The Porcelain Dove (47 page)

       
From all quarters I hear news of peasants burning châteaux, tearing down dovecotes, shooting rabbits. Dear Adèle, have a care to thyself, and beseech thy husband to hear his peasants patiently lest they leave him without a roof to cover his head. Whatever may come to pass, I rely on the good sense of thine excellent Berthe to keep thee safe.

Thy loving sister,
Hortense de Fourchet de Bonsecours

Well. I remember I read this absorbing missive through from beginning to end, never lifting my eyes from the page to see whether madame listened or not. When I finished, she shrieked and groaned "La sainte Vierge preserve us!" then fainted untidily back upon her chaise longue. I myself was sufficiently horrified that I'd barely the wit to search for her smelling-salts, and indeed took a sniff at them myself before applying them to her nose. She came to with a start, and straightaway began to call for monsieur.

Mlle Linotte peeked in. "What's to do, Berthe?" she asked. "Is madame my mother ill again?"

"She is as you see her, mademoiselle," I snapped. "She desires speech with monsieur your father."

"He's in the aviary: I'll go fetch him if you tell me what has made you look so grim." I hesitated, and she frowned. "You forget I am a woman grown."

"Yes, mademoiselle. I forget." A woman grown, said I to myself. And a Maindur to boot. I put the letter into her hand.

She flicked through the scrawled pages, read the closing lines, reread them. A flame rose in her cheeks and eyes. "Revolution!" she exclaimed. "How monsieur my father will be furious."

Monsieur her father was furious: furious at being dragged away from his precious birds to listen to his wife's hysterical entreaties that he convey her and her daughter to Switzerland now, immediately.

"See where Hortense warns us to have a care, and talks of heads on pikes and I know not what other atrocities," she wailed. "What will become of us should the peasants burn Beauxprés around our ears?"

"Eh bien, foutre!" shouted the duc. "Let them but try! They'll learn fast enough how a Maindur deals with rebels. I'll hear no more of Switzerland, madame, nor of thy vaporish fears. Beauxprés is the seat of the ducs de Malvoeux, and in times of danger and uncertainty, the place of the duchesse de Malvoeux is at Beauxprés. Hortense is making a piece of work out of nothing. Those heads on pikes belong to common rioters, rely on it."

Then he stormed back to his birds, and there, we thought, was an end to it.

That night as I carried a posset up to madame, I heard a great pother from the courtyard of shouting voices and stamping feet. Alarmed, I turned and listened. The noise resolved into a chanted repetition of monsieur's name.

"Duc François," they cried. "François l'oiseleur!"

For an eerie moment I stood benumbed, waiting for the intolerable clamor of magic to shake the air as it had twelve years gone, when the beggar had summoned monsieur to the courtyard. A chilly draught scurried down the stairs and I looked up to see monsieur standing in the open door of his chamber. He was wearing a nightcap and a dark brocaded gown; his eyes glittered madly in the candlelight.

"You shall not have her," he shouted, and rushed past me down the steps and across the vestibule to the library.

At the head of the stairs my mistress appeared, leaning on Linotte's arm and complaining faintly of the prodigious deal of noise without. Hearing the chant, she faltered and clung to the railing.

Some heavy object began to thrust rhythmically against the doors, which gave and shuddered and groaned as with pain. Monsieur emerged from the library with his épée in his hand and started across the vestibule. The lock broke suddenly, ripped from its frame, and the doors gaped around a tree trunk, its branches roughly trimmed. Madame stumbled down the steps and clung to me. Water-kneed, I clung to her again and thought at least that we would die as we had lived.

When the doors burst asunder, there was a small hush. The tree trunk withdrew, and through the gap I saw the courtyard roiling with shadow and flame. One shadow stepped forward alone, proud as any prince over the threshold of Beauxprés. A filthy prince, clad in gray rags, his guard of honor armed with hoes and pitchforks and scythes.

"François Marie Baptiste Armand Maindur."

I started to hear the voice of Artide, rusty as the well-house pump but nonetheless familiar—Artide come into his own.

"François Maindur. Hear the will of the king of France."

Monsieur lowered the point of his épée and lifted his long nose. "I hear only a mutinous lackey backed by a herd of oxen."

An angry mutter greeted these words, more menacing, somehow, than a shout. Madame flinched, but did not retreat. Artide pulled his lips back from his teeth, reached into the bosom of his much-abused livery, and drew out a paper. Slowly he unfurled it, beckoned a flam-beau closer, and began to declaim into a reverent silence.

"In the king's name. All people in the country are allowed to enter all the châteaux of the region to demand their title deeds. If they are refused, they can loot, burn and plunder; they will not be punished."

Monsieur raised his épée. "I'll see you in Hell first. Eater of shit! Peasants!"

At that the mob pressed forward into the hall. Their mouths gaped redly; their eyes rolled and stared; their faces were obscured by soot and fury. Yet I knew them: Yves and Estienne Pyanet, Claude Mareschal, Dieudonné Malateste, Pierre Desmoulins, Just Vissot, all the men in the village.

"The deeds!" Mareschal bayed. "Give us the deeds!"

Beside him, Just Vissot bellowed: "The land we farm is ours!"

"Death to the rich!" a woman's voice cried. "Death to the aristocrats!" And mère Boudin thrust herself through the press and advanced on monsieur like some malevolent fairy, one fist raised and threatening. "Give us what is ours, monster. Have a mind to the curse of the Maindurs, and for your soul's sake, give us what is ours."

Monsieur laughed. He looked upon his children's old nurse, her greasy skein of hair wound up under a red cap and white cockade, and laughed like Roland's horn. The peasants, uncertain, halted.

A hand gripped my elbow; a breath warmed my ear. "Hide the rent rolls," murmured Linotte.

I gasped and started. "What did you say?"

"The rent rolls. Hide them. Artide knows where they're kept, and they'll be ashes in a trice if they're not hidden. Hurry. I'll take care of madame my mother."

"The rent rolls."

"Yes. In the Armament room, where Sangsue keeps the accounts."

"The Armament room."

"Up the stairs and through the gallery of Depositions. Oh, Berthe, you know the Armament room."

Of a certainty I knew the Armament room, but this was no time to dispute with Sangsue my right to remove even a mote of dust from his personal domain. "Devil take the rent rolls," I said. "Let the peasants burn them."

"Go," she said. Just that: "Go."

And I went. With my skirts gathered up in both hands, I ran headlong through the dark and echoing chambers of Beauxprés, tripping over chairs and display cases, cursing the name of Maindur with every panting breath but running nevertheless as though I'd no will in the matter.

By some miracle—or spell—the Armament room was open and Sangsue absent.

Our miser was not a tidy man. Books, scrolls, quills, pen-wipers were scattered pell-mell over the trestle, and unmarked boxes shouldered undated ledgers on the shelves. Though I despaired of finding anything to the purpose, I rummaged, and luck—or some spell of Linotte's—was with me, for soon I came upon a leather box like a stocking-case crammed with dozens of tightly-rolled parchments—the rent rolls without a doubt. Slamming it shut, I snatched it up. A tin lantern stood on the window-ledge. I took that as well, and the tinderbox beside it.

Once outside the door, I stood rooted in a panic of uncertainty. Should I light the lantern? Where should I go? The document case was unwieldy, battered, all too obviously practical. Among all the ordered glory of the Beauxprés collections, 'twould stand out like a rag-seller among the queen's ladies-in-waiting.

Under my pallet? In the nursery? The devil fly away with it! In the distance, I heard shouting and the clatter of sabots on marble, sounds that awoke in my feet a will of their own. Pell-mell they carried me down the gallery of Depositions to the Violin room, down three steps into the cabinet des Fées, right at the Fan room and through the little arch that led to the donjon tower. Almost before I knew where I was going, I was down the winding stairs, across the laundry, and in the room where the soap tubs were kept, the room where I'd found bébé Malateste.

The arched door was uncovered and ajar as I had left it. Without daring to take time to light the lantern, I groped down the steps and into the darkness beyond.

CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH

In Which Berthe Uncovers the Crow's Nest and Linotte Takes Flight

I picked my gingerly way down a steep and narrow stair with the document case clutched like a swaddled infant to my breast. My skirts dragged over a thick, soft silting; under the dust, each step was swaybacked as a goat.

At the bottom I stopped to strike the tinder and light the tin lantern. 'Twas a tedious, fumbling business in the dark, but I managed it at last. The light revealed a low, stone chamber furnished with a trestle table and stools. I saw torches in the rusty cressets and great rusty keys dangling like hanged men from rusty hooks above eight doors, iron-banded and grated, four to each side of the chamber. A wide arch facing the stair framed a more inward darkness. I had found the ancient dungeons of Beauxprés.

I drew a shaking breath of stale air and held it to listen. Nothing. No rumor of sabots or peasant imprecations. No squeaking or scrabble of verminous feet.

Bon, said I to myself. Peasants have at least as much sense as rats: I'll leave the case down here. I waded through the dust to the trestle and laid my burden upon it. How large it hulked in the lantern-light! How out of place it looked, how exposed! And my trail through the dust was as clear as a way-post: Hidden documents this way.

"Bugger," I muttered. "Bugger the documents. Bugger the duc. Yes, and bugger the peasants, and Artide, and the birds, and the whole fornicating lot of them."

Something in the silence that followed my fit of spleen inspired me to an
Ave
, a
Pater Noster
, and a
mea culpa
, after which I felt somewhat calmer. Here were eight cells, and heaven only knew what deeps beyond the arch. Surely the dungeons of Beauxprés must once have concealed secrets more unwieldy than a document case.

I tried the door of the nearest cell, then another beside it, and another still. All were locked, by time and rust no less than by the heavy, useless keys: I couldn't budge them. There was one left a little ajar, and by dint of putting my back to the oak and pushing with all my strength, I managed to shift it enough to squeeze through. The cell was no wider than two coffins and barely as high as a man, with a narrow stone ledge across the far end. A perfect hiding-place, had it not been for the black water trickling down the walls. No use saving the rent rolls from fire only to lose them to rot.

That left the darkness beyond the arch gaping hungrily as a toothless mouth. I thought of ghosts and traps and nameless horrors. I thought of leaving the case on the trestle and pushing back the tub to hide the door again. I thought, to my eternal shame, of giving it up to the rebels. While I was thinking, I must have been moving toward the arch, for all at once I found myself beneath it, looking out into the chamber beyond.

Where the guard room had been bare, this chamber looked to be cluttered and crowded with odd bits of furniture. No, not furniture. A rack. An Iron Maiden. Divers other engines of repellent aspect. The floor was lost under a dark, mucky carpet; the air was fetid. I prodded at the mire with my toe, coughed at the ensuing acrid stink of a thousand ripe chamber pots. Bat dung. But where were the bats? I held my breath and my lantern high. No rustling; no flicker of wings, no gleam of tiny eyes. Where were the bats?

"Ah, fool, 'tis night!" I answered myself aloud. "Messires les chauve-souris take their suppers in the free air. Saint Francis be thanked they don't sleep at night like God-fearing folk!"

This time, the silence seemed indifferent to my words. I hefted the case in my arm and, after some hesitation, picked my way around the wall where the dung lay thinnest. Not thin enough, however, for every nook and crevice in the walls was foul with it. After a filthy and disheartening while, I came to another door half-hidden behind the Iron Maiden opening into a small, bare tunnel.

The floor slanted down beneath my feet, the passage twisted right
and left, and suddenly my way was barred by a wall of fine-dressed stone carved with a quincunx of five-pointed stars.

Well. Afraid to curse, I kicked at the lowermost star in pure frustration. It gave, or rather the wall gave, and a low door gaped wide as Hell-gate upon an inky darkness.

Almost I turned and ran—la sainte Vierge knows I wanted to. Torture chambers and secret doors were no part of the world I knew. In a conte des fées, this door might lead to an enchanted land of emerald grasses and trees hung with rubies. In Beauxprés, 'twas more likely to lead to a dank oubliette. Still, I hadn't yet found a hiding-place for monsieur's documents. Having come so far, I couldn't go back. And if I couldn't go back, then I must go forward.

I held up my lantern, flame dancing with my nervous shuddering, raised my foot, and stepped through the secret door.

Half-expecting to be blinded by eerie light or to feel sharp blades of emerald beneath my slipper, I'd closed my eyes. I opened them quick enough when my foot came down on a hard, chill, flat surface that could only be common flagstone.

A low stone chamber, something like the guard room, save for a row of pillars down its length and a hearth fully broad and deep enough to roast an oxen whole. A perfectly ordinary room, even to the sparse and cobwebby furnishings: a joint-stool, an armchair of ancient design, a row of wooden clothes-presses against the wall, and, handy to the hearth, an iron cauldron and a tall table like a dressing-board. Oubliette? Subterranean kingdom? Bah! 'Twas nothing but a storage room.