their mother from the womb—their mother, who so entirely and tenderly adores them. Bien sûr, I weep over them. What woman of sensibility would not?"

And weep she did. Where once she'd been as gay a companion as anyone could wish, now she sobbed and sighed from morning until night. In vain I plied her with all her old remedies—needlework, the bibliothèque bleu, Doucette, Mme d'Aulnoy, her birds. She only shook her head, smiled wanly, and murmured that next week perhaps she would be stronger. In vain, monsieur berated her for being spoiled and weak-willed. No doubt he was right, she sighed; only she was tired to death, and indeed she couldn't help it. He sent for mère Malateste, who gave her a purge that sank her into such depths of despair that he wrote to Mme la baronne du Fourchet to come at once and take her daughter in hand.

His letter was answered within a fortnight—not by madame's mother, but by the marquise de Bonsecours in person, accompanied by a Swiss nobleman and his wife, who, being on the way home to Lausanne, had kindly offered to carry Mme la marquise with them as far as Beauxprés. Quite in his Paris manner, monsieur courteously desired the comte and comtesse Réverdil to break their journey for a day or two, in the course of which he and the comte found so many common friends and philosophies to discuss that the Réverdils stayed with us for five weeks.