Her daughter’s hatred would be seen as Gabrielle’s fault. What of it? Such an outcome was not to be lamented or evaded, but accepted. Better for little Gazouette to believe her mama indifferent than for her to be used as leverage. Or worse, to be trapped in identical coils.
Gabrielle-Sidonie Goncourt looked down at her sleeping daughter with deliberate coldness, taking in the rucked sheets, the petal-coloured cheeks, then walked from the room into the lampless passageway. She had never wanted to bear a child, anyway, she reminded herself. One would think that at forty the chance of doing so had passed.
She shut the bedroom’s door and leaned against its dark panels, their wood creaking slightly.
Strength. She willed herself forward. There were appearances to keep up.
As she walked along the corridor, Gabrielle’s skirts rustled, sweeping the tops of her shoes, rubbing against her silk sleeves as her arms moved forward and back, forward and back. Turning a corner, she heard with sudden clarity the sounds of the diners below: her lover, faithful Missy, and the ballet backers she’d brought with her—the loud, rather coarse ice magnate M’sieur Hanse; the abstemious M’sieur Falco Tessiter and his equally sober son Robert. And of course Gabrielle’s husband. Who did not ask of her more than she could give.
The ballet was to be dedicated to Gazouette: a show, literally, of Gabrielle’s maternal affection. Probably the child would want more. Too bad.
Gabrielle knew how to walk downstairs; her mother, Sido, had shown her how not to lower her head, how to keep the line of her neck taut and appealing. Hand on the banister, eyes on the chandelier, she glided along in a smooth descent. Wasted; not one of her guests had peered through the doorway of the dining room to see her coming.
The maids had cleared the plates with their unsightly burdens, brushed crumbs and fallen titbits from the damask cloth. In a proper household the ladies would have now withdrawn, but Missy remained in the chair where she’d been seated during the meal, and Gabrielle found a glass waiting for her as expected at her own place, filled with a tawny vintage.
Goncourt and the Tessiters rose quickly; Hanse lagged somewhat behind them, one hand on the back of his chair. “Madame,” her husband began, “we have been wondering if, perhaps, there might be some discussion of business?”
Gabrielle nodded. Goncourt eased the padded chair beneath her as she resumed her spot. “We are on good enough terms now, are we not?” She turned to Tessiter Père on her left. “It is in my mind that you would like best to give us support in the matter of costumery, maquillage, scenery—the materials bought once. As soon as the war ends, of course. While you—” she faced the other way, towards Hanse, “—would be the one to supply ongoing expenses such as rents, advertisements, and dancers’ and musicians’ salaries.”
“Yes, but how are the proceeds to be disbursed?” asked this worthy. “Proportionally to our costs? Our risks?”
Missy intervened. “There is no risk. In a few months, when the war ends, we proceed. Our composer is Ravel; our choreographer Nijinsky. Our shining star is Gabrielle.”
The older Tessiter demurred. “It is 1915. Nearly ten years now since they rioted in the streets over your kiss, Mesdames.” He looked long and meaningfully at Missy’s handsome but aging countenance. “The sensation has died down. Forgive me if I seek some other surety for our investment.”
“I am good for it,” Missy replied. Her voice was heavy with disappointment, as if she scolded a cat of whom she anticipated nothing better than a certain level of misbehavior. “Goncourt also may be relied upon.”
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
The evening went convincingly, she thought. From her seat on the chaise longue before her boudoir’s velvet-draped window, Gabrielle watched the Tessiters’ carriage rattle away in the dull moonlight with tempered relief. Now the die must be cast.
Goncourt would be expecting her in their shared bedroom, a long walk and two turns along the passageway. Let him wait. She had a private farewell to make.
Reaching behind her seat to where the other woman stood, she arrested the hand of her lover, captured it firmly in her own so Missy could no longer toy with the tendrils escaping from Gabrielle’s carefully inexact coiffure. Still plump and smooth, the mound under Missy’s thumb yielded softly to Gabrielle’s teasing bite. A heavy sigh—a sound too soft to be called a moan—escaped her lover’s lips. Gabrielle drew her down to kiss not her mouth but her neck.
Soon the chaise held them both, a pliant twist of flesh and pleasure. No fire filled the room’s grate, so they didn’t remove their clothing, merely rearranged it. Nor did they linger long in the chill that followed passion.
Missy sighed again as she moved away, pulling up her stockings and fastening them in place.
A third sigh. Gabrielle rose to put enough distance between them that she could ask what was wrong without the danger of a collapse into her arms.
“I wish I could go with you,” Missy replied. The shadows thrown by the candle on the mantel showed only half her face. That half held a stoically sad expression Gabrielle knew from earlier separations.
“But it is to Goncourt’s estate we go,” Gabrielle objected. “Inviting you would not be fair to him. Here, in the house you let to us, it is different.”
“Yes.” Missy stood also, shaking out the skirts of her gown, smiling ruefully. “Here, it is different.”
Kissing her lover goodbye, Gabrielle prayed silently that she and Missy would meet once more in safety. That someday she’d be free of the shadowy militarists who sought to bind Gabrielle to their service by threatening those she loved.
But not soon. Her ostensible masters would learn where she had fled to, eventually, though they wouldn’t be able to manipulate her so easily at Rozven. Her husband’s family was well-established, his retainers loyal.
In their bedroom, Goncourt, fully dressed, paced in front of the glowing hearth. “All is in readiness?” she asked, to give him a chance to reprove her.
“This past hour. Where have you been?”
“With the child,” Gabrielle lied.
Goncourt laughed. “A likely story! Haven’t I always known—”
Though she had instigated it, she found herself bored by the prospect of the coming lecture. So she simply stopped listening. As her husband thundered on, she glanced around, noting instead the table newly emptied of his cosmetics: wax for his moustache, cream for the shining skin atop his head. Cologne and manicure set were also gone. A carafe and drinking glass occupied the bedside table, but overall the room’s air was of a location soon to be abandoned.
That was the doing of this so-called “great” war, which was to have been over by Christmas. Dragging on and on, it had brought “requests” from her government she couldn’t afford to refuse outright: to travel, to spy, to report on their enemies. To monitor even their ostensible friends.
Now her view of the room was obscured by memories: the awkward approach of her would-be recruiter during a lull in business at the dim café down the street; his laughable attempt to force her capitulation by publicising her African heritage—as if that weren’t a point of which to be proud! As if it weren’t already widely known—and when that failed, his semi-obscure promises to do violence to Missy, which Gabrielle tried to face with equanimity, hoping that her lover’s wealth would shield her from harm. And then his hints about visiting pain upon Gazouette. Which Gabrielle was not able to treat with the same disdain.
“Do you suppose we fooled them?” Gabrielle asked, and knew from Goncourt’s face she had interrupted what he was saying.
After being forced to vent his anger he usually became a penitent lamb. As was now the case: he gathered her gently in his arms. “Can you forgive me? In the morning it will be all over town—I have allowed a reporter to write about our little project for the Journal.”
Gabrielle grimaced, but answered cheerfully, “Then we had best be on our way, hadn’t we?” By the time their departure was known, she and her child would be safe.
Her husband held the bedroom door open for her with a small bow, and repeated the gesture at the entrances to the kitchen and the courtyard. Inside the cramped stables the loaded automobile throbbed loudly, the purring of an immense, watchful cat. Their driver got out and let Goncourt take his seat, then helped Gabrielle take hers. He arranged the fur collar of her favourite coat so it protected her ears without tickling her chin. He opened the cat’s eyes, or rather, uncovered its headlamps.
“Where is Gazouette?” her husband asked.
“Gone ahead, with her nanny.”
“They are to meet us in Chartres?”
“No. Tomorrow night, in Le Mans.” That was when she would tell him that their child had embarked for Canada. By then Gazouette would be gone.
“Fine. As long as you are satisfied.” He waved at the driver to open the courtyard gates and they set off.
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
But Gabrielle’s ruse didn’t work. A miscommunication of some sort. Less than a week after she and Goncourt arrived at Rozven, Taylor and Gazouette arrived also. Taylor sat challengingly upright on the uncomfortable chair in Gabrielle’s office, her timid charge curled at her feet. “There were no suitable lodgings on Guernsey, not on the entire island,” the Englishwoman explained. “I would have continued on, but then I heard the news of the fire on the Mauretania.”
Gabrielle had not heard of the disaster herself till this morning. The ship on which she’d booked Gazouette’s passage to Quebec was out of commission—suspiciously so, as it baulked her from removing the child from the grasp of government manipulators. For how long the ship would be disabled she didn’t know. Nor did she comprehend why the woman hadn’t journeyed on to her homeland and stayed there till repairs were effected. Or until some other method of escape offered itself.
Nonetheless, she nodded. “Of course. The nursery is being readied for you.”
That change would lessen the space available to board nurses, for the house would soon be filled with wounded soldiers. The nurses would have to be made to fit somewhere—perhaps an outbuilding? Later she would re-examine their disposition; at the moment what mattered was that her plans for Gazouette’s safety were ruined.
Gabrielle brought the interview to a quick close and went to the library. It had been her site of solace for three years now, during every visit since her marriage: the narrow windows admitting sunlight, stormlight, moonlight, mistlight; the polished stones of the floor, reddish black, stubbornly refusing to reflect more than smudges of those who stood upon them; and, of course, the books.
Not many remained on the emptying shelves. A quarter of the room’s former inhabitants. Gabrielle caught the top of one tall volume with a crooked finger and pulled it down toward her. An old favourite, this one, rescued from the sale of her girlhood home’s contents. It was clad in blue twill, crammed full of coloured plates depicting classical myths. She sat on a footstool and idly turned its pages till she came to Rubens’s portrait of Thetis bathing Achilles. Here was an idea.
Though the hero had died.
But perhaps his death was owing to an error on the part of his mother? Or, perhaps the River Styx’s hellish nature had precluded a happy ending?
Marking her place with one finger, Gabrielle carried the book of myths with her to her bedroom in the turret. The afternoon’s long shadows stretched themselves out upon the naked staircase, concealing and revealing its scars, the result of removing the runner which had covered it so many years. That worn strip of carpet had been rolled up and stored temporarily in the entrance hall. It was to be laid down the middle of the transformed ballroom, between ranks of the hospital beds still stacked in the front drive, awaiting their installation.
She had written yesterday to affirm that they’d be ready to receive their first consignment of the “great” war’s wounded by March 1. A fortnight away.
Outside her door she paused. On the other side of the circular landing lay the nursery. From beneath the bottom of its door came murmurs, contented-sounding voices: low and womanly, high and prattlingly childish. Gabrielle wouldn’t interrupt; she could picture the scene clearly enough. Taylor would be unpacking, Gazouette staggering like a drunken doll as she struggled to follow in her nanny’s bustling steps. The jumpers and heavy knitted stockings, the bonnets and leggings and jackets so carefully selected in anticipation of Britain’s cool climate would be stowed away in chests of drawers.
Couldn’t Gazouette and her clothing stay here? Wouldn’t she be safe enough at Rozven, safe as her father and mother?
Entering her half-moon-shaped bedchamber, Gabrielle rang for her fire to be lit. The sun would soon set, and she’d need the warmth and light. When the housemaid had come and gone she pulled a white-painted, flower-cushioned armchair to the hearth and reopened her book to the Rubens.
Bats. They besieged the painting, framed the subjects, surrounded them. In the distance, ghosts clamoured to Charon for release from their dull afterlives—understandably. The river’s waters, green and poisonous-looking, showed nothing of the miracle they were supposed to instill in those brought by supplicants to its shores. Brought to be bathed in the chill and cold, to freeze the body but soothe the soul…
And Thetis, that foolish nymph, had subjected her child to this treatment—to preserve his life, of course—but had failed to do it thoroughly enough. Why had she not submerged her own hand in the Styx, if that would keep her son from harm?
Gabrielle studied the painting’s reproduction till the dinner bell. Would she need a dog? Or a friend such as the spinner Clotho to hold up an illuminating flame?
No—no flames, no bats. She’d try what she could accomplish without them.
After dinner she fended off Goncourt’s attentions. It took very little trouble. She looked in on Gazouette, spoke a brief word with Taylor about the program for the following day, and went to bed betimes.
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
Gabrielle woke, as always, without recourse to an alarm clock. Only the faintest clues announced the coming of the day: a sky like milk from a dark blue cow, a western breeze laden with the merest hint of brine.
There was a bit of fuss in the nursery. To save time and lessen the noise, Gabrielle accepted Taylor’s accompaniment out of the house and across lawns crackling with frost, to the path she had discovered during her first explorations. She insisted on carrying the child herself, though.
Even leafless with winter, the beech trees cut off much of the dawn’s growing light. Taylor stopped at the woods’ edge to adjust her lantern to a wider aperture, but Gabrielle, impatient, darted ahead, trusting to the bark’s silvery glimmering to show her the way. “Leave that thing there!” she called back over her shoulder. No flames.
Gradually, the land fell. The path, like a young girl, ran straight down precipitous slopes, then dallied flirtatiously with the stream at their bottom, climbing in opposition to its flow to the low granite bluffs occupying Rozven’s eastern boundaries. At last, as glowing pink and yellow tints had just touched the clouds far above, they came to the sacred spring.
The source.
A curved wall had been built into the earth. From a crack between its grey stones poured a cascade of singing water. Caught momentarily in a round pool, it laughed and splashed itself out by way of a channel bridged with slabs of that same stone. Above the wall and to one side stood a gracefully bowed beech, its lower branches festooned with ribbons: gay and bright or tattered, faded, old. Each ribbon represented a prayer, so the old women seated before nearby cottages had intimated.
Gabrielle knelt on the ground, Gazouette in her lap. Taylor spread the rug she had stubbornly brought. Gabrielle was glad of it; the dead leaves were damp. She lay the drowsy child down on the rug and went to work on removing her clothes.
Despite the harsh temperature, Gazouette seemed to enjoy her nudity. No sooner had her mother divested her of the last of her garments than she hoisted herself to her feet, fully awake now, running and stumbling in spirals and zigzags as the two women chased her. To Gabrielle’s pride it was she who gathered the giggling girl into her arms, not Taylor. But she had to relinquish her to the nanny anyway in order to remove her own boots, coat, and skirt, and to roll and tuck up her crinoline and her blouse’s long sleeves.
For a ribbon she had brought the band off an old gardening hat of Sido’s. That old straw hat was the only remnant Gabrielle had of her mother’s practical wardrobe, which had been sparse at the height of its glory and was now all but vanished with time. The band’s pale blue spoke of the dusty, sunny days she’d spent under Sido’s watchful maternal eye, guarded with the best of care.
So many others had petitioned the spring before her. Rumors among the women of the village said every single one had gotten her wish. But as Gabrielle chose her twig and tied her prayer to it she wondered if some other sacrifice would be required.
Taylor parted with Gazouette reluctantly. Gabrielle carried the squirming, wriggling little child to the bridge and lay on her stomach on the big flat stone. Using both hands—she was not afraid, not she—she gently lowered her daughter into the babbling brook. Cold stole into Gabrielle’s bones, but she held the girl firmly, swishing her back and forth, twice changing her grip to ensure every inch of skin received its blessing. Then she pulled the wailing, dripping wet and now hopefully invulnerable child back out of the water and wrapped her in the driest part of her under-chemise.
A weird, skirling cry split the air—getting louder and louder, sharper and sharper, hurting her ears. Gabrielle sheltered Gazouette beneath her breasts and shoulders, peered up and saw a swelling black thing falling toward her. Its wide wings unfurled—an eagle?—osprey?—she could see its grasping claws, its dark, hooked beak—
It swerved aside! With a crash, it hit the pool. Only a few feet away… And now she perceived Taylor squealing with fright, running forward with arms stretched out—what good would that do?
Gabrielle rolled to lessen her weight on the baby and saw the bird surface from the pool’s depths and fly to the tree of prayers, a flash of silver held struggling in its feet. This it transferred to its mouth. It hopped higher, out of sight, but Gabrielle had no doubt the silver signified a fish, which the osprey—only ospreys dived so—would now eat in peaceful retirement.
Fending off Taylor’s stupid attempts to take Gazouette from her, Gabrielle raised herself onto her hips. She’d received an omen, but what did it mean? She couldn’t decide.
Her hands, as she resumed her dress, felt oddly nimble. Shouldn’t they be numb? Yet she barely required Taylor’s assistance with her ties and buttons. Gazouette’s were more trouble, but just because the girl ran about like a zany, and even once caught, refused naughtily to submit to being clothed.
The way back seemed to take a shorter time than had the trek to the stream’s source. They reached the house at the hour Gabrielle was accustomed to take breakfast. Early for visitors, and yet an unfamiliar car stood parked next to the piles of unassembled bedframes. It was empty. But Goncourt’s man met her at the door and informed her of Missy’s presence in the library.
Without any hesitation, Gabrielle gave Gazouette into the nanny’s care and hurried to greet her unexpectedly-arrived lover, almost running along the gallery in her haste, plunging down the three steps to the Low Wing, thrusting open the library’s door—and halting on the room’s threshold.
Missy was not alone. She’d brought someone with her. A man.
A moment passed. Hardly any time. Gabrielle recognised her other guest: the younger Tessiter, M’sieur Robert. What could the fellow possibly want? The ballet’s premiere was far in the future.
She walked forward at a seemly pace, hands open. “My dear! How good to see you!” Missy joined her in a swift embrace. The awkward pause went unremarked.
“Will you have tea? Chocolate?” She faced M’sieur Tessiter politely. “I am afraid I can’t offer you a place to spend the night. You see, we are in an uproar—”
Missy’s throaty chuckle interrupted her attempt at an excuse. “But that’s the news I’ve come to share! Robert will stay with me. I’ve bought a new home not five leagues from here!”
Gabrielle wouldn’t need to pressure Goncourt into hosting his rival, then. Yet Missy would be near enough to see, to touch. What measures, if any, could be taken for her safety?
Gabrielle cast about in her mind for the names of available neighbouring estates. “Not—Broceliande?”
“But yes! Broceliande, certainly! Is that—is there something wrong with it? The house? The lands? The—”
“No.” Gabrielle forced herself to think rationally. “Only Goncourt’s people have an old feud with the former owners. And there is an idiotic tradition involving a curse—”
“A curse!” Missy collapsed onto the footstool. “Don’t say such a thing!”
“Mere silliness, I assure you. Nothing at all to worry about if it were true.” Nothing more than eternal enmity between their households.
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
Goncourt drove. Rozven was low on male servants. Of course a woman could manage an automobile as well as any man, barring a breakdown. Gabrielle herself, for example. Her newly sensitive hands were also strong. They longed to hold and turn the car’s steering wheel.
By boat, Broceliande was no more than five leagues away. If small enough, Gabrielle and her husband could have sailed down the beautiful stream and over the dark pond into which it fed, then out again, past the farmers’ fields and so on, and so at last to the sea. She pictured their vessel as a dried brown leaf, sides deeply curling, a sail of white samite attached to its stem. An idle fancy.
In reality there were no good direct roads such as they needed; it took them the better part of the afternoon to reach the prim-looking house of Gabrielle’s lover. Its walls were a delicate, biscuity yellow, the colour of an aging beauty’s complexion.
Missy served English tea: lavish cakes, plentiful sandwiches, hothouse pineapples and grapes. The grapes aroused in Gabrielle a startling greed.
The problematic M’sieur Robert Tessiter was still in attendance, a week after he’d arrived. Goncourt could be managed well enough: a hint that the house’s previous inhabitants had left so hastily for South America that their cellars remained largely intact was sufficient to clear him from the stage. But M’sieur Robert was not so easily got rid of.
Gabrielle had him open a window so she could more easily admire the room’s view of the sea. It was admittedly magnificent. She blamed this quality for dazzling her into a clumsy-handedness she never experienced these days and causing her to drop her diamond bracelet onto the beach below. Then she stared at the man half a minute, until he volunteered to go and hunt for it.
He left. Gabrielle wasted not one second. She sped to the divan. Missy half-rose and drew her down. Gabrielle tasted sweet juices dried to a slight stickiness on her lover’s lips, a last trace of their shared meal.
Shouting floated in the open window. Impossible to distinguish any words in it, though the tone was querulous.
The women investigated only themselves. Each breathed the other’s breath. The shouting outside continued, muffled by distance and the noise of the waves. Missy spoke over it, her voice close and low: “You will stay here tonight? And come to me?”
Gabrielle gave no answer.
“You hesitate—why?”
Gazouette would be safe. She must have faith in that. She must show her faith and stay.
Had she not seen proof? The day after her immersion the child had tumbled down the entire length of the grand staircase unhurt—just a bit frightened.
Then the head groom’s mastiff had gone mad and dug up his stake, rushing chain and all at Gazouette, whom Taylor had lain to bathe in the unseasonably warm sun. With her own horror-filled eyes Gabrielle had watched from the terrace as the ravening dog ran toward her daughter, and as the stake caught on something not there—on nothing—on air—on the bare soil of the empty flower beds. Halting the beast till it could be shot.
“I will.” A change in Gabrielle’s attitude toward her daughter would be marked, were anyone watching.
As well she agreed. Her husband’s hard-soled shoes sounded in the corridor. Automatically the two women moved a few inches apart. Nothing could have been more decorous, more placatory, than their attitudes as Goncourt entered.
Her husband’s expedition to the cellar had been fruitful, and he was happy to accept Missy’s offer of hospitality. That evening, with their supper, the four enjoyed several bottles of wines he deemed “satisfactory”. More formally inclined than Gabrielle, Missy signaled her when it was the hour to withdraw from the gentlemen’s company. But scarcely had they exchanged preliminary embraces than Tessiter and Goncourt followed them, to swallow more tea and converse ignorantly about the war—although M’sieur Robert’s observations seemed oddly better than those of the older and more worldly man. They scanned, somehow, matching a rhythm of international affairs Gabrielle hadn’t realised she’d internalised.
Not until she and Goncourt retired did Gabrielle find the note. Missy had apparently secreted it in her pocket. “Turn right, then left, then straight on till six,” it read, a touch cryptically. Below that line it unambiguously added, “Midnight.”
“What have you got?” her husband asked.
“A puzzle. Not a very interesting one.” She threw it on the dying fire and set about to soothe him to sleep.
Gabrielle herself stayed awake, and when she judged it time, slipped from the bed and made her way across the invisible floor on bare feet. She had memorised the furniture’s location; she made it to the door without incident, and exited quickly so that the candle left burning in the passage wouldn’t disturb Goncourt with its light.
A right turn took her to where a narrow corridor branched off to the left. The crack beneath the corridor’s sixth door glowed yellow. Inside, a curl of smoke rose above a high-backed armchair drawn up to face the bright hearth. As Gabrielle closed the door an arm clad in the tailored sleeve of a man’s jacket appeared to one side of the chair, cigarette in hand.
“Is it not a little dangerous to dress so, even here in your home, my love?” she asked.
“I rather hope you are mistaken.” Not Missy, but M’sieur Robert stood to welcome her in.
Gabrielle kept calm. “It would appear so. My apologies.” She turned to leave.
“Oh, you have come to the right place,” said Tessiter. He moved with surprising speed to block the door. “Congratulations. You executed my directions flawlessly.”
“Your directions.” Her voice lacked all intonation. She knew suddenly what was toward. The men who believed themselves her masters were again attempting to control her.
“The first set of them, at any rate.” He gestured to the armchair. “If you’ll be so kind as to seat yourself, I’ll convey the rest.”
She could scream. The room wasn’t that isolated; someone would hear and come. But how to explain her presence in this unlocked room with a man to whom she wasn’t married? Goncourt’s smouldering jealousy would blaze up at the discovery, and servants, deplorably, talked.
She sat. With half her mind, she listened. An important spy had been gravely wounded. He was to be sent to her hospital. Via Tessiter the government instructed Gabrielle to tend to his needs herself. She was to ensure that whatever he said of his mission in Flanders fell on her ears alone: fevered ravings, lucid reports, deathbed confessions. She should record his pronouncements and pass them on to Tessiter, using Missy as their go-between. Simple enough, did she not think?
She thought. As before, the government’s requests seemed reasonable. The war itself, though, was not. Bluntly, it was a flaunting display of cretinism, a contest between heads of nations desperate to determine who possessed the longest metaphoric stick between their legs.
The half of her attention not claimed by Tessiter Gabrielle devoted to calculation. If Missy was to play the role of a messenger in this scheme, she was perhaps more deeply involved than first indicated. The threats against her must have been mere charades. Or perhaps her lover’s status had changed between this approach to Gabrielle and the earlier one. In either circumstance, Gabrielle had no need to protect her.
Goncourt she disregarded, as always. He could look after himself. His connections were more current, more powerful than Missy’s—though if her lover was now an agent, their respective ambits might be evenly matched.
Which left Gabrielle with perhaps one regrettable vulnerability. Gazouette.
Would Gabrielle’s compliance guarantee her daughter’s freedom? Probably not. Leverage once gained would never be abandoned.
As for the stairs, the mastiff: they could have been coincidence as easily as evidence of an answered prayer.
Did she believe her daughter safe? Or not?
Abruptly, there was silence. No sound but the hissing of the flames. Reviewing her memory of the past few seconds she realised Tessiter had asked a question: Would she do the job? She shifted uncomfortably on the too-soft velveteen cushion and answered him.
“Yes.”
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
At least the spy was handsome. Blond, almost silver-haired, with eyes an unusually deep green and a face like a young David—though Gabrielle couldn’t help seeing him as a gape-mouthed fish caught in her talons. The wound to his thigh stank and seeped an ugly mixture of blood and pus when he arrived. She washed it thoroughly with lavender water and packed it with a special healing clay like one Sido had used. This was perhaps why the gaping hole in his flesh closed so quickly. Or it could be due to some supernatural quality in her touch, as many claimed.
Alas, the spy’s mind recovered slowly. When she knew she wasn’t going to be free to sit by his side, Gabrielle gave him drops of a tincture she’d brewed from valerian and poppy to still his broken ramblings.
The nurses and servants believed she tended Lieutenant Tranché because she desired him. Little matter that. Any story would do but the truth, and she took care to give their rumors no grounds. Nothing that could be laid before Goncourt as definitive.
Despite the house’s pressing lack of living space, Gabrielle had maintained her private room. Here she wrote her tales of an irretrievable past. It made sense to use the same pen, paper, desk drawer, lock, and key for her secret work for the government. Scrupulously she inscribed every wandering sentence the lieutenant uttered, not venturing to decide its relevance. She sealed the results in scented envelopes and delivered them personally into the hands of her former lover at their too-frequent meetings.
She took care that they two were never again alone together. Nonetheless, Missy’s eyes often spilled over with questions and unacknowledged tears.
For weeks there was no coherence to Tranché’s speech. At last his green eyes focused on her, and not some phantom of his illness. She introduced herself, said the password Tessiter had revealed to her, received his countersign. From that moment commenced Gabrielle’s real labours in the fields of intelligence. She always remembered the exact date. It was one month from the day she had sent Gazouette away a second time. For good.
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
Gabrielle died at the age of eighty-one. Her estranged and cold yet dutiful daughter returned to attend her sickbed, travelling alone all the way to France from Greece, her most recent in a series of loveless homes.
Rozven had been sold years earlier, upon Goncourt succumbing to a malady of the heart; Gabrielle inhabited a flat in Paris, alone except for her beloved bulldog Beau and a paid nurse. The medal bestowed in exchange for her wartime activities hung framed above her headboard, in a spot where she didn’t have to see it.
Propped up with massive quantities of pillows, as she insisted, she watched out her windows while the chestnuts blossomed, watched their leaves unfurl, darken, become brown. But she didn’t see them fall.
When, at last, after two seasons of grudging patience, the inevitable moment came, Gazouette (who had never shaken her childish nickname) was where she knew she should be, holding her mother’s always strangely youthful hands. She bent forward to catch Gabrielle’s last words—for posterity, she told herself, because they could never be meant for anyone else.
“It was best that you not know,” the old woman murmured. “I made my mind up never to tell you, and I never did. Even long after the danger.”
Gazouette couldn’t help questioning that. “Never to tell me what?”
Gabrielle seemed not to hear her, or at least not to make the effort to respond. “You never felt the smallest threat.”
She shut her eyes a final time. “And even without you, I have had a beautiful life.”
“A Beautiful Stream” by Nisi Shawl