The Porcelain Dove (32 page)

"You need not trouble yourself, sister," said madame icily. "I myself have taken steps to ensure that the child's education will be in all ways superior to Port Royal, except, perhaps, in the study of pranks and intrigue."

In the general way, I would not have said the sisters much resembled one another, but now the pair of them sat stiffly on their chairs, their faces identical masks of suppressed rage. The visit did not look to survive the exchange, and I was preparing to break the chocolate-basin to give them some common cause for their anger when Mme de Bonsecours' face softened.

"I beg your pardon, Adèle. I'd cause to hate Port Royal myself, though not, bien sûr, so great a cause as you. Am I to understand that you intend to teach Linotte yourself?"

"Pompey will teach her," said my mistress.

"Ah," said Mme de Bonsecours. "Rousseau triumphant. I approve."

In September, a letter arrived from Beauxprés bearing M. le duc de Malvoeux's wonder at his wife's long absence. If the first snowfall did not find her home at Beauxprés, he'd be forced to consider himself a widower and his children motherless.

"Poor heart," was madame's response to this chilly missive. "I must go to him at once. How he misses me."

So it was that when next Mme de Bonsecours called, she found
us in a chaos of trunks and hat boxes, baskets and cases. She surveyed the bed piled high with gowns, the corsets wrapped in muslin, the stacks of gloves and folded chemises, and arched her brows.

"So your falconer has whistled you to his fist at last," she said.

Madame raised her chin. "I have but remembered my duty as a wife," she said.

"Ah," said Mme de Bonsecours. "Still, I expect you'll miss Paris sadly, after your succès fou. I don't know how a certain prince will contrive to survive your absence."

My mistress blushed. "If he does not, 'twill not be for lack of ladies willing to comfort him."

"Bien sûr. But how dull 'twould be not knowing which among them he chooses. Shall I write and tell you?"

Though she seemed to tease, something in her tone drew my attention, some echo of the yearning I'd often heard in my mistress' voice when she addressed monsieur. Coming from so formidable a woman, it surprised and touched me. Madame, of course, was deaf. She smiled at her sister—a formal, chilly smile—and said, "If it amuses you, Hortense, of course you may write."

I have them still, twenty or more of the marquise's letters, which provide a running account of the bedrooms and salons of Paris and Versailles. They sit beside me now, worn with reading, stained with ashes and rouge and wax, breathing a faint perfume of vanished intrigues. The first of them arrived at Beauxprés before I'd quite finished unpacking madame's things.

October 1779

       
"Mlle" d'Eon has been arrested. Just as I predicted, the creature soon tired of being a woman and petitioned the king for permission to wear breeches on week-days, saving petticoats for Sundays and feast days. Not remarkably, the petition was ignored, whereupon d'Eon wrote to Maurepas complaining of the king's ill-treatment of a loyal subject who was both a gentlewoman and an officer of the Royal Army. Though the letter was prodigious rude and ill-writ—I've seen it myself—the creature was sufficiently proud of it to print it up and circulate it among the ladies of the court as a kind of Declaration of the Rights of Women. The fruit of this idiocy was six grenadiers calling with an arrest order at the
chevalière's lodgings in Versailles. The delicate creature resisted (manfully, I had almost wrote), stunning two of them with a carbine charged with grapeshot, but was overpowered at last by the survivors. Now the chevalière languishes in prison, the nuns of Auxerre having refused sanctuary to a supplicant whom only the king, and not God, had created female.

In my memory, a small voice cuts through these final words like shears through silk—Linotte's voice, crying, "This chevalière, is she a hare?"

We were in the China antechamber, as I recall, madame at her embroidery, Linotte at her sampler, me reading Mme de Bonsecours' letter aloud to them as they worked. Madame had returned from Paris fired with determination to teach her daughter the maidenly pursuits she herself had learned at the convent. I cannot say she taught her well, having no more idea of how to proceed than of how to write a book of philosophy. Yet these lessons were not unpleasant.

The day of Mme de Bonsecours' letter, for instance. When we stared at her interruption, not knowing what to answer, Linotte repeated her question: "Is the chevalière a hare?"

"Of course not, mignonne," said madame, rather snappishly, "nor is she a she at all, but only a silly man dressed up in petticoats. Why should she—peste!—he be anything other?"

Linotte clearly found this question as silly as the chevalière. To my surprise, she answered it nonetheless.

"Well, madame, when le bon Dieu let the waters come down in the great flood, all the animals had to get on the ark in a great hurry. The hares, being very fast, were among the first to enter, but so were the tigers, and the tigress was very hungry, for she was carrying cubs. It took a very long time for all the rest of the animals to get on the ark, and when Noë came at last to feed the tigers and the hares, he found the male hare mourning over a pile of clean bones.

"'Mme la Tigresse has eaten my poor wife,' cried the hare. 'Who will now bear leverets to run upon the new earth le bon Dieu prepares for us?' But Noë could not answer him. So the hare fell to his knees and called upon le bon Dieu, who told him that when the waters had departed, the hare would turn female and bear a litter, also male, who would turn female in their season and bear other litters, and so there would always be leverets and hares. And then le bon Dieu turned to the tigress and He marked her beautiful golden hide with black bars
in punishment for her crime, though He forbore to make her all black because she was only feeding the children within her.

"And that is why I asked if the chevalière is a hare, madame, for that's the only creature to be male one season and female another. Unless"—here her face brightened with revelation—"unless by chance she has walked under a rainbow, right under the center of it, and changed from man to woman in the space of a step?"

Madame sighed and shook her head. "Petite idiote!" she said. "All the world knows that hares are born male and female, even as tigers and horses and chickens are. Are they not, Berthe?"

I glanced at Linotte. She'd offered up her nonsense with such a pretty air of solemnity, as though 'twere Gospel, and now she looked so cast down that I pitied her. "Well, madame," I said carefully. "It seems likely. Yet I have never seen a female hare, nor has M. Malesherbes, in all his years of roasting, stewing, and sautéing them. So we must either believe that all female hares are so much quicker and smarter than their husbands and brothers that no one ever catches them, or else we must believe that Mlle Linotte's story has some grain of truth in it after all."

"Peste, Berthe, thou'rt as great an idiot as she," was all my mistress had to say. But I was rewarded by Linotte's smiling at me—a secret smile, the smile of one initiate to another. I smiled in return, though I could not imagine what mystery she thought we shared. That was the moment I decided to ask madame to give Peronel to Linotte as her femme de chambre.

It seemed a good idea at the time, not only to me, but also to madame, who remarked sentimentally that Linotte was almost the age she'd been when I entered her service. "And how much happier they'll be than you and I, exiled to Port Royal. We must close the nursery and give her her own rooms, of course. Do you think the Cameo apartment would suit?"

As the Cameo apartment opened out of the cabinet des Fées, it suited Linotte very well, as did her official elevation to young ladyhood. Peronel, however, was oddly reluctant.

"But I
like
the laundry," she said when I told her of her good fortune. "I know nothing of rouge and head-dresses, Berthe, nothing of serving a great lady. And what if I want to marry someday?"

"Oh, Peronel. She's only a child as yet—you've time and enough to learn about the mode. And as for your marrying. . . . Listen to your Berthe, now. The bonds forged in youth are strong. The younger your
mistress, the more events you both will witness and suffer together and the closer you'll grow, until a single heart beats in your two bodies. And if that prospect does not move you, consider that if you attend the child, mère Boudin will not. At a stroke, we'll all be rid of an unpleasant old hag, and you'll gain an extra five livres a year for your purse."

A year passed, a year of false peace in which monsieur once again welcomed madame into his aviary, Peronel learned to dress hair, Marie bore her first child, Pompey taught Linotte her letters, and mère Boudin set up in the village as a seller of secondhand linens. She did very well for herself, the château laundry-maids being glad to sell the worn sheets to her rather than wait on the peddler, who came by only twice or thrice a year and was a great thief besides. No one spoke of the beggar, though his shadow could still be discerned in monsieur's continued economies and the bowl of ashes in Mme Pyanet's garden. Then one summer's day, Artide came into the back kitchen waving a letter like a banner above his head. It was creased and stained and directed in an illiterate scrawl to M. le duc de Malvoeux.

"Jacques Charreton brought it this morning," he said. "It came from Nantes, he said, and the carrier who brought it had it of a sailor on the warship
Belle Poule
. I take it no one'll object if I open it?"

For answer, M. Malesherbes heated a sharp knife, and a crowd of assistant chefs, scullions, and servingmaids gathered around as Artide gently pried up the wax, unfolded the single sheet, and read it aloud.

March, 1778. M. le duc de Malvoeux. Expedition impressed into the navy. Have seen many islands, none of them Fortunate. Besides my ship, only birds common gulls and terns. C'est la guerre.

Yr. obedient servant, Gouberville

Artide laughed. "So much for Hy Brasil and Avalon. If the Dove's in the Indies, some Englishman has undoubtedly shot it and stuffed it by now. The English are like that, they say."

"Think you monsieur will rave again?" Finette asked breathlessly. "I missed it last time."

"Idiote!" snapped M. Malesherbes. "Imbecile! I see it now. Monsieur in an uproar, madame unable to swallow more than a spoonful
of soft custard. I know not why I remain here, cooking for a madman and a malade imaginaire, when a prince of the blood royal has offered me a place in his kitchens. Par Dieu, I must be as mad as our master, me."

The sous-chef suggested that we burn the letter on the grounds of monsieur's heart not grieving over what his eye did not see. Artide shrugged. "What do you care whether monsieur grieves or not, eh? He cares nothing for your feelings. Besides, 'twill do him good to know that there are matters in the world more pressing than his jean-foutre bird."

So we sealed the letter up again and Artide took it to monsieur, who read it and flung it upon the fire. He did not rave, did not so much as frown, and for all I know to the contrary, spoke of it to no one, neither then nor later. I can only conclude that he decided there was no letter, and therefore no war, and that a bird-hunter still searched the West for a Porcelain Dove.

In the summer of 1780, the baron du Fourchet succumbed to a meal of port and lobster and went to learn how taxes were farmed in Heaven.

Monsieur made no objection to madame's attending her father's funeral. Indeed, he said he'd accompany her, and Linotte as well. Although the weather was charming and the journey an easy one, to my dismay Peronel was quiet and sullen the whole while, hated the inns and the changing land, and pronounced the Seine valley flat and tedious. Paris was a pigsty, the Tuileries not so handsome as the gardens of Beauxprés, and the elegant ladies in their barouches and diligences wore their hair too high and their gowns too low. She pronounced Olympe and her friends a flock of hens tricked out like peacocks, and the handsome Mlle Raucourt an over-painted virago who squealed like a pig. I began to think Peronel an ungrateful chit.

The house on the rue Quincampoix was more crowded than usual. Mme de Poix had returned from England to pay her last respects to her father, and her husband seized the opportunity to demand the return of her marriage settlement. I couldn't take three steps outside my mistress' chamber without running into her or her new English maid, or M. de Poix, or M. de Poix's handsome secretary, or M. de Poix's lawyer, or the young vicomte de Montplaisir.

Two years at L'Epieu had polished M. Léon to a high gloss. His
neckcloths were astounding, his coats a second skin, his boots like glass, and he wore his own unpowdered hair tied back in a velvet band. He drawled when he spoke, sprawled when he sat, and dangled a lace kerchief from his finger's ends as daintily as any petit maître. His shoulders were still broad and his eyes pale and cold: a wolf in dandy's clothing.

And like a wolf, he had an attendant fox—a thin, sandy manservant called Alain Reynaud. When monsieur first became aware of him, I thought there would be murder done. 'Twas in madame's chamber as she dressed for the baron's funeral and the subject of her gown arose—how much it had cost and who was to pay for it. M. Léon agreed with monsieur that it had been very dear and madame returned the betrayal by inquiring whether the scrawny boy loitering at the door were another of L'Epieu's numerous amenities?

Monsieur turned his cold eye first upon the boy and then upon his son. "This lout belongs to you? Take care, Montplaisir, how you spend my gold without my leave. Begone, you," he told the boy, who cowered against the door. "And be grateful I don't have the public hangman count out your wages across your back."

M. Léon looked black for a moment, then laughed. "Come, m'sieur. 'Twill be a savings to ye, I declare. Here's laundry and personal services twenty livres
per annum
, not counting the odd silver for the carriage of messages and suchlike. A manservant costs no more than half that amount, outside of the livery, which may be sent from Beauxprés at no expense."