The Porcelain Dove (45 page)

Reluctantly (for her shift was soaked with piss) I picked her up, whereupon she turned upon me a look of venom that was her granddam to the life, then returned to her roaring and kicking. 'Twas many and many a year since I'd handled M. Léon in a fit of temper; I was not so vigilant as once I'd been. Before I knew what she was about, she had grabbed my amber chain with both hands, torn it from my neck, and flung it violently at the wall. It hit the stones with a rattle and disappeared behind the soap-tub.

Well. That chain was a treasure of mine, given me by madame and worth a year's wages besides. I dropped the child—gently, bien sûr—put my shoulder to the tub, and pushed. It moved reluctantly, wood against damp wood, and finally tipped off the edge of its plank, revealing a deep hole in the wall behind—no casual gap, but a dressed arch as high and wide as the tub itself. Bébé Malateste, babbling eagerly, crawled up onto the plank and leaned precariously out over the darkness beyond. I was furious enough to let her break her neck if she was so minded, but because she was Marie's daughter, I dragged her to safety by her unsavory shift before pushing the plank aside. A gap, slightly narrower than the plank, appeared in the flagstone floor. I knelt down by it and peered into the gloom, curiosity calling me as loud as my lost necklace, if not louder.

The hole was a four-stepped staircase descending into the arch
and ending at a stout wooden door. The chain had fallen on the second step. I could see it well enough, but I couldn't reach it without overbalancing. Gathering my skirts about me, I stepped carefully down and retrieved it, pressing the wooden door with my rump as I bent. Had I felt the door move? Turning, I pushed at it. Yes, it moved a little, screeched, caught, opened further. Beyond it was blackness, thick as felt, and a sense of endless depths that breathed, as I listened, a cold, stale sigh.

I might have descended, if only a step or two, had not bébé Malateste scrambled down the steps and grasped at the darkness with her small fat hands.

"Chut, little one," I said, scooping her up and shaking her briskly. "Thou'rt over-young for an adventurer, thou. What would thy mother say if I loosed thee to creep through the bowels of Beauxprés? There might be rats down there, or le bon Dieu knows what ancient foulness. Hush now, and I'll give thee something nice to eat."

Far from being mollified, the little goose only screeched the louder. I tucked her squirming under my arm and went in search of her mother, thinking that by now Marie would have had time to bid farewell to Jean a thousand times over.

I found them in the stable-yard, arranged in a tableau that looked for all the world like the last act of a melodrama. For Marie had found not only Jean, as she had purposed, she'd found Artide as well.

Oh, yes—Artide. When Jean went to Cathay, Marie had been frantic for consolation. She'd despaired of a husband, was past her first flush of youth, any man was better than none, Artide was an old friend—enfin, there'd been a liaison, though it didn't last long. I'd stake my best cap she'd never looked at him when Jean was at Beauxprés. Yet to see her holding his hand, her eye resting on him as tenderly as it rested on Jean, you'd think the two men ancient rivals. As for the two men, they were as hang-dog as choir boys caught drinking the communion wine. Artide was the more ill at ease, for he perforce must give Marie his full attention, while Jean's was divided between her and the gelding tugging impatiently at the rein. I approached them with my noisy, reechy burden, and the animal rolled its eyes and danced away.

Marie loosed her old lovers and received the child into her arms. "Thank you, Duvet. No, don't come with me—what I had to say to you, I've already said." Then to her daughter, who was tearing at her
bosom: "But a small moment, greedyguts, and thou shalt have thy fill of me."

The last I saw Marie, she was marching downhill to a fanfare of her daughter's piercing cries. We watched her out of sight, Jean, Artide, and I, and when she was gone, Jean shook his head and led the gelding into the stable without a word.

"She was a plump little cony once," said Artide regretfully. "And lecherous as a she-wolf. That hypocrite Malateste's bred all the life out of her. I'll wager the curé told him she'd make him a better wife so. Priests! Leeches and secret lechers, every mother's son. Their parishioners may go to Hell in a basket for all of them, so long as they've a bottle to empty and a woman to fill."

"Bah!" I said. "If our curé knows his member has another use than pissing, I for one would be vastly astonished. Secret lecher indeed! The curé's pure as new milk."

I'd have done better to hold my peace, for opposition only heated Artide's tongue. These days, when he fairly got going, he could ring more changes on "foutre" and "bougre" than the vicomte de Montplaisir. "A pure slug," he sneered. "Even if we have souls to save, which I take leave to doubt, our curé's far too lazy to save them. Confess to fornication or witchcraft or consorting with heretics, and all he'll ask in the way of penance is an
Ave
and a copper coin for the poor.

"You'll say he gives that coin to the poor, and I'll grant he does, so, yes, the curé's a good man in his way: I've no real quarrel with
our
curé. 'Tis these fat prelates, these vampire bishops and incubus monks I object to, who suck the life's blood from common men, eat their children, rip the skin from the poor to make them gloves, and all the while mouthing pieties, the stinking, crapulous—"

"Enough, Artide!" I cried, clapping my hands over my ears. "No bishop is more corrupt than your mind and no monk fouler than your mouth. Go to Rome and swear at the Pope. I can't bear to hear it again."

CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH

In Which Artide Comes into His Own

I did hear it again, of course.

The long years of bitterness had told heavily upon Artide, corkscrewed his hopes into rage and his eloquence into invective. Thought by thought, word by word, he wove a chrysalis of hatred from which he emerged a rebel full-grown. All during the winter of 1789 we listened to him declare the queen a whore, the king a cuckold, the nobles of his court fornicators and leeches. According to him, priests were nothing more than vampires, monks sodomites, and bankers and court officials maggots growing fat on corruption. These opinions brought Artide a seat by Yves Pyanet's fire and an open invitation to the mutinous gatherings Just Vissot entertained in his grange on moonless nights. Of these last I know only that they existed. The assemblies in the inn—well, by purest happenstance, I myself assisted at one of those.

I was on my way to Clauda Boudin's to collect the week's laundry. 'Twas February, I remember, and colder than charity. The path through the wood was glazed with ice; the rocks and tree roots were disguised under snow. Before I'd even reached the great beech, I'd fallen thrice. My tail was bruised, my breath frozen in the shawl I'd tied over my mouth, and my legs numb and stiff as clappers in my iron-hard petticoats. I'd no difficulty crediting Mme de Bonsecours' recent report that France had not seen such a winter since 1709, when the red Bordeaux froze solid in Louis XIV's golden goblet.

In any case, there I was, all but dead of cold, passing the inn on my way to Clauda's. Smoke was coiling out of the tumbledown chimney, warm light escaped cracks in the winter shutters, and the long and the short of it was that I thought Yves Pyanet might not begrudge my sitting by his fire just long enough to warm my feet. Surely he'd have little other custom on a day like this.

As I approached the door, I could hear a single male voice holding forth above a chorus of murmurs and coughs. Having no special wish to witness the drunken moanings of a clutch of dirt-arsed farmers, I'd have pressed on to Clauda's had an icy gust of wind not changed my mind for me. Sick with cold, I pulled open the door and entered, and there they were, the Jobs of Beauxprés, lamenting their boils in a desert of empty cups.

The voice I'd heard belonged to Just Vissot, who stood with his back to the fire before an audience comprising Artide, Estienne Pyanet, Claude Mareschal, and Jean, who looked very much at home with his feet cocked up on a table and a tankard balanced on his belly. Quietly, I asked Yves Pyanet for a cup of mulled wine and picked my way through the clutter of stools and tables to a nook behind the chimney-corner where I could be both warm and unobserved.

Farmer Vissot was nearing the end of his oration. ". . . oil seed, of all the inedible, useless crops. My corn was beat flat as a hearth-cake by that hailstorm in July. And what few grains I saved are bound to disappear down the gullets of the seigneur's birds, one way or t'other. Firewood's dear as diamonds, flour dearer yet, and I haven't a sou for my taxes, seeing as how the cheese won't ripen in this cold and I can't get to Champagnole to sell it anyway. My only comfort is that when we've all frozen or starved, the thrice-damned birds must peck at our bones, for 'tis sure as death there'll be naught else for them to eat." He nodded heavily, put his pipe in his mouth, realized it was dead, and bent to the fire for a coal to light it.

"Like enough," said Mareschal. "Me, I have hopes of this assembly they say we're voting on come spring. Us peasants'll have commoners to speak for us, and the curé says they'll get rid of the Farmers and the taxes, and stop the likes of Sangsue"—they spat ceremonially—"from selling all our seed-grain in Paris."

Artide snorted. "Nothing'll stop Sangsue and his like from sucking the last drop of seed from each one of you and hanging the dry husk from those trees he's planted to cut up your fields. Monsieur don't care how hard the bugger screws you so long as he screws out the
coin to pay his debts. The deputy don't care—he's likely some rich merchant from Besançon who keeps a carriage like a lord and dreams of buying a title. And the king cares for nothing save hunting and keeping his courtiers out of his wife's bed."

"That's not what the curé says," objected Mareschal. "The curé says that our complaints he's been taking down and sending to Besançon are going straight to the king, and that when he's read them, he'll see something done for us poor folk."

"Foutre!" said Artide. "If you believe that, Claude Mareschal, you'll believe our duc means well by us."

Mareschal objected loudly, I sighed in my corner at the high price of warmth, and Estienne Pyanet suddenly remembered that he was a patriot. "Foutre, yourself," he snapped. "King and noble, they're not the same thing at all. All the world knows that nobles are only out for themselves. But our little king, now, he's a simple man. That harpy queen of his may fill his ears with foreign lies, as Artide here's always telling us. But the king loves us, never doubt it. He'll read every word of those complaints, and then there'll be no more goat dung from the Austrian whore about how we can eat grass if we can't afford bread, just like we wasn't men at all, but only so many oxen."

Jean laughed. "I've heard much the same tale, Mareschal, but 'twas stone soup the queen said the peasants should eat, or stone-dust gruel, or even cake. You shouldn't believe everything tinkers and peddlers tell you."

"Stone-dust gruel. Well, it may come to that." Just Vissot sucked glumly on his pipe. "For if Sangsue don't take everything I own, the brigands will."

"Aye," said Claude Mareschal. "Colporteur the peddler's been telling my wife's aunt all about the salt smugglers who burned the cow-house of a farmer who wouldn't hide them, right down to the ground, mind. And then all his furniture was smashed by the gardeloups who came looking for the smugglers. The law's as bad as the thieves nowadays, that's what Colporteur says."

"Gardeloups, my ass," said Artide. "A dog's but a wolf with a master, when all's said and done."

There was a murmur of assent, a silence, and then Just Vissot said, "Baste me for a roasted rabbit if I don't hate the seigneur worse than the Devil himself. I hate his tithes and his corvée and his forest rights and his dovecotes and his aviary and his damned aristocratic
pointed nose. If only M. le bird-brained duc would follow his sons into Hell, life would become ten thousand times more supportable for us all."

I felt inclined to agree with him. Jean's voice floated lazily from the opposite corner. "Come, come, goodman Vissot. Be reasonable. A good tale's a good tale, but you really don't believe all that about stone soup and the gardeloups, do you? Hate le duc de Malvoeux, very well—la sainte Vierge knows he's earned it. And his present steward's the pinch-arsed bastard of a diseased Englishman. Consider to yourself that both duc and steward are facts of life, like thunder and rain. If you get rid of these, there'll only be others behind them, maybe worse. And even if there aren't . . . Well. Can you imagine growing crops without rain and thunder?"

"Rain? Thunder?" Artide's face blotched scarlet. "What have tithes in common with rain, O fucker of horses? Hast spent all thy brains with thy seed?"

"Oh, shut up, Desmoulins," said Vissot amiably, then turned to Jean and said, "and you, mon vieux, don't be an ass. You know how things stand, you've just never thought about 'em, being the duc's groom and all. Look. I want some land. Before I can tie up the deal with the fellow who's selling it, I'm forced to pay certain dues. And these dues go not to my king, but to a neighbor landowner who has nothing to do with me in the general way of things, and gives me nothing for my money but the right to spend it. Still, I pay the dues and I buy the land, and 'tis my land, a tiny part of the wide world that is my very own. Upon it I sow, let's say corn, and, if le bon Dieu smiles upon me, I see that corn grow tall and green.

"Now my neighbor puts in another appearance. He drags me away from my land and my corn to mend his roads for nothing. Every time I cross a river, he exacts a toll from me. And when I go to market, there the bugger is again with his hand in my purse, taking a goodly portion of every livre I earn from the grain I've grown on the land I paid him for the right to buy. Even at my own fireside I'm not free of him: my grain must be ground at his mill for a fee, and my bread baked in his oven for another. And what does he do with all this money he's squeezed out of me? Does he give alms to the poor or hire honest soldiers to guard me from brigands? No. He collects birds."