Pam Rosenthal

by The Bookseller's Daughter

  One of the dogs whined jealously. She felt a tightness at her throat, as though someone had buckled a leather collar around it. Which was, she thought, really quite appropriate to her situation, since the Duc clearly had no intention of treating her as someone with a will or intelligence of her own. He was happiest with dumb animals, anyway. What had the Duchesse called her? Ah yes, a docile little dairy cow, at his beck and call like the dogs.

  She thought she might choke. But she found, as she raised her head, that she could speak calmly enough.

  “You must excuse me, Monsieur le Duc, for I fear I’m a bit faint, with…with pleasure, and with…with the honor of my new position, and I must…”

  She prattled on about how, in her condition, she was often seized by the urge to vomit, particularly when overtaken with such intense sensations as she was feeling at this moment.

  Mercifully, he recoiled and let her step away while he stammered a witticism about how she must take good care of herself, for in the future he’d be seeing a great deal more of her, oh yes (his eyes shining), a great deal more indeed.

  As she hurried out of the room and down the corridor, she considered for a moment that she didn’t exactly loathe him. She pitied him rather, this lumpish, sad, unlovable boy in his stocky adult body. It’s not really your fault, Monsieur le Duc, she thought, trying to wipe the feeling of his puffy hand from her lips. But if you believe for one instant that I’m going to sacrifice either my child or myself to make up for slights you suffered twenty years ago…well, dream on, Monsieur le Duc. Dream, or do whatever it is you do with a mind you’ve pickled in alcohol.

  She regretted that there wouldn’t be time to say goodbye to Louise. Or Robert, Monsieur Colet, or any of the others who’d tried to help her.

  But she had to leave now. Even if she didn’t have a sou. Perhaps, she thought vaguely, she could get her deposit back from Bertrande’s cousins in the village. Or perhaps not.

  She didn’t know where she’d go or what she’d do. But she did know that no one was going to imprison her in a cottage with Monsieur Hubert and his simple needs.

  So she stepped through the tall, arched doorway, crossed the courtyard and drawbridge, and walked away from the chateau. Away from all her carefully laid plans and hopes.

  How easy it was, she thought. How simple just to go when you had no idea where you were going. There was a certain exhilarating sense of freedom when you were desperate, a purity of action when no action made sense.

  When you were acting from your most elemental instincts for self-preservation. And when the only way to go was away.

  She wanted to look back just one last time. Absurdly, as she hurried down the steep winding road, she found herself wondering if she’d be able to tell which of the windows belonged to Joseph’s bedchamber. No. She wouldn’t turn her head or even her thoughts in that direction.

  Anyway, merely keeping going was difficult enough. The morning sun was rapidly climbing in the sky and her feet wobbled in her clogs above the road’s uneven stones and gravel. The day would only get hotter. Her back hurt and she was already thirsty.

  Perhaps, she thought, she should walk a bit more slowly, to conserve energy for the long trek down to the village. But she was afraid to do so—any minute, now, she thought, someone would realize she was gone and come after her.

  Oof. She slipped on a gnarled root and gave her ankle a turn. She waited, panting in the still, bright air, hoping that the pain would subside. Mercifully, it did. But she’d have to be more careful, and keep a sharper eye on the road’s treacherous, uneven surface. And she’d also have to keep a sharp ear out for sounds on the road behind her, sounds of someone—probably Jacques—in pursuit. If hear him, she told herself, I’ll get off the road and hide in the thorny bushes at its edges.

  “I won’t go back,” she repeated to herself. “We won’t go back,” she corrected herself, “will we, Sophie-or-Alexandre? We’ll continue on until we find a safe place for you to be born, you can trust me on that absolutely.”

  She rounded a turn in the road, and the view of a hillside unfolded before her eyes: a field of lavender, a vineyard, and off in the distance, a small flock of sheep. Words from an ancient and familiar lullaby drifted into her mind, “Sleep, baby, sleep…there’s no reason to cry…the lamb doesn’t bleat in his meadow, his eyes are gay, filled with happiness…” Her own eyes stung for a moment, with bitterness and fear, before she hurried on.

  But it wasn’t only bitterness and fear that had brought tears to her eyes. It was dust. And it seemed to come from everywhere.

  She could hear Jacques now, running thunderously after her from the chateau. But the breeze also seemed to be picking up a little dust from a mule cart that she could hear somewhere down the hill. If, she thought, she could fight Jacques off until the mule cart traveled up to where she was standing, perhaps she could get some help. And in any case her struggle wouldn’t go unwitnessed.

  He was advancing on her. She looked around for a bush to hide behind, but she was on a terrible stretch of road here, with only steep hillside on either side of her. She could hear his breath now; she could almost feel a bony hand grasping after her. She pivoted, barely avoiding a ditch, and crossed her arms.

  “All right,” he said. “Now, why don’t you come quietly and save me the trouble of dragging you all the way up the hill?”

  Her mouth was full of dust. She spat it out at him.

  “Stay away from me,” she said. “Stay away unless you want me to set you howling again. Like I did last time you tried to lay a hand on me.”

  In truth, she didn’t think she could execute that move anymore. Nor did she have surprise on her side this time. But the memory of the pain she’d caused him made him cautious.

  Damn, where was that mule cart she’d thought she’d heard?

  He grasped her shoulders, and she tried to position herself to knee him in the groin. But it was an entirely different thing with a big belly in front of her. He laughed, and then yowled as she raked her fingernails across his cheek. And even if she couldn’t get him where it really counted, a wooden clog aimed hard at the shin does at least a little damage.

  “Bitch,” he muttered, finally able to immobilize her arms by bending them behind her back, “aristocrat’s whore, and shameless about it too. Well, at least I’ll get to keep the seventy-eight livres after I get you up the hill.”

  There was nothing to do but scream. Which she did with some creativity, bellowing out epithets she wasn’t even aware she knew. She screamed her hatred for the vicious people who were using her so spitefully; her rage at having her arms painfully bent behind her back; and her fury at being pushed back up the hill, toward the chateau she never wanted to see again.

  She screamed so loudly that she quite drowned out the squeaks and rattles of the mule cart as it pulled to a stop behind Jacques. And she was so intent on resisting Jacques’s shoving that for a moment she didn’t hear the droll, familiar voice protesting at his back.

  “Hey, let her alone, Jacques, you’re hurting her.”

  She turned her head in mid-scream, letting the sound dissolve in her open, astonished mouth.

  “Baptiste?”

  It was most definitely Baptiste, accompanied by a thin, soberly dressed gentleman with deeply rutted cheeks and small, piercing eyes. The thin gentleman was holding up a sheet of heavy white paper, as though it had some sort of magic power.

  “Jean-Marie du Plessix, my good fellow”—he bowed coldly to an astonished Jacques—“lawyer in the employ of the Marquise Jeanne de Machery and her husband, the Vicomte d’Auvers-Raimond.”

  “Monsieur du Plessix and I were just investigating—”

  Baptiste had begun to say something, but Monsieur du Plessix interrupted him.

  “…some of the Marquise’s financial holdings in this region,” he said, “and some legal matters in addition. But we were also searching for this young woman, who, with my help, may want to initiate a lawsuit against certain parties
, for abduction, by the look of it.”

  “I’ve taken the liberty, Mademoiselle,” he said to Marie-Laure, “of drawing up some preliminary papers, if you’d like to take a glance at them.”

  Jacques still had Marie-Laure’s hands pinned behind her back, but his grip had loosened, and Marie-Laure jerked herself free, walking over to Monsieur du Plessix to scan the papers he held out to her.

  “Thank you, Monsieur,” she murmured, though what she was reading was merely an accounting of the food and wine the lawyer and valet had consumed between Paris and Provence. “Thank you, I’ll review the details with you at my leisure, while we’re—”

  “While we’re on our way to Paris,” Baptiste sang out, guiding the mules carefully through a turnaround at the widest part of the road.

  He and Monsieur du Plessix helped Marie-Laure into the cart, climbed in after her, and began their rolling, jolting trip down the hill, leaving a gaping Jacques behind them in the dust.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Except for a certain dankness in the air, Joseph had found his couple of months in the Bastille exceedingly tolerable. Even comfortable—well, it was comfortable, he thought, if you had a large cell with a window that faced the ever-changing city streets. And a rich wife to supply you with every conceivable amenity, from rugs, furniture, and tapestries for the stone walls; to books, warm clothing, and cartloads of nourishing and delicate foodstuffs.

  He regretted the lack of exercise. A daily walk in the prison yard wasn’t nearly enough to keep his muscles in tone, so he practiced fencing for an hour every morning and afternoon. Of course, he wasn’t allowed a weapon, but he amused himself by holding a quill pen in the hand that thrust and parried. Wasn’t that what writers did, after all? And if he had no opponent except himself? Well, he’d probably always been his own worst enemy anyway.

  Of course he felt stifled by the lack of society, the unvarying company of a few guards and fellow prisoners instead of the wide, brilliant circle of acquaintances he’d enjoyed as Jeanne’s husband. And naturally he hated not being able to come and go as he wished.

  But with all that duly noted, it astonished him how little changed he felt his life to be. The Hôtel Mélicourt had been rich in creature comfort and convenient to every diversion Paris could offer. But in truth he’d felt imprisoned within it, since the turn of the year especially, without any mail from Marie-Laure to remind him what his life might really be about.

  Accommodating to the Bastille had been a challenge and a novelty. Discomforts could be overlooked or circumvented; solitude engendered meditation. It was interesting to observe the system of guards and security, too: there were some inconsistencies, he noted, some gaps in security that might allow a clever prisoner—one who was quick on his feet and good at disguise—to engineer an escape attempt. Someone a bit more desperate than he was. Someone as desperate as he might become, if there wasn’t a break in the case soon.

  Jeanne visited every week: he laughed at her stories and gossip, nodded at her piercing commentary on what was being argued in the salons. He wished he could tell her that she needn’t be quite so unfailingly optimistic about his prospects. Luckily, Monsieur du Plessix had been more straightforward.

  Joseph liked the quick-witted lawyer. Dutifully, in response to questions, he’d recounted every detail he could remember about the day of the murder. He found that he could easily reconstruct the list of booksellers he’d visited and even the approximate times of each visit. If the Baron had really been dispatched during a late-midday luncheon, it was probably while Joseph had been delivering books to a plump, scatterbrained fellow called Bluet, who specialized in pious literature but liked to keep a few atheist philosophers in stock as well.

  After Bluet, he’d been jostled by passersby as he made his way to the back door of Rigaud’s grand establishment. He remembered vaguely that his leg had begun to hurt just about then. And then things had gotten hazy—no wonder Rigaud had been able to wheedle those extra books out of him. He’d gone to the Vernets’ last because their shop was too small to have a separate delivery entrance and was therefore more safely visited under cover of dusk.

  “Ironic, isn’t it,” he commented to Monsieur du Plessix, “that it was only the Vernets—well Dr. Vernet, anyway—who told Inspector Lebrun that I was in Montpellier? Just enough evidence to establish that I was in the city. And none to prove that I wasn’t at the Baron’s.”

  Du Plessix nodded and jotted down the most important points.

  “We must get Bluet or Rigaud to confirm your alibi,” he said. “We’re lucky that the King has recently eased up on the censorship laws,” he added, “because it’ll be easier to get you off on any possible book-smuggling charges.”

  “And what are the chances,” Joseph had asked, “of any bookseller admitting to having dealt in forbidden books? Even when interviewed by as meticulous and engaging an investigator as yourself, cher Monsieur?”

  Du Plessix had sighed. Eh bien, he’d admitted, none whatsoever. Still, he and Baptiste would be taking a coach to Montpellier that very evening to see what they could turn up. They’d been gone now for several weeks, since Easter. Well, at least it gave Baptiste something to do, Joseph thought. As for the efficacy of the trip—he shrugged. One must hope for the best, of course, but he had his doubts.

  He stared idly out the window at a troop of street urchins begging a sou from a well-dressed passerby. The passerby shrugged, dug into the pocket of his alpaca cloak, tossed some coins into the gutter, and hurried on. A handsome light cloak, Joseph thought, the weather must have turned mild. Yes, now that he was paying attention he could feel a spring breeze. And the children’s feet were naked as well. Last January when he’d begun watching them, they’d run and skipped through patches of dirty snow with layers of rags wrapped from toe to ankle.

  Most touching, Monsieur, your concern for the common people.

  He winced at the sound of a familiar, sneering voice. Solitude could be restful, even a sort of discipline. But when one was feeling—well, oddly agitated, as he seemed to be today, the solitude might engender unpleasant phantom encounters, with alternative selves one had been trying to avoid.

  Like a certain sneering, highly strung aristocrat, quick to anger, absurdly sensitive to slights. The same Vicomte d’Auvers-Raimond who was determined to convince him that Marie-Laure had married her old sweetheart. She’s deserted you, mon vieux. Forget about her.

  Luckily, he knew another phantom gentleman—call him Joseph Raimond—who found it easier to keep faith. She promised to love you forever. She does love you. She needs your help. Monsieur Raimond visited him a bit less frequently than the cynical Vicomte did. But today—it must be the unsettling effect of the spring breeze, the disappearance of the last snow from the cobblestones—today it seemed that both phantom selves had chosen to visit him simultaneously.

  And suddenly she was with him in his cell as well—warm and alive, flushed and smiling. She held out her hand; he could see ink stains on her fingers. He felt himself go hot and cold. It had been a long time since he’d let himself imagine her. He had to stop. But he didn’t. It might be painful, it might even be madness, but he felt freer than he’d felt in months.

  His chest was tight; how long, he wondered, since he’d taken a decent breath? He thrust his nose between the bars at the window and inhaled a deep draught of warm, stinking Paris air. It was foul. It was thrilling. It stirred something within him.

  He heard a rattle at the barred door of his cell. A key turned in the lock. He’d forgotten it was Thursday, the day of Jeanne’s visit. His little crowd of phantom guests evaporated, scared off by her footsteps and her reassuring corporeality.

  He turned to embrace her, waiting until she dropped her parcels on a table. A burly footman put his heavier load of boxes and baskets next to hers, bowed, and stood at attention next to the warden, who took a stool by the cell door.

  Visits couldn’t be private, but Jeanne treated the prison officials like servants
anyway. “You will see that he gets some fresh water every day for these hyacinths I’ve brought,” she murmured to the warden as she settled into her seat.

  And to Joseph, “Perhaps you would have preferred daffodils. They’re running riot over the garden this week. But I thought the hyacinths, because of their scent—

  “But you’re looking unusually well, chéri,” she interrupted herself.

  He smiled. “It’s the spring, perhaps. I can’t help but feel stirred up by it.”

  “Well, sit back in your chair then,” she said, “and brace yourself. Because you’re about to hear some extremely stirring news. You see, I’ve received a letter from Monsieur du Plessix today, from Provence…”

  Monsieur du Plessix had quickly penned the letter at the inn in Carency, a few minutes before they’d boarded the coach for Paris.

  “They’ll be delighted, Marie-Laure, to learn that you’re coming back with us,” he’d assured her. “And I want them to know it as soon as possible. So they can prepare for your arrival.”

  She’d frowned. “Delighted? When I’m in this condition?”

  “The Marquise is an unusual woman,” the lawyer said. “She and the Vicomte have a very liberal relationship.”

  Whatever that might mean. She supposed she’d just have to wait and see.

  Baptiste assured her that Joseph had been devastated not to hear from her. He’d be overjoyed to hear that she was coming. And especially—the valet put an affectionate hand on her belly—about the baby.

  Well, maybe he would be and maybe he wouldn’t. At least now she knew that he’d sent more letters. But there was something suspicious about Monsieur du Plessix’s bland good humor; he and Baptiste were clearly hiding something. Perhaps Joseph truly was in love with the sublime Mademoiselle Beauvoisin. Perhaps he would have stopped writing to her in any case. She thought of his letters, reduced to ashes in the Duchesse’s fireplace; it was maddening not to know what he’d written.