The Porcelain Dove (54 page)

Once in two weeks or thereabouts, the curé would ascend the path to give us the news. He told us that the Assembly had abolished feudal rights and ducs; that Louis was no longer king of France but of the French; that church estates were the property of the nation. I confess that I wasn't much interested, though I should have been grateful that he came at all, with the villagers feeling as they did about monsieur and monsieur feeling as he did about the clergy.

He was such an innocent, that curé. How shocked he was at the reports of riot and mayhem, as though revolutions did not spawn riots as middens spawn maggots. Once he brought me a horn-cornered journal from Paris describing a riot of fishwives in Versailles and pointed with a trembling finger to an engraving of three cockaded "citizenesses" astride a rampant cannon. I'm sure I disappointed him terribly when I only nodded absently—very distressing, to be sure, mon père—less worried over the dissolution of the world as we'd known it than over the curé's possible reaction to the sudden appearance in the kitchen of a hand or monsieur.

Well, we couldn't keep him confined
all
the time, could we? 'Twas his château, after all, and it wasn't as if he could do much damage, even if he became violent. Mostly in those early days he sat by the ornamental pond or climbed among the aviary ruins, more bewildered than enraged. Oh, sometimes he'd rant and threaten and thunder, just like the old days. But there was no one to carry out his threats, no Sangsue to flog us, no Malateste to flay us. There was no one save
monsieur, who could do us little harm now that the peasants had broken his épée.

Madame was an altogether different case. Madame had run mad. Where once she'd seldom stirred from her chaise longue, now she couldn't sit or lie quietly for a minute before she must leap up to pace, to search for this or find a place for that. When she was not pacing, she was huddling in a corner, screaming with fear of the birds, their battering wings, their darting beaks, their talons, oh, their talons slashing at her hands and face. Why didn't I chase them away? Dear God, did I hate her so that I'd watch her be pecked to pieces? And her head hurt so. Where was her laudanum? Why had I hidden it?

Well, when I told her that the only laudanum left in the house was a sticky residue on her chamber floor, she tried to go and lick it up, and when I tried to prevent her she fought me with a wild and feverish strength. That was the first time I locked her into the Cameo apartment and fled to the kitchen. It was not the last.

You understand 'twas not disgust drove me thus to abandon her. I still loved her, pitied her, bled from my heart for her anguish. But I could do nothing to ease her pain, though I tried, even to the extent of asking the satchel for laudanum. It gave me dried valerian, handfuls of it, smelling like cat piss and making a most vile-tasting tisane that I gave to madame nonetheless, on the chance it might help her. She threw it in my face at the first sip, and that was that. Afterwards, I tried to keep her clean, emptied her chamber pot, left food and water on a tray with a little cup of the valerian tisane, just in case. Then I locked her door and went my ways.

In the winter of 1790, as if things weren't bad enough, the magics Mlle Linotte had left behind her began to fail, or at least to grow wonderfully capricious in their workings. The hands were the first to go, disappearing one morning without so much as a wave of farewell. I clapped for them until my palms stung, even ventured up to the Alchemical attic and down to the cellars in search of them: not a nail-paring could I find. Although they made my skin creep, I'd found them useful, obedient servants, and the first time I hauled water from the well myself, I was sorry enough they were gone. Jean laughed when I complained, welcomed me home from fairyland, and predicted that the satchel'd be the next to go.

He was right, bugger him. 'Twas the Eve of Saint-Denis, as I recall, when I took the satchel on my lap as usual, closed my eyes,
murmured the charm, and put in my hand to find pease porridge instead of the fish I'd asked for. This was not an entirely uncommon occurrence: the satchel wanted to be wooed, that was all. "Sweet satchel," I said, "thy generosity is as the love of God, ever-flowing. We thank thee for this good pottage, and beseech thee to add unto it a boiled trout, in honor of the holy Saint-Denis whose feast-day is tomorrow."

Again I put in my hand, and again I found porridge—cold, gelatinous, with unground pease lurking in each bite like shot in a hare. And porridge is all it would give me, begged I never so prettily.

"That's it," said Jean at last. "Put it in a pot and heat it up—we've nothing else to eat. In a day or so, perhaps the cursed thing'll have recovered itself, and if it hasn't, well, we've still got that gold you conjured out of it. 'Tis enough for a cow, and pease and beans for planting."

The following Sunday, Jean pocketed a portion of the gold and set out for Besançon. Early though it was for it, we'd had one snowfall and the sky threatened more. I objected that Besançon was three days' walk in good weather.

"Perhaps Just Vissot will sell us a cow, if the curé asks him for us. This is not a good time to be proud, Jean."

A week of lumpy porridge had put Jean sadly out of temper. "Ah, but 'tis a good time to be cautious," he said sourly. "Remember this gold is magic gold, and magic's as fickle as a dockside whore. I'm going to Besançon, and there's an end to it. If I can't find a cow to buy, there'll surely be goats and hens, and if the gold disappears after I've gone, well, they won't be so ready to come after me if the roads are heavy going."

He was gone so long I thought he'd run away or been killed—two weeks and more. I was miserable. No one to talk to save a sweating lunatic, a raving madman, and the White Cat's tiny dog Toutou, who wasn't quite the wonder she had been.

When first awakened, Toutou had been able to dance a sarabande, leap through a finger-ring, and speak two languages, though her French was very poor. She would chatter to madame by the hour, and sometimes could make her laugh with her antics. By imperceptible degrees, her sarabande degenerated into a little dog staggering about on her hind legs and her clever speech into yipping and yapping. She could still step through a finger-ring, but when her thousand colors faded
into white blotched with brown, I had to accept that she was only an ordinary little dog, a pretty papillon, ridiculously small and quite useless. Madame said she looked like a rat and that her yapping made her head pound. So I moved Toutou and the purple rats to the kitchen, where at least they served to keep more ordinary vermin at bay.

Madame had by now regained at least so much of her sense that I was able to coax the tisane down her, which soothed the pain in her belly. The fits continued, however, racking her so cruelly that I would have had to be as hard as Jorre to have witnessed them. I learned to watch for signs—sneezing, abstraction, shivering, a certain clamminess of the brow and shrinking of the pupils—and when I observed them, to take my leave and lock the door behind me. Sometimes I could hear her screams as far as the gallery of Depositions.

In contrast, monsieur seemed almost rational. Wherever I might go, gallery of Swords or Alchemical attic, there he might be also, striding back and forth in unutterable agitation, disputing hotly with thin air. Philosophy, politics, natural science—everything he'd read or thought in his life spilled from his lips in a passion of argument, all to persuade some invisible interlocutor that wizards cannot exist in a rational world, that the sins of a man four hundred years dust are not the responsibility of his descendants, that the complete understanding of the natural world is the sole hope of mankind. This insubstantial debate was real to him, more real than cold or hunger, certainly more real than I. If I touched his arm or addressed him, his eyes would catch on me a second, no more, before sliding back to the ghost of whatever philosophe he was currently refuting.

An annoying madness, monsieur's, most especially when I'd wake in the middle of the night to hear him expounding the finer points of Locke, say, or Voltaire on the scientific method: a lone, hoarse voice assaulting the indifferent darkness with logic. At such times I prayed for Jean to return and protect me. Not from monsieur, who didn't seem to see me, but from a growing sense that the worlds he and madame inhabited were real, and I only a phantom of my own imaginings.

By the time Jean returned, I truly believe I was more than half mad myself. I remember watching him trudge through the formal gardens, leading a brindle cow by a ring through her nose, carrying one large wicker basket strapped to his back and another dangling from his hand. The cow looked cold and unhappy, as well she might,
having walked further than any cow wants to walk in a lifetime, uphill much of the way and in the snow, too. I quite felt for her, imagining her milk freezing in her udder, the snow collecting in hard frozen balls in her hooves, the grass sparse, hard to find, and prickly on her great, soft tongue.

"Ho, Duvet! I've brought us a cow! And chickens, too—three hens and a cock." Jean grinned at me through stubble like burned-over corn. "Success, Duvet! Aren't you going to thank me?"

The question woke me from my stupor. "Thank you? Well, I suppose I must, if the cow doesn't die from exposure where she stands and the hens have survived the bumping and cold. You certainly took your ease. Did you enjoy yourself in Besançon, Jean? Tumble a whore or two? Attend a play, perhaps? It's been as good as a play here, the past two weeks, I can tell you, with monsieur eating air and clouds and madame seeing devils in the pear tree, as the saying goes."

"Softly, now, Duvet," said Jean, angry in his turn. "I came as quick as I could. And the cow'll be more likely to live if you take her into the kitchen where 'tis warm while I search out some hay for her to eat."

As it happened, Jean had attended a play in Besançon, quite by accident, on his way to the house of a man he'd heard had a cow to sell. The man lived up in the citadel, where he'd retreated during the unpleasantness of July and August. Jean had to climb a hundred steep stone steps, bribe a guard with fairy gold, then climb another thousand steps or so, and what should he find when he reached the top but the way blockaded and the central courtyard cordoned off and packed as full as it would hold with dignitaries and carters and beggars and shopkeepers. At the far end of the court by the wellhouse stood a great scaffold and a crowd of men upon it, declaiming and waving their arms in a theatrical frenzy.

"I couldn't very well get a cow through all that brouhaha even if I could've pushed through it myself. So I stepped on a few toes and elbowed a few ribs to get closer, then craned with the rest.

"I'll tell you, Duvet, 'twas a sight worth climbing any number of stairs to see: the fortress of the Bastille, only a little bigger than madame's dressing-case, complete in every part from the portcullis to the cannon and carved out of a stone of the Bastille itself. Behind it stood a type in a red cap and a cockade reading poetry while two other types crawled around the model moving little soldiers here and there and
winching down the little portcullis. More poetry, some shouting about liberty, equality and fraternity, and then they raised a tiny white flag from the tower, winched the portcullis back up again, and talked of the Age of the Common Man. Then red-cap opened a big chest and brought out such a collection of horrors as you can't imagine—a metal corset they said was an engine of torture, and heavy manacles and lengths of black chain and pictures of the prisoners, thinner than skeletons, with white beards down to their waists. There were real skeletons, too, that they found in the lowermost cells when they were taking the place apart—or at least engravings of them—and a genuine fragment of the crust formed on the cell walls by the breath, sweat, and blood of the men unjustly imprisoned there. The nobles—the aristos—have much to answer for, Duvet. They do indeed."

I couldn't disagree with him, but felt bound to remind him that he'd thrown in his lot with those aristos nonetheless. Even as Jean spoke, our own personal aristo could be heard in the distance, declaring that a seigneur stood as a father to his tenants, and like a father, must often seem cruel to be kind.

Jean grimaced and sipped at his fresh milk.

"Why'd you come back?" I asked him curiously. "You had gold, a cow, the world before you. The Age of the Common Man, is it? You're more common than most, Jean. Why didn't you go out and claim your place?"

Startled, Jean looked at me. "This is my place. Besides, after I left, I heard a rumor of gold turning to dung. I'm a wanted man, Duvet. I dare not leave Beauxprés."

After that, the days and nights passed, each finding us colder, hungrier, more frightened than the last. Forgetting Pompey, the wolves howled close in the snowy wood. Forgetting monsieur, the peasants stole wood from the ruins of the aviary. Jean stabled our precious cow in the back kitchen, stole fodder from the Mareschal's grange, and chased Just Vissot's second son down the hill with a pitchfork. Me, I'd never worked so hard in my life. If a pot wanted scrubbing or a loaf of bread kneading, who was there to scrub or knead it save I? Jean was too busy milking, mucking out, hoeing, besides feeling himself above such merely domestic labor. You'd have thought I'd asked him to keel the pots with his manhood, so loudly did he prate of my insulting it when I suggested he lend a hand in the kitchen.

As for madame, she was both better and worse. Better, in that
her food stayed with her when she ate it and the fits came not so often as they had. Worse, in that her spirits were so excited that nothing I could do could calm her, not even brushing her hair. And she was sad with it, grief-stricken even to rage, weeping like Niobe over the children, the ghostly children who had no one to love them and so could not rest. Fearing she might cast herself from a window in her despair, I nailed her shutters. And when she said she felt stifled, imprisoned, caged, I opened another room to her: the cabinet des Fées.

How often in the dark years to come did I worry at the bone of my guilt like a starving dog? I blamed—I still blame—myself entirely. She was my mistress, my charge, my bien aimée, and mad as a hare in spring. I should have kept her by me, or tied her to the bedpost, or at the very least removed the various magical hats and nuts and flowers of forgotten uses scattered about the cabinet des Fées to some more distant chamber. I should have; I did not. Instead, I left her locked up, alone, despairing, without even a purple rat for company. And one evening in the spring of 1791, I unbarred the door of the cabinet des Fées to see a large dun bird perched on the arm of the sofa.