The Porcelain Dove (41 page)

Pompey shrugged. "M. le duc has decided that his children are unruly, disobedient, stubborn, and in sore need of trained minds and strong hands to control them. He has engaged a master of mathematics and a master of philosophy to teach them."

"That doesn't explain why you're suddenly a groom."

"M. le duc has declared that he will have no animals living in his house." Pompey's voice was bitter, his eyes sorrowful. The sorrow was an old thing, the bitterness new. Once I could lighten his grief with a jest or an embrace. Now I had no comfort for him. I had little enough for myself.

He smiled. "You don't have to weep for me, Berthe. The stable is not a bad place. I am out of monsieur's way, and Jean doesn't care if my skin is black or roan or dapple-gray, providing the horses like me. And you and I may still meet in the kitchen."

"Bien sûr," I began, "but—"

I was interrupted by a commotion at the door.

"Traitor!" monsieur shouted as he strode towards us. "Turn my
daughter against me, will you? Take your baboon's face out of my sight, and be grateful that I don't have your black hide flayed from your back."

Fleurette blew and backed uneasily. Pompey patted her neck.

"Art deaf as well as half-witted? Have I not told thee to go?"

Pompey did not take his eyes or hands from the restive mare. "Monsieur's servant heard him clearly. But monsieur did not say where he desired his servant to go."

"To Hell!"

At monsieur's scream, Fleurette snorted and danced and would have bolted had it not been for Pompey's hand upon her bridle. Monsieur snatched the riding whip from me with such violence that I fell down in the dust, and cut it across Pompey's face, leaving a garnet chain of blood beaded upon one black cheek. Pompey struck the whip from monsieur's hand, Fleurette reared, and then all was shouting and plunging hooves and dust and a great confusion of booted feet, so that there was nothing for me to do but curl up in the dust and wait to be trampled. Someone kicked my wrist; a foot or a hoof caught me on the buttocks. For the second time in what seemed to me as many days, I commended my soul to my Savior.

Suddenly, the brouhaha ceased, and all was quiet save for the mare's panting and a soft murmur of men's voices. I ventured to uncurl a little and open my eyes. Mare and duc each stood splay-legged and trembling in the aftershock of passion. Jean held Fleurette's bridle, Philiberte Malateste held monsieur's arm; each poured honeyed nonsense into the ear of his shivering charge. After a moment, monsieur shook off his milk-brother's hand and commanded him to find the blackamoor. Once found, monsieur instructed Malateste to flay him, hang him, and pin his carcass to the stable door like a rat's.

Malateste bowed and swore the deed already accomplished, which oath made him at once a liar and forsworn. For Pompey had disappeared as utterly as a dream at waking. The servants whispered of witchery, of a wig compounded of hanged man's hair and lark's blood that allowed its wearer to walk unseen. Had he returned to Beauxprés, I fear he'd hardly have escaped burning. But he did not return, that day or any day thereafter.

The months following Pompey's flight from Beauxprés were unspeakably dreary. Hard cold came in November, with wind and snow and sleet, and fires forbidden in all rooms save the library and ma
dame's apartment and the kitchen. The cold seeped into my bones until I thought I'd never be warm again, and images of the scene in the Forêt des Enfans were constantly bobbing up in my mind like drowned corpses. Dressing madame's hair, I saw the shadow of the pauper girl's haggard face in the glass; folding her gowns, I felt the boy's sticky rags between my fingers. I couldn't unstopper a vial of scent without smelling blood. And whether madame asked for her ribbon or her rouge-box, all I heard was her command to Carmontelle: "Drive on."

After so many years of painting it, studying it, washing it, stroking it, my mistress' face was more familiar to me than my own. Yet that winter, whether I saw it reflected in her mirror or turned to me in inquiry or bent over her tambour, I saw a stranger's countenance. This dark-haired, rose-mouthed woman who dressed in madame's clothes and smelled of madame's perfume—this woman was not madame, but a changeling, a demon. Only a demon would command a groom to fire upon starving children. Only a stranger would have been so ready to throw me to the wolves—when she still thought they were wolves, before we saw that they were coneys instead. It all went around and around in my head, and the longer I brooded upon it and her, the angrier I grew.

I said nothing to her, of course. Femmes de chambre do not comment upon the morals of their mistresses, be they unchaste as she-wolves or evil as cats—not if they wish to keep their places. A thousand times, I decided to follow Noël Songis and Jacques Ministre to freedom. A thousand times, I bit my tongue. Where (I asked myself as I tugged the brush through her graying hair) would I go?

As many plans as I conceived, so many objections rose like mère Malatestes to abort them. Paris? Upon the boulevards of Paris, lady's maids are as common as brambles in the Forêt des Enfans. It went without saying I'd get no letter of character, and without a letter, I'd end up like poor Peronel, or worse, being older and unsuited to the work. Not Paris, then.

Lausanne? I knew the comtesse Réverdil, and she knew any number of bankers' wives. I needed a change of scene, and Lausanne would be most pleasant. Ah, beautiful Lac Leman, I told myself. The mountains! The air! The damp, myself answered glumly. The cold! The snow! As well stay in Beauxprés. And mon Dieu, the Protestants! Lausanne was in the middle of a Protestant canton—not a priest for
miles. Where would I hear Mass? And bankers' wives are fat and vulgar. Not Lausanne.

As far as I could see, all roads leading from Beauxprés ended, sooner or later, in Hell. For a practical woman of middle age, the choice between unhappiness and starvation is not a choice at all. I was miserable, bien sûr, but I was also passably well-fed, well-clothed, well-housed. And when I tried to imagine life without my mistress . . . Well, my imagination failed me, and that's the truth of it.

So there I was, feeling like a prisoner in the Bastille, and there were Artide, and Jean, and M. Malesherbes, and Dentelle, and Malateste, and Carmontelle, and Clauda, and the rest of them, all fretting and cursing and bemoaning their lot, but only when Sangsue wasn't by to hear them. There were Mlle Linotte and M. Justin, the one too young, the other too closely watched to run away. There was monsieur, who'd no desire to leave Beauxprés. And there was my mistress, who could not, though she tried.

In November, Mme de Bonsecours sent word of the death of the baronne du Fourchet. The weather had cleared a little, the roads were passable in a sleigh, winter traveling was hardly new to us—of course madame would attend her mother's obsequies. In less time than it takes to tell, the boxes were packed, the sleigh at the door, and we tucked into it with furs and a brazier, gliding over the milk-blue snow towards the chestnut drive.

The bare limbs of the chestnuts arched around us, black filigree against the pale sky. My mistress peered suddenly upwards. "There, Berthe," she exclaimed. "Did you see it? No, 'tis gone. But there
was
something: I know it."

"Madame has seen a bird," I said. "There are always birds around Beauxprés."

She objected that 'twas too big for a bird, far too big, and stared and fidgeted all the way to the foot of the hill. I thought she'd settle when we passed into the meadows, but she only grew more and more tetchy, until by the time we made the Forêt des Enfans, she was like a duck who sees the cook's boy approaching. The first ranks of firs opened to us, and we passed slowly among them. There was no sound in the forest save the scraping hiss of the runners, the muffled clop of the hooves, and then, suddenly, my mistress' voice shrieking at Carmontelle to turn around at once.

"Children, Berthe," she panted when at last he'd managed the
feat of turning four horses and a sleigh on a narrow forest road. "On the road. Didn't you see them?"

I'd seen long aisles of trees, shaggy and dark, with the prospect of Paris shimmering like heaven beyond them. Now I saw nothing at all. "No, madame," I said coldly.

"A dozen or more. Beggars, like the ones . . . you know. I expected to see them, but not so close to Beauxprés. They're everywhere, aren't they, so many of them, so hungry. . . . Surely they can't expect me to feed them all. And if I feed them today, they'll only be hungry again tomorrow."

"The poor are always with us, madame."

Well, she said nothing to that: indeed, what could she say? She did not mention the children again. Nor did she attend her mother's funeral, or visit Paris, or Versailles, or Lausanne. She did send gold to Baume-les-Messieurs to buy Masses for the baronne's soul, wept like a fountain for a month and wore black for a year. Me, I mourned for Olympe, who had doubtless received Mme la baronne's dying breath, closed her eyes, bound her jaw, bathed and arrayed her outworn body for its journey to the grave. Olympe, who called herself a cautious woman but could never resist a bit of lace or a fashionable hat. I feared she'd saved little enough of her wages, and she was now too old to find another position and too proud to enter an almshouse. I prayed she'd not starve or freeze in some Saint-Antoine doorway. I much fear she must have.

That winter, the winter of 1784, was terrible—not as bad as the winter of '88, mind you, but bad enough. The cold seemed endless, and the suffering also. In the village, the peasants burned dung or froze, for monsieur had exercised his right of triage and claimed all the dead wood for his own use. The aviary furnaces roared night and day, and still, without Noël Songis to nurse them, parrots and macaws, toucans and honey-birds fell sick and died by the dozen.

Because of the warmth, I went there whenever I had an hour to spare—provided I knew monsieur to be occupied elsewhere—and often I would discover a feathered corpse among the drooping greenery, or two, or three. Once, a small, bright bird dropped right into my lap, jerked its claws, spread one wing, and stiffened. Dead, it looked too lapidary to have ever been alive: its tail was peridot, its wings lapis lazuli and turquoise, its body burnished gold, its head carnelian. Folding the wing, I gathered it up, half thinking to find it as cold and heavy
in my hands as the mechanical nightingale the chevalier du Faraud had given Linotte. But its body was still warm, and its feathers softer than swansdown. I remember thinking one day I'd find my mistress like that, still and soft and broken, or Linotte, or even the magpie Justin, freed at last from Beauxprés and the vigilance of the tutors his father had procured for him.

Tutors. Bah! Jailers, rather: thick-necked, iron-handed, gimlet-eyed jailers. If they were masters of mathematics and philosophy, why then I was Voltaire's mistress. They stuck as close to the boy as his shirt. Closer. I doubt he could turn over in his sleep or fill his chamber pot without one or both of them taking note of it. And the tutors were not the worst of the torments his father forced upon him.

One day, passing the library, I heard a scream. I jumped. Well, anyone would have: a screech like a crow's alarm, and me not expecting it.

"Damned! Damned! Damned!" the crow mourned. 'Twas more than flesh and blood could bear not to hear who was being damned and how, so when my heart had calmed somewhat, I stood close by the door and listened.

"Superstition!" monsieur was shouting. "Hell is only a nursery tale, and damnation a goblin to frighten infants into good behavior. Your precious monks had you for five years, and look at you—no strength, no will of your own, no accomplishments, good for nothing but praying day and night. And what good's
that
, I ask you?"

The answer came very firm. "To praise Him who is our Creator and our Savior. And to purify our souls."

I heard the smack of flesh against flesh, then monsieur's voice: "I'll tell you what comes of purifying your soul. Nothing save a puling weakness. You shame me, Justin. You shame the name of Maindur."

"Hearing Mass is not nothing," said Justin, and I vow there was no weakness in his voice.

"'Tis less than nothing—less than the twittering of birds."

"I beseech you, monsieur, to beware how you place your soul in jeopardy."

"My soul, if indeed I have such a thing, is no concern of yours. You will obey me. Does not the rule of Saint Benedict enjoin you to obedience? Does not your God Himself command you to honor your father?"

"The Devil quotes scripture."

"Call me Devil, will you?" Smack.

A pause, and then Justin's voice again, growing as he spoke ever stronger and more passionate. "Saint Paul has written that if a man would serve God with his whole heart, he must leave behind his father and mother, his home, his wife and children. As I'd leave you, monsieur. Yet I swear upon the bones of Christ that I'll not seek to return to Baume-les-Messieurs, that I'll obey you cheerfully and dutifully in all you ask of me, if only you'll let me be confessed and hear Mass. If you do not trust my vow, at least allow the curé to come to me here. Once a week is all I ask. Monsieur—Father—I beg you."

This last was said so earnestly, so reasonably that the Devil himself must have been moved. Monsieur was not. His answer came through the door as the whistle and thwack of a crop or a stick. I did not hear Justin cry out, but then I did not listen long. My store of pity, as of patience and loving-kindness, was more barren than Mme Pyanet's larder.

And what's pity, after all? A poor, threadbare emotion, of no more use to its object than a cloak of sighs to a freezing man. Yet a cloak of sighs may warm a soul. And I was so angry in those days, so troubled in my heart and unquiet in my mind, that I begrudged madame even that thin comfort.

One winter's night at the turn of the year, I was roused from a sound sleep by the frantic tinkling of my mistress' bell. Grumbling, I crept out of my bed, lit a candle, wrapped myself in a shawl, and made my yawning way to the China apartment. She was sitting up in her bed, shivering like a flame in a draught, her eyes liquid and her voice quavering as she bade me light the candles and build the fire high. Had I inquired, she might have told me why she'd been weeping, but I'd have sooner comforted mère Boudin. I did as I'd been told, then inquired coldly if that would be all. Indignant, she said it would not, and kept me busy with meaningless tasks until dawn.