The Bee and the Orange Tree

by Melissa Ashley

  Father Étienne stepped to the far side of the platform. Monsieur de Longval approached Madame Tiquet. She held her hand out for him to kiss, an act of exquisite civility, given the circumstances. She glanced at the crowds, whom she had entranced, their gazes fixed on her every movement. Her serenity was unearthly, such a contrast to the comportment of her servant. Perhaps she had been wrongly accused and condemned. She kissed the handle of the executioner’s axe, as was the custom. ‘Sir,’ she began, ‘would you be kind enough to show me the position I’m to take?’

  Monsieur de Longval answered that she was only to kneel on the cushion, close her eyes and hold out her head. She obeyed, an attendant stepping forward to remove her veil – her fine hair had been shorn off – so that her neck was exposed for the sword.

  The executioner raised his axe to strike, but he fell short, entirely missing his mark. Ominous hisses of disapproval rumbled through the crowd. He adjusted his mask and raised the sword, but again his aim was defective. Marie Catherine felt she might faint. She grasped Sophie and Angelina’s hands and roared out her disapproval with her fellow Parisians. Nicola had been injured, but not mortally. Shaking, the executioner made a third attempt at his task, again botching his strike. The crowd lost control, screaming and calling out his name, tormenting him, starting to throw items towards the scaffold. He had better succeed or there would be a riot, the fencing knocked down, the masses surging forward in a protest fuelled by bloodlust – now no longer for the head of Madame Tiquet, but for that of Monsieur de Longval.

  ‘Dear God,’ muttered Sophie, making the sign of the cross.

  Angelina squeezed Marie Catherine’s fingers. ‘I’m sorry you couldn’t save her, Maman,’ she whispered, her voice fiercely controlled. ‘But we have brought her relief. A small mercy. And that is something.’

  Marie Catherine met her daughter’s gaze. Her eyes were full of tears. She saw Angelina working in her kitchen the previous day, soaking the communion hosts in the solution of opium she had bought for the Baron. What an unusual courage her youngest child possessed. ‘I know, Angie. Thank you.’ Her throat felt so dry she could barely speak.

  She gripped Angelina’s hand. Breaking their gaze, she turned her head towards the scaffold. She focused her attention on her friend’s white gown, her clipped scalp and exposed neck. She held her breath, felt the bodies of those beside her pressing against her back and shoulders, felt the spirit of the whole city paused on this final moment. That it be done, that the tragic affair of Nicola Tiquet be finished with, once and for all.

  Angelina

  19 June

  The rise and fall of the carriage wheels, negotiating a bump in the uneven road, woke Angelina. She was lying on the floor of the transportation, between the two benches. She felt someone’s feet in her back; another set of shoes were inches from her face – if she wished, she could reach out and undo the buckles. Someone had lain their coat on the floor to cushion her back and placed another on top of her. She could feel its rough wool on her arms. The carriage smelt plush and new, not the type her mother hired for an errand or outing, and in the dim light she noticed tiny crosses, wreathed together with crowns, a golden plait, decorating the interior door panelling. She drew her knees closer to her chest, moving the coat so that it was under her cheeks, and closed her eyes again, concentrating on the motion of the vehicle, the sound of the wheels turning beneath her, letting the rocking sensation soothe her back to sleep.

  The coach stopped on the street outside Marie Catherine’s apartment. The footman announced they were home, but she could not rouse herself to move. It was as if her bones had liquified, her organs and muscles dissolved into a murky soup. One of the servant’s arms dug under her knees, the other cradled her around the shoulders, and she was hoisted out of the carriage, her boot catching on the narrow doorframe. Delivered to the street, she was urged to stand up, only to collapse again, deserted by the spirit that animated her, the fuse that coordinated her limbs’ movements like the mechanism of a clock. Eyes shut, her head against the footman’s chest – she heard the steady, distant thump of his heart – she was carried into the house, down the hallway and up the stairs to her bedchamber.

  Feebly, she tried to fight the stupor stealing over her consciousness. Lise or Sophie, she did not know whom, was undressing her, preparing her for bed. A candle burned on her writing table, and she let her gaze drift across the articles and quotations she had cut from her mother’s journals and pasted to the wall, so that when she glanced up from writing in her diary, she might find a sentence or phrase to keep her going, wrestling the thought she was exploring until she had it captured and pinned in its entirety on her page. But what was the use? The discipline of expressing her ideas seemed many distant fathoms away; her mind was dust, she could taste its grainy particles inside her mouth. It was as if a hideous slug had taken residence inside her head, entirely boneless, a tongue that moved in groping pulses, making its eyeless sweep. She was disappeared, contracted deep inside herself, without speech, a clenched fist, a thing.

  She had watched Madame Tiquet’s execution until its miserable end. She kept her wits about her, stepping aside when a fistfight broke out amidst a party of reporters. A mounted police guard trotted over to investigate, the skittish horse stamping on a bloody handkerchief and dropped walking stick. She had even gripped Father Étienne’s cold hand in hers. He had been speaking to a huddle of clerics; he must have noticed the commotion and then spied their party of three. They were as helpless and confused as everyone else, robbed of speech and sense, unsure how they would leave the square, which direction they should travel in. Should they go home? Should they file respectfully past the scaffold? Should they find the nearest tavern in which to drown their shame and sorrow?

  All afternoon she had surveyed the crowds, never giving up the hope of finding Alphonse, as if his face, his eyes, his shoulder pressing into hers, his proximity might somehow dampen her misery. The raw reality of Nicola’s execution dissolved her anger at his unkindness, melted the defensiveness she felt at his criticism of Marie Catherine’s treatment of her. She could admit he had a point. Despite everything, Alphonse was the person she most wished to be near.

  She did not know what had come over her, but, rather than speak with Father Étienne and her mother and Sophie, she had instead stepped aside. She had allowed her gaze to drift back to the scaffold. The Archbishop was making his way up the steps. The executioner had removed his mask and was sobbing. The Archbishop might well have wielded the axe himself, she thought bitterly, Monsieur de Longval merely the bonded hand operated by the invisible body of the Church. Oh, it was an uncharitable thought, but she could not help herself. She and her mother had been proven powerless, despite all their efforts to save Madame Tiquet. Mesmerised, she watched the executioner wipe a cloth across the blade. Mouer’s body, his face beneath a sack, hung limply from the gibbet, its twisted final grimace mercifully hidden from view. The Archbishop crouched before the cushion on which Madame Tiquet had knelt, observing the executioner’s assistant pick up the severed head and walk to the edge of the scaffold, where he placed it, turning it out so that all of Paris could see her features.

  She should not have looked. Oh, but if she could put her mouth over the twin piercings of knowing, suck at its poison and spit it out. For three long nights and days she dreamed of Madame Tiquet’s head, shorn and exposed, no snakes writhing in place of her hair, for she was no Gorgon or Medusa, no matter what the Archbishop suggested about her influence over the wives of Paris.

  She opened her eyes. How much time had passed? Perhaps a day? Her chamber was wreathed in daylight, her mother seated on a chair in the corner of the tiny room, her writing tray across her knees.

  ‘Angie?’ said Marie Catherine, putting the tray down on the bed and drawing her chair close to Angelina’s face. Was she ready to eat? Might she coax her into swallowing a mouthful of tea? Angelina shook her head weakly: not yet. Might she be diverted by a story, perhaps? Marie Cat
herine had drafted another new fairy tale and was eager to share it with her. ‘You had best recover quickly,’ whispered Marie Catherine, stroking her hair, making snakes upon the pillow. ‘How could I possibly edit my works without you?’

  By the fourth day, Angelina had made a complete recovery from her fainting spell, but something inside her resisted letting her mother know that she was strong again. She claimed to be too infirm to make proper conversation, and perhaps in this she was not entirely lying. Theresa visited, gifting her a handpainted crystal cup in which to store her quills. Deidre and her four daughters crammed into her room, the twins crawling over her legs, lifting the covers to tickle her naked feet, making her smile despite her determination to play up her feeble state.

  Father Étienne stopped by; she hardly recognised him, his usual patient and self-effacing manner returned, the persona of the enervated gallows assistant who had tended Madame Tiquet slipped back into his secret box of props. She shuffled herself to the far edge of the bed to allow him to sit beside her, then closed her eyes and pretended to doze while he arranged the dried pears he had brought on a plate on her bedside table. He had also brought a gift for her, a book by his favourite philosopher, Montaigne. When she was ready, he would like to read her one of the great thinker’s essays. Angelina knew that her mother had informed him of her confession, for there was an intimacy in the priest’s bearing; she saw it in the moments his eyes lingered on her face. Accepting a pear, she sat up in the bed, told him she was ready to hear the author’s meditations. Pleased, Father Étienne chose Montaigne’s essay about pain. She had little to contribute, by way of answering the philosopher’s thoughts, but she would store his wisdom up. It was as if she were collecting the priest – her father’s – affection for another time. Then and there, she was not ready to respond. Perhaps later, when the fontanelle of her vulnerable new self had shifted closed, she would dare to formulate her feelings into words. For now, this visit by her real father was too overwhelming, too fragile to dissect with conversation. Alone, while she grew strong again, she vowed to take out Father Étienne’s treasures, lay them on a velvet cloth, examining them beneath the glass slide of her thinking. And he seemed to understand. He accepted her solicitous silence, did not ask directly about her feelings, nor attempt to excuse the far-reaching consequences of the decisions he had made all those years ago.

  A small stack of correspondence sat in her writing tray, in front of the row of books she had collected and arranged in a line under the windowsill. Mademoiselle L’Héritier and Madame de Murat had heard about her fainting spell and written kind get-well notes. Using the opposite tactic from her mother, Henriette-Julie instructed her to take her time in writing the review that she had promised of her memoir, there was no rush. Strangely, this counsel inspired her, and, late into the fifth night, her mother retired to her own chamber, she arose from her bed and went to sit in the chair before her writing desk. She wrapped a blanket around her legs, and laid out a blank piece of notepaper, cutting herself a fresh quill. She would answer the letters in good time. For now, she reflected on the idea she’d had the night of Mademoiselle L’Héritier’s salon about writing a story of her very own. The events of the past week had thrown up new material, and she jotted down her thoughts, the path of her original idea forking in several new directions. It was too soon to tell how the experiences might interact and re-form in her imagination, but she felt confident that the germ of an original tale, penned by her own hand, had been seeded. What a strange sense, to face the asylum of her writing desk without compromise or interference, with no need to understand and interpret and make clear the creative will of another writer.

  She had said goodbye to Madame Tiquet so many times in her dreams, she was surprised that she continued to be visited by her; she heard her voice; she recalled the distress on her beautiful face the afternoon of Marie Catherine’s salon, when Angelina had first met Alphonse. Free of demands, she kept returning to the moment she had unhatched the idea to add the solution of opium she had purchased for the Baron to the communion hosts, her foolhardy notion of asking Father Étienne to agree to her plan. She had been half out of her mind, the nursing sister of her training concerned above all else, with alleviating needless suffering. She had thought to act as an angel of mercy. Whenever she felt especially vulnerable to reliving the terror of Madame Tiquet’s demise, she would tell herself that she had provided a special link in the drama, that the lonely course of her childhood had been necessary, the sacrifice making her a sort of emissary, neutralising the impact of Nicola’s final moments. For why on earth else would a priest have agreed to such a dangerous and risky action? The willingness of Father Étienne and Marie Catherine to bring her plan to fruition enabled her to take a strange comfort in her abandonment by them. The grief they had caused her, the guilt they obviously felt, had in fact enabled them to agree to her blasphemous and highly illegal solution.

  It was an odd power to bear and she held onto it tightly. She also turned over the argument her mother had put to her in her letter, that she had only Angelina’s best interests at heart when she had left her at Saint Anne’s. Perhaps Angelina understood what she meant, for what was more precious than the gift of freedom, the treasure of knowledge, which allowed her to determine the course of her own life? She was not yet twenty years of age, she was unmarried and had no children to feed. It was up to her to make whatever she wished of her opportunities.

  All these years, she had carried around a false belief about herself – and it was not the obvious one, as to who was her father. Rather, she had viewed herself as an assistant, as an aid to the important work of her mother, and then, most recently, Alphonse. She had seen her part as that of a looking glass in which their best efforts to express themselves could be reflected. She had told herself over and again that she did not have the audacity, the mettle, the courage required to strike out on her own as an author. But perhaps she had been misguided, self-limiting. Her ineffable pleasure and satisfaction at the audience’s response to ‘The Clever Deception’, more the fruit of her creative thinking than Alphonse’s, had been transformative. Might she hold inside herself her very own secret language, its grammar yet to be invented? Touching the pages of her notebook, running her fingers along the feather of her quill, she imagined the stories she might write in the privacy of her chamber one day, piecing them together as if arranging different-coloured fabrics and stitching them into a magnificent quilt. The very idea made her tremble with excitement.

  She opened a pot of ink and dipped her quill into the liquid. Oh, she could write a story then and there, but first she must compose a letter. If Marie Catherine could confess the identity of her father in a piece of correspondence rather than speak it to her face, then she could utilise the same medium for her response. After all, she had similar motivations to her mother. She needed to protect herself from whatever arguments Marie Catherine might make to persuade her from the course of action she had chosen. For her mother’s opinions had a way of worming their way inside Angelina, burrowing into her mind and leaving holes in their wake. She must be resolute.

  She might have devoted long paragraphs to words of understanding and acceptance, but found herself unable to formulate such sentences. It was best to turn her writing implement to matters of a practical nature. She would leave Marie Catherine with the recipe for her medicine, so that Sophie might pick up her next batch from the apothecary. She was sure she would remember how she rubbed her fingers over her skin, loosening the painful crystals that hurt her joints – might she pass this information on to her maid? She wrote that she adored her new fairy tale, ‘The Bee and the Orange Tree’, and appreciated the dedication she had made to her. She only hoped that in the future she might be as resourceful and courageous as Aimée. The dedication was an honour, and she was glad to accept it. In so far as she could deduce, the story had no need of Angelina’s editing pen: it was perfectly formed, not a scene or description, not a character or thought out of place. She
wished her mother all the very best in publishing the new collection she had been spurred into composing. She had no doubts whatsoever of its success. What a relief it must feel, to have the mechanism of her imagination in full working order again. She apologised, but she was resigning from her position as Marie Catherine’s secretary. She would have no trouble, she imagined, in hiring a new young scribe to fill her shoes. She must work without fear, and not open the stopper on her brandy bottle so often – it hardly helped. In the forging of a new collection of fairy tales Marie Catherine would regain her old strength.

  Angelina squeezed her fingers and took out a new piece of paper, composing a small note of farewell to Father Étienne. She enclosed it with her mother’s letter and sealed the envelope. Dropping the correspondence into her tray, she arose from her chair and pushed it into her desk. From under her bed she took out her travelling valise. Scooping up her books, she placed them carefully inside. She added her pens and notebooks, and then turned to her armoire, pulling open its heavy drawers and fingering her gowns and skirts and underclothing, deciding what was most necessary for her journey.

  She changed into one of Theresa’s dresses, donning a wig and headpiece, and applying face powder and a heart-shaped beauty patch, a dab of perfume, a smudge of rouge for her cheeks. She checked in the hallway, glancing down the stairs, listening out for movement. Quietly closing the door to her chamber, she crept down the stairs to the lower level of her mother’s apartment. Her heart thrummed and her cheeks felt flushed as she buttoned on her cape in the dark. Her hand on the handle of the front door, she saw a movement out of the corner of her eye. Sophie had been roused, a gown over her nightdress and a candleholder in her hand. She met Angelina’s eyes in the flickering shadows and made a short nod. Angelina put a finger to her lip and Sophie understood immediately, moving with stealth to open the front door for her.