The Porcelain Dove Read online

  Madame, on the other hand, had had her fill of peace. As the days drew in, so did her restlessness increase, until she was like a bitch in heat, forever on the wrong side of the door. We hardly saw monsieur, who had not troubled himself so much as to greet her upon her return, and Linotte all too clearly preferred learning magic and mathematics from Pompey to learning embroidery and the clavichord from her mother. Finding nothing to distract her in all Beauxprés, madame turned to the state of her health.

  I will not dwell on the rheums and agues, the languors and irritable fits of that long winter. She wrote for advice to every quack in France and spent all her ribbon-money on nostrums, potions, and powders. One physician counseled her to eat fowl fed on vipers. Another advised her to take a tincture of gold in milk to strengthen her heart. She bathed every day—even days in water so hot she was in danger of scalding, odd days in water so cold 'twas a wonder she escaped pneumonia. M. Malesherbes complained of her diet, the lackeys complained of the countless cans of hot and cold water they must haul up to her room and down again. Even Dentelle complained, for my mistress called upon him in his role of monsieur's barber to bleed her once a week. In short, not a soul in Beauxprés but rejoiced when M. Tissot wrote from Lausanne suggesting that all madame needed to maintain perfect health was a regimen of regular equestrian exercise. Not a soul, that is, except monsieur.

  Not that he minded madame's riding—he'd hardly have noticed had she taken a fancy to tramp the hills with a pack, like a gypsy. His objection was that his stable did not include a horse trained to a lady's saddle, and M. le duc de Malvoeux would not squander a hundred livres on a beast that boasted neither wings nor feathers. If madame his wife needed exercise, he said, she could walk in the garden.

  'Twas once again a case of inciting a dove to wrath. Next morning my mistress was up betimes, stealing a rope of pearls from her own jewel box, and ordering an undergroom to accompany her to Champagnole for the purpose of buying a horse. Having failed to argue or flatter her into a prudent docility, I washed my hands of the affair, and when she returned that evening with a pretty brown mare tied behind the dog-cart, I fled to the aviary. When parrots scream abuse at one another, I cannot understand their insults.

  As I'd predicted, monsieur was angry enough to spit iron. Le bon Dieu be thanked, I didn't see it, though Artide was glad to give me every detail of how my master had broken a riding-whip across my mistress' shoulders and sworn he'd have the groom hanged and the mare butchered for hawk-meat. So much was monsieur's way and only to be expected; madame's response was another thing altogether. According to Artide—and to Philiberte Malateste and the groom as well—my mistress boldly declared that the pearls were hers, given her by her father, and the horse she'd bought with them her own personal property.

  "Keep the nag, then," monsieur said. "May it break your neck."

  Thereafter, madame rode the mare Fleurette every day, and though she swore the exercise gave her little pleasure, she abandoned her nostrums and her chaise longue and ate with an appetite to bring joy to the fainting heart of M. Malesherbes.

  The spring that saw madame riding Fleurette ventre-à-terre through the fields to the grave peril of wayfarers and stray chickens also brought the vicomte de Montplaisir back to Beauxprés.

  I'd expected—well, hoped—that the vicomte would follow the usual path of fledgling nobility into the army or the court. But the vicomte de Montplaisir, as always, followed his own path. Upon completing his fifth year at L'Epieu, he wrote that he could no longer bear to be away from his ancestral home. He wished to hunt and learn husbandry and to be a comfort to his father and mother.

  The letter, alas, is lost. I remember it as a work of art, false as an abbé's compliments and twice as fulsome. Yet what could I say? It told madame what she wanted to hear—that her eldest son loved her. And monsieur . . . Well, monsieur was so far moved as to await his son's arrival by the fountain of Latona and to kiss him on either cheek when he alighted from his horse. He bore him straightway to the library, and shortly thereafter summoned Menée and Jacques Ministre to confer with them.

  Only figure to yourself how curiously we awaited their report! By we, I mean M. Malesherbes and Artide and Dentelle and some few younger servants who'd wormed their way into the inner circle while I'd been gone. Of them, I remember only Clauda Boudin, mère Boudin's niece whom I'd been training in Peronel's place as madame's laundress. I did not make new friends so easily at thirty-seven as I had at eighteen.

  So there we all were, talking of this and that, when in came Menée LeRoi and Jacques Ministre, both of them with the faces of men who've just dined on rotten meat. Between them was the vicomte's manservant Reynaud, and his face knew where the meat came from.

  "This is the valet of M. le vicomte de Montplaisir," said Jacques Ministre. "Pray you all make him welcome."

  Reynaud caught sight of me. "Mlle Duvet, is it not? Berthe, dear Berthe! Mere words cannot express how comfortable it is to discover thy dear countenance amidst this crowd of strange faces!" He plumped to his knees on the flagstones and kissed my hand while the rest of them stared—Menée with fury, Jacques Ministre with astonishment, the maidservants with varying degrees of envy. I dare say they thought him good to look upon.

  Snatching my hand from his lips, I applied it smartly to his cheek. "Impertinence!" I said.

  "Oh, unkind," he said, and his water-green eyes glowed as if with tears. He lifted them to Clauda. "You are too . . . young, demoiselle, to know the pain of love forsworn, of passion denied. Take a warning of me, my dear, and never trust a lover's vows, lest your innocence, like mine, be betrayed."

  Clauda, who was as plain and thick as a wooden sabot, squinnied at him. "I don't know what you're going on about, M. le valet, but ye'll be wanting a bit of meat to put to that cheek, or it'll turn black on ye sure as hedgehogs."

  This artless speech inspired Reynaud to a jest about raw meat pointed enough to make Clauda thrust her large, red hands under her apron and stumble out of the kitchen with real tears in her eyes.

  "You are a rude fellow," said M. Malesherbes when she was gone. "I tolerate no rudeness in my kitchen."

  Reynaud hopped up from the floor onto Clauda's stool. "M. Menée told me the girl was a great-uddered cow with a wet lip and a wetter—"

  "I deny every word of it," sputtered LeRoi. "You, M. Smart-Mouth, are a lying, jumped-up, lace-eating, powder-pissing, buggering remover of boots."

  "Like Dentelle?" inquired Reynaud brightly.

  Well. In less than a second, Menée was bellowing and spluttering, Dentelle's eyes were bulging from his head, Malesherbes was imploring Heaven for patience. Even Jacques Ministre was shouting and gesticulating. And there sat Alain Reynaud looking unhappier and smaller and more and more frightened until everyone started to feel uncomfortable, and even Menée fell silent.

  "I want to be friends," said Reynaud, very small.

  "Pooh," said Dentelle loftily, and waved his hand.

  The boy flinched away from him. Dentelle looked startled.

  "You've an odd enough way of showing it," said Jacques Ministre.

  Reynaud turned to him a face candid as a puppy's. "I'm from the street, you see, my master picked me starving from the street, and that's the way life is in the streets of Paris. We often call a friend salopard or vieille vache in all love."

  The household of the duc de Malvoeux exchanged glances that said: the boy knows no better, he's young, the streets of Paris are strange and unknown territory, the service of M. le vicomte de Montplaisir could not possibly be much better. A servingmaid—Finette, it seems as if there was always a Finette in M. Malesherbes' kitchen—mixed a mug of hot brandy-and-sugar and handed it to Reynaud. Artide ruffled his hair. Dentelle offered to teach him how to mend a lace jabot. Thus, at the cost of a scolding, Alain Reynaud bought himself a place in the kitchen, which was the living heart of Beauxprés. 'Twas as pretty piece of cony-catching as you'd wish to see outside a thieves' market.

  Soon the talk tu
rned to what had passed in the library.

  "The boy's to set up his collection," said Menée. "We talked of where to put it, mostly. There's precious few rooms in Beauxprés left unnamed and unfilled."

  Dentelle sighed. "Time passes so quickly! 'Twas only yesterday, or so it seems, that monsieur was begging his father to build a mews to house the haggard falcon he'd snared in the Forêt des Enfans. Ah, how his father was proud! Well I recall my distress to find he'd used his stocking for a snare and his shirt for a gamebag! Pray heaven, boy, that your master's fancy is not hard upon his clothes."

  Through his sandy lashes, Reynaud gave Dentelle a laughing look that said as clear as words that valets share jests beyond the understanding of less privileged mortals. Dentelle, vain fool, beamed besottedly.

  "So what is it?" asked Artide. "What strange and deadly thing has captured the noble vicomte's heart? Puppies' tails? Wingless flies? Peasants' hides?"

  Reynaud remaining silent, "Bugger a word of what," said Menée. "Solid gold chamber pots, for all I know. Truth to tell, there won't be much reason to call the chamber anything, for 'tis stuck all by itself in the old donjon. Opens from the gallery of Swords—you know, overlooking the drying-yard?"

  Artide chucked Reynaud on the ear. "I'll stake my soul on it you know something. What's your name—Reynaud? A good name for a gamin, I vow. Now, Reynaud. There isn't a fox alive doesn't know more about the wolf he follows than he lets on. To the wolf, that is. We're all foxes here."

  "I swear, I know nothing—or very little. He keeps his counsel, does my master, and would not thank me for giving it away. There are some books, some few boxes of a middling weight. Please. I can say no more."

  No fox with feathers on his lips could have been more vehement in denying all knowledge of goose-flesh. We understood that he knew the contents of those books and boxes to an item, yet would not, or could not, reveal them. The other servants thought him too afraid; I thought him too clever. He was certainly clever enough to call up pity in one servingmaid's black eyes, compassion in another's smile. Before my mind's eye swam the vision of a chapel hung in black, and Finette plucked naked and trussed upon the altar like a hen on a salver. My heart sank into my slippers. No more than Reynaud could I say what I knew; still, two may play at innuendo.

  "I'll warrant 'tis no great thing, this collection of your master's," I said. "Little knives for gutting frogs, is my guess, or perhaps horse whips."

  He grinned at me. "I can't say, I'm sure. I am not so intimate with my master's tastes and pleasures as you, dear Berthe."

  "Yes, Duvet, how come you to speak with such authority?" That was Dentelle, with such a leer that LeRoi near pissed himself laughing. I told Dentelle to take care lest his lip grow permanently curled beneath his nose, but my heart wasn't in the exchange.

  When the roads were dry enough, Jacques Charreton conveyed the few boxes of middling weight from Besançon, and lackeys carried them up to the round chamber in the donjon tower. The carpenter built shelves for the books, several glass cases, and a pair of mounting boards set with small hooks in patterns of the vicomte's devising. Then the vicomte unpacked and arranged his mysteries while lackeys and servingmaids polished the blades in the long-neglected gallery of Swords to wires and prayed for him to leave the door to the unnamed chamber unlocked.

  This was not a safe pastime; the vicomte might turn up at any hour and he had no patience with spies. One lackey he surprised with his eye to the keyhole he might have choked to death had not Reynaud pulled him away.

  I succeeded where the rest of them failed, me. I entered the forbidden chamber, unveiled all its secrets, and came away scatheless. I had the key.

  I didn't steal it, exactly: 'twas not an easy thing to steal, that key, being as long as your palm with a great chased grip. Furthermore, the vicomte wore it on a length of blue ribbon like a lorgnon, and never removed it, except, perhaps, to sleep. Try as I might, I couldn't come up with a colorable plan for taking it, or even its impression. At length, I carried my dilemma to Pompey, who treated me to an incomprehensible discourse on locks and keys, the sum of which was that I'd no need to touch the key at all, only coat a blank with wax and stick it in the lock to get an impression of the wards. To me, this sounded no easier than procuring the original, and I was still trying to puzzle it out some days later when Pompey handed me a heavy, handkerchief-wrapped packet and told me the blacksmith would know what to do with it. To my astonishment, the blacksmith did. And charged me twenty sous for a clumsy iron rod with a flat "N" stuck on one end which he swore would fit that lock as a plow its furrow. After that, I could only wait with what patience I could muster for M. le vicomte de Montplaisir to get safely out of the way.

  Before I'd quite gone mad with waiting, a pair of rare Muscovy ducks arrived from South America, and monsieur took it into his head that all his family must go pay homage to them. A pretty picture they made: handsome father and pretty mother, tall son and little daughter, strolling in the brilliant sunlight through the brilliant gardens of Beauxprés. They hadn't reached the pergola before I was threading the maze of rooms, drawing the key from my pocket, inserting it in the lock, and enduring the tortures of the damned while it caught and snagged in the wards.

  Finally, it turned. I slipped inside, closed the door, and with some reluctance, locked it again behind me.

  The chamber was round, thick-walled, and dark. A little sunlight filtered through the shutters, barely enough for me to see what was to be seen. No black draperies and no profane altar, le bon Dieu be thanked, but whips and knives in plenty. My first thought was that there wasn't much to see, and my second that there was a great deal, considering how little time the vicomte had had to collect it.

  My third thought, as I examined the contents of the cases, was that here were represented all the collections of Beauxprés: weapons, snuffboxes, fans, miniatures, tapestries, china plates, etchings, a chamber pot. There was furniture in the shape of a low sofa and a curiously constructed chair. There were statuettes and an oil painting, figured lace, a lacquered ostrich egg, and, strangest of all, a pair of animal skins stuffed with straw: a fox and a hare posed in such a manner as to defy nature, gravity, and belief all at once.

  What united this motley of objects into a single collection was their common—their very common—theme. In pairs, alone, in groups of two and three and more, men, women, and children danced countless variations of an old and simple dance. How ingenious were those variations! Many looked comical, many more painful, and all of them monstrous hard on the back. I was puzzling out the number of celebrants in one particularly crowded fan-painting when I heard the unwelcome scrape of a key in the lock and the voice of the vicomte de Montplaisir saying, ". . . of all kinds, much more curious than those musty wands in the cabinet des Fées."

  Well. My face went numb with the cold of absolute panic, and I was barely able to slip behind the sofa before the door opened and the vicomte entered, shepherding a small figure before him. So befuddled was I and so dim the light that it took me a moment to recognize Mlle Linotte.

  "My magic rituals are far more interesting than Pompey's," he was saying. "And 'tis far more convenable that you learn them from your brother than from a black savage."

  Shrugging his hand away, Linotte went to stand before the hare and the fox. "Interesting indeed, brother. What is the purpose of this object, for example?"

  "To put the viewer in a frame of mind proper to the working of my magic. Contemplate it, ma soeur, examine it closely. Touch it if you like. There. Is't not soft and yielding to your hand? Are you not moved?"

  Linotte giggled. "Yes, brother, in a manner of speaking. The hare has moths, I think."

  "Come look at this picture. Shall I lift you up to see it?"

  "No need—here is a footstool for me to stand upon." A long silence ensued. Unable to see what was going on, I began to think I'd have to make my presence known. Imagining the vicomte's reaction, my belly quaked within me. Nevertheless, I'd eased my skirts from u
nder my feet and was preparing to rise when I heard Linotte say, "What sillies! Aren't they cold?"

  "No." The vicomte's voice was sharp. "Their sport warms them." He paused, then said more softly: " 'Tis chilly in here, is it not? I thought I saw you shiver a moment since. Come here, dear sister, and let me warm you."

  "I'm quite comfortable. But 'tis kind of you to ask."

  "Here, look at this wand, sister." I thought the vicomte's voice was taking on a desperate tone. "It masters a most potent magic. Shall I teach it you?"

  In the silence, I heard a soft intake of breath that might have been a yawn. "I suppose," said Linotte, very ennuyée. "If it pleases you. 'Tis monstrous ugly."

  The vicomte's red-heeled shoes minced past the sofa and out of my sight. "Take it in your hands, thus, and stroke it. Yes, like that. And while you stroke it, I touch you here and here, to wind up the spell."

  His voice had thickened, and again my heart began to labor. Linotte giggled.

  "You tickle," she said. "And this stupid wand, see how it bends and flops. Is that part of its magic? Or is its virtue used up, like Prince Lutin's roses?"

  She was fortunate, Linotte. Another man might have forced her. The vicomte simply lost his temper.

  "Get out," he shouted, sounding very young. "You've spoiled it all, you bitch. Go play at snakes and holes with your filthy blackamoor, just get your hands away from me, and quit laughing, damn you!"

  "I'm sorry," said Linotte, not at all contrite. " 'Tis only that you look so droll that I can't help it. Thank you for showing me your collection, though. I'm sure 'tis very interesting. Has monsieur our father seen it?"

  "Out!"

  She left the door open behind her. The vicomte slammed it shut. I heard the key turn in the lock, saw his shoes march towards the sofa. My heart began to thump and pound so 'twas a miracle he didn't hear it. Muttering, he threw himself down upon the sofa, and presently I heard him grunting and thrashing close by my head. After a space he gave a sob—I thought of pleasure until I heard him curse Linotte anew, and with a kind of fear, as a damned witch. Then he rose and fled, I suppose buttoning his breeches as he went.