Finding Emilie

by Laurel Corona

  The inn was unlike any place she had been—a dark, timbered room with low ceilings and a large stone fireplace that gave off the sour smell of cold, blackened wood. A few people in tattered work clothes sat at a table talking with a man wiping the cups left behind by others. He put them on a shelf and came over to Lili.

  “Would Madame like to sit over there,” he asked, “so as not to be bothered?” He gestured to the far side of the room, and Lili followed him to a table. “Shall I bring you something to eat?” he asked as he lit a candle.

  Before Lili could reply, he disappeared. A few minutes later he returned, holding a wedge of bread in the crook of a hairy arm, and carrying a bowl of stew large enough to require both hands. “Madame would like wine?” he asked, putting the bread down on the bare plank table. Taken aback at the casual arrival of her dinner while she was still expecting to hear what her choices were, Lili nodded without saying a word.

  She picked up the spoon resting in the bowl. It was more like a ladle, almost as wide as her mouth and quite deep—nothing at all like the tiny consommé spoons at home. The aroma from the stew rose from the bowl, and when the man hurried off for her wine, she put her lips to the rim of the spoon and took a delicate sip. She shut her eyes, savoring the sweet, heady swirl of mutton, chervil, new onions, and carrots, before opening her mouth wide and taking in the entire spoonful. Still breaking down the tender meat with her tongue, she scooped up another spoonful, and then another, until she had polished off the entire bowl and mopped up the last bits with her remaining bread.

  The innkeeper came over. “Was it to your liking, Madame?” He nodded toward the empty bowl. “Would you like a little more?” You’re behaving like a barnyard animal, she could hear Baronne Lomont saying. Slopping like a pig who’s now grunting for more.

  She gave the man a happy grin. “Yes,” she said. “S’il vous plait, another bowl.”

  STEPHANE CAME BACK just as Lili was finishing the last of her wine, with word that no one had inquired about her and no letter had arrived anywhere in the village. He went off to get a second room for himself, and feeling a sudden twinge of fear at being alone in a strange place, Lili got up from the table and hurried upstairs to her room.

  The beams of the ceiling were so low she could reach up and touch them, but the bed was soft and inviting. After pouring water from a pitcher into a cracked porcelain bowl, she washed her hands slowly, thinking through her situation. She’d wait all day tomorrow, and if no one arrived, she would hire a driver the following day and go to Cirey on her own. I haven’t gone all this way just to sit in Bar-sur-l’Aube, she told herself. I’m going to see my father if I have to walk there and beat down his door.

  It was a long time until tomorrow. She pulled out her traveling case and opened the small vial of ink. Dipping her quill, she began to write.

  The tower atop the Carpathian Mountains loomed high over the snowcapped peaks spread out below. Through a small window at the top, Meadowlark heard the sighs of a young maiden.

  “What are you doing up there?” she called up.

  “I’ve been imprisoned by my parents because I won’t obey them.”

  Lili wrote furiously until her quill was dull and she was too exhausted to sharpen it. Heaving a deep sigh, she crawled into bed.

  The following morning Lili woke up to the sound of voices. She went to her window and looked down at what had yesterday been a sleepy town square but was now filled with the cries of farmers and craftspeople hawking their wares. Young laying hens and geese squawked, and piglets squealed in their pens. Baskets were piled high with apples and pears, and racks were strung so thickly with fragrant hops, they served as arbors to shade the sweating merchants from the sun.

  “Best eggs you can buy,” a man was saying. “Eggs from the henhouses at Cirey!”

  Cirey? Lili’s heart leapt. She dashed over to the chair where Justine had laid out her dress to air and stepped back into it. She made a quick, fumbling attempt to lace the back by herself, then gave up and threw her traveling cloak over her shoulders to cover the loose dress. After a frantic struggle to pull on her shoes without stockings, she ran downstairs, barely noticing the odd sensation of the dress flopping at her sides.

  Lili hurried in the direction of the voice. “Did you say you’re from the Château de Cirey?” she asked a burly man who looked to be about forty.

  He took off his hat. “From the village,” he said. “We don’t live in the house, if that’s what you mean.”

  “How did you get here?” Lili asked.

  The man shifted nervously at the odd question. “By cart. Begging your pardon, but how else? We bring our eggs and whatever we can spare from our garden. It’s just a few beets this week, and some carrots.” He glanced at Lili before looking away immediately, confused by the elite Parisian accent coming from someone with disheveled hair and the blur of sleep still in her eyes. “Is there something mademoiselle is concerned about?”

  “I just wondered about the market. How it works. How everyone gets here.”

  “Well, I told you how.” The man looked again at the people passing by. “Eggs!” he called out again. “Eggs from Cirey!”

  “What time do you go home?” Lili asked.

  “Midday. Earlier, if we’ve sold everything … Eggs from Cirey!”

  Lili searched in her pockets and found several coins. “Listen,” she said. “I need to go to the château and I have no way to get there. Take these now, and I’ll give you more if you’ll take me with you when you go home.”

  His face broadened into a smile. “And I told my wife it wasn’t worth coming this week, with so little to sell. Come back in two hours. My cart’s not fit for a lady such as yourself, but it will get you there all the same.”

  “Would you like to taste my fresh butter, mademoiselle?” A woman sitting on a stool near the man cut a thick slice of brown bread. “Made before daybreak this morning. Try it with my quince jam.” After slathering both on top, she handed it to Lili.

  The bread was dense and tangy, unlike any Lili had ever tasted. The butter tasted like clouds, and the tiny pieces of fruit floating in the jam exploded with flavor so intense that she momentarily forgot everything else. Licking her fingers greedily, she accepted another piece. Promising to return with money to buy more, she went back in the direction of the inn, carrying the glistening crust in front of her like a crown on a pillow, and wondering whether she had ever in her life experienced a moment of such pure joy.

  The tavern keeper was already at work when she walked back in. “Do you know the date?” she asked him.

  “Not offhand,” he said, “but I can figure it out. It’s market day, so it’s Thursday.” He consulted an almanac he pulled from a drawer. “Thursday, the third of September, 1767.”

  Lili grinned. My birthday, she thought. I’m eighteen today. And my present is a ride to Cirey.

  THE TWO-HORSE CART made its way down the bumpy dirt road leading to Cirey. Next to Lili sat a stout woman in an apron and an old dress frayed at the cuffs and elbows. On her other side a man of nearly seventy, with a wizened face under a white beard, held the reins. In the back of the wagon, Stephane sat on a pile of straw with the man Lili had met at the market. Justine perched on top of an empty egg crate, holding the rail of the cart as the makeshift chair slid and rocked beneath her.

  “Do you know the marquis?” Lili asked the old couple.

  “Know him?” the woman said. “I worked for him most of my life. Him and madame, when she was alive.”

  Madame? Lili’s heart jumped.

  “I was a laundress until my fingers went bad.” The woman held out two arthritic hands. “Spent washing day in the courtyard every week. Broke my back, with those vats and wringers and lines, especially when the house was full of company.” She nodded in the direction of her husband. “He tended the barnyard at the château before the marquis took sick and didn’t care anymore. Most of his hens died last year, so we keep him supplied with what few eggs he needs
from our own henhouse. Master don’t know the difference, God bless him.”

  “Hardly nobody at the house now,” the old man said before falling silent again.

  “Did you say that my—that the marquis is sick?” Lili asked. Until then her plan to visit her father was no more real than one of her stories. As talk of him continued, her stomach churned. She would have to deal with a real person, one she knew nothing about, and the prospect unnerved her more with each passing minute. Could I walk back to Bar-sur-l’Aube? she wondered. Could I ask them to turn around? Tell them I’ve made a terrible mistake and I’ll pay them for their trouble?

  I could let the wheels go around one more time and then tell him to stop, Lili thought each time the large wooden wheels came full circle. Eventually this calmed her. I’m going to Cirey whether I’m ready or not, she decided. I’ll figure things out when I get there.

  She pulled her attention back to what the woman was saying. “He’s a good man. Not like some who treat you no better than clods of dirt in a field. Make you work for them day in and day out, leaving your own cows unmilked and birds eating the seed in your garden.” She shook her head. “No, Monsieur le Marquis is a good man, God have mercy on him.” She looked at Lili. “But I thought you’d know that, coming to visit him. I thought maybe things might be worse than we know.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Lili she would need a story of her own. “I’m his niece,” she said, doing a quick mental calculation before revising her story. “His grandniece actually. I just wanted to surprise him with a visit while he’s ailing.”

  Neither of them said anything. Of course they don’t believe me, Lili thought. Young noblewomen didn’t show up alone in a strange town needing a ride from the first person they found with a cart, but tenants on an estate weren’t going to ask questions. “Tell me about those days,” she said. “I love hearing stories from before my time.”

  The old woman harrumphed. “That’s a laugh,” she said. “Most young people think the world wasn’t created until they came out crying from the womb. Think no one but them knows anything at all.”

  “Tell me about Madame la Marquise.” Lili tried to keep the insistence out of her voice. “I’ve heard she was quite unusual.” She saw the old man smile, but he said nothing.

  “Unusual isn’t half of it,” the woman said. “She was always up to some or another kind of crazy thing, dragging everybody into it.”

  “I thought she was some kind of vision,” the man from the market volunteered from the back of the wagon. “Not like any woman I’d ever seen.”

  Lili turned to look at him as the cart bounced along the road. “I was just a boy—it’s about thirty years ago now—when she lived here with Monsieur Voltaire, but it was one exciting thing after another,” he said with a laugh. “Papa, do you remember when they set the forest on fire?”

  “Damn near burnt everything to the ground,” the old man said. “Made us all stand there with buckets, roasting alive.” He thought for a moment. “Not as bad as the forge, though, where they melted things over and over again, and nobody got anything important done for a week.”

  “But you remember the theater, don’t you?” the younger man asked. “I used to help put up playbills with their son, and sometimes I’d have a costume and get to stand onstage. I used to think it was better than any feast day, being up there in that attic while she sang.”

  Son. Lili rarely thought about the fact that her mother had a son. The baroness had made it clear the forty-year-old brother Lili had never met saw her as nothing more than a possible threat to some tiny share of his patrimony. Of her sister, all she knew was that her name was Gabrielle-Pauline, and that she had been given a good dowry, lived very far away, and hadn’t written or visited anyone in Paris for more than twenty years. They seemed little more than distractions at the moment. It’s my father I came to find, she reminded herself, not a family it’s too late to have.

  “She did have the most beautiful voice,” the woman was saying. “Sang opera for hours without forgetting nothing. And she always invited everyone, not just her rich-folks company.”

  “Yelled a lot too,” the old man said. “Especially at Monsieur Voltaire. And not in any language they speak around here.”

  The old woman thought for a moment. “Can’t say I ever understood the situation, how he was living there, like he was the husband. Then when the marquis was home from his regiment, it was just the three of them, like old friends.” She shook her head. “Don’t know nobody who would have been as patient with it all as Monsieur le Marquis was.”

  “Well, the nobility’s different, isn’t they?” the man said. “They don’t have our ways.”

  They fell silent again. “Was she pretty—the marquise?” Lili asked.

  The old woman turned to her son. “What would you say, Anton? Was she pretty?”

  “She always seemed so to me,” the man from the market said. “But different. She didn’t care as much about her hair or her makeup as the other ladies who visited, but she always wore her diamonds, even in the bathtub.”

  “How would you know what she wore in the bathtub?” his mother asked.

  “Because I saw her once. I had an errand in the house and Longchamp asked me to help him bring some more hot water for her bath. She told him to pour it right between her legs, and I saw a little more than I’d be willing to say, except now that so much time has passed, There’s no one to care.”

  “Longchamp?” Lili asked.

  “Monsieur Voltaire’s manservant—Maman, you remember Sébastien Longchamp, don’t you? He was always full of stories about how the marquise would pull off her chemise when she changed her clothes and expose—well, all her nature, I guess you could say—without caring who was there. Did the same with me in the theater, standing around with clothes you could look through as if no one had eyes to see with. ‘We’re all no more than a cup of bouillon on a sideboard to people like them,’ Longchamp told me, and I suppose he should know, living in the house and all.”

  Small stone houses now lined the road, and up ahead, Lili saw a church steeple. “Is this Cirey?” she asked, but before anyone could answer, two dogs came rushing down the street, barking excitedly. A door opened and a boy of about ten came out, followed by a younger girl, holding the hand of another child around three years old.

  “Papa!” they clamored. “Did you bring us anything?”

  Anton jumped down from the cart. “Nothing today,” he said with a slump of the shoulders. He laughed, seeing their crestfallen faces. “Except this!” He pulled out a cloth bag full of tiny candies he had bought with some of Lili’s money. The children squealed with delight, nearly knocking the package to the ground as each tried to have the first fingers into the bag.

  “Who is she?” the boy asked, noticing Lili.

  “Guest of the marquis,” Anton said, holding the reins. “Run there now and find someone who can bring a carriage for mademoiselle,” he told him, before turning back to help Lili down. “We can’t have the Marquis du Châtelet’s niece arriving in a wagon, can we?”

  “Maman! A lady’s come to see us!” Anton’s little daughter ran into the house in front of Lili. The smell of fresh milk permeated the air, and in the dim light seeping through the translucent panes of two small windows, Lili could see the contents of its single room. A straw mattress sagged inside a rough bed frame, opposite a soot-darkened fireplace on which hung a cooking pot. A cradle was pushed into one corner, near a butter churn. Anton’s wife got up from a wooden bench at the family table, still holding a nursing infant to her breast.

  “Please forgive me, mademoiselle, for not coming outside. My baby is ill and nurses so poorly, I couldn’t disturb her.” She came closer, and Lili saw an infant so emaciated it would have been impossible to guess its age. It lay limp in its mother’s arms in a way that suggested not a contented sleep but exhaustion at the sheer effort of continuing to live.

  By now the old woman next to Lili in the cart had also come in.
She came over and peered in the baby’s face. “Still with us,” she said. She held out her crippled hands to take the baby and, cooing softly, put it in the cradle. She sat on a stool and rocked it gently with one foot while she contemplated Lili through the gloom.

  “You must be from Madame the Marquise’s side,” Anton’s wife said. “You look like her, especially from the side.”

  Lili’s heart leapt. “My mother …” She struggled to remember the story she had told. “My mother was the Marquise du Châtelet’s niece. Is the baby—”

  “Sickly from birth,” the grandmother said. “For reasons known to God.”

  The little girl knelt by the cradle and crossed herself solemnly, looking up to make sure that her grandmother had noticed.

  “I suppose you must be hungry after that long ride,” Anton’s wife said. “Célie, bring the cheese from the larder.”

  The little girl scrambled to her feet. “Where are you from?” she asked when she returned to lay a small round of cheese on the table.

  “I’m from Paris.” Lili said.

  “Is that near Bar-sur-l’Aube?” Célie asked. “I went there once.” She glanced over at her mother, who was scooping butter into a bowl. “I saw a warf, didn’t I, Maman?”

  “You saw a dwarf, ma chérie,” the woman said, and Lili felt a pang of sadness that there was no Maman to call her that anymore.

  “Are you rich?” the little girl said. Her grandmother leaned forward and hissed at her to be quiet. The baby gave a tiny cry at the jostling. “Now look what you’ve done!” the old woman said.

  Célie’s face crumpled. “I just wanted to know.”

  Feeling like an eavesdropper on a family spat, Lili changed the subject. “Didn’t the marquis have a daughter?”

  “Didn’t see her much,” the grandmother said. “She was away at a convent in Joinville most of the time and then was married straight from there. To someone Italian maybe—do you remember, Lise?”