Pam Rosenthal (29 page)

Just another example, she shrugged, of life teaching you what books did not. She’d have to be vigilant in her choice of a wet nurse. Surely some of them must be more generous, less harried, than others. With luck, she’d also find a job that afforded her some occasional free time; she’d accept lower wages in exchange for the chance to visit her child now and then. And during the month before she returned to work, she’d simply have to give the baby so much love (and so much milk of her own) that little Sophie or Alexandre (for she didn’t care whether it was a boy or a girl) would be sustained through the separations to come.

The bookstall, of course, was postponed indefinitely. What counted was maintaining herself and the child, staying independent, and never (she only let herself think of this for moments at a time, when she woke up in the middle of the night) being reduced to cleaning some horrible innkeeper’s privy for room and board.

Time passed surprisingly pleasantly. She seemed to have locked away all her sadness and disillusionment with Joseph into some dark, inaccessible place. She’d misjudged him, she told herself; well, all right, that was that. Oddly, she was quite sure she still loved him—perhaps because of a private notion that it would be better for the baby if she felt that way. She didn’t suppose medical science would agree, but Marie-Laure was sure that a baby would be happier and healthier if it spent its nine months of gestation curled up close to a loving heart. What was important was that the baby never felt a lack of love. She and the baby, she told herself, were lucky to be safe and well cared for. Even the weather had agreed to be gentle; it was March now, and Provence was enjoying a mild, wet early spring.

The almond trees had just begun to blossom. Robert showed Marie-Laure a knobby black branch he’d broken off,
with a few blooms forcing themselves through the hard buds.

“Let’s put it in the chipped pitcher on the windowsill,” she suggested, looking up from the young green beans she was snapping. “It’ll be nice to watch it come into flower, a little more every day.”

They smiled at each other over their work, in honor of spring and new life.

Robert was making madeleines for tea today. Carefully, he measured out flour, sugar, salt. The little tea cakes shaped like seashells were easy, especially compared to puff pastry, but Robert was a perfectionist. He beat three large fresh eggs into the batter and began blending in half a pound of melted butter. “
Merde
,” he muttered, skinning a knuckle as he grated the lemon rind.

“Have you decided about middle names yet?” he asked as he poured the mixture into the aspic molds that gave the cakes their shape.

“For a boy I have,” she told him. “If it’s a boy it’ll be Alexandre Joseph,” she added. “The
Alexandre
is for my papa, and the
Joseph”—
her voice became careful, controlled—“well, you know who that’s for.”

Robert shrugged and went to put away the butter. Someone brought in a pile of greasy pots and Marie-Laure hauled some fresh hot water from the hearth. Jacques passed by, made a lewd gesture at Marie-Laure’s belly, and laughed harshly as Robert chased him away.

“And for a girl?” Robert asked sometime later.

“What? Oh, a middle name, you mean. No, if it’s a girl, it’ll be Sophie, for Mamma. But I don’t have a middle name for her yet.”

“You’ll find one,” he said.

He held up a newly baked madeleine. “Have a bite.”

“Mmmmmm.” The bite of cake dissolved slowly against her tongue, light and rich at the same time, with just a breath of lemon to keep it from being insipid.

“It’s wonderful, Robert,” she said. “It’s perfect, you’re going to be an artist like Monsieur Colet.”

He blushed. “Oh no, Marie-Laure.”

“And you’re a good friend too,” she added.

A teasing light appeared in her eyes. “In fact, if the baby is a girl, I’m going to name her after you, to remember you at just this moment.”

“Sophie Roberte?” He looked as though it didn’t sound very mellifluous to him.

“Sophie Madeleine.” She smiled triumphantly. “Isn’t that pretty?”

He agreed that it was pretty, and Marie-Laure dove into the rest of her chores with a sense that she’d accomplished something, if only in her mind.
Sophie Madeleine or Alexandre Joseph
, she thought,
you will be a lucky child, for you are sure to inherit some of your papa’s gifts. While from your mamma—well, my gift to you will be a certain tenacity. And the capacity for an abiding love.

Chapter Twenty

April arrived in a gorgeous flurry of cherry blossoms, loud choruses of calling birds, brilliant days and warm starry nights. And no letters for Marie-Laure, except a brief, embarrassed-sounding note from Gilles, announcing that Augustin Rigaud had married his cousin Suzanne from Nîmes.

After Easter the Duc and Duchesse demanded a series of elaborate feasts to make up for their Lenten privations. And suddenly Marie-Laure found it difficult to keep up. She felt swollen, enormous, weighed down by her increasing bulk.

Her clothes barely fit, even with the ugly new panels she and Louise had sewn into them. Even her shoes and stockings felt too tight. And her back hurt devilishly.

She took it day by hard, slow day. Soon she would quit, she told herself. Any day now. She woke slowly in the mornings, struggled into her clothes and thrust her bare feet into wooden clogs someone in the house had lent her. The only thing within her control seemed to be her hair, which she tried to keep pretty and shining.

She murmured encouragements to herself and to the baby. “We’ll get along without him,” she repeated patiently. “We don’t need him. We’ll take care of ourselves. We have our own money.”

She tried not to count her stash of coins too often. But sometimes the seventy-eight
livres
in their little sack were the only thing that comforted her. And one bright April morning she couldn’t resist the temptation.

No one was about, though she could hear Robert and Monsieur Colet bustling around the storeroom. Just a quick little peek before they returned. She wiggled out the loose brick to find—nothing.

She blinked. No, nothing at all except some loose straw.
All right
, she told herself, willing herself to be patient in the face of rising panic,
don’t worry, it’s the wrong brick, that’s all.
She tried another. And another still. She tried every brick on the left side of the hearth and then for good measure every brick on the right. None of them even budged.

But what was that, almost covered with cinders in the front corner of the large fireplace? It sparkled—well, there were actually two kinds of sparkles—the glitter of broken glass and the gleam of thin gold wire…

She knew what she’d find, even before she dug Papa’s ruined spectacles out of the ashes.

Her finger was bleeding. She must have cut it on a sliver of glass, but she couldn’t feel any pain. She felt, instead, a sort of movement within herself. As though something solid had given way: all her months of plotting and planning, of looking on the bright side and keeping up her hopes and optimism, seemed to crumble into dust and ashes. She curled up on the hearthside and wept.

“It’s the Duchesse. It’s Jacques. I know it is,” she wailed to Robert and Monsieur Colet when they found her there.

Feebly, Monsieur Colet tried to reason with her. There was no point making accusations with no proof to back them up, he told her. She glared at him as though he were an enemy.

“And what
do
you suggest I do?” she asked. The disrespectful tone she heard in her voice shocked her. And the fact that he didn’t seem offended alarmed her. If he were allowing her to speak so rudely, she thought, her predicament must be every bit as awful as it seemed.

He shrugged, poured himself a glass of wine and offered her one as well. She shook her head. The silence in the room felt hollow, hopeless.

“Well,” Robert offered timidly, “you might still hear from Monsieur Joseph.”

Her eyes blazed. “Thank you, Robert.”

Her mouth twisted into a cruel smile. “Indeed, he might appear this very morning carrying a glass slipper. Having somehow dispatched his wife and mistress both. And having found the only pair of glass slippers in all of France to fit my swollen feet. Quite the modern fairy tale, don’t you think?”

“That’s enough, Marie-Laure. Don’t taunt Robert.” The wine had restored some authority to Monsieur Colet’s voice.

She nodded. “I’m sorry, Robert. And please pardon my disrespect, Monsieur Colet.” She rose unsteadily to her feet.

“But I can’t just sit here weeping and wondering,” she continued. “And so I’m going to have to go demand my money back from that bitch—”

“
Marie-Laure!
”
Monsieur Colet’s voice rose.

“…that Gorgon, that
hyena
of a boss lady.”

“Marie-Laure,” he repeated, “this is
not
a good idea.”

It probably wasn’t, she thought as she mounted the stairs. But she didn’t have any other ideas and neither did her friends in the kitchen.

She needed to do something definite. Something audacious. She didn’t actually suppose she’d get her money back, but perhaps she might finally find out what these awful people had wanted of her, and why they’d insisted she’d spend all those humiliating hours giving them their tea.

There were a lot of stairs between the kitchen and the Duc and Duchesse’s wing of the chateau. Panting as she climbed the last of them, she nonetheless kept up a brisk march through the plastered and gilded hallways. She grimaced at her repeated reflections in the hallways’ large mirrors, and blinked in the sunlight flooding through recently enlarged windows and dancing on delicate chairs and inlaid tables.

Purposefully as she could, she strode through the Duchesse’s antechamber and tapestried bedchamber.

Her clogs made a racket on parquet floors and sank into thick rugs. She hurried through splendidly decorated spaces, afraid she’d lose her courage if she slowed down.

Until finally, pausing at the doorway of an elegant little boudoir, she took a few deep breaths, knocked, didn’t wait for an answer, and threw open the door.

To be greeted by a low laugh that chilled her flushed cheeks and made her wish she’d stayed downstairs in the kitchen.

She knew I’d come. She planned this.

The Duchesse was drinking tea behind a long low table, in an armchair upholstered in apple-green silk. There was a low fire in the grate, its warm air currents wafting the steam from the Duchesse’s teapot across the room to Marie-Laure’s nostrils. Peppermint and elderberry leaf. It should have been a soothing smell, but it wrenched her stomach.

She stared at the elegant clutter on the table: the gay
Sèvres
tea service, a half-eaten meringue, a leather folder thick with correspondence. A silver tray held a tooled ebony box and a perfect white rose in a tall crystal vase. The Duchesse’s soft white hands emerged gracefully from the flounced sleeves of her ivory satin robe. Ivory—or Goose Shit satin, if you preferred.

The robe fell in stately pleats from the Duchesse’s shoulders and draped subtly past her belly. Marie-Laure thought of how she’d tugged at her own dress to get it to fit around her this morning.
What will I do
, she wondered,
when it ceases to fit me at all?
The Duchesse was carrying her pregnancy splendidly.
Well, she has the height for it
, Marie-Laure thought.
And the clothes, thanks to Louise and me.

Hortense, the maid who’d been with Madame Amélie since before her marriage, looked up sourly from the lace christening gown she held. For a moment it seemed as though she was going to chase Marie-Laure away from her mistress’s private sanctum, but she remained silent at a nod from her mistress.

As she slowly raised her eyes to the Duchesse’s calm, attentive face, Marie-Laure felt all her boldness drain away, like sand in an egg timer.

She’s not the Gorgon any longer
, she thought.
She’s finally at ease with her privilege and power and doesn’t need to scowl at her hirelings. She’s playing with me; she’s enjoying this. Like a cat. No, like a snake, coiled around a field mouse before it sinks its fangs into the little creature’s neck.

And I look ridiculous. Like a clumsy, swollen, tongue-tied idiot.

She curtsied awkwardly and winced at the noise her clogs made on the parquet floor. She cleared her throat.

The Duchesse smiled and nodded pleasantly, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to entertain a stained, perspiring, and extremely pregnant scullery maid in one’s apartments of a morning. She took a tiny bite of the meringue and another sip of tea. She put down her teacup, wiped her mouth slowly with a lace-trimmed napkin, and bent her head to sniff the rose, closing her eyes as though communing with its essence.

When she opened her eyes, they were flat, green, and opaque, and her voice was venom laced with honey.

“Good morning, Marianne.”

Quickly then, feigning embarrassment, “Oh, but I believe it’s Marie-Laure, isn’t it? Forgive me, yes, of course, it’s Marie-Laure, from the scullery.”

“Yes, Madame la Duchesse.”

“Well, you look very well, my dear. Especially in your—well, in
our
condition.” The cold smile affected a sisterly complicity. “And how far along do you suppose you are? Or don’t you know?”