CHAPTER TWELVE

Marie

THE CONVERSATION WITH Philidor three days earlier had gone exactly as she’d hoped. Following much clanking, grinding and hammering over the ensuing days, he’d then supplied her with the mechanical limbs and, soon after, the torso. She measured each part, setting down the details in her notebook and clearing the space to work with the clay. Philidor had not let her in his workshop, claiming it was not fitting for her to view the mechanical designs. It furthered her irritation that he didn’t trust her with the information. Not that she would extend an invitation for him to come and watch her work either.

Naturally, she had her own secrets – those that pertained to her own methods of construction, as well as more intimate secrets about herself. As she gently unfolded the wet cloth that bound the block of terracotta clay, she thought about the secret she’d kept the longest. It was simply that she was the daughter of an executioner. As a child she had known her father was an official with an important job in town. She saw how the people nodded in respect and hushed their children when they walked passed. But as she aged she was made to understand, first by the well-aimed remarks of her friends, then by her mother, that her father was respected but for the wrong reasons.

She took up a wood-handled blade and began to slice off sections of clay in readiness to begin the models of each limb. The blade glided smoothly through the block and brought with it the smell of rich, damp earth. Yes, the people were afraid of her father and what his hands, always so large and clean with rounded nails, were capable of. She picked up a sizeable piece with her small white fingers, squeezed it hard against her palm and checked again the measurements of Antoinette’s mechanical arm. She threw the clay down, picked it up and threw it down again, bringing the tiny air bubbles to the surface in order to ensure the texture remained smooth. Then she began to knead the clay into the shape of an arm that could encase the mechanical skeleton. Push, fold, push against the table again, and the fleshy base of where her thumb joint met her wrist always carried the weight of the kneading. It wasn’t just her father’s hands that she remembered, it was his eyes that were arresting: light blue, large and almost translucent.

But the day her mother explained exactly what her father did for a livelihood was the day she stopped meeting those eyes and turned away from the hands she’d once sought to capture in her own. Now she wiped her hands down upon her apron and reached over to her box, which held the more delicate accessories for her creations. She picked out one of Antoinette’s blue glass eyes, so cold in her warm clay-sodden hand. It stared back at her, unblinking. Her father’s eyes had once stared at her in the same way. She returned the eye to its spot amongst the row of others, various shades of green, brown and blue, then began smoothing and shaping the shoulder joint, the biceps and triceps, the elbow and down to the forearm before starting the second limb. Once completed she laid them both out on the long wooden table to dry.

As she opened another slab of clay to begin the legs, she glanced again at the blue eyes waiting to be inserted. Her father. He had seemingly understood her withdrawal and didn’t ask her to voice or give reason for it, but instead added her to the list of deaths he’d witnessed – his way of staying sane, sealing each memory up so it brought no pain. But she was alive. He couldn’t not see her. So he detached.

The second secret, she thought, as she stoked the fire to hasten the drying of the clay, was that of her maiden name. Being the daughter of an executioner, she was only permitted to marry the son of an executioner. Had she been male, she would have had to become an executioner. Instead, as her youth bloomed, she became aware that however coquettish she contrived to be, the young men ignored her. Her friends conducted dalliances that they shared with her in blushes, while Marie wondered if she would ever experience this. Soon enough, she clamped down on the hollow daydreams of a future that would never be hers and concentrated instead on improving her mind. Executioners’ sons were scarce, and she knew she would have to accept any offer of marriage bestowed on her from one of them eventually, if she was lucky to have an offer at all.

But she couldn’t see herself being touched by a man with blood on his hands. She looked down at her own hands thrust into the clay and stained orange with its pigment, her knuckles clenched white in peaks of contrast. She held them up in front of her and turned them around, slivers of clay congealing in the shallow base between her fingers. Certainly her hands had been covered with blood in the Revolution. Death had always followed her, indifferent to how fast she’d tried to run. So it was no surprise, really, that she had been brought to the brink of it and nearly executed by a man whose job had been tied to her fortune since birth. She plunged her hands back into the lump. Prior to the Revolution she had never seen an execution; the moment she’d done so, she had realised with a sickening lurch the terrible burden those blue eyes had carried, and how much it must have hurt to have your own child withhold their love because of it.

She was surprised by the drop of moisture that slid down her nose and into the clay as she repeatedly threw each handful onto the table with a satisfying thud until the tears stopped. Then she worked the piles together to form long thick slabs; at least six clay blocks were required for the legs. Next came the sculpting and defining of the quadriceps, the hamstrings, the abductors for the thighs, followed by the knee joints and the tibialis anteriors to make the shin muscles. Finally the calves, with some slight definition of the gastrocnemius and soleus muscles as the female form was more fleshy than muscly. She laid each leg out beside the arms and began work on the torso, which incorporated the hips that the legs would eventually lock into. Again this required a number of slabs worked together, so she moved further down the table, closer to the fire; this part of Antoinette’s body would take the longest to dry.

She remembered helping her mother lay out her father’s body and wash and prepare it for burial. And as her strong hands flexed and pushed the clay together to sculpt Antoinette’s chest, she recalled her guilt as she’d looked down upon his corpse. In his death she had been freed. They could move away, and her surname would mean nothing.

Curtius, her father’s brother, became their benefactor. He who would save her from poverty and the chains of marriage to an executioner’s son would later save her from the guillotine. He lived far from their village and offered her mother a housekeeping position. He took them both into his home with no further expectation or motive. He was one if not the only gentleman, apart from her father, whom Marie had trusted in her life.

To both Marie’s and Curtius’s surprise, she took an interest in his business, which was the study of anatomy. And as she finished Antoinette’s breasts and moved to build up her ribs and rounded stomach, she imagined the internal organs that would lie underneath if this body were real. Official supplies of cadavers were short, and Curtius was reluctant to engage the services of undesirable men who promised to deliver a body according to specifications, but only at night for an inordinate sum. Curtius fell to constructing wax models in order to better understand the body, and as a consequence he taught Marie all he knew about this practice. Her active mind absorbed all the anatomical and biological information, and she possessed a deft touch with the instruments. She also demonstrated the artistic ability to imagine and then create what she saw in her inner eye, whether on paper or with clay.

And so a new life opened up for her and her mother in a new town, where her surname’s connotations melted like wax and her future was no longer set in a predetermined mould. Curtius encouraged her to continue her studies by giving her liberty to use his extensive library, not seeing her as merely a girl but valuing her mind and ability, free from prejudice against her sex. He even introduced her to his colleagues and permitted her to sit in his study when they called on him.

She gradually forgot the shame of her father’s name and occupation, and took on something of Curtius’s respectable house- hold. But still, while she had no wish to leave, she could not escape the attention of a certain young man who saw in her qualities that he had not: hard work, determination, a commitment to craft. Given her circumstances – no father and a mother in service – Marie was not in a position to choose or be contrary. And although she had found lovers in young medical students whom she had met through Curtius, when the civil engineer asked for her hand, she accepted. His hands, it must be said, were white; they were also big, like her father’s. Her jaw tightened when she thought of his fingers skating over her skin. But he was a way out of an uncertain future; she had known she could not rely on the generosity of Curtius forever. Though she was certain he felt towards her as a father would have, to strain his favour into womanhood was selfish.

Marie’s thoughts returned to the present, her forehead damp with sweat from the fire and the exertion of working the clay. The torso was finished, including Antoinette’s small breasts with a suggestion of a nipple, her shapely buttocks and quim, just a smooth mound with no further details necessary.

Now to the hands. Marie dragged a stool over to the table and sat down. Antoinette’s hands were delicate, so she needed to slow down and take care. She separated out two more little squares of clay, kneaded them then began to pinch out each elegant finger. Antoinette’s fingers used to be crowded with rings, while her own stayed bare. She had not worn her wedding ring at all, soon realising she had to remove it when she worked anyway; as this was an everyday occurrence, she fell out of the habit. It was of no concern. Her acceptance of the engineer’s proposal had been on one condition: her new husband was to permit her to continue to study, learn and create the wax models of anatomy that she produced for Curtius, as well as to accept commissions for busts, such as the one she created of esteemed citizen Voltaire. Her husband had acquiesced, the money it brought in being the main reason he’d offered to marry her. They both understood it was not a match of love. Her passion would enable him to continue his own – which, it soon became apparent, was not engineering but drinking, gambling and philandering.

From their union at least came her two sons. They lived for a time all together in the village of her husband’s family, until Curtius died and left her his premises, workshop, library and collection. She persuaded her husband that to move would benefit her ability to earn, so he readily agreed, and they shifted into Curtius’s former lodgings in Paris. From there she continued to create. Now she understood the inner functions of anatomy, she could construct life- sized models and put them on display – not for medical purposes, trapped in glass cabinets to be pored over by the scientific eyes of old men, but for the entertainment and pleasure of the public who could see the royal family portrayed as they dined. She experienced modest success of income and of recognition. But there was to be more. She had bigger, grander plans.

Then the Revolution came.

She finished each of Antoinette’s hands. The time spent in her workshop had hurried past in a blur. From beginning to end the whole process had taken three days. Three days caught in the web of memories, how they stuck in the corners of her mind. Nothing to do now but wait for the clay to dry. In the meantime, in the quiet wandering space her mind inhabited when her hands were rhythmically occupied, she had an idea for an invention. She had begun sketching a breathing contrivance that could be used in her wax creations, adding another dimension to their realism. When out replenishing supplies, she had also bought some metal bits and pieces needed to construct this small but intricate contraption. She had used the time waiting for the clay to dry to assemble the parts, ensuring that when she finished she packed away all evidence of her project in a box and hid it beneath the pile of dirty rags.

On the third day of checking the clay was dry, she mixed the plaster then painted it thickly over each clay body part. In only a few hours it would dry in interlocking plates that she would prise open, join and seal up again. Then the wax, heated in the metal bucket above the fire, was poured into the mould. She bound each plaster mould in twine and immersed them in troughs of cold water to speed the process. The next day she opened the mould, and the wax limbs were ready.

While Philidor watched, she sliced each limb open lengthways. With his assistance, the mechanics were inserted and sealed into their respective chambers, and each limb attached to the torso, the head into the spine, the pieces all locked into place with satisfying clicks. The final stages of the aesthetics she worked through herself over the next five days, those of mixing and applying the oil paint to the skin, followed by the pastes, powders and embellishments for the face that needed reapplying, styling the hair and then dressing the figure.

Antoinette was finally complete.

That night Marie made herself comfortable with a blanket in the corner of her workshop on an old padded settee, partly hidden behind the tables, boxes, buckets and troughs. Something about the first night of a completed figure was special, almost as if it needed her. But then came a pad, pad, pad on the stairs. Her rest was to be disturbed. The audacity of the man to creep up into her workshop was deplorable. Another breach of etiquette. She’d informed him Antoinette would be ready for tomorrow, and they had agreed they would both test her workings for the first time together. But clearly he couldn’t wait. His word, so freely given to her in Paris, amounted to nothing.

Marie’s silhouette must have blended in with everything else, so that upon entering the room he failed to see her. He circled Antoinette like a dog panting with thirst, the naked skin of his chest illuminated in the moonlight. Her allure was strong – bewitching, even. Marie had felt it as she had worked on her. To be so close, face to face with one of the most powerful women in history, was an intoxicating stimulant. And so, like any man, like almost every man, he had followed the scent of his desire.

What was he doing? Touching her cheek, his finger travelling down her throat. The hollow of her neck, across to her breast. Then down, down, and he cupped his hand over the silk of her dress to push between her legs. Ready to explore. Ready to infiltrate. But no. Antoinette did not have the parts required for such an act.

Marie half rose from the chair still holding the blanket. She would not tolerate this. Antoinette was not – was not a – Oh! Now he pressed himself against her, his hand moving in and out. No more. She let the blanket fall and stood up properly.

But before she could utter a word, he stepped back. Finished. Whatever his desire, he had sated it. He breathed out heavily, ran his fingers over his lips, then slunk from the room, shutting the door behind him.

Marie stood there, her heart beating against her rib cage, the blanket at her feet.

That pig. What should she do? She crossed to the window to take a deep breath of fresh air. Let her emotions settle. She needed to think. Calmly, rationally. How to approach this, him, required strategy. Planning. Not an emotional outburst. Rash. Rash produced mistakes. Mistakes made one vulnerable. To be vulnerable to a man such as Philidor was unthinkable. In only five minutes, perhaps, he’d infected the air with an odious stench of lust.

Across the street below the window, she spotted movement. Oh, there he is again. Over the past few weeks as she’d worked, she’d had opportunities to watch the gentleman from next door come and go. His rooms were also Druce’s but accessed by a separate front door. Like Marie, this gentleman kept nocturnal hours. He would withdraw a large ring of keys from the depths of his jacket to enter or leave the premises. She gathered he was the owner of the Baker Street Bazaar, which declared on its sign: Rare books and artefacts bought and sold. The gentleman was himself a rare object, with his greying hair worn long and prominent side-whiskers, his collar ironed to sit upright in peaks that almost covered his cheekbones, and a topper with the brim pulled low, obscuring his face.

What time was it? Already past midnight. Philidor had gone back to bed and her light was surely visible now from the street. The gentleman always crossed the road in the same spot then paused and looked back up at his window – or was it at her, his nocturnal companion divided from him by the bricks and plaster?

Oh no! There was Druce, crossing the street, her hand raised as if hailing him. He looked behind, saw her and tried to hasten to the carriage. Oh, bad luck, she’d caught up with him. Marie watched them interact, saw Druce reach out to touch the gentleman, who dropped his books, picked them up and disappeared from sight. His carriage pulled away, and Druce crossed back over below Marie’s window. A detestable woman. What was the meaning of such behaviour?

Marie turned back to Antoinette. It was a warm night, so sitting up with her creation was going to be pleasurable; she felt like a mother with her newborn. Unless the pig trotted in again. She grabbed a cloth and began cleaning Antoinette’s skin. Philidor had betrayed her. This was something that she would not forget.