The Porcelain Dove (22 page)

"Aye," said Jean eagerly. "Maybe he's a loup-garou with a taste for noble flesh."

"An old wives' tale to frighten babies," sneered Artide. "More likely he's monsieur's old tutor, turned off like M. LeSueur, and fallen to begging in his old age."

Philiberte Malateste tutted. Jacques Ministre threw his hands aloft, and Malesherbes remarked acidly that if Artide kept talking like that, 'twas even more likely that he himself would be begging his bread before he was much older. Artide called Malesherbes a damned Italian
eater of mushrooms, and the parley turned into a mêlée. At last Pierre Arroseur stood up and stalked out of the tavern, followed by Estienne Pyanet, who left the door open behind him. Yves Pyanet ran to close it, but not before a chill wind fluttered the fire to a flame and set us all shivering.

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

The Curse

When I was a little child, my mother told me that the man in the moon had been sent there by le bon Dieu because he would not cease his labors, even on Sundays and feast days. God taxed him with his sacrilege, whereupon he replied that he was a poor man and had all he could do to keep his family in radishes and black bread when he worked every day in the week. Nevertheless, he promised to try and keep the sabbath. And try he did; but things just kept turning up that had to be dealt with. Three times God pardoned him: when he hoed the weeds that were choking his cabbages; when he mended a hole in his hedge; when he wandered the fields in search of his goat.

Then one cold Sunday God caught the man gathering a faggot of thorn for his fire instead of attending Mass and lost His divine temper. "For that thou hast not obeyed Me," He thundered, "I will remove thee altogether from the face of the earth. Thou shalt live in the moon, thou and thy faggot of thorn, and roll her each night across the sky. When rest was lawful did'st thou refuse it; thou shalt not rest again until the Day of Doom." And so it came to pass.

The man's name, maman said, was February.

This tale made little sense to me until I spent a winter in Beauxprés, when I came to feel a deep sympathy for M. Février and his faggot of thorn. Winter in the mountains is as different from winter in Paris as chalk is from cheese. In Paris, the cold lasts only from December to March, and there are balls and entertainments and the
aters and salons to distract you from the weather, and plenty of wood and coal (if you can afford them) to keep the fires burning high. In Beauxprés, the first snow falls at the end of October and the last in early April, if we're lucky. Out of doors, there's wind and storm and roads frozen hard as stone, so that we must go about in sleighs if we go about at all. Within, draughts fairly whistle among the tapestries, and the constant damp makes the fires balk and madame's gowns slick and musty. The days are short and dark, and to brave the steep path to the village is to risk a broken leg or worse, so that monsieur's servants sicken of one another's glum faces and bicker like children.

Jean always laughs when I complain about winter in Beauxprés. I should've come out to the stable, he says. Then I'd know what cold and damp really are. 'Tis not so bad sleeping with the horses—you always know where you are with horses, and they make quiet, warm bedmates. Undemanding, too. But mucking out frozen straw and tearing the skin from your fingers on the icy metal of the harness buckles—musty gowns are nothing to that!

That's as may be. Stable and château, indoors and out, each one of us was tried in his own way. But among monsieur's household, none was so sorely tried as the bird-keepers, whose task it was to keep monsieur's tropical birds from dying of the cold.

Le bon Dieu had cause, if He'd a mind, to send the bird-keepers to help M. Février with the moon; for they worked like ants, Sundays and Saints' Days and all, hauling wood from the great stacks among the outbuildings and feeding it to the Gargantuan furnaces, the stoves and wheeled braziers that heated the aviary. Come February, with two more months of cold still ahead, they were out in the forest daily, eking out their damp and dwindling fuel with windfalls while Noël Songis nursed a pack of unhappy, molting, wheezing birds whose blood God had made for warmer climes.

Although 'twas the same every year, I did not witness it often, for of habit madame and monsieur lived in the rue des Lions from Christmas until Lent. In January of 1777, however, the damp that threatened the parrots with pneumonia seeped into Linotte's chest as well, striking the child so dangerously ill that Jacques Ministre wrote monsieur that his daughter was dying. Monsieur, wig-deep in scientific discourse, referred the matter to madame, who sighed once for Mme de Bouffler's rout and bade me pack and order the berline.

Despite fur robes and a brazier in the sleigh, our journey to Beauxprés was anxious, protracted, and prodigiously cold. Madame
could neither rest nor eat for worrying that we'd not arrive in time, although how she intended to help her daughter once we got there was no clearer to her than to me. In any case, we made it at last, hungry, weary, and chilled to the marrow, to find that Linotte's fever had broken the very day Jacques Ministre sent his letter. Nevertheless, the child was very weak still and touchingly glad to see my mistress, who declared her intention to nurse her daughter back to health with her own hands. Which vow, to my deep astonishment, she mostly fulfilled, making such ado with lap-robes and broth and lavender-water 'twas a wonder the child did not fall ill again. At the end of a week, Linotte was beginning to grow fractious and madame herself to cough.

Madame fell ill at the end of January. As the days wore on towards the feast of St. Valentine and her coughing worsened, monsieur rode down to Beauxprés at last, bringing with him one M. Berthelemy, a famous physician who'd bled the gout from half the philosophes in Paris. Having studied my mistress' water and felt her pulse, M. Berthelemy let a pint of blood from a vein in her ankle and prescribed for her a tisane of saffron and the kernels of pine-nuts, mixed with a little wine and calomel.

Nursing madame naturally fell to me. I couldn't be with her every moment, of course—M. Berthelemy said I'd fall sick myself if I did not take some rest. So Pompey sat with her during the day, or mère Boudin. Monsieur, he wouldn't come near her, even though illness had made my mistress more birdlike than ever, with flat, bright eyes, scaly claws, a pink and pointed beak, and a staccato cough like a waterbird's call.

At night, I sat my vigil alone. Fever had weakened madame's eyes—she couldn't bear even a shaded candle near her—so I sat in the firelight listening to her breath whistle and creak in her lungs like a leaky bellows.

This illness of my mistress' was hard for me to bear. Not only did I fear for her life, but there were long hours when she did not know me. The sick may be free to say whatever they like, but what madame liked was to berate me. Even as I sat wiping the fever-sweat from her face, she would mutter that I had deserted her, that I hated her, that I was spiteful, jealous, managing, sly. Twenty times I planned to leave, to walk down to the village and beg Jacques Charreton to give me a seat in his cart as far as Besançon. I'd some money laid by—almost two hundred livres—a respectable dowry, and enough to
start a business on. I'd be a modiste, I thought, or even a lingère like my mother. I even thought of taking passage to America. There was war there, I'd heard, but also great riches and freedom for all, and no law against hiring a servant with no letter of character.

And why didn't I go? I asked myself the question a thousand times or more. Was it that ancient vow of constancy, sworn by a child to a child weeping in the night? Bah. I'm not so much a sentimentalist as that. Greed? Well, 'tis true that my wages were good—twenty livres a year, paid regularly upon the Feast of the Assumption. My mistress was generous, too, in the matter of castoff gowns and petticoats, ribbons and trinkets. But these were not enough to keep me, had I truly wished to go.

The real answer to the question, then, is that I did not want to leave her. Leave Beauxprés, yes. Leave monsieur, his birds, and his collections, a thousand times yes. But leave madame my mistress? I could not. Habit, need, and affection bound me to her with the strongest of gossamer threads, and in the end I stayed because my place was at her side. I stayed because I could not leave her and still remain Berthe Duvet.

On the night following St. Valentine's feast day, the beggar appeared to us for the last time.

I'd asked Peronel to come at midnight and sit with madame for an hour or two while I took some rest in the dressing-room. Peronel wasn't quick, not like Marie, but she was gentle-handed, quiet, and very pretty. Besides, I pitied the girl. Menée had brought her into the laundry, warmed his bed with her for a few months, and then set her aside. The other servingmaids, naturally enough, made her life a misery, which she didn't really deserve, poor cabbage. Madame seemed to like having her about, and she got on with Pompey. So I let her help with the nursing.

Just before twelve o'clock, Peronel scratched at the door and entered, balancing a tisane on a tray and yawning prodigiously. Madame had fallen asleep. I rose from my chair, stretched, took the tray, and carried it to the fire, which was burning very low. When I'd mended it, I knelt upon the hearth to set the tisane in the coals to warm.

The clock on the mantel began to chime the hour, and the air splintered with a clamor like iron bells.

At first, it seemed no more than a harsh, metallic raving; then,
one by one, words clanged through my head: "François Marie Baptiste Armand Maindur, duc de Malvoeux. Come thou forth to thy judgment."

Again the call, drawing me as surely as if 'twere addressed to me. I knelt by the fire in a puddle of tisane and cast an anxious eye toward the bed. Thanks be to la sainte Vierge, madame still slept, though she frowned and whimpered restlessly. Peronel, silly slut, had her eyes screwed shut and her fingers stuffed into her ears.

I rose, took her by the shoulders, and gave her a good shaking. "Watch madame," I told her when her eyes opened. "If she wakes, hold her hand and talk to her."

"About what?" whispered Peronel, panic draining her cheeks.

"Anything—laundry!" Releasing her, I rose and tiptoed out the door and across the stair-head to the little panelled door that gave Dentelle private access to monsieur's dressing-room. I opened it and slipped into a murk that smelled of eau de cologne and birds. A sullen, uncertain glow illuminated the window. My ears rang with fear and something more—the clamor of a thousand bells, bright and dark at once.

Magic?

As I have come to look, look I must, though my legs will hardly bear me to the window. By the fountain of Latona stands the beggar, so translated that I'm hard put to recognize him. His eyes are ablaze, and his staff gouts a scarlet fire in whose flickering light the fountain's half-frogs grimace and contort. The rags of his black cloak flutter in a sourceless wind; his hair and beard writhe about his face like smoke. He's no longer bent or crippled, nor does he look particularly old. The air trembles under the iron lash of his voice.

"Three times have you and yours refused me charity. Three times have you and yours reviled me. Three times have you and yours taunted me. The prophecy of which your father told you being fulfilled, a new prophecy ariseth to take its place.

"I say to thee, François Marie Baptiste Armand, François called L'oiseleur, that, great as it is, thy collection lacks the one bird it must have. Without it, thine estate will dwindle, thy herds slacken, thy wheat rot in the fields, thy ventures miscarry. Without it, thou wilt grow old, solitary, bitter, mad. Without it, thy wife will know no peace upon this earth. Without it, thy sons will have no inheritance and thy daughter no dowry. Without it, the family of Maindur will wither and die."

The beggar fell silent. I waited for monsieur to answer him, to
laugh and tell the old goat that curses count for nothing in an Age of Reason. But the duc de Malvoeux only leaned his hands upon the balcony railing.

The beggar—the sorcerer, I should say—lowered his voice, so that I must strain to hear him. "As thy daughter hath shewn some impulse of kindness towards an old beggar, so will the old beggar shew some pity for her sake. The bird is the Porcelain Dove; look for it in the Fortunate Isles." He laughed, showing sharp white teeth; above them his yellow eyes stared expressionless. Then, like a snuffed candle-flame, he was gone.

As if the sorcerer's words had turned us to stone, monsieur stood on his balcony and I in my window. Like the afterimage of lightning, the sorcerer's form was emblazoned on my eyes, and I could no more turn from it than I could sprout wings and fly up to where M. Février trundled the moon across the sky. Then I became aware of the stars again, and the courtyard lying cold and still in the moonlight. And I remembered madame and what monsieur would say if he caught me spying.

I groped my way blindly through the panelling, and was stumbling across the stair-head when monsieur threw open the door of his apartment. So pinched and set was his mouth and so fierce his eyes when they fell upon me that I feared at first that he'd heard me in his dressing-room. Expecting a blow, I cringed when he raised his arm; but he only put me blindly aside and stalked past me down the stairs.

Trembling, I returned to madame's chamber to find my mistress asleep with Peronel sitting beside her, holding her hand and murmuring.

"Now, you starch thread-lace with sugar-water," she was saying. "But sugar-water doesn't work at all on blond, which takes—"

I must have made some noise, for Peronel started violently and clapped her free hand over her mouth to stifle a scream. When she saw me, she crossed herself. "Why, Berthe! You're white as your fichu. In the name of le bon Dieu, what have you seen?"

Although two hundred years later I can quote the beggar's words as he said them; although I can describe quite accurately how monsieur's peregrine eye fixed upon and dismissed me; although these words and events were even then fresh imprinted on my senses, I could not answer her.