The Porcelain Dove (13 page)

As it happened, I knew mère Malateste by sight. In those days, I didn't believe in witches, and even if I had, mère Malateste would not have suited my idea of one. She was a handsome, prosperous-looking woman: tall and big-boned, with the Roman nose, the proud, hurrying gait, and the cold, haughty eye of a well-fed goose. Her hair was astonishingly black and her teeth sound for a woman of an age to have given my master suck. The breasts Menée remembered so fondly still dangled full as a cow's udder when she bent to fill her buckets at the village well. She spoke to no one on these occasions, and the younger women always spat and crossed themselves as soon as she turned her back. Witch, they called her, making the old women laugh.

"She knows more than thee, that's why tha fears her," I remember one granny saying. "Witch or no, she brought thee into this world, and'll bring thy brats likewise, so tha's best be civil."

Inquiry among the other servants yielded the information that mère Malateste lived some little way off the village path, in a stone cottage tucked under a stony outcrop surrounded by fir and brambles. By the time I'd slogged and slithered there through the heavy snow, I was quite breathless and my skirts soaked through to the knee.

For Beauxprés 'twas a neat cottage as, for a Beauxprés peasant, mère Malateste was a neat woman. Yet I vow upon my mother's head
that when she opened the door to my knocking, my hand twitched with the impulse to sign myself against evil. I thrust it firmly into my shawl, greeted her politely, and stated my business.

"Hmph," she said when I was finished, and closed the door in my face.

"Wait," I cried, and "Oh,
please
," and also, "the Devil damn you black," whereupon mère Malateste emerged again with a red shawl over her head and a small basket on her arm.

She eyed me down her nose, then set off at an astonishing pace up the path I'd made with me stumbling behind. In at the kitchen door she swept without a by-your-leave, and up the backstairs to the China apartment.

Upon reaching madame's door, mère Malateste didn't scratch or knock—no, not she. Mère Malateste simply walked into the bedchamber, stripped back the coverlet without a word, poked madame here and there on her belly, lifted her eyelids one by one and peered under them, smelled her breath, untied her chemise to look at her breasts, and asked her abruptly when she'd last had her woman's courses.

Madame blushed uncomfortably. "I . . . I'm not sure." And, bridling, "What need have you to know such a thing as
that?
"

"Hmph," said mère Malateste, and looked at me.

"Six weeks, perhaps seven," I said slowly. "Of course! How I am stupid!"

"What
is
it, Berthe? Mère Malateste? Why do you look at me so? Am I very ill? Will I die?"

Mère Malateste honked with amusement. "Bien sûr ye'll die, madame: ain't we all dust at the end? And ain't ye a daughter of Eve, doomed to birth your children in blood and pain?" She turned to me. "Tonnerre! Does the girl know naught?"

I shrugged. How very like Mme du Fourchet, I thought, to instruct her daughter on the sowing of the seed without mentioning the possibility of harvest. Gently, I took my mistress' hands and patted them. "You are to become a mother, madame. Your firstborn grows in your belly, and you will bear it forth in nine months' time or a little less."

"If all goes well," said mère Malateste darkly. "Narrow-hipped as a sparrow she is. Like as not it'll be born untimely. Tha, city girl. Thy name's Duvet?"

I nodded. "Berthe Duvet. I've served madame from a child."

"Well, Duvet, see that she keeps warm and has plenty of meat to her diet. And oporto before she sleeps."

"I don't like oporto," said madame.

Mère Malateste huffed out her bosom and stared down her nose at madame, whose lips began to tremble. " 'Tis to strengthen your blood, madame," I said hastily. "You must allow mère Malateste to know best what you are to eat and drink, for she has brought a goodly number of infants into the world, and you not a single one."

"Can I still go to Paris?"

"Go to America if ye wish, madame—'tis your baby, after all. I've known a woman rode a-horseback ten days before her time and her babe was born alive. Bien sûr," she went on thoughtfully, "it never thrived, and died of a convulsion ere ever 'twas weaned."

"Oh." Madame turned quite white.

I clasped my hands together under my apron to keep them from mère Malateste's cheeks. "We will consult monsieur," I said.

Mère Malateste snorted in answer, then picked up basket and shawl and marched off to the front hall to await her nursling. Feeling that madame would surely need an advocate, I accompanied her, and we stood louring at one another until our master came in, when she called out that monsieur would be the father of a son in eight months' time, providing he didn't do anything foolish. This trip to Paris, for example. Nothing could be more foolish than that.

I'd begun to object when monsieur himself forestalled me. "Nonsense," he said. "Of a surety we go to Paris. I will not have my son born a weakling from over-much coddling of his mother. Ah, Nounou, thou art as great a tyrant as monsieur our king," he added, smiling at her. "I know thee of old, but my duchesse does not, and I'll not have thee worrying her into an untimely birth."

Mère Malateste smiled slyly. "Not of your firstborn, M. François, that goes without the saying. But your duchesse is such a tiny thing—more bird than woman, with bones I might crack with a flick of my littlest finger. Monsieur knows what pains monsieur's mother suffered in his bearing, and how I brought the infant that would've been monsieur's younger brother out of her belly piecemeal, with my little hook."

"Yes. To be sure." Monsieur's look was bleak. "You have told me often enough."

"However, if only she keep warm and drink her oporto like I've told her, I think madame'll carry your get as long as she need. This body-woman of hers is a silly, townish slut. . . ." She glared at me with a challenging air; I shut my teeth and curtsied. "But I'll learn her. Ye'll see, monsieur, what tender care I'll have of your duchesse."

Mère Malateste shouted this last to monsieur's retreating back, for he was flying up the steps two at a time, shedding his cloak as he ran. Dentelle appeared as if by magic to gather it up off the stairs.

"What a brouhaha is this?" he exclaimed. "Mère Malateste! Is the mistress dead? Or"—a sly smile spread his fish's pout—"an heir! An heir to the House of Malvoeux!"

The happy news spread through the household like a blaze in a high wind. Marie was rapturous. "Heir to Beauxprés! Just think of it, Berthe. Who'll have the nursing of it, I wonder?" I made a scornful noise, and she looked at me curiously. "Why, what ails you, Berthe?"

I shrugged. "My mistress is hardly quickened; 'tis early days yet to speak of a wet nurse. Time enough for that when the brat is screaming for the teat."

Marie embraced me. "Dear Berthe. You mustn't worry about your mistress. For all that mère Malateste's the Devil's own dam, she's the best midwife in the district. Providing the child's baptized at once, there's nothing to fear."

"To be sure," I said, not at all comforted.

For, reasonable woman though I was, mère Malateste made my teeth ache, and not only with grinding them. The woman terrified me beyond all reason. In her face I saw bloody sheets; in her voice I heard the moans of dying women. For me, there was no comfort in her having been monsieur's wet nurse, and nursemaid too, judging from the intimacy between them. Duc and peasant-woman spoke together as equals—as confederates, I almost wrote, although I'd be hard put to say what cause their confederacy might further. Perhaps I caught in their attitudes some distant reflection of the first duc de Malvoeux and his evil nurse. Perhaps I now only believe I should have.

If there's one thing Beauxprés has taught me, 'tis that omens can be more real and true than death. Equally, they can be simple hindsight. The trick is in telling the one from the other. Hindsight is as good as a telescope for swelling small events into great prophecies.
How could I have been so blind!
we cry. '
Twas plain all along to those with eyes to see! The grange burned on the very day I turned the beggar from my door; my sister's daughter had a convulsive fit not an hour after I saw the screech owl in broad daylight
. And ever after, when we see a screech owl in daylight, we look about us for a child in convulsions, which is not so rare a sight that one cannot be found if needed. Thus I look back on monsieur and mère Malateste knowing the history of Jorre
Maindur and his nurse Barbe Grosos, and I find in that knowledge, which I did not then have, the cause of my dismay.

Even Jean, who is as superstitious a man as ever hid a Host in the stable against goblins, even Jean says that I was merely jealous.

Merely jealous! Well, perhaps, though jealousy seems too simple a word for my turmoil. I remember watching my mistress as she dreamed pink-cheeked by the fire, her hair about her shoulders and one hand upon her belly, and thinking that M. le duc de Malvoeux had not so much devoured the girl who had been Adèle du Fourchet as he had invaded her, set his stamp upon her within and without, filled her so full of himself that no corner of her was left either for me or for her to dwell in. My heart would draw tight as a stay-lace, and then I'd feel a touch on my hand and look down to see Pompey, all satin turban and jet eyes, nodding at me with a grave little air of sympathy.

Because of madame's queasiness, monsieur and Dentelle went ahead of us to Paris. We followed them three days later—madame, Pompey, Marie, Doucette, and myself, all packed together into a traveling sleigh. We were an interminable eight days upon the road, with madame and Doucette moaning and spewing, and Pompey as close to sullen as I'd ever seen him. Marie wept for Beauxprés before it was well out of sight, and if all that weren't enough, snow in the mountains kept the skies leaden and our pace to a weary crawl. In Châtillon, where the snow thinned, we changed to a berline, and after that made better time. Yet 'twas an age of the world before we reached the outskirts of Paris on the afternoon of December the tenth.

There needed no wall to divide Paris from its surrounds. One moment we were driving past leafless copses and gray fields stuck with windmills, their vanes sailless to the winter wind. The next, we were surrounded by black and ugly tenements that towered above the berline four stories or more. The horses' hooves clattered and slithered on mucky cobbles. A chilly reek trickled up the drains and gusted from the tanneries across the Bièvre. Madame, well-dosed with laudanum, slept in the corner.

Marie buried her nose in her muff. "Does all Paris smell of stale piss?" she asked plaintively.

I shrugged. "Give thanks to heaven 'tis winter, Marie, or it would smell of worse things than that. The reek is no more than the village on a hot day—you'll soon grow used to it."

Marie made a rude noise, but removed the muff so that she could see more freely out the window.

I've promised Colette to be as honest as possible in this account. Dearly as I'd love to paint a portrait of Paris as Heaven upon earth, honesty compels me to confess that a large part of it more closely resembled Hell. The outmost faubourgs were a maze of narrow streets clogged with dung, porters, beggars, ragged street-urchins, and crones of all ages hawking tisanes and old hats at each corner. Every face we passed was gray and peaked with cold, and the eyes within were hollow. Some cursed us as the berline crept through the crowd; some held up a bunch of withered herbs to sell, or filthy hands for alms. A tall man in a leather apron and a patched coat spat at the carriage, earning a curse and a flick of the whip from Carmontelle. And when the street began to widen and we could make greater speed, the berline rattled and lurched over cobbles heaved up by the frost and never reset.

Madame, thankfully, did not wake. Who knows what prodigy of nature might have resulted from her seeing, thus early in her pregnancy, the beggar-children with their misshapen limbs and weeping wounds and the cheap street girls with their faces painted red and white like barber poles and their noses gnawed by pox?

"I don't think I like Paris," said Marie.

At that moment, fresh from two months in the country, I was nearly as shocked as she was. But I'd rather have died than said so, and therefore: "This is not Paris," I declared. "This is only Saint-Marceau. Wait until we come to the better districts—to the Marais and the faubourg Saint-Honoré. There you will see such boulevards and gardens and houses as you've never seen before and lackeys dressed in silk and velvet like lords." And, when she still looked doubtful, "Come now, Marie. The folk in Beauxprés are nearly as poor as these."

"Yes," she said. "But that's different."

Pompey scratched Doucette between her ears. "How?"

"What knowest thou of poverty, baboon? It is—that's all."

Like most of the Beauxprés servants, Marie regarded Pompey as little more than an expensive and over-sized pet. I'd hoped that in traveling with him, she would come to know him better. And she might have, had he not taken it into his woolly head to cling to madame, who lapped him in a corner of her fur robe and made a great fuss over him. No doubt Marie would pinch at him the whole time we were in Paris. To the Devil with them all, I thought; and as we drove
north-east through the slums of the Île, almost I wished us back at Beauxprés.

I began to feel better when we reached the wide boulevards of the faubourg Saint-Honoré, better yet when we entered the Marais, and by the time we turned into the courtyard of the hôtel Malvoeux, I once again knew that Paris was Heaven.

"Perhaps I'll like Paris after all," murmured Marie as we entered the foyer. "How this is elegant!"

Astonishingly, it was elegant. Fresh blue paint on the front door, rocaille cabinets displaying a collection of inkstands in the grand salon, woven carpets in the antechambers, gilded chairs in the halls—even in the first flush of impending fatherhood, monsieur would never of himself have spent so freely and to such good purpose. He must have enlisted help: Mme du Fourchet, I suspected. Mme la baronne's taste for opulence and à la modality was apparent throughout, especially in madame's bedchamber, where the long-case clock had been replaced by a small gilt écritoire that transformed into a reading-stand at the turn of a crank. The stark crimson bed-curtains had given way to billowing draperies of white satin, and a gilt pier-glass, fitted out with no fewer than four candles, reflected a rocaille dressing-table and an overstuffed chaise longue.