The Porcelain Dove (34 page)

By the autumn of 1781, madame my mistress was finding Paris sadly flat. The haut monde was chewing over the same tired subjects like a particularly indigestible cud: the Compte Rendu, Necker's resignation, Fleury's taxes, the price of salt, Mesmer's animal spirits, the infant dauphin, the war with England, the price of grain, the latest satires, the new robes-chemises in which the queen of France could not be distinguished from a grisette on her way to bed. There was nothing new to talk about, no one new to talk to. Parisian society was eternally the same, she complained, and the Parisian streets stank worse than the aviary in August. Unsummoned and unannounced, we returned to Beauxprés.

After so long an absence, I'd almost forgotten how mountains can loom over one, how fir and brambles overshadow the road on one side and open to a long and rocky drop on the other. The farmhouses like great stone tents, the church steeples tiled like snake skins, the villages playing cache-cache on the rocky hillsides—mile by mile, they grew more familiar. I found myself thinking fondly of Estienne Pyanet's crusted bread and the back kitchen at Beauxprés with a fire in the hearth, a hot brandy-and-sugar in my hand, and M. Malesherbes, Artide, the sous-chef, Jacques Ministre, even Dentelle regaling me with the small happenings of the year past.

And Pompey, the child of my heart. Pompey most of all.

The fire and the brandy-and-sugar and Artide and M. Malesherbes were all just as I'd imagined them. Pompey, on the other hand, was nowhere to be seen. I wasn't too astonished—he was Mlle Linotte's only servant, after all, and not one to take his duties lightly. Yet I thought he might have come down to greet me.

"Oh, Pompey's a great man now," sneered Artide when I inquired after him. "He's playing Abélard to our little Héloïse and has no time for us."

M. Malesherbes shook his head over his steaming cup. " 'Twas one thing when he was small, to make a pet of him and laugh at his barbaric ways. But to give a grown savage governance over a Catholic child! I cannot think it right, me."

"Nor would I think it right," I said, "were Pompey in truth a savage."

Artide laughed. "Give it up, Malesherbes. You know how Berthe dotes upon our dusky ape." I looked daggers at him; he threw up his hands as though to ward against a blow. "Peace, peace, Mlle Amie des Noirs. I'll admit that Pompey is as civilized as you please, if you'll admit that there are more suitable tutors for a French noble's young daughter than a full-grown male blackamoor."

"Ah, bah!" I said. "He's as suited for the job as any Frenchman of a like age, and more suitable than most."

"Enough!" said M. Malesherbes. "I see, Berthe, that Paris has done little to mend your temper."

Artide leaned forward and pinched my chin. "Go seek your monkey in the cabinet des Fées, my cabbage. I wish you joy of your reunion."

Dismissed and deflated, I mounted the stairs to the hall of Depositions. Absence—or perhaps the sour taste of the scene just past —must have made me more than usually sensitive to the gloomy influence of bleeding Christs and weeping Virgins, for by the time I'd reached the Snuffbox antechamber that led to the cabinet des Fées, I felt myself close to tears.

Reluctant to greet Pompey in this maudlin state, I stayed where I was and tried to compose myself.

The Snuffbox antechamber is a good room for distracting the mind. The boxes are arranged in a kind of crescendo—plain enamels nearest the Fan room, moving through beaded and cloisonnéd and jeweled and painted to the most artful, the most precious of all, housed in two cases flanking the door of the cabinet des Fées. These are a hundred oval boxes bound in vermeil, each bearing the miniature portrait of some renowned fairy, wizard, or princess. In the left-hand case, the Yellow Dwarf scowls ferociously, the White Cat lifts a dainty paw, the Fairy Magotine flourishes her wand of serpents. In the right-hand case nestles a clutch of golden-haired princesses, one as like another as hen's eggs. Perfect beauty is perfect beauty, after all, and doesn't vary much.

I'd just reached the princesses when Pompey's voice sounded through the door. "No, no, mademoiselle," he said, amused and indulgent. "Don't you remember? The roses were Prince Lutin's, and their virtue died with him. They are curiosities only. Now, I ask again.
You wish to make a long journey. Which of these objects would you choose to take?"

Half-ashamed of my stealth, I applied my eye to the keyhole. A broad table occupied my field of vision, and upon it I could see a small green cap ornamented with scarlet feathers, a good-sized walnut, three roses, and a worn leather satchel. Mlle Linotte had her elbows on the table and was studying the objects before her with knotty concentration. She was then ten years old, not nearly so pretty as her mother at that age—thin and tall and sharp-faced like her father. The resemblance was so strong, I wondered how I'd not noticed it before. Her black hair hung in elf-locks about her narrow shoulders, and her white gown was spotty and smudged. I thought her a repellent child.

"The walnut holds a dress," she said suddenly, "and would be of no use to me unless my journey were to Versailles. The satchel gives food, which would be useful on a long journey. I think I'd rather have something to make the journey short." She squinted up—at Pompey, I suppose, though she seemed to be looking straight through the keyhole at me. As I drew back discomfited, I heard her say, "I can't remember what the cap does. If the roses are curiosities only, then I should take the cap."

Pompey laughed. "Well reasoned! When you are grown, if sorceresses are not à la mode, you may call yourself a philosophe. Now, go and read 'Prince Lutin,' which you were to read yesterday, and learn about the cap—yes, and the roses, too. And when you have done that, we will go to the aviary and help Jacques Ministre feed the birds."

Hastily I unbent myself, knocked smartly upon the door, opened it, and stepped inside. "Ah, Pompey," I said briskly. "Artide said I should find you here. Mlle Linotte"—I dipped her the smallest of curtsies—"your mother is returned home from Paris. Pray go and welcome her." I looked her up and down, from beggar's skirt to unkempt hair. "I see mademoiselle has no one to attend her. Shall I find a comb for her, and perhaps a clean gown?"

If I'd hoped to daunt the child, I was to be disappointed. She tilted up her chin at me, tossed back her hair, and sailed out the door as proudly as one of the snuffbox princesses.

Linotte gone, I held out my arms to Pompey. He came into them readily enough, and lifted me clean off my feet in a mighty hug. I'd forgotten how big he was—tall as monsieur and a span across the shoulders, with beautiful long hands beside which mine were small as a child's.

"You intend to stay this time," he said as he put me down again. "I'm glad. There is no one here to talk with save mademoiselle, who is still very young." His soft voice deepened. "You weren't very kind to her, Berthe."

I drew myself out of his arms. "The child is a disgrace. Are there no laundresses at Beauxprés? And surely she's not so young that she cannot comb her hair now and again."

"Ah, Berthe," sighed Pompey, and turned away from me to gather up the enchanted hat and other things from the table and return them to their proper cases and drawers. Stitch by stitch, I felt our old easy friendship raveling into tangle of petty jealousy and broken loyalty. Pompey was no longer the little page I'd comforted in my arms, the soft-eyed youth I'd teased and protected. In this year of absence, he'd grown into a hulking stranger: a savage, alien. The tears I'd banished among the snuffboxes welled up again.

"I've missed you, Pompey," I said. "Olympe grows old, and all her conversation these days is of old lovers and new aches. I love her still, bien sûr—she is my mother's blood. But I cannot trust her discretion."

"You have something to tell me that torments you past bearing. I could smell it through the door, like rotting flowers. Poor Berthe."

Poor Berthe indeed! How dare he snuffle at my emotions without my leave? "Can'st then sniff out what torments me?" I snapped. "Sacré tonnerre, boy! 'Twould become thee better to let me tell my tale in my own way!"

Pompey bowed his head and waited as I asked until the silence grew thick and heavy between us. He waited while I seethed, while I considered flouncing out of the room, while I considered throwing a magic nut at his inky face. He waited until I began to grow exceedingly perplexed and somewhat ashamed. Then he asked quietly, "You have found Peronel Mareschal?"

"How do you know?"

He shook his head. "I only guess. Is she well?"

"She's alive and she's not ill, at least not yet, though I'd hardly call her well. Our Peronel's a Parisian whore, and Parisian whores seldom keep their health for long, especially in such a house as she inhabits."

Silently, Pompey came to me, took my arm, and led me into the Fan room, to a window furnished with a deep, cushioned seat. There he sat me down and listened gravely while I told him of Peronel and
the vicomte and of his valet Alain Reynaud and their curious, distasteful pastimes. When I was done, I found I could not look at him, so I looked instead at the dusty fans in the case behind him and remembered how I'd cut out M. Léon's breeches in this very room, and how Marie had teased Peronel because a young boy had stolen a kiss of her.

"Musk and blood," said Pompey from a long silence. "All the Maindurs smell of old blood—even Mlle Linotte. But Léon! Even in the womb he stank of shit."

Confessed, I felt lighter. "Well," I said, giving his hand a pat. "Now there's two of us to keep an eye upon the servingmaids, should the vicomte take it in his head to come visiting."

"Yes," he said. "But if servingmaids begin disappearing one by one, how are we to prevent it? Monsieur is unlikely to believe his son a monster."

I thought of M. LeSueur and of Justin's being whipped, more than once, for some misdeed of his brother's. "To be sure. 'Twill end, I fear, as it always ends with M. Léon—with others paying for his crimes. Yet forewarned is forearmed. We'll think of something when the time comes."

In the life of a village, a year is longer than this eternity we have dwelt in Beauxprés. That Sunday when I went to Mass, I was astonished to hear all that had transpired. The old curé had died, and a foreigner from Bugey had taken his place—a baron's son, godly, learned, and timid. He preached a sermon on the blessing of life in honor of Marie Malateste, who was being churched after the birth of her fourth child in three years, the second child having been twins. I nodded to her courteously at the church door and was rewarded with such a look as I'd give a cat who'd kittened on my Sunday petticoat. Dentelle stood godfather to the brat, and to hear him brag, you'd have thought he'd fathered it himself.

Mère Boudin was dressed in black, and told me when I greeted her that she was a widow now. Mme Pyanet whispered in my ear that 'twas said that she'd lost her husband's balls to the Devil at dice, whereupon the poor man'd had no choice but to die of shame. All in all, 'twas as good as a play.

I was not displeased to be home again. Yes, home. Jean says my brain must be going soft. As far as
he
recalls, I never liked Beauxprés, never ceased for a moment to long for Paris, to praise its theaters, its
boulevards, its shops, its pleasures. Well, he's right. I didn't. Nonetheless, Beauxprés had come to feel like home to me. Colette, wiser in the ways of grief than Jean, may understand what he does not: that I was linked to Beauxprés by what I'd suffered there. And the quiet of Beauxprés was not so different, after all, from the quiet of Port Royal and of the hôtel Fourchet, where madame and I had been so peaceful together.

Madame, on the other hand, had had her fill of peace. As the days drew in, so did her restlessness increase, until she was like a bitch in heat, forever on the wrong side of the door. We hardly saw monsieur, who had not troubled himself so much as to greet her upon her return, and Linotte all too clearly preferred learning magic and mathematics from Pompey to learning embroidery and the clavichord from her mother. Finding nothing to distract her in all Beauxprés, madame turned to the state of her health.

I will not dwell on the rheums and agues, the languors and irritable fits of that long winter. She wrote for advice to every quack in France and spent all her ribbon-money on nostrums, potions, and powders. One physician counseled her to eat fowl fed on vipers. Another advised her to take a tincture of gold in milk to strengthen her heart. She bathed every day—even days in water so hot she was in danger of scalding, odd days in water so cold 'twas a wonder she escaped pneumonia. M. Malesherbes complained of her diet, the lackeys complained of the countless cans of hot and cold water they must haul up to her room and down again. Even Dentelle complained, for my mistress called upon him in his role of monsieur's barber to bleed her once a week. In short, not a soul in Beauxprés but rejoiced when M. Tissot wrote from Lausanne suggesting that all madame needed to maintain perfect health was a regimen of regular equestrian exercise. Not a soul, that is, except monsieur.

Not that he minded madame's riding—he'd hardly have noticed had she taken a fancy to tramp the hills with a pack, like a gypsy. His objection was that his stable did not include a horse trained to a lady's saddle, and M. le duc de Malvoeux would not squander a hundred livres on a beast that boasted neither wings nor feathers. If madame his wife needed exercise, he said, she could walk in the garden.

'Twas once again a case of inciting a dove to wrath. Next morning my mistress was up betimes, stealing a rope of pearls from her own jewel box, and ordering an undergroom to accompany her to Champagnole for the purpose of buying a horse. Having failed to argue or
flatter her into a prudent docility, I washed my hands of the affair, and when she returned that evening with a pretty brown mare tied behind the dog-cart, I fled to the aviary. When parrots scream abuse at one another, I cannot understand their insults.

As I'd predicted, monsieur was angry enough to spit iron. Le bon Dieu be thanked, I didn't see it, though Artide was glad to give me every detail of how my master had broken a riding-whip across my mistress' shoulders and sworn he'd have the groom hanged and the mare butchered for hawk-meat. So much was monsieur's way and only to be expected; madame's response was another thing altogether. According to Artide—and to Philiberte Malateste and the groom as well—my mistress boldly declared that the pearls were hers, given her by her father, and the horse she'd bought with them her own personal property.