The Porcelain Dove (53 page)

CHAPTER THE EIGHTEENTH

In Which Both France and Madame Are Transformed

After reading the document, we didn't speak to each other for one whole day, Jean and I, though we worked companionably to feed monsieur and madame and bring order to the kitchen. Even when we'd recovered the power of speech, we made no further mention of Jorre's confession or the horrors it revealed. We had no need. Its spawn lay all about us, blasted and rotten, fouling the air we breathed with poisonous exhalations of decay.

Jean vows he put the thought of it from him. 'Twas all so long ago, after all, and he'd horrors enough to contemplate closer at hand. Now Jean is my good friend, and he had not seen the bones, so I'll not name him liar. For myself, who had not only seen the bones of the innocents Jorre had slain, but had touched them . . . Well, I was haunted, sleeping and waking, by the echoes of screams and the shadows of weeping eyes and tiny, pleading hands. I tried to exorcise them with chatter of practical matters, of wood and candles and suchlike aids to daily comfort. 'Tis all very well, I said, to have a magic satchel that gives you anything you ask of it. I prefer, me, to get my wood from trees, my eggs from hens, and my bread from a baker's oven.

Jean agreed with me and talked of buying a cow, a cock, and some hens from Claude Mareschal.

"Very practical, to be sure," I said. "Just where will we get the coin to pay for them? And the grain to feed them?"

Jean shrugged. "M. le duc de Malvoeux is a rich man, Berthe. He's coin in store we never dreamed of, I'll wager, and hidden so Artide would never find it."

"Bah!" I said. "And bah again! If 'tis so well hid, we'll never find it either. I doubt this horde exists, me. Sangsue kept monsieur's gold, as well you know, and the peasants left no more of it in his money-box than they left flesh upon his belly, poor devil, just some few bloody shreds of écus and . . . "

"Enough, Berthe—I take your meaning. Well, we'll trade for them, then."

"With disemboweled clocks and dismembered glass cases?"

Jean scowled and begged me to leave off talking of horrors.

"Then must I leave off talking altogether," I said, "for we are sunk to our chins in horrors. Forget the cow and chickens, at least while I try to persuade this magic satchel you trust so little to spit up the coin to pay for them. If it won't, I seem to remember a wand in the cabinet des Fées that conjures up gold."

Jean threw up his hands and beseeched le bon Dieu to give him patience. "Magic is for sorcerers, Berthe. We aren't sorcerers, nor have I any desire to be one, nor to consort with a witch. And that's what you'd be, Berthe, did you start playing with wands and suchlike."

I objected that 'twas the wand, not me, did the magic, to which he answered that he didn't care to listen to silly arguments, and he'd leave me to shift for myself did I not find some less tainted source of coin. Whereupon I threw M. Malesherbes' favorite omelette pan at him and told him to go, then, if he thought he'd be better off elsewhere. He said there'd be no need for him to go if I were only a little reasonable, and I said—well, I don't remember what I said, only that it made him laugh, which made me angrier. We bickered back and forth like children until in the end we agreed that I'd write the marquise de Bonsecours explaining (with diplomatic omissions) how it was with her sister and her sister's husband. Then Jean would creep down to the village after dark and give it to the curé, who, we thought, might be able to get it to the abbot at Baume-les-Messieurs, who might be able to convey it to the marquise at Versailles. Or at her hôtel in Paris. It was, in any case, worth a try.

Never since first I copied out
pater noster
on my slate have I struggled so with words. After ruining a sheet of our precious stock of paper with a blotted and incoherent account of murder, destruction,
and madness, I decided simplicity would be best. Having sent the note, I do not pretend to remember it word for word—'twas something like:
Beauxprés intact. M. le duc de Malvoeux and madame your sister unharmed but much distressed. Please be assured, Mme la marquise, that I will care for her until my last breath, which will certainly be delayed by your sending 50 livres by messenger as soon as may be
.

By the time I'd finished this missive and sealed it with madame's ring, the sun had dipped into the Forêt des Enfans and Jean had decided that no power in Heaven above, Earth below, nor Hell beneath would force him down the rocky path to the village.

"They wanted to kill us, Berthe, and they would've, too, if they hadn't lost the stomach for it after butchering Sangsue. You can't call me a coward; I've faced dragons in my time and yellow-faced demons, and I'd face them again if I had to. What I don't have to face is our neighbors, not tonight. We'll find some other way to send the letter to the marquise."

"Bah, Jean. You're as stubborn as M. Justin's mule and not half so sensible. You don't trust Pompey's bag and you won't take my letter to the curé. What shall we do for bread, hein?"

Sullen-faced, Jean shrugged. "Le bon Dieu will provide."

"Poltroon! Tête de merde! I'll take it myself!"

"Take what?"

The voice was so familiar to me from many years of daily hearing, that before I remembered I'd last heard it screaming for blood, I answered, "A letter to Mme la marquise de Bonsecours."

"A letter to the marquise, eh?" Mère Boudin stepped through the door and held out her hand. "Give it me."

I stared at her. She'd clearly not washed herself since the burning of the aviary, for her cheeks bore traces of soot and long, dark smears of blood, as did her arms and her naked feet. She stank most vilely of smoke and anger-sweat and something else, something familiar, though not on her. Roses and civet. Ah! Madame's Eau de Venus, that was it! And that gown Boudin was wearing. Could it be that old gown of madame's I'd made over for myself?

"Becomes me, don't it?" she said, complacently smoothing the corsage. The satin strained over her great breasts and uncorseted waist, the seams gaping over the unclean flesh beneath. Become her? It made her look like a burst sausage. And a sallow-faced woman should never wear goose-turd green.

"Yes, we're all better clad than we were," she went on, "and better fed, too, though there's more feathers than meat on most of them birds. I thought I'd pay a neighborly visit, as among old friends: chat, take a glass of wine, see how ye keep yerselves."

Jean, who'd been standing by with his mouth ajar, shut it with a snap. "Well, now you've seen."

"Yes," said mère Boudin, seating herself comfortably by the fire we'd lit with shards of furniture. "Keeping pretty well, ain't ye? Seigneur et dame de Beauxprés, eh? And how does the former seigneur and dame? Dead or alive?"

I thought of monsieur as I'd last seen him, perched behind the long table in the library like a hawk in molt, shoulders hunched, hands searching the ruined surface aimlessly, calling for Noël Songis. And madame, curled up in her daughter's bed, sweating, sneezing, spewing, and sobbing for a drop, a single drop of laudanum.

"Alive," I said shortly.

Boudin's eyes narrowed. "What's he planning to do to us? In Christian charity, ye owe an old friend so much, and if y' don't feel friendly to me, why, Mme Pyanet, she refused to come with us that night. Surely she deserves a warning of monsieur's plans."

Oh, fear's an unreasonable thing. There we sat, Jean and I, helpless as nestlings, and there stood Boudin, crammed to her gums with stewed crane and cross-eyed with fear of us, or rather of that crane's former owner, M. le duc de Malvoeux. His sixteen meaningless quarterings terrified her; his useless triages and lods et ventes and corvées filled her with unspeakable awe.

Boudin looked from me to Jean, who, predictably, shrugged. "You know the duc as well as I," he said.

This brought her upright and bristling. "Ye'd play with me, would ye? Pat and claw, like a pair of cats, and don't the mice squeak pretty? Well, this time I'm the cat and ye the mice, ye and your precious duc de Malvoeux. I spit on his taxes and I spit on his revenge. There's worse things than the mad duc coming to Beauxprés, and out of my good heart and for old friendship's sake, I'll do for ye what ye're too proud to do for me, and that's give ye fair warning.

"Tell the duc that the Franche-Comté is alive with brigands burning and murdering honest men in their beds. 'Tis only a matter of time before they reach us, tell him. Say also that a courier's been stopped in Grenoble with a letter from the Austrian whore to her brother.
There'll be fifty thousand Austrians marching through here before long if another courier was luckier. Or not so lucky—they say the end of the message sent the bearer to his grave, so that he was happy to be caught, and in gratitude denounced the queen's plot to poison our king, may God preserve him, and set up her lover in his place."

Jean and I listened to this tirade with mounting fear—of her words, bien sûr, and also of her dying of an apoplexy. She was scarlet-faced and sweating, her wrinkled dugs heaving over the neck of her —my—gown. While I'd hardly mourn her passing, the villagers would never believe we hadn't somehow killed her.

"There'll be order now," she was screaming, "and plenty, and peace. There'll be no more leeches like thee, Berthe Duvet. I tell thee, and tha may tell M. le duc de Malvoeux, that the world he has known is thrown down and destroyed and will never come again."

That fine piece of rhetoric was her final salvo. Having fired it, she stamped to the outer door and went away, leaving the two of us shaking as with a fever.

After a time, I conjured a sup of brandy from the satchel, which Jean wasn't too mistrustful to drink at a draught.

Needless to say, Jean didn't go down to the village that night or the next or the next. We discussed his walking to Baume-les-Messieurs to give the letter to the abbot himself, and we discussed his walking to Besançon, where he'd likely get fresher news than he could come by in a smaller town. Yet he was as nervous of leaving Beauxprés as I was nervous to be left, and day after day passed without him walking anywhere.

In the first week in August, we were surprised by the curé tapping hesitantly at the kitchen door. He'd not set foot under monsieur's roof in five years, and he stood just inside in an agony of fear, clutching his broad-brimmed hat and darting nervous glances at the stairs. Like mère Boudin, he desired to know how things stood with monsieur and madame. 'Twould have been a comfort and a release to me to confess myself to him, but one look at his knotted brow and his pale, frightened eyes told me I dared not.

"They're well enough," I said. "Grieved over their tenants' hatred. Worried about the king, may le bon Dieu bless him. Longing for news of madame's sister in Paris."

"As to Paris, I've heard nothing myself. The abbot has sent a note
counseling patience and faith. My parishioners have chopped up the seigneurial pew. I don't quite see my way, Mlle Duvet, indeed I do not."

Did he imagine I'd comfort him? When the shepherd loses his faith, what then are the sheep to believe in? "Well, perhaps you might see your way to enclosing this note to the marquise de Bonsecours in your next letter to the abbot," I said tartly.

The curé, who'd been drooping like a beaten dog, picked up his ears a bit. " 'Tis little enough you ask, Mlle Duvet. I'll see to it immediately. This letter to the abbot—nothing easier, I'm sure." He turned to leave, then turned again, one finger upraised almost in his old manner. "A word of advice, Mlle Duvet, if you'd not take it amiss? You might be thinking of calling upon your old friend Mme Pyanet. Let it go for a little while yet. There's high feelings down in the village about the rent rolls, and superstitious nonsense about a magic stick and floating hands and I don't know what else. I am persuaded 'tis only the exhalations of unlearned and over-excited brains. Yet I'd not like to see you suffer any, ah . . . inconvenience over it."

One of the hands floated into sight, carrying a twiggy broom. The curé, being somewhat short-sighted, didn't immediately see it.

"To be sure," I said, chivvying him towards the door. "Thank you, Father. God be with you."

"And with you, my daughter. Now, you're quite sure your mistress is bearing up under her affliction?"

I looked him firmly in the eye and lied. "Quite sure, Father."

The hand gave me the besom and darted up into the rafters.

"What's that?" cried the curé, squinting up after it.

"What's what?" I glared at the hovering hand. It made a rude gesture. My heart heaved into my throat. "Oh, a bat, I dare say, or some kind of bird. All sorts of things got stirred up when the peasants came to call, you can't imagine the rats in the cabinet des Fées; in fact, I've got to go chase them out right now, that's why I picked up this broom. You were most kind to come, Father."

Puzzled and gentle, he frowned at me. "To be sure," he said. "A white bat. God bless you, my daughter." He sketched a cross over me and went away shaking his head.

The hand streaked down from the rafters, slammed the door to, flicked at the air the curé had signed, twitched my cap over one ear, and whisked away before I could slap it.

"Good thing the curé didn't see you," I told it. "Inconvenienced! Why, they'd burn me for a witch."

The marquise didn't send the fifty livres; neither did she send an answer to my letter. The curé made another sally up the hill to tell me he'd given it to a courier from Dijon, who'd assured him that the roads were peaceful and the threatened brigands as invisible as a noble's charity: there'd be no trouble getting the letter to Baume-les-Messieurs, not the least trouble in the world. So perhaps 'twas between Baume-les-Messieurs and Paris it miscarried. Or between Paris and Versailles. In any case, Mme la marquise neither came nor sent word.

The year moved on to harvest. Whenever I looked out over the meadows, I saw peasants moving in their fields, reaping, binding, stacking fodder for their cows. Some of them wore red caps, and those few strains of harvest rejoicing that reached my ear had a curiously martial sound to them. Truly, the times had changed.