The French Bride (21 page)

‘I know where I'll send her,' Louise whispered. ‘I've thought of nothing else all night. Why are you doing this?' she asked. ‘Not just to help me, surely?'

‘I told you.' He giggled his soft laugh. ‘Pure mischief. I'm bored and I get restless without some little intrigue to pass the time. I have a score to settle with Madame, remember I told you she'd pay for snubbing me like that. And if I can help replace the dear Du Barry, I shall have grateful friends in the highest places. If your find is a success, she may stay on, who knows? One last word. Look for a girl with breeding and intelligence if such a one exists. Otherwise, I suggest you insist on the bizarre. Come, it is late and we must go. The Quai d'Orée and ask for Mme. Grand-mère. Such a clever name for an old procuress, don't you think?'

Charles had been to Paris that night, but not to see his wife. As a boy he had suffered from fits of restlessness that drove him out in search of trouble, in search of women as he grew older, even into picking drunken quarrels. It was a long time since the urge to lose himself in some debauch had attacked him as violently as it did that evening, and it hounded him as it had done his Scottish ancestors long ago, sending them out on cattle raids, burning and kidnapping and killing for the sheer pleasure of it.

A few friends went to the capital with him, the young Vicomte de Renouille – the companion of that fatal game in which he lost his money to De Charlot and the whole unhappy train of events began nearly a year before – and a captain of musketeers with more money than sense or morals. It was the vicomte's idea that they should visit a certain courtesan who kept a fine house near the Tuileries where rich young men were welcomed and provided with amusement. By two in the morning they had settled down to gamble; his friends were hilariously drunk, but Charles, with more wine and brandy in his stomach than any of them, was deadly sober and in an evil mood. Luck ran against him, and he pursued it savagely, losing with every hand. He already owed the mistress of the house a thousand louis, and the captain of musketeers five hundred more.

Mme. Boileau was a handsome woman in her thirties, who had advanced from common prostitution on the streets to the semi-respectable status of a kept woman, protected by several rich men of middle class. The house was the parting gift of the last of them and she was wealthy enough now to run her own establishment with a select clientele of young noblemen and officers and a choice of half a dozen girls. Madame had developed taste since her youth; there was nothing sordid or vulgar about her house. She catered with elegance and she charged accordingly, and in her own way she was not ill-natured.

‘Come, M. Macdonald, you've lost enough for tonight,' she said. It would never do to let the young fool run into debts he could not pay; it would give her place a bad name among his friends. ‘Leave the cards for tonight; they're not going to run in your favour. Come upstairs with me instead.'

He looked up at her, hesitating for a moment. He knew the whores in the upper rooms; in his time he had sampled all of them. ‘You'll be paid, madame,' he snarled, ‘no matter what I lose. De Renouille, deal another hand!'

The vicomte shook his head. ‘Too drunk, my dear Charles. Too drunk to play now.… Did you suggest a trip upstairs, madame? I think I can just make the most of it if we go now.… Poor Charles here is in a devilish state, aren't you, friend? His wife has left him and he's lost a fortune.… Come on, madame, see what you can do to cheer him up.' He was half on his feet when Charles's fist caught him in the mouth; he fell backwards, upsetting the table, and lay, without moving, on his back. Madame put her hand on Charles's shoulder.

‘He deserved that,' she said quietly. ‘Come to my rooms, we'll leave the girls for tonight. That's not what you need.'

‘Tell me,' he sneered, ‘what do I need then? What do you suggest …?'

Madame's suggestion kept him until the dawn broke, and when he left her bed, the note for a thousand louis had been torn up, and Madame lay sleeping peacefully, as handsome as one of Boucher's voluptuous goddesses, on her satin pillows. She was capable of such acts of generosity at times; it was worth the money to prove that she was still better at her art than the conceited strumpets she employed who were only half her age.

As the dawn came up over the city, Charles spurred his horse on the road to Versailles and as he rode, he cursed. He had never felt worse in his life. If he had met his wife along that road, he felt he would have killed her, and on his soul he could not understand why he should hate her so. It was not as if he had ever loved her for a moment.

‘Madame, I beg you, let me send word to the Comtesse de Mallot. Let me send for Lady Macdonald!'

‘No,' Anne said. ‘No, Marie-Jeanne, I forbid you to tell anyone about this. The doctor says I'm perfectly well. It will be time enough to tell them when we're back at Charantaise. I couldn't bear to have them fussing over me. If anyone told my husband, I should never forgive them.'

‘But madame.' The little maid's eyes opened wide. ‘He'll have to know!'

‘I see no reason why he should,' her mistress said. ‘That's all over now. The child is nothing to do with him.'

She got up and walked away, repressing the tears that threatened. If Charles were told, he would imagine it a trick to get him back. She was done with making those attempts.

And now the matter was beyond her; her father-in-law had written to say he was consulting a lawyer to arrange a final settlement and begin the case for separation once they had the King's approval. This request must be delayed because the King's bad humour made him capricious where petitions were concerned. It struck her as doubly ironic that those cousins, who had been so anxious to arrange the match, were taking so much trouble to bring it to an end. And now she was content to let them. All her life Anne had been strong and independent; she had fought with tenacity and courage to win Charles's love, sacrificing pride and honour, and deeming both well lost. Until the night of that fatal ball her hopes had still run high, but those few words had crushed them finally.

‘I don't think you know the Baroness de Vitale. Louise, my charming wife.' Even when the words themselves had slipped into confusion, when she was an old woman and past looking for love, she would remember that dark face, so full of mockery and cruelty, and the light eyes gleaming down at her in triumph. It was all she could remember of him now. Pregnancy had sapped her strength; she was weak for the first time, weak and painfully vulnerable. If she could not have comfort, she shrank in horror from the thought of cruelty, and cruelty of the kind at which Charles was so expert. If he came near her, if she fell victim to his mockery, his callousness, she would be broken, and she knew it. The child must be kept secret; it would be all she had to live for, all that remained of the absolute ruin of her life.

‘He's taken everything from me,' she said suddenly. ‘If I have a son, he shan't grow up to be like him. He shan't take my child too. And he would, Marie-Jeanne, he would. I know that now. That would be his ultimate revenge on me for marrying him.' She swung round. ‘No one is to know, you understand, no one in the world. In two more weeks we'll be at Charantaise and we'll be safe!'

‘Thank God, madame,' the maid said quickly. She waited a moment; the intimacy that had grown up between them was still new, and she blushed.

‘Madame … what about Captain O'Neil … you said we would be going to Metz.'

‘That is no concern of yours,' Anne answered, more sharply than she meant, and seeing the girl's flushed face, she instantly relented. ‘I didn't mean to snap at you, my child. I haven't forgotten the captain. Anyway, If I were going there, it would be no place for you.' Marie-Jeanne curtsied and said no more.

The Quai d'Orée was a dark, winding street in the heart of the city; the houses leant across the narrow cobbled way until the rooftops seemed to touch. It was a place of darkness and stench, riddled with alleyways and passageways like a stinking rat run, and Louise had been forced to abandon her coach some way back and go on foot, protected by the two armed lackeys. Both carried a torch in one hand and an iron-tipped cudgel in the other. Creatures, scarcely identifiable as human, watched them from the black doorways and the alley mouths, and scuttled away. Once a beggar approached them, horribly deformed in both legs, crawling along on rough crutches, whining and whimpering for alms, until the servants drove him off. The language that followed them down the dark street made Louise feel sick.

‘We should turn back,' the senior lackey said. ‘This is madness, madame. The place is crawling with cutthroats and thieves!'

‘Hold your tongue,' his mistress snapped. ‘This must be the house – there, where a lantern hangs outside the door.'

De Tallieu had given her direction, and this must be the place. It was the only one that had a light; the light was only a tallow candle, guttering and spitting in its glass frame, and it swung to and fro in the cold wind blowing in from the Seine. She was covered from head to foot in a cloak and her face was hidden by a silk half mask. Most of Mme. Grand-mère's clients came to her incognito. If she guessed their names, she had no proof and wanted none. Money was her only interest. Blackmail would have quickly ruined her trade and banished her to prison. Some of the most powerful people in the kingdom slipped into the house on the Quai d'Orée.

When the door was opened to Louise, the smell was almost worse than the stink of refuse in the streets. There was a scented pomander hidden in her muff and she raised it quickly to her face. A man in dirty rags led the way down a dank passage, lit here and there by more tallow candles, and finally showed her into a little room. The lackeys stayed outside the door. The room was furnished with a chair and a table and it was empty. The creature who had escorted her made a low bow. He had great thick arms and shoulders like a wrestler, and the black hair hung down almost to his eyes.

‘Sit down, Highness, Mme. Grand-mère will be here in a moment.'

A few moments later the door opened again and an extraordinary apparition came hobbling through it, supporting herself on a stick. It was impossible to guess the woman's age, or even to be sure it was a woman. The painted face, daubed with scarlet rouge, its sunken eyes outlined with black, was almost sexless; the mouth was a red slit, and it parted, showing gums and isolated teeth in a hideous travesty of a smile. On the head there was set a black wig, covered in shiny, black curls, with a mob cap on top of it. A black woollen shawl and a lace apron, now so dirty as to be part of the fusty dress she wore, completed the appearance of the infamous Mme. Grand-mère. Rumour had insisted once that she was actually a man; it was not so. The monster was indeed a female one. Too unbelievably ugly to sell herself, she had started early in life selling others and now she was undisputed mistress of the frightful trade in vice that flourished in the city.

Bastard children were sold to her; girls who ventured into Paris from the country without protection were often kidnapped and delivered to Mme. Grand-mère, where they were soon beaten and starved into submission and sent out on to the streets or loaned to clients for a night or two. The children were the most profitable part of her trade; if they grew up to be pretty girls and handsome boys, she fed them and trained them with an eye to her special customers, such as the Comte de Tallieu. Those who proved impossible to sell into prostitution because they were ugly or defective were either murdered or brutally maimed and sold to the beggar fraternity, where they were put out to work the streets. The brute who had shown Louise to the room was one of Madame's little band of disciplinarians who kept the merchandise in order and tamed the spirits of the new recruits.

Many a noble lady or a well-off, middle-class matron who yielded to the temptation to put out her bastard child to fosterhood, actually gave it into the keeping of Mme. Grand-mère and never heard of it again. Madame dropped a curtsy to her new client; the darting black eyes noted the expensive stuff of her cloak and the ermine muff. In spite of the mask she was sure she had never seen her before, not even when parties of ladies and gentlemen visited her after an evening's entertainment when many were the worse for wine. It was easy to sell them anything then; non-virgins, boys who had been caught picking pockets on the streets.… This great lady, nervous and sniffing at her scented muff, had not entered Mme. Grand-mère's house before.

‘I am honoured, Highness. What can I do for you?'

‘I want a girl,' Louise said. Her nerve was returning; she sensed a business woman in the monstrosity before her; if one forgot the surroundings, the stink and the horror of the creature herself, it would be possible to get out of her what she needed.

‘Certainly madame. For yourself? I have some beautiful little girls if you prefer them very young – or a big strapping country lass, with muscles like a man.…'

‘No, no!' Louise interrupted in disgust. ‘I don't want one of these creatures for myself. Listen a moment. I want a young girl, beautiful – untouched, you understand. Absolutely untouched.'

Madame nodded. ‘For a man, then. I see. I see.'

‘For a man so important,' Louise said slowly, ‘that I dare not think what may happen to me, and to you, Mme. Grand-mère, if he is disappointed. A man of sensibility and taste; a coarse girl, one who is clumsy or graceless would be useless. I want a young virgin, with some breeding in her, if that's possible – some charm. Ugh!' She shuddered. ‘It seems impossible that anything could exist here but the dregs. You had better let me see what you have.'

‘You underestimate me, madame,' the old woman said softly. ‘My house may be humble but I have had the children of duchesses here before now. My boys and girls have gone to some of the greatest homes in France and none has disgraced their old grandmother. Come with me and you shall see. Pierre!' she yelled for the man who had been Louise's guide and he came out into the corridor, carrying a lamp.