The Porcelain Dove (40 page)

As always, we slept the first night at Fontainebleau. Early the next morning, our courier, one Gousse, presented himself to madame with a rumor of desperate men murdering travelers upon the road. He, Gousse, feared to go on without protection, and begged the duchesse's leave to procure a musket or hire an armed guard. Madame, very alarmed, declared she would not stir another step, with or without a guard. For what was there to hinder an armed guard from robbing her himself? Gousse fetched a deep sigh and inquired whom the duchesse expected to inform M. le duc de Malvoeux of her decision to take up residence in Fontainebleau? Madame did not know, she was sure, and was Gousse being impertinent?

At this point, I took it upon myself to hustle Gousse out the door, winking and nodding as I shooed him away. Later, I slipped out to the inn yard, gave him a louis out of my own purse, and told him to arm himself as he saw fit.

That afternoon, Gousse returned brandishing a long pistol. Madame was vastly impressed when he put a ball through one of the innkeeper's chickens, agreeing, as she averted her eyes from the chick
en's torn carcass, that even the boldest brigand might be reluctant to court a similar fate. Accordingly, we packed ourselves into the berline at lark-song next morning and once more set off towards Beauxprés.

The rumored brigands failed to show themselves either that day or the next, though I remember noticing an unusual number of vagabonds abroad. Trudging along by twos and threes, heads bowed and ragged coats flapping about their heels, they were as pitiable a straggle of walking scarecrows as ever sought work where there was none. When my mistress caught sight of one ahead, she'd down with the back window and shout to Gousse to make sure his piece was charged and ready to fire. Gousse would shout back reassuringly, which would silence her until we passed another group of poor sots wading through the mire.

A dull journey, dogged with little pieces of ill-luck, the last of which was the offside leader's picking up a stone in its shoe and slowing us so that sunset found us still climbing through the Forêt des Enfans, far from the nearest inn and farther still from Beauxprés.

In the course of writing this history, I have felt certain scenes and memories rouse as from long sleep to the scratching of my feather pen. Some events I cannot say that I have truly recalled until I've written them down and read them over to Jean, who says yes, he remembers something of the sort, though that's not how he'd have told it, him. This memory, however, this scene I am about to embark upon, is all my own.

The library is warm around me, a shaft of morning sun pierces the long windows to pick out the books' gilded titles and the furniture's rocaille flourishes. I'm fed, comfortably seated, a glass of wine to my hand. Yet when I close my eyes, I seem to feel myself swaying along a mountain road, rocky, narrow, and dim in the twilight. The shadows are long and dark. Madame drowses nervously in one corner, Linotte in another. Myself, I am too cold to sleep, depressed by thoughts of Sangsue and porridge for supper. The berline rattles and creaks, the horses clop and snort, stiff branches scrape the window.

All at once Carmontelle shouts. The berline lurches, bouncing Linotte to the floor and tossing madame from side to side like a tennis ball. Have we lost a wheel? I cling to the hand-strap as the carriage gives a final bound and stops, canted a little to one side, but upright. Not a wheel, then.

Angry voices without: Gousse, Carmontelle, others—how many I can't tell for all the noise within. Mlle Linotte, jolted from sleep, whines like a puppy; madame wails aloud.

"Ah, my heart!" she moans. "Berthe! My salts! I am shaken all to pieces!" And to Linotte: "Be still, naughty girl: thy noise goes quite through me! Does no one think of my nerves? Carmontelle must be drunk, or mad. I'll have the idiot turned out upon the street!"

"Yes, madame. Shall I tell him so?"

"Yes. No—I know not, Berthe." Irritably, she snatches the salts from my hand and sniffs at them. "I pray the fool has not run down a pig or some such nonsense. Do look out, Berthe, and see."

I'll do better than that, I think, and slip from the carriage on the uphill side. As soon as I'm out, I want to be in again, for the road swarms with wild-eyed faces and fluttering rags. Night is falling: I can barely see. There might be twenty brigands attacking us or thirty or a hundred, pouring out of the undergrowth like a pack of starving wolves, clawing at the horses' heads, yarring and whurring with rage. Their voices are shrill and their accents incomprehensibly rustic, but their cadence speaks clearly of our death.

"Blood! Blood!" I hear them cry.

I cling to the carriage door, my legs turned to wood and my bowels leaping with a thousand fleas. I'd give much to fall into a swoon, but I can no more faint than climb back into the berline. As Gousse swears at the failing light, I close my eyes, commend my soul to my Lord Jesu Christ, and wait for brigandly hands to rend me.

Behind my head, the window rattles open. "Imbecile!" Madame shrills. "Coward!
Do
something! Shoot!"

Gousse's pistol explodes.

For a moment, all is still—mob, madame, groom, horses, all shocked into silence by the shot. Then a single voice cries out, "Janneton!" and a chorus of wails and sobs splits the evening air.

Madame screams, "Drive on!"

The berline jerks forward, scraping across my back. I am thrown off-balance, falling under the wheels to be crushed, when I hear an imperious young voice cry, "Stop!"

The door flies open, knocks me sprawling into the road. Someone leaps from the berline with a rush of skirts and a light thump.

"Light," demands Mlle Linotte. "He's not quite dead, I think, but I must have light."

Cursing steadily, Gousse lights a flambeau, clambers down from
the rearward seat, and lights the carriage lamps. I pull myself to my feet.

The scene revealed by the light was pitiful and strange: Mlle Linotte on her knees in the mud cradling the fallen brigand's verminous head in her lap. He was very skinny, that brigand, very ragged, and very young—younger, or at least smaller, than the girl who supported him. His shoulder and neck glistened darkly. The mob, clustered fearfully at the road's edge, was a handful of children—beardless boys and hollow-chested girls with grubby infants clinging to their skirts.

Untying my apron, I moved towards the boy, knelt, and wadded it against his gaping shoulder.

A leathern bottle appeared by my cheek. "Give him a drop of this." Gousse's voice shook in concert with his trembling hand. " 'Tis brandy from my lord's cellars, strong enough to raise the dead."

Linotte took the bottle and, pushing my hand and bloody apron aside, poured a dollop of strong brandy into the wound. The boy writhed and cried out. The children on the verge answered him.

"Leave be! Ain't ye made sorrow enough without ye torture him too?" A young girl, snaggle-toothed and scrag-necked as a crone, dashed the bottle away and raked the boy into her own arms.

Linotte sat back on her heels. "Let us put him into the carriage," she said quietly. "We'll bind his shoulder, give him a warm bed and food. You can come, too."

The girl hesitated. "Will you give me bread?"

"All you can eat," said Linotte.

"Sausages?"

"And wine and milk and porridge."

The girl jerked her head over her shoulder, where a dozen hungry eyes gleamed in the shadows. "For them?"

"Yes, yes, there's plenty for you all. Now, let Gousse lift him into the carriage. Is he your brother?" The girl shrugged, bewildered. "It doesn't matter. Brothers aren't anything special. Quickly, Berthe; make a bed for him."

Well. In less time than it takes to tell, I was folding lap rugs on the floor of the berline while madame wrung her hands and babbled at me. I'm sure she inquired what I was about, ordered me to fetch Linotte, her salts, a hot brick, brandy, but I did not hear her. My ears were echoing with cries for blood, with a beloved voice commanding Gousse to shoot and the pistol's prompt reply. My hands were dark with blood. I scrubbed them in the deep fur of the lap rugs.

When I'd made a kind of nest on the carriage floor, Gousse took up the wounded boy and laid him tenderly in it. The beggar-girl crept up the steps and crouched at his head; Linotte climbed in after and curled herself at his feet. And all the while madame never ceased exclaiming. "What are you doing? What is this? Get it out at once, do you hear me? Who is that amazingly filthy girl? Whatever will M. le duc say? Is that blood? Oh, I shall surely faint!" and so on and on in staccato counterpoint to the boy's sustained groans.

The contents of Gousse's leather bottle were soaking into the mud of the road, but a little silver flask of the same spirit was kept in a pocket on the carriage door. I found it, uncapped it, and tipped a few drops into the boy's mouth. He coughed and opened his eyes.

"Bread," he said. 'Twas no more than a hoarse whisper, but I heard it clearly. "For the love of God, give me bread."

Bread. Blood. Not so very close in sound. Fear had made of them a single word; shame declared them different tongues. The boy's eyes fluttered shut.

"He dies," said the girl coldly. "The lady has killed him."

"'Twas the groom shot him," objected Linotte.

The girl shrugged. "Servant, lady—all the same. Poor Janneton. Still, 'tis faster than starving."

We had begun to move, slowly, to spare the wounded child. He fell into a swooning doze in which he seemed to feel no pain, except when a wheel jolted over a rut, when he'd whimper a little. Madame had fallen silent. Hoping that she, too, had fainted, I looked up to see her staring helplessly from the bloody child to the filthy beggar-girl to her daughter and back again to the child. Her muff was jammed against her mouth and her eyes were shadowed gorges. She neither stirred nor spoke—not when the boy Janneton died; not when Linotte tearfully vowed to give him Christian burial and make the girl her maid and take care of her forever; not when the girl spat in Linotte's face and demanded to be let down.

"I'll starve rather than eat bread bought with blood," she said fiercely.

I remember thinking how young she sounded. Pride makes a poor meal, I might have told her. Bread bought with blood will nourish you as well as cheaper fare. Take it for yourself and your friends. Then the boy won't have died for nothing.

All this I had in mind to say, indeed, half-thought I'd said it. I must not have, however, for next thing I knew, the girl had opened
the door of the berline and tumbled out into the night, dragging the boy's body with her.

Naturally, Carmontelle stopped the horses at once, and naturally Gousse asked what the devil was going on now?

The beggar-girl picked herself up and laboriously tugged the corpse out of the road. Lulling it in her arms, she turned ancient eyes upon us. "Drive on," she commanded, mocking.

Carmontelle hesitated. Linotte leaned out the window. "Do as she says," she screamed, then brought her head in again and buried it in her arms. Obediently, the coachman whipped up the horses and drove through the black night to Beauxprés.

It must have been nearly dawn when we pulled up in the stable-yard and Jean opened the door of the berline to find the three of us sitting within, stiff and bloody and silent. He says at first he thought us dead. He says he touched my hand—gloved in blood, and cold, he says, as the hand of Death himself—whereupon I started, and awoke, and rose, and commanded fires and food and bed warmers like a sensible woman. He has told me all this, and has sworn upon the bone-white fountain that 'tis the truth. And I must perforce believe him, for I've no memory of any of it.

Even this magic pen cannot arouse the slumbering memory of those days. Was I entranced for two days? For three? Jean, of course, does not recall, nor does he understand why the loss of a day, or even a week, of my life in the world should chafe me so. They must have been ordinary days, given to unpacking, mending, washing, a walk to the village, confession, absolution, Mass, a gossip in the church porch, a cup of wine with Mme Pyanet. I ask him why I can't forget Janneton's shoulder, all torn flesh and chips of bloody bone, or madame's transformation, or what the peasants did to Sangsue, or Jorre de Maindur's hideous collection, or any other unpleasant thing, if I must forget? Jean answers that life is not fair, that if it were, beggars would all eat their fill and men like monsieur go hungry. I say that's no answer.

So. For a day (or two or three) I went about my business with my eyes open and my senses shut, and when at length I came to myself, I was standing in the stable-yard, holding a pair of fur-lined gloves, as I recall, and a riding whip. Beside me Mlle Linotte, dressed in a sky-blue riding costume, watched Fleurette mincing towards us behind a groom—a new lad, tall, strong-built, whose dark face and hands faded to invisibility against the mare's dark hide. Mlle Linotte gasped.

"Pompey!"

Belatedly, my mind awoke and gave my still-sleeping spirit a shake. "Pompey!" I cried.

"Why are you leading Fleurette?" asked Linotte. "That's what the grooms are for."

Pompey's onyx eyes, expressionless, moved from my face to Linotte's, then sidelong to Fleurette. "I am a groom now," he said. "Does mademoiselle wish me to help her mount?"

"Don't be silly, Pompey. I've missed you. I've been looking for you and asking for you, and no one will answer me. Is this another test? Have I passed it? May we go riding now?"

"I beg mademoiselle's indulgence. My duties prevent me. M. le duc has ordered Jean Coquelet to attend mademoiselle if it pleases her to ride."

"Well, it doesn't please me," Linotte said hotly. "I don't know why you won't look at me, Pompey, or why you're talking such nonsense. You are my tutor. Madame my mother has said so. If monsieur my father has made you a groom, he can unmake you again. And so I shall tell him." And she threw the tail of her habit over her arm and ran back into the château.

In my dizzy and bewildered state, this was altogether too much for me. Clinging to the gloves and the whip, I turned to Pompey and pleaded, "What passes here?"