Chapter Fifteen

In the nursery Nicolas was crying. The air was warm and heavy with the smell of fever sweat, and his hair was matted to his head and stuck up damply when he rubbed his eyes or his pink face. Anne had built up the fire, so that as soon as Marie Catherine stepped into the children’s room she could feel the band of her veil adhering to her forehead, the heavy crepe of her dress turning sticky under her arms and down her ribs. She tore the veil off and shook the pins out of her plait. Sophie was sleeping limply in the bed beside Nicolas, her face flushed feverish pink.

‘Nicolas, darling.’ She kissed his forehead, and he cried louder.

‘He’s been like that the past half-hour,’ Anne said. ‘He cries, I can’t do anything – he’s vomited his whole stomach up.’

‘Maman, it’s too warm.’ Nicolas squirmed in her embrace and whined pitifully.

‘Where’s the doctor? Someone get him.’

‘Madame, we called when Sophie fell ill. At once. He hasn’t come yet.’

‘Then tell the coachman he’s to go back out and fetch him.’

‘He should be—’ Anne began, but Marie Catherine cut her off with a gesture.

‘Now! And where’s Jeanne?’

Anne crumpled under her gaze, as she did when anyone spoke to her sharply. Madame de Cardonnoy barely noticed. She was smoothing Nicolas’s hair back over his forehead, then passing to Sophie, who stirred miserably in her sleep when her mother touched her face. Anne hung in the doorway, waiting to be dismissed. There were nervous tears starting in her eyes.

‘Well, go! What are you waiting for? And send Jeanne.’

Marie Catherine had already forgotten that Jeanne had been sick when she left that morning. Anne was gentle with the children, but it was Jeanne’s sense that Marie Catherine trusted. Once, when Sophie had had an attack of stomach sickness, Jeanne had visited some wise woman she knew in Paris and returned with a powder that, mixed into a little broth, helped her hold down her food. And, unlike Anne, she wouldn’t be afraid.

Marie Catherine pulled Sophie’s bedclothes tighter under her chin, checked the window to make sure it was securely latched and then drew the curtains over it, which made the room dim but reduced the chill that emanated from the windowpanes. The fire cast long fingers of shadow up the walls and made the silhouettes of Sophie’s dolls move and whisper to each other.

The baron had lain bloody in the salon downstairs, and now, Marie Catherine thought, his ghost was here to claim his right to his children. She wished she could reject that thought, but it had occurred too suddenly and vividly.

‘Maman, it’s so warm.’ Nicolas’s crying had subsided, and now he just sniffled, twisting in his bed until the sheet made a rope around him. Marie Catherine found a basin of water that Anne had left on the dressing table, dipped a cloth in it, lit a candle to chase away the shadows and began to sponge off his forehead.

‘Hush, Nicolas, sleep.’

‘Everything hurts.’

‘What’s happening?’ In the next bed, Sophie sat up on her pillow and then collapsed backwards as if she couldn’t support her own weight. ‘Where did the cat go?’

She had pulled the covers around her head as if to hide in them.

‘What’s wrong?’ Marie Catherine asked, wondering wildly where the servants were.

‘I’m so thirsty, my throat hurts so much,’ Sophie whispered and then, squeezing her eyes shut, ‘I had bad dreams.’

Marie Catherine brought her a cup of water, and Sophie took a small sip and then pushed it away.

‘I can’t.’

‘Don’t be afraid, it will be all right. Here, take your doll.’ The doll with the broken hand, Sophie’s favourite, was lying halfway under the bed. Marie Catherine tucked her in next to Sophie’s pillow, and the girl curled around her and clenched the edge of the broken porcelain in her fist. Marie Catherine wanted to peel her fingers back, in case she cut herself. But she hoped the doll might be a talisman that could keep Sophie tethered to the world of the living. She put her hand on Sophie’s hot forehead, took it away, rushed to the door to look for the servants, found the hallway empty and closed the door tightly to keep out the draught that she imagined she felt. She went and sat down on the floor, in the space between the children’s beds, and reached out a hand on each side to hold the children’s small hands.

‘It’s been a long time since I told you a story, hasn’t it?’ she said, trying to make her voice cheerful. ‘How would you like that?’

‘All right,’ said Sophie, very weakly.

‘Good. Just take a little sip of water first, yes?’

Sophie let her bring the cup to her lips, then turned her head away. ‘It tastes bad. It’s cold.’

‘Drink a little.’

Sophie drank, reluctantly, coughed, let a foamy line of water trickle down her chin.

Where were the servants? Where was Jeanne? Marie Catherine finally remembered that the maid, when she had last seen her, had been asleep in her alcove and was tossing under the weight of a fever. It had seemed like nothing. Marie Catherine had recovered so quickly. Now it was as if the entire household had fled, leaving her here with the two sick children and no one to help.

‘Once, far from Paris, there was a widow who lived alone with her daughter.’ She tried to keep her voice steady as she began the tale. ‘One day the girl’s mother took sick. For days she tossed and turned, and it seemed that no medicine would cure her. So the girl went out into the forest to weep, and there the devil appeared to her. “Why do you cry, my child?” the devil asked, and he had a sweet voice, although he was very ugly to look at.’

Sophie lay with her cheek on her pillow, watching her mother with heavy eyelids.

‘Sophie? Nicolas? Are you listening?’ She needed to hear their voices, even as she hoped that the tale would lull them to sleep and bring them relief from the fever.

‘Yes, Maman.’

‘Good.’ Marie Catherine cleared her throat. ‘The girl told the devil that she was weeping for her mother, who was ill. “I can sell you a draught that cures all ills,” said the devil, “but the price is high. For you will have to come with me to hell and serve me there for seven years, and if during that time you disobey me, it will be for eternity that your soul is forfeit.”’

It was not the first time the children had been ill. But Marie Catherine was already trying to keep herself from picturing the worst, as if imagining it would summon it. She felt that she was calling the devil himself to come in and bargain. She would trade her health for theirs. The children shouldn’t suffer for their mother’s fault.

‘The girl shivered, but she accepted the bargain, and the devil gave her a little vial of clear water and told her to wet her mother’s lips with it and she would be healed. And truly, she had no sooner opened the bottle than the air of her mother’s cottage smelled sweeter, as if spring had come in the middle of winter, and just as soon as the old woman had taken a drink, she opened her eyes and sprang up from her sickbed, and danced around the room with her child in her arms, laughing.

‘But the girl was downcast, for now she had to pack her bonnet and her extra shift, and a bit of dried apple to eat on the road, and prepare to meet the devil and go with him to hell. And when she told her mother how she had bargained for her life, the old woman, too, was sad and sat at her table and wept.’

The children were quiet. Sophie nodded, fitfully, and closed her eyes.

‘Are you listening?’

Sophie nodded. She was falling asleep, sinking back down into the fever.

‘“No,” the old woman said, “I will not allow you to go to hell in my place.” And she hid the girl in the chest at the foot of the bed and told her to be quiet as a mouse. So the next day, when the devil grew tired of waiting in the wood and came to see where his vassal was, the mother opened the door a sliver and, when he asked why her daughter was tarrying, she told him that the girl was dead.’

At this point, the door creaked. Madame de Cardonnoy jumped, hoping to see the face of the doctor – but it was Jeanne, half dressed, with two burning roses in each cheek.

‘Madame,’ she said and curtseyed.

‘I thought you were ill.’

‘Anne said you had called for me.’ She leaned unsteadily against the doorframe. ‘It took me some time to dress. Anne’s in distress. The cook’s sick too, and some of the kitchen staff, and the man she sent out to fetch the doctor hasn’t returned.’

‘God preserve us,’ said Marie Catherine. Jeanne leaned in the doorway and watched her, wavering like a man returned from a night of drinking. Marie Catherine caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye and jumped, believing in ghosts, and saw that it was nothing and the room was empty.

‘What do you need, Madame?’ the servant girl asked.

‘Nothing.’ Marie Catherine hesitated. ‘Only – wait with me, please. For the doctor to come.’

‘Madame.’ Jeanne’s curtsey dipped dangerously low, and she caught herself and felt her way over to Nicolas’s bed, where she sank to the floor and rested her head against the mattress. ‘Tell me if you require anything and I’ll get up.’

Marie Catherine shook her head. Jeanne did not look well. ‘I’d forgotten you were feverish when I told Anne to fetch you. Lie down. There’s an extra blanket in the trunk.’

She stood to fetch the blanket, and Jeanne lay down with her head on the floor, curled around the foot of Nicolas’s bed like a spring caterpillar wrapped around a branch. Marie Catherine put the blanket over her, and Jeanne raised her head and looked up at her.

‘Forgive me. I’m so tired.’

‘I was telling the children a story. But they’re sleeping now.’

Jeanne let her head fall back on the floor and lay on her side, facing Marie Catherine, her eyes gleaming in the flickering light of the candle.

‘I’ll listen, if you go on.’ Illness gave her a directness of speech that she rarely showed before her mistress. Marie Catherine took a deep breath.

‘The old woman told the devil that her daughter had died that morning of fright, so terrified had she been of the journey to hell, and that if her soul was not already among his servants, then he could have no further claim on her. But the devil did not believe her, and he demanded proof. So the mother closed the door on him and went to the oak chest where her daughter was hidden, and then, with tears in her eyes, she cut off the girl’s left hand and carried it out to him. And the girl bit her tongue and did not cry out.

‘“There is your proof,” the old woman said to the devil. Still the devil was suspicious.’

Sophie had dropped her doll and now held her two clenched fists close to her mouth, as if there was something that she was determined not to let go of, even in sleep. Marie Catherine reached across and tucked the blanket more firmly under her chin, hiding her two knotted hands. She was grateful for Jeanne, whose presence allowed her to go on telling the tale that was only just keeping her real fears at bay.

‘“Listen,” said the old woman. “I understand that I owe you a debt, and I am happy to repay it. My daughter may be dead, but I will go in her place, and I swear you will have nothing to complain of in my work.” Then the devil relented, for he liked the idea that this old woman, still mourning her daughter, must go and be his servant. And the old woman went inside and put some bread and apples in a basket, and bandaged her daughter’s wound, and then she took the devil’s hand and set off with him on the road to hell.’

She had to stop or her voice would crack. She looked at her hands folded in her lap. They were swimming behind a curtain of water.

‘Madame?’ Jeanne asked softly.

‘It’s nothing.’ She took deep breaths until the tears began to dry. ‘For seven years her daughter stayed alone in their cottage. When she planted peas in the garden, they grew to the size of apples, and the apple tree bowed to the ground with the weight of its fruit. Her cow gave her cream instead of milk, and her beehives overflowed with honey. It was as if the mere scent of the magic water that the devil had given her breathed new life into everything. But she missed her mother, and at night she would look into the fire and think of the old woman, working in hell to pay off her debt. The girl let her hair grow until it reached her ankles, then trailed on the floor behind her. She let her face go unwashed, and her nails grew into claws, and her clothes turned into rags. She didn’t plant or hoe, but the garden grew up around her and fed her, and when people passed by the way to her cottage they told each other that there was the house of the wild woman, who was mourning the death of her mother.’

Nicolas stirred in his bed and whimpered. ‘Maman, I’m going to be sick.’

Someone had moved the chamberpot. Marie Catherine leaned under the bed and searched for a handle, for the cold of the porcelain, and found nothing. Finally she took the washbasin from the dressing table, still half full of cool water, and held it out next to Nicolas’s bed. She had to help him sit up, bracing his head in the crook of her arm while he vomited, the bile floating in thick strands through the washing water. His hair was matted to his skull with sweat, and when he had finished and squirmed back down under the covers she could still feel the damp impression of his head against her breast.

‘Shall I take that, Madame?’ Jeanne had risen to her knees and was holding out her hands for the bowl.

‘Leave it, please,’ Marie Catherine said. ‘Someone’s already whisked away the chamberpot. We may need it again.’

Jeanne nodded, sank down to the floor and pulled her blankets tighter around her. She was not so delirious now as she had been in the morning, but still her head and her hands felt heavy, as if she were swimming through some substance that was thicker than air and resisted her at every turn. Odd details struck her – the rabbitlike movement of Sophie’s feet under the covers, the way Madame kept wiping her palms on her dress after touching Nicolas’s sweaty hair. So Madame de Cardonnoy was afraid for the children. Strange to see this woman who had power over her livelihood, over even her life, held fast in the hand of God and unable to peer out of his fist. Jeanne wondered if Madame felt it too, the presence of divine judgement, if she considered it a punishment for her sins.

Jeanne’s own sins were jumbled together – the letter she’d carried, the pregnancy she’d ended, the man she had allowed to take her to bed, not even for pleasure, but only because she’d believed that he would marry her and buy her a pretty dress and then her life would be solved. She had lied – to her mistress, to the police. She had carried money and secrets for Laure, she had carried a deep sympathy in her heart for La Chapelle, the witch, and for La Voisin, the poisoner. Even for Madame she felt a kind of protective compassion that was not love, exactly, or loyalty, or envy of the privileges of her station, but the knowledge necessary for close service. Always Jeanne was splitting into two selves – one loyal, humble, obedient to God, the law and her mistress, and the other a secret stranger, who lived under the skin of the good servant girl and did as she pleased. The stranger who knew that her fever was breaking, that her body was strong, that God, whatever he thought of her, was not yet ready to kill her.

‘Will you go on telling the story?’ Jeanne asked, after Madame had sat for a while in silence. Her stomach was heaving and her head still felt as heavy as if someone had filled her skull with old washing water, but she could see that her mistress was lost in dark thoughts.

Madame de Cardonnoy shook her head. ‘They’re sleeping. They can’t hear it.’

‘I will.’ At La Chapelle’s, and in the house in which she’d served before, she had been taught not to assert herself like this. It should not matter what Jeanne wanted to hear. Although Madame was not the kind of employer who might have mocked her or punished her for speaking in this way, she would have been puzzled by it.

‘Very well, I’ll go on.’ Madame spoke so quietly it was impossible to know whether she had noticed that Jeanne had spoken out of turn. Jeanne lay down with her head on the floor, cradled in her arms, and watched Madame de Cardonnoy as she turned her hands over in her lap, inventing the next part of the story. She could feel the cold seeping up through the rug, touching her ribs with an icy cat’s tongue. She watched the dust moving in the fibres of the carpet with the current of her breath, and when she looked up she met Madame’s eyes, watching her as she so rarely did, looking closely at her face instead of letting her eyes glide politely away from Jeanne’s eyes.

‘Meanwhile the girl’s mother was working off her debt in hell. The devil gave her a set of keys to his palace, and every morning the old woman would sweep out the ashes from his hundred fireplaces, where the sad souls of the damned burned to light the devil’s house at night, and then she would chop and carry great cords of wood to stoke the hearth in the kitchen, where the sad souls of the damned were boiled during the day. And in the evening, when she was tired to her bones, the devil would call her in to eat supper with him, and she would sit across from him at a long table, wearing her dirty clothes, and the devil would eat white bread with butter, roast meat, candied oranges, cakes soaked in honey, cinnamon and mace. And when he was done, he would pass his plates to the old woman, who ate only the crusts of his bread because she was afraid to eat the fruits of hell.’

Jeanne closed her eyes. What did Madame de Cardonnoy know about eating the crusts from a great table? She was a woman who ate white bread and fresh asparagus. But there was something in the story that made Jeanne think, just for a moment, that Madame had seen her – that she had seen the way Jeanne looked at her world. As if she should care whether Madame saw her at all.

Would Madame really go down to the devil for her children, if it came to it? La Chapelle would have gone, for Laure. Would anyone go down that way for Jeanne? She didn’t think her own mother would have.

‘Where is Anne?’ Madame de Cardonnoy asked, speaking to no one. Certainly not, exactly, to Jeanne. ‘Where is the doctor?’

‘He will come soon, Madame. The coachman has gone to fetch him, and soon he will find him and bring him here.’ She spoke soothingly, the way she would to a child, without regard for whether the words were true.

‘My father never trusted doctors,’ Madame de Cardonnoy said. ‘He’d say that any illness that couldn’t be cured by rest and the grace of God could not be cured either by some bearded creature with a bag full of powders. He still summoned them when he was dying. I suppose he lost his nerve.’

‘Do you remember him, Madame?’ Jeanne asked. Her stomach churned, and she tried to summon back the image that the baronne’s words had conjured for her, of the brave old woman carrying her bundle of apples through the lonely rooms of hell.

‘Of course. In my prayers, with my mother. He did not have an easy death. Is your father … ?’ She trailed off, suggestively. Not asking, alive?

Jeanne shook her head. She had not seen her father since he had put her on the back of the cart that would take her to Paris, to the house where her aunt worked. She had not been able to write, nor he to read. She had watched him recede into the distance down the road, feeling something dull coming loose inside her chest and streaming out as the creaking wheels took her farther and farther from home. Who could say if he was still alive?

‘No,’ she said. ‘God rest him.’ And with that, she erased the farm, and her family, and made herself the daughter of the cart driver who’d taken her to Paris and left her on her aunt’s doorstep, guiding her there with a hand on her shoulder to make certain she didn’t lose her way and find herself in some house of ill repute. She imagined that man, with his beard going to white, older than her father and softer, and she said, again, ‘God rest him.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Madame de Cardonnoy.

‘The doctor will come soon, Madame.’

‘Do you remember when Sophie was sick?’ Madame asked. ‘There was a wise woman, who you went to for a remedy.’

‘I remember. But she too is dead now.’ Jeanne sniffed. Poor La Chapelle would burn, like La Voisin.

‘Oh.’ Marie Catherine pulled at her skirts, so that they were spread out more neatly on the floor, darkness making the black cloth fade into the red of the carpet. She no longer quite believed in the doctor, or in any part of the world outside this room, the sleeping children like statues themselves, who might wake or might not. Her body itself felt cold and heavy, as if there were some thicker substance where her blood had once circulated.

‘The old woman had a key to every room in the devil’s palace but one,’ she said, after a while. ‘The last key was a little golden one that the devil wore on a ribbon around his neck, and it unlocked a plain iron door at the very centre of the palace, which was so low that the old woman would have had to stoop to enter it. Sometimes she would stop in her work and listen at this door, and when she did, she would hear birdsong, and the sound of rushing water, and a cool breeze rustling the leaves of the trees of the forest, and even a sound like her daughter’s laughter. And for a moment she would feel the heat of hell recede and she would be happy.

‘But when the devil came across her listening at this little door, he laughed, and said, “Leave that door to me, little mother, for if I catch you inside, it will be eternity you spend with me and not seven short years.”’

Marie Catherine ran her hand over Nicolas’s hair as he slept, and then over Sophie’s hands.

‘So for a while the old woman left the door alone, but as time passed, she found herself drawn there once again. And when she listened with her ear pressed to the keyhole, she thought she could hear her daughter singing.’

At the foot of Nicolas’s bed, Jeanne sat up and pressed her hand over her throat.

‘Madame, I feel sick.’

Madame de Cardonnoy pushed the reeking basin she’d held for Nicolas towards the servant girl, who crouched over it on her hands and knees, trying to turn her face away from the smell even as she dry-retched. Her hair was falling into her face – she’d done it up badly, in haste and, Marie Catherine thought, with trembling hands. Marie Catherine inched forward, across the floor, pulled the loose skein of Jeanne’s hair back from her forehead, twisted it securely at her neck. Jeanne was having trouble bringing up whatever was in her stomach. She choked for a long time and then caught her breath, on the point of weeping. Marie Catherine was still holding her hair back from her face, smoothing the little tendrils of it that clung to her damp forehead.

‘Darling.’ She spoke, without thinking, as if she were talking to a dear friend or a child, rather than to a servant. ‘You’re not doing any good here. Go down and sleep.’

Jeanne shook her head.

‘I’m all right.’ She put her head down on the carpet, by Madame de Cardonnoy’s knee, looking miserable. Sickness had pulled her face back into childhood, washing away the mute knowingness that she had worn so often in the past weeks and leaving a look of determination that was strangely bright and innocent in its purity. Marie Catherine reached out and put the back of her hand against the girl’s forehead, feeling the fever beating under her skin.

‘I found your jewels,’ Jeanne said.

‘What?’ She didn’t remove her hand. She thought for a moment that the girl might be speaking out of a fever dream.

‘The ones you hid in your clothing chest. The chambermaid could have come across them, easily.’ There was a fierceness to her expression that Marie Catherine had never seen before, or rarely, in moments when Jeanne did not know she was being looked at.

‘So you found them instead?’ She might have been afraid, but fear for the children had rinsed her clean. She might have held Jeanne down by the wrists and said, What will you do with what you know? But the desire wasn’t in her. She took her hand away from Jeanne’s forehead. They might have been clinging together to a raft in the wake of the wreck of some ship, far out at sea.

The silence was broken by a knock on the door and, ignoring protocol, Arnaud burst into the room, bowed, pulled himself up straight.

‘The doctor, Madame.’

‘Thank heaven.’ She struggled up under the heavy weight of her petticoats, bracing herself on Nicolas’s bed. This Doctor Girondeau, who she had met before, was a tall, delicate man, who always became taller and thinner in her imagination, dressed in a white curling wig and lace cuffs. He had a high tenor voice that sometimes had a birdlike whistle of asthma in it. He was obsequious, too, with his little ‘Forgive me, Madame, for the delay, you understand about the weather, this Parisian mud is simply too much for my carriage.’ Always, she remembered from other visits, he had one thousand similar soft-spoken complaints. But she liked the gentleness with which his manicured hands felt his patient’s pulse, taking Sophie’s transparent green-veined wrist off the bed and inclining his head as if he were listening to something that the rhythm of her heartbeats might tell him.

He was gentle, too, with the scalpel, if a bleeding was necessary. He did not take too much.

‘Please look at them, Monsieur. Let me know whatever you need. And my maid is ill as well.’

Girondeau was already by the bedside, still talking without especially expecting an answer, about how his carriage mare had thrown a shoe just the other week, leaving him stranded on his expedition to visit a venerable gentleman with an attack of gout, whose name Madame de Cardonnoy would surely know. Marie Catherine found herself tapping her foot.

But there was something soothing about the doctor’s continual stream of inanities, as if they revealed a professional instinct that said that this, too, was no emergency – a difficult case perhaps, but not so much as to put a stop to the necessary ebb and flow of polite conversation. The doctor perfumed his cuffs with orange-blossom water, to dispel the foul air of the sickroom. Madame de Cardonnoy was overcome with such relief and gratitude that she put a hand over her mouth and, behind it, let out a deep sigh.

‘And the kitchen staff, Madame.’ Arnaud bowed again, backing out of the doorway, as if he were embarrassed by his interruption, or afraid that the miasma of sickness would seize him as well if he ventured too far into the room.

‘The whole household has it,’ Marie Catherine said.

‘Stomach sickness?’ asked Girondeau.

‘Yes, badly.’

‘Hmm. Have you changed your cook?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Other kitchen staff? Visitors?’

‘Not since my husband’s death. My mind has been away from the household affairs.’

Girondeau nodded. ‘Servants can make mistakes, under such circumstances. Something spoiled, perhaps. When it’s only one member of the household, people get all kinds of ideas these days. Such fear of poison. The truth is that such illnesses often occur in spring and summer, as the warming of the air causes the miasma from the sewers to circulate. Now I will just open this vein to relieve the fever.’

And already he had his scalpel at hand, already the basin, and he was turning to Arnaud at the door and asking for a little egg from the kitchen, with the white nicely separated from the yolk, and then there was the cleanness of the cut, Sophie’s eyelids fluttering open, heavy with sleep and pain, and the slow drip of blood into the basin. Sophie tried to twitch her arm back out of his grasp, and the doctor pressed the meat of her thumb between his fingers and soothed her, ‘There now, it’s only a little blood, be an obedient child.’

The cloth that he held against her wrist to stop the flow was stained with old blood, but he managed to keep the red off his cuffs. When the egg came, he mixed it, in the cup Arnaud had carried it in, with the contents of a blue bottle that, uncorked, filled the room with the smell of roses and turpentine, sharp as if he had opened a window and let in a gust of bracingly cold air. Madame de Cardonnoy breathed deeply and watched him as he applied the potion to the long, straight cut, as he folded Sophie’s free hand under the blanket to prevent her from touching the wound with her fingers.

‘Ah, Madame,’ the doctor said, looking back at Madame de Cardonnoy. ‘I should have asked you to leave the room. But then you do not faint at the sight of blood?’

‘No, Monsieur. Not since giving birth to my children.’

Certainly a shiver went through her when the scalpel passed down Nicolas’s pale arm, when he cried, fighting the doctor with weak arms, so that the blade slipped and zigzagged on his skin. She held him by the shoulders, saying, Hush now, it’s all right. Only a little blood to cool the fever. Girondeau had a tonic, too, which he prescribed to relieve such ailments. The worst of it was not Nicolas’s disconsolate crying, but the way, beneath the turpentine smell of the doctor’s ointment, the room was full of the scent of butchery. One didn’t want to imagine a child cut open, spread out on a plate like a witch’s meal. It would be easier not to look when he cried. To go out of the room and let the doctor work, surrounded by his own meaningless bedside chatter, dropping pit-pit like rain off a roof. When he’d finished with the scalpel, Nicolas was pale and fretful. He seemed, mostly, exhausted by the ordeal.

‘You haven’t taken too much?’ she asked, watching the red slosh up the sides of the bowl as the doctor put it down on the table.

‘No, he’s a strong boy. He’ll sleep now – it will be better. Open your mouth for this spoon now, little gentleman.’ And Nicolas turned his face away and had to have his lips prised open by his mother. Gently.

‘I can leave some of the same mixture for the servants?’ Girondeau suggested, graciously.

‘I’d like you to look at my maid specially.’

And Jeanne curtseyed, swaying, sat down on the edge of the bed to be examined.

‘Certainly, certainly.’ He took her hand. ‘Not a high fever. A little blood, perhaps.’

‘Monsieur, I believe I will be well without it,’ said Jeanne. ‘The children are more fragile.’

He smiled. ‘Of course. But you city girls too are delicate. The children, Madame la Baronne’ – and he turned back to Marie Catherine as seamlessly as if Jeanne had never spoken – ‘the children might do better if you remove to the country a little early this year. Paris is an unhealthy city.’

His hands with the scalpel were gentle still, but Madame de Cardonnoy thought the precise movements of his small fingers did not quite conceal a kind of benign indifference to the girl he was handling, as if the baronne had ordered him from caprice to administer his cures to a lapdog or the children’s favourite cat. Jeanne bore the bloodletting without complaint. When it was finished, she held the cloth against her arm and looked at the blood seeping up through it.

‘A day of rest,’ said the doctor. ‘No work, young lady, you may tell your mistress I have ordered it.’

‘Thank you, Monsieur,’ said Jeanne.

Madame de Cardonnoy did not come with him to the servants’ quarters, where the kitchen staff were sleeping away the fever and the fires were banked and cold. She sent Arnaud to the traiteur, to bring soup for the children, when they woke. The doctor insisted that it should be a thin broth, not too hot, a little bread moistened in it and easy to chew.

‘Will you come back tomorrow, Doctor?’ she asked.

‘Of course, Madame, if you desire it,’ he said. ‘I believe they are in no grave danger, but perhaps when they are stronger you might take them from Paris. When the whole household is afflicted, a change of air can work wonders.’

He bowed, one hand supporting his tightly curled wig.

‘Thank you.’ She turned to Jeanne as he left and pushed her towards the door with a gentle hand. ‘You should go downstairs and rest. I’ll fetch Anne.’

‘I’ll sit up with you,’ Jeanne said. ‘If you please.’ She was wavering upright, but her face was determined. Marie Catherine retrieved her blanket from the floor and draped it around her shoulders.

Nicolas had already fallen back asleep. The flush of fever had faded away and left his face pale. Sophie was awake, running her fingers over the residue of the ointment that the doctor had applied to her cut.

‘You should close your eyes, chérie.’

Sophie shook her head, mutely. The bloodletting had drained the flush from her cheeks.

‘Shall I go on with the story? Do you remember where we left off?’

Again the child said nothing, but she slid down in the bed and let her cheek rest on the white pillow, looking up at Marie Catherine expectantly.

‘Listen,’ Marie Catherine said, and she reached out and touched Sophie’s forehead, still warm, she thought, but not so feverish as before. ‘One night when the seven years were nearly over, it happened that the devil sat down to dinner and from his pocket he brought out the old woman’s daughter’s left hand, which was as soft and white as the day she had given it to him. And he said, “Little mother, I have kept this hand next to my heart, and although the years have passed, it has not withered. And I think your daughter, too, is not dead, but is alive and well, and when your seven years with me are over, I will come and bring her down to hell for another seven years, and seven after that, until all her days are gone, because you have been untruthful with me.”’

She looked between Sophie and Jeanne, who had crept in close and was resting her head against the foot of Sophie’s bed.

‘The old woman wept,’ she said, ‘and insisted that her daughter was dead. But the devil only laughed, and drank glass after glass of wine until he fell asleep at the table, and snored with his head thrown back. And then the old woman steeled her nerves and crept up close to him, and she put her hand in the pocket of his fine silk coat and took out her daughter’s hand. And then she took the golden key from around his neck and put it around her own, and went to the forbidden door. For she thought that if the devil learned of her disobedience, he would keep her in hell, instead of her daughter.

‘When she opened the door, the air that surrounded her was like the first cool breath of spring and she stepped inside quickly, but she left the door open, so that the devil would feel how the heat of hell had dimmed and would find her and punish her, and forget her child.’

Sophie’s eyes blinked shut, then moved to watch Madame de Cardonnoy’s hands as she described the movement of the old woman’s hands with her own, turning the key in the lock.

‘On the other side of the door was a garden, surrounded by stone walls that went up beyond the old woman’s sight. White roses grew up the stones, and honeysuckle, and canes of blackberry, and birds flew between the close walls. At the centre of the garden was a straight white tree, from whose branches hung a heavy weight of golden apples, and from the tree’s roots there came a spring, and the old woman had no sooner touched her fingertips to its water than she knew it was the water of life, for which her daughter had bargained with the devil. And the old woman sat down by the spring, and kissed her daughter’s hand and cried.

‘She cried for a long time, and then she heard a voice from above, calling, “Mother! Mother, is that really you?” It was her daughter’s voice.’

Marie Catherine had started crying again, to her shame. She would have liked to pretend there was nothing she feared. Jeanne reached out and put a warm hand on her elbow, in silence. Sophie was watching her with an expression of exhausted fierceness. Her blood had left a stain on the sheets.

‘Now,’ she said, and her voice was only a little unsteady, ‘the daughter had left her cottage, and as she made her way sadly through the woods, she heard the sound of weeping coming from an old dry well. And when she went to the well’s edge and looked down, she saw all the way through the crust of the earth and into hell, where her mother was sitting by the spring of the water of life, crying. And as her mother looked up and saw her, too, there was a roar that shook the earth, for the devil had woken and discovered that his key and his little white hand were gone. And the old woman raised her arms, as if to embrace her daughter, and called farewell to her, because she knew that the devil was coming to take her away.

‘“Wait,” said the daughter. “Climb the tree, as high as you can, and I will pull you out.”

‘So the mother wrapped up her daughter’s hand in her handkerchief, and dipped the bundle in the water of life and began to climb. But although she had grown so thin in hell that even the highest, most slender branches of the tree barely bent under her weight, the edge of the well was still too far away and she could not reach her daughter’s outstretched hand. Below, in the garden, there was a puff of smoke, for the devil had put on his coat of eternal fire and was nearly at the door to the garden. “It’s no use,” called the old woman to her daughter. “Farewell!” ’

Sophie coughed, miserably, and Marie Catherine stopped the tale and put a hand on her daughter’s chest, feeling her ribs heave.

‘I feel better now, Maman,’ Sophie murmured. ‘I’m all right.’

Marie Catherine pulled the stained sheets up to her daughter’s neck, tucking her in against the draught. Jeanne reached out from her seat on the floor and took Sophie’s hand in hers, to keep her from picking at her scab.

‘Then,’ said Marie Catherine, ‘the daughter leaned over the well and threw down her hair, which had grown so long while she was alone that it made a rope that stretched all the way to her mother’s hands and below, as far as the spring where the water of life bubbled up into hell. And the old woman took hold of her hair and climbed up to the lip of the well, to safety. And the two of them embraced, and laughed at their good fortune.

‘But their happiness lasted only a moment. Because the devil had seen the old woman climbing up her daughter’s long hair and he, too, had grabbed the end of her tangled plait and begun to climb. And soon a column of black smoke emerged from the well, and the daughter cried out in fear. But the old woman was not afraid, and she ran to the wood pile and took the axe that lay there and then hurried back to her daughter and, just as the devil’s clawed hand was reaching for the lip of the well, she chopped off her daughter’s long plait, and the devil’s littlest finger with it. And the devil fell back down the well, and whether it was the shock of having fallen from grace a second time or the insult of his missing finger, he never dared to come for either the old woman or her daughter again.’

Let it come true, she thought. Let it come true.

‘As for the two women, they prospered. That night the old woman sat down with her daughter to dinner and, when the meal was done, she combed the knots from her hair, and washed the dirt from the girl’s face, and cut her long nails. Then she unwrapped the little severed hand that she had taken from the devil and laid it against her daughter’s wrist, where, bathed in the water of life, it grew back whole.’

Sophie’s eyes were closed again. Her slow breath sucked in a strand of hair that lay across her mouth and then blew it out like a banner. Madame de Cardonnoy kissed her forehead. It was warm, but she thought finally that the worst was over, and she might wake from the dream she was dreaming and live.