Falcon in the dive, p.3
Falcon in the Dive, page 3
A slim woman came forward, exquisitely clad in a silk and velvet dress of layered pinks and dusty rose bunched beneath the deepest reds, petticoats aflutter, like that very loon taking off across the lake, wings flapping and water parting beneath her feet. Her hair sat in tall, twirled buns with carefully hanging curls. A clip the size of an apple adorned one side of her head. The woman wasn’t plump enough to be the Marquise de Lourmarin—notoriously the butt of pamphlet jokes—so Ani figured the woman must be the marquise of whoever this marquis was and gave the lady a curtsy, while Josephine, a woman nearing twenty or just past, triumphed down the hallway as if trumpets should be exulting her entrance. She approached the pair and motioned for Ani to stop curtsying.
The marquis smirked with amusement. “I apologize for putting more work on you, Mademoiselle Journeaux, but there is this young woman,” he motioned, “who shall be our reckoner for the fire insurance. She’s sent from Compagnie d’assurance contre l’incendie directly and will be staying with us. She’ll require—”
“I understand, my lord,” Josephine said, her eyes already on the mud at Ani’s hem, the splashes up the girl’s ankles.
What Ani understood was that this beautiful woman was not the marquise, but such extravagance bestowed upon a servant?
Josephine ushered Ani through the hallway toward the washbasin in the nearest boudoir, and Ani emulated the woman’s proud gait. When Ani glanced back down the hall to the spot where the cross hallway joined, there still stood the young marquis, watching intently with one hand cupping his chin, fingers splayed across his jawline in a pose befitting some ancient Greek scholar.
Chapter Two
Two lies and a truth
A little rebellion
now and then
is a good thing.
—Thomas Jefferson
Now
In the bathing room, Josephine laid out a piece of linen along the wood floor at Ani’s feet and positioned her before the washbasin. She instructed Ani to strip down and not to worry about getting mud on the linen. Josephine left the room to fetch hot water and returned a dozen times to fill the tub, each time finding Ani standing in the same position with clothes still donned.
“Girl, you’ll have to follow instructions better than that. You’re in a military garrison. Men bark orders around here like they’re unleashed hound dogs, and you’ll learn right quick which ones to throw a bone and which ones to let starve. The marquis gets the bones. Whatever I say comes from him, so best mind it. Now strip and get in that tub before the water cools. You are a filthy mess of a girl.”
“Did that come from him?”
“Oh, sakes alive. You’re a smart one, I see. It is twice my lucky day, then.” Josephine stood with her hands on her hips.
Ani hadn’t anticipated standing before a washbasin, but she was intrigued. This would give her time to think, to be alone. So it was the garrison. Right palace, wrong Beaumercy. But she’d never been wrong like this before. She wished someone would say his title or given name instead of my lord this and the marquis that. He was too clever to say his own name. He was a step ahead of her, and she wasn’t used to being so precariously balanced. Josephine still stood behind her. Ani waited, then said, “Are…are you remaining here?”
“Remaining here?” Josephine grunted and reached for the laces on Ani’s dress. “I’m going to bathe you, foolish girl.”
Ani jerked away. “I prefer to bathe myself, if I may.”
“You may certainly not. No woman of any worth bathes herself.”
“But I—”
“Turn around. Stop being obstinate.” Josephine took Ani’s laces and untied the back of her dress. The servant inhaled audibly when she saw Ani’s back and neck, the tops of the girl’s arms; whip gashes traveled Ani’s backside like a map of battlefield maneuvers. Josephine stayed silent and undressed Ani the rest of the way. “Do you have no undergarments?” she asked quietly. “Any corset or stockings?”
All Ani had was her dress, one thin layer of petticoats, wooden shoes over bare feet, and the trousers and men’s blouses hidden at the bottom of her satchel. She shook her head and stepped into the brass basin. Dirt shed from her skin in gray rings and misted through the bath. She touched her finger to the top of the water and dragged tiny circles through the surface like bugs skittering along capillary ripples. The water warmed her skin. Moisture soaked into the tips of her fingers, slowly pruning the pads. She smiled. It was certainly better than lakewater. Flickers of a different time returned: A copper basin with ivory handles, her mother’s long fingers around a wooden comb dragged through Ani’s wet hair, often Dr. Breauchard’s lye cloth on her tiny back, long before the skin was mapped in scars. A balsa swan that floated on the water’s surface.
Josephine leaned Ani forward in the tub and held her breath. Her cloth barely grazed the whip gashes along Ani’s torso, arms, and shoulders, as if the old scars would rip open again on contact. But Josephine didn’t miss a beat when she unmangled a heavily soiled linen from Ani’s forearm and pressed the cleansing cloth into a deep glass cut. “What do you call yourself?” Josephine asked.
“Ani.”
“Well, Ani. This is grotesque.” She looked at it closer. “It’s infected, and looks like…like glass shards in your skin?” Josephine touched it lightly, and Ani drew breath. “You have another on the back of your elbow, here, split up bad. We’ll require a doctor if this is to heal properly. Else you’ll end up losing the hand or the skin if it gets rotted.” She sighed. “What house do you belong to, Ani? I’m not permitted to address a guest by first name.”
“Just Ani will do. I’m not really a guest.”
“An intruder, then.”
Ani glanced at her, then examined the cut herself. No matter how bad it looked, she’d survived worse. But the thought of it rotting gave her pause. Her motion stirred steam that tickled her lungs into a cough. She gripped onto the side of the basin to brace herself and coughed forward into the water. Dirty bathwater splashed onto Josephine, crouched at the side of the tub.
The servant pinched her face together. “All right, Just Ani. I’m inclined to call it a day and let it rot—”
“A doctor once had to cut two fingers from Gret’s hand that rotted.”
“Did you ever talk to this Gret’s doctor?”
Ani bit down on her tongue. Why had she mentioned Grietje? She’d have to be more careful. Couldn’t name any names. “No. I don’t know any doctors.” She tapped against the tub anxiously.
***
Before, the Bastille, faubourg Saint-Antoine, almost nine years prior
“Dr. Breauchard?”
The doctor reached toward the tiny voice and took the hand connected to it. “Stay close to me, Allyriane.” He didn’t really have to tell her—she was already standing on his heels.
The stench of the building was nauseating. Prisoners with boils over their lips, styes on their eyelids, sitting in their own vomit, feces. Rotten apple cores covered in insects and mice. Blood pooled beneath bodies of men sprawled on the floor in their own tubercular, consumptive messes.
“Where’s Papa?” the little girl said, holding her nose.
“We’ll find him,” Dr. Breauchard said, but he didn’t want to lie. He didn’t know if they’d find him, but how could he say that to a child of eight? A child he’d known since before her birth, as a friend of her father’s and closer friend of her mother’s, before the woman had died years before. He’d tended to the young girl’s infant care when she’d suffered first from jaundice, then breastmilk contamination, then colic, and throughout her childhood of lead poisoning, famine, dehydration, heatstroke, the loss of both parents, and already the undeniable symptoms of blacklung.
And when finally he did see Simon—eyes barely hanging in his head, one showing inflamed sockets through an abscess in his temple, his fingers scratched to bloody nubs from clawing crazedly at the wall—Breauchard turned the girl toward his own knee and walked her back, back, away.
“He’s not here,” Dr. Breauchard said. “Must not be here. We’ll look somewhere else.”
But Ani had seen her father’s vacant face, smelled his overflowed chamber pot. Her father. A republican-minded pamphleteer, he was one of the heavily taxed men who stood up against the monarchy. He’d thought it intolerable for merchants to pay forty separate tolls for one single box of wine making its way from Provence to Paris, despite his appointed position to enforce it. His rebellion posed a threat to the monarchy, clutching desperately at its royal reins—the new Constitution merely a flimsy parchment at the time. Now, true rebellion was here, and her father, who had called for it to come, was jailed because of it. She turned away, but for a second a string had connected them, and she’d known the hollowness creeping through her insides like a hunger.
“Allyriane, why don’t you recite for me a verse,” Dr. Breauchard said. “Something cheery?”
Ani stayed silent for a moment, but then recited, “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world…to darkness…and to me.” She turned her head and looked back at her father, but he was a ghost. She willed him to recognize her, to see, but an infection had taken his mind.
“I said ‘something cheery,’ child,” the doctor said. “Is that all I’ve taught you? Darkness and weary ways?”
Ani stopped walking and pulled her hand from Breauchard’s. “Are you going to leave me, too?” A tear ran down her cheek.
Breauchard knelt and pulled her forehead to his lips. “No. No, not ever.” He closed his eyes and held her to his neck. He knew he couldn’t promise that, but what could he say to a child of eight?
***
Now
Josephine rubbed the lye cloth over the fresh cuts, and Ani winced. “I’ll talk to the marquis about a doctor,” Josephine said.
“Oh no,” Ani said, “please don’t.”
“That won’t heal on its own.”
“I don’t want to trouble the Lord Lourmar—” She stopped herself. He wasn’t Lourmarin; that much she’d figured out. “—to trouble him wi—”
“Eh, he’s a troubler.” Josephine waved her hand as if swatting a fly. “He’ll trouble himself if you don’t trouble him first. Might as well get it out of the way. And we’ll have to get you a new dress. You’re smaller than me, but nothing a little altering won’t fix. I’ll fetch you something to wear that should fit fine enough.”
Josephine stood and went to the door, then saw the satchel. She looked at Ani, whose head now rested on the lip of the basin, her eyes closed. Josephine snatched the satchel and ducked out the door, closing it quickly behind her. She leaned against the wall and clutched the bag to her chest, her heart pounding. She opened it and looked inside. The stench of unwashed garments hit her first, and she closed the bag abruptly to keep from gagging, then opened it again. Men’s clothing, tucked and pinned for a smaller fit. Shoes with soles so thin she could put her fingers through them. Some small brown pouch that looked empty. A vial of something powdery. A ball of twine. Then she gasped and closed the bag and whirled herself around the corner to find the marquis standing where she’d left him, one hand glued to his chin, the other twisting his buttons. The smell of rye malts haloed him.
“Are you drunk?” she asked. “I’ll have to pick your wits up off the floor and give them a good dusting.”
“I may have had a dram of whisky, yes, Mademoiselle Journeaux. Your concern has been noted.” He peered around her toward the bathing room. “Brief me.”
She sighed and whispered, “I’m frightfully concerned that she is not what she seems. She’s lower class, quite obviously. Her body is a battlefield of scars. She’s got an unpleasant cough—heaven help us if it’s the typhoid. Her mouth is smart. She has men’s clothing!” Josephine held up the clothes. “And she has cuts all over her arms that are infected with what look like glass shards in them.” She lowered her voice even further. “I believe she’s escaped from somewhere.”
“Well now, see. This is why a man takes a drink.”
“She needs a doctor, but she won’t go to one. I doubt she can afford it, I’d say.”
“Put her in a sleeveless frock, so I can administer to her arms. That should give me something to do with these fidgeting fingers. You know what I say about idle hands.”
“Yes, sir, ‘they make for excellent drunkards.’” She said it as if a practiced proverb. “And I believe she thinks you are the Lord Lourmarin.”
“Yes, I’ve surmised that. Yet, I am the one who requested a new clerk. Right palace, wrong Beaumercy.”
“And, my lord, when I looked through her satchel—”
“You looked through her satchel?”
“Of course! And I found this!” She raised the glass vial of a powdered mixture.
The marquis took the vial and examined it closely, rolling it around in his fingers. “Huh,” he grunted. “What do you suppose it is? An inhalant or a dissolvent?” He popped the lid, stuck the tip of his finger into the powder, and dabbed it on his tongue.
Josephine gasped. “Or a poison!”
He smirked. “Could have been a poison, I suppose.”
“Do not you toy with my nerves, sir!”
“Hallucinogenic anesthetic. She knows an apothecary somewhere.”
“Then she is also a liar.”
“Oh?” He grinned and smacked his lips together. “Pain deadeners to mask…something else quite indistinct. Huh. Perhaps our new friend is an addict. And a liar. Naturally.”
“And a murderer!” Josephine hissed. “I found these!” She held up two sheathed knives that she’d pulled from the bottom of Ani’s bag. “She might have slit your throat!”
“Well, is she going to poison me or slit my throat, which is it?” He handed the vial back to Josephine.
“And I found this!” She held up the ball of twine. “She means to bind you with it!”
“My! Is that before or after she poisons me and slits my throat?”
“I am not in jest!”
“I believe you are not.” He smiled sadly. “But did you consider that perhaps she just desperately needs the job? You of all people ought to have a little compassion for that, Josette, no? We weren’t all born into this. She’s scrambling for that wealth as you once did. Let’s not judge our new friend too quickly. Everyone’s got some kind of knife and poison these days, bah, and I could break that twine with my teeth. Besides…I do believe this dreary place could use another touch of gentler fingers.”
“You don’t mean to let her stay?”
He shrugged. “I let you stay, didn’t I. You came to me under much darker circumstances, yet you’re the one thing in this palace that I cannot do without.” He turned toward the front parlor, but then turned back. “But, Josette…hide the knives.”
“I was already going to, sir.”
Josephine watched him walk away at his thinking pace, then continued down the hallway to exchange Ani’s soiled clothes for a sleeveless dress and undergarments. She returned to the bathing room to find Ani still soaking in the tub with her head thrown back, eyes closed, murmuring the chorus of “Ça Ira.”
“Don’t sing that here, Just Ani,” Josephine said, startling her. “This is not the National Guard and certainly not the Commune. You’re among the king’s men now. Come, up, up, up.” Josephine unfolded a dress, stockings, undergarments, corset, and shoes at the dressing table. “Call for me when you get to the corset. Then right back down the same hallway you entered, and go into the last door on your left before the front door,” the servant added on her way out the bathing room. “Understood? Last door on the left before the front door. That’s the front parlor. Hurry along, and don’t make him wait. Not because he won’t wait, but because he’ll wait forever without complaint. I, however, will not.”
***
Now
Ani, dressed in elegant new clothes, walked down the hallway toward the front parlor, moving from plaque to plaque under the portraits, searching for a clue to his identity. The large wall-sized portrait at the head of the hallway was of Josephine, the oddity of it all, for that was the position reserved for the master of the house. What nobleman didn’t fill his own hallways with portrait after portrait of himself?
A servant stepped into the hall and cleared his throat, not at all subtly. He held a letter too dearly to be for anyone but the marquis. Ani seized her opportunity.
“Is that for me?” she said and stepped forward with her hand outstretched.
Before he could reply, she had hold of one edge and tugged. His grip too fervent, all she managed to do was rip a corner, but it was enough to see the title. The servant pipped, his mouth wide open, but Ani quickly read the name. Collioure. She felt as if she’d been stabbed. This name of all the Beaumercy names. He had the duke’s title—was the son to inherit the duke’s lands in Collioure. She collected herself.
“My thousand pardons, monsieur.” She curtsied clumsily, but the servant’s jaw hadn’t closed. She frantically tried to remember everything she knew about the Marquis de Collioure. How could they have told her the wrong Beaumercy? Did they know?
She brushed by the servant before he could admonish her, entered the front parlor, and stood in front of the marquis as he sat reading Modern Chivalry: Containing the Adventures of Captain John Farrago and Teague O’Regan, His Servant. His eyes were alight, scanning the page, and she wondered if he’d noticed her enter. Perhaps she could back out quietly and poke around in the next room without detection? But she thought better of it—the Marquis de Collioure wasn’t as distracted and blockheaded as his brother was purported to be.
