The Bastard: The Kent Family Chronicles (4 page)

Marie Charboneau studied her son.

“Is this the first time with her?”

“Yes.”

“With anyone?”

“Yes. For God’s sake, Mama, I’m seventeen! There’s no crime in—”

“Who beat you?” Marie interrupted.

As matter-of-factly as he could, but omitting all reference to the slurs against her, he explained. Then he looked straight into her eyes.

“I want to know why they call me a little lord. I’ve heard it before—and always with a sneer. I want to know what’s wrong with a girl like Charlotte. She was kind, I was hurting, she brought me wine—”

“To trap you,” Marie said.

“That’s no explanation. What if I said I wanted to marry Charlotte? Boys in Auvergne are sometimes fathers at fourteen!”

Marie replied, “Phillipe, you will come inside. There are things I must tell you now, before you mire yourself in trouble and error.”

Turning, her lantern held high and her step somehow assured, she walked out of the stable. In a turmoil, he followed her—to learn whatever secrets she had at last decided to reveal.

“I
WANT TO TELL
you of your father,” said Marie Charboneau, in the stillness of the large, sparsely furnished room she occupied at the head of the stairs. She kept the room spotless. Or rather insisted that Charlotte do so, in the hope that an overflow of guests might require its rental. That happened perhaps once a year. In a good year.

Phillipe thought briefly of Charlotte; she was gone now, with Girard. He recalled the indescribable sensations of their coupling; swallowed, his cheeks warm.

His mother was obviously awaiting his response to her statement. He perched on a little stool at the foot of her high bed, tried a small smile.

“I always assumed I had one, Mama.”

Marie did not smile in return. More soberly, Phillipe continued, “I imagined he might have been English, too, since you speak so highly of that country. But I don’t know how a French woman could meet a man from a land that’s always been our foe.”

She stepped toward a dark corner where the glow of the single candle burning on her washstand barely penetrated. In that corner were clustered the room’s only ornamentations. On the wall, two small, crudely done miniatures of an elderly, fierce-eyed man—his grandfather, Paul Charboneau—and his grandmother, a tiny woman, Marie had told him once. But even at the age at which she had been painted, the woman possessed that dark, lustrous hair that her daughter, and her grandson, had inherited. The portraits had been done by an itinerant artist who could only afford bed and board by bartering a few days of his time and mediocre talent.

Just beyond the miniatures was an oversized niche containing a Madonna and two small votive lights in amber glass. Although his mother had long ago been barred from Holy Church by her choice of profession, the statue had occupied its place in her room for as long as Phillipe could remember. He had never seen her praying before it, however.

Now she moved the Madonna aside. From the darkness behind, she lifted a small, leather-bound casket with nailed corner pieces of mellow yellowing brass.

“It was not difficult for me to meet an Englishman when I was twenty, and playing Moliere on the Rue des Fosses-St. Germain.” He kept staring at the cracking leather of the casket as she went on, “Do you recall the coach that stopped here in August?”

He certainly did. “Four very elegant and nasty English. Gold thread on their coats. Powder in their hair. And all of them not more than a year or two older than I am. But each one had two servants of his own—and they were almost as foul-mouthed as their masters. I’d have hit a couple of them for the way they talked about Charl—things here, except they were spending a lot. Girard and I spoke about them afterward. How they ordered everyone about as if it were their right. Girard said that before many more years go by, the nobility will no longer be allowed to behave that way.”

Annoyed, his mother sat near the foot of the bed and leaned toward him. “Girard is engaged to teach you mathematics and English speech—”

“I know both tolerably well already.”

“—
not
to fill your mind with his radical rot. Those young gentlemen are of a class to which you will belong one day.” As if to emphasize the point, she set the casket firmly on the duck-feather comforter. Then her features softened a little.

“Besides, not all men of noble birth are as ill-mannered as those four. But do you know why their coach stopped here for the night? Where they were bound?”

“Over the Alps to Rome, I heard them boasting.”

“On the island of Britain, it is the custom for wealthy and titled young men to take what’s called the Grand Tour after finishing their university education. They visit Paris, Berlin, Rome—the great capitals. The museums, the theaters. That was how I met your father. In Paris, when I was twenty and he was just a year older. He came to the Comedie-Francaise, where I was playing. He didn’t watch from the pit, with the drunken fops who baited the players loudly while soldiers stood by, their bayonets ready in case of a riot. Your father sat in one of the rows provided for the gentry right on stage. He didn’t jeer or joke or indulge in the kind of nasty games that enraged too many of our hot-tempered company and got them clapped in prison at For-l’Eveque, courtesy of the Chamber of Police.

“When I withstood the rage of my father—your grandfather—at age nineteen, and went to Paris, and apprenticed to a company, I knew that play-actors were not considered persons with rights. I knew the risks. Jail at the pleasure of any drunken duke in the audience, who could hurl the vilest insults without reprisal but call for the arrest of any hapless actor goaded into answering with a taunt in kind. I also knew about the immediate barring from the Church—”

Her tone had grown bitter. Outside, the night wind began to creak the eaves, a melancholy sound.

“I cared about none of that because I’d had enough of this place. I felt that to stay here would be to waste my life. Despite the perils—the low status of men and women of the theater—I was convinced that in Paris I had a chance at something better. I went to jail twice myself for refusing to let ugly fools with titles sleep with me at their pleasure—did I ever mention that?”

Held fascinated by this tunneling back toward his own dimly perceived beginnings, Phillipe could only shake his head. Marie spoke again:

“But then came that glorious night when your father visited the playhouse and sat on the stage, watching me. I ruined half my lines because he was so handsome and seemed to look at no one else. At that moment, I knew again that the filthy jails, the scorn of the priests, my father’s anger and my mother’s broken heart were all worth it. He was on the Grand Tour, you see. More than seventeen years ago—and one year before the great war started. Before France and England began brawling all over Europe, and in the Americas too. I think I fell in love with your father on sight. He remained in Paris for nearly two months while the rest of his friends went on to Rome. It was the happiest time of my life. I wanted nothing more than to bear his child. And I did. I bore you.”

“What—what was his name, Mama?”

“Is,
Phillipe. His name is James Amberly. His title is sixth Duke of Kentland. It’s because of him that you must not throw yourself after cheap little strumpets like Charlotte. Noblemen’s children—even bastard sons—can marry well, if they’ve the money. Your father is alive today, in England. He cares about you. He writes me letters inquiring after your welfare. That’s why I have prepared you to speak his language far better than I ever learned to. I believe he’ll want to see you someday. And you must be ready. Because, Phillipe—”

Marie’s roughened hands, perhaps soft long ago when they flitted a stage fan in Paris, clasped tightly around the leather casket. She lifted it like some kind of offering.

“Your father intends for you to inherit a substantial part of his fortune.”

Outside, the wind groaned louder around the inn. Phillipe walked to the window, unprepared for all he’d heard, and shaken to the center of his being.

He pushed the shutter out and hunted for stars, for any sign of the world remaining stable. But the northern wind had brought heavy mist rolling down. The stars were gone. Cold dampness touched his face.

He turned back to Marie. She slumped a little, as if at last relieved of a burden.

“I thought,” he said slowly, “that when boys like Auguste teased me—called me a little lord—it was only their stupid joking.”

She shook her head. “I’m afraid I am responsible for some of that. Now and then, when I’m feeling blue, I indulge myself in a glass too many in the village. Sometimes things slip. I don’t think the fools around here have ever believed what I’ve hinted at, though. I’m sure they consider any comments about you just more of what they refer to as my ‘airs.’ ”

“An English lord!” he exclaimed, unable to keep from clapping his hands. He wished Auguste could hear; how stupefied he’d look!

Phillipe rushed to the bed, sat close beside his mother, all eagerness. “You say his name’s Amberly?”

“But the family title is Kentland. They own a splendid estate and have many important connections at the court of George III. Your father served in the military when the war broke out in fifty-four. He rode at the great battle of Minden in fifty-nine.”

Phillipe nodded. He’d heard of Minden, one of the historic clashes between the alliance of France and Austria on one hand, and Prussia, Hanover and Britain on the other. Marie continued:

“But for all that, Phillipe, he was—and is—a mild man. Kindly. At Minden he took a saber in the side. A bad wound. It happened when the men in his unit, the Tenth Dragoons, charged of their own accord after their cowardly commander, Lord Sack-something, refused to commit his horsemen to the battle even though he’d been ordered three times. After the battle, your father was forced to return to England. His letters say the wound still troubles him.”

“Is he married? I mean—he never married you, did he? Even secretly?”

She shook her head. “Both of us understood, during those two months in Paris, that it wouldn’t be possible. In fact, he didn’t so much as kiss me till he’d explained that he could never marry any woman except the one already chosen for him. I didn’t care. I was full of the joy of being with him. And despite the reputation of actors as willful children who never grow up, I understood the realities very well. I came from nothing. From the dirt of Auvergne. And in the eyes of the magistrates and the prelates, I was no better than a street harlot. So what chance had I for marriage? As I say—it didn’t matter. Your father, being a decent man, is dutiful to his wife. But he has always cared for me in a special way—”

Slowly, then, she opened the casket.

By the dim glow of the candle, Phillipe saw ribbon-tied letters. Written in French. Marie pulled one from the packet.

“I will not show you all of them. But this one’s important. It’s the only reason I came back to this hateful place after Paris. To wait. To raise you properly—”

She dropped the finely inked parchment into her lap and seized his shoulders, her black eyes brimming with tears that mingled sorrow and happiness.

“I tell you again—it is no shame to be a nobleman’s bastard. Your father loves you like any son. And this very letter is the proof!”

They talked almost until morning. Marie’s revelations helped Phillipe to understand various matters that had been puzzles before: her fury over a possible liaison with Charlotte, her haughtiness toward others up and down the valley.

He had long imagined that he might have been fathered by some foreigner—perhaps even a runaway soldier who’d somehow happened along during the turmoil of the Seven Years’ War. But an English lord! She had every right to put on airs! And no wonder she never reprimanded him for his occasional unconscious swaggering.

As she filled in details of the story during the long hours before dawn, Marie made it clear that she had loved this James Amberly, Lord Kentland, freely, completely—but with no claim on him. Phillipe realized the depth of that love when she told him that, after Amberly’s departure from Paris, she had made a conscious decision to return to Auvergne even though she suspected she was already pregnant.

“I knew I would have a son,” she said. “I knew—and I came back to this dismal place for that child’s sake. You see, James promised me that he would acknowledge our child at the proper time, in order to leave him a portion of his inheritance. So I returned and made peace with my father as best I could—”

She gestured in a sad way, pointing to the cracked miniature of the old man hanging near the niche.

“A week after you were born, I wrote—in French, which of course your father reads well—that his son had come into the world. Since then, he has sent money faithfully each year.”

“Money?” Phillipe repeated, thunderstruck. “For me?”

“For us. The equivalent of ten sterling pounds. A handsome sum these days. Enough to let us get along even when no coaches roll through for days at a time. Enough to enable me to hire a tutor when I could find one. Girard was heaven-sent.”

“So the reason for the English lessons is to help me when I eventually meet my father?”

“Yes. It may be many years before that happens. I may be long buried. But this will guarantee that it happens. This will carry you out of this accursed land for the rest of your life.”

She lifted the letter again, carefully unfolding the crackling parchment so that he could read.

The letter was dated in December of 1754, one year after his birth.

My beloved Marie,

I have spent a substantial sum to ensure that the courier bearing this missive reaches you despite the outbreak of hostilities. This is the letter which I promised you in Paris, and it is dispatched with all my faith and devotion. I rejoice in the birth of our son, whom you have named Phillipe. I wished to send you my assurances concerning his future long before this. But, in candor, my wife encountered difficulties, and indeed nearly perished, in the delivering of our newly born son, Roger.