Hearts Beguiled (26 page)

❧

The diligence that had taken them away from Paris that day fifteen months before had been crowded with passengers so that Dominique had to sit on Gabrielle's lap. They were wedged between a plasterer coated with white dust and smelling of pickled herring and a laundress smelling more pleasantly of soap.

Dominique asked a million questions: Where were they going? What were they going to do once they got there? How was that man able to make his eye float in his head?

The man, who sat across from them, did have something wrong with his right eye. The pupil, which couldn't seem to stay focused on any one object, drifted up and down and from side to side like a pearl onion in a bowl of broth. Gabrielle flushed and apologized to the man for her son's rudeness.

"Don't be distressed. The child means no harm," he said. "It's refreshing to find curiosity in one so young."

He couldn't help overhearing, he said, that they were going to Dijon. To visit family perhaps? Himself, he was going a little further, to Beaune, where he resided with his wife (alas, they were childless) and where he ran a business. He was a vintner; he bottled and shipped wine. His name was Baptiste Balue—had madame perhaps heard of the Balue label? He didn't mean to brag, but his circumstances were comfortable, very comfortable indeed, though he worked hard for what he got. Did madame know how many vines it took to produce a single bottle of good burgundy?

He talked on. Gabrielle was grateful for the distraction. Her throat ached and her eyes burned from the effort it was taking to hold back her tears. She still wanted to crawl into a hole somewhere and die, or to drown in one of Monsieur Balue's vats of wine. It seemed a monumental effort just to breathe. Max, Max, Max. The pain wouldn't go away. It wasn't ever going to go away.

It took the stagecoach an hour to cover five leagues, and that wasn't counting the stops to pay tolls or change horses or clear the fallen logs and boulders from the road. They were a very long time getting to Dijon.

Baptiste Balue was a big man, with thick bullock-like shoulders and a round, jutting head, and with his strange eye he would have seemed menacing if not for his gentle smile and childlike, easy laughter. He was also an astute man. By the time they arrived in Dijon he had guessed that the lovely Madame Prion and her son were running away from something. A cruel father, an abusive husband, a jealous lover, perhaps? He didn't care. He could see that madame wasn't one of the canaille—the rabble. She was educated, polished; she had style. Would she be interested, perhaps, in journeying on to Beaune to become a companion to his invalid wife, who was lonely and needed someone of a genteel disposition with which to pass the time?

To Gabrielle, Monsieur Baptiste Balue seemed a nice enough man—when one got used to his floating eye. He was offering her a living, a roof and food for her son. She told herself if she didn't like it she could always leave. She didn't care where she lived or what she did; she didn't care about anything anymore. Besides, Dominique seemed to like the man.

Although the town of Beaune was not large, it was the center of the great wine-producing district known as the Cote de Beaune. The hotel of Baptiste Balue was the finest in the region—finer even, Balue told her with pride, than the local seigneur's. It had a staff of twenty-three, including two maids whose sole job it was to clean up after the other servants. Gabrielle and Dominique were given a room all to themselves, on the fourth floor with the rest of the live-in staff.

Dominique liked the room because it was high above the other roofs of the town and he could pretend he was floating in a 'stat with M'sieur Max. Every day he asked Gabrielle where were his new papa and Agnes and Simon and when were they coming, and every day she told him they were all still in Paris and couldn't come.

One day a sudden thought struck him and he went running to Maman to share it with her. "I know what we can do!" he said, so excited he was hopping from foot to foot. "If they can't come to us, we can go back to Paris!"

She knelt down so they were face to face. "But we can't, cheri. We must stay here and take care of Madame Balue, who is very ill and needs our help."

"I don't like Madame Balue. She stinks. And she cries a lot—worse than a baby."

"She only cries when she's in pain."

"I never cry."

She hugged him until he began to squirm and make a face. "That's because you're my little man," she said.

Dominique's chest puffed with pride and he forgot for a time about going back to Paris.

Eventually Dominique decided that Monsieur Max must have gone to heaven like his other papa, because every night, when she thought he was asleep, he could hear Maman crying Monsieur Max's name and begging him not to do something. And then one Sunday Maman took him to Mass and he heard the priest say they should all pray to heaven, to ask and you shall receive, and so Dominique began to pray to Monsieur Max, asking him to leave heaven and come to Beaune, which was nice but not as nice as Paris. It was true that Maman took him fishing here, although it was only a tiny little creek, not big like the river Seine. The cook made him gingerbread sometimes, but it was not as good as what Agnes used to buy. He liked Monsieur Balue, who laughed a lot, but he never put him up on his shoulders the way Monsieur Max used to do.

And Maman was sad all the time. She had never been sad before, especially when Monsieur Max was around.

Gabrielle was able to spend a lot of time with her son, for her duties to Madame Balue were not exacting ones. The nature of the woman's illness was never precisely explained, except that she had to be bled three or four times a week.

The poor woman's arms and legs were covered with thick ridges of scars made by the barber's knife and she was left so weak she couldn't rise up from her bed. In between bleedings she would recline on the settee while Gabrielle read aloud to her, always books with a strong religious theme. She liked to talk about her childhood in Provence and how she had wanted to become a nun, but her father, who knew, of course, what was best, had said she must marry instead.

Instead of eating in the servants' hall, as part of her duties Gabrielle ate upstairs with monsieur and madame. And when madame took one of her bad turns, Gabrielle dined alone with monsieur—chaperoned by a butler and two servants and separated by fifteen feet of polished mahogany and a ton of silver plate. Balue's cheerful voice, punctuated by his hearty laugh, would rattle on about wine and politics and the weather, while Gabrielle ate and smiled politely and even listened a little because it meant she didn't have to think. Or remember.

Except at meals, she rarely saw Balue. Occasionally he would listen for a time while she read to his wife. Once or twice she had been in a room alone and looked up to find him watching her, his strange eye floating eerily in its socket. He would stay and chat politely for a few minutes, and then leave. He was gone from the house for many hours at a time, for his business kept him busy.

And so the hours passed and became days and the days slipped into months, until a year had come and gone. And there was not a minute of the hours, days, and months that Gabrielle did not think of Max and mourn. Not for what she had lost, but for what had never been.

She had been in Beaune for over a year when Baptiste Balue invited her and Dominique to come with him to watch the grape harvest.

It was a beautiful October day. The air was dry and mild, the sky a vivid turquoise-blue, dotted with small clouds as thin and lacy as dandelion puffs. They made a picnic of it, supping under the shade of a group of cottonwoods that grew beside the vineyard. They watched the pickers walk up and down the rows, baskets swinging down their backs, hanging by straps across their foreheads. As the baskets filled with grapes, they were emptied into a cart and brought to the vats to be crushed.

Gabrielle, with Dominique's enthusiastic help, filled a couple of baskets herself, while Balue walked beside her and explained in laborious detail the process of making wine. Gabrielle let his voice drone on above her head and luxuriated in the feel of her muscles stretching and bending after so many cramped and tedious hours spent indoors.

That evening they all joined in a celebration to mark the beginning of the harvest. With the other village girls, Gabrielle kilted her skirts above her knees and climbed into the vat to crush the grapes.

Someone began to play a guitar and they all stamped their feet in time to the music in a strange, clumsy dance. The sticky juice oozed between her toes and slapped up to coat her calves. It felt wonderful—cool and sensual. The smell of the must rose up to fill her head, making her feel a bit drunk.

Gabrielle threw back her head, and her golden-red hair hung down her back to catch the rays of the dying sun. She laughed out loud and the sound of her joy bounded across the fields. It was the first time Balue had heard her laugh, and he stood looking up at her, transfixed.

That night he tried to rape her.

She always locked her door, but he must have kept a key, for suddenly he was there with no warning except the crash of the door against the wall, crushing her down on the mattress with his big bulk, smothering her screams with one hand while he tore at her nightdress to paw at her breasts with the other, whispering harshly about her beauty and how she was driving him mad and how he could see she wanted this, was begging for this . . . His hands left clammy trails of sweat on her skin and his breath smelled of sour wine and garlic, and though she fought him she knew she couldn't stop him. He was so heavy, so strong . . .

She heard someone crying. Dominique, she thought as she scratched and clawed and kicked with her legs, feeling the obscenity of Balue's hard shaft jabbing at her thighs. Dominique is watching this, Dominique is going to see—

Suddenly Balue screamed, a high-pitched woman's shriek, and arched up, his face twisted into a rictus of agony. He rolled off her, clutching his thigh, swearing and sobbing. And Dominique, her five-year-old child, stood beside the bed with a knife in his hand.

"Maman, I gutted him!" Dominique cried, his voice shaky, almost hysterical. "I gutted him like the fishes!"

"You damned brat! I'll kill you for this!" Balue roared. He clawed at the bedclothes, trying to pull himself up. Even in the dim light cast by the moon coming in the narrow window, Gabrielle could see the shining wetness of the blood on his thigh.

Gabrielle leaped off the bed and, snatching up her son, began to back into the hall. Balue tried to lunge to his feet after her, but his leg collapsed beneath him and he fell to the floor, swearing and sobbing. Gabrielle heard a door open somewhere downstairs and a man call out. Balue was screaming loud enough for all of Beaune to hear.

"And you, you bitch! I'll see you branded and whipped through the streets! I'll make you wish you—"

Gabrielle whirled and fled from the horror in the room.

The other servants were all too intent on discovering the source of the terrible shouts to try to stop her. She burst into the night, Dominique in her arms, and ran for the open country where there would be ditches and ravines and places to hide. She didn't know for how long she ran or where she was when she stopped. There were trees all around, and she could hear somewhere nearby the trickle of water flowing over rocks, but it was nothing compared to the roar of her own harsh breathing. She leaned her back against a large boulder and slowly sank to the ground with Dominique in her lap.

She looked down and saw that her son still had the knife clutched tightly in his hand. It was of a set that came from the kitchen. She wondered how he had come by it, but then he had always been attracted to things that were shiny and sharp. Oh, Dominique, Dominique . . . There was blood on the sleeve of his nightshirt.

"Dominique," she said softly, not wanting to frighten him. He wasn't crying, but she could feel tremors shaking his small body. "Give me the knife, cheri. "

He gave it to her. "He was a bad man, Maman."

"Yes, he was. A very bad man."

"I gutted him."

"Oh, cheri ..." Silent tears streamed down Gabrielle's face. Oh my son, my son, she thought. What have I done to you?

❧

It was said that November of 1788 was the coldest anyone could remember. Rivers and streams froze solid. Hailstorms ravaged the countryside, ruining the crops. It was so cold that wine bottles burst in the cellars and windmill sails had to be doused with warm water to melt the ice.

Gabrielle and Dominique had fled Beaune with nothing but a knife and their nightclothes. Before dawn, at the first village they came to, she broke through the window of a laundry and stole enough things to make them decent and keep them warm. She stole more clothes later, and food, too, enough to live on. She begged some days, but times were hard, and she and Dominique were strangers, vagabonds, and the country folk were more used to taking care of their own. She was too afraid to stop in any one place long enough to find work. Balue's threat was not an idle one—he could have her whipped and branded for what had been done to him.

Once a cobbler, seeing them barefoot, took pity and gave them each a pair of sabots. She thought their luck was really turning when the next day a farmer gave them a ride in his cart all the way to the next village. But then, after the cart disappeared over the crest of the hill, it began to rain and Gabrielle looked down, thinking to grab Dominique's hand so that they could run for the dubious shelter of the ditch along the road. And then she saw her son's bare feet.

She seized his shoulders, giving him a rough shake. "What have you done with your sabots?" she shouted at him, her voice cracking.

He stared up at her, looking small and wan and rebellious while the rain fell in icy, nugget-sized drops.

"Don't know. I left them in the cart, I guess."

"You guess! Oh, Dominique, what were you thinking? You can't walk across France in the middle of winter in your bare feet!" Her voice caught on a sob as the terrible useless-ness of it all struck her then. They were running away, but they had nowhere to go and there was nothing for them once they got there.

She knelt beside her son and pulled him into her arms. She could feel through the rags of his clothes the sharp bones of his ribs. His nose was running and his lips were blue and she was killing him through her selfishness.

Her throat felt raw, as if it had been grated with sand, and she knew she was burning with a fever. She was getting sick. What if she became too ill to care for him? What had she brought him to anyway—to starve or freeze or to the racked with fever, pummeled by icy rain in a ditch?

She would give him up, taking him to the Nevers family. They were of his blood. They would care for him, love him probably. Dieu, but didn't they want him enough to hound her for years, trying to take him from her? After all she had done, they would probably think a cell in a convent too good for her now, but it wouldn't matter what happened to her, as long as Dominique was safe and loved.

She held him at arm's length and forced a bright note into her voice. "Dominique? Would you like to go see your grand-mere? She is a grand duchesse and she lives in a big chateau not far from here, I think. Would you like that?"

Dominique nodded, wiping his nose with the end of his sleeve. "I suppose so. But will M'sieur Max be able to find us there? He's coming from heaven and he might not know where to look for us."

A sob tore from Gabrielle's pain-ravaged throat and she crushed Dominique against her breast. Oh, Max, her heart cried out to him. Max, her husband, not in heaven but safe in Paris. Was he laughing at the thought of her and Dominique running like flushed pheasants across France, with nothing, not even a pair of sabots? Did he hate them that much? Why? Why had he done this to them?

Oh, God, Max. I loved you. I thought you loved me, you said you did, you married me. I love you, love you, love you . . .

But though her heart called out to him, she heard only the moaning of the cold November wind, and as the rain beat down hard on her bent head, she felt for the first time in her life defeated.