The Oracle Glass Part 21

"Hardly. I imagine my mercenary little Sylvie has already done you sufficient damage. For myself, I act in the name of justice served." He bowed again deeply and left, trudging through the spring mud, while Sylvie summoned the bearers of my chair, who had been throwing dice only a few paces beyond the domed pavilion.

All that afternoon I was in a kind of dreamy daze. Andre Lamotte and I were sitting at an intimate little supper table, drinking wine.

"That was terribly clever, the way you saved d'Urbec. It's a pity I didn't think of it myself. I admire a brilliant woman. And brains so rarely are combined with beauty. Lackey, pour the Burgundy I've been saving. Genevieve, let's drink to our future." And as we raised gla.s.ses, I shook off the dream. Enough of this stupidity, Genevieve Pasquier, I said to myself. Girls who daydream end badly, Grandmother always said. But then, who was she to talk? Hadn't she wept over Astree in her own day?

April 5, 1675. What madness makes me want Lamotte, who will never have me? It's enough to make a person believe in demons that can seize the soul. Is it because he's beautiful, or because he was Marie-Angelique's, and having him would make me as beautiful as she? It certainly isn't his mind. No, it has to be his charm. Even the memory of it warms me through. And he makes the world seem deliciously simple. I want to be part of his easy simplicity-But as I wrote, I started, as if something cold had touched me. I looked up into the dark beyond the candle and saw something hollow eyed and mocking, staring at me. It looked like the ghost of Florent d'Urbec.

That evening in the town of Versailles, as Sylvie brushed off my clothes in our tiny little rented room under the eaves, I looked up from writing in what she chose to call my "account book." "Sylvie, I want you to take this letter into Paris tomorrow and put it in the confessional box of the Jesuit church on the rue Saint-Antoine."

"What's in it?" she asked impudently.

"What's in it is a silver louis for you. But if you wish, you may read it. I haven't sealed it yet." Sylvie took the letter and worked her way slowly through it, making her mouth work with each word.

"Ooo. This is nasty. A denunciation to the police. Who is this Cato fellow who promised you marriage and absconded with your silver spoons? And you traveled all the way to Paris to find him, and he'd taken up with another woman? He seems pretty villainous-'tall, reddish hair with a beard that grows brown, scar on one cheek, makes his living writing libelles under false names and takes money from William of Orange.' Nasty work!"

"Whoever he is, he is the exact opposite of Monsieur d'Urbec, who is dark and of medium height."

"Oho, you're the sly one. Case of mistaken ident.i.ty, eh? Delays matters a bit. And if they haven't tortured him to find out who the printer was, why, they might even let him go. That is, if it doesn't hurt their pride too much." She looked at me shrewdly. "But I didn't know you knew this fellow d'Urbec. Are you soft on him?"

"I don't know him at all," I answered hurriedly.

"Then how'd you know what he looks like?"

"Why, I suppose he looks like his father, that's all."

"Too bad for him if he's red headed, then," she answered before she blew out the candle. But her voice sounded cynical.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The dispatch rider from Paris set out from Fort Saint-Jean early in the morning. Even in the chill air, the stench of the wintering galleys bobbing at anchor almost overpowered him as he rode the length of the Quai du Port to the a.r.s.enal. The pride of the French fleet, the choice a.s.signment for the sons of the highest aristocracy, the low, narrow ships looked nothing like their summer incarnations. The bands of musicians were dispersed, the silk pennants in storage. The gilt and crimson scrollwork was invisible beneath huge canvas tents that stretched from the bow to the stern over the rowers' benches, giving the ships the air of monstrous coc.o.o.ns. The rider could read the names on the bows: L'Audace, La Superbe, L'Herone...

As the icy pink dawn faded from the sky, the coc.o.o.ns appeared to hatch hundreds of galley slaves who been released from the chains that held them to their benches all night. Now chained in pairs, surrounded by armed escorts of halberdiers, they were herded across the quay to various workplaces in the city of Ma.r.s.eilles, to earn their winter keep. The rider hardly noticed this everyday sight, and having made his first delivery at the a.r.s.enal, he headed to the more fashionable section of Ma.r.s.eilles, where the Captain of the Superbe had his winter residence.

Breakfast had just been cleared when the lackey showed in the messenger, and the captain was still clad in his quilted silk dressing gown, his wigless head protected by a fur-lined, embroidered cap.

"Well, well," he said, almost to himself as he read the letter from the Captain General of the Galleys, "it looks as if someone has a friend at court. Remind me, Vincent. Who is this Florent d'Urbec? Have I seen him?" Vincent, whose shaven head and eyebrows proclaimed him also to be a wintering galerien, thought a moment and answered.

"I think it's that new one on number seven, the one who weeps."

"Oh, yes, the fellow who mends clocks. I like to have skilled trades among my rowers; I've made a good deal of money from him this winter." He squinted again at the dispatch. "Pah! These courtiers-they don't understand necessity. Do they expect me just to throw away the men I need? I must have a full complement for the campaign this summer; I see no reason to let a perfectly good one go just now. Later is good enough to satisfy the captain general." The captain refolded the offending paper and opened the seal on the next dispatch. He waved his hand to dismiss his lackey. "Go see his comite, Vincent, and tell him to inform this fellow that when he can provide me with the price of a Turkish slave to replace him, I will let him go."

The Superbe spent the first weeks of spring in maneuvers designed to break the new men to the oar, then joined the fleet on campaign against North African corsairs for the remaining months of summer. Chained around the clock to the benches, the galeriens sometimes rowed for ten to twelve hours at a stretch, the comites feeding them bread dipped in wine to keep them from dropping. Even so, by the summer's end, thirty-six had died and were pitched overboard.

D'Urbec began by a.s.suring himself that in defiance of the galley masters he would at least keep his mind as his own. But as the first week ran into the second and then the third, he realized that pain and hunger, systematically applied, had done their work. His brain could no longer hold more than a minute at a time in focus; his concerns had shrunk to the size of his bread ration. At night he shivered in the open air, sleepless from the rattle of chained men scratching their vermin. And when at last he saw that he had become little more than a beast with arms, no different than the thieves on either side of him, his heart broke. The fever that haunted the oarsmen's benches took possession of him. He had decided to die.

Images moved through his brain randomly. Paris. His friends. A stable yard at home. He could hear voices talking about him.

"Another one with fever, Lieutenant..."

"...the hospital weakens them. Just move him to the end of the oar. He'll harden up..."

The rattle of chains and someone saying "Move, you." Other images. A sign over a door, "D'Urbec et fils, Horlogers." His father waving good-bye as he left on the diligence for Paris, wearing a secondhand suit. A frail girl with gray eyes, clutching a Latin book. The frightened look on the maid's face at the back door of the great house as she said, "Monsieur, she is dead." "...but she was well when I saw her last..." "Monsieur, she drowned herself." Let it all go, said his mind as it left him.

The captain increased rations to combat the fever and had meat issued to the rowers. D'Urbec, wasted, blistered by the sun, his eyes burned deep into their sockets, rowed on at the easier end of the oar, his shoulders and arms gradually acquiring the abnormal strength of the galerien.

"You speak well," said the ship's tavernier when he measured out d'Urbec's watery wine ration. "What were you before?"

"A law student," said d'Urbec, his eyes dull and desperate.

"Ah, just what I could use," replied the tavernier, who was also a fence of stolen property when the ship docked for the winter at Ma.r.s.eilles. "I have a client who needs a marriage certificate for his daughter-dated last year, if you know what I mean. Could you draw one up, nice and legal, if I got the right parchment and seals for it?"

"It would not be hard."

"What about wills, deeds? I know people who'll pay well."

"Of course," answered the law student who had once wanted to reform the state.

It was not until the following spring that a filthy, hollow-eyed man in worn, badly fitting government-issue clothes left Ma.r.s.eilles on foot for Paris. A black, shapeless hat hid his shaven head, but nothing could conceal that his face was without eyebrows. A short jacket, sprung out at the seams, and a coa.r.s.e, patched shirt concealed the G A L branded deep into his shoulder. He was filled with bitter knowledge: how much wine diluted with seawater could be drunk before illness set in, how to bribe a comite to spare the lash, how much more easily money could be made secretly forging legal doc.u.ments than mending clocks, and the exact price of a Turk. Hidden inside his shirt was the doc.u.ment that gave him freedom and a much-refolded, grimy letter from his father that he had paid a considerable bribe to receive. One pa.s.sage, puzzled over again and again, was burned into his mind: "...a generous and t.i.tled widow with great influence at court has helped me secure this miracle..." Who? Who? he mumbled silently to himself. Those who pa.s.sed him on the road thought he was insane.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I left court shortly before Easter and returned to Paris, for while the fortune-telling business vanished during Holy Week at Versailles, it remained as good as ever in the city, where the austerities of the season had never interfered with the main business of life, which was to have a good time. The night that we packed, Sylvie got a glimpse of the heap of gold louis in my locked coffer and sucked in her breath.

"Oh my," she said, in her sharp little voice. "That's a fortune. I could retire on that."

"It goes to La Voisin," I replied, locking the box.

"And not a bit to us, for some nice new clothes, or a trip to Vichy to take the waters and meet some good-looking men? She sure has a racket, she does. I wish I was her. I been figuring. I been watching. I calculate, just from what I know about who works for her, she must bring in maybe a hundred thousand ecus a year-straight profit." Sylvie's eyes narrowed as she savored the sum. A greater income than all but the mightiest n.o.ble families in the kingdom. It dwarfed the modest sum in the box, the annual income of an ordinary family of the provincial aristocracy.

"A contract is a contract," I said, as we departed down the rickety outer staircase.

"Sometimes I think that for an old lady you're kind of simple," she answered, puffing beneath her burden of bundles as she followed behind me.

We arrived after Ma.s.s on Easter Sunday at the villa on the rue Beauregard. The mingled smell of a dozen meat dishes to break the long season of fasting penetrated every room from the inner fastness of the kitchen. The whole house had been newly cleaned for the holiday. The heavy silver plate, all freshly polished, glinted down from the sideboard. The carpets were beaten, the rich, dark furniture dusted, down to the last k.n.o.b and carving. Marie-Marguerite bustled by in a new dress and cap, with a fresh little linen-and-lace ap.r.o.n that once would have sent my sister into an ecstasy. Only Antoine Montvoisin was not to be seen in new clothes. He was upstairs, sick in bed. Sylvie followed me into La Voisin's little cabinet, carrying the locked coffer.

"You look sour this week. Come, wasn't life pleasant? Imagine, you might live like that always if you are guided by me. Remember that I made you," the sorceress added, counting up the money on her writing desk and opening her great ledger. The little cat's face winked up at me from atop a sheaf of papers with cabalistic drawings on them. "Is it all here?" she asked in a suspicious voice.