The Porcelain Dove (18 page)

"Bah!" Malesherbes threw up his hands as if tossing away beggar woman, Artide, and all. "Hear the savant now, the man of learning! I am the chef de cuisine, me, and my authority is second only to Menée and Jacques Ministre. Do you care to argue your points of law with them, M. Learned Pig? Do honest women have clipped tongues?"

Defeated, Artide gnawed his lip, and M. Malesherbes triumphantly folded his arms over his mountainous apron and turned to Jean.

"You must take your story to Jacques Ministre so that he may be on his guard, but I think you need not mention Marie's presence. 'Twas just as well you were there, after all—Heaven alone knows what harm they might have done the horses. You, Marie. Stop sniveling or I'll remember that your virginity is in doubt and have you examined by mère Malateste." He lifted his plump hands to Heaven. "A hundred thousand thunders! How can I contemplate a new sauce when I am
surrounded by prick-proud grooms and laundry-maids screaming about dead babies? I am an artist, me, and I require peace! How I am tried, cher Dieu. How I am tried!"

When later I tasked Marie with her secrecy, she flared up at me like dry tinder. Whatever my life might consist of, hers would not be all lace and dirty chemises, not if she could help it. Her Jean was a jewel among men. He was stronger than my precious Parisian Saint-Cloud, she said, and handsomer, too, for all he wasn't decked out in silk and gold lace and fine linen hose. Her Jean was an honest man, one who'd make his way in the world, and he'd promised to marry her just as soon as she'd saved up a proper dowry from her wages, providing monsieur gave his consent to the match.

Well. I thought that only such a gaby as Marie would believe that any man was likely to buy a mare he could ride for nothing any time he wanted. And then there was the danger of her belly growing round sooner than her purse, leading to the streets and the branding I mentioned earlier. But a woman in love will not listen to sense, and so I held my peace.

After Justin, madame bore only one living son—Louis-Marie Timothée Antoine Charles—a quiet child who lasted a matter of four months before succumbing unexpectedly to a summer fever. Two more infants she slipped before their time and was delivered of another, dead, after a labor that all but killed her as well.

Now, 'tis very sad when a woman endures the pangs of birth with no babe to show for it after, but in the living world, that's the way things are. If every child lived that was born, the mightiest wizard could not conjure up sufficient bread to feed them all. And which is sadder, after all: to bury a babe that has never drawn breath, or watch it die a year or so later of disease or hunger? Grief and resignation—every woman must make her peace between them. But no woman so much as a midwife.

Now the midwives of Paris, who are more accustomed to hustle an infant untimely from the womb than to deliver it alive—the midwives of Paris have a name for hardness. Yet I vow and declare that mère Malateste's insensibility would have astonished even those bloody-handed viragos. A miscarriage at four or five months? Never mind, madame, it was bound to be born deformed or worse, and besides, it had no soul. Did the birth-cord strangle a full-term boy?
Never mind, madame, mère Desmoulins had the holy water to hand, and 'tis better he died with his soul bound for Heaven than later when it might rot in Hell.

"You must not worry my wife into an untimely birth," monsieur had said, and his nurse had answered him, leering, "Not of your firstborn, monsieur. No indeed." Not of the firstborn, nor yet of the second, for children die from time to time, be they never so healthy. Even the heir of Malvoeux. But the third-born and the fourth and the fifth? It beggars belief.

Here in the library of Beauxprés are many chronicles of great families, and from them I've learned that too many children weaken a great family as surely as too few. Dowries for daughters and portions for younger sons chip away at both land and goods until at last nothing is left of a mighty domain but a few pieces of plate and a hectare of stony pasture. Yet the ducs de Malvoeux endured sixteen generations in an unbroken line with their holdings undiminished. And no duchesse de Malvoeux ever raised more than four children to adulthood.

Now, although mère Malateste may not have been a student of history, like all peasants, she understood economy. Two children was a good number, and two children would madame raise: no more, no less. Louis-Marie was born when Justin had been sick for over a year—first a swelling in his neck, and then a series of fevers and coughs and purgings that left him weak, skinny as a starved kitten, and deaf in one ear. Eventually, Justin recovered his health, though not his hearing. Louis-Marie died.

Two children: no more, no less.

Mlle Linotte Héloïse Charlotte Jehanne de Malvoeux was born on May Eve, 1772. Had mère Malateste not died in '71, she wouldn't have been born at all. And since she had to be born for the curse to be broken, I can't help thinking that some good angel must have put it into monsieur's head to bring a male accoucheur from Dijon to deliver madame.

I confess that I didn't take to Dr. Patin or to his starched-up assistant, but his brisk and scientific air, however chilly, was vastly reassuring. A large, pale, smooth man with large, pale, smooth hands, he carried a leather case that clinked most importantly with each step he took, and while he examined madame he quoted from the writings of the learned physicians Delaroche, du Fot, and de la Motte, for all the world as if he were lecturing a class.

Although he employed a lancet instead of leeches for bleeding and smelled of Parma violets, in arrogance at least, Dr. Patin was mère Malateste's soul mate. No sooner had he set his neatly-shod foot in the door than he announced that he had his methods, and if anyone did not like them, bien, let them say so now and save him the trouble of unpacking. Monsieur hastened to assure him that his methods came highly recommended, and Mme la duchesse promised to follow them to the smallest particular. Docile as a pigeon, she drank the milk he gave her, submitted to judicious bleeding, and walked the length of her apartment twenty times a day. She did protest when he told her that only his own attendant might assist at her confinement, but was easily overborne. Thus it was that while modern science delivered Linotte, I held vigil outside with Pompey.

Pompey was by this time fourteen or fifteen years old, a handsome enough youth once you got used to his looks, with skin like dull ebony and high, round cheeks. During the last year, his voice had slid an octave, his chest had deepened, and Mme la baronne had written from Paris to suggest 'twas time he was sent to the stables. "He is no longer a Child," she wrote, "and I cannot think it convenable to keep a Grown Savage in yr House. Who knows when his Bestial Blood might not move him to some unimaginable Act of Violence?"

The peasants of Beauxprés have a saying: "Beware the anger of the dove," a saying that my mistress has proved the truth of more than once. My mistress wrote back that M. Rousseau had demonstrated that savages were gentle by nature and more loyal to those they love than any civilized man. She would not be so narrow-minded as to banish Pompey to the stables only to satisfy madame her mother's silly prejudices, indeed she would not. Besides, no one else in the household read with such expression and sensibility. She'd keep him by her, and that was that.

Some little time later, a packet arrived from Mme de Bonsecours, its contents a note complimenting her little Adèle on her independent spirit and a romance by M. Butini entitled
Les lettres Africaines
.

'Twas a very silly book. Madame enjoyed it amazingly. She would waddle dutifully from couch to window and back to the tune of Pompey's voice declaiming the romantic ecstasies of Abensar and his mistress Phedima. After a savage idyll among the mighty palms and wild tigers of the African jungle, the pair was captured by English slavers and cruelly separated to suffer innumerable hardships among the wild
palms and mighty tigers of Louisiana. Apart, they composed long letters of thwarted love, the beauty of whose sentiments inspired madame to design a fire-screen portraying the pair, which sits in her dressing-room to this day.

Upon a large piece of silk, she sketched Abensar in breeches, turban, and waistcoat languishing at the feet of his dusky ladylove. A large, striped, catlike animal lurked in the bushes behind them; monkeys and parrots sported in the palm leaves above. Between walks, she plied her needle busily, and soon had reason to fear that she'd crowded the design with one monkey too many.

"Peste! It must be unpicked," she exclaimed, and had just taken up her stork-billed scissors to clip the thread when a look of terror, longing, and pain twisted her delicate face. She gasped, dropped frame and scissors; I knew her time was upon her.

While Pompey ran for Dr. Patin, I supported madame to her bed, every moment half-expecting mère Malateste and her cronies to totter in at the door, munching their gums and calling for the fire to be made up higher. Very glad I was when Dr. Patin bustled in with his clanking case instead, even when his starched-up assistant swept me from the room like so much dirt.

"Poor Berthe," said Pompey as the door closed firmly behind me. "Think of mère Malateste cooing over the dead and shrouding the living, and take comfort that she's gone." He shivered violently. "The air of Beauxprés grew sweeter when she died, but 'twill be long before the stink of her evil disappears entirely. That cottage of hers! Pah! I wonder how M. Malateste can bear it."

"She was his mother," I said absently, straining my ears towards the inner room. "Besides, he's so pious, she wouldn't dare haunt him. What nonsense you are talking, Pompey."

He picked up the
Lettres Africaines
and waved it at me. "No greater nonsense than I've been reading. Listen to this, if you please. '
To a man who burns with love, you offer friendship and gold? Friendship? There has never been, will never be such a thing between lovers. Hatred, cruel Phedima, hatred alone is the beginning and ending of love!
'

"The sentiment aside, tell me if you can, Berthe, how a savage African learned to turn his phrases as prettily as any chevalier in France."

I shrugged. "He's a prince, isn't he? African or no, why shouldn't
he speak prettily? After all, you can turn a phrase when you've a mind to, and with far greater wit than Abensar."

"I'm not an African prince. I'm not an African anything, Berthe, for I seem to recall I was born in Haiti. There are no tigers in Haiti, and I doubt I'd remember them even if there were. Firs are more familiar to me than palm trees. I live in France, speak French, read French." He looked surprised, as though an idea had just occurred to him. "In fact, by every sign of culture and education, Berthe, I am a Frenchman."

Grasping his wrist, I waggled his hand before his eyes. "Is a Frenchman's skin black as a crow's wing? Is a Frenchman's hair woolly as a sheep's back? Haitian or African, you're still a blackamoor. If your descendants were to breed for ten generations under our pale French sun, perhaps your ten-times-great grandchildren would be white. If so, they'll be Frenchmen. However prettily you may speak, you are not. You are madame's noble savage, Pompey, and you'd best remember it."

"I know, Berthe. I know." His voice was so sad that I moved to embrace him, but he shook me off gently and went over to the sofa where Doucette snored on a cushion. She opened her eyes when he stroked her, and her stumpy tail gave a languid thump or two. Beyond the closed door, madame groaned; the little spaniel raised her head and whined.

"She grows old," said Pompey. "Time was she'd have scratched the door down trying to get to her mistress if I didn't keep her from it. Now look at her." Doucette dragged herself up onto all four feet, turned around, and with a prodigious sigh, lay down again. Another sigh, and she was asleep, one paw over her nose.

"We all grow old," I said sourly. "I myself am nearly twenty-eight. And you are a great lad of what, fourteen? Pompey, do you remember . . ." Thinking I had heard madame calling my name, I stopped abruptly.

"Do I remember what, Berthe?" Restless, he turned from Doucette to the lovebirds whose cage hung in the sunny window. The original lovebirds had died: one at the hands of M. Léon, who hadn't understood it wasn't a toy, the other of a broken heart not long after. Madame had wept until monsieur gave her another pair, with instructions to look after them better. They were pretty things, tame enough to perch on your finger, and except when her eldest son was present,
madame left their cage door ajar so that they could fly about the room at will. One flew out now to light upon Pompey's shoulder and nibble at the pearl in his ear. He laughed delightedly and stroked the bird with a gentle finger. "Do I remember what?"

"When you were just a little lad," I said, "and we first came to Beauxprés, you wouldn't go near the aviary, no, not though you were threatened with beating. I thought at first you feared the birds. Since then, I've seen you touch birds—even feed Bébé from your lips when you thought no one was near. And I remembered that you weren't afraid of the birds we brought from Paris the first time we came to Beauxprés. So what—"

A series of rising cries brought me to my feet. Pompey put his finger under the lovebird's tiny claws and conveyed it gently back into the cage, then took up the embroidery from the floor. "Sit down, Berthe, and unpick madame's monkey. Waiting's easier if you're occupied: you taught me that."

Reluctantly, knowing he was right, I took the tambour frame from him, perched on madame's chair, and began to pull out her neat stitches. There was no use in wasting good thread, so I picked at the work with a silver needle while Pompey, sitting at my feet, sorted and smoothed the tangled silks in madame's workbasket.

"It wasn't the birds I feared," he said thoughtfully, "or at least not the birds themselves. I thought them very bright and pretty, but I remember they made me want to weep. When I heard a parrot scream or saw a redpoll losing its pretty colors in a cage, I'd grow sad and angry all at once. When we first went to the aviary, and I heard them all cawing and chattering and calling out in their wild voices, 'twas almost more than I could bear."