The Oracle Glass (9 page)

My heart stopped pounding when I saw it was only another of my hostess's ubiquitous cats, a big striped tom, leaping from his perch on top of the armoire, where he had been sleeping. He jumped gracefully onto the huge, curtained bed where I was sitting, purring and rubbing his head on my hand, demanding to be petted. As I played with the cat, I couldn't help noticing how warm the room was on this cold winter afternoon, even though there was no fire in the bedroom grate. Surely there was a stove hidden somewhere. What a clever way to keep a bedroom, ordinarily so frigid, cozy! I got up and looked about the room, hunting about the heavy, dark furniture. I lifted the rich green drapes that kept the cold from seeping in the frosty window and peeked out into the barren garden. Rows of neatly planted, winter-bare trees rose from the snow, and in the center, a classical grotto with Greek columns and a fountain held up by nymphs made an ice sculpture, white on white, in the frozen landscape. Incongruously, a narrow chimney rose from the back of the grotto. Even Madame Montvoisin's garden folly was equipped with every comfort.

Giving up my search, I decided to return to the interesting book in the nightstand. But crossing by the great tapestry behind the bed, I felt an unusual source of warmth and smelled something odd. I lifted the tapestry, and there behind it was a little iron oven set into the stone wall, still giving off a fading warmth. An odd place for an oven, I thought, dropping the tapestry as I heard a knock on the door. It was the fortune-teller's stepdaughter, Marie-Marguerite, just my age but rather taller and straighter, and, as I looked her up and down regretfully, prettier, too. She had a tray with biscuits and chocolate sent up by her stepmother.

“I'd rather be here than downstairs just now,” she said cheerfully, licking the brown off the corners of her mouth preparatory to devouring another biscuit. “All those dull masked ladies—‘tell me this, tell me that.' When I marry Jean-Baptiste, we'll live above his
patisserie
, and I'll do nothing but drink cocoa and play with my babies all day. You won't find
me
traveling all over the countryside incognito and letting strangers in my house! I'm going to live the way a real woman should, with my man taking care of me.”

“Nice work, if you can get it,” I answered, annoyed at her pretty brown curls.

“Oh, well, don't feel bad. You can't help it if men aren't interested. You'll do well enough reading water glasses, I imagine, though I thought it was awfully boring, myself. Want to play cards?” And she took from her apron pocket a pack of well-thumbed playing cards wrapped in a scrap of silk scarf. “Here,” she said, dealing them out in an elaborate pattern like a star between us where we sat on the bed. The cards were like nothing I'd ever seen before. They were painted not with hearts and clubs but with knives, towers, faces of the sun, hermits, kings, and queens. “Why, that's a very nice one!” she exclaimed.

“Nice what? How do we play the game?”

“It's not a game, silly; it's your fortune. See the sun there? That's good luck. And that one there means money soon. Now, who else shall we do?”

“What about the cat?” She laughed and dealt the cards again. “Oh, puss, a death's head for you, you old thing. Best not go outside, or you'll be made into stew by the assistant gardener's family!” So we spent the remainder of the afternoon quite pleasantly, casting fortunes for various family members and grandees at court. “Only you mustn't do it for the King,” she cautioned. “That's treason, and they will draw and quarter you in the Place de Grève for it.” Clearly, becoming wealthy in the fortune-telling business had more pitfalls than her stepmother had made out.

“So, Mademoiselle, let's see how quick you are. Here are three cards: ten, queen, king. Now, I lay them out in order on their faces. Where's the queen?” I pointed to the place where the queen lay, facedown, on La Voisin's great, dark dining table. The winter rain rattled at the windows, in a way that made the tall, tapestry-hung room and leaping fire seem all the more cheerful and delightful. “Wrong! Try again! Ha! Wrong again! Look sharp!” The magician's hands, smooth and deft, flashed across the cards. Another of La Voisin's lovers, but one of the chief ones, as far as I could tell from the comings and goings in this most complex of households. An older-looking, rumpled sort of fellow in a rusty wig and homespun, the man who called himself Le Sage seemed almost deceptively clumsy, until you looked into his shrewd eyes and caught sight of the smooth-moving, swift hands, so curiously white, which he usually kept protected in gloves.

“Your eyes need glasses, Mademoiselle—why, here's the queen, hidden up your own sleeve.” The white hand flicked past my own, as he produced the queen with a flourish.

The false shuffle, the break, the false cut, the force, I had learned them all, and now the desired card would slither invisibly to the top of the deck under my hands. Invaluable knowledge for a fortune-teller. But always, Le Sage was the master. Now he shuffled the three cards back into the deck, and the cards leaped between his hands like liquid.

“Show me that, Le Sage,” I begged.

“Foolish again, Mademoiselle,” he announced. “A card reader should never look too adept at the shuffle. A certain naive sincerity is important. Intensity. Survey each card slowly, as if you were spying an oracle of doom. Watch Madame through the peephole next time she reads for a client.” Then, as if to prove his point, he shuffled the cards again, this time with one hand only.

Madame Montvoisin's house was a veritable factory for deception, with peepholes behind tapestries, a speaking tube between the dining room and the reception room, and oiled pulleys in the ceiling that could be worked from the floor above. In the few days I had been there, I had already seen a séance at which a ghostly white hand had appeared, conveniently lowered on a black thread. Yet even then I sensed there were things I was not allowed to see. There was the masked woman, pale and frightened, who was shown upstairs for some unknown purpose. The smoking stove in the garden pavilion and Madame's study with its strange cupboards remained under lock and key. Sometimes Madame would silence jesting among the members of her household with a dark look, saying, “If you understood my powers, you would never say that in my presence.”

But for the most part, I was too busy to wonder about the deeper mysteries in the house on the rue Beauregard. I had been plunged into a round of instruction: the signs of the zodiac, the lines of the palm, the interpretation of blobs of candle wax dripped into a bowl of water. Then there was the deciphering of signs and portents and the study of objects, such as stones, and the memorization of which of them restored health, brought luck, or protected against poison. All must be learned, if I were to impress my new clients, for most of the aristocrats who consulted fortune-tellers were themselves students of the occult, and quick to spot an amateur.

“So, Adam, how is the progress? Didn't I tell you she was quick?” La Voisin had bustled in from the reception parlor after the last of a long series of consultations.

“As usual, right, my love. Your powers of discovery are undimmed. And your idea—purest genius. The way she talks—all purse lipped and sharp, with those long words! Marvelous! Who would ever believe she was anything less than a century old?” La Voisin looked pleased with herself. Then nothing would do but to demonstrate my new skills. La Voisin ordered a bit of wine and a plate of cakes from the kitchen and then seated herself in her armchair at the head of the table.

“Ah, excellent,” breathed the sorceress. “But you, Mademoiselle, what is this sour look I see? Where is your gratitude for the treasures of knowledge showered on you?”

“I thought I agreed to be transformed into a beautiful object of desire, not a cardsharp,” I answered. La Voisin laughed.

“All in time, you spoiled little miss. Why, I've already made the arrangements. It's about time you boarded out, anyway. I don't want to risk my clients getting a glimpse of you before you're done.”

“Done? Like a roast?”

“Done like a masterpiece. You will be my crowning achievement.”

“
Our
crowning achievement, my sweet,” corrected the magician, finishing his wine. “Have you seen Lemaire yet?”

“Yes, it's all arranged. Consultation with Lemaire, then the dressmaker. Bouchet has been slow with the genealogy—he says court business is so heavy these days. I reminded him of his little…ah…debt to us, and that did seem to make him considerably more attentive.”

“Bouchet, the genealogist?” I interrupted. “The one who improves people's ancestors when they want to rise at court?”

“Bouchet, the genius, my dear. You see? I've spared no expense. You must admit a title will enhance you. Besides, it opens so many doors. I wish you to have a well-placed clientele. Yes indeed, you'll enjoy your new self—that I can guarantee. How do you like the title of the Marquise de Morville, eh? Elegant, isn't it? Get used to the sound of it.”

“But…but…I will be pretty, won't I? Like other girls? You promised.” La Voisin and Le Sage exchanged glances.

“My dear,” responded the sorceress, “I promised to make you beautiful and desired, but I did
not
promise to make you like other girls. A fortune-teller must
never
be common. You must have that air of mystery—a goddesslike distance from all that is ordinary. Adam, did you bring the book?”

With a flourish, Le Sage produced from his pocket a little volume bound in calfskin. I leafed through it. A volume of manners from the time of Henri IV.

“Now, you can study that this evening,” announced La Voisin, “after our lesson at the glass. I want you to pass for a creature from another century. The Marquise de Morville is a
very
old lady.”

“But I don't want to be old,” I protested.

“Not old. Preserved in eternal youth. By the secret arts of alchemy.” She waggled her eyebrows humorously. She didn't need to go further. I saw it at once. Mystery. Magnetism. A rare joke. Aristocratic households that would never have considered receiving the
financier
Pasquier, even in his days of favor and fortune, would vie with one another to receive the most outrageous charlatan ever conceived. Such are the penalties of wealth and boredom. It was delicious.

That night I wrote in my book:

December 12, 1674. The great Plato says that the masses are not fit to govern by reason of their gullibility. But what shall we say then of the first families of France, who are equally gullible? How I wish I could discuss this point with Father. I believe he would find the Marquise de Morville as splendid a prank as I do.

The very next evening, after a hilarious celebration in which far too many toasts were drunk to my splendid new career, I was bundled off in a carriage to a concealed location, where I might regenerate like a caterpillar in its cocoon before I burst on an amazed world.

***

I awoke in an alien country. Winter light was shining through the open shutters of a narrow little room and making shining patterns on the bare wooden floor by the bed. Repetitive bouquets of stenciled flowers brightened the yellow painted walls under the slanted eaves, and the tiny attic chamber smelled of fresh linen. The pillow felt as if it were filled with bricks. The featherbed weighed a thousand pounds. I had an awful headache. I turned my head. My clothes were hanging on a peg, my notebooks piled neatly beside my shoes. Someone had put a nightgown on me and put me to bed. Why, as long as I don't move my head, the fortune-telling business isn't bad, so far, I thought. There was a knock on the door, and a busy, buxom young woman in a cap and apron entered the room, allowing the smell of chocolate to float up from somewhere in the bowels of the house. I groaned.

“So, finally up, are you? How does it feel to be one hundred and fifty years old?”

“Exactly like being fifteen. But I've got a terrible headache.”

“As well you might expect. I've never seen anyone drunker than you were last night when they delivered you here. I've brought you a headache remedy. I compound them myself, and they are excellent. Here, drink this and dress. You have a busy day ahead of you. You're consulting Monsieur Lemaire today and being measured for a new gown at the tailor's. Up! Up! Yes, you have to drink it. And let this be a lesson to you. If you're to be a great fortune-teller, you must never lose control again. Leave wine alone, or you'll betray yourself in company.”

I looked at the disgusting brew in the goblet. Reason enough to leave wine alone, if this were the cure. I drank it. It tasted like something dreadful scraped off the river bottom in summer.

“Ah, good. That's it. Now, if I could only give it a better flavor, I'd make my fortune,” announced the woman. “Now, come downstairs when you're ready. We've made cocoa especially in your honor.”

The headache was already passing. I got up, felt my limbs cautiously, and found them still attached, got dressed, and descended the narrow staircase. The large room downstairs was quite astonishing. It was part kitchen, part apothecary's shop. I'd never seen anything like it. There was an oven built into the wide brick wall of the huge fireplace and a tall, strange-looking stove with a tower beside it that contained charcoal, so cunningly built that the fire in the stove could be fed continuously for many days. There were long workbenches against the wall covered with curious glassware and sealed jugs. Two little girls who looked to be about ten and twelve were filling rows of small green glass vials with a funnel and ladle under the supervision of a tall, older woman who held a copper vessel full of something mysterious. A kitchen maid in apron and cap, having stirred some eerily sweet-scented brew in a little pot beside the great soup kettle on the hearth, was now engaged in renewing the wood in the oven, from which a strange acrid smell came and mingled with the appealing scent of chocolate. There were boxes and bales of who knows what piled in the corners, and on shelves were ranged an array of strange, globular animals folded up and preserved in jars like pickles. Above everything, suspended from the ceiling, was a fantastical production of the taxidermist's art, a hairy creation with four legs, each ending in a huge stork's foot. The creature possessed feathered wings spread wide and a sort of human face compounded of plaster and what appeared to be goat hair. On the odd stove, a pan of cocoa was warming, while beside it on a little shelf sat a heavy earthenware plate of rolls, fresh from the baker's, all covered with a napkin.

“Ah, so you like our harpy. Nice, isn't she?” The older of the two women had turned around to address me. She was tall and thin, with graying hair tucked in a little cap above her pale face. She had a shrewd look to her, as if she had seen too much and made the best of it. She had introduced herself as a widow, Catherine Trianon, and people knew her as La Trianon. The little girls laid down the funnel. “Now, now,” she admonished, “you must wash your hands before you eat anything. That's a rule, when you're learning this trade.” Daughters? Apprentices? And just what trade was it? Alchemical? Pharmaceutical? I couldn't tell. The girls scampered off to set a bowl beneath the tap of the immense kitchen reservoir that stood in the corner.

“How do you know it's a she?” I asked, continuing to look up at the creature's curiously nondescript underside. The taxidermist had provided the thing's belly with a discreet covering of iridescent duck's feathers.

“Because everything in the house is a she. We wouldn't have it any other way.” The shorter, pretty woman that I'd first seen upstairs, who was known as La Dodée, had fetched cups from a shelf and set them out on an empty worktable.

“
Hsst
now,” warned her older companion, “I wouldn't be so ready to gossip until I'd seen the sign.” She turned to me. “Are you one of us?” I made the sign I'd been shown. “One of us, and not one of us. How long since you left the other world?” Somehow, I knew what she meant.

“Two weeks ago,” I said.

“My, what a change. What were you doing two weeks ago before it all began?” La Trianon queried.

“I was planning to drown myself, but instead I'm here,” I said, in a matter-of-fact voice. Somehow they didn't look as shocked as most people would. I took another sip of their excellent chocolate.

“Was it a man?” asked the shorter woman called La Dodée. “It usually is. You aren't pregnant, are you?” What a ghastly thought. Suddenly the chocolate tasted like dust. The women saw the look in my eyes and nodded to each other. “Don't worry,” answered La Dodée. “You're with us now. That's not a problem in our world. Though I can't say they don't try to make trouble for us. Men, I mean. They can't bear the thought of women running a business on their own. ‘Where's your license?' ‘Who owns the building?' ‘Are you sheltering felons or escapees here?' ‘Surely you don't live entirely without men!' ‘Surely we do, Monsieur Police, and our papers are all in order. We're respectable widows, following the trade left to us by our dear, departed husbands, distilling perfumes and medicines.' We wipe a tear from our eyes. We offer a bit of rose water for the wife or girlfriend. ‘Have a drink on us, Sergeant; we know you're only doing your duty.' And, of course, influence helps. The influence of La Voisin. We can live as we wish. Without men.”

“She says you've studied,” interrupted the first woman. “So when she asked us to help you out, we said, ‘Good, if she can read and figure she can help us straighten out our records.'” I looked at the untidy piles of slips of paper everywhere. I was annoyed. This was not like a cocoon waiting to hatch a glamorous butterfly at all. La Trianon continued: “The business has gotten a little ahead of us lately. We've been so successful, you see—deliveries all over Europe. It's our quality. We guarantee quality and have never had a disappointed customer. So people rely on us. Good. I knew you'd help. We look after you, you look after us, La Voisin looks after us all. Why, we're almost a philanthropic society. Yes, welcome to our society. Do good, and you'll always do well, as my mother used to say.”