FORTY-NINE

Debts

 

 

He had brought it all with him – every piece of paper, every letter of commission, every sub-contractor’s account.

‘Of course, most was incurred in the Sologne,’ he said referring to his figures. ‘The unicorn was relatively speaking inexpensive. These last extensions – ah, it’s appalling how the costs of basic materials have soared. It amazes me. But then there’s little precedent for work on the scale that we’ve undertaken, you and I. And all loans secured against land, as you wished.’

‘Against land? Never! You always said…’

Vache laughed good-humouredly. ‘Ah business, business! So many words. I forget. And my brain’s not so young as it was formerly. I forget so much. Show me the paper. Where it’s set down, what I said, and that’s a different matter. That’s always been my policy. Set it down on paper and there you have it: an aide memoire to last till Doomsday …But I do recollect quite clear how you told me your astronomer must be well paid. And as her agent…’ He unearthed one sheet from the dozen he was holding; several others seesawed to the ground. He had, in his capacity as Thibault’s agent, engaged Urania at a salary of one thousand livres per year, taking ninety per cent for his commission.

‘Well and what does it come to? What figure have you invented, you usuring leech?’

‘And then there was the compensation to the Merchant River Guild while the river’s stopped up. I settled it myself – not liking to trouble you when your thoughts were so occupied with creativity. I do so admire an artist – men of taste and discernment like yourself, with a sense of continuity and a thirst for the very best in every respect. You’ll agree I’ve always supplied you the very best of everything you’ve requested – rien meilleur – entertainers, horseflesh, furnishings …How is the crocodile faring? And the tapirs? Of course I haven’t your taste for curios. Very fashionable, I know. But I’m a home-loving man myself. French through and through. Fish-skins hold a limited interest for me – except on the side of my plate, as you can see – I regret!’ He patted his flat stomach which, if he was truly a glutton, concealed the vice as thoroughly as his fawning and cringeing had concealed his lifelong, patient, inexorable intentions.

‘The figure, for Christ’s sake! What do I owe you?’

‘Owe? Oh. It’s all here. Everything’s detailed. In total it comes to – you may have an accountant verify the exact sum – but in round numbers my calculations, allowing for interest accruing on the loan at a percentage of fifteen – very moderate – you won’t find a lower anywhere…’

‘How much?’

‘Say three hundred thousand livres. Secured against thirty thousand acres of the Sablois.’

‘Oho! I see you leave me enough for my grave dog face! Only thirty thousand? You’re too modest in your ambitions! You’ve left me a place to lie down and pull the earth over my head!’

Vache scratched his hair. ‘Have I? You recollect, of course, that your family purchased your freedom from captivity in Spain with a sale of land. I bought two thousand then – the remaining thousand to finance your repairs to the chateau and the lawsuit with that annoying Tolon-Peque girl. To be of assistance to you, if you recall? But naturally, I can afford you the use of your family vault. I’d be an unnatural and a godless man else.’

‘Sebastian! De Puy! Come here! Quick!’ He beckoned urgently to his friend whom he saw coming with a strumpet on each arm and three goblets of wine clasped awkwardly between his hands. Thibault shooed the girls away and put his arm round Sebastian, not just for moral support but to hold his head still and his eyes engaged on Vache. ‘This lamprey thinks he has his head sunk in me up to the gills. He’s bored and bored his way into my substance, he says. He’s only trying to lay claim to Gloriole for settlement of debts!’

Sebastian struggled to disentangle a strand of his hair from around a button of Thibault’s doublet. ‘Is he though? And what does he say they’ve mounted to, those debts?’

‘Three hundred thousand’s the magic number. As good as any, don’t you think? A handsome enough figure in its own right.’ Sebastian whistled appreciatively. ‘I never knew money could be spent so deep.’

‘By fraudsters and embezzlers, why not?’ said Thibault, snapping his fingers in Vache’s face. ‘But you’ll bear witness, won’t you? That he did it all out of love and philanthropy? Begged me for the honour of doing me good? Revelled in the glory that rubbed off against his name? The contempt he had felt for Vache at the time redoubled. Did he honestly believe he could filch an entire comte? ‘I’m afraid, Monsieur Shopkeeper, you’ll find cause in a court of law to wish you’d stopped short of forgery.’ And he ground his heel into the fallen papers on the grass. ‘Look Sebastian. Find me a paper with my signature forged upon it, before the villain tries to withdraw and destroy the evidence. They boil forgers in vats of oil, Monsieur Lamprey. Were you aware of that when you took this perverse and wreckless little adventure into your worm-eaten head?’ De Puy thrust two of the spilled goblets of wine into their hands to be free to stoop and pick up the crumpled, muddied sheets. ‘Well? Do you find my name signed in pledge of any land to secure a loan?’

‘No. No. Nowhere.’

‘Oh come now, Vache. Try to gull me with unsigned papers? Has this full moon turned you dog-mad? What kind of a…’

‘Only mine,’ said Sebastian. ‘He’s forged your signature?’

‘Well, let me …No. No. My name’s only where I set it down on your behalf, acting as your signatory.’ He knocked his own cup up against theirs with a tinny clash. ‘But before you sully the night with business, let me ask you – on a more cheerful note – to drink a toast. Just one toast. Well, more than one if the fancy takes you, but so …To me. To Sebastian de Puy. This being a night of great moment and magnitude. Yes.’

‘De Puy, you’re drunk.’

‘I mean my betrothal.’

‘Your what?’

‘Don’t I, Joshua? My betrothal, to the good Councillor’s excellent daughter. But you’re not drinking, dear old friend Thibault. Dear old companion-in-captivity. Dear old wine-butt confidant!’ There were tears glittering in Sebastians’s eyes, but they were tears of hysteria and not remorse.

‘You’ve plotted with Vache to strip off my land?’ said Thibault. His voice was high and breathless with disbelief. His eyes searched de Puy’s face for a landmark, some means of reorientating himself within an unknown place. ‘You’ve schemed with this worm here, taken his scurvy daughter for a bribe? You’ve betrayed the Sablois into his hands? For why? Does he own your soul?’

Sebastian waved his hand airily, intoxicated on the store of words he had kept hidden for so very long. ‘I’m sorry, cousin. Nothing personal, you understand. Call it a family tradition. Goes back generations. Generations of contempt. Humiliation. Grubby farmsteading. My father …grandfather …his before him. The pattern’s held good these hundred and fifty years. Always ambitious for a taste of inheritance. Never climbing higher than beggary. I was raised on covetousness, in truth. At my mother’s breast, I was fed on it. Always one remove from inheriting – next-in-line – always kept down by your sheer bloody refusal to die out. “Pull him down.” “Restore the family fortunes.” That’s our family motto. Seemingly it goes back to the English wars, though more surely it goes back to your turd of a grandfather. He did gain a grip but then he promptly shed his name. Nothing personal though, Thibault. No great personal wrong to avenge, nothing so grand. Though I’ve a great curiosity to know how it feels to be treated like a man instead of a hearth-hound. So there it is. The de Puys back in the family title-seat. No loss of continuity. It should be a comfort to you that – knowing there’s a piece of family at Gloriole even after you’re not. Santé!’

He was just like Vache. A whole life given over to the cause of vengeance, and for ills Thibault was not even aware of having done him. Thibault turned his face away from de Puy and looked at the merchant. ‘You’d better give him a plot of land for dowry, Monsieur Lamprey. Even Judas Iscariot must have his Field of Blood …Ah, but you’d not’ve read the New Testament to know it, would you, Jewboy.’

Calmly now. It was no great matter. Already Thibault was making adjustments within his head. The two must be mad to stray so far from the house lights, into so shadowy a part of the garden and to stand so close to the moat. One does not hold a lamprey off by the tail. One cuts it off close at the throat. It was plain as the inconstant moonlight. The men must both die. He would hold that head, that square, jowled head with its ugly teeth and its dagged turban – he would hold it under the water of the moat, push his fingers through its eyes, reach so far into its skull that he could close his fist around the calculating, insinuating leech of a brain.

Vache pulled at his nose thoughtfully with two fingers and plucked at his top lip. ‘I take it you use that for a term of abuse, my lord Comte? “Jewboy”? Now that does surprise me, I have to admit. Given that I take Communion as often as the next Christian man. And given your bloodstock.’

And as for de Puy …He would erase his farm from the maps of Sablois as if it had never been, and wrap him in hessian for a gravecloth …Thibault’s mind sailed back, on streams of liquored sentimentality, through all the times when Sebastian had sat at his drinking elbow and they had laughed the creeping world to scorn.

Vache was still talking, still talking, saying …‘confided the truth of it to me on his deathbed. How my aunt gave birth by proxy for the Chatelaine Vérité – the one they call just “The Chatelaine”. Or “The Madwoman”. Or “The Bastard”. Not in our household, mind. Oh, the name’s held in great respect there, I might tell you. I believe my grandfather had a great tenderness towards her, you know? Towards your grandmother. Or that’s to say the one credited with bearing your father. She’d’ve liked to disown the boy -she tried with all her might – but her lover prevented her. Blackened her. Lied before a court of law. That’s your grandfather, Cyr de Gloriole. Cyr de Puy before he sloughed off the name like the beetle he was. Isn’t that right, son-in-law? So you see, all this acrimony, all this talk of Jewishness – all so very inappropriate between us. After all, I am kin to you, and not so very far removed. And we’ve both left our Jewishness behind us, haven’t we? No wonder I’ve always held you in my heart with such affection.’

Thibault stooped down and grasped a handful of water and splashed his own face. Perhaps he thought it would wake him out of the nightmare. Perhaps he thought it would wash the flesh off his bones, the blood out of his veins, the contamination out of his soul. He knew it was true. He denied it as damned lies, but all the time his lips were moving he could feel the Jewishness inside him, growing like a cancer, poisoning his noble blood, strangling the letters of his name, smudging his title. He could almost feel himself falling as the Truth nudged him out of his hereditary place in Heaven among the white-robed aristocracy of saints crowned in familial coronets of light. Vache was relishing his hour of triumph, but he had no concept, none whatsoever, of the depth of torment he had achieved for Thibault.

Yes, he had used the word ‘Jew’ as a term of abuse. The name of any other animal in Creation would have served as well to throw at Vache. Thibault was an anti-semite in an age of anti-semites, without time to spend on reasoning out why. But if, in that moment, he could have found the particular recess of his body in which the offending foulness lay, he would have taken a knife and cut it out. He wished even now to cut off his hands that they might never make a gesture deriving from Cecille Vache. He wished to castrate his son that the mutant stock of Gloriole should not survive to pollute the pure stock of Aristocracy. He was a Jew who had aspired to a nobility which nothing but birth could bestow. He wanted to crucify the Barabbas in himself.

All he said was, ‘Lies. I wouldn’t expect other from you. Lies. Fraud and lies. I’ll see you in the law courts to keep my land, and I’ll see you in Hell after, Monsieur Bourgeois. By these eyes, I will. As for my chateau…’

‘As for the chateau, we have you blockaded,’ said de Puy with an air of puzzlement, as if he did not see how Thibault could have overlooked it. ‘You can’t come or go without crossing over the Councillor’s land. And if he chooses to toll the road, who’s to say how high he mightn’t set the toll? If this were chess we’re playing, this would be the time to “castle”, eh? But since it isn’t…’ He drank down the wine left in his cup, his sniggers making bubbles that burst against his cheeks.

‘As for my chateau,’ said Thibault deliberately, pulling de Puy so close up against him that the goblet pressed deep into the man’s diaphragm and left him powerless to speak,’ since you say I’m a Jew, it won’t startle you to learn that I’ll never again let hogs and swine set foot inside, nor never countenance the sight of them unless it’s with their throat cut!’

He tore himself away from them like a sheep from a toil of brambles. He could have sworn he was bleeding. The land, after all, had been flayed off his chateau. How could it live without its flesh? The house too would die. It was true what Sebastian had said. He was blockaded and all means of income were in the hands of his enemies. A year from now his situation would be such that Vache could buy the chateau from him for a handful of sous, a mess of potage.

He must find his son. He could not tell why, but he needed to see a face which would give the lie to this waking nightmare, one face which would not unmask before his very eyes into a grinning grotesque. He ran through the gardens, looking for Thomas with the desperation of a parent for a lost toddler – pushing, barging, his breath sobbing in his throat, the name held between his teeth. ‘Thomas. Thomas. Thomas.’

And Vache came after him. Wherever he looked, wherever he turned the bend of a pail-mail alley, Vache was approaching him – a finger raised, a hola! in his throat, hobbling along as fast as he could go on an arthritic hip, trying to add some codicil to the horror he had just scrawled across Thibault’s life.

Thibault ran from him. He was the black dog that had pursued him in childhood nightmares, the brown mud of the Sologne welling up to engulf him. He ran like a man demented, searching for his son, searching for Thomas so that he could go home in company. Just go home. To the library, to the stove, to the bed whose curtains closed him round like a little hero’s pavilion, to the small domestic corners of his chateau.

He must have run in circles, for Vache was quite equal to him. ‘A moment, Comte! A word!’ All the old mannerisms of humility were in evidence again, the stooping forwards, the raised eyebrows, the simpering mouth, the petty-petitioning voice. He folded one hand into the other as Thibault allowed him at last to catch up. One hand inside the other, as communicants hold the holy water for later, secret consumption. ‘You were too quick for me! I was afraid you’d go home without me catching you. Do let me crave a word out of the hearing of Monsieur de Puy. I would’ve said it before, but he was upon us before I could say my fill.’

‘I do assure you, eel, you have said my fill and plenty besides.’

‘Oh, but of course, of course, of course I don’t mean to take your chateau from you! It was never my intention! The Sablois is a comte! What’s a comte without a comte? Pray calm yourself, my lord. No, indeed. I don’t wonder you were put out by my unpolished opening.’

So. It was a jest. It had all along been a practical joke, probably orchestrated by de Puy. Thibault laughed. Not funny now, but in a little while, when his heart was restored like a statue to its pediment, he would appreciate the humour of it. He admitted to himself, he had never enjoyed the warmest sense of humour. He tried to laugh again. Yes, it was easier that time.

‘There’s a ready solution to our difficulties,’ said Vache. ‘It would please me so much more than lawsuits and destraints and so forth. Blockades indeed! What are we doing talking of blockades and tolls? We friends? We men with children.’

He stopped there. But it was only like a fiddler stopping in the middle of a well-known phrase. The brain continued it on irresistibly to the last note. Thibault clasped his hands together and raised a cheer of congratulation. He slapped his knees and tweaked Vache by both cheeks, then took the dagged cap out of his hands and placed it back on Joshua’s head. ‘My dear sir! Well, well, well! I have you! you are the soul of clarity! Would to God I had understood you earlier! Yes, yes, yes! I have you! Indeed I do! You mean our children to marry?’ A smile twitched Vache’s face. ‘My Thomas and you …your…’

‘Germaine.’

‘So! You do think like me after all! Noblesse de robe is no noblesse at all! Not by the side of the noblesse d’épée – the noble sang, the blood noble! You mean us to join our bloodlines and be related in true and earnest! Father and father-in-law. Joint parents, as it were. Husband and wife!’

Oh, Vache wanted it. One look at his face confirmed that. As Caligula wished to be a god, as Icarus wished to fly as high as the sun, as Midas wanted gold, Vache wanted his daughter to be Chatelaine of Gloriole, his grandson to be born to the title and lineage, Comte de Gloriole-sur-Sablois. He flinched from Thibault’s noisy cheering and dancing, and his mouth hung a little ajar, unsure whether the smile on it was premature. But he wanted it, just as much as Thibault had ever wanted to win the King’s favour or make Gloriole the finest chateau in the Valley of the Loire. He wanted it.

‘And you and your daughter would come to Gloriole, and the children reign together in nuptial vigour, and we two old men could dawdle out our lives in the shade of the orangery, drinking claret on the terrace, and – who knows? – shuffle our slippers to Court sometimes to lend the King the benefit of our sage advice. Tell me…do you have more than one daughter, or shall we be disappointing poor Monsieur de Puy yet again?’

‘I regret. I did rather mislead Monsieur de Puy in my eagerness to enlist his invaluable help. To have his co-operation when it was needed. I do have another daughter. But not for the likes of him, I think. Still, I’m sure some other small compensation can be found for him.’ Still Vache’s small eyes moved nervously between half-closed lids. This exuberant, capering, roaring man seemed taller than ever, physically awesome: he set Vache’s sharp-tuned nerves jangling.

Just then, a monkey came leaping along the alleyway of hedges, one paw down, trailing diaper bands and a leather leash. It leapt up at Thibault, shrieking, teeth bared. He thought it was a demon come to carry his soul away to Hell.

But the King came in pursuit of it, trailing a retinue of giggling youths, all frocked and powdered. ‘Ah, you see how Our baby takes after Us!’ cried the King, striking a declamatory posture. ‘Does it not show our excellent taste in men?’ The party was too far advanced for jealous rancour. The youths all laughed unreservedly and clustered round Thibault to recover the monkey from where it clung to his hair and ruff, turning round and round and round till it had manacled itself in the leash. They lifted it down, though its long fingers clung on tight and had to be prised open. ‘Tsk, tsk, friend Thibault,’ the King reprimanded him, slapping him on the wrist. ‘You may have her after.’ He made a stage-grand show of looking furtively over each shoulder, then whispered behind his hand in Thibault’s ear. ‘I have a little bitch puppy dog is better by far. You shall prove if I’m a liar.’

And for this Thibault had built and planned and laboured, engaged his every intellectual power, obsequiously ingratiated himself with the Queen. For this he had buried a year of his life in the swamps of the Sologne. For this he had hunted unicorn under an African sky. For this he had hunted werewolves under a winter moon, for this he had seen his wife leap to her death. For this he had killed his son. He knew in that moment how God felt on Good Friday when He saw on what He had wasted Creation.

The King turned to Vache. ‘What? Not gone yet, Councillor? Pray don’t let Our little soiree keep you too late from your bed. We want the Comte here. By Lucy, We do!’

After Henry had gone, Vache was genuinely agitated. ‘I’ve kept you from the King. I mustn’t detain you. But if we could just settle…’

‘Naturally! When I tell him the nature of our contract, the King will understand perfectly well why our business couldn’t wait another day.’

‘Then there is a contract?’ exclaimed Vache.

‘But of course, man! What? Undone and remade in a single night? There’s cause enough to celebrate, sure! …One small amendment, though. I would make one small amendment to your eminent plan – or should I say your plan for eminence?’

Immediately, Vache was all guards up, bristling with suspicion, too close to his goal to dare believe in it.

‘Might I suggest that I, and not my son, should marry your excellent daughter? No delay, then, for you in seeing a Vache made Comtesse de Gloriole. No risk of your dying with your ambitions unsatisfied …Come now! Don’t gawp at me, man! Am I not a widower? Am I not eligible to marry howsoever I please? Tonight, why not? Tomorrow, anyway.’

‘Your honour…’ Vache was overcome. He put three fingers into his mouth as though he were licking honey off them, then was confused to find them there when he came to speak. ‘Could we? Could you? Oh my soul! Oh, my good body and soul!’ He could not help commending his daughter’s intelligence, youth, sweetness of nature – hawking her to him like the salesman who reflexly continues his patter after too easy a sale. Thibault held up a silencing hand.

‘Bring her on. You saw the Dragon of Saumur? Your girl can hardly compete with such ugliness and sourness of nature.’

‘Oh indeed! She’s a good girl! An excellent! Well, you know her qualities already!’

‘Oh, I’ve met her, have I? God strike me, but I can’t call to mind that particular privilege.’

‘Oh yes, oh yes. And she’s done you good service, though you’d never have credited her genius if I’d told you she was mine, ha-ha. Far more talented than her father. Far more, ha-ha.’

‘ “Germaine” you say? I can’t recall…’

‘Oh but you know her by her professional name, of course. You know her by the name of Urania.’

He did find Thomas at long last. He was with the astrologer woman, which Vache thought was marvellously fortuitous since they could be informed both together of the evening’s remarkable outcome.

‘No, no.’ said Thibault, trying to restrain the merchant’s outburst of joy. ‘Don’t speak of it straight off. I must take steps to commend myself to your daughter.’

But Vache was close to the lodestone of his ambition, powerless to change course. ‘Germaine! Germaine! It’s concluded! It’s decided! Tonight I’ve secured you a happiness you’ll bless me for on your deathbed! You shall be Chatelaine of Gloriole, as I’ve always promised! Come and give your father a kiss. I’ve matched you to the finest husband in the Touraine!’

She drew herself up so tall that her white neck was swan-curved, and the hollows of her throat deepened. She turned on Thomas a smile so incandescent that his cheeks flushed as at the opening of a stove door. ‘At last!’ she said very softly. ‘Finally.’ And she hurried to kiss her father and thank him. She could not quite bring herself to look Thibault in the eye, but as she crossed the ground in front of him and her glance skirted his feet she said. ‘Did I not say I’d known it all my life? That I’d come to Gloriole, monsieur?’ In her delight she moved like a peacock, her hems lifting and falling over the grass. She returned to Thomas and took hold of one hand between both hers. Haven’t I always counselled you not to lose heart, my love?’ she whispered.

The flush did not fade from Thomas’s cheek. ‘Vache is your father? But your surname – you told me your …You’re Vache’s daughter? She laughed with pride at her well-kept secret.

‘Ah, but our plan is a little amended,’ said Vache hurriedly, perceiving a complication he had known nothing of. He spoke heavily, pointedly, for his daughter’s benefit – a signal that she should not jeopardize their good luck. ‘The Comte here has expressed the desire to marry you himself, and of course I wouldn’t stand in the way of such a chance for you to rise up, Germaine.’

‘The Comte?’ she said, as if in need of translation. ‘But it was always going to be…’

‘You, Father?’

‘In settlement of outstanding debts. Councillor Vache has spent a world of time in arranging this marriage. A world of time. It’s been an evening of revelations, I have to tell you, son. But there it is. My hand given on it. My word as a Christian nobleman. I crave the joy of marrying Mademoiselle Urania …Germaine, is it not? Providing she can cast a favourable horoscope and light on the best and most auspicious day.’

‘What?’ said Urania.

‘Top grade!’ exclaimed Vache. ‘She shall” She shall”’ he pawed at the air, trying to catch hold of his daughter’s hand to draw her to his side, but she was a world away, lost among her disappointments. ‘Tomorrow she shall cast a horoscope to settle the date, and on that day – well! – I shall light a victory bonfire with these!’ he tapped his breast. So many papers lined it that it sounded hollow, empty. It was Vache’s way of asserting one last time that his was the ultimate power, that the feudal pyramid had been overturned and that he was at its peak now, master of Gloriole.

‘Oh, she shall do it tonight, by all that’s sacred.’ Said Thibault peaceably, softly, incontrovertibly. ‘The days are gone for patience, surely? And the finest astrologer in the world can hardly work by daylight. If we go now, she may yet have time to sight an omen speaking yea or nay for the match. Come, lady. Let us become acquainted on a more agreeable footing than previously. I dare swear I’ve not always treated you to the attention your beauty deserved. But you must own, I’ve been at a disadvantage all these years. I mean to say: you were aware of what lay in store for my future. By the rules of your profession, you should surely have told me!’

She could not raise even the most wan of smiles. ‘Begging your indulgence, sir. I didn’t read that knowledge in the stars, and I was not employed as your fortune-teller but as your astronomer.’ She turned towards Thomas to see when he would speak up, when he would bear witness to the impossibility of such a marriage. But he seemed too stunned to speak. His face had taken on the inexpressiveness of stone and glass and lead.

‘But what of the King?’ asked Vache anxiously. ‘The King wants you!’

‘The King?’ said Thibault. ‘What’s he?’ Then, to dispel the look of horror on Vache’s face, ‘What’s he, I mean, in comparison with securing my house and future happiness? Shall we go, lady?’

The fact that Thomas would say nothing did not mean that Urania could not. As they rode towards Gloriole in the darkest watch, Urania said to Thibault, ‘My father always said he intended me to marry your son, Thomas.’

‘Then I’m glad the evening held some surprises for you, also. Now you shall be raised to the rank of Comtesse immediately and not be put to the tedium of awaiting my death.’

‘Oh that’d be no great hardship,’ she assured him hurriedly. ‘I hope that I’m not so very vainglorious as to chase after worldly titles.’

‘I am the more fortunate, then.’ Thibault sealed the subject so closed that they had ridden another mile before Urania dared reopen it.

‘I fear I was so much of that impression that I gave your good son certain …encouragements to care for me. And I allowed my heart to attach itself to him.’

He turned and looked at her, an equestrian bronze turning its head to address a passer-by. ‘You mean you’re not a virgin? Pray don’t be afraid that I’ll hold it against you. The times are such that I’d have been more surprised if you were. What’s a momentary disappointment in these times of …readjustment?’

‘I meant no such thing! Of course I’m…’ Breathlessly she gabbled it out, her own revelation in a night of revelations, her long-awaited coup: ‘I mean, sir, that we’re married already. Your late wife witnessed it – gave us her blessing.’ The face did not react. ‘So. If we could return to my father’s first solution, you won’t be troubled with the burden of an unhappy woman for a wife and your dear son will be well reconciled to the…’

‘Oh, but I was burdened with an ugly and strident woman in my first marriage. Alongside that, it seems to me no trouble in the world to be burdened with an unhappy one. Pray don’t fret on that account. And still a virgin? Strange marriage! Worse and worse for Thomas. Better and better for me. If it’s the matter of vows that worries you, I can reassure you there, too. I had it proved to me this evening that I’m a Jew. So I think all contracts between God and my house are quite annulled, don’t you? That surely holds good for Thomas as well?’

‘But we love each other!’

‘Ah. That.’ Thibault stood up in his stirrups to look for some directional bearing in the increasing light. He said most earnestly, ‘It’s the brickwork, you know. I couldn’t get it out of the brickwork.

But you mustn’t concern yourself, my dear. I do believe the spoor are entering a dormant period.’

This bizarre, incomprehensible remark so unnerved Urania that she shut her open mouth with a slight snap and allowed her horse to fall back into the wake of the Comte, following the flickering pattern of the chequered horsecloth creasing and uncreasing.

Only a very few stars were still visible against the pallor of morning by the time they crossed the causeway (now levied with cliffs of new buildings) over the drained and lightless moat. The statues hailed them, arms raised in a perpetually servile salute, called out silent salutations of ‘Noel! Noel! Largesse! Largesse!’ The caryatid women beckoned them, only the tips of their buxom breasts standing out beyond their recessed niches to be stained milk-white by moonlight.

They dismounted by the door of the observatory and he had her go ahead of him up the potence steps. While she unrolled a current map of the summer sky and laid out her rules and charcoals, he patiently prepared for a long wait by laying down his cloak for a seat on the draughty plank floor of the loft.

She was nervous, agitated. The tools looked like strangers to her. She made a show of scanning the sky and checking her maps, of looking for portents and phenomena. But her nerves and concentration were jarred by the sudden alteration in other people’s plans for her lifetime and by his impressive, oppressive presence.

‘Might I be of assistance?’ he asked after watching her every movement for ten minutes. ‘I know full well what you’ll tell me at the end, so might I not save you the energy of invention?’

‘My lord?’

‘You’ll tell me that the stars are not propitious. That they speak an urgent need for you to marry with my son. That such a union would be blessed with a veritable constellation of little ones. That nothing good would come…’

‘Sir, I…’

‘The stars are entirely right, of course.’ 

‘Sir?’ Though her back was turned to him, she sensed him get up.

‘Do you have a sister?’

‘Yes sir. Two. Why?’

‘Excellent. In that case, I offer you a choice. Between love and vainglory. I’m touched, you see, by your brave declaration of love for my son. But as your long acquaintance with this house must’ve taught you, I’m cursed by a peevish nature. I take disloyalty hard. Would you say that was true?’

‘I—’

‘Yes. So. Imagine my feelings, now I find my son and heir’s married behind my back – deceitfully – with his mother’s connivance. I’ll own I do rather choke on that. My argentier make a mock of me, yes. My best friend gull me – not the first time in the history of the world. My astronomer keep me darkling – well and what’s new? But my own son? Ah now. That’s something different. No matter. I must practise Acceptance. I must acknowledge the mystical power of Love, I suppose,’ he said banally. ‘I must consider how to embrace this new development. So what say we divide gain and loss evenly between us, Thomas and I? I disinherit him of Gloriole but give him back his bride. That’s to say, I marry your sister.’

‘My sister?’

‘A fair compromise, eh? Or you can marry me. Consider! How long can I last on this earth? And with my death you can pass to Thomas as a part of his inheritance …Not as his wife, of course. Oh no. We must join Gloriole to the noble house of Vache, mustn’t we? Your father insists. So Thomas must marry your sister. What d’you say? Comtesse of Gloriole, or a blissful but impoverished bride with the man of your heart’s choosing. Which is it to be?’ He allowed her time to think.

‘You’re making sport of me!’ she protested, but he assured her that he was perfectly serious. She must choose. Gloriole or true love. ‘I’m very fond of my sister,’ she said at last.

‘What does that mean?’

At first even she did not seem to know what it meant. Her nervous, scribbling hand was gradually, unconsciously obliterating the constellation of Gemini on her map within a charcoal whorl.

‘She’d be in such very good hands with Thomas, don’t you think? He is so very gentle. And you…’

‘Can I believe my luck? A willing bride after all? I’m sorry you were about to say: “and me”?’

She dropped her head forward almost penitentially, turning it so as to look at him out of the corner of half-closed eyes. ‘It’s well approved – you are the most handsome man in the whole Touraine.’

So she wanted it, too. She wanted Gloriole. As her father and his father before him. There was, after all, no disease more hereditary in the whole world than the desire to own the Chateau of Gloriole-sur-Sablois.

Thibault laughed: at least there is no other name for the animal roar that emerged from behind the rigidly impassive face. She was frightened to look round at the face that made it. She turned her back again and stared at the map.

‘Praise God. She loved me all along!’

‘Well, I always…’

She sensed rather than heard the ringing rasp of his sword being drawn. Her hands closed over the sides of the desk and, unaccountably, she could not unfasten them.

‘But whatever would the stars say?’ He asked with exaggerated awe. ‘Do tell me what the stars would say to it.’

‘The stars, my lord, are silent. They have no voice.’ She said it without breathing or turning her head.

‘Oh, but that’s absurd!’ His arm came over her shoulder and he picked up her metal rule. Then one by one, as he ran from window to window, he smashed the panes to let in the noise of the stars. ‘Don’t you hear them? Such shouts of protest! Such Cassandra wails of warning! So piercing! So deafeningly loud! What, and you can’t hear them? Out there – set in their ordered spheres by the hand of God, never to digress or falter or fail? Listen to them! Well and how could they countenance such an abomination? Such an aberration?’

‘As bigamy, sir? She whispered.

‘As marriage between lord and serf. As betrayal of a sacred trust into the hands of a tinker. As pollution of the noble sang. As nobility bending its knee to a bourgeois!’

‘Sir, there’s good precedent…’

‘For sin? Ay, plenty of precedent for sin. There’s damnation for it, too. How credulous can a man be?’ Once civilized pretence was done with, nothing civilized remained in Thibault. ‘Does your creeping maggot of a father really think he can extort his way to nobility? Doesn’t he know he’ll never rise higher than the noose draws him?’

‘You seemed content, my lord…’ The feet of the desk actually lifted off the ground, so rigid were her arms and back, and so tight her grip.

‘Yes, well, “seeming” is the sport in fashion, mademoiselle, as you must confess yourself. As your father has taught me. Don’t think me rash. I gave it deep consideration as we rode. I’m not an impulsive man.’

‘What will you do to me?’

‘I’m not a reckless man, as I say. I have a royal friend who’ll teach your father the sum of his true worth.’

‘You won’t kill me! Pray God you won’t.’

‘The King himself will settle my debts. Then plant Monsieur Vache in the outermost colony of Hell to boil in a vat of forger’s gold for ay-and-everlasting.’

‘Yes, yes. As you like. Pay or don’t pay. Good, good! I’m happy the King’ll pay. I’m happy he’s such a good friend. I’m glad of it. Settle your debts or don’t. Your quarrel’s with my father, not me! I never liked this way of doing things. I always said he should be more open!’ She went on talking, even as the tip of his sword cut one by one through the laces of her dress, then through every strand of her hair. The fallen curls, the broken laces made cabbalistic signs on the plank floor.

Yes. He would go back to the King. He would abase himself to whatsoever degree ensured the redemption and survival of Gloriole-sur -Sablois. The proud, the noble Comte Thibault could not have done it. But the bastard son of a Jewish slut could do it – could do what was called for. Now that he understood how two strains of man had occupied the one body, he could make better sense of things in his past. He was full of enlightenment. He understood, for instance, the perversion of love he had felt for the Saumur woman, the affection he had felt for his poltroon of a son, the hardship – yes, now he could confront it – the difficulty he had had in killing the traitor Kempis. He was two men in one: the common, vulgar weakling, Jewish Thibault and the true Comte de Gloriole, the nobleman, the demi-god, the upright and uncompromised chevalier outsoaring the dirt, the squalor, the sinful and the foul. No matter. He would subjugate one to the other. The Jew could be made to serve the aristocrat.

‘Unrobe, woman.’

‘Oh God. Oh pray God you won’t kill be for being obedient to my father? I had no choice!’

‘I gave you the choice and you damned yourself. Blood shows, sure enough. You’re a piece of your father. Unrobe’

‘I was a true astrologer, wasn’t I? I knew my science. There was no fraud in my reading of the stars?’ The swordtip pierced the stiff buckram of her bodice with a loud popping. She dropped her shoulders forward and allowed the open dress to fall away. ‘But I was a prisoner to my father’s plotting, sir! He used me!’

‘Then I’ll use you, too. I mean to use you as common women were meant to be used. And afterwards, you can carry a message to your father. Tell him, let him send his account and I’ll settle it. I’ll send money enough to bury him and interest enough for him to choke on. Just as you are now, you can carry the message. Then let him sell you onto whosoever he can, once you’ve walked to Plessis in the noblesse de robe God gave you!’

Her scream was the loudest noise the observatory had ever contained. It spiralled down the ash-lined cylinder of the building, then spiralled up again to the rafters, intermingling voice with echo, echo with voice. It unsettled the scarlet parrots roosting in the uppermost beams, and the roof-void so amplified the noise that it seemed angels or demons must be carrying the old dovecote away.

He should have left her her hair; it would have given him something to hold on to. As it was, she was a dirty white comet whirling him round – ice-slippery and insubstantial. She pulled out of his hands and ran, her eyes closed in panic, round the precipitous edge of the platform. When she slipped, and one foot plunged over the rim, he did nothing to help her pull herself back on to the splintery planks, but when she had done so, he was waiting for her, scraping his swordtip across the only pane of glass still intact. The noise made the parrots buffet their combs against the conical roof in a frenzy of alarm.

She pulled away from him again, grabbing at the rope from which the cast-iron timepiece swung, darting behind the great sphere of the astrolabe which hung from a chain centrally over the platform. As he feinted to right and left, taunting her with the ease of his conquest, the futility of resisting – ‘Am I not the most handsome man in the Touraine, after all?’ – the astrolabe spun between her hands, first east then west. The seemly and proper rules of the universe were out of joint in that claustrophobic little loft. With one last desperate shriek of terror, she pushed the iron globe at him – a puny, futile push that far from injuring him only swung the thing within reach of his hands. He caught it at the apogee of its swing.

‘Fate, you see, is not immutable,’ he sneered at her. ‘A man needn’t submit to events. Isn’t that what your studies taught us? A man may choose whether to be the cat’s-paw of a tinker or the favourite of a king. Whether to marry a greedy whore or drive her out of his castle with her maidenhead between her hands.’ And to prove his strength he pushed the astrolabe, on its chain, in a wide, circling orbit of the platform; one that cut her off from the staircase, one that made her duck down with her arms over her head. Round went the sphere, the air humming through its iron cage, the chain grating in its hasp with an ugly kind of music. As it completed its orbit, Thibault put up his hands and stopped it dead. The next moment, his face was all changed – masked – visored in a scarlet tourney-helmet of sheeny feathers, chevroned with white and red, and braided with blood.

Throughout the white empire of Gloriole, the parrots had multiplied and expanded their territory with an imperialist aggression. Now, in niches of blue -black tile, in pediments of Carrara marble, in lamp-holders and tie-beam joints, in cellars and attics, stables and halls, on stairwells and in the cast-iron contrivances of the observatory, they had withdrawn to an annual quietness to breed and raise their young. The particular parrot brood that had made its home in the astrolabe prized their domestic peace. When they found themselves shaken and spun about and deafened by laughter and screaming, they naturally retaliated. Without respect for his rank, without sensitivity to his feelings, without admiration for his personal beauty, they mobbed the Comte de Gloriole and ripped up his exquisite face.