The Shadow Queen A Novel (6 page)

My other treasure was my virginity, and I’d thought of selling it too, years back, to the steward’s hunchback son. I had refrained, holding out—I told myself—for a higher bidder. Now I fancied myself ruler of an impregnable realm.

Impregnable, indeed! I was wearing every bit of clothing I owned: three chemises (one flannel, two with long sleeves), four skirts (one of heavy wool and another quilted felt), two bodices, three fichus, and two caps. Plus my father’s old leather jerkin and two pairs of wool socks I’d knit myself, layered under his boots.
Plus
mitts, a hooded cloak, and a thread-thin lavender shawl, for ornament. Even so, I was cold. I pulled the shawl snug around my neck.

“Two,” Monsieur Martin said. He was misproportioned, only his right arm muscular—from swinging a mallet, I guessed—a stonemason by the look of his hands.

I took off my mitts and felt through the side-slits of my many skirts to the leather coin sack underneath. I pulled it out onto my lap, working the stiff lace. I frowned looking over the coins, counting, feigning difficulty with this simple task. I had more coins in my valise, but we would need them to buy bread, wood, and ale. We’d been warned that the water in Paris would make us violently sick, even when boiled and filtered through sand. “I have only enough for one month, Monsieur, but I will be a good tenant.” Not mentioning Mother and Gaston.

“You seem like a nice enough girl.” He leaned in, no doubt assuming I was setting up for trade.

I put out my hand, palm up—the universal pleading position, players call it. “
One
month?”

Monsieur Martin’s hand on my shoulder was heavy. He could snap my neck should he choose. He roughly caressed my wrist as he took the coins. His nails were as black as his two teeth.

“It’s agreed then,” I announced in a carrying voice.

The door creaked open and Gaston peeped in, his blue eyes bright. He sang a hopeful, questioning note. His voice, yet to change, was high-pitched, that of a girl. Short, with chubby cheeks, he looked younger than his years.

Monsieur Martin stared, taken aback.

“This is my brother, Gaston,” I said, stepping aside for him to edge into the room with our horse-hide traveling trunk and carpetbag. I motioned for him to put them down beside the dismantled table.

I heard shuffling footsteps. “And our mother, Madame des Oeillets,” I said as Mother entered the room, panting from the climb.

“Mercy sakes!” she exclaimed breathlessly. Her plaits had come loose, giving her a wild look.

“The Widow des Oeillets,” I added, although she did not look the part. She was wearing two frilly mobcaps and her dressing gown was on upside-down over her cloak. Its empty arms trailed after her like a noblewoman’s train. Father’s death years before had shaken her, beyond repair I feared. She’d become unsettled.

“Enchantée, Monsieur,” she said, bending one leg and dipping with the extravagant air of a great lady. Gaston, unsure, tried to mime her.

“How many are you?” the landlord demanded.

“Only three, Monsieur,” I assured him, with a watchful eye on Mother, who was now trying to prize open the leather trunk. “We’re clean, quiet, and—”

“Weary me no more!” I heard Mother mutter as she wrenched open the trunk and started pulling out the contents, spreading them over the rushes: her small linens and patched stockings, a stained chemise. “Let me creep into the silence of the night to weep.”

Clean, quiet—and just a little mad, I thought with chagrin, glancing apologetically at our new landlord.

“Madame, isn’t that a line from
The Cid
?” he asked, stepping forward.

Mother looked up, bewildered.

“You’ve seen the play, Monsieur?” I asked, hoping to distract him.

“Three times—at the Petit-Bourbon.”

I handed Gaston the leather bucket and gave him a denier to get water from a carrier. Eagerly he clambered out, clunking down the narrow stairs. “Are there many theaters?” I asked Monsieur Martin. One of the first things I planned to do now that we were in Paris was to try to find Monsieur Courageux, as Father had suggested. Our former troupe player might be able to help us find employment.

“Non, hélas! And now there is talk that even the Petit-Bourbon is to be taken down. The Bourgogne is said to be one of the best, but it’s some distance from here and costful I’m told. There used to be another one, the Marais, but it burned.”

Wasn’t the Marais the theater my parents had played in? I looked over at Mother, but she was still rummaging through the trunk. I cringed to see the mess she was making.

“It’s a pity. The Petit-Bourbon is a fine theater,” Monsieur Martin went on, ebullient now. “I also saw
Cinna
there, but
The Cid
is my favorite. There hasn’t been a new Corneille play since the great playwright retired.”

“Ah, here she is,” Mother exclaimed, lifting up the tiny wood statue of the Virgin.

“My mother played in
The Cid,
” I said, judging from Monsieur Martin’s enthusiasm that it was safe to reveal our background. “In the original production.”

“You’re a player, Madame?” the landlord asked, his voice awed.

“
No,
Monsieur,” Mother said, standing, looking around for a place to set the Virgin. “I’m decidedly not.”

“
The Cid,
Maman—you had a part in the original production.”

“It was only a small part,” Mother said, setting the Virgin in a corner and placing trinkets at her feet: the rusty key, a dried carnation, the chipped teacup.

“Not
that
small a part,” I said, crossing my arms. We’d had to sell our costumes in Nantes, the slapstick, tin crown and wood sword at a country fair near Saint-Nazaire. Stories of the glory days were all I had left. “You played Leonora—”

“The Infanta’s lady-in-waiting?” Monsieur Martin pressed his wool cap to his heart. “
Do you wish to live in the land of dream?
” he recited in falsetto.

“Non! I will compose myself—in spite of my grief,”
Mother answered, giving the Infanta’s correct response. (Though her wits had scattered, her memory for verse remained wondrous.)

“Would you happen to know of a player named Courageux, Monsieur?” I asked on impulse.

Monsieur Martin shook his head, his mouth downturned.

I was about to ask if he knew of any charity schools (for Gaston), but I was silenced by a woman’s sharp voice calling up the stone stairwell.

“Ah, it’s the boss—my wife.” He turned at the door. “I’ll send my boy up with wood.”

“Thank you, Monsieur!” I said, but already he was gone, whistling down the stairs.

“I can’t find the corn-husk doll,” Mother said, sitting back on her haunches.

“It’s in the carpetbag,” I said, prying open the shutters of the one small window to the cacophony of hawkers below. I looked down at the jostling crowd. The elevation dizzied me. Paris! I had at last fulfilled my promise to my father.

Finally I spotted Gaston carrying the leather bucket, slopping water in his cumbersome way. He was becoming a young man; he was going to need a place in the world.

CHAPTER 10

N
il desperandum.
Never despair.

In Paris, flour was five times what we were used to paying; even a sack of beans was dear. What resources we had were running out. I became sleepless, my mind spinning through the dark hours.

I’d asked everywhere, searching for Monsieur Courageux. I’d looked for work as a washerwoman, milliner, or seamstress, knocking on the doors of service entrances to the private grand hotels, and even the more humble back-alley merchants—fighting off more than one advance due to the assumption that any woman who worked was a prostitute. I’d quickly discovered that it was impossible to get almost any kind of employment without a guild certificate—and guild membership was not only hard to obtain, but expensive as well. I could do many things—just not, apparently, for hire. I could read and write, I was a qualified letter-writer, but the genteel vocations were closed to women. I was going to have to be, in Father’s word,
inventive.

“We’ll go to the bridge today,” I told Mother. “Gaston and I.”

She glanced up from her knitting. She’d been working on a shawl since before the New Year, using ends of darning worsted together with scraps of carpet thread, twine, twill, and leather. The shawl got longer and longer, uglier and uglier, but was never pronounced finished.

I took up my sack, heavy with stones. “You stay, Maman. There’s beer and bread.”

I led Gaston through a maze of dark alleys to the river. He sang a frenzied melody, jogging to keep up.

I paused, waiting for an opportunity to cross the roadway. Coaches, carts, and horses were coming in all directions. Mercifully, the rain had let up. Mercifully, it wasn’t snowing.

“New?” he stuttered.

The Pont Neuf, I guessed he meant, the new bridge. Over time he had learned to form a few simple words. With schooling, I was confident he could learn more. “No, we’ll try the Pont Marie,” I said, once we were over the mud-rutted intersection. There would be more people on the wide new bridge, but it would be crowded with licensed stalls—and officers of the law.

He pressed his hand to his forehead, then waggled a finger:
I’m not worried.

I smiled and puckered my nose at him. Really, he was so sweet. “I’ve got an idea.” It had come to me in the night—
Thank you, Father!—
a plan that would not only feed us, but possibly even enable me to hire a teacher for Gaston and eventually enroll him in an apprenticeship program.

The vista at the river revealed a vast sky, blooming with dark clouds. To the right, the towers of Notre-Dame on the Île de la Cité were shrouded in mist. To the left was the Pont Marie, leading to the Île Saint-Louis.

Most of the river was still ice, but pocked now, softened by the rain. In stretches I could see black water, turgid and swollen, foaming. It roared through one of the arches of the bridge. A barrel, tossed up by the turbulent water, shattered against the piles.

“Here comes another one,” I heard someone behind me say.

People cheered as a second barrel exploded into splinters, thrown up against the bridge by the surging water.

I watched for a chance to cross over the roadway, but it was thronged with carriages and carts, men on horseback. A four-horse carriage manned by men in livery raced past, the driver cracking his whip. “Careful,” I said, holding Gaston back. I’d seen a woman run down by a team of horses the day before.

A homeless family emerged from the riverside, dragging a soggy canvas. They waded fearlessly into the traffic.

“Is the river rising?” a hawker of oysters called out.

“Not yet,” the beggar woman answered. The rain clouds parted. “Ah, sun,” she said, tipping her face to the sky.

THE PONT MARIE
was more like a street than a bridge, lined on both sides with houses in ill repair. Shutters hung from hinges and some windows were boarded over. Both sides of the road were crowded with hawkers and beggars, whores and charlatans, gangs of ill-shod children. From one of the windows—Chez Gilbert—came a chorus of sawing and hammering, carpenters singing as they worked. The sudden warm weather had made everyone joyous.

I headed up the steeply sloping bridge, pushing my way through to a small spot beside a stand in front of a jeweler’s shop.
Fortunes 4 sous,
a sign said.

A plump woman, humming cheerfully, fussed over the rosaries, saint images, and good-luck charms spread out on a little table.

Gaston hummed along with her in harmony.

“Lovely,” she said, beaming at him. She was wearing a heavy cloak in a sickly shade of goose-turd green. But for a hairy mole on one cheek, she was pretty as a posy.

“He likes to sing,” I said, wishing I had four sous. I would have liked to know my fortune. Would I ever marry, have a family of my own? “Is it permitted to set up here?”

“I’ve the license, but I’m happy to share the space if you’re willing to watch over my table when I’m reading the cards.”

“Certainly!” I said, taking a waxed cloth out of our sack and spreading it on the cobbles, making it smooth. I set the wooden Mill board on it and gestured to Gaston to sit down in front of it. He looked puzzled but did as I asked. I set out the stones, the dark ones on his side (his favorites), the light ones on the other side of the board.

“Trust me,” I told him, propping up a sign I’d made:
1 denier to play
:
3 if you win.
Gaston had a curious talent for the game.

CHAPTER 11

S
oon a boy stopped by. He was tall and gangly, bone thin, his hair uncut and his clothes rags. “Don’t,” I said. He was clearly impoverished. “He’ll beat you.”

“Impossible,” he insisted, but soon discovered otherwise. Even so, I refused his coin.

Next was a girl with her mother, then a miller and a maid, and then some shopkeepers and a number of others, mostly men. Gaston won every game, of course. The last was a group of four roughs. “Hey!” they exclaimed, seeing their chance. They threw down their coins, one after another, then skulked away defeated, their pockets empty.

I counted our earnings: fifteen deniers. I sent Gaston to get oysters from a vendor, cheap fare.

“Does he always win?” the fortune-teller asked, standing and stretching. Madame Catherine, she’d introduced herself. She’d had quite a few customers that morning telling fortunes.

“Oui,” I admitted proudly. I’d never won a game of Mill against him. (Ever!)

“Yet a simple,” she observed.

I noticed she offered remedies for a variety of ailments, from worms to faint sweats—a dragon’s blood cure for colds, another concoction for pain of the piles. “Have you a cure for such a … malady?” I asked on impulse.

“No, but I know of a woman who got a mute to talk,” she said, “and a girl, dumb as a donkey, she got to read and write Latin.”

My heart sang to hear of such miracles. “How much does she charge?”