‘How could anyone not like it?’
‘Unfortunately . . . Some men are more exacting than you.’ She sounded sad and her face fell a little. ‘You think I’m beautiful?’
I blushed, but nodded all the same.
‘Is Virginie more beautiful?’
I nodded again and she laughed, taking my hand and squeezing it. We walked on while she told me what her cousin, the duke, wanted of her. That was when I first realised he intended to let me marry Virginie. He was not simply humouring his daughter while he found other ways to deal with her infatuation. ‘Do you know the marquis d’Aumout?’
‘No, my lady.’
‘So polite. We are friends. You may call me cousin . . . D’Aumout is old,’ she said. ‘Only bastards for children and none he likes. You are family.’ She glanced at me, looking doubtful. ‘Distant family. The duke is sure of it. I am to ask the king on my uncle’s behalf for permission for the marquis to adopt you.’
‘Why would he do that?’
She stopped, put her hands on my shoulders. ‘Do you really know so little of the world? He is poor, the duke is rich. Why would he not? You will become comte d’Aumout, and marquis in time. The marquis lives in Paris. But there is a castle in the south, probably hideous. But it will become yours.’
‘I will be suitable for Virginie?’
‘You are suitable already,’ she said seriously. ‘In the duke’s eyes you are already suitable. This makes you suitable in the eyes of everyone else.’
‘The duchess?’
Hélène nodded. ‘In her eyes too. Now go tell that girl of yours to stop scowling at me.’ I turned and saw Virginie watching us from the terrace. When I turned back Hélène was already walking away.
‘You held hands,’ Virginie said furiously. ‘She held your shoulders. She turned circles in front of you to show herself off. You talked and you talked. What did you talk about?’
‘She asked if she was more beautiful than you.’
Virginie went very still. Until I told her I’d said no. At which she relented, hugging me fiercely when I said I believed her father would let us marry within the year.
1738
Marriage
As though amazed that cooks this far south knew how to prepare something that complicated, Charlot examined the pigeon pasty, peeling strips of parchment-like pastry from its case and selecting the largest chunks of meat.
‘You have a prize bull. Those apple trees are skilfully pruned. Your servants wear shoes. There are carp in the moat . . . ’ I thought him surprised to find the south so civilised, until I realised he was mocking me to hide the fact that he was surprised. At school he’d regarded southerners as little better washed or mannered than Moors.
The sun was blade sharp, the sky the blue of the royal banner. ‘It is a good day for France,’ Charlot said. ‘Chateau d’Aumout has a new lord to make it strong. And the new lord will have a new wife to keep him strong.’ Like most of the things Charlot said it lingered somewhere between brilliance and idiocy. It was hard to know if he meant it or was simply playing with words. ‘I hate goodbyes,’ he added.
‘Charlot, I’m marrying your sister.’
‘Exactly.’ He gripped my shoulders hard. ‘Goodbye to childhood. Goodbye to the old world. Goodbye to freedom.’
It is the spring of 1738, Virginie is eighteen and I am almost twenty-one. Charlot is my best friend and my best man. Behind me is the lonely tower of the village church next to a pine twisted into arthritic fingers. Under our feet the earth is red, virulent as powdered paint. For a second I see my new estate through Charlot’s eyes; ruined and ragged and far from Burgundy’s richness, or France’s heart, which lies at Versailles. Down here we hear not the beat of the king’s ambition but the slow clop of mules on empty roads and the caws of crows rising like black rags from stony fields. Charlot laughs when I tell him this.
‘There’s room for dreamers in this kingdom of ours.’
Keep his sister happy and I’ll have his family’s friendship for life. It means something, their friendship. They have the ear of the king. More to the point, the duke has the ear of his mistress. That’s why we are there, at the head of the drive watching for the carriage that will bring Virginie to the altar.
Of our wedding itself I remember little. Prayers and hymns and vows. Virginie in a simple white dress looking closer to angel than human. There is a feast afterwards, obviously enough. And then we retire to our bed and leave the others to sly jokes and laughter. As I say, of the wedding I remember little. Of the morning after I remember everything. I wake and she is smiling, her lips almost on mine and her breath on my face. She pulls back, covering her mouth, and freezes as my hand reaches out to find her shoulder. Her fingers close over mine after a second, tightening slightly, and then she slips from beneath the covers and I see the white of her gown cutting through the warm light of the early dawn as she heads for the closet, closing the door behind her.
She pisses after several seconds’ hesitation.
A full bladder’s worth from a healthy girl who’s drunk more wine than was wise the night before, for all her old nurse kept mixing it with water. We have a pot under the bed, as most couples do, but I realise from the blush on her cheeks when she returns that she’s been too embarrassed to use it. I wonder if I’d be embarrassed to stand there and piss in front of her so soon and am grateful I’d woken in the predawn and used the pot then.
Sliding into bed beside me, she jerks back a little as my fingers reach between her legs and touch moisture. Her urine tastes much as mine, flavoured with food from the night before and scented with herbs used in its cooking. At least the drop I taste does. Her eyes are wide and uncertain as she watches me.
‘You’re beautiful,’ I tell her.
She smiles instinctively, shaking her head to brush aside the compliment. Margot is beautiful, as shinily perfect as a Limoges figurine, her composure uncracked and unchipped as the finest glaze. Élise might be beautiful if she grows into the body nature intended to give her. But my lovely Virginie . . . ? Her hair is brown, with slight waves, thick enough to be a mane. But her body remains the one Élise is already growing out of. Her breasts are full and her stomach soft, her hips slightly wide and her buttocks broad. I have still to see her naked and the night’s sleep has only delayed the moment for all we look at each other with clearer eyes. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Better than I should.’
‘Drink some water,’ I suggest. ‘That usually helps with a bad head.’ The water is in a carafe on her side of the bed and as I lean across her I can feel her breasts against my chest and then against my thighs. She is blushing deeper than ever when I offer her the glass. ‘Sip it,’ I say, and she does. Small sips, looking to me for approval.
Our bed is huge, curled at both ends and inlaid with black woods from the Indies and pale woods from Malacca, its legs thick and squat. The whole thing a mix of the old solid simplicities and the new elegance. Much like Virginie’s father, the man who gave it to us, along with two dozen of the finest sheets, and a Gobelin tapestry to hang on our bedroom wall. He is the man whose approval she’s wanted before now. Now that man is me, and watching her sip carefully from the glass I know I want her approval in return.
She lets me take the glass from her hands and put it carefully on the sideboard and she smiles a little nervously when I rest her back on the pillow and kiss her deeply.
‘My breath,’ she says.
‘Is sweet . . . ’ We kiss again and I feel her lips soften and her nipples harden as my hand reaches up to hold her breasts through the gown. I want to strip her and taste her, see her naked and put my fingers and tongue into every part of her. But she is trembling and her kisses are becoming unhappy and distracted. So I let go the breast I am gripping and roll myself above her, taking my weight on my hands.
‘I love you.’ I mean it without reserv
ation. She has brought me titles and lands, her father’s patronage and the approval of his friends. I am Jerome’s equal, Charlot’s dearest companion, Margot’s dear brother, Élise’s imaginary knight . . . But most of all she has brought me herself. And it was this I wanted more than anything. Her self to go with my self, so the two of us can make a better person together.
She smiles. ‘I love you too . . . ’
Pulling her nightdress to her hips, I stare for a second at the thick dark tangle between her legs and the glint of her sex, remembering something Charlot said years back about using spit to make entry easier. Talking not about his sister then, of course, but about some servant girl he claimed to have taken. Virginie’s eyes widen as I spit onto my fingers and smear it where I’ve previously sought the taste of piss.
I spit again, discreetly. Tasting her on my fingers as I coat them with my own spit and put it between her legs, letting my fingertips reach deeper until she opens her knees wide without being asked and I put myself against her.
‘Gently,’ she says. ‘Margot said I should say gently.’
Dipping forward, I try to push in. She is tight and nervous and it takes another mouthful of spit on my fingers and her promise that she is all right, not really afraid, before I put my hardness against her again. This time she pushes up as I push down and gasps as a little of me enters. We hang like that, me suspended above her and both of us suspended in time, and then she grins.
‘More,’ she says. So I pull away and, feeling her relax, drop my hips until she squeaks and I am mostly in. We kiss with only our groins and lips touching and clean morning air between the rest of us. It is a sweet kiss, as perfect as it’s possible to imagine. Then she shifts a little, so that I slide slightly out of her, and pushes up until we are joined, hilt to quim, my body resting along the length of hers and her body utterly still beneath me.
When I looked at her she is crying.
‘What’s wrong?’
Virginie turns her head in embarrassment, only to giggle when I kiss below her ear. Liking her giggle, I kiss her ear again and her arms come up to hold me tight and she stays like that as I plough her slowly, finding it easier with every stroke. At last, sooner than I would like, but as long as any other man could have managed with a new bride, I feel my body spasm.
‘Well,’ she says, when I am done.
Her grin is wider than ever. Later, she will tell me Margot had said the first time was usually painful and men usually brutal, which said more about Margot’s husband, the Prince de Ligney, than it did about nature itself. Her mother had told her to bear it well and then ask, tactfully, with words of love, to be excused further such duties until she’d had time to recompose herself. Her mother suggested three days should be sufficient.
Virginie tells me all this as she crouches on top of me several hours later, her legs drawn up and her chin resting on her hands, which rest on her knees. Her full weight is on my hips and I am buried deep inside. Before this I have lain two or three times between her thighs, with my mouth to the tangle of hair, my hands holding her thrashing hips in place as she bit her own wrist to muffle the cries of her excitement. The bouts ended with my mouth so bruised and bottom lip so swollen from where she ground against me I could have been punched.
‘Take off your gown.’
She scowls and stops rocking.
‘I want to see your body. It’s beautiful.’
Virginie shakes her head fiercely. ‘It’s not,’ she insists. ‘It’s ugly.’
‘No, believe me. You’re beautiful.’
Her face takes a petulant look that turns from playful to real as the thought behind it takes hold. ‘I suppose you’ve seen lots of girls naked?’
I shake my head.
‘You shouldn’t lie.’ She is glaring at me.
‘A handful,’ I say. ‘None as beautiful as you.’
‘Charlot said . . . ’
‘Your brother has seen several handfuls and would still need to count on all the toes of both his feet. I don’t care what he told you. A handful is the most I’ll admit to. And I’ll only admit to them if you believe none were as beautiful as you.’
‘He said you loved me.’
‘Of course I love you. Why would I marry you otherwise?’
Her lips twist in sadness rather than joy. ‘Because my father is the duc de Saulx? Because you have lands that were his lands? Because Monsieur Duras says . . . ’
‘What does Emile say?’
What Jerome and her brother say can be embarrassing, mischievous even, and possibly both. I’m coming to realise, however, that what Emile says can be dangerous to my happiness, to my safety and to the health of my marriage if Virginie ever decides to believe I was part of that bet. ‘That you married me for what you could gain.’
‘The man’s an idiot and blind. I married you because I love you.’
‘You swear it?’ she says fiercely.
‘On my life and soul, on everything I believe in. On my happiness.’
She bends forward and kisses me slowly on the lips, opening her mouth to take my bruised lip between her teeth and pull back a little. And then my fingers are in her hair and I kiss her hard until she breaks away and sits upright, still half supported on her knees and half supported on my hips and begins to rock in earnest. She doesn’t remove her nightgown and won’t the whole of the first month we lie together. As I watch her raise her face to the ceiling and stare intently at something inside her eyelids, I know I’ve never been happier and suspect I’ll never be this happy again. She comes the second before I do, the wave that sweeps her inside pulling a fountain from me that fills her so full it oozes from between her thighs for the next half hour as we lie in each other’s arms and find our breath and kiss, not with passion, which is entirely spent, but with a fondness that silences us both.
Jean-Pierre is conceived that day.
Virginie is sure of it. Not the first time, when I lay between her thighs, but the second, when she knelt above me in private communion with the spirit inside her. ‘I love you.’ She repeats it endlessly, as if she doesn’t realise she’s said it already a few seconds earlier. ‘I love you.’ And I nod and am grateful.
Our first son was born nine months later and we adored him, because he was ours, because we had made him in the coolness of the evening after a day in each other’s arms. Virginie’s body was that of a woman, at least I thought so then. Now I look back and see a girl. Although, even then, I knew the face smiling down at me had little more than a child’s experience such was its innocence. We called the boy Jean-Pierre and counted ourselves blessed.
1742
The Barbary Goat
Emile is the next to marry, a porcelain-faced, blue-eyed bourgeoise with blonde ringlets and a father so rich he owns two chateaux in the Loire, a long strip of the Lot valley and a vineyard outside Bordeaux large enough to count its vintages in thousands of bottles. The marriage takes place at Église Saint-Séverin in Paris, across the river from the Louvre and just north of the Sorbonne. Whichever way you enter Paris you hit squalor. Rue Saint Jacques is ankle deep in shit, the church cold and Emile’s bride so brittle she could be spun sugar.
Église Saint-Séverin is the southern archdeaconry of the diocese of Paris, and its marble choir a gift from the duchesses of Montpensier. Emile told me both of these facts without saying why he thought they mattered. We stand before the altar, Emile and I, shivering in the cold while his spun sugar bride takes her place beside him and I step back.
Charlot and Jerome are in the front row of the pews. Emile’s mother insisted, giving up her place and that of her husband, probably without consulting him. I’m surprised to see Charlot, and Emile’s face tightened when I made my excuses for Virginie. It’s the second year of our marriage and she’s miscarried our second child. But Jean-Pierre thrives and she’s stayed with him at Chateau d’Aumout.
‘How is my sister?’ Charlot mutters. He should be concentrating on the marriage being solemnised. Jerome is concentrating, although I suspect it’s on the young bride in front of us. The dress is pinched tight at the waist and cascades in pleats across her buttocks. It’s also cut square and low at the front but that’s not where Jerome’s interest lies.
‘Well enough, considering.’
‘But too ill to travel?’
‘She’s weak, a little tearful. We were lucky . . . ’ I wonder if I can say that. She lost the child early, months before she was close to full term. If it had been a month or two before that we might never have known she was pregnant. ‘Well, perhaps not lucky.’
‘Ahh . . . ’ Charlot looks to where Emile stands beside Thérèse and nods. He understands that his sister’s decision not to travel turns on more than simple tiredness. She has not forgiven Emile the bet and she would hate Emile’s new bride, I’m certain of it.
‘White,’ Charlot mutters.
I can hear the disgust in his voice. Virginie married in a dress of green silk, patterned with roses, with a train that fell from her shoulders. Thérèse’s dress is white and lacks a train. If it had a train I imagine Jerome’s interest would be less. ‘Behave,’ I tell Jerome, who glowers at me. That burning Normandy gaze girls find so affecting. ‘I mean it.’
‘A man can dream . . . ’
‘Dream on that instead.’
He follows my gaze to where one of the bride’s cousins sits across the aisle, and she blushes and looks quickly away as he smiles. They spend the rest of the service throwing glances when each thinks the other isn’t looking. At the meal that evening their chairs are empty and neither can be found. Four months later Jerome marries his slight, dark-haired girl at a service in Mont Saint Michel. Eugenie’s waist is already thickening and Jerome is convinced she will have a boy. He tells me her pregnancy is a secret. He also tells Charlot, who tells me and then sulks when he discovers I have the secret before him. Emile knows already through his wife, Eugenie’s brother having married one of Thérèse’s cousins. Eugenie’s family are old, Jerome is at pains to tell me, noblesse d’épée rather than noblesse de robe. And he dotes on her. Charlot and I doubt it will be enough to keep his eyes and hands and cock from roving, especially when Eugenie’s stomach begins to swell, but she looks at him with real fondness and we decide she’s probably the forgiving kind.
The Last Banquet Page 12
