The Porcelain Dove (55 page)

My first thought was how terrified my mistress would be and how long 'twould take to calm her, if indeed I could calm her at all. For a moment, I wished there were laudanum in the house as profoundly as she. Then, ashamed, I called out to her:

"Have no fear, madame. 'Tis a real bird—I see it, too. A peahen, nasty thing. I'll just chase it away, and then 'tis time for your warm milk. Nothing to be frightened of, madame, I assure you. Just a peahen. Perfectly ordinary."

That she made no answer to my babbling did not alarm me, for I pictured her cowering under the bed, too terrified to squeak. I did think it strange that the bird didn't take flight at my shouting, but hopped down from its perch and paced curiously towards me, snaking its neck to keep me in view. 'Twas indeed a common peahen, save for being uncommonly large and sleek and plump in the breast. I couldn't imagine how it had gotten in, nor how, in the midst of famine, it had contrived to survive so long uneaten.

I edged around behind it and stamped my foot. "Vas-y!" I said. "Filthy bird." It fluttered into a heap of pale material that happened to be lying on the floor and tangled its claws in the gauzy stuff. Tucking its head into its breast feathers, it peered at its feet, then raised its black beak and uttered a hollow and mournful scream.

Whether 'twas the gesture of looking to see what had caught it or its unbirdlike calm, I was suddenly sure that the peahen was madame.

Well, I dropped my tray, of course, and 'twas a question whether I'd follow it to the floor, so dim did my eyes grow and so weak my knees. At the crash of crockery, the peahen—my mistress—battered her wings and pranced amid the ennetting folds. In fear that she'd break a wing or a leg, I stepped over the mess, knelt, and clucked my tongue soothingly.

What held her, I saw, was the robe-chemise of white muslin I'd dressed her in that morning. Tears started to my eyes, and I reached out blindly and much too fast. With a hiss, she pecked at my hand and tore the fleshy part of my thumb.

I swore and sucked the blood from my hand while she eyed me with a bright, black, suspicious gaze. Her feathers were all huffed out with temper. When I moved, she rattled them at me and caterwauled again.

The vanity of peacocks is proverbial. "Softly, ma belle," I said to her. "Thy beauty deserves a nest far richer than this poor muslin, fit for common fowl as ducks and geese, but not for a queen of birds such as thou. Only be still and let thy handmaid free thy feet, and she will give thee a nest of gold such as will make all other birds stare and wonder. Softly, now, now . . . Ah, bah!"

She'd pecked me again, drawing blood, and now she set up such a screeching and fluttering that I could hardly hear myself shouting that she was ungrateful and unkind and deserved to be stuffed with watercress and roasted. Shocked, I clamped my hands over my traitorous mouth.

Presently I remembered that Noël Songis used to subdue fractious birds by mantling their wings in a heavy drapery and went into the bedchamber to search for a shawl. This took far longer than it should have, for sometime during the day my mistress had turned out the chests and drawers, so that petticoats, ribbons, stockings, fichus, bodices, ruffles, corsets, and gowns were drifted and strewn across the floor. Cursing her again, I dug through the mess, and all the while she screamed as only a peahen can scream.

At last I found a shawl and was preparing to fling it over her from behind when monsieur appeared at the outer door.

He looked very much as he'd looked in the days after the beggar first cursed him—glitter-eyed, crack-lipped, beak-nosed. He appeared
to be half-naked under his brocade dressing-gown, and a rough beard shaded his craggy cheeks. He pursed his dry lips and whistled, low and piercing.

The screams stopped; madame bobbed her head searchingly. Monsieur whistled again, a tuneless air that grated on my ears. It had quite another effect on madame, who settled down upon her feet and cocked her head at him. Slowly he approached her, knelt and lifted her, cradled her breast in the crook of his arm, and with his free hand unwound the muslin from her claws, whistling softly as he worked. When she was free, he stroked her wings. She folded her neck sleepily, then stretched it again, nestling her head under his chin to mingle the black feathers of her crest with his black beard.

At the time, I thought the beggar's curse accomplished, the duc and his duchesse stripped of goods, reason, of their bare humanity. Now, I'm not sure but that they foiled the beggar at last. For, in this their extremity, monsieur and madame at last found some measure of peace. Monsieur had a bird to care for. And madame had the love of her husband restored to her, with all the tender devotion he'd never shown her, not even in the first flush of his passion.

CHAPTER THE NINETEENTH

In Which the Crows Feast

Two years passed, or perhaps three. I'd never understood, before, how Mme Pyanet could forget how old she was and whether 'twas last year or the year before that Jacques Charreton broke his arm and Hugenin Mareschal wed Elizabel Vissot. In a village as small as Beauxprés, there's not so much to remember, I thought. And that, I learned in the years after madame's transformation, is why forgetting is so easy. When life consists of keeping oneself alive, daily events are much of a kind. The satchel does or does not produce porridge. Monsieur does or does not set snares that may equally catch rats or rabbits, or once, madame, out for a dust-bath in the stable-yard. Now
that
was a set-to, attended by cursing and screeching and some little blood—monsieur's, from madame pecking his hands as he tried to release her. Made sliced meat of them, she did: he'd have borne the scars until the day he died, if Mlle Linotte hadn't made him immortal. The scene I recall as if 'twere yesterday. But the year? 1791? 1793? I cannot remember. They were all so much the same that not even an enchanted quill can choose among them.

The seasons, too, were much the same. As the beggar's curse seeped into the soil of Beauxprés, the earth grew barren; as it sublimed into the air, the atmosphere grew cold and unfriendly to life. Winters, to keep from freezing, we spent the days and nights huddled in the kitchen with the cow and the chickens and Toutou and the purple rats—even madame and monsieur. That was bad enough; but the
springs were worse, when we could see the pale gauze of young grass and leaves clothing the meadows all around while dirty snow lingered in the stable-yard. The exotic shrubs and trees planted by monsieur's father all died, so that even in July and August the gardens were as brown and gray as December. A few weeds still grew—knot grass and angelica and scarlet pimpernel—enough to choke out the vegetables in Jean's little garden.

Except when Jean crept down by night to steal a cabbage or a handful of beans, we held ourselves aloof from our neighbors. Strange to descend the path only as far as the fallen beech, to hear mère Mareschal scolding her grandchildren or père Mareschal cursing a laborer and not go down to speak with them; stranger still to hear the church bell calling me to Mass and not answer. At first 'twas fear of mère Boudin and Artide and their rabble that kept me from the village, then fear of what I saw when I stood by the beech and peered down between the trees to the well. The washhouse roof hid the well itself, but not the stripped sapling the peasants erected beside the well and decked with tri-colored ribbons, nor the papers and posters they tacked to the church door, nor the earnest, angry gesturing of the men who read and argued over them. After a time, I ceased going even so far, and was on the whole content to see no more of our neighbors than the pale curls of smoke from their chimneys and the morning and evening processions of their cows to the milking.

For their part, the villagers seemed equally content to see nothing of us, and shunned the hill as religiously as Jean and I shunned the valley. Even the curé had not ventured up the path for a year or more, so that I started as though I'd seen a ghost when I came upon him one day lingering by the horse trough.

He was a little fatter than he had been, and had given up his cassock and priest's bands for a brown coat and a patriotically-striped waistcoat. His height and his uncertainty were unmistakable, however, as was his answer to my greeting.

"Yes, yes, citizeness, I am enchanted to see you well. Ah, is Mme la du . . . That is"—he looked about him anxiously—"is the citizeness, ah, Maindur, is she by any chance receiving visitors today?"

It took me a moment to recognize madame in this novel form of address, though not so long as 'twould have taken the curé to recognize madame herself, hunting insects in the dirt not a stone's throw from his feet. Sternly I stifled the urge to introduce him, asking instead what had brought him to the château.

His eyes flitted uncomfortably from the château to the ruined gardens to the brassy sky to me. "Ah," he said. "Oh, dear. What the mayor will say if he comes to know I've been here, I daren't imagine. Aristos, you know. Anti-revolutionaries. If they're still alive. And the letter. I shouldn't have accepted it in the first place, but I just can't see my way clear to giving it to citizen Desmoulins. A
personal
letter, after all, quite harmless, I'm sure."

To endure so long without news, and then to be approached by this white rabbit of a curé twitching his nose at me and talking nonsense—why, 'twould try the patience of a saint. I cocked my fists upon my hips. "Then you're more sure than I,
citizen
," I snapped. "What mayor? What aristos? What letter?"

Humbly, he pulled a small packet from his pocket. "Of course, citizeness Duvet. I beg your pardon, I'm sure. A peddler gave it me. He said he'd had it of a vagabond, le bon Dieu only knows how
he
came by it. It could only be from the marquise, you see—from citizeness Bonsecours."

My heart rose in my throat. "To be sure," I said. "Just a letter from, ah, citizeness Bonsecours to her sister. What could be more natural?"

"If I thought 'twas political, or seditious, or anything of the like, I'd feel compelled to give it over to citizen Desmoulins. He's mayor now, did you know? A great patriot, too great a patriot for an out of the way place like Beauxprés, I fear. God willing, he'll soon be off to Besançon where he can do some real good."

I looked at him narrowly. "Yes," I said. "Of course he will. I always knew Artide Desmoulins would go far. Well. Thank you for bringing us the letter."

The curé looked down at the packet he still held in his hand. "I don't quite see my way," he began unhappily.

"Bah!" I snatched it from him. "So. You did not give it me. Now, mon père, go away."

The curé opened his mouth as if to protest, closed it again, shrugged, blessed me, and left me with the precious packet, directed in Mme de Bonsecours' familiar, sprawling hand to citizeness Maindur, Beauxprés near Champagnole, department of Jura.

Judging from the state of it—tied up with a bit of grimy string and stained with grease and candle-drippings—it had had a hard journey. Miraculously, the wax seal was unbroken. I broke it, unfolded the thick, coarse sheets, and read.

20 Floréal, year II of the Republic

Beloved sister:

       
I write you from Port Royal.

       
No, I've not taken the veil, though I'm a widow now and apt for the cloister, were there any left to retreat to. As you may know, there are not, not even Port Royal, which is no longer either convent or Port Royal. Still, 'tis a house of detention, and I once more among its detainees.

       
I am here upon suspicion. Suspicion of what they do not say, save of being the daughter of a Farmer Général, the wife of a treasury official, and the mother of an émigré. With such familial ties, I must surely harbor anti-revolutionary sympathies. Most especially as the revolution, in the persons of a handful of zealous sans-culottes, murdered my poor husband last September while he was visiting a friend in the Conciergerie. The butchers, the Septembrists, broke into the cell with axes and pikes and slaughtered them both out of hand. Hundreds died that day—forgers, prostitutes, malcontents, priests, nobles, patriots of all persuasions. I cannot weep for them. Some of them were surely guilty, if not of anti-revolutionary plots, then of other crimes. I save my tears for my husband, innocent as an hour-old babe, and for myself, who am become the citizeness widow Bonsecours, whose husband died in the Conciergerie.

       
I confess to missing Bonsecours. I miss him so sorely that I've been forced to conclude that I must have loved him—if such a decorous, domesticated, half-irritable comfortableness as we shared can be called love. Certainly 'twas not the passionate and single-minded devotion described by my fellow widows in their communal lamentations. Daily they water the earth with tears and shake the air with such a storm of sighings and moanings as render the cloister walk inhospitable to all save themselves. Me, I prefer to solace my grief in the acacia court, among the young men playing whist and talking politics. Between bouts of tears, the widows whisper to one another that I am all mind and no heart, as utterly without human feeling as citizen Robespierre. So you see that little has changed at Port Royal.

       
Or rather everything is changed. First there is the name—Port Libre. What a name for a prison! I can still laugh at the irony of it, and at the inscriptions they've written up on the walls of the refectory:

       
"Liberty includes all the rights of man—reason, equality, justice."

       
"The Republic brings society happiness: she unites all men under the banner of common interest."

       
"The free man cherishes his freedom even while he is deprived of it."

       
Nothing of women, of course. Women are accustomed to cloisters.

       
I remember when I was a pensionnaire, beating my head against the convent wall and the convent will that barred me from the world. The wall remains, and the will to suppress individual difference. But now the world and I are on the same side of the wall. Men and women, financiers and flirts, rakes and politicians, pious and profane, young and old: all have been stripped of titles and former lives—just as the nuns had been, now I come to think of it—and set to work for the glory of a Higher Authority.