Pam Rosenthal

by The Bookseller's Daughter

  Not that she could be entirely sure what she meant by such a thought. Of course, she had a few of her own ideas: a few regular nighttime fantasies, accompanied by a host of fascinating questions about how certain acts were actually managed. But how absurd it was, she told herself, even to wonder.

  Nothing would come of her lurid imaginings. Nothing except some momentary excitement, followed by sadness, loneliness, and (she blushed here) some very unpleasant physical frustration.

  The worst thing, Joseph thought, about these recent weeks of chastity—the longest interlude he could remember—was that everybody thought it quite the opposite. His father took envious pleasure in observing that “at least somebody in this house is being satisfied,” before launching into another highly embroidered story about his own long-past conquests. And just yesterday, Hubert had looked up from a letter from a marriage broker with a sharp laugh. “Hah, Joseph, this one settles enough on you to buy you a proper mistress. It’ll keep you out of kitchens forever.”

  “And if it’s kitchen grease that stirs his blood?” his father had retorted from the depths of the rattan wheelchair he occupied these days. “Leave the boy alone. He amuses me in the daytime and pounds his little scullery girl at night. There have been worse arrangements in this chateau.”

  It wasn’t as though Joseph lacked for other opportunities. Flirtatious notes from local ladies arrived with numbing regularity; and he’d heard that the girl plying her trade at the village inn wasn’t bad either.

  The local ladies presented more complications than he needed, especially during all this tiresome matchmaking. And so he’d turned his thoughts to the girl at the inn, deciding to ride down to the village and get a little relief from her.

  He brought protection; not, he supposed, that she’d expect a customer to care about that sort of thing. But he did care: there was always the possibility of disease—and of other dangers as well. And so he’d put several protective sheathes—the best quality he knew how to find, made of pig’s bladder—in his waistcoat pocket, just to be ready.

  He sat down at a table and ordered a glass of their terrible brandy. The innkeeper could see, though, that he hadn’t come down the hill for a drink.

  “She’ll be ready in a wink of an eye, Monsieur le Vicomte,” he’d said, “I’ll just go give a yell for her to finish off the fellow she’s with. And then she’s all yours.”

  A wink of an eye. Finish him off quickly. Ah yes, very appealing indeed.

  He threw some coins onto the table and had galloped halfway back up the hill by the time the innkeeper came out to the courtyard to see what had become of him.

  Weeks had slipped by since then. It was the somnolence of life in the country, he told himself. You simply let the weather, the season, the movements of peasants and crops, lull you into a bovine tranquility.

  And if he found himself looking forward to each evening with growing eagerness? If he could hardly finish Monsieur Colet’s tarts or glacés because he wanted to get back to his bedchamber and scribble away at the story with the gray-eyed heroine and then pace impatiently while listening for her steps in the corridor? Well, what of it?

  The physical discomfort was considerable; he hadn’t contained himself in this manner since—well, for many years, anyway. Still, he found himself wishing that this frustrating and yet oddly delightful interlude would never end. He’d convinced Hubert to widen the search for a wife, to write to marriage brokers in Paris as well as Provence and Languedoc. Waiting for responses by post would at least slow the process down. Hubert had agreed: a well-married brother-in-law in Paris accorded perfectly with Amélie’s plans for social advancement. And now that the Parisian offers were coming in—well, they were so ridiculously detailed that they’d take forever to evaluate.

  Meanwhile, there was his father to amuse. Or to distract, for the doctors said that the intermittent pain gnawing at his belly and joints would only increase. Poor old man, with so little to be proud of, so little to comfort him. Hubert and Amélie were pointedly bored by everything he had to say and only interested in what they’d inherit, while the Duchesse—who once had loved him passionately—was only good for wringing her hands and praying over him.

  And so it was left to Joseph to devise entertainments: the chess games he won only as often as necessary to remain a credible opponent, the feigned interest in his father’s rambling, disjointed stories. He even did magic tricks: as a boy Joseph had spent a week—and all his pocket money—persuading a carnival magician to teach him to make a deck of cards do his bidding and to pull gold coins from behind people’s ears. He’d put the card tricks to use at various gaming tables over the years, and he was gratified to discover that he could still make coins appear.

  He insisted that the Duc breathe some fresh air every day. So unless the mistral kept them inside, they took a daily walk through the chateau’s gardens, Joseph’s tall figure looming over his father’s wheelchair.

  The centerpiece of all his efforts was a restaging of a comedy the old man had once written and paid a small fortune to have produced at a theater near Versailles. He’d proudly shown the manuscript to Joseph one day; he remembered its hackneyed lines more clearly than what he’d eaten for dinner the night before. Perhaps they could produce it again, the Duc suggested, for the neighboring gentry; perhaps Amélie’s carpenters could build a little theater here at the chateau.

  “Perhaps,” Joseph had replied, “but let’s start with something simpler.” He’d taken the manuscript and prepared his own little presentation: at afternoon tea in the library with the family as audience and himself variously draped in old sheets and curtains, taking all half-dozen roles.

  “And Marie-Laure, it was absolutely so dreadful that even I could tell what a bad writer the Duc was,” Louise reported in an awestruck giggle. “But Monsieur Joseph, well, he was something to see, the way he changed his expressions and posture for each character. He seemed to become all those different people—one after the other, as though he’d been possessed by their spirits.

  “And when he took a sword and played both sides of a duel—once he even made me gasp in fear for him, well, for one of him, anyway, and the Gorgon threw me one of her scowls. But anybody could see how happy it made his father to watch him.”

  Marie-Laure thought of the rehearsal Joseph had staged for her just the night before, whirling about the room in a precisely choreographed duel against his own shadow. He’d been unaccountably nervous about this performance, and so she supposed she was glad it had gone off so well. She’d be sure to congratulate him tonight, though she doubted that he’d care. He was probably more interested in his impending marriage, which had been the overriding topic of conversation this evening at the servants’ dinner.

  Not that she cared about such things. Why should she interest herself in the trivial doings of the tedious family who happened to pay her salary? Why should anybody? France was a big country: wasn’t there anything to think about besides the nobility’s everlasting maneuvers for marriage and position? Anything else for the servants to chatter and squabble over as they took their meals?

  Because it was official. The family was choosing between the final candidates—the two ladies in Paris.

  “Well, the offers just dwarfed everything they got from this region.” As always, Nicolas was proud of the extent of his knowledge.

  “And it’ll be the Marquise de Machery,” he added firmly. “Her family is richer, and I overheard the Vicomte laugh and tell his brother that she’s an old friend of his. From Versailles, I believe he said.”

  From Versailles? Marie-Laure kept her eyes fixed on her dinner plate. The meat was unusually tough this evening, she thought. If she didn’t chew it carefully, she was likely to choke on it.

  Bertrande snorted, fairly bursting to tell what she’d overheard yesterday at tea. “Friend or foe, it doesn’t matter a whit. The only thing that matters is how much the lady’s family is willing to pay for a husband.

  “The Marquise�
�s family has offered—this is only for Monsieur Joseph’s monthly clothing allowance, mind you—a sum that would feed my entire village for a year.”

  Her self-satisfaction was tinged with resentment. “That’s aside from the dowry itself, of course. The Marquise is fat, though, and bookish. Monsieur Hubert said she was a regular bluestocking…”

  Nicolas laughed. “And the other lady is skinny, and suffers from convulsions. But, in both cases, the money’s the main thing.”

  “The Vicomte won’t be leaving right away, though,” he added. “He’ll stay with the Duc for as long as, um, it takes.”

  The conversation trailed off. None of the servants was looking forward to the day, not so long in the future, when Monsieur Hubert became Duc—and the Gorgon assumed even more power than she had now.

  “Anyway,” Bertrande had remarked to Marie-Laure as they’d cleared the table, “it’s a good thing you’re drinking that tea. The family wouldn’t enjoy an unwelcome visitor right now.”

  Marie-Laure had shrugged breezily. “Nor would I. I do have my own future to think about, you know, even if there’s no marriage broker looking after my affairs.”

  Damn Bertrande anyway.

  And damn the Marquise de Machery, who’d been at Versailles and whose family fortune could have fed half of Provence. And who liked books as well. Somehow she hadn’t expected that he’d be marrying a woman who cared for books and reading. She tried to tell herself that it didn’t matter. But it did matter; somehow it mattered terribly.

  Well, damn Joseph too.

  But she was only wasting her energy on him. Stop it, she told herself. He’s not a part of your life; he never was.

  Soon he’d be no more than a swirl of memory and yearning, locked tightly away in some secret, untouchable compartment of her thoughts. As tightly as she’d locked him away the first time he’d left her.

  Of course, there would be more memories to lock away this time. But she’d manage. She lifted her chin. She’d manage quite well, thank you. She did have a future—the future she’d once described to Joseph.

  It would seem a lot more possible in December, of course. Because in December, there would be twenty livres, her first half-year’s wages. She would save as much of it as she could. And she resolved again to pay the strictest attention to Monsieur Colet’s lessons and techniques, always thinking how to adapt them for the sort of small city household that might hire her to cook for them. The chateau, she thought, had been a fine first step outside the confines of a sheltered childhood. But soon it would be time to move on to a city—Nîmes, perhaps, or Avignon.

  A city where she could visit bookshops on her afternoon off, keep up with what people were reading, exercise her professional eye for bindings and typefaces. She vowed to save every sou she was paid. And once she had her next job, she’d cadge a few additional sous each month from the household accounts. For Monsieur Colet had taught her that as well: petty grifting, he insisted, was as much a part of a cook’s repertoire as a good béchamel sauce. She’d been scribbling figures and estimates on bits of scrap kitchen parchment and the totals were modest but reassuring: in a few years she would have enough to open her own bookstall.

  It wouldn’t be much, of course: just a few square feet near the marketplace; she’d never be able to afford a whole shop. But she’d be surrounded by stimulating urban hubbub and more importantly, she’d be a bookseller again, a citizen of the republic of letters. Most important of all, she’d be away from this oppressive world of petty servants’ gossip, adults reduced to squabbling children, careening between the pride and resentment bred of living in the shadow of their masters’ lives.

  She opened the door at the first sound of Baptiste’s knock, ignored his surprise at her curt, unsmiling nod, and followed him swiftly down the silent late-night corridor.

  Chapter Ten

  On the whole, Joseph congratulated himself, his performance had come off quite well. His father, at least, had watched with rapt attention, laughing, cheering, sometimes even reciting along, thrilled to see his words acted out after so many years. His father had thought it a huge success.

  And his father’s response was what counted, wasn’t it?

  Of course it was.

  After all, nobody else cared.

  It would have been foolish to expect Hubert or Amélie to understand how much work he’d put into the little show. And fatuous to hope that his mother might steal a moment from her prayers to witness her younger son’s few poor talents in action.

  But in fact he had expected something. Sadly, secretly, in some unsophisticated place inside of himself, he’d wanted them all to laugh, to admire and enjoy. Perhaps even to appreciate his kindness to the old Duc.

  The truth—much as it humiliated him to admit it—was that he’d wanted their attention. Attention or something even better: their understanding, their encouragement.

  What had Marie-Laure said? Papa believed in encouraging children’s intellectual curiosity. He wondered what that would have felt like. Having spent the greater part of his early years with no one but servants and a very boring tutor to talk to, he supposed he’d never know.

  His parents had often been at Versailles, Hubert away at school. From time to time his mother or father would come home for a visit, and the servants would get very busy, cleaning, cooking, and cursing; eventually he’d be summoned, usually to be shown off for guests: a precocious prattling toy, his hair painstakingly curled and a miniature sword dangling from his side.

  He’d almost never seen his parents together; they had separate interests and pursuits—and separate guests, like the series of gorgeous ladies his father had entertained.

  “Your little boy’s adorable, Alphonse,” a lady would coo. “Sweet as my lapdog.”

  “If he were smaller,” one of them had added, “I’d borrow him to wear on my arm like a bracelet.”

  He’d always known quite well that these ladies were his father’s mistresses—the servants’ jokes about them were easy enough to understand. And while he hadn’t liked the way they’d fawned over his father, he’d certainly preferred the mistresses to the priest who came to give his mother religious instruction. He’d hated his mother’s tremulous humility in Père Antoine’s presence, her long eyelashes casting shadows over her flushed cheeks, her red lips parted in what she must have supposed was devotion.

  He’d wanted to kill Père Antoine. But he was too afraid of him to dare misbehaving. So he simply recited some verses he’d memorized, bowed, received the priest’s hurried commendations, and backed away, staring at the large, ivory, manicured hand laid so possessively over one of his mother’s small white ones. “And now, my dear Madame, we will sequester ourselves for your, ah, confession…”

  The double doors would close upon the tableau of his mother kneeling on an embroidered stool, the priest looming in front of her, his hands invisible under the even folds of his heavy silk gown. It looked as though she were worshipping at the foot of a black marble pillar topped with alabaster, a look of smug anticipation cleanly carved into the priest’s cruel, handsome face.

  Joseph would try to find a hiding place after Père Antoine’s visits. He didn’t really mind the servants’ jokes about his father’s playmates, but he didn’t like hearing what they had to say about his mother’s confessor.

  He’d been less a child, he thought now, than a house pet—clever, pretty, and pathetically eager for affection. A witness to things a child shouldn’t witness, he’d been brought in to confer innocence on the proceedings. He’d been quite a valuable little asset, all in all.

  And now he was going to be sold to the highest bidder.

  Which had really been what they’d wanted to talk about this afternoon at tea. His father had barely begun to applaud and to call out his bravos when Hubert launched into his own song of praise—about the two potential wives from Paris.

  The lawyers, he announced, had deemed the Machery offer a better one.

  “But they advised us
not to play our cards too quickly,” Hubert continued. “Keep them bidding a little longer; we can probably squeeze another thousand out of them. Amazing, isn’t it, what those old bloodlines of ours are worth?”

  He grinned sourly as he poured a bit of Armagnac into his tea. “Especially when a lady’s main charm is her family’s money. Of course, the Machery family is a pretty ancient one too. But I guess nobody wanted that fat old Marquise without a fortune attached to her.”

  His wife chose to ignore the opening part of his comment.

  “I’ve heard that their house in Paris is magnificent,” she said. “The art, the furnishings…it will be a delight to be received there.

  “Especially,” she turned to Joseph with a sisterly smile, “because we shall be seeing you surrounded by all that splendor. We’ll come to visit you and your wife often, dear Joseph.”

  And so it went. Hubert relishing the money, Amélie the family connections, his mother nodding and smiling, promising to produce the precious necklace she’d been saving all these years for Joseph’s bride. Worn out by the excitement of seeing his play, his father snored in his wheelchair.

  I was a damned fool, Joseph told himself, to expect anything else.

  From them, at any rate.

  He paced his room, too agitated this evening even to write.

  And if he were to try to describe his feelings to Marie-Laure?

  Never.

  It would mean opening the Pandora’s box of his emotions—anger, petulance, and confusion would come flying out; she’d see what he really was like inside—and how powerless he was over his destiny. Better to keep a tight lid on all that, maintain a little dignity.

  And anyway, her life had its own challenges. Remarkable how strong-willed she was; she actually intended to work her way back into the world of bookselling, all from the pittance they were paying her to scrub and scour the pots.

  “I’ll sell Papa’s spectacles too,” she’d told him one evening. “They’re good ones, from Amsterdam; I know they’ll bring in something. Of course, then I won’t have them to remind me of him—but I’ll know how proud he’d be if he could see me through them, and that will be just as good.”