The Porcelain Dove Read online

  Take the maze in the library—that happened the very morning we first saw the beggar, and a blind man might have seen 'twas an omen. The question is, an omen of what? Now its significance is plain as a pattern-piece. Then . . . I remember well how I turned it this way and that on the fabric of events until at last I discarded it as useless. I didn't believe in magic—more fool I—not as I believed in Nôtre Seigneur and the power of reason and madame's right to throw her pomade at me when she felt liverish. Bien sûr, there'd been magic once in France—the tales of the bibliothèque bleu, of Charlemagne and Mélusine and St. Denis proved it beyond doubt. Even in Mme d'Aulnoy's day, perhaps, fairies and wizards had meddled in the affairs of mortals. But in 1776? Bah!

  As I recall it, the twelfth of April was a cold, blustery, dismal day both within doors and without. We'd just returned from Nice, where the trees were already greening and the air fragrant with spring. Monsieur had been attentive, his friends flattering—in short, madame had been happy in Nice, easy and bright as a rose in bud. Now the rose was distinctly frostbit.

  "I'm a hag today," she complained, putting aside yet another lace cap. "Look here, Berthe, and here." She rubbed viciously at her brow and cheek. "Wrinkles. And my hair! 'Pon my soul, there's little enough need to powder it. To look at me, you'd think my oldest child to be twenty, not half that age."

  "Twelve, madame."

  "What? Twelve what, Berthe?"

  "The vicomte de Montplaisir. He is twelve years old, madame, not ten."

  My mistress began to rouge her cheeks in angry little dabs. "Ten, twelve—in either case, too young to have a crone for a mother. And far too young to go away to college among all those soldiers. Far better he remain at home, in the bosom of a family that loves him. I cannot bear to think of him marching up and down with a heavy sword, and taking orders and such. My Léon is a delicate boy."

  "Yes, madame." What good would it have done to tell her that M. Léon would be much improved by a forced march to someone else's beat? In that mood, she'd have fallen into strong hysterics. As it was, she only complained of a migraine, of a ringing in her ears, a tingling in her teeth, and a thousand vague aches and pains which drove her to her chaise longue as soon as she was dressed. I put a hot brick to her feet and was sponging her temples with vinegar when there came a scratching at the door.

  "Enter," she said weakly.

  Artide entered, bowing. "M. le duc requires madame's presence in the library," he said. "At once."

  Madame laid her wrist to her brow and winced delicately. "At once? When my head pounds so I can hardly lift it? Convey my regrets to monsieur my husband, pray, and tell him I am indisposed."

  "'Tis an affair of some moment, madame, concerning madame's children."

  Madame surged upright with an energy I'd not have credited had I not seen such transformations before. One moment she'd be indolent, careless, her vital forces blocked with ennui like a forest brook with leaves and dirt. The next moment, she'd be in spate, freed by some appeal to her heart or her erratic sense of duty. Can a soul be at once generous and petty? Such was Adèle's soul, once upon a time.

  "A shawl, Berthe, quickly. The library, was it? Oh, do make haste!" And she had snatched the shawl from my hand and hurried out the door before I could well gather my wits about me.

  Artide and I followed her through the Fan room and down the Tapestry hall. "What's going on?" I whispered.

  Artide shrugged. "Who can fathom the whims of an aristocrat? Today he returns from the aviary before two and holds court in the library. Tomorrow he may call us all into the stables at dawn. As to what's going on, who can say?"

  Drawing near the library, I grew conscious of a quivering in the air. My teeth itched, and as I stepped over the threshold, my blood quickened and beat in my ears, insisting that something was about to happen, something perilous and strange. Yet at first glance all I saw was monsieur in a rage: perilous, bien sûr, but hardly strange.

  As always, he'd taken center stage, in this case the mirrored pier between the long glass doors. His arms were folded across his breast in a froth of fine lace, and below his blue-powdered wig his face was white and beaky with rage. He looked like a high-tragic hero—Theseus, perhaps, confronting Phèdre with her adultery.

  Madame picked up the cue with a speed Mme Dumesnil might have envied. "Husband," she gasped. "Why do you look so? What has happened here?"

  Monsieur flung wide his arms. "Chaos," he answered.

  His gesture encompassed the shelves, which had been denuded, and the floor, which had been crazily scattered with books. Some were propped erect and others lay flat, so that the room had the look of a hayfield after a heavy storm, with chairs and tables, globes and lectoires standing amongst the wreckage like bony cattle.

  Monsieur pointed to a miserable huddle of children and servants cowering in a corner. "What has happened here?" he echoed her. "What has happened, madame, is that your children have run wild. They are no better than beasts, madame, and I must hire a menagerie keeper to keep them in order, since a nursemaid and a tutor cannot."

  My mistress produced a handkerchief. "They're only babies," she pleaded. " 'Twas only an excess of spirits, depend upon it. What harm have they done?"

  "What harm? I'll tell you what harm. I enter my library to consult my Brisson, and what do I find but that, that silk-and-satin ape of yours squatting on a desk while your daughter roots about like a pig on the floor. As I take my stick to the blackamoor, I hear Léon laughing behind the curtains. I drag him out, and he shows me where his brother is hiding in a cupboard. I send for their nursemaid, who is asleep in the nursery, and for their tutor, who is run to earth in the Silver closet with a half-empty bottle of Burgundy."

  This tutor was one M. LeSueur, a rusty, weedy little man whose unenviable job was to teach the vicomte de Montplaisir and his brother the fundamentals of Latin, Greek, and mathematics. He'd been at Beauxprés for four years, and hardly a day of those years had passed without his finding his bed fouled with a dismembered frog, or his chamber pot filled with stable-sweepings, or his books scribbled over with rude verses. Remembering Stéphanie-Germaine and my mistress at Port Royal, I might have pitied him. But his nose was so long and drooping, his eyes so weak and small, his hair so lank and red that I confess 'twas all I could do not to add to his torments myself. Pompey said he smelled like one of those flea-bit curs you always itch to kick whether it's done anything to deserve a kick or not.

  When monsieur's glare turned on him, M. LeSueur's head retreated nervously into his neckcloth. "Poltroon," said monsieur disgustedly. "Drunkard. Sot. Thou art no longer in my service, thou."

  The vicomte sputtered with laughter. Monsieur darted out a long arm, seized his heir by the ear, and dragged him forward. "And thou, my son. What hast thou to say?"

  M. Léon rubbed his ear and scowled. "Nothing, monsieur. Justin built it."

  "Justin?" The duc's bellow drew his second son from behind Boudin's skirts as a magnet draws a needle—although, to be sure, there was nothing either sharp or bright about Justin as a child, especially with his face all slobbered with snot and tears.

  "Well, Justin?"

  Justin snuffled. "M. LeSueur was teaching us the Siege of Troy, that had streets like a ball of twine, and how that made it impregnable."

  "And so you slipped away from him while he contemplated the impregnability of Troy?"

  "No, monsieur," said M. Léon slyly. "He told us to go away. To Cathay. Or the Devil—he cared not which."

  "Did he, by damn! And so we return to M. le comte d'Encre. Speak, thou! Is this how you teach my sons?"

  From my little knowledge of him, I'd have expected this question of his master's to reduce M. LeSueur to blubbering and pleading. Instead, he shook his head unsteadily. "Ah," he said. "Your sons. Your sons, sir, are unteachable. Or rather your older son is unteachable, and your younger son too cowed to learn."

  "You forget yourself, maggot," said monsieur. "You are drunk."

  A tiny, rec
kless spark kindled in the tutor's bleary eye. "Bien sûr, I am drunk. How else am I to face the indignities to which the vicomte de Montplaisir subjects me?" His voice rose. "Do you know what he has done to me, to his own brother, to newborn puppies and flies? He puts their eyes out, is what he does, and he tears their legs off, one by one." He was shouting now, his eyes flaming madly. "He's not human, I swear it. He's a demon, an imp of Hell. He should be exorcised, or horse-whipped, or, better yet, burnt."

  "Oh!" Madame knelt in a froth of lace and silk to gather her eldest son into her arms. "You're the one should be horse-whipped or burnt," she cried. "Horrid man! You shouldn't be let near decent children."

  M. LeSueur, now thoroughly aroused, screamed that the vicomte was not a decent child, and then everyone was shouting at once—M. LeSueur, monsieur, madame, and even mère Boudin, who assured us loudly that M. Léon's blood was only overheated, and all he needed to make him docile as a pigeon was a dose of sulfur to clear his bowels.

  In the midst of this brouhaha, Pompey sidled up beside me and touched my arm. "Here," he whispered. "Monsieur's forgotten her."

  I felt a tug on my skirt, and looked down to see Linotte staring up at me, her black curls powdered with purple spangles. For all the world as if she and I were old friends and not mère nodding acquaintances, she took my hand. Pompey smiled, an ivory flash, and slipped like a shadow out the door.

  "Enough," shouted monsieur at last. "Boudin, to Hell with your sulfur. Take the children away; take them out of the house—anywhere, through the park, to the aviary. Keep them there long enough for this man to pack his traps and leave." His eye fell on me where I stood in the door with Linotte. "Duvet, Mme de Malvoeux will spare you, I'm sure, to assist Boudin. Now. All of you. Out of my sight."

  We scattered before him, all save my mistress, who turned her anxious face to him like a flower to the sun.

  A matter of ten minutes later, the five of us were trudging against the wind through the formal garden, Boudin grumbling mightily at the cold and puffing great clouds of breath into the chill air. Me, I was glad to be outside under the clean heavens. Linotte and M. Léon ran shouting down the pebbled paths before us, and even Justin stopped sniveling and released Boudin's hand to trot along behind them.

  It was the kind of April day all too common in the high meadows—more like late winter than early spring. Though the snow was mostly gone, the grass was still brown and livid clouds blew across a sky as pale as January. Before we reached the pergola, my feet were aching with the cold and my cheeks stinging.

  As we entered the copse, a ragged ancient popped out of the bushes like an operatic demon.

  For Colette's sake, I'd like to write that I gave him a sou and a kind word, or at least that I stood my ground. But I have sworn to write the truth, and the truth is that I screeched like a scalded hen and recoiled two or three paces. After all, beggars were not common around Beauxprés, where neither work nor charity was plentiful. And this beggar was so particularly repellent. His chin was disfigured with a sparse white beard, his mouth was a graveyard of blackened teeth, and he stank like a sick goat. He squinted from me to Linotte with diseased yellow eyes, then thrust out his hand and whined for alms. Had I not been so afraid, I might have pitied him, for the hand was blue with cold and wrapped in rags, and he leaned heavily upon an iron-shod staff.

  Wide-eyed, Linotte shrank back against me, and I felt another small body pressing hard at my back. The beggar reached for Linotte and might have seized her for all I could do to stay him. 'Twas fortunate for us all that Boudin was cut of sterner stuff. Boudin never quailed. Boudin stuck her nose into the beggar's filthy face, thumped his skinny chest with one fat, red finger, and cursed him and his ancestors to the most noisome deeps of Hell.

  "M. le duc de Malvoeux," she finished, "is accustomed to order all vagrants chopped fine and fed to his hawks. If thou, beggar, hast any love for that scrawny carcass of thine, I'd advise thee remove it."

  "He'd give the hawks bellyache," piped the vicomte de Montplaisir scornfully. Behind me, Justin giggled nervously. Linotte, to my surprise, began to cry; moved by a sudden impulse of tenderness, I knelt down and hugged her to me.

  The beggar laughed and spat thickly at our feet. "That's once," he said and, leaning on his staff, shuffled back among the trees, his cloak folded tight around him.

  Boudin was all for returning to the château and complaining to monsieur. Justin, once again in tears, seconded her.

  "Poltroon," said the vicomte in his father's lordly tone. " 'Twas only an old muck-worm, weak and harmless. We need not trouble monsieur my father with such." He turned to me with a graceful bow. "Take courage, Duvet. The heir of Malvoeux himself shall protect you." And he made a great business of cutting a withy from an arching shrub.

  "Hoy, M. le mendiant," he shouted, whistling the withy over his head. "Tough as it is, the hawks of monsieur my father hunger for thy flesh."

  Linotte, who'd been standing quietly all this while, struggled in my arms. "No, no, no, no! No hawks, you mustn't!" she cried, and would not be comforted even when Boudin assured her that hawks wouldn't eat man-flesh, and wouldn't she like Duvet to take her back to the house and make her some nice chocolate?

  "No! Don't want to go back," Linotte wailed. "Want to see birds!"

  "It'll be better so," I said, rising.

  Boudin growled. "Why?"

  "What do you think monsieur will say if we return almost before we've set out? Do you think he'll thank you for interrupting whatever he's doing to M. LeSueur to tell him that you've been frightened by an old beggar?"

  She opened her mouth to blast me, hesitated, "But—" she said. "Well—" She shrugged, then bent to Linotte and none too gently swiped at her eyes and streaming nose with the corner of her apron. "Very well, mademoiselle. 'Tis forgotten. Come see the birds now."

  That night, after I'd put madame to bed, I retreated to the kitchen, where I sat by the banked fire and listened to the comfortable snoring of the kitchen-boys asleep on their pallets under the tables. Thoughts of libraries, beggars, even of the hapless M. LeSueur, pushed and jostled in my mind.

  "In all wide Troy, there is none to befriend me, none," mourned a low voice in the shadows. "For all turn from me with loathing."

  "Name of a name! Pompey! Thou . . . monkey! I'm like to've bepissed myself!"

  Contrite, Pompey stepped into the light and laid his hand on my shoulder. When I twitched it off angrily, he sank to one knee before me and clasped his hands to his brow. "A thousand pardons, Mlle Duvet," he said. "Behold me cast down at your feet, my head sunk to my breast under the mingled weight of my cruelty and your displeasure."

  "Oh, bah," I said. "I'll forgive thee, monkey, if only to hear what happened in the library. 'Tis all a mystery to me from beginning to end."

  He curled down on the hearth and busied himself removing his slippers and his white silk stockings. "Mademoiselle and I were in the cabinet des Fées," he began.

  I nodded. Pompey and Linotte were always in the cabinet des Fées, at least when he was at Beauxprés and madame had no immediate need for him. From the time she could babble, Linotte had made it clear that she preferred Pompey's company to all other. Given the characters of her nurse and her brothers, this was not remarkable. That Pompey should have taken pleasure in the company of a girl-child of four was perhaps more so. Yet he did.

  The cabinet des Fées was their favored playground, and the pair of them would crouch by the hour together sending the Princess Florine's tiny steel coach on quests across the carpet, coaxing milk and cake from the magic satchel to feed the violet rats that drew the coach, stroking the rainbow fur of the White Cat's sleeping dog, Toutou. The treasures came alive for Pompey as they did for no other, excepting the wand of the Fairy Friandise, which worked its magic only for Linotte. 'Twas a trumpery thing, that wand, fluttering with silk ribbons and crowned with a purple star. When waved, it would shower the air with marzipan pigs and trails of sparkling purple dust in which Linotte would d
abble her hands until it swirled in glittering veils around her.

  That (said Pompey, wiggling his naked toes in the warm ashes) was what she'd been doing that morning, and it had occurred to him to wonder, as he watched her, why the wand only produced sweetmeats and purple dust. Other wands conjured up practical things: meat pies, gold coins, cudgels, cars drawn by winged frogs. But marzipan pigs and sparkles? What use could they be, even to a fairy called Friandise? He thought the library might yield him an answer.

  "You know no one enters it," he said, "not since Artide gave up thinking he'd go to Paris. Well, I heard bumping and voices, and thinking them to be the sounds of a lackey and a servingmaid . . . dancing a country dance, I told mademoiselle we'd come back another time. ' 'Tis only my brothers,' says she. So I tap. There follows a deal of scurrying and banging, and when I open the door, the room is as you saw it, save for two wooden horses lying among the books, and this by the window."

  From the pocket of his coat he withdrew a largish object, which proved to be a lacquered egg about the size of a goose egg, snow-white.

  "The swan's egg's missing from the case in monsieur's antechamber," Pompey said.

  "Monsieur will be furious."

  Pompey shook his head. "Monsieur won't notice 'tis gone if no one tells him. An egg is not a bird, after all."

  "Granted. So. You saw all this and then what?"

  "Mademoiselle laughs and claps her hands. 'A puzzle,' says she."

  "A puzzle? To be sure," I said waspishly. "Two horses, an egg, and a welter of books make a puzzle indeed."

  The kitchen was growing cold; Pompey took the poker and stirred one corner of the fire into flame. "It wasn't just a welter, Berthe—I saw that at once. The books defined a winding path, like a maze."

  "Ah, bah, Pompey. I've never heard of such a thing! A maze of books? What is there in building a maze to catch the fancy of an imp like M. Léon? Is it a trap? An engine of torture? What could it gain him?"