Lili gave Berthe a long and penetrating look. She could, perhaps, force the woman to say more. She was, after all, a servant, even if she had taken on the role of mistress of the house. I’ll know soon enough what she means, Lili thought. Just let her be.
Justine poured Lili a cup of coffee and was stirring in a large amount of milk. Lili watched disinterestedly, as if the breakfast were not for her. “Can you show me my mother’s rooms later today?” she asked Berthe. “I liked seeing the theater and—”
“They’re locked.”
Lili’s jaw dropped momentarily at the abruptness with which a servant had cut her off, but she closed her mouth without saying anything. Chastisement at that point would only lead to angry silence, when she wanted to hear everything the talkative Berthe might be willing to reveal.
“Have been for years,” Berthe went on, “ever since Monsieur le
Marquis returned after …” The thought did not need finishing. “Monsieur Voltaire took away more than he should have, more than was his, but there was still enough of hers left behind to break the marquis’s heart, so it’s no wonder he locked her rooms up.”
“I thought you said he was angry with her.”
Berthe gave her a quizzical smile. “You’re young. Apparently you haven’t learned that a broken heart can be the angriest kind of all.”
FLORENT-CLAUDE, THE MARQUIS
du Châtelet-Lomont, sat in the wood-paneled antechamber in his apartment. Tucked into the top of his uniform was a large white napkin spotted with drips from the tisane his nurse was urging him to finish. Seeing Lili, she removed the napkin, picked up his tray, and departed with a polite curtsey to them both.
“You’re my daughter, come for a visit,” he said. Lili felt her armpits prickle in a flood of relief.
“Yes, I am,” Lili said. “Stanislas-Adélaïde, named after your good friend, the Duc de Lorraine.”
“Lorraine?” His puzzled look made Lili’s heart sink, but he quickly recovered. “I was a regimental commander there. And Duke Stanislas’s grand maréchal until I came back to Cirey.” His eyes darted around the room, as if to confirm that Cirey was indeed where he was. “And you,” he added. “Is your husband well? Have you traveled alone from Italy?”
Lili’s heart, buoyed by the lucidity of his first words, sank again. “I’m not that daughter,” she said. “I’m the one raised in Paris by Madame de Bercy until her unfortunate death. The one Baronne Lomont recently wrote to you about. She asked for your permission to choose a husband for me. I’m sure you will recall—”
“Why are you here?” His voice dropped to a whisper.
“I felt it was important to meet my fath—”
“Did she say I was your father?” Florent-Claude’s pale face turned red.
“Excuse me, sir, but I am not sure to whom you are referring.” Lili struggled to keep her voice firm and her eyes locked on his. “But whether you mean Baronne Lomont or Madame de Bercy makes no difference in the matter. Since you are my father, there is no need for anyone to tell me so.”
You’ll hear rumors at court. Lili’s heart skipped a beat, remembering the baroness’s words.
The marquis’s face grew calm again, and he smiled. “I’m afraid you’ve missed Gabrielle-Pauline. She lives at the Couvent de la Pitié in Joinville, but if you wait a few days, I’m sure my wife will fetch her again for one of Monsieur Voltaire’s plays.” He chuckled. “Have you met the marquise yet? I’m sure she’ll ask right away how good you are at memorizing lines.”
Lili’s eyes shut in despair. When she opened them, he was staring at her with fierce eyes. “You tell them I’m not fooled,” he growled.
Lucien hurried into the room. He must have been listening from the hall, Lili realized. “Monsieur tires easily,” Lucien said. “I think mademoiselle should visit him again later.”
Her frustration and anxiety were tinged with relief at Lucien’s rescue. “Of course,” she said, standing up and giving a demure nod in the terrifying old man’s direction. Then an idea lodged in her mind. “But if you should be so kind,” she asked him, “your wife’s chambers seem to be locked. Do I have your permission to enter?”
He looked confused. “If she doesn’t mind, I don’t see why I should.”
“I’m sure she won’t mind.” Lili gave him a sweet smile. Mind? She’s been waiting for me for years. Back in the hallway, she raced in the direction of the kitchen to search for Berthe and her keys.
BERTHE OPENED THE
latch with such delicacy that for a moment Lili thought she was afraid of disturbing her mistress’s sleep. “Best to wait here while I pull back the curtains so you have enough light,” she
said, bustling ahead. When she had gone through all the rooms, she came back to Lili, wiping her dusty hands on her apron. “I suppose you’d like to be alone,” she said. “If you need me there’s a cord over there that rings a bell downstairs.”
As Berthe’s steps receded in the passageway, Lili stood in the doorway, feeling oddly shy. Dust swirled in the gray bolts of light coming through the newly opened curtains, revealing a large blue-upholstered daybed inside the first room. Flowered pillows were strewn casually at one end, while a wrinkled dent in the middle suggested that the occupant had just gotten up for a moment and intended to settle in again. Furnished with chairs and side tables, the room looked like a typical parlor, except for a bathtub set incongruously in the middle of the marble floor, as if it were just another comfortable place to sit and chat with company.
Lili passed through the doorway into her mother’s dressing room. Beneath a fancifully painted ceiling, gilt moldings framed lacquered-green wall panels. A small sofa and several chairs were arranged on a large and luxurious rug, while in the corners, matching cabinets stood emptied of whatever they had once held. The silence of her mother’s quarters was so complete that Lili walked across the room with slow, delicate steps, as if to do so much as cause a board to creak would make her an intruder rather than a daughter who belonged there.
The next room was dominated by a large bed, stripped of its canopy and bedcovers. This is where my mother slept, Lili thought as she sat down on the mattress. She looked back toward the dressing room and tried to imagine a woman coming toward her in a beautiful dressing gown, her hair already unpinned and lying in waves on her shoulders. You were here. You were really here.
Everything in the room, from the wallpaper to an enameled clock on a shelf, was lemon yellow or blue, including a little basket near the bed where a dog must have slept. Lili got up from the bed and bent over to pat her hand inside it. A black dog, she decided, from the dusty hairs she brushed off her fingers.
On the other side of the room, a passageway led into a small boudoir dazzling with light from glass-paneled doors leading out onto a small terrace. A single white taffeta sofa and matching stools took up most of the space in the cozy room, next to a marble fireplace that could have kept her mother warm when short winter days left her craving every last bit of light. A room just big enough for you, Lili thought. Your hideaway.
Lili cast her eyes over the delicately painted ceiling and the miniature paintings in gold filigree frames at the center of each slender wall panel. Watteau, she decided, recognizing depictions of fables by Jean de La Fontaine in two of them. We liked the same stories.
Lili opened the door and gazed from her mother’s private terrace across the garden and lawn, down to the stream that ran through the grounds. It’s quite a place to make a home, she thought, imagining the green lawns covered with snow and the dainty tracks of wandering deer.
Though the rooms were silent, the people that had once animated them stirred Lili’s imagination, and as she turned to go back to the main door, she could almost hear the laughter and the clink of coffee spoons. Walking again through the bedroom, a question hit her with such power that she found herself sitting on the bed without knowing exactly how she got there.
What if you hadn’t died?
I would have known the people sitting in the chairs in your bathroom. They would have called me by name and asked what you were teaching me. I would have sat with you in that pretty little boudoir—perhaps on one of those little stools—playing with your dog. I might have been the only one permitted to visit you there. “It’s our hideaway, Lili,” you might have said, giving me a secret look we shared. I would have run across that lawn, and you would have called out to me to be careful or I’d fall. You would have let me get under the covers on this bed and you would have read La Fontaine to me.
She touched the mattress, as if to anchor herself to nonexistent memories. “I miss you,” she whispered, “even if I never knew you.”
Missed her even more now, she realized, after the sweet pain of going through her mother’s rooms.
Something wasn’t right in what she’d seen, and as she took another look around the bedchamber she realized what it was. A few chairs were scattered here and there, but where the desk should have been, the space was bare. More than a few items seemed to be gone, including all the books. What had Berthe said? That Voltaire took many things with him before these rooms were locked and left to gather dust?
Lili noticed for the first time that the two mirrored panels on the far wall were doors. They opened with a loud creak, and Lili found herself in a room entirely unlike the others. Nothing hung on its walls. Huge, glass-doored bookcases, empty except for stacks of loose papers, stood on both sides of a fireplace. A section of marble floor was incomplete, leaving the boards visible underneath.
In the middle of the room was a dainty and beautifully polished desk. Its inlays in contrasting woods and slivers of gold matched the cabinets in the other room. She moved the desk in here, Lili realized. Pushed up against one side was a plain wooden work table spotted here and there with congealed bumps of candle wax, and littered with papers, books, and scientific tools.
For a moment Lili felt she knew her mother, understood her deeply. She was someone who would turn her back on the beauty and grace of her other rooms to come work in here, because truth was all that mattered, all that was really permanent.
Lili looked around for a place to rest and contemplate. The chair at the desk had been removed, but the window bay was deep enough to sit on. As Lili went over to it, she saw something half-hidden under the bottom of the curtain. She picked it up and held it to the light, watching as tiny rainbows shot from a prism and danced across the walls.
She put it back down, but her fingers did not want to let it go. Keep it. The thought came over her so strongly that she looked around, as if she half expected her mother to be standing there, telling
her she had left it as a gift. The edges of the cut crystal were so sharp, it felt as if it were heating up in her hand. Keep it. She tucked the prism into her bodice and held her fingers there for a moment, feeling its outline over her heart.
Lili could tell by the rough feel of the keyhole on the desk drawer that someone had once made a clumsy attempt to pick it open, but when she put the point of the compass in the opening to do the same, the lock released as if it were letting out a long-held breath.
The drawer was filled with a jumble of papers that hardly appeared worth the effort of locking it at all. On top was a draft of an essay by Voltaire covered with comments in another hand, and Lili’s heart leapt at what she knew must be her mother’s writing. Farther down in the drawer were some sheets of foolscap filled with carefully drawn graphs of parabolas covered with calculations so long the page had been turned to continue up the margin. A few unpaid bills were scattered near the bottom of the drawer—for jewelry, perfume, clothing, renovations to her rooms. Lili smiled. Apparently the man laying the marble floor was still waiting for his payment.
Taking out the next layer of papers, she heard the thunk of a hard object at the bottom of the drawer. She pulled out an ovalshaped picture frame in ornate silver, facing down. Voltaire. Lili thought as she turned it over.
She stared in confusion at the face looking out at her. It was not Voltaire, but a handsome man in his thirties, wearing an immaculate white wig with a black velvet ribbon securing the tail at the back of his neck. His eyebrows were arched and his head slightly cocked to one side, as if he was waiting for an answer to an interesting question. His eyes were as round as hers, and he had the same pronounced bow in his lip.
“What are you doing here?”
Lili whirled around so quickly that the frame flew from her hand and clattered across the marble floor. The marquis stood in the doorway of the library, his eyes flashing in anger.
“I—you gave me permission to come in, sir.”
The man she had seen slumped in a chair earlier that day now pulled up his chest and thundered at her. “Do you think I can’t figure out why you wanted me to come home so quickly? Do you think I believe that after all these years you’re suddenly filled with desire for me?” His lip curled and his voice dripped with scorn. “Have enough servants and villagers seen me, and have enough guests come to dinner to report that I’m here?”
“I—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, of course. That’s always a good thing to say when you have something to hide. I suppose I should be grateful your pretense averted a scandal, and I won’t be ridiculed as a cuckold at court, but if you and Monsieur Voltaire are quite finished with my services, I’d like to return to Lunéville.”
Lili’s mouth was agape and she stared at him, speechless. Then, almost as if he were a leaking bag of air, the marquis’s shoulders began to slump and he was once again the frail old man she had seen that morning.
“Emilie,” he said in a voice now more petulant than angry. “I’ve been most forgiving, most tolerant—how could you repay me like this? How could you get yourself with child at your age? And by that little dandy Saint-Lambert? He is so unworthy of you.”
Lili’s eyes darted to the portrait on the floor. Saint-Lambert. The one for whom the coachman had taken a beating. The man with her eyes, her mouth. “No,” she whispered to herself. “It can’t be true.”
The marquis came closer and peered into Lili’s face. “You’re not my wife.”