The Porcelain Dove Read online

  "So that's the Porcelain Dove," said the Maid, and reached out her hand to it. Beside me, monsieur growled low in his throat; from the corner of my eye, I saw his fingers twitch and scrabble upon his thighs. It seemed to me that the beggar-wizard glanced out towards us and that his smile broadened. Or perhaps he only rejoiced to see Linotte so eager—who knows? His joy was a cruel joy in either case, the cat's joy in lifting a single claw from the wing of her prey.

  "First give me the Cloak," said the beggar-wizard; and with a bitter tenderness, she laid it across his knees and watched hot-eyed as he fingered it.

  "I hope it brings me more joy than thy first gift, ma mie. The Horse of the North Wind will suffer nor saddle nor bridle—no, not so much as a hand laid upon him. He's been the death of two good grooms."

  The Maid cast down her eyes. "The cloak will not harm you," she said.

  "Nevertheless. Now for the third task, that pays for all." The beggar-wizard laid the cloak aside and, taking up his staff, rose from the high carved chair he'd been sitting in. As he stood, he grew more upright, more lordly, until he seemed a king among wizards: crowned with black cloud, a scepter of thorn in his left hand, and in his right, a living, feathered orb. Blood and night robed him, and his words crashed and rattled like rocks in a landslide.

  "Hear thy fate, O Child of Maindur. Life for life is my right, and life for life shall I have. Thy third task is to give me a daughter of my getting, to love and rear and teach in the place of my lost Colette. Thou wilt therefore wed with me, and be my wife at bed and at board until that thou dost conceive and bear forth a girl-child alive."

  As though the words had been rocks indeed, they beat upon the Maid until she huddled to the floor with her hands to her ears. She had not wept when the Wizard of Norroway fell to dust; she did not weep now. Like her father at the sack of Beauxprés, she only gazed upon her tormentor as though the very intensity of her look might silence him.

  The beggar-wizard returned her gaze, a smile upon his bearded lips. "Well, girl?"

  Linotte lowered her hands to her lap and shut her eyes. "A year and a day," she said. " 'Tis my right."

  "Thou wert more than two years in Norroway, and in the house of Boreas less than one. Thyself hast set aside the binding of time. Never think to take it up again, now it chances to serve thy turn."

  The Maid nodded. "Three days to decide."

  "No."

  She opened her eyes and glared at him. "Three days to prepare, then. No bride should go to her marriage without time in which to bid her maidenhead farewell and make her a gown to be wed in."

  "You consent?" Triumph and suspicion warred in the wizard's voice.

  "I do." Very clipped, and the breath bated at the end of the phrase, awaiting his response.

  He grinned like a skull. "Thou shalt have thy three days, ma mie, alone, as thou hast asked, providing thou keep to the island and seek not to venture abroad. In earnest of which promise, do thou kiss me."

  Stiffly the Maid gained her feet and stepped towards him. On his fist, the Porcelain Dove cucuroo'd in its pearly throat. She halted and considered it, her dark eyes unfathomable.

  "Yes—'tis fair, my Dove. But not so fair as my dead child. Come. Thy kiss."

  Another step brought her to him. She lifted her face and, firm and unshrinking, laid her lips to his. Then she turned and went from him, down through the tower and out to the stable where the Horse of the North Wind, looking sadly neglected, greeted her with soft whickers of joy.

  The three days of the beggar-wizard's grace the Maid passed in the stable, grooming the matted hair from the Horse's coat, cleaning his stall, sitting on an upturned bucket with the wand of the Fairy Friandise in her hand and, at her feet, the Horse's bridle and the silver walnut she'd brought with her from the cabinet des Fées. Once she waved the wand, whispering words over it she'd learned of the Wizard of Norroway. It gained her a sticky handful of marzipan pigs and the usual cloud of purple dust. The dust eddied about the Horse, who snuffled at it, then shook his ears and neighed gustily. The Maid stared at him and the purple sparkles so incongruously bespangling his mane, and helplessly began to laugh, her laughter as painful as weeping. She fed the marzipan pigs to the Horse, cast her arms around his neck and stood with her head tucked under his jaw while the purple glitter faded slowly into the air.

  Well. I could make nothing of that, nor of the calm with which, next morning, Linotte cracked open the silver walnut and found—to no one's surprise—a gown as bright as the stars.

  I confess I'd always wondered what such a gown would look like, how it would be fashioned, and above all, how she'd manage to put it on without a maid to lace it up for her and drape the skirts. So 'twas with a professional interest that I watched her strip off her boy's clothes, shake out the gown, and cast it over her head. Alas, the gown was so bright that I couldn't look directly at it, but must squint with slitted eyes at the quicksilver folds rippling down Linotte's body to clothe her in a seamless glory of light. Prosaically, she combed out her short black hair with her fingers, and before leaving the stable, waved the wand of the Fairy Friandise, ate a marzipan pig, and pulled the dust around her like a sparkling mantle.

  All that came before and after the wedding, I remember well. The wedding itself I don't care to remember. 'Twas like no nuptial Mass I've ever heard sung, that I will say, the groom himself conducting the rite in accordance with rubrics as strange as they were foul. In comparison to the ceremony, the eerie witnesses seemed like old friends. There they were: Jorre's victims, the children of madame's bedchamber, the creeping infants, the staggering babes, the little maids and lads of five or six years' growth. I could hardly bear to look at them for wondering if they'd been disturbed by my pawing through their bones and which of them, living, had owned the skull I'd shattered to dust. Yet look on them I must, for they impressed themselves upon my senses even with my eyes shut: rank upon rank of childish faces, still and unreadable as servants' faces, waiting.

  At last the rite drew to an end. The wizard, plunging his hand into a brazier filled with aromatic coals, drew forth a ring that glowed red. This ring he thrust onto the forefinger of the Maid's left hand. I saw her pale lips move—a spell of warding, I suppose, for she neither winced nor withdrew her hand from the burning gleed. Then the watching children sighed and faded from sight, and the beggar-wizard, smiling, took his bride by the hand and led her up to bed.

  Helplessly I watched as they mounted the winding stair, their steps illuminated by the gown as bright as the stars. When they came to the top, the gown's light fell upon a small, round chamber, empty save for a wooden bed of ancient and rustic design. The wizard turned to the Maid and touched her above the heart, and the gown as bright as the stars flowed away from his hand like water to gather in a gleaming puddle at her feet. Her hands moved to cover her breasts and her sex. He laughed; they fell away again to hang passive at her sides.

  A flick of his hand, and his own garments fell from him—all save the rusty black cloak he wore hung over his shoulders, fastened at his throat by the brooch of rushes. He let fall, too, the glamour he'd cast upon his person. I don't know how a man four hundred years old might be expected to look, few such having been recorded since the days of Abraham and Methuselah. This man was seamed of skin, sunken of belly and chest, shrunk of shank, gray and lax from head to horny foot, save for his manhood that rose in dark and angry salutation to his wife.

  Taking her hand, he led her to the bed, laid her down upon it, knelt between her legs. He stroked her impassive face, her neck, her shoulders, her breasts, his hands moving like insects across her white skin. And all the while he stroked and caressed his wife, when he mounted and as he rode her, his eyes were fixed, not on her, but on monsieur, and he smiled at him an old man's gap-toothed smile.

  Beside me, I felt monsieur stir, heard his harsh breath in his throat like a death-rattle that had no end. I thought—I prayed—that I'd go blind, go mad, die with the horror of the wizard's revenge. Linotte's h
and crept up her husband's haunch. He glanced down at her, startled, and she moaned and heaved her hips and locked her shapely legs around his withered buttocks. For the first time, he bent his head to kiss her. The black cloak covered them, its rusty darkness making whiter by contrast the arm Linotte twined about her husband's neck. Finally he gave a great thrust and cried out; shuddered and gurgled deep in his throat, then collapsed upon his wife in the lassitude of passion spent.

  How many nights to get a child, I thought. Will he force us to watch them all, and the birthing, too? And: how many years have we sat here?

  Upon this thought, I found I could move my hands, discovered I'd clenched them so hard over my mouth that both my palms and my lips were torn. As I wiped away the blood with my apron, the black mound upon the bed gave a heave and the beggar-wizard flopped over onto his back. Linotte dragged herself upright and put back her hair from her face. Her pale skin was flooded with scarlet, as were the sheets and pillows beneath her. Her bleak eyes looked down upon her husband.

  I followed her gaze to a corpse, shrunken and fast falling into decay; a corpse in the hollow of whose throat was thrust the pin of a round brooch improbably woven of rushes.

  CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIRST

  In Which the Porcelain Dove Comes to Beauxprés

  The vision of the Sorcerer Maid faded with the wizard's corpse, and in the place of his tower I saw only bare boards, a badly-painted scene, two framework trees, and a grassy knoll fashioned from a heap of green canvas. Actors there were none. The prophetically named Le Destin, Rosemont, La Grotte, Belle Étoile, L'Espérance—all were returned to their proper time and place, or translated at the wizard's death le bon Dieu alone knows where.

  Though Le Destin was gone, his properties remained at Beauxprés, including the oxen and the dun horse, which increase of our stock pleased Jean greatly. He'd been snoring against my knee after the vision faded and, when I woke him, owned not the smallest memory of seeing Linotte or the beggar-wizard or Pompey. Charmant had tricked Alcendre in the end, he said, and ridden off on the Horse with the Cloak on his back, the Maid at his saddlebow, and the Dove on his fist to live happily ever after. He remembered it all perfectly, him. As for the sudden departure of Le Destin and his troupe unpaid, he'd no explanation save that actors are an unaccountable race.

  Thus Jean then; thus Jean now. I do not believe he lies. What Jean wishes to see, that is the thing he sees. A comfortable magic, that has warded him against an army of horrors, not the least of them this vision of Linotte's wedding. Oh, the shame I felt, to be constrained to sit and watch the rape, powerless to look away or call out or even to throw fruit! And there is some shame, too, in having written it all for Colette to read, lest in some sense I have served her as her father's spell served me.

  Or was it her father's spell? He saw monsieur, I am sure of it, watched him watching him take his daughter's maidenhead, and unastonished to find himself so observed. The ghostly children he did not see, or at least did not acknowledge, nor did he know of Linotte's adventures anything more than she herself revealed. As Pompey was fond of saying, and the Wizard of Norroway also, the patterns of magic are as capricious as they are compelling, and not the most learned wizard on earth can cast a spell to perform only his desire and no more.

  I was writing about Jean.

  He would not believe me, wondered that I would care to invent such filth, and left me as I was consigning all the inhabitants of Beauxprés, servant, master, and child, to the deeps of Satan's hottest sinkhole and good riddance to them. Nor did the next day encourage me to a more charitable disposition. Jean could hardly bring himself to speak to me. Monsieur and madame made a Charenton of the library, caterwauling and raving enough for a hundred maniacs. Me, I carried on as I had before, save for a revolution in my belly that cast my food back up my throat as soon as ever I swallowed it.

  I was spewing porridge into the horse trough. When Linotte returned to Beauxprés, I thought I'd never be warm again, or well, or happy. I thought I'd be dead soon, the sooner the better. And when the spasm released me, I leaned my brow on the edge of the trough and wept.

  Through my weeping, I heard birds.

  Birds! Only imagine the shock, after perhaps four years of silence, to hear larks, doves, nightingales, finches, linnets, singing full and liquid paeans to the sun, which, for a wonder, was warming my back as it had not been warmed since I couldn't even remember when.

  My over-tried heart counseled flight. The last marvel, it told me, had not been of a particularly comforting nature; why should I be eager to greet the next? I'd be wisest to run to the kitchen, bar the door, and hide me in the chimney corner until whatever horror the birdsong heralded had run its course and departed. Thus my heart. My feet, in the meantime, carried me past the kitchen door and around the north wing to the forecourt and Latona and the long, blasted lawn to the east. And there my eyes showed me the chestnut trees blooming and leafing out like chicks hatching while a tide of gold and new green rushed up the slope: grass shooting up and rippling in the warm wind, marguerites and cowslips and anemones hurriedly unfurling their leaves and petals.

  I screamed for Jean.

  As I think I've said before, pain and pleasure sound much alike. Jean came running from his garden at full tilt, hoe raised and ready for mayhem. "What's wrong now, Duvet?" he panted. "Have you run mad?"

  Well, that struck me as funny, the way he'd said it, and I began laughing so hard I couldn't answer him, only point over his shoulder and sputter. He dropped the hoe, took me by the shoulders and shook me until my teeth chattered. "Shut it, Berthe Duvet! Do you hear me? Just shut it!"

  Still laughing, I forced him around to face the chestnut drive, brilliant as emerald in the clear air. His jaw dropped. He put his fists to his eyes, rubbed, and looked again. A cloaked figure on a storm-gray horse emerged from the end of the drive and started up the hill.

  "Who's that?" he asked plaintively. "Another sorcerer? And who's that with him? D'ye think they're dangerous? I tell you, Duvet, I don't think I can endure much more."

  My turn to shake him—more gently than he'd shaken me, bien sûr—and to make soothing noises. "Now, now, Jean—'tis only Mlle Linotte, returned from her quest. Remember, she went dressed as a boy? Of course you remember. As for who's with her, I'd guess the vicomte de Montplaisir and M. Justin. The tale is told, Jean, and we've come to happily ever after. There'll be nothing more for you to endure. You'll see."

  I was wrong.

  If this history of mine were in truth a conte des fées, I could make an end here, with Linotte, like Persephone, bringing spring to Beauxprés. I could purloin my closing lines from Mme d'Aulnoy or even M. Perrault, some scene of restoration and reconciliation replete with tears and smiles and wedding bells, change the names to suit, and Jean at least would be satisfied that I'd ended my tale the way a tale ought to end.

  Colette, on the other hand, would not be satisfied with such a romance, however elegantly composed. From a child she has always insisted upon knowing the truth. Oh, the questions she asked! What was beyond the mist? Why would Léon not come out of his room? Where was monsieur? What happened to Pompey? And when we told her le bon Dieu alone knew the answer to that, why she'd stamp her little foot and vow she'd find out for herself. Which she set herself to do, with her readings and her scribblings and her magical experiments in farseeing.

  How like Linotte she is. And how unlike. Colette's magic is all making and doing and knowing; Linotte's was all breaking and undoing and hiding away. And that, I think, was the wizard's parting malediction upon monsieur: that his daughter sacrifice her youth and her joy and her maidenhood in the quest of the Porcelain Dove.

  Yet Linotte had her moment of triumph, and at first her return was glorious as even Jean could have wished. Like an April queen she trod the carpet of new grass and flowers that sprung up beneath her horse's feet. A rainbow of small birds arched above her and her two brothers rode behind as guard of honor. On her fist, borne high and forward li
ke a standard, perched a bird whose feathers gave back the sunlight with a hard, polished gleam, a bird whose beak was coral, whose eyes glittered red as faceted glass. The Porcelain Dove.

  The Horse's iron-shod hooves rang upon the cobbles of the fountain court, then halted by the front steps where Jean and I were standing. Through my blur of tears, I saw only a shadow crowned with flowers and haloed with light. The Sorcerer Maid spoke.

  "Fetch monsieur my father, Berthe."

  That was all Linotte's greeting, in a voice as hard and bright as the Dove's feathers. No sign of being happy to see us or grateful or relieved the château was still standing; just "Fetch my father, Berthe," as though I were a lackey. Bah!

  "Bah!" I said. "Fetch him yourself, you. You're good at fetching things."

  She'd no reply to this save silence. I tented my hand and glared up defiantly; she bent her head to meet my gaze. Her eyes were red and swollen-lidded and shadowed with pain; her face a dozen years older than the face of the girl who'd cracked the walnut and put on the gown as bright as the stars. Still angry, and ashamed now with it, I shrugged, turned, entered the château, crossed the hall to the library, and rattled the broken handle.

  "Monsieur," I shouted. "Oh, M. le bougre duc de Malvoeux. Come out, O descendant of monsters. Thy daughter awaits thee, O fornicator of birds. She's brought thy thrice-cursed Porcelain Dove, and I pray to le bon Dieu that 'twill peck out thy eyes."

  Silence. Then a scream worthy of madame, a great crashing, and the handle torn from my hand as he pulled open the library door and stumbled past me to a scene I'd no desire to witness: the coming together of duc and Dove. I'd had my fill of birds, me.

  I slid to the floor and sat hugging myself, waiting for it all to be over. Madame stalked out of the library, trembled her feather aigrette at me, pecked at my shoe, and paced with heavy dignity across the hall to the door where she jerked a beady glance over her back and waited. I sighed; but my time for defiance was past. I hauled myself wearily to my feet and followed her.