The Oracle Glass (54 page)

“What?” asked Florent. “The comtesse is in town? Why isn't she at court in this season? Everyone who is anyone is at Saint-Germain. Something serious is going on. I only wish I knew what.”

“Oh, I don't think so. With that woman, it could be anything from indigestion to a new lover,” I answered.

***

But I was wrong. As I was helped out of my carriage at the foot of the great stairs in the carriage court at the Hôtel Soissons, I saw Primi Visconti descending them. He was hunched against the sharp March winds, his cloak pulled tightly around him, his head bent down, the picture of despondency.

“Hey, Monsieur Primi!” I called into the wind, and he tilted his head up and assumed a jaunty expression as if he hadn't a care in the world.

“Why, hello, Madame de Morville. My congratulations: you look younger every day.”

“No thanks to you, Primi. Tell me, what is it today? Another duel of the fortune-tellers? Or shall I be put on exhibit with a clockwork figure and a dancing bear?”

“I suppose I should apologize, Marquise. The King's favorite sport is unmasking fortune-tellers, magicians, and mountebanks.”

“Next time unmask yourself, Primi, you charlatan. I've half a mind to burn a faggot against you and give you a dreadful curse, just to teach you a lesson.”

“Ah, I always said you were a witch—not that it matters anymore,” he said, sighing.

“So what have you to be sad about? He made you a favorite, but he ruined me.”

“We are all ruined now, little marquise. I would flee, but I am in love. So I'll stay, and risk everything.”

“I'll be frozen long before I'm starved. Let's stand in the doorway.”

“Better to freeze, in this case. We shouldn't be overheard.” He gestured to the Swiss guard in livery standing at the great double doors of the mansion. The cold wind seemed to want to blow us apart as we stood together on the wide stone staircase. “The rumor has been about town in the last few days that the fortune-tellers of Paris have enhanced the quality of their predictions by poison. Some dreadful old woman I never heard of was arrested. Marie Bosse, they called her. She implicated a fortune-teller called La Vigoreux. I met this woman once at Madame de Vassé's—she read my palm. Now she is at the Château de Vincennes, and they say she is giving the names of her accomplices under torture.”

“Primi, you are morbid—one little palm reading? They'll find you innocent, just like all the other silly women who had their palms read by her.” But the barb went wild. Primi was too upset to notice.

“If that were only so,” he said, looking frantic. “But Marquise, for me it is worse than you can imagine. The woman I love—oh, Marquise, you should see her! She is a divinity!” His mood shifted just as suddenly as it had collapsed. He kissed his fingers at the mere thought of this woman, then went on. “We met when she called me to read her palm. One look, and I was immediately in love. Those eyes! That adorable waist! I just had to win her! I read her fortune. I predicted that she would soon fall passionately in love with me and be my bride. Unfortunately, she was already married. Doubly unfortunately, her husband has fallen ill and died, putting me under suspicion that I poisoned him with the aid of this La Vigoreux.”

“So you have given her up?”

“Give her up? What madness! Of course not. We make passionate love every evening. I am bound by Cupid's chains—it is my destiny to perish of love…”

“Primi, you are a madman.”

“Of course. What other way is there to be in this insane world? Adieu, Marquise. We may only meet again in the next world—”

“Primi, wait—” I cried into the wind, as he started down the stairs. He turned, and the wind blew his words back to me.

“No more; it's all finished, our world. Over. Go console the countess, but be sure you get your payment on the spot.” I watched the slender figure of the Italian as he climbed into the waiting carriage. As the coachman gathered the reins and drove off, I could see Primi slumped in back, his hat pulled over his eyes.

I waited for a long time in the cold, marble-floored antechamber of the countess's rooms. The glass panes rattled in the tall windows, and I could feel the drafts blowing under the gilt-paneled doors. What could she want, the countess? She was consulting fortune-tellers—something must have happened at court. She'd heard something that had sent her once again to the occult. Either something she wanted, or something she was afraid of. But what?

The countess's face was drawn; she had tried to conceal the new lines that crossed her ravaged cheeks with heavy white makeup. Her eyes darted from side to side in her narrow little face; her smile was so strangely pulled out that it looked like some sort of soundless scream. This time, it isn't because she wants the King for a lover, I said to myself. This is fear.

“Madame de—well, whatever you call yourself now, I know you read true. Visconti, he saw a break in my line of fate; he saw disgrace, a fall, in the cards. A secret of my past will emerge from darkness into the light.” Ah, that was it. The rumors swarming around the arrest of La Bosse and La Vigoreux that Visconti had warned me about. But he didn't know what I knew, that the investigation had stopped short. The arrests had gathered in only La Bosse's people, and no one had touched La Voisin or her close associates. Had the countess gotten the poison with which she had removed her husband from La Bosse? If so, she had a right to be worried. La Bosse had been under torture for several weeks now and might well have been made to produce a list of her clients. And now through the gossipy magistrates, some sort of news had escaped La Reynie's secret inquiry into the families of the robe, and thence to court. And if it wasn't a matter of her husband, what other persons had left this earth by the countess's little white hand? Perhaps enough to condemn even a woman of her rank.

“You wish to know your future,” I announced, unrolling my cloth.

She leaned over the glass as I stirred, the diamonds on her bosom reflecting little rainbows into the water.

“Madame, please—the colors of your gown, your jewels, they interfere with the image.”

“I must know,” she said, moving back slightly.

“I see the same image I saw for you many years ago: your carriage at night, your footmen in plain gray, your horses at full speed, hurrying through the dark. The Marquise d'Alluye is with you. You are not speaking…your faces are tense.”

“Not an assignation after all—no, flight. And to think that for years I have supposed that reading to be your one failure! Oh, how bitter! You saw it all along. Why didn't you warn me?”

“Wait, Madame, another image is coming up. You are—It must be a foreign place, the clothes are strange…they don't seem French. You are at Mass in a strange church…”

“Then I am saved—”

“Wait! Two men are in the back of the church, one with a large sack. The first—I believe I recognize him—signals by dropping his hand. The second…Oh, and there is a third, on the other side of the church…open their sacks. Goodness! The sacks are full of black cats. They run pell-mell through the church. The crowd is turning on you—they appear to think the cats are devils brought by you…They are shouting, threatening. They drag at your gown, trying to tear you to bits…your lackeys beat them off as you flee to your carriage outside.”

“The man who does this—you say you recognize him?”

“An agent of the Paris police, Madame.” To be precise, Desgrez. The man who had lured Madame de Brinvilliers out of her sanctuary in a foreign convent.

“They will kill me! They incite the mob against me! Oh, what a convenient death—and no one is to blame! The low-born villains dare not attack a Mancini directly, so they use craft. I swear it is Louvois. He hates me. He hates us all, we who are above him in breeding. I know him; he will use his creature La Reynie to pursue his vengeance under cover of law. That is how he is—devious—and he bides his time. No one is safe, not even the Mancinis. Tell me, my death…”

“That will require payment in advance, Madame.” I took the fee and looked again. “You die old,” I said. The air in the chilly room was shattered by the countess's mad laughter.

She stood up suddenly, stretching her arms above her head, shrieking, “Old, old, I shall live despite you, Louvois!” Then she remembered I was there and, looking at me with glowing, insane eyes, she said, “Louvois, what do I care for him? Ha! He is nothing, not even this—” She snapped her fingers to show his insignificance. “Oh, the ugly little bourgeois man; I swear, I'll have my vengeance on him!”

As my carriage pulled into the rue de Picardie I leaned back into the cushions, nearly ill with the fatigue that comes from too many readings close together. A few more like that will kill me, I thought. I think I might even have dozed off, for I felt as if I awoke with a shudder when the carriage stopped in the rue Forez. My final errand of the day. To get my last cordial made up at one-quarter strength.

La Dodée met me at the door. Her ordinarily cheerful face was long with worry beneath her white linen house cap. She wiped her damp hands on her apron as she said, “Oh, you've come, after all! It's all made up, your order, but not in the bottles yet. La Trianon wants you in the back. She's been worried to death and needs a reading.” I groaned.

“I don't have it in me. I've been doing readings all afternoon and feel as if I will faint if I even look at the glass again.”

“Come into the laboratory and put your feet up. We'll make you coffee, and your strength will come back. Terrible things are happening. The lightning is striking all around us, and we must know where it will fall next.”

They put an armchair by the fire, and as I sank back into it, my eyes closed. One of the girls must have brought a footstool, for the last thing I felt before oblivion was someone propping up my feet.

“Wake up! Wake up!” La Trianon's voice was urgent. She was shaking my shoulders.

“Why, I wasn't asleep at all—just resting my eyes.”

“A curious way of resting. It must be your eyes that snore, then.”

“Me? Snore? Never!” I sat up straight. La Trianon stood beside me, hands on her hips, the sleeves of her black dress rolled up to the elbow as if she had just left her worktable.

“I thought that would rouse you. Now, restore your strength with this—we must have a reading. It is life or death.” The Turkish coffee was heavy and sweet, better than medicine. I held the little cup in my hands, warming them, as I breathed in the dark, strong scent.

“Ah, excellent. You definitely look more alert. We have the water set up on the worktable by the athanor.” I looked across the room to see the water vase shimmering in the fading light from the window. One of the girls was sweeping the floor; a cat was nursing its kittens in a box behind the athanor. La Dodée and another girl were finishing pouring the last of my cordial into bottles with a funnel and sealing the corks.

“Oh, look at that; your harpy is coming unraveled—it must be the moths,” I observed.

“More than the harpy is coming unraveled these days. Those who can are going into hiding. But we can't hide—our livelihood is here. But all may yet be mended. Madame has planned a great
coup
that will save us all. She is taking a petition to the King. But we must know how it goes, so we can lay our plans.”

“A petition? Whatever for?”

“It is poisoned,” whispered La Trianon. “Even La Dodée does not know. Next week she goes to present it at Saint-Germain. She was overwhelmed by the crowd around the King last time and returned with it. But next time she will not fail. And now, now…it is essential to us that she succeed.”

“But how can poison go from paper to the eyes of a reader?”

“Not to the eyes, to the pocket. The petition is covered with a fine powder. The King habitually places petitions, unread, in the pocket where he keeps his handkerchief. When he is dead, his ministers will fall; no one will think to pursue this case in the turmoil, and this dreadful inquiry will stop before we are all implicated.”

“And if she fails?”

“Then we are all dead—you, me, Madame de Montespan, the Mancinis, and all the rest.”

“Very well, then, let me do the reading.” I pulled a stool up to the high worktable. La Trianon shooed away the girls, and even La Dodée, with a tense, “Later…later. You mustn't disturb the little marquise. It must be a perfect reading.”

The water seemed to darken, as if it were absorbing the falling dusk from outside. Then in the center, I could see an orange glow, first small, then larger, until it filled the vase.

“What is it you see?”

“A fire—Wait, I see something more.” Above the flames, the end of a heavy stake. In the center of the flames, a living figure, chained sitting. A face, distorted, screaming silently in the orange heart of the fire.

“Sitting…someone who has been tortured…legs broken—It is…Wait, I can't quite make out…” I peered closely, so closely my breath dimpled the water. The image wobbled and swayed. I pulled back. It was certain.

“It is Madame, being burned alive.”

“Are you certain?”

“Certain. Her hair is a cinder. Her face is black—but I would know it anywhere. The executioner's assistants…are pulling the body apart with hooks—but…I don't think she's dead…the limbs are moving…” The weakness was terrible. I swayed as the ceiling, harpy and all, began to rotate above me.

“Come quick! Come quick!” La Trianon held me up as the others came back to help me into the armchair. “It is the worst, the worst. Marie, call a vinaigrette from the corner. I must go to Madame tonight. I must dissuade her. She must not go to Saint-Germain next week; she must flee—” One of the girls had already brought La Trianon her wide black felt hat and her dark cloak, but as another went for the door, I called out to her to halt.