Marvelous, p.29
Marvelous, page 29
Raising her eyes to the window, she sees Petrus, shoulders humped like an old man’s to avoid notice.
For a moment, Catherine’s anger with the world could swallow her whole, like a whale gulping down a fish.
And then Antoinette—entirely better now, the tincture prepared by Platter having worked its subtle magic—kneels up upon her chair, nose nearly to the window glass, voice an eager piping. “Maman, Maman! There’s a cat! May I pet it?”
Catherine breathes out through her nose in two warm, calming streams. Leans over to peer through the glass at the right angle to see the cat, a sleek spotted thing curled in a patch of sunlight in the inn yard. A cat grown fat and happy on the inn’s steady diet of mice and rats.
At court, Antoinette was forever patting the heads, scratching the backs, rubbing the bellies of the dogs who slept at the court ladies’ feet and the hunters who wheeled about their masters on the lawn, tails like mad pendulums. She chased the kitchen cats, who were reticent creatures, tempting them with stolen scraps until they finally came to her, purring, rubbing at her ankle bones. If the animals’ keepers were not there to stop her, she would no doubt have wriggled her way into the lions’ den, dragging a stolen haunch of venison, a headless plucked goose, through the dirt to lay like an offering at their great, clawed feet.
No, Catherine almost says then. We must stay here and wait for Papa.
But the sun is shining today, hot enough for the cat to stretch luxuriously, toes spreading, head rubbing against the ground. It streams through the dirty windowpanes, highlighting the smudges and streaks, showing bright the twirling dust motes over their table. And she can feel the curiosity and disgust of the eyes of the maidservant wiping down the tables from last night’s merriment. The cat is in a sheltered alcove; surely that would be better than sitting here, bearing that girl’s stare, forcing her beautiful children to bear it. Even Petrus, with his terror of the world, must think so.
So, “Of course,” she says, and rises to gather their few things: her purse, Henri’s cape, Antoinette’s doll. Henri leaps eagerly down from his chair, ignoring or oblivious of the servant girl’s startled backward step. As if, Catherine thinks, the anger rising up again, as if her narrow-shouldered son, her high-spirited boy, might knock her over like a rolling barrel. As if he might be a danger to her.
She gives the servant her mother’s best disdainful glance—the one that said unfortunate as clearly as words—as she sweeps past her after her children, out the tavern door, and into the sunlight to pet a cat.
Chapter 55
Pedro
He looks up to see his wife and children leaving the tavern, curling in a single, sinuous line toward the inn’s inner courtyard. Anxiety leaps in his belly, and he drops whatever he was holding, to the startlement of the coach driver, and hurries after them, his boot thuds echoing his pulse.
But they have not gone far; he stops when he sees them, Antoinette crouched, hand poised to stroke the inn’s cat, its white coat speckled with orange. He looks at Catherine, who watches their youngest child with a faint smile, hands at her hips; Henri, who gives the cat a perfunctory scratch behind its ears; Madeleine, who turns her face up to the sun, hands extended behind her, fingers splayed, as if in rapture.
He is smiling himself when he turns away, back to the coach.
Chapter 56
Catherine
The innkeeper’s wife finds them there, and Catherine knows that though the woman’s features will fade from her memory, her kindness never will. For without blinking, she crouches down beside Antoinette, smiling into her face; says in halting French, “My husband doesn’t like us to name the cats—says it makes them lazier. But my son named this one, anyway.” She touches the cat’s head. “Pox,” she says, with a wrinkle of her nose. “For his spots.” And when Antoinette turns an outraged face upon her, she laughs, slapping her thighs.
“I know!” she says. “Isn’t it just terrible?” She leans closer, as if she and Catherine’s daughter are friends, conspirators. “I won’t tell him if you want to give this boy a new name.”
Antoinette smiles, showing the gap where her bottom two teeth have recently gone missing. “Pierre!” she says. “Like my papa.”
The woman nods. “Pierre he is, then.” She stands, smiling as Antoinette sits right down in the dusty yard, the better to fondle Pierre’s great, soft ears. Then she turns to Catherine.
“My son is in school,” she says; and there is pride in her voice. She nods toward Henri, scuffing at the dirt with the toe of his shoe. “Yours, too, I imagine?”
Catherine nods, even as she reaches out to steady herself against the rough brick wall of the inn. Not a word from this woman about her children’s strange looks; not a whiff of nervousness or discomfort. She has the urge to reach for the hands of the innkeeper’s wife, calloused and reddened and beautiful in a way that makes Catherine’s chest hurt; to wrap her own hands around them and feel the other woman’s heartbeat at her pulse point, the tendons in her wrists.
“My daughters, too,” she says, half-choked. “They read and write and figure as well as their brother.”
“My, what a thing.” The woman wipes her hands on her skirt. “I can get you some extra cheese, some bread, for your journey if you’d like. Your boy looks just my son’s age, and he eats every meal as if we starved him.”
“Why—thank you,” Catherine says, and the woman nods, smiles, and holds up one finger, vanishing through the inn’s kitchen door.
Catherine turns back to say something to Antoinette—about Pierre the cat, about the woman’s kindness, about how sad it is that they must coop themselves back up in a coach on such a lovely day. She turns, smiling, all these words and more bubbling at her lips, happiness rising in her like water from the center of a fountain, all because the innkeeper’s wife looked at her children, and saw children and nothing more.
She turns, intending to crouch with her daughter, to put her fingers into the cat’s thick sun-hot fur, to kiss her daughter’s own warm head, to ask whether Antoinette would like a little of the inn’s cheese at the start of their journey, or if she would rather wait.
She turns, a smile on her mouth, such lightness in her body that she is like a seed caught in the wind, carried up and up into the blue.
She turns—
But both the cat and Antoinette are gone.
A quick, circular turning, in case Antoinette is hiding nearby. The inn’s courtyard is a narrow rectangle, almost entirely enclosed by the pale red brick of the inn’s walls and the weathered gray wood of the stable’s; only an opening, high and wide enough for a coach to pass through, leading out to the street, breaks the enclosure. Their coach stands there, Petrus and the coachman with it, checking harnesses, talking together about the unevenly worn coach wheels, Catherine’s husband nodding seriously, as if coach wheels were something he has considered every day of his life. Henri and Madeleine have wandered over, watching their father.
The yard is dirt, mostly dried out from the other day’s terrible rains, only a few darker spots in the dips and divots of the narrow space serving as a reminder that the ground here was a great churn of mud not so long ago.
There is nowhere for a small girl to easily hide; all is open. Only inside the coach—
Catherine hurries over in a rustle of skirts and breath—jerks open the coach door, ignoring the men’s confusion—half-climbs inside, peering into the shadows, as if Antoinette might have melted into them. But she is not there.
Chapter 57
Pedro
“Antoinette is gone,” Catherine says. She comes down out of the coach, her voice calmer than her face, her hands touching Petrus’s sleeve, plucking at it. “I do not know—I cannot—”
Petrus’s head swings around, searching the inn yard; but the only other living creature, other than Henri and Madeleine, is a draggle-feathered chicken pecking forlornly at the dirt. “The cat,” he says, “the cat is gone, too, she must have—”
“Yes,” Catherine says, as their elder children come up to them, questions in their eyes. But she says, “Your sister is missing—have you seen her?” And when they shake their heads, “You must stay here with the coach. Do not move,” this to Henri, nearly shouted, as their son opened his mouth to protest; and then, to Madeleine, “Watch him. Stay here. I cannot have either of you disappearing, too.”
“She is probably inside the tavern,” Petrus says, half-believing it, though a peculiar sort of panic is rushing through his veins as hotly as blood. It is the panic of foreknowledge, he thinks; the panic Queen Caterina must have felt when she woke from the dream that foretold her husband’s death. “Or the kitchen, if the cat went inside—”
“The innkeeper’s wife was wrapping us some food.” Catherine nods to the coachman. “Go to the kitchen—see if Antoinette is there. Petrus, check the tavern, the other inn rooms—see if perhaps she went back up to our room. I will—” She gestures toward the yawning entranceway leading to the street, through which the din of city life murmurs.
Almost, Petrus says he will go, instead—but he sees his wife’s bright, hard glance, the one that says she knows his fear of the wider world, and honors it; and, too, that they haven’t time to indulge it. She will go. He will check the inn. They will find Antoinette very soon, almost certainly curled around the inn’s fat cat in some hidden corner.
A nod, a press of hands, and they part ways.
Chapter 58
Catherine
Which way, which way? This is what dashes through her head, over and over, again and again, the terrible drone of it leaving no room for rational thought to intrude. Standing in the sunlight, squinting up the street and down, uncertain of everything except that her child is not here, there is no flash of blue dress, no soft little face, no thrum of her shoes coming nearer. A dog snuffles around Catherine’s feet, and she nearly kicks out at it. An old man nods to her as he passes, and she rushes up to him, nearly clutches his arm, stopping herself only at the last moment and holding tight to her skirts instead. Have you seen a little girl? she asks, and when he shakes his head, she turns without thanking him, without returning his greeting, and hurries down the street where it curves out of sight. Everyone she passes, she says, Have you seen? Have you seen? All give the same answer: no, they are sorry, but no.
She passes a woman selling cheeses—a man selling gloves. She lets her skirts drag through a puddle, heedless of the streaks of dirt and wet. Heedless of everything but one thought—If Petrus was right—if she let their daughter outside and the worst happened—
If, if, if—
No, no, no—
Chapter 59
Pedro
She is not in their room, where the bed is still unmade, the hearth unswept, the stub of the candle they burned down last night still stuck in its holder with streams of wax. There is nowhere to hide here, either, and so Petrus does not linger; he is thudding down the corridor, down the stairs, calling his daughter’s name. Through the tavern once more, ignoring the maid’s staring, the jump of fear in her eyes as he approaches her at a gallop, leans his hands on the table she had been scrubbing and says, “Have you seen my daughter?”
“N-no, sir,” the maid says, staring at his face as if she were staring into the face of the devil himself; but for once, Petrus does not care.
Outside once again, where the driver says Antoinette was not in the kitchen, and the innkeeper’s wife, a parcel of food clutched to her bosom, says she will look, too, she will check the cellar, the attics, all the secret places a child might like to hide—
Petrus nods to her, thanks her, even as he is moving away. Toward the busyness of the road, all fears disappeared as suddenly as paper in a hot blaze, all save one.
Chapter 60
Catherine
She has chosen the wrong direction. No one has seen Antoinette—even when she stopped asking whether they had seen a little girl and began asking whether they had seen a hairy girl, the answer remained, firmly, no.
Turning back, skirts bunched in her hands, shoes beating the cobbles. Pins loosening, hair tumbling down from under her cap. Heart beating in her throat hard enough to hammer its way through the thin skin.
Chapter 61
Pedro
He passes merchants with their carts, boys with deliveries, an old woman leading a donkey on a rope. All of them whirling about him as he runs.
For a gasping moment, he sees not the tumult in the street around him, but a different street entirely, one that wound its way near to the blue crash of sea, to where the fishing boats docked, where poor children gathered shellfish to fill the bellies of their families. Down that street runs a woman, her cloud-white hair snarling in the wind of her swiftness, one hand pressed to her narrow chest, as if to keep her heart from beating through the bone. All the way down to the beach she runs, her feet sinking into the black sand where, sometime earlier, the footprints of a boy were swept away by the same tide that swept him away from her forever in a pirate ship. She calls his name, hands cupped around her mouth so the sound will carry. She calls until her voice is hoarse, her throat aching. Up and down the beach, stopping the fishermen as they return for the night, nets filled. Begging for news.
She spies a pair of shoes and caves into herself there, her knees giving out. She sits, awkward, upon the rock into which the boy used to tuck himself, where he listened to the calling seabirds and the rhythm of the water. She finds the bag beside him, the bag she wove with her own cramped fingers. Inside, she finds shells, just perfect for stringing into necklaces, for a moment lying white and black and iridescent against the lines of her palm until she flings them from her with a wild, torn cry. They patter into the sea, return to the water, as water washes the woman’s face, as she keens her grief in a forbidden tongue.
Petrus’s chest cracks and he lets out a desperate sound of his own. And then—he sees her, Antoinette—and for a moment it is as if he is viewing a painting. A woman, perhaps a little younger than he, bending toward his child; Antoinette looking up into the woman’s face, her own face tear-wet. The woman’s fingers around Antoinette’s wrist, the gentle tugging of them, and his daughter following, docile and trusting as a pony on a lead.
Petrus is barreling through the street toward them before he knew he meant to move, running with the swift urgency of a dog on a scent, his body recognizing the danger in the moment before his head had managed to catch on. He has grabbed Antoinette about her middle before either she or the woman holding her wrist had noticed him coming, half-lifting her from her feet so that she yelps. Then she looks back, sees that it is her Papa holding her, and twists so that she can catch Petrus around his neck with her free hand, wildly sobbing, fingers scrabbling to find purchase.
Petrus, bent in half, clutches her, and he looks up at the woman, who still holds his daughter’s wrist, who is looking back at him as if he is one of her nightmares come to life. For once, he is grateful to be seen as a wild man—a single low, throbbing growl of his voice, and she has dropped Antoinette, has backed away, has begun to run.
And his daughter wraps her other arm now around his neck, buries her face in the hollow between his neck and shoulder, wets his collar with her tears. “I want Pierre, where is Pierre?” she cries, and he says, “I am here, my littlest love, I am here.”
Chapter 62
Catherine
She sees them coming through the inn yard. She’d returned, panting, asking the driver, the innkeeper’s wife, for news; but neither had any. Her husband had gone out, they said, and when Catherine stared, asked, Which way did he go? they pointed in the direction she had not taken.
She sees them, and her breath stops as if stabbed. Antoinette in Petrus’s arms, her arms about his neck, and he is holding her with both hands splayed over her narrow back. Just a moment, half a breath, and then Catherine finds herself running; she can hear Henri and Madeleine pattering behind her, but she—heavier, slower, more encumbered by her clothing—still reaches Petrus and Antoinette first. She is prying Antoinette’s fingers from her father’s hair, lifting her from his arms, and Petrus lets her, pressing a hand to his own chest.
“Oh, cara mia, thanks be to God,” Catherine says, over and over, touching her daughter’s hair, her dress, her face.
Antoinette says, “Maman, Maman, I could not find Pierre!”
“He will return, little one, he will come back,” Catherine says, and Antoinette looks up at her, clearly disbelieving, tears pulling her lashes into spikes sharp as thorns.
“What happened? Where was she?” Catherine says, looking up at her husband.
And he tells her, stripping off his gloves. Tells her of the woman, her grip on Antoinette’s wrist. Her fear of him he describes with something like pride, though he says, “She might only have been trying to help—but I could not think, I only took her away—” A slap of his gloves against the side of his leg, punctuating every other word.
“And thank God you did,” Catherine says, and then stops, for at the same time Antoinette says, “She was trying to help, Papa, she said she would take me to her coach, that you and Maman had already left the city and were far away, but that she could take me there. A place where everyone would love someone like me, she said; and you were going there, too.”
Catherine cannot look at him, then. Cannot make real what has forever seemed unreal, despite what she knew of his own life. But she gasps into her daughter’s hair, little puffs of air, over and over, rocking and rocking their bodies together until at last Antoinette says, “Maman, let me go,” and wriggles away.
