Cap nods solemnly.
‘So, child, I understand you want an apology from me?’
Cap thinks of saying: I wanted you to know what it feels like to be insulted. But instead she lowers her eyes and says: ‘No, Madame la Comtesse. I’m the one who was disrespectful. I ask for your pardon.’
La comtesse rests a hand on Cap’s shoulder. ‘I will speak to your father,’ she says. ‘Your father and I have always been frank with each other. I would be willing to groom you for service. You are intelligent, you have good taste, you could be trained.’
Cap says nothing.
‘This idea does not please you?’ la comtesse demands.
‘I like to be with my father,’ Cap says. ‘I like to work with him.’
‘You would see and touch beautiful things every day,’ la comtesse entices. ‘Eventually, you could become my personal maid.’
Seconds pass.
‘I always wanted a daughter,’ the countess sighs. ‘It was a daughter I prayed for because fathers take sons for themselves. My own brother was ashamed of our mother and went to live with our father. My father ignored me. I did not exist for him. I only saw him three times because my mother was his mistress, not his wife. I am descended from a long line of mistresses, and so I made a vow: If I could just be a wife and not a mistress, if I could have a child instead of a chateau …
‘And so I must keep my vow, although it was a daughter I prayed for, a girl who would not be illegitimate like me. But one must accept what God gives. His ways are beyond understanding. One accepts what He gives, even when His ways seem most … seem least … seem intended to mock us.’
8.
The day following their First Communion, the day le Petit Loup is released from his blue dress, is the day Cap begins to become someone else and pulls a different dress entirely over her own head and shoulders. Tricked out in black silk and white lace, she can feel the fabric like hummingbird wings against her skin. There are many small round black buttons, hard as seed pods, to be fastened one by one between neckline and waist. The lace cuffs must be attended to, the lace collar adjusted, the apron tied.
La comtesse stands behind Cap, her hands on the girl’s shoulders. Both woman and child are reflected in the baroque mirror, one of many in the chateau, all the mirrors at least seven feet tall, some of them ten feet, some of them twelve, all of them stretching like pools of light towards a domed or a vaulted ceiling, all of them framed in convoluted mouldings of gold. The mirrors telegraph spaces to one another, they commune in a semaphore of arcades, they beckon into rooms that are not there.
There is only one mirror in the gardener’s cottage and Cap has to stand on tiptoes to see herself. The mirror is barely large enough to contain her face. People who live with vast mirrors, Cap thinks, know there are invisible worlds. They understand that they barely know themselves.
La comtesse lifts the mass of Cap’s nut-brown hair from her shoulders and twists it into a knot which she ties with a black velvet ribbon. ‘What do you think?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know,’ Cap says. ‘I don’t know who that girl is.’ An entire corridor of her new selves stretches towards infinity, curving slightly to the right then bouncing back from the mirror on the opposite wall of the boudoir. Cap feels dizzy. ‘May I sit down?’
‘Here,’ la comtesse says. ‘At my dressing table.’ Capucine sinks into a velvet-upholstered chair with gilded arms and legs. ‘Cabriole chair,’ la comtesse instructs, checking off an article in a new catechism. ‘You must learn these things. The chair legs, do you see how they curve out at the knee? The slim ankles? The dainty feet of a lion cub? There are many new rules you must master.’
Cap is seated in front of a two-tiered ornate table with multiple drawers. Attached to the table is a hinged mirror which la comtesse tilts towards her personal maid. ‘My dressing table is Louis XV. You see the difference from the Louis XIV pieces in the salon? Those are baroque. This is rococo. This piece was done by an ébéniste whom my great-grandmother knew personally. He was, I believe, her lover. It was the fashionable thing in the eighteenth century, to have fine furniture and a lover.’
Cap thinks of asking: Have you ever had a lover, Madame la Comtesse? and as though she has heard Cap’s thoughts, la comtesse says: ‘I have never wanted a lover, but I have always wanted fine furniture and fine fabrics and art. And I wanted to be married and have my own child who would be the legitimate heir of his father’s property as well as mine.’
Capucine runs her fingertips across the satiny and visually intricate surface of the dressing table, a jungle of acanthus leaves and vines, light and dark, some of them lustrous, some of them as unreflecting as midnight. ‘That is marquetry work,’ la comtesse explains. ‘Tortoiseshell, ivory, beech, exotic timbers, all inlaid in layers to give us so many colours, so many sensations of one thing turning into another by pure enchantment. The ébénistes were magicians.’
Now, via the tilted dresser mirror, Capucine can see two branching corridors of herself, of her new unrecognisable self – or of the unknown girl in the mirrors – one fork curling towards the gardener’s cottage, the other coiling into a padded silk-covered apricot wall panel which self-multiplies infinitely and spirals back into one of the dressing-table drawers. La comtesse also seems transfixed by this split image. ‘We must call you Melusine,’ she says, animated. ‘Yes. It is perfect. That will be your name.’
‘Melusine.’ Cap says it aloud to the multiplicity of images she faces. Why not? She does not know the girls in the mirrors. She does not know their names. Melusine, the ravishingly beautiful woman of French folktales who was secretly a mermaid one night a week – why not? Everyone knows that story. Cap can feel the black silk of her dress whispering against her thighs as lightly as fish passing each other underwater. She fingers her lace collar and cuffs. She touches the tasselled handle of a small drawer in the dressing table, the drawer which appears to be the vanishing point of the serpentine coil of the Melusines.
‘Ah,’ la comtesse says. ‘I think I must have realised from the moment you dared to confront me in the porch of the church that you had esoteric knowledge, ma petite Melusine. That is one of the secret drawers you are touching, and here is the secret key.’ La comtesse trails her fingers below the neckline of her own gown and pulls up a fine gold chain, very long, at the end of which is a small golden key. She inserts the key into the lock on the drawer. ‘What do you see?’ she asks.
The drawer is very small, only four inches wide and, when Cap opens it, only five inches deep. ‘I see a very small drawer. It is empty.’
‘But there is a drawer behind the drawer,’ la comtesse says. ‘Pull the drawer out entirely and set it on my dressing table. Now, make your hand small and reach in and press against the back of that space. Tell me what you find.’
‘The back has popped open like a trapdoor.’
‘Feel behind it. Whatever you find, pull it out.’
‘It is a silk sac of gold thread,’ Cap says, displaying it.
‘It contains a lock of le petit vicomte’s hair. His first haircut, when he was one year old. I did not wish his hair to be cut at all, but his father insisted. Did you know that during the years of the plague, the first-cut lock of a boy-child’s hair could stave off death in the family? It could cure the sickness of the boy-child’s mother.’
‘Are there other secret drawers?’ Cap asks.
‘Many. There are many secret drawers and hidden panels in my boudoir and throughout the chateau. There are underground tunnels whose maps and exits have been lost. Places to keep secrets are essential. In my family history, secrecy was the essence of survival. I will show you.’ La comtesse removes a painting from one of the padded and silk-panelled segments of the wall. She props the painting against one of the sofas. The silk panel is embroidered with ravishing mermaids who have spangled tails of cobalt sequins and gold thread and seed pearls. La comtesse presses the navel of the central sea-nymph, the Melusine, and one side of the panel moves soundlessly awa
y from its frame. ‘A lover could be hidden here,’ la comtesse explains. ‘Or the King could be hidden when an inconvenient visitor arrived. A reputation or a life could be saved.’ Cap thinks of asking: Why are you showing me these secrets? ‘There is even, it is said, a mysterious room in the cellars with a tunnel to an exit in the forest. I don’t know where it is. Perhaps it’s nothing more than a rumour, but I’ve always believed it could be true. I’ve heard it said that your father knows something.’
‘My father knows everything there is to know,’ Cap says, ‘about grapes and vintages and wine. He says there’s no secret to making good wine. The vines must suffer.’
‘Hmm,’ la comtesse says. ‘And he has a daughter as cleverly discreet as her father. He has superintended some very fine vintages for me. And now there are many things you must learn if you are to become the personal maid of a countess. First, jewellery. You would be responsible for the care and cleaning and for making ready the pieces that your mistress might choose to wear for any particular occasion. Sometimes, perhaps, if I am buying jewellery or art or antique furniture, I may take you with me to Paris. Ah, I see the thought of Paris excites you.’
‘Yes, Madame la Comtesse. It does.’
‘Good. That pleases me. And now my gowns. Can you tell the difference between silk and cashmere and fine linen?’
‘I’m not sure, Madame. I think I know silk.’
‘I will teach you. And then the furniture. You must learn to distinguish baroque from régence from rococo. You must know which should be oiled and which should never be oiled.’
‘Yes, Madame.’
‘You must recognise Empire, you must distinguish between Restoration and Louis Philippe. I do not own very much from these periods. I prefer the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Those were more civilised times.’
‘Before the Occupation, Madame?’
‘Mon Dieu!’ the countess says, dumbfounded. ‘Melusine, mon Dieu! What else don’t you know?’
‘Papa says that the Occupation proved we are only one hair’s-breadth removed from barbarians.’
‘Indeed,’ the countess says. She takes fast shallow breaths as she paces the room. She seems highly disturbed. ‘Indeed. Is that so? Is that what your father believes?’
‘Yes, Madame la Comtesse. But since you saved his life he thinks you are not numbered among the barbarians.’
The countess is too stunned to speak. She regards Capucine as though something truly strange, far stranger than a mermaid, is in her boudoir.
‘Your father is a believer, yes? He goes to mass? He takes the sacrament.’
‘Yes, Madame la Comtesse. You know that. You have seen him at mass.’
‘We must pray,’ la comtesse says, agitated. ‘We must pray the rosary. We must beseech the Virgin for peace.’ She places one hand over her heart. Cap notes the tremor in the countess’s hand. She is aware that the countess is having considerable difficulty with her breathing.
‘Madame la Comtesse,’ she says, alarmed. ‘Should I call the doctor?’
‘No. Doctors cannot help us in these situations. We must pray,’ la comtesse says. ‘We must beseech the Virgin for inner calm.’
At the prie-dieux in the salon, Cap and la comtesse kneel side by side. Cap lets the smooth cobalt beads of the rosary slide between her fingers.
‘You must meditate on the face of the Virgin,’ la comtesse says. ‘Meditate on her face.’ She points to a painting. ‘That is by Philippe de Champaigne, seventeenth century, La vierge Marie donnant la couronne et le sceptre à Louis XIV. You can see why I acquired it. The Virgin is giving the crown and the sceptre to the boy king, and there is his younger brother, the Duc d’Orléans, at his side.’
‘The Duc d’Orléans looks like Ti-Loup. I mean Ti-Loup before his First Communion.’
‘The Duc d’Orléans was as yet unbreeched at the time of the painting. It was done in 1643.’
‘He is wearing a blue dress.’
‘Look upon the Virgin’s face, Melusine. Direct your attention there. Meditate upon it. It is the face of all mothers who feel anxiety for their sons.’
Cap studies the painting. The Virgin, whose chubby and energetic child seems barely contained on his mother’s slippery silk robe, looks placid, half smiling, not too interesting. In fact, the child Jesus is clearly focused on grabbing the coronet that his mother is offering the five-year-old king. Within a minute, two at most, Jesus will slide from his mother’s lap, clutch at the crown, and catapult himself into the Sun King, who will in turn be knocked like a domino into the frail and angelic body of his three-year-old brother, the Duc d’Orléans, who looks so much like Ti-Loup, sweet and bewildered and sad.
The boy king reminds Cap of Pierre, the chateau pageboy, in his ridiculous velvet pantaloons. Both are bad actors, dressed up, on stage and unconvincing.
What rivets Cap is the woman in black silk, white lace collar, white cuffs, who stands between the two children. Surely this is the Queen, their mother, the woman who has endured four stillbirths and sixteen years of public humiliation at court before the birth of Louis XIV. Now there is an interesting face, sad and beautiful. In the painting, she has no status, this woman. She could have been the nursery maid. She could have been a housemaid in the clearly sumptuous chateau of the Virgin.
Cap meditates upon this face.
One day she will ask her father if the nuns told him anything, anything at all. She will ask if her father made inquiries. She will ask if they can visit the convent and talk to the nuns.
The face of the woman in the painting is the face of a woman who knows she will be required to surrender her children to forces beyond her control. In the painting, everyone is watching the wriggling Baby Jesus, not the Virgin, but then quite suddenly it is apparent to Cap that the woman in black, the mother Queen, has turned slightly and that the woman’s sorrowful eyes are meeting Cap’s. Capucine – or Melusine? or the child who must have been given by her own mother a name unknown? – feels a high-voltage infusion of energy, as though the sun itself has touched her and filled her with light.
‘Did you meditate on the face in the painting, Melusine?’
‘Yes, Madame la Comtesse.’
‘Do you feel at peace now?’
‘Yes, Madame.’
‘That is the Virgin’s gift,’ la comtesse says. ‘That is ever her gift. And now we must continue with your duties.’
She begins to take inlaid boxes from drawers and armoires. She begins to spread necklaces on the satin bedspread, a spill of diamonds, pearls, rubies, emeralds. ‘We all had to protect our treasures as best we could,’ she says. ‘Hiding places are the secret of survival. But Melusine, Melusine, you must be educated. We must see to it. When was the Sun King’s reign?’
‘I don’t know, Madame la Comtesse.’
‘Seventeenth century. You must remember that. And the eighteenth century belongs to Louis XV and to the unfortunate Louis XVI, but I do not collect anything from after the Revolution. Now. When was the reign of Louis XIV?’
‘Seventeenth century, Madame.’
La comtesse sighs with relief. ‘So we have a starting point. We have a base. But there must be history lessons. Furniture, jewellery, fabrics. And then the paintings and sculptures. If a visitor from Paris should ask: Is that an Antoine Watteau or a François Boucher? Is this Poussin? you should be able to answer correctly, you understand? But also demurely. I will attend to your education on these matters.’
9.
In the outdoor bar at the boathouse restaurant in Central Park, Cap tucks the requisite number of twenty-dollar bills into the folder the waiter has brought, but she finds herself doodling on a manila envelope, document-sized, delivered by a messenger boy on a bicycle, not yet opened – with the monogrammed ballpoint pen. She finds she has drawn a mermaid. She draws a line, the surface of the ocean, and the mermaid is below this line. She draws a shoreline of sheer rock which rises steeply and abruptly from the water, hostile as a granite cliff or the wall
of a fortress. Beneath the waterline, the rock wall opens into a cave which is lit by some kind of oceanic phosphorescence and seems to beckon, seems to imply interior depth, seems to indicate a pathway to a safe interior cocoon.
‘Hey, wow, that’s not bad,’ the waiter says, returning for the check. ‘How do you get that effect in black and white? Are you an artist?’
‘No. I studied painters and paintings. But I’m just a doodler.’
‘Reminds me of that movie – what was it? With that actress who plays a mermaid?’
‘Daryl Hannah?’
‘Right. That’s it. Must be at least ten years ago. With Tom Hanks, right? And he doesn’t know she’s a mermaid. Very sexy blonde, but when you think about it, the fish tail would complicate things in bed.’
‘It would. I don’t know how fishes do it, do you?’
‘Never thought about it, but now I won’t be able to stop thinking about it until I find out.’
‘Okay if I sit here until I finish this glass of wine?’
‘You want to keep shivering? Feel free.’ He taps the manila envelope. ‘Bad news or not?’
‘I still don’t know,’ Cap says. ‘Hence the wine.’
‘Procrastinating, huh? That means you’re expecting bad news. Should I bring a martini?’
‘No. No. God, no. I’ve definitely had enough.’
‘Well, good luck.’
In fact, Cap is not really expecting bad news, at least not out of the normal range of the kind of bad news she must deal with all the time, collecting and relaying evidence of the darkest side of human behaviour. For this kind of news she has had to develop a kind of working detachment, not always easy to maintain. However, she is not expecting personal bad news, and so she is unable to account for the fog of anxiety that now seems to have settled on her table. She cannot really understand her extreme reluctance to open the envelope. She tries to analyse her reaction.
The packet is definitely not from Lucifer or Celise. They have got what they wanted and are welcome to it. Neither Cap nor anyone she knows has any interest in appealing the verdict. Therefore the packet, like the threatening summons under her door, is either from one of the two art-buying clients who are currently in New York, or from persons unknown, the usual persons unknown, generic thugs from the worldwide Ministry of Intimidation. This is hardly a new experience, though the method of delivery is new, and intimidation on American soil is without precedent. Is this why Cap feels so apprehensive?
The Claimant Page 20
