The Porcelain Dove (51 page)

"When you believe that in your heart, mademoiselle, then you'll be so much closer to mastery," said Pompey severely. Turning his attention to the pile of magical objects, he shook his head. "You can't take all that, Mlle Linotte—you know you can't. Three only—and not the satchel. There are those more in need of its properties than you."

Mlle Linotte squatted beside the pile, handed the satchel to him with an ill grace, and began to pick through the rest, muttering to herself.

Pompey put the satchel into my hands. I dropped it. He picked it up. I objected. He insisted. In the end, he had his way, and taught me how to make it yield up endless food or gold or any other thing I might happen to have need of. The thing didn't take easily to me, nor I to it. By the time I'd got the trick of it, Mlle Linotte had drawn on the seven-league boots, tucked a silver walnut into her pocket, and thrust the wand of the Fairy Friandise through her belt. She was doing her best to be patient, but her hands and teeth—the former opening and closing into fists, the latter worrying at her lower lip—betrayed her failure. Clearly the time had come for farewells, and I'd no desire to drag them out.

Formally I embraced Mlle Linotte. Pompey knelt and asked my blessing before pressing me in his arms once more. Then he released me, stepped back, plucked a black feather from behind his left ear, and blew upon it. In less time than it takes me to write the words, his jacket had sprouted feathers, his legs dwindled to sticks and his body to the size of a large cat, while his nose grew more pointed and his eyes more beady until he had become, to all appearances, a very handsome crow.

He sprang into the air and circled me three times, wide wings beating strongly, black legs pumping, then took off into the night, cawing raucously. Mlle Linotte gave a joyous whoop, lifted her right foot, and strode off after him. At least I suppose she followed him; the seven-league boots took her out of sight in a single step. Me, I couldn't have seen her anyway, what with my eyes being full of tears and the night moonless and the stable-yard as black as Pompey's wings, except for the torches. I strained my ears for his cawing, but heard nothing. Except for the church bell, tolling midnight.

CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH

In Which a Curious Document Is Unveiled

The sun rose as usual the next morning, trundled peacefully across the sky, set, and rose again. Monsieur, to all appearances recovered of his shock, was for calling down the law upon his tenants. He'd been wronged, insulted, his honor trampled upon and his property stolen by mere peasants, by damned, porridge-eating, dung-footed
farmers
, and he'd see justice done or die in the attempt. Then he demanded that Jacques Ministre and Menée be sent to him and wanted to know how Noël Songis was getting on with breeding the emerald cuckoos.

Jean bowed deeply, said he'd fetch them forthwith, and locked M. le duc de Malvoeux in the library where the interview had taken place. He found me in the kitchen, where I'd retreated out of habit. Madame had been driving me distracted with "Where is my husband, Berthe?" and "Where is my daughter?" and "How my belly gripes me!" and "Whatever are we to do?" so that I'd dosed her with the last of the laudanum simply to quiet her.

"Well, Duvet," said Jean when he saw me.

"Well, Jean," said I.

And then we sat, silenced by the thought of three hundred rooms filled with the detritus of thousands of costly objets d'art, and one man and one woman who hadn't enough sense between them, were they fish, to keep them from drowning. Yet we were pledged to serve that man and that woman—had served them all our lives. We had
two choices, Jean and I: serve ourselves for once and leave our charges to die, or stay and die with them. Faced with such choices as these, what use is conversation?

With a visible effort, Jean roused himself. "The first question's bread. I've no answer to it without we go begging in the streets of Besançon. For 'tis a louis d'or to stable-dirt that no one in Beauxprés will give us so much as a moldy crust."

I'd put off this moment as long as I could, having thus far kept body and soul together on orts scraped from the pantry floor—disgusting stuff to be sure, but real. Now it had come down to magic or starvation, my clenching belly chose for me. "Bread, at least, I can supply."

Rising, I fetched the satchel from the chimney corner where I'd hung it two nights before. "This is a magic satchel," I said. "And if you don't mend your look, you'll get nothing from it but rotten eggs and stale water." For Jean was scratching his stubbly cheek and eying me with the look of a sane man penned up with lunatics.

"Very well," he said at length. " 'Tis a magic satchel. In the last twelve years, I've swallowed a wizard's curse and men who lie down to sleep upon beds of fire and a dragon with whiskers six ells long. I suppose I can swallow a magic satchel, so long as my belief yields me a mouthful of wine to sweeten the draught."

"Le bon Dieu willing, it shall." Then I closed my eyes tight and muttered the charm Pompey had taught me, full of doubts as St. Thomas.

I'd asked for a meat pie. I got a sausage, raw and gristly, as punishment, I suppose, for my lack of faith. Astonished that I'd gotten anything at all, I thanked the satchel as Pompey had instructed me, whereupon it relented and produced not only the pie I'd asked for, but a baguette as well and a stone bottle full of good Normandy cider. Jean fell upon the pie like a starving man, which indeed he was, and between the two of us, we made short work of it.

When we were done, Jean belched happily, leaned back against the wall and laced his fingers across his belly. "Yon bag's as fine a cook as M. Malesherbes, in its way," he said. "I'm almost resigned to living again. Still, we're in a fine mess, Duvet, and no mistake."

I had to agree with him. "The only reasonable thing to do is to put them in the berline and take them to their friends."

"The duc de Malvoeux has no friends," said Jean. "Nor yet no family, at least that I've ever heard of."

"And the marquise de Bonsecours has enough to worry her without an hysterical sister and her mad husband."

"Yes. And besides, the horses have disappeared."

We looked at one another and sighed.

"How far do you think we'd get on foot?" I asked.

"Who's we? Monsieur and madame and you and I? The bottom of the hill, or perhaps the end of Just Vissot's far meadow. If his cowman should chance to be nodding, we might even make the Forêt des Enfans, but I doubt we'd make it through."

"Because of the curse," I said.

"Because of the curse, because of the brigands, because monsieur would fall down a gully, because madame would fall in a stream. Alone, you and I might possibly make Besançon, if you wore a coarse gown and kept your Parisian jaw shut."

Pain squirmed in my breast when Jean spoke of Besançon—pain like the breeding of maggots.

"I will stay by my mistress," I said. "You may do as you please."

Jean shrugged. " 'Twill make a good tale someday, how I locked the mad duc de Malvoeux in his own library and fed him meat pies from a magic satchel. I'll stay."

From pure relief I wanted to embrace him, to kiss his hands and rain tears upon them like the heroine of one of madame's novels. We'd never been on that kind of terms, however, nor did I wish to be. So I said only, "That tale'd be sure to get
you
locked up—as a maniac or a mutin, the one or the other. Still, making this place habitable again's too great a task for one. I'm content to have you stay, if only you promise not to make a tale of it."

"Surely you can't mean to put the entire château to rights!" he exclaimed.

"Not at once, no. Just the kitchen for us and the library for monsieur, perhaps his apartment as well. Those will do for the winter. Come spring, we'll see what more."

Jean gaped at me. "Come spring? What are you saying, Duvet? We'll stay, bien sûr, maybe a month or two, until things in Paris have settled and we can get word to madame's sister."

The maggots swarmed up again, worse than ever. "I've already said I won't go," I snapped. "Leave Beauxprés? Sacré Dieu, Jean! Where will Pompey find me if I leave Beauxprés?" And I leapt from my seat and commenced to pace the length of the hearth, wringing
my hands in my apron and declaring I'd wait for the Porcelain Dove, yes, if it took Mlle Linotte twenty years to find it.

Jean watched me gawp-mouthed for a space, then, "Duvet," he said firmly; a little louder, "Berthe Duvet!"; finally at full voice, "BERTHE!" which startled me so much I froze in mid-stride with my apron all wadded up in my hands. Then he came to me and pried open my fists and smoothed down my apron, talking gently all the while.

"There, there, ma belle," he murmured. "That's better, now, n'est ce pas? All sweet and calm, now, there's nothing here to fright thee, just old Jean who loves thee. Gently, gently, now, sit and rest thyself. Thou hast done nobly, nobly. Chère Berthe, ma belle, ma bien aimée."

Sensitive as a snail out of its shell, I didn't want him touching me and would have struck his hands away had I not been too weary to move. Still murmuring, he led me to the settle and fetched me a cup of water. I began to weep. He clucked soothingly and took up my apron corner to wipe my face. A great wad of yellowed parchment fell from the pocket, thud, at his knees. "What's this?" he asked.

"I don't know. I found it." Remembering where I'd found it, I shuddered. "Leave it be, Jean; 'tis a filthy thing." I dipped the corner of my apron into the water he'd brought me and held it to my burning eyes.

"'Tis not so dirty," he objected, examining it. "Though it looks to be older than the Devil himself." He turned it crackling in his hands. "Can you read it?"

"No. Yes. I don't know whether I can or not. When, pray, have I had the leisure to try? I found it only yesterday—no, the night before, when . . . you know. Give it here, and the satchel, too. Madame'll be waking soon, and you don't want monsieur starving to death, do you?"

"Hunger may bring him to his senses. Come on, Duvet, just the first line. It may be about the quest."

I'm sure I don't know what made Jean so insistent. He swears it must have been some spell upon the parchment. But to hide a document so carefully and then to bespell it so that whoever discovers it, will he nill he must read it: that doesn't sound like wizard's logic to me. Unless the spell were Colette's, to bring the truth to light and expose it, grim and festering, to the healing air. In any case, 'twas easier to read it than to argue with Jean, so I carried it out to the stable-yard where the light was better, sat on the mounting block,
spread the parchment on my knees, and squinted at it. 'Twas not an easy task to decipher it, the hand being crabbed, the ink faded and blurred in spots, the language antique, and the spelling more erratic even than madame's.

"'By order of my father, Jorre Maindur de Malvoeux,' " I read, " 'duc de Malvoeux, Seigneur of Beauxprés and Montplaisir, I something something words—dying words, I think—as he speaks. His, his confessor—' " I looked up. "This is a dying confession, Jean. We've no right to read it."

Jean glared at me. "Where's your famous curiosity, Mlle la chatte? Jorre Maindur was the first duc de Malvoeux. This is important, I tell you: I feel it in my bones. What if it says where to find the Dove?"

I turned over the first sheet and glanced over the second. " 'Little children, use them for . . .' O Jean, I cannot read this!" Yet my eye had seen and my brain understood the rest of the sentence, and the one following, so that even as I protested, I read.

"One hundred and twenty!" I exclaimed. "Mère de Dieu! That such wickedness could exist in the world!"

"Name of a name! One hundred and twenty what? What wickedness? Read it out to me, Berthe Duvet, or I swear by my mother's grave that I'll take it away to someone who will, and leave you to manage monsieur and madame and the peasants all by yourself."

He looked like he'd do it, too. Turning back to the beginning, I began to read aloud.

Now I come to it, the confession of Jorre Maindur de Malvoeux. Days ago I fetched it from the Armament room where I put it after that day, and ever since I've been like the ass of Buridan, who starved beside two stacks of hay because he could not decide between them. Except that the stacks, in this case, are both poisoned and filthy, or at least one is, and the other may be, and Oh, how I wish I'd never begun this history or found the confession or promised Colette to be truthful and to tell all!

Today she's been as shy with me as a wild bird eying a crumb of bread, in and out of the library, picking up first this book and then that, perhaps reading a page or two, sighing, putting it down, sliding glances at me and my desk and my wad of ancient parchment. I've told her I don't know if I can bear to read the repellent thing again, far less copy it word for painful word.

"Please, Berthe," was all she said.

And that's what her eyes say now, looking at me from the table between the long windows, the table at which monsieur would write his breeding records, his observations, his letters of inquiry to Brisson and Réamur and Mme la présidente de Baudeville.

"'Tis not comme il faut," I say.

"Nevertheless," she says.

"You will upset yourself," I say.

"Nevertheless," she says.

"Here is the original, then—read that."

"No," she says, and shudders. And indeed I am shocked that I have suggested it, when I think of the pains it cost me to puzzle it all out and how she'd have to read and reread it through a dozen tortures, a dozen slow deaths. I will spare her that, at least.

       
By order of my father, Jorre Maindur de Malvoeux, duc de Malvoeux, Seigneur of Beauxprés and Montplaisir, I copy these his dying words as he speaketh them. His confessor, granting him absolution for his sins, hath requir'd of him that he cause this document to be made so that his son and his son's sons may know the truth of their inheritance.

       
Jorre Maindur de Malvoeux would have it known that in his youth he was a stout man of his hands, born to the sword and bred to battle. The year he saw light was mark'd by English Edward's provoking that quarrel the which staineth our good soil of France with French and English blood unto this very day. Child and man, his life was toucht by death; for his mother perish'd in the Great Mortality and his sister also, his three brothers falling or at Crècy or at Poitiers. In that last rout was his father slain and he himself wounded even unto death. Yet he recovered of that wound, being young and quick to heal, and fought again, gathering around him a company of doughty men, whose swords drank deep of English blood as well in pitched battle as in siege, in mark of which the King was pleased to name Jorre Maindur Baron de Montplaisir. Then pride did swell in Jorre's breast and Satan did whisper in Jorre's ear that great fortune awaiteth that wight who feareth not to grasp it in his hand, though it burn him to the bone. And so it came to pass upon a day that Baron Jorre and his company rode the Jura mountains in that debatable land to the east of Bourguignon that oweth sure allegiance to no lord, neither French nor Swiss nor German. And from the Western height of the Forêt des Sapins,
Jorre Maindur saw the fair hill of Beauxprés set among the broad meads that named the place, and the sight of it struck his heart and his soul as it were a fair woman.