XIV

 

 

 

“Violaine, Violaine,” Thérion said in the darkness. His lips pressed against my forehead, my cheeks, my lips. I moaned and my body convulsed with shivers. A warm coat was wrapped around me. “Thank God you’re alive.”

“Thérion,” I murmured. “Is it really you?” I placed my trembling hand against his cheek to feel the familiar outline of his jaw.

“Shhh,” he said, and I was lifted off the ground and wrapped in his warm arms, carried like a child. “My God, you hardly weigh anything.”

My eyelids fluttered open. The day had dawned under a clouded sky, and in its light, for the first time, I saw my lover’s face.

“Harlequin. I knew it was you all along. Thérion, my Beast. I love you.”

“Shhh. You must never tell anyone. I love you, too. More than I’ve ever loved anyone or anything. But for your own safety and that of your children, you must pretend you don’t know me. I’ll say … good God, what will I say? That you’re a village girl … you were lost in the forest and wandered in here … I don’t know.”

“But why? What’s happened?”

“We’ve been found out.” He was carrying me through the garden now. “It was Donatien. He got his vengeance on me by telling my wife how to reach Boisaulne. She never knew it existed.”

“Your wife?” I said through my chattering teeth. “Then you believed me about Donatien.”

“Of course I believed you. I’d already decided before I got your reply, that Clio had to be telling the truth and it was wrong of us to doubt her.”

“If only I’d written sooner, she might have been spared.”

“She wasn’t harmed, thank God. And it happened before he attacked you.”

“It did?”

“That was what made me doubt her story at first. If it really happened, why wouldn’t she have told someone at once? But she’s so young. It took her a while to get up the courage. And when you left she was worried for you and felt she ought to say something, in case Donatien had attacked you too and that was why you left.”

“But thank God she wasn’t hurt. Your letter made me think …”

“She had a little set of tools she carried on the end of a chatelaine, for trimming her brushes and scraping paint. She was alone with him in her rooms after supper and apparently he wanted to take things further than she did. She had to threaten him with a pair of scissors to get him to leave.”

“Would that she’d stabbed him!”

“After I got your letter that night, I searched his rooms. He’d spied on us and taken the letter of instructions I’d left you and hidden it, to be sure of finding you alone while I was away in Annecy. I escorted him back to Paris myself and told him he was no longer welcome at Boisaulne and none of our friends would receive him in Paris anymore.”

“Why didn’t you write back to me? I was so worried.”

“Léonore was in Paris, by a stroke of bad luck. She insisted I stay for a day and a night. And she’s here now.”

“Léonore?”

“Catherine-Éléonore, my wife. She’s been wanting to end our estrangement. Ordinarily she spends six weeks with a friend in Chambord while I go to Boisaulne, but she’d cut her visit short because her friend had fallen ill.”

“I can scarcely take it all in. I’m so tired and cold. You must explain it to me later.”

“You don’t understand. There may never be another chance for us to speak privately. This is what I was afraid of, the reason I was so careful all along. It’s why I hid myself, even from you. She also now knows it was I who drew all the cartoons for the gazette under the name of Harlequin. Donatien told her. If I cross her there’ll be a lettre de cachet against me and I’ll be imprisoned in the Château de Vincennes. There’s no refuge for me even in Savoy, because her father is a friend of the governor, and I could just as easily be sent to the Château de Miolans. I’m utterly at her mercy.”

“But what wife would be so cruel? Who would send her own husband to prison?”

“You don’t know Léonore. She found your Book of the Rose and threw it in the fire. It’s gone now, forever, and all your poems with it.”

“What?” I struggled to sit up in his arms and then lay back again, too weak.

“Thank God, I managed to burn all your letters before she found them. But she found your poems in the book, signed with your name. Donatien told her I had a mistress here, and she knew at once the poems were yours.”

“But the book was there with me in my father’s house. I kept it hidden under the mattress so it would be safe.”

“When you fell asleep at night, it would come to me at Boisaulne. I don’t know how. I’ve never understood how my own powers work. Only that I see in the dark, that I can bring darkness around me, and this place formed its beauty in accordance with my wishes. And your book came to me in place of you, when I wanted more than anything to have you here in my arms. I’d find it on a table in my study with your letter inside, and I’d leave my letter for you in it. Then while I slept it would travel back to you. Perhaps it wasn’t my power at all. Perhaps the book had its own magic. But when Léonore arrived, she sensed at once it was something precious to me. And destroyed it.”

“I th-thought the book was lost or s-stolen. Zéphyr was gone too, when we woke.”

“I called Zéphyr back to Boisaulne. I hoped it would delay you leaving long enough for me to get word to you that it wasn’t safe to come back anymore. If only I could have made you forget I ever existed so you’d believe the whole thing was only a dream.”

“Was it real after all, then, and no dream?”

“Oh, Violaine. But I can’t call you that anymore. She knows that was the name of the woman I loved. Donatien guessed everything and told her all of it. We need a new surnom for you. I’ll call you Psyché. She also had a lover who came to her only in the dark. We’ll say … you’re a cousin of Aurore’s from Grenoble … Aurore will protect you, I know she will. They all will, if I ask it of them. But what will I tell them? No one can ever know what we’ve been to each other. You’ll never be safe from Léonore. The sooner you can leave here and stay away for good, the better.”

We reached the house, but instead of going through the glass-paned doors, we turned off to the side and went through a small door around a corner that I had never noticed before. It led down into a cellar, dimly lit by daylight coming in through a grating on one side of the ceiling. We came up out of the cellar into an unfamiliar narrow stairwell, up several flights of stairs that seemed to mount endlessly. At last we came to the top of the stairs, to a locked door. It must be the garret. Thérion was staggering and struggling under my weight now, however light he had claimed I was at first.

“Can you stand?” he whispered.

“I think so.” I seemed to have only bruises, no broken bones as I had feared.

He set me down onto my feet with a grunt, tugged the coat more snugly around me with both hands, and then reached into the coat’s pocket and drew out a heavy ring of keys. He unlocked the door and beckoned me in. It was a small, cramped servant’s room, furnished with only a narrow iron bed and thin mattress, a table and chair, and a chest.

“We need to get you out of your wet clothes,” he said. “How on earth did you get here without Zéphyr, anyway?” He slipped the coat off my shoulders, and I let him tug off my dress and stays, and my chemise underneath.

“I walked through the forest. I tried to cross the stream, but I fell in. I made it to the other side, but then there were wolves.”

“Wolves!”

I was naked now, and he pulled me close, caressing me and trying to warm me with his arms through his shirt-sleeves.

“My God, your skin is ice-cold. Here.” He went to the trunk next to the wall and pulled out blankets and a soft new chemise. He drew the garment over my head, then made me lie down on the bed and covered me in the blankets. They were as warm as though someone had placed a hot brick between them. “We need some hot tea,” he said.

When I looked over at the table, a steaming pot of tea and a cup were on it, and he poured tea into the cup and handed it to me. I propped myself up and blew on it to cool it. He frowned and shook his head.

“Wolves. I can’t believe you went into the woods alone at night. That was incredibly dangerous and foolish. It’s a miracle you weren’t lost. You must have come in by way of the grotto, too. You could have been drawn down into that tunnel … That was why I wanted you to promise never to go that way alone at night.”

“What is that tunnel? I heard music and saw lights coming from it, but then it seemed they weren’t real. If Zéphyr hadn’t been there, neighing, I’m sure I would have gone down into it.”

He peered at me, as if trying to gauge whether I was prepared to believe him. “Do they tell tales in your village of the demoiselles, the forest fairies in white dresses, who live in caves and govern the springs?”

I shook my head. “Not often. We were forbidden to speak of them – demousélas, they’re called in our patois.”

“My nurse from Maisnie would tell me stories of them when I stayed at the manor as a boy. She meant to warn me away from the spring in the grotto, of course. One was never supposed to go there alone after dark. I’m only grateful no worse harm befell you, if there really were wolves.”

“I dreamt I saw the roi des aulnes again. I dreamt he rescued me from the wolves.”

“Good God. Violaine – Psyché – I have to get used to calling you that. Why did you take such risks?” He sat next to me on the bed and stroked my cheek.

“I love you. Can’t you believe me when I say that? I was afraid you were sick, or hurt, or in danger. I wanted to help you or rescue you if I could.”

“No one can save me now. It’s too late. I made a terrible mistake ten years ago, and it’s my curse to live with it until Death has mercy and takes one or both of us.”

He stood up, put on his coat, and moved to the door. He hesitated, his hand on the doorknob.

“Rest and be well.”

He left me.

 



 

I slept soundly and dreamlessly. When I woke, it was because Aurore was sitting next to me on the room’s solitary wooden chair, smoothing back the hair from my forehead.

“Darling, are you awake?” she said. “You’ve been sleeping all day. It’s almost supper time.”

“Oh, I’m so glad to see you.” I sat up, and she leaned over to embrace me and kiss me on the cheek.

“We thought perhaps you’d gone back to your village to stay. Clio was worried it was because of something Donatien did to you. She knew he’d been hanging around you, and he’d done things to frighten her, too.”

Haltingly, I told her of Donatien’s attack and how I left with Zéphyr in the middle of the night. Her usual pleasant smile slid from her face, and her expression was dead-eyed.

“I can believe it all too well.”

“I hadn’t thought him capable of it,” I said. “Séléné thought his vanity would forbid it, if nothing else. I trusted him.”

She shook her head. “I could have told Séléné, and you too. He didn’t force himself on me. In the end, I let him. But I’m not sure he’d have listened if I’d said no.”

“But what’s happened since I left? Harlequin told me he took Donatien back to Paris and forbade him to come back ever again. And he said his wife came back with him, and she’s here now at Boisaulne.”

“I couldn’t believe it. It turns out Harlequin was the Marquis de Boisaulne himself, all this time. Had you any idea?”

“I did suspect,” I admitted. “But the others had joked about being the Marquis, too.”

“Well, he had me fooled. He fooled everyone, even his own wife. She never knew he had a second marquisat, any more than the rest of us did. But his secret’s out now.”

“What’s she like, his wife?”

“She was … rather chilly toward me. I went to chapel with her this morning. She brought a friend, an abbé who seems to be a sort of counselor or advisor to her. She only got here the night before last, and we met her for the first time at dinner last night. It’s bizarre to imagine her and Harlequin as husband and wife. They’re so unlike each other.”

“You hadn’t met her before in Paris?”

“Not really. I knew of her. I knew they were married, of course, but she never came to my or Séléné’s salons. I didn’t really even associate them with each other in my mind since Harlequin didn’t use his title amongst his friends. The Marquise du Herle, on the other hand, had friends at court and moved in the highest circles. You’d hear sometimes of her entertainments, but I’d never been introduced to her before yesterday.”

“Harlequin seems terrified of her.”

“He told me Donatien had convinced her you and Harlequin had been lovers. That was Donatien’s defense for his appalling actions, apparently. That you were a low courtesan with social ambitions, and you’d seduced first Harlequin and then Donatien. He claimed Harlequin only sent him away out of jealousy. What an awful, sordid business.”

“Harlequin told me she’d threatened him with prison if he crossed her. And he was afraid for my safety if she found out I was here.”

“I don’t know. I suppose she always had a reputation as a – how should I say – a forceful personality? People said she took offense easily and could be vindictive, and liked to throw her influence around. If you weren’t invited to her balls, you were shut out from court circles altogether. Her father’s someone powerful in the government. But I thought Harlequin must love her on some level. He never spoke much of her, but I never heard of him having an affair or anything but the most harmless of flirtations.”

“Is it any wonder he wanted to keep Boisaulne a secret from her, though, if she’s really threatening him with prison?”

“I don’t know what to think of it all. Ordinarily I’d say husbands and wives shouldn’t keep secrets from each other. But I always fibbed and told my own husband I was going to visit my sister in Grenoble when I wanted to come to Boisaulne. And anyway, I can certainly keep it a secret that you’re the one who accused Donatien.”

“Oh, thank you. That’s the saving grace, I suppose – the Marquise doesn’t know what I look like, unless Donatien thought to describe me to her.”

“Right. We’ll all call you Psyché from now on instead of Belle-Âme. Belle-Âme’s gone away for good, as far as any of us know. The story is, you’re an impoverished niece of mine from Grenoble. I’ve written to my sister and asked whether you could come take up a position in my house in Paris as a companion, which is something I’ve felt the need of since my poor husband’s been ailing. And you just arrived from Grenoble today.”

“I’m sorry to put you to so much trouble.”

“It’s not the least bit of trouble. It’s not even a lie about wanting a companion in Paris. You could come with me when we all go back at the end of the week. You could even send for your children, and they could stay with us too. I miss having little ones around.”

My mouth fell open. I hadn’t thought of anything like this. What would it be like in Paris? Could I bear to be so far from my father and sisters? Could I bear to live in such a great city, so far from my mountains with their constantly shifting canvas of green meadows, gray rocks, pine forests, snows, sunrays, and shadows? Would I ever see Thérion or Boisaulne again?

“Well,” she said, “you needn’t decide at once. We have till the end of the week. If you’re well enough to come down, why don’t we get dressed for dinner? We’ll share my rooms, if you don’t mind. Harlequin’s arranging for another bed to be brought in. The Marquise took your rooms, because they were the nicest in the château, apparently.”

I stretched and sat up with my feet on the floor.

“I wonder what happened to my old wet clothes,” I said. “I suppose they’ve disappeared, the way things do here. I’ll have to sneak downstairs behind you in my chemise. Keep a lookout ahead and warn me if anyone’s there.”

“But what’s this?” Aurore asked, looking down at the bare little table.

A circle of silver glinted on it. I breathed out a sigh of relief. “My medallion. I thought I’d lost it.”

“What is it?”

“Oh, nothing. An old good luck charm.” I stood up and put it round my neck.

 



 

Aurore took pains to make sure I was dressed for dinner in a convincingly provincial fashion; she tied a lace kerchief around my neck to cover my bosom. We were the last to arrive at the supper table.

Léonore, the Marquise du Herle, sat at the head of the table, with Thérion at her right hand, and a gentleman I didn’t recognize at her left. She was proportioned like a giantess, taller than anyone else at the table, her face puffy and heavy-jowled, her bosom large enough that she had to tuck a napkin round her neck to avoid spilling soup into her décolletage. She wore a lofty, elaborately curled and powdered wig. There was no telling what her natural hair color was, for she had painted her eyebrows black, and the rest of her face was heavily powdered and made up. For all that, it wasn’t an ugly face, and her coloring and features seemed pretty enough beneath the paint.

Aurore presented me to the company, and everyone else pretended, absurdly, to be meeting me for the first time. It was all any of us could do not to burst out laughing – all except for Thérion, whose face was expressionless, as if he had never known me and didn’t care to.

The Marquise narrowed her eyes at me suspiciously.

The gentleman on her other side was introduced simply as the Abbé. He wore the little collar and short mantle of those Catholic scholars who were neither priests nor monks, but who benefitted from a churchly association without being subject to any requirement of ascetic rigor in their manner of living. He was nearly the opposite of the Marquise in all respects: short where she was tall, rail-thin where she was fleshy, beak-nosed, wearing a short unpowdered wig of the kind ordinary to his profession. While the Marquise flashed a brilliant smile around the room that was belied by the instants when her eyes narrowed like those of a hawk about to strike, or her brightly painted mouth twisted in a bitter, subtle display of contempt, the Abbé had a dreamy, gentle gaze.

“So you’ve just come from Grenoble, have you?” the Marquise said to me. “I can only imagine how vile and provincial it will seem to you once you’ve moved on to Paris.”

Without waiting for a response from me or Aurore, she launched into a long monologue about all the pains she had taken to eradicate every last bit of country style from her house and wardrobe in Paris, including the costs of various articles of furniture and linens. As she went on, the others grew distracted and began to fidget and whisper amongst themselves.

At last she paused for a breath, and the Scotsman said in his mild, genial way, “But you must admit, the climate is much more pleasant here in the summer than in your capital.”

“No. The only thing that ever makes the countryside bearable is the chance to go hunting.”

“Ah, you’re keen on the sport, are you? In my country it’s become quite the fashion for those of noble birth to hunt the fox with hounds. But I must say, I’m fond of the game meat we’ve been eating all summer here. If one’s going to hunt it seems more sensible to me to do it for food.”

“But that’s not at all the point,” the Marquise said. “You’ve never seen magnificence till you’ve been along on a royal hunting expedition. It’s not about meat, it’s about power, opulence, blood, the thrill of the chase, those of us who are noble establishing our mastery over nature. Why, I’ve had the privilege of seeing dozens of deer and boars rounded up and shot – what a thing, to see these prideful beasts brought low! I’m not a bad markswoman myself with a musket, you know. Some might say it’s not ladylike to hunt, but I find it invigorating, and plenty of ladies at court enjoy the spectacle and thrill of it.”

Most of the rest of the dinner was spent with the Marquise droning on about the sport of the hunt.

I whispered to Aurore, “I can see why she’s considered so dangerous. There’s a good risk she’ll bore us all to death.”

Aurore giggled, earning us a dagger-edged glare from the Marquise. I half wanted to laugh out loud, just to spite her, but then I remembered what Thérion had told me about the Marquise throwing the Book of the Rose into the fire. Tears sprang to my eyes at the thought of my lost book and poems, and my lost love, and I had to dab at them with my napkin. Thérion wouldn’t look in my direction at all.

As if she had guessed my thoughts, the Marquise directed a small self-satisfied smile my way.

“But perhaps Madame la marquise could indulge her love of hunting here at Boisaulne,” said Séléné, with what I recognized as a poisonous sweetness. “Harlequin, you must have a few muskets about. The château’s always so well-provisioned with everything one could want.” Her tone was so arch, I seemed to hear a double meaning in every word. I made a mental note to ask her about her late husband’s hunting accident, as I remembered how much joy the memory of it had seemed to bring her.

“It’s a curious thing,” the Marquise said. “My dear husband claims the woods here make for poor hunting. Yet when the Abbé and I spoke to the curé in the village, we heard an entirely different story. It was astonishing. We were told the villagers have free rein to hunt on Boisaulne’s lands as long as they don’t cross the river. Moreover, a considerable amount of meat and skins from this side of the stream goes to the villagers in exchange for a paltry amount of foodstuff, hardly any more than Boisaulne’s guests need to eat.”

Thérion looked pale. “Most of Savoy has been in a state of famine the past few years. Every autumn you see a heartbreaking exodus of boys from the villages setting out to make their way on foot to Paris to become chimney sweeps and servants. Those who don’t find work in the city, far from their parents, become beggars in the slums, or they simply starve. But Maisnie-la-Forêt has kept its children. The famine hasn’t touched here. I’ve simply tried to do the right thing by the villagers.” He had been drinking steadily throughout the meal, and his speech had begun to slur.

The Abbé cleared his throat. “I hardly see how making poachers of the people can truly benefit them in the long run. When their hands are chopped off for thievery, will they thank you?”

“Indeed,” the Marquise said, “one has to think of the welfare of the soul and not just the body. There’ll be no more of this, letting these worthless poachers take advantage of us. It enrages me, just to think of it. It’s lucky I’m finally here to take a hand in things. To imagine, all this time, a mountain hunting manor being neglected and run to ruin as you let people cheat and rob us. And I certainly intend to get a count of the game population in the forest on both sides of the river. The Abbé’s something of an authority on animals. He can help us with it.”

The Abbé chuckled. “Madame la marquise, you flatter me. Of course, I did help the Duc de Montvalère to gather together the animals for his game park. But I think of myself more as a man of science, a naturalist. I’ve been collecting a few samples to study and had meant to collect more live ones when the weather clears up. This could lend itself to survey of game species at the same time, but I must warn that it’s an inexact procedure.”

“Might I accompany you?” the Scotsman asked. “I’d love to see how you do it. I had noticed, too, that there were a great number of species in the region unfamiliar to me. Perhaps I could even be of some assistance to you.”

“Quite. It would be my pleasure. Speaking of a survey, do you know, I was looking at some maps of the area in the Marquis’s study. It appears the domain of Boisaulne borders on several villages of heretics – Vaudois, as they call themselves. Degenerates worse than Huguenots, so wicked even the Calvinists would hardly acknowledge them as among their own. These depraved dregs of humanity ought to have been wiped out with the rest of their kind a century ago. But quite extraordinarily, they’ve been treated with indulgence and particularly protected by the lords of Boisaulne. Apparently there’s a history of the domain being infected with this terrible disease, the idea of so-called religious toleration, which has become such a scourge to the stability of the governments of Europe in our times.”

The Scotsman coughed delicately. “Perhaps you don’t recall, sir, that my own countrymen are Presbyterians for the most part? We’re but a hair’s breadth from being Calvinists ourselves.”

The Abbé smiled his gentle, peaceable smile. “My dear friend, I don’t mean to cause any offense, but I’m firmly of the belief that Protestantism is the greatest calamity that ever befell Europe.”

The Scotsman smiled too. There was admittedly something amusing in hearing such a declaration made in in such a gentle, friendly tone.

“Worse than the Black Plague?” he asked. “Worse than the earthquake of Lisbon?”

“Protestantism has been responsible for the bloodiest of wars and civil conflicts. And that’s not even the half of it. It threatens to destroy our future. It threatens the stability of every government, even those of countries such as your own where it’s embraced as the state religion.”

The Scotsman raised his eyebrows and awaited further elaboration.

“The State and the Christian faith are two sisters,” the Abbé said. “They’ve sometimes quarreled, but they cannot do without each other. The one sustains the other. Legal codes take their precepts from the faith, and the state protects the faith. The faith in turn upholds the state and the monarch’s authority. These twin pillars of order used to rest on a foundation of majestic infallibility, which led by way of blind trust in authority, and renunciation of individual reason, to a set of universal beliefs.”

The Scotsman nodded. “With this I can’t disagree.”

“Then innovators weakened this foundation by undermining it, seeking to dig deeper. How did they do this? They replaced obedience with discussion. They set the arrogance of individual reason and judgment against Catholic judgment and the authority of long tradition.”

The Scotsman looked ready to burst out laughing. But I was still trembling at the mention of the Vaudois villages. I saw how slit-eyed the Marquise was as she listened and how Thérion grew paler still and gulped down another goblet of wine far too quickly and filled it again. Now his eyes looked glazed over and his stare was vacant.

One by one, while the Scotsman and the Abbé had been speaking, Séléné, Ulysse, Clio, and Tristan had each slipped out of the room.

“Excuse me,” I said, folding my napkin in front of me on the table, “but the journey from Grenoble was tiring today. I think I’ll go upstairs now. It’s been such a pleasure becoming acquainted.”

Aurore and the Scotsman excused themselves too. The Marquise, her face now a rictus of the friendliest goodwill, wished us a good evening and we went out, leaving Thérion alone with her and the Abbé.