The Porcelain Dove (20 page)

A matter of ten minutes later, the five of us were trudging against the wind through the formal garden, Boudin grumbling mightily at the cold and puffing great clouds of breath into the chill air. Me, I was glad to be outside under the clean heavens. Linotte and M. Léon ran shouting down the pebbled paths before us, and even Justin stopped sniveling and released Boudin's hand to trot along behind them.

It was the kind of April day all too common in the high meadows—more like late winter than early spring. Though the snow was mostly gone, the grass was still brown and livid clouds blew across a sky as pale as January. Before we reached the pergola, my feet were aching with the cold and my cheeks stinging.

As we entered the copse, a ragged ancient popped out of the bushes like an operatic demon.

For Colette's sake, I'd like to write that I gave him a sou and a kind word, or at least that I stood my ground. But I have sworn to write the truth, and the truth is that I screeched like a scalded hen and recoiled two or three paces. After all, beggars were not common around Beauxprés, where neither work nor charity was plentiful. And this beggar was so particularly repellent. His chin was disfigured with a sparse white beard, his mouth was a graveyard of blackened teeth, and he stank like a sick goat. He squinted from me to Linotte with diseased yellow eyes, then thrust out his hand and whined for alms. Had I not been so afraid, I might have pitied him, for the hand was blue with cold and wrapped in rags, and he leaned heavily upon an iron-shod staff.

Wide-eyed, Linotte shrank back against me, and I felt another small body pressing hard at my back. The beggar reached for Linotte and might have seized her for all I could do to stay him. 'Twas fortunate for us all that Boudin was cut of sterner stuff. Boudin never quailed. Boudin stuck her nose into the beggar's filthy face, thumped his skinny chest with one fat, red finger, and cursed him and his ancestors to the most noisome deeps of Hell.

"M. le duc de Malvoeux," she finished, "is accustomed to order all vagrants chopped fine and fed to his hawks. If thou, beggar, hast any love for that scrawny carcass of thine, I'd advise thee remove it."

"He'd give the hawks bellyache," piped the vicomte de Montplaisir scornfully. Behind me, Justin giggled nervously. Linotte, to my surprise, began to cry; moved by a sudden impulse of tenderness, I knelt down and hugged her to me.

The beggar laughed and spat thickly at our feet. "That's once," he said and, leaning on his staff, shuffled back among the trees, his cloak folded tight around him.

Boudin was all for returning to the château and complaining to monsieur. Justin, once again in tears, seconded her.

"Poltroon," said the vicomte in his father's lordly tone. " 'Twas only an old muck-worm, weak and harmless. We need not trouble monsieur my father with such." He turned to me with a graceful bow. "Take courage, Duvet. The heir of Malvoeux himself shall protect you." And he made a great business of cutting a withy from an arching shrub.

"Hoy, M. le mendiant," he shouted, whistling the withy over his head. "Tough as it is, the hawks of monsieur my father hunger for thy flesh."

Linotte, who'd been standing quietly all this while, struggled in my arms. "No, no, no, no! No hawks, you mustn't!" she cried, and would not be comforted even when Boudin assured her that hawks wouldn't eat man-flesh, and wouldn't she like Duvet to take her back to the house and make her some nice chocolate?

"No! Don't want to go back," Linotte wailed. "Want to see birds!"

"It'll be better so," I said, rising.

Boudin growled. "Why?"

"What do
you
think monsieur will say if we return almost before we've set out? Do you think he'll thank you for interrupting whatever
he's doing to M. LeSueur to tell him that you've been frightened by an old beggar?"

She opened her mouth to blast me, hesitated, "But—" she said. "Well—" She shrugged, then bent to Linotte and none too gently swiped at her eyes and streaming nose with the corner of her apron. "Very well, mademoiselle. 'Tis forgotten. Come see the birds now."

That night, after I'd put madame to bed, I retreated to the kitchen, where I sat by the banked fire and listened to the comfortable snoring of the kitchen-boys asleep on their pallets under the tables. Thoughts of libraries, beggars, even of the hapless M. LeSueur, pushed and jostled in my mind.

"In all wide Troy, there is none to befriend me, none," mourned a low voice in the shadows. "For all turn from me with loathing."

"Name of a name! Pompey! Thou . . . monkey! I'm like to've bepissed myself!"

Contrite, Pompey stepped into the light and laid his hand on my shoulder. When I twitched it off angrily, he sank to one knee before me and clasped his hands to his brow. "A thousand pardons, Mlle Duvet," he said. "Behold me cast down at your feet, my head sunk to my breast under the mingled weight of my cruelty and your displeasure."

"Oh, bah," I said. "I'll forgive thee, monkey, if only to hear what happened in the library. 'Tis all a mystery to me from beginning to end."

He curled down on the hearth and busied himself removing his slippers and his white silk stockings. "Mademoiselle and I were in the cabinet des Fées," he began.

I nodded. Pompey and Linotte were always in the cabinet des Fées, at least when he was at Beauxprés and madame had no immediate need for him. From the time she could babble, Linotte had made it clear that she preferred Pompey's company to all other. Given the characters of her nurse and her brothers, this was not remarkable. That Pompey should have taken pleasure in the company of a girl-child of four was perhaps more so. Yet he did.

The cabinet des Fées was their favored playground, and the pair of them would crouch by the hour together sending the Princess Florine's tiny steel coach on quests across the carpet, coaxing milk and cake from the magic satchel to feed the violet rats that drew the
coach, stroking the rainbow fur of the White Cat's sleeping dog, Toutou. The treasures came alive for Pompey as they did for no other, excepting the wand of the Fairy Friandise, which worked its magic only for Linotte. 'Twas a trumpery thing, that wand, fluttering with silk ribbons and crowned with a purple star. When waved, it would shower the air with marzipan pigs and trails of sparkling purple dust in which Linotte would dabble her hands until it swirled in glittering veils around her.

That (said Pompey, wiggling his naked toes in the warm ashes) was what she'd been doing that morning, and it had occurred to him to wonder, as he watched her, why the wand only produced sweetmeats and purple dust. Other wands conjured up practical things: meat pies, gold coins, cudgels, cars drawn by winged frogs. But marzipan pigs and sparkles? What use could they be, even to a fairy called Friandise? He thought the library might yield him an answer.

"You know no one enters it," he said, "not since Artide gave up thinking he'd go to Paris. Well, I heard bumping and voices, and thinking them to be the sounds of a lackey and a servingmaid . . . dancing a country dance, I told mademoiselle we'd come back another time. ' 'Tis only my brothers,' says she. So I tap. There follows a deal of scurrying and banging, and when I open the door, the room is as you saw it, save for two wooden horses lying among the books, and this by the window."

From the pocket of his coat he withdrew a largish object, which proved to be a lacquered egg about the size of a goose egg, snow-white.

"The swan's egg's missing from the case in monsieur's antechamber," Pompey said.

"Monsieur will be furious."

Pompey shook his head. "Monsieur won't notice 'tis gone if no one tells him. An egg is not a bird, after all."

"Granted. So. You saw all this and then what?"

"Mademoiselle laughs and claps her hands. 'A puzzle,' says she."

"A puzzle? To be sure," I said waspishly. "Two horses, an egg, and a welter of books make a puzzle indeed."

The kitchen was growing cold; Pompey took the poker and stirred one corner of the fire into flame. "It wasn't just a welter, Berthe—I saw that at once. The books defined a winding path, like a maze."

"Ah, bah, Pompey. I've never heard of such a thing! A maze of
books? What is there in building a maze to catch the fancy of an imp like M. Léon? Is it a trap? An engine of torture? What could it gain him?"

"Well, it did trap M. LeSueur, though the vicomte more likely intended it for Justin. You misjudge him if you think him incapable of doing something simply for the joy of it."

I tweaked his hair playfully. "You defend his character, Pompey? You who have so often said that the vicomte de Montplaisir stinks of musk and blood?"

Pompey laughed and untangled my hand from his hair. "Oh, you needn't think I mean to praise him, Berthe. 'Tis only that you're foolish to think M. Léon a dull boy just because he won't learn Latin. He's sharp enough when it comes to his own pleasure or discomfiting others."

"D'accord. So M. Léon built a maze. What was he playing at?"

"The Siege of Troy, of course. Justin as much as said so."

"Did he? I don't recall." And I didn't at the time, although I do now. It must be the magic inkpot has improved my memory as my reading has improved my mind. For example, I'd never need to ask now, as I did then, what on earth a swan's egg had to do with a game of Troy.

Pompey smiled at me. "Helen, the whore of Troy, was said to be hatched from the egg of a swan."

"To be sure," I said, and pondered what he'd told me. It made a kind of sense, once I knew how to look at it. There would have been the fun of stealing the egg, pulling the books from the shelves, and the game itself—no doubt as complicated as its setting. All this, and the delicious thought that in time someone (not M. Léon, to be sure) would catch a beating for the whole.

"Very likely you're right," I said at last. "So. Linotte said there was a puzzle. Then what?"

"She bunched up her skirts and began to walk the maze, heel-to-toe. Some of the books had fallen when the boys fled, so the path was no longer clear. She came to the first horse."

I sighed. Pompey, who read the tales of others so beautifully, had no gift for telling his own. Hind-side-fore as often as not, and half of it left out. "Go on, Pompey," I said as patiently as I could. "What happened then?"

"She picked it up, and with all her might, she threw it from her.
When it fell, I felt something begin to gather in the air, bright and dark at once. Magic."

"Magic. Bah! Nerves, anticipation, impatience, anything might have caused such a sensation. Not magic. We live in an Age of Reason now. All that's left of magic in France are some antique curiosities like the pie of prophesying birds and the wand of the Fairy Friandise—pretty toys of no practical use whatever."

"You forget the seven-league boots, Berthe: those are useful. And this
was
magic, I swear it. Oh, at first I wasn't sure. But when mademoiselle reached Justin's horse and threw it after M. Léon's, the magic swelled and swelled until I thought I should burst. When monsieur interrupted her, she was within an arm's reach of the terrace doors and the egg." Pompey hugged his knees and shuddered. "Oh, 'twas terrible, Berthe. The air was ringing a thousand bells, and I felt somehow as if I were about to sneeze, but could not. Monsieur screamed when he saw me and plowed through the books, scattering them as he came. He caught me hard across the arm with his stick. I heard the vicomte laughing."

I pulled his head against my knee and burrowed my fingers in his woolly hair. "Dear monkey," I said. "For all your broad shoulders and deep voice, you're nothing but a child, after all. To be so caught up in a small girl's game that you come to believe in it as faithfully as she!" He shook his head and began to protest; I hushed him with a laugh. "I fear the purple dust of the Fairy Friandise has gone to your head. Now, 'tis past midnight, and my eyes are drooping from their sockets. Bank the fire, poppet, and go to bed. No doubt it will all be forgotten in the morning."

The beggar did not appear again until July. The day was very warm and clear, I remember. Madame was hard at work at a tapestry of Leda and the Swan. I'd opened the long windows to let the fragrant air refresh her when all at once a wild clatter of hooves and the shouting of an excited child rose shrilly from the court. Madame started, driving the needle into her hand. The sight of the blood beading on her palm turned her quite faint, and what with binding up her wound and burning feathers to bring her round, I quite forgot the fuss that had begun it all.

Had Marie been able to keep her counsel, I'd have thought no more about it. Jean had begged her to keep silent, having himself been
warned to discretion by M. le duc himself. As well warn a cock not to crow or a hen not to cackle. At least Marie had the sense to tell only me, who knew how to keep a still tongue in my head.

It seemed that Jean had ridden out that morning with the young master, his brother, and two dogs, all set upon hunting rabbits. As they dismounted at the edge of Just Vissot's cornfield, a cloaked and filthy man appeared and begged for alms. The dogs took one sniff of him, whined piteously, and shrunk trembling behind Jean's legs. The vicomte, sounding most precisely like his father, demanded whether the beggar had forgotten the duc's hawks. For answer, the old goat laughed horribly, spat on the ground, said, "That's twice," and vanished back into the corn.

The incident was soon over, and Jean himself not particularly disturbed by it. After all (he told Marie) the man was only an old vagabond, not a pretty sight, perhaps, but hardly dangerous. He, Jean, was therefore astonished when the vicomte had flown into such a passion as is only permissible in a noble of an ancient house. He raged and swore that such a slight must be avenged, and ordered Jean to scour the field for the old man and whip him out to justice.

Judging this task at once useless and unpleasant, Jean was just considering how he might avoid it when Justin began to whine and snivel. The young master had shouted that Justin was a blot upon the name of Malvoeux and lifted his whip. For a moment, Jean thought he'd lash it across his brother's face, but he turned it upon the dogs instead, then flung himself on his horse and rode ventre-à-terre back to the château. Jean had followed more slowly with the sobbing Justin, to find Artide awaiting them at the mounting-block with the unwelcome word that the groom Jean Coquelet was required immediately in the library.