The Oracle Glass Part 57

My good hand was knotted tight on my lap, clutching his handkerchief rolled into a soggy ball. I could hear my heart thump in the long silence while I studied him as he stood there before the window. He looked careworn, and the mockery and malice had gone from his dark eyes. Around them were the first fine lines of the approaching age that he feared. Suddenly, I wanted his old self back, the impudent, innocent cynic who had been on fire to reform the world. And I wanted to be the girl I had once been, who had never seen anything worse than the naughty works she read in secret and whose only plans were to read Herodotus to her father every evening. Now we had both seen too much, and done too much, and each of us knew that about the other without a word exchanged.

"Yes, Florent, I will accept you as you are, provided you can do the same for me." Could he know everything? Did he understand the whole of what he was promising? Suddenly, I was terrified of losing him all over again.

"That was always part of it, Genevieve."

"You...you might take my hand," I said in a small voice. He came and stood before my chair, taking the hand that I extended.

"It's all damp," he said tenderly, looking down at me.

"Florent..." I managed to stammer. I wanted him so. Was it real? Could he care for me this much, in spite of everything? I couldn't bear for love to come and then vanish. Gravely, he knelt on one knee before me, not letting go of my hand.

"Would you consider marriage, Mademoiselle Pasquier? I am not sure to whom I should apply-your brother, who has the legal right to dispose of you in marriage, but who believes you dead, or your patroness, who seems to have a certain...moral right, if witches can be said to possess such a thing."

"More to the point, Florent, she will regard it as an attempt upon her income and act accordingly."

"Then I shall have to buy out your contract, won't I, little witch?"

"I shouldn't try that just now, if I were you. Business is slow and Madame is irritable. Besides...I...I have difficulties with the idea of marriage. So many couples seem to poison each other..."

He laughed and got up, dusting off his knee. "You certainly are far from the common...most women think only of marriage, no matter what the price. But then, that's part of your charm: you've always been completely eccentric. You could never bore me, Athena. And if this is how you want things to be for now, who am I to say no?" Then he pulled the footstool close to my chair, sat down, and took my hand in both of his.

"Seriously, Genevieve, consider this: my parents are still quite pleased with each other, despite everything they have been through-it's quite possible, you know." His face was amused and tolerant, his voice drolly self-mocking. I looked at him and I knew he was the only man I'd ever want. I couldn't help smiling.

"I like your parents, Florent. I imagine I'd like your brothers, too. I hope to meet them all someday. But I'm not sure I'm prepared to travel abroad just yet."

"What? You imagine I would dare to defy Colbert and smuggle them across the border?"

"It's something I thought of. After all, I had a father who defied Colbert. And, knowing you, you probably managed to get their last franc out as well as the entire household down to the dog and cat."

"No, the cat we had to leave. It was not Protestant. But the dog, seeing no future for the Reformed Religion in France, was happy enough to go." I laughed out loud. I'd judged his character right. He was the one, and only he.

"Colbert and Louvois are fools, I think. If they want to preserve the skilled workers of France, the state should offer incentives to stay, not punishment for flight."

"And so we talk politics instead of making love." He sighed. "I should have known this would happen. Mademoiselle, at what level of amity shall we agree to, since you seem so uninterested in marriage? 'Constante Amitie,' 'Tendre-sur-Estime,' or shall we rush on to the 'Tendre-sur-Inclination?'"

"Oh, the Carte de Tendre. You are a wicked fellow, Monsieur, to tease me so."

"Tease you, Mademoiselle? How so?"

"Well...you know..." and here I paused as I felt my face turn hot, "I didn't have in mind a...a Platonic friendship..."

"Mademoiselle Pasquier," he said, his face full of happiness, "may I have the honor of inviting you to supper?"

The summer heat in d'Urbec's rooms had not fled with the evening. It made my bones feel loose and my mind languorous. I was intoxicated with food and drink and the nearness of him. Entering the bedroom, I spied in the shadows behind the closed shutters a curious clock of great antiquity on an inlaid table. His books were in a corner cabinet, in neat rows like soldiers, evidently arranged by subject. The heavy curtains on the bed were pulled back. For once, I didn't want to read the spines of someone else's books.

"That's a strange clock you have there, Florent," I said as he closed the door behind us. He had taken his coat off in the heat, and the neck of his shirt stood open.

"It's quite old; it tells the movements of the planets as well as the hour. Lately I have not been able to resist the urge to collect a few rarities. Some of them have to be put in working order again. It amuses me, I suppose." A thin sheen of sweat stood on his face and shone on the muscles of his neck and the little hollow between the collarbones.

"What is the box there?" I asked, pointing to the night table by the bed.

"It plays music," he answered, opening it up to show the mechanism within-a row of tiny bells and hammers entangled in clockwork. His hands were wide and muscular; I was surprised at the delicacy of their movement as he showed me the working parts of the little box. "...or, rather, it will play soon," he went on. "It needs a new mainspring and a part I am having made to order across town." I sat down on the bed; he sat beside me and put his hand around my waist. I could feel the heat of his body and smell the soft animal scent of a man in desire.

"So much steel," he murmured, as his hand encountered the heavy corset stays.

"It's an easier mechanism than the box," I answered. He said something soft, rhythmic, his voice like dark smoke. "What is that language?" I asked, looking up to see his dark eyes fixed on me.

"It is the old language," he said, but he seemed to mean more. The language of the conquered south, of the vanished troubadours. All that was Parisian, cosmopolitan, seemed to have been stripped away like some false skin. Slowly and precisely, he undid the pins on my bodice, smiling as he translated the old chanson, his voice sensual. "...good it were, I count it, naked to hold her and behold..." The corset stays loosened, he peeled away the shift beneath. "Beautiful," he said softly. But he had left his shirt on. With my good hand, I began to unb.u.t.ton it.

"All of you, exactly as you are..." I repeated my promise, stroking the livid mark. His bare torso shone with sweat; the black hair on it felt damp on my breast. "Just as you are, forever...," I whispered.

"My love," he said, but it was in the old language.

"I don't see why you're annoyed with me, Madame. Someone was bound to tell Madame Montvoisin you'd taken up with d'Urbec again, and if it hadn't been me, I'd have been in a lot of trouble." Sylvie shook the featherbed viciously and then pounded the pillows until little wispy bits of down floated in the morning air. I sat at the small writing table in my ruelle, quill in hand, writing up my accounts for the weekly reckoning with Madame. Zero, zero, zero. Nothing at all. Twenty-five percent of nothing is nothing. A splendid week it had been, full of lazy breakfasts in bed, the Gazette de France crumpled among the rumpled sheets, and an open volume of Ovid still lying beside a burned-out candle on the nightstand.

"Why do you look at me that way?" I asked, as he lay contented on the pillows, his hands behind his dark head, the noonday sun picking a bright pattern across his wide chest and the crumpled coverlet that was spread over far too little of us.

"Because you are so beautiful," he said happily. "Your face, the way the dark curls fall over it, the way your gray eyes shine, your body, your mind, your soul..." Then I could feel the warmth of love welling up again to fill everything in me, even my fingertips and the ends of my hair. I thought my heart would split apart with the flood of it.

"When I first saw you there, in the window of that great, dark house, you were like the light of a little candle, flickering bravely in the gloom. Now you shine like the sun."

"Yours forever, Florent. No matter what." I put my head on his heart to hear it beat while he stroked my hair. "Always and forever." I sighed again.

"And I," he answered, "no matter what comes."

What did come was soon enough, although we knew it had to be. He left on another of his mysterious trips, and I did not ask where he was going, or who his patron was, although I had my suspicions. After all, what one doesn't know one cannot be forced to tell. And in the meantime, although his entree with the Mancinis had been spoiled by the Brissac affair, his welcome at the enemies of the Mancinis had become all the warmer, especially because he dressed well and made a point of losing large sums to the proper people, recouping from those who were out of favor.

"It is the last day before I must leave," he had said only the day before, as he b.u.t.tered a roll at breakfast. His dark eyes amused, he extended a bit of crust to Grandmother's parrot. The bird s.n.a.t.c.hed it and converted it to crumbs, which dribbled down his feathery front.

"Pretty bird, pretty bird. Clever d'Urbec. Clever d'Urbec. Genevieve, doesn't your bird ever learn anything new?"

"Only when it pleases him."

"He's a stubborn creature-not unlike myself, I suppose. Come now, Lorito. Say 'pretty bird.' It's high time you quit spouting Protestant h.e.l.lfire and d.a.m.nation."

"Fire and brimstone!" announced the bird and went back to cracking seeds.

"Hardheaded bird. Will you miss me when I'm gone?"

"h.e.l.l and d.a.m.nation!"

"Well, that's sort of an answer," I offered. Fall was in the air, though the days were still warm.

"Let us do something splendid, Genevieve. Let me take you driving on the Cours-la-Reine this afternoon, and then we'll go incognito to the opera. One of Lully's new operas is playing. They say the stage machines are a marvel. Would this please you, do you think?"