The Porcelain Dove (50 page)

Linotte shook her head. "You're as stubborn as a stone, Berthe. Perhaps I am the Porcelain Dove. Nonetheless, I must leave Beauxprés, now, tonight, before midnight sounds."

"How do you know?"

"Oh, I know." She looked at me, teasing. "Shall I tell you a story?"

I shrugged. "Can you rip seams while you're telling?"

In answer, Linotte took up the breeches and the dagger and set to work.

"Once upon a time," she said, "there was a small girl. She had two brothers, both much older than she, and a nursemaid who was an ogress. One day when they were all out walking, they chanced to meet an old beggar-man. He was very ragged and very ugly, with eyes as yellow as the feathers of a canary bird and long gray hair growing from his chin like a billy-goat's beard. Despite his ragged cloak, the small girl could see that this beggar was in reality a mighty wizard, so that when her elder brother blustered and threatened him, it frightened her very much."

I snorted. "Threatened to feed him to the hawks, did he? I know this story, mademoiselle."

"Patience, Berthe, and listen."

Well, I'd nothing better to do, so, "Very well," I said. "Not a word shall pass my lips until you've finished: by the Virgin's blue mantle, I swear it."

She nodded and went on.

"Now, besides two brothers, the small girl had a father, and like the old beggar, he was a mighty wizard. His magic was dominion over all the birds of the air, and he was so powerful that he had only one weakness: he had no heart. He'd given it to his birds, you see, in order to strengthen his power over them, and therefore he was no longer able to feel any tender emotion. Because he lacked a heart, he often forgot his children. When he remembered them, he took them to his court of birds. There he would call each bird by its name, and the birds would fly to him and bow to him and do his bidding in all things.

"One day, he remembered the small girl. Now it happened that the small girl liked birds and alone of all his children understood their tuneful language; so she was glad to go with her father, and even more so because her brothers were not by. So they set out walking, and they hadn't gone far when who should appear before them but an old beggar-man? The small girl saw his eyes yellow as canary feathers and his chin bearded like a goat's, and recognized him at once as the ragged wizard her eldest brother had wanted to feed to the hawks. At first she was frightened lest he blame her for her brother's rudeness. But the beggar-wizard did not seem to notice her at all. Fixing his yellow eye on the bird-wizard, he said:

"'L'oiseleur. I have come to beg a thing from thee, and thou darest not deny me.' "

At this point Mlle Linotte frowned and fell silent. I realized that I was holding the struggling needle poised in the air and that my mouth was stupidly ajar. Snapping it shut, I stabbed the needle into the heavy stuff of Justin's old coat. Eagerly it wormed through the folds, pulled the stitches taut, and darted back in again. "Bah," I said, and let it get on with the seam. Smiling, Linotte took up the breeches and the tale once more.

"At the beggar-wizard's salutation, the bird-wizard grew pale and still with rage. 'Beg, then,' he said.

"The beggar-wizard drew himself up in his old ragged cloak, and much to the small girl's dismay, pointed his taloned finger at her. 'I beg of thee thy daughter,' he said. 'Thy daughter in the room of mine. Give her me.'

"Well, I need hardly tell you that the small girl didn't like that idea at all. For now the beggar-wizard was looking right at her with the expression of a starving man who spies a sausage or a sweet cake, so that she feared he intended her for his stewpot or worse.

"Now, she knew that her father the bird-wizard did not believe in ogres—if he did, he'd never have hired the nursemaid. Despairing, she clung to her father's leg and begged him not to give her away. The beggar-wizard shot out his sharp, gray hand, seized the small girl by the wrist, and pulled her into his arms, along with the bird-wizard her father. For a moment the two wizards stood nose to nose and eye to eye, with the small girl caught between them like a hare in a trap. Then she felt a jerk and a heave, and she was in the bird-wizard's arms, and the beggar-wizard was grovelling in the dust with his sharp gray fingers rubbing his billy-goat's chin.

"'I will give thee nothing,' the bird-wizard sneered at him. 'Begone, vermin, lest I have thee flayed and thy hide nailed to the stable door as a warning to any man who would dare to lay hands on what is mine.'

"While the small girl was very glad she need not go with the ogre, she thought it might have been better if her wizard father had held his tongue, for the ogre was looking fire out of his canary-yellow eyes. Being, after all, only a small girl, she began to weep and tremble. The bird-wizard impatiently bade her be still, or he'd take her back to her nursemaid, which made her weep the more, whereupon he turned away from the court of birds and began to retrace his steps. And the small girl heard the beggar-wizard screech after them:

" 'That's thrice, l'oiseleur. That's thrice!"

The needle had been busy throughout this astonishing tale, and as Mlle Linotte spoke the final word, it set the final stitch in the coat, knotted the thread and went still. Absently, I bit through the gossamer—it tasted most curiously of crême caramel—and took the unseamed breeches from her hands. Her normally pale cheeks were flushed and her lips pleated with the effort of holding back tears.

"The candle burns low, child," I said gently. "Can you conjure me up another?"

Mlle Linotte drew a quivering breath, expelled it, nodded, and clapped her hands sharply, rousing two of her stiff-jointed servants from the untidy pile where they lay heaped like gloves. Over the centuries I've grown used to the hands, can even tell one from another by a broken nail, a callus, a gesture. I can't say I'm fond of them, however, and when mademoiselle first animated them, I could scarcely bear them about me. But I've never denied their usefulness. Soon a branch of candles illuminated both my work and Mlle Linotte's carefully composed face.

"So," I said after a space. "You intend to find this beggar-wizard and give yourself up to him?"

"Yes."

That was clear enough, to be sure, if hardly enlightening. "Why?" I asked.

"Because I am the youngest. Really, Berthe, you are very dull tonight."

"And no wonder if I am, Mlle Taratata, seeing as I've neither slept nor eaten for two days and nights. I don't understand what this fairy tale of yours has to do with the Porcelain Dove. 'Tis the same beggar, bien sûr: his enigmatic speech marks him no less than his yellow eyes. If you ask me, even a hero would be well-advised to keep away from him—yes, and pick a less ill-omened time to go a-questing as well."

"Ill-omened? No, Berthe. Don't you see that the omens point to this being the perfect, the only time for me to begin the quest? There's nothing to keep me here—"

"Except madame your mother, who's helpless as a babe newborn, and needs her daughter. As well you know."

"And well
you
know she hardly knows she has a daughter. You love her enough for both of us, Berthe; she has no need of me." Linotte took an anxious look at a man's watch the hands had rescued, mirac
ulously unbroken, from the Horological closet. " 'Tis gone eleven. Are you nearly done?"

The needle had come to the end of one leg and I of my patience. "You haven't answered me a single question yet," I said. "Hints and stories and evasions of all sorts—oh, yes, plenty of those. But a plain answer in plain French? Not a one! I'm a good mind to call the needle off and let you quest bare-arsed."

Mlle Linotte shrugged. "I cannot answer you, Berthe," she said. "Your questions have no plain answers. All I know is that the beggar is a wizard who lost a daughter, I know not how, and asked for me in return. When my father refused, he cursed our family to ruin unless we should find a certain Porcelain Dove. Beggar and Dove are linked. To find one will be to find the other. That, Berthe, is the logic of magic."

Although I felt little wiser than before, I could clearly see that Mlle Linotte had indeed told me all she knew. If any of it meant anything, well, she was the sorceress, not I. I sighed and told her to remove her gown and promised that by midnight I'd have her turned out like a gentleman, or know the reason why.

And I did, though 'twas a near thing, what with having to cut her hair and finding a ribbon to tie it back and rags to stuff in Justin's shoes to keep them from rubbing sores on her feet. She wanted to take along a plaguey lot of magical impedimenta, too: seven-league boots and the leather satchel, Prince Lutin's scarlet hat, a magical walking-stick, an enchanted cheese, assorted acorns and walnuts, two or three fairy jewels, the steel coach—to bribe queens with, she said —and the wand of the Fairy Friandise, purple spangles, marzipan pigs and all.

But 'twas done at last, and just on midnight, she and I stood in the stable-yard with a hodge-podge pile at our feet and a brace of torches floating over our heads. As the church bell tolled the first stroke of twelve, I fully expected a magic chariot drawn by frogs or dragons to descend from the stars and whisk my translated young mistress away.

What appeared instead was the long, low shape of a great black wolf padding paw by giant paw out of the shadows over the cobbles. My throat clamped shut with terror, or I'd have screamed fit to wake the dead. Armless hands are fairy-tale devices, and not to be taken seriously. Wolves, on the other hand, are real, with real teeth and real claws and real bellies to fill.

I must have made some sound after all, for Mlle Linotte took my arm and shook it. "Don't be frightened, Berthe," she said impatiently. "He means us no harm. He's our friend, Berthe, really he is."

Unconvinced, I gazed terror-struck into the wolf's eyes: deep, unnatural eyes, black as the midnight sky.

"Oh, dear," said Mlle Linotte. " 'Tis too much for her, Pompey. She'll faint in a moment, I know it. There's no time for this!"

Thus addressed, the wolf reared up on its hinder legs and turned into a man.

As I look back upon it, it seems to me that there were two Berthes who watched that transformation. The first was a Berthe who quaked and quivered and crossed herself and called upon la sainte Vierge to protect her. The second was a Berthe who observed how the wolf's muzzle and ears appeared to melt back into its skull, which swelled like a bladder to receive them, and how its paws split and its hips realigned under the spine and its fur matted into a velvet coat and breeches more elegant by far than anything Pompey had worn in his life.

For it was Pompey who stepped forward and very sensibly shook the two Berthes into one before catching me to his breast, where I sobbed that I'd always known he wasn't dead while he stroked my back and said he'd missed me, too. Even when I was calmer, I stood in his embrace, my cheek pressed into his jacket. 'Twas scratchier than it looked and smelled faintly doggy.

"Come on, Pompey," wailed Mlle Linotte behind us.

"There's time," he said. "Be patient." Mlle Linotte looked sulky, but held her peace while he led me to the mounting block, sat me down upon it, and squatted by my knee.

As you may imagine, I had a thousand questions; so many, in fact, that I could not ask one of them. Instead, I looked into Pompey's face and stroked his cheeks that had grown lean and lined, and his woolly hair that had threads of white twined among the black. He was thirty years old, after all. Why should I have been so astonished that he looked his age?

"Thou art grown most princely, my son," I said to him at last.

He kissed my hand. "A prince of wolves, mother."

"Tell me."

"I've ever been a poor hand at a story," he said, "but you deserve some account of where I've been and what I've been doing these six years. First, I have to go back even further than that, to when madame
our mistress was so sick, do you remember? Well, I met a sorcerer in the Forêt des Enfans, a wolf-master and a good man in his way, although his way is not ours. 'Twas he gave me the receipt that cured madame, and thereafter I met him from time to time at the forest's edge. He taught me other magics, of shape-change and spell-casting and invisibility. When monsieur beat me with the riding-whip, I made myself invisible and went into the forest to dwell with him."

Mlle Linotte, who'd been dancing with impatience through this speech, broke in. "Let me tell, Pompey, and it'll go faster. Maître Grisloup taught him a lot of magic, and me, too, when I could get away, and we did what we could to soften the beggar-wizard's curse on Beauxprés. It wasn't much. We begged the wolves not to eat the cattle and gave wood to any peasant brave enough to push on past the bounds of the curse to the heart of the Forêt des Enfans. Pompey wanted to fly over the fields in the form of a crow and sow the fields with healthy seed, but Grisloup wouldn't let him. Just think, Berthe! 'Tis contrary to the law of magic for one wizard to work directly against another, just as Mme d'Aulnoy said."

By now, I was feeling more myself. "That's very interesting, child," I said. "Be tranquil now and let Pompey speak for himself. You're going no faster than he, and I've already had one long tale from you tonight."

"In truth, Berthe, there's little left to tell," said Pompey. "I was maître Grisloup's apprentice, and Mlle Linotte was mine. Now we are raised to journeymen, and our first journey is to the Fortunate Isles."

"Do you know where they lie?"

"Bien sûr," said Pompey, surprised. "Would I set out on a quest without knowing where I was going?"

Well, I came as close as my next breath to slapping his face, sorcerer or no. What stayed my hand was the fear that after this night, I'd never see him again. Thinking that a blow's a poor farewell, I swallowed my spleen and kissed his brow instead.

"No, thou would'st not, clever monkey that thou art."

"Enough!" cried Mlle Linotte. "Midnight, maître Grisloup said, not a moment after, and here we've been talking for hours. If 'tis not spoiled already, it soon will be, and the blame is not mine, Pompey, be sure of that."

Pompey turned his night-black eyes on her, holding her gaze until she looked away and sighed. "I know," she said. "Patience. I'm only
a maiden sorcerer. I don't understand everything yet. When I'm ready, I will understand. Patience is part of being ready."