The Porcelain Dove (19 page)

For the first time I wondered what Pompey remembered of the place of his birth, and whether he'd missed the heat and the jungles and the running about carefree and naked. "Did it remind you of your home?" I asked curiously.

"I don't know. My earliest memory is a ship's hold, very hot and stinking, and a hairy man with great golden rings in his ears. He was the first white man I'd ever seen, and except for the golden rings, I found him prodigiously ugly. His face was pointed like a beast's and of a most inhuman paleness, and he stank abominably of greed. When first I met monsieur, he smelled the same, and I feared all white men would smell thus of avarice, but I was wrong."

I laughed. "I should think so indeed! How could a duc smell like a filthy slave-merchant who's been at sea for months and has probably never come near a flagon of perfume in the whole of his life?"

Pompey shrugged. "People do have a certain—'smell' is not the right word, but there is no better. Artide, for instance, smells of damp hay. And Dentelle smells like a long-dead mouse. Madame, she smells a little like Doucette. Sometimes, when I smell rain or carry your linen to the laundry, I think I remember the scent of my mother. She was a good woman, my mother, and loved me."

The monkey was half unpicked by now, and threads in shades of brown and black and cream lay neatly ranged on Pompey's knee. Beyond the door, I heard my mistress grunting. I applied myself with a good will to the monkey's buttocks and tail.

"In that case, 'tis no great wonder that monsieur should smell like a slaver," I said idly. "According to your science, a duc with great collections might even smell the same as a peasant with a horde of golden louis under his mattress."

"More or less. And there's something else as well—some stink of old blood and . . . Listen, Berthe!"

Through the door came a strong, lusty wailing. Tears blurred my view of madame's embroidery, now monkeyless. "An hour," I whispered. "Less. And it sounds healthy enough. Que Dieu soit béni!" Reverently, I crossed myself as the door opened on the doctor's assistant, considerably less starched than she'd been an hour ago, and smiling in a most unscientific manner.

"'Twas the easiest birth I ever attended," she said. "M. Patin is quite put about. You may tell M. le duc de Malvoeux that he is father to a handsome daughter. She slid into the world with no fuss at all, and there's no bleeding to speak of. Almost magic, it was. I've never seen the like."

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

In Which an Ancient Beggar Makes a Nuisance of Himself

Now I come at last to the horse I spoke of when I began: the beggar and his curse.

To tell of the beggar is a harder task than I had expected. Not that my memory fails me—what I intend to write is as clear in my mind as my catechism. No, I set these blots and scratched-out lines to Colette's account. After all, Colette knows—none better—who the beggar was and what cause he had to curse. And her sympathy, in the course of nature, must lie with him. In telling her this tale, Jean has always cut it to a childish measure, goggling his eyes like a frightened cow, inviting Colette to laugh at him, monsieur, me, the beggar—the beggar most of all. Yet the beggar was as he was, which was far from droll. And he did what he did, which was far from comic. Whatever Colette may say now about the beauty of a plain story, I fear she may not find it so beautiful when she comes to read what I am about to write. On the other hand, there's no use to my writing a history at all if I temper this, which is its matrix and its heart. For without the beggar and his curse, the events of the next twenty years had neither order nor meaning.

Jean says this is great nonsense. Things happen. Sometimes they make sense and more often they don't, but none of it means anything in particular. Once a good tale's bought its teller his fill of wine, it has served its whole purpose and might as well be forgotten. He's wrong, of course: he doesn't even really believe he's right. Our presence
here in Beauxprés must convince even Jean that tales often do have meanings, and events, patterns.

Take the maze in the library—that happened the very morning we first saw the beggar, and a blind man might have seen 'twas an omen. The question is, an omen of what? Now its significance is plain as a pattern-piece. Then . . . I remember well how I turned it this way and that on the fabric of events until at last I discarded it as useless. I didn't believe in magic—more fool I—not as I believed in Nôtre Seigneur and the power of reason and madame's right to throw her pomade at me when she felt liverish. Bien sûr, there'd been magic once in France—the tales of the bibliothèque bleu, of Charlemagne and Mélusine and St. Denis proved it beyond doubt. Even in Mme d'Aulnoy's day, perhaps, fairies and wizards had meddled in the affairs of mortals. But in 1776? Bah!

As I recall it, the twelfth of April was a cold, blustery, dismal day both within doors and without. We'd just returned from Nice, where the trees were already greening and the air fragrant with spring. Monsieur had been attentive, his friends flattering—in short, madame had been happy in Nice, easy and bright as a rose in bud. Now the rose was distinctly frostbit.

"I'm a hag today," she complained, putting aside yet another lace cap. "Look here, Berthe, and here." She rubbed viciously at her brow and cheek. "Wrinkles. And my hair! 'Pon my soul, there's little enough need to powder it. To look at me, you'd think my oldest child to be twenty, not half that age."

"Twelve, madame."

"What? Twelve what, Berthe?"

"The vicomte de Montplaisir. He is twelve years old, madame, not ten."

My mistress began to rouge her cheeks in angry little dabs. "Ten, twelve—in either case, too young to have a crone for a mother. And far too young to go away to college among all those soldiers. Far better he remain at home, in the bosom of a family that loves him. I cannot bear to think of him marching up and down with a heavy sword, and taking orders and such. My Léon is a delicate boy."

"Yes, madame." What good would it have done to tell her that M. Léon would be much improved by a forced march to someone else's beat? In that mood, she'd have fallen into strong hysterics. As it was, she only complained of a migraine, of a ringing in her ears, a
tingling in her teeth, and a thousand vague aches and pains which drove her to her chaise longue as soon as she was dressed. I put a hot brick to her feet and was sponging her temples with vinegar when there came a scratching at the door.

"Enter," she said weakly.

Artide entered, bowing. "M. le duc requires madame's presence in the library," he said. "At once."

Madame laid her wrist to her brow and winced delicately. "At once? When my head pounds so I can hardly lift it? Convey my regrets to monsieur my husband, pray, and tell him I am indisposed."

"'Tis an affair of some moment, madame, concerning madame's children."

Madame surged upright with an energy I'd not have credited had I not seen such transformations before. One moment she'd be indolent, careless, her vital forces blocked with ennui like a forest brook with leaves and dirt. The next moment, she'd be in spate, freed by some appeal to her heart or her erratic sense of duty. Can a soul be at once generous and petty? Such was Adèle's soul, once upon a time.

"A shawl, Berthe, quickly. The library, was it? Oh, do make haste!" And she had snatched the shawl from my hand and hurried out the door before I could well gather my wits about me.

Artide and I followed her through the Fan room and down the Tapestry hall. "What's going on?" I whispered.

Artide shrugged. "Who can fathom the whims of an aristocrat? Today he returns from the aviary before two and holds court in the library. Tomorrow he may call us all into the stables at dawn. As to what's going on, who can say?"

Drawing near the library, I grew conscious of a quivering in the air. My teeth itched, and as I stepped over the threshold, my blood quickened and beat in my ears, insisting that something was about to happen, something perilous and strange. Yet at first glance all I saw was monsieur in a rage: perilous, bien sûr, but hardly strange.

As always, he'd taken center stage, in this case the mirrored pier between the long glass doors. His arms were folded across his breast in a froth of fine lace, and below his blue-powdered wig his face was white and beaky with rage. He looked like a high-tragic hero—Theseus, perhaps, confronting Phèdre with her adultery.

Madame picked up the cue with a speed Mme Dumesnil might have envied. "Husband," she gasped. "Why do you look so? What has happened here?"

Monsieur flung wide his arms. "Chaos," he answered.

His gesture encompassed the shelves, which had been denuded, and the floor, which had been crazily scattered with books. Some were propped erect and others lay flat, so that the room had the look of a hayfield after a heavy storm, with chairs and tables, globes and lectoires standing amongst the wreckage like bony cattle.

Monsieur pointed to a miserable huddle of children and servants cowering in a corner. "What has happened here?" he echoed her. "What has happened, madame, is that your children have run wild. They are no better than beasts, madame, and I must hire a menagerie keeper to keep them in order, since a nursemaid and a tutor cannot."

My mistress produced a handkerchief. "They're only babies," she pleaded. " 'Twas only an excess of spirits, depend upon it. What harm have they done?"

"What harm? I'll tell you what harm. I enter my library to consult my Brisson, and what do I find but that, that silk-and-satin ape of yours squatting on a desk while your daughter roots about like a pig on the floor. As I take my stick to the blackamoor, I hear Léon laughing behind the curtains. I drag him out, and he shows me where his brother is hiding in a cupboard. I send for their nursemaid, who is asleep in the nursery, and for their tutor, who is run to earth in the Silver closet with a half-empty bottle of Burgundy."

This tutor was one M. LeSueur, a rusty, weedy little man whose unenviable job was to teach the vicomte de Montplaisir and his brother the fundamentals of Latin, Greek, and mathematics. He'd been at Beauxprés for four years, and hardly a day of those years had passed without his finding his bed fouled with a dismembered frog, or his chamber pot filled with stable-sweepings, or his books scribbled over with rude verses. Remembering Stéphanie-Germaine and my mistress at Port Royal, I might have pitied him. But his nose was so long and drooping, his eyes so weak and small, his hair so lank and red that I confess 'twas all I could do not to add to his torments myself. Pompey said he smelled like one of those flea-bit curs you always itch to kick whether it's done anything to deserve a kick or not.

When monsieur's glare turned on him, M. LeSueur's head retreated nervously into his neckcloth. "Poltroon," said monsieur disgustedly. "Drunkard. Sot. Thou art no longer in my service, thou."

The vicomte sputtered with laughter. Monsieur darted out a long arm, seized his heir by the ear, and dragged him forward. "And thou, my son. What hast thou to say?"

M. Léon rubbed his ear and scowled. "Nothing, monsieur. Justin built it."

"Justin?" The duc's bellow drew his second son from behind Boudin's skirts as a magnet draws a needle—although, to be sure, there was nothing either sharp or bright about Justin as a child, especially with his face all slobbered with snot and tears.

"Well, Justin?"

Justin snuffled. "M. LeSueur was teaching us the Siege of Troy, that had streets like a ball of twine, and how that made it impregnable."

"And so you slipped away from him while he contemplated the impregnability of Troy?"

"No, monsieur," said M. Léon slyly. "He told us to go away. To Cathay. Or the Devil—he cared not which."

"Did he, by damn! And so we return to M. le comte d'Encre. Speak, thou! Is this how you teach my sons?"

From my little knowledge of him, I'd have expected this question of his master's to reduce M. LeSueur to blubbering and pleading. Instead, he shook his head unsteadily. "Ah," he said. "Your sons. Your sons, sir, are unteachable. Or rather your older son is unteachable, and your younger son too cowed to learn."

"You forget yourself, maggot," said monsieur. "You are drunk."

A tiny, reckless spark kindled in the tutor's bleary eye. "Bien sûr, I am drunk. How else am I to face the indignities to which the vicomte de Montplaisir subjects me?" His voice rose. "Do you know what he has done to me, to his own brother, to newborn puppies and flies? He puts their eyes out, is what he does, and he tears their legs off, one by one." He was shouting now, his eyes flaming madly. "He's not human, I swear it. He's a demon, an imp of Hell. He should be exorcised, or horse-whipped, or, better yet, burnt."

"Oh!" Madame knelt in a froth of lace and silk to gather her eldest son into her arms. "You're the one should be horse-whipped or burnt," she cried. "Horrid man! You shouldn't be let near decent children."

M. LeSueur, now thoroughly aroused, screamed that the vicomte was
not
a decent child, and then everyone was shouting at once—M. LeSueur, monsieur, madame, and even mère Boudin, who assured us loudly that M. Léon's blood was only overheated, and all he needed to make him docile as a pigeon was a dose of sulfur to clear his bowels.

In the midst of this brouhaha, Pompey sidled up beside me and touched my arm. "Here," he whispered. "Monsieur's forgotten her."

I felt a tug on my skirt, and looked down to see Linotte staring up at me, her black curls powdered with purple spangles. For all the world as if she and I were old friends and not mère nodding acquaintances, she took my hand. Pompey smiled, an ivory flash, and slipped like a shadow out the door.

"Enough," shouted monsieur at last. "Boudin, to Hell with your sulfur. Take the children away; take them out of the house—anywhere, through the park, to the aviary. Keep them there long enough for this man to pack his traps and leave." His eye fell on me where I stood in the door with Linotte. "Duvet, Mme de Malvoeux will spare you, I'm sure, to assist Boudin. Now. All of you. Out of my sight."

We scattered before him, all save my mistress, who turned her anxious face to him like a flower to the sun.