Pam Rosenthal (10 page)

All the while trying to concoct the perfect welcoming remark to make to
her
. Something brief and witty: friendly, unprovocative, and just a bit sly and unexpected.

On the whole, he’d thought that his greeting had come off rather neatly, and that he’d done a good job nudging the conversation around to literature in general and Rousseau’s
Confessions
in particular. Given how deftly she’d dissected his own writing last winter (but
that
he’d be sure to steer her away from) he’d been sincerely eager to hear what she thought of the book all literate France was discussing.

He’d engineered an abstract, cerebral conversation to bridge the chasm between their all-too-separate social positions. A meeting of minds—to distract attention from their all-too-present bodies.

And very successfully too, he’d thought. Not that she hadn’t also been marvelous to look at. Wonderful that way she had of casting her eyes about for just the right word, all the while curling her legs under herself and snuggling into the window seat’s cushions. Her bright hair seemed to reflect the light of all the room’s candles, while her eyes glowed with subtler inner lights—her immersion in the subject’s complexities, of course; her joy in matters of the intellect.

Until her yawn had put an end to all that by showing him just how fatuous his perceptions had been.

A good thing his olive complexion didn’t show blushes. But he felt a deep chagrin at his thoughtlessness.

How could he not have noticed how exhausted she was? Her hand was trembling; the skin below her eyes was blue.

How could he have imagined it tactful to ignore what she’d been doing all day? As though physical labor were something shameful, regrettable.

Anyway, what
had
she been doing all day?

All he knew was that she’d helped prepare the large, formal dinner—the excellent meal that he’d been quite happy to eat. And that she worked in the scullery.

But what did they actually do in a scullery? He believed—though he wasn’t sure—that they washed pots there. Food
was
cooked in pots, wasn’t it? Or was it pans they used down there? Pots, pans—what did it matter? He probably couldn’t tell one from the other anyway.

He had only the most distant notion even of how an omelet was prepared. One simply sat at the table and food appeared, lightly veiled by its pastry shell, or fragrant and blushing atop a pool of raspberry sauce—as cunningly and elaborately arrayed as a woman dressed to meet her lover. And as silent, as secretive about the mysteries of preparation.

He stared at the girl in the window seat. Her skin was pale
under her freckles. She raised a chapped hand to her mouth, endeavoring to stifle another yawn and failing miserably.

“But you’re tired. You’ve been working all day. Cooking that dinner must have taken a lot of effort.”

She shrugged. “I didn’t really
cook
it.”

“Well then, doing…ah…something, whatever it was. And I’ve kept you up so late, with all this conversation.”

“It’s been lovely to talk to you. I don’t get opportunities like this any longer.”

“Still…” He felt abashed for having thought he’d worked hard, bowing and simpering and charming the family’s guests. He’d thought himself magnanimous to be so unmindful of her inferior station. And such a hero and martyr too, for not touching her.

Damn his self-centeredness—it
seemed that he’d also misinterpreted those longing glances she’d been directing toward his bed. He’d thought she’d been imagining the same thing
he
had.

“You need to sleep. I’ll have Baptiste take you back to your room. Or…”—
well, she
would
be more comfortable
—“would
you like to take a little nap here? You really
can
trust me, you know,” he added.

“I know.”

“Because I
never
—”

“Take advantage of servants. Yes, you mentioned that.” Her voice was quiet, but that slight curve of her mouth, he thought, might hint at irony.

“Well, perhaps I will lie down, just for a little.” She uncurled her legs from beneath her. Her left stocking had a little tear in its weave, near the ankle.

His bed was high off the ground. Perhaps he should lift her onto it.
No, better not.

“Just rest for a while,” he whispered, as she sank down onto the pillows. She sighed and stretched her legs, searching for the perfect posture.

“Just…rest.” The tiny catch in the fabric of his voice, it seemed to him, reflected the rip in her stocking. But she hadn’t heard him; she’d already fallen asleep, barely moving—except for the gentle rise and fall of her chest—all the next hour, until he wrested his gaze from her and whispered to Baptiste to wake her and lead her to her room upstairs.

A blush suffused her face as early morning sunlight slanted through her bedroom window and memories of the preceding night rushed back to consciousness.

Had she really fallen asleep in his bed? How sweetly awkward, how chastely intimate the evening had been.

You really
can
trust me, you know.
It seemed she could, which was a good thing, she supposed.

Well,
of course
it’s a good thing.
(She heard this thought in Gilles’s insistent voice.)
It’s a very good thing indeed that he’s so decent. You’re lucky to have his protection, Marie-Laure.

Even if the evening wasn’t anything like her dreams of visiting Monsieur X’s bedchamber. Nor the way anyone else in the chateau had imagined it.

Well, damn everyone in the chateau then. Damn them and their lecherous fantasies too. Anyway, she thought now, there was at least one person here who’d be glad to know the innocent, virtuous truth.

Her bedmate Louise had returned from her mother’s funeral late last night, while Marie-Laure had been in Joseph’s room. Of course Louise knew where Marie-Laure had been: her fiancé, Martin from the stables, would have told her the whole story when he’d fetched her at the inn.

Louise was pious and believed in the sacraments. She and Martin, as she’d told Marie-Laure, were waiting until they could afford to marry. She’d been asleep when Marie-Laure had come back to bed last night (there was no mistaking her loud snore), but Marie-Laure had thought she’d detected Louise’s disapproval even in sleep, from the way she’d scrunched herself up and turned her face to the wall.

She wasn’t sleeping now, though. Marie-Laure couldn’t hear any snores from Louise’s side of the bed. Only—just as insistent, somehow, in its silence—a regretful, intensely pitying stare.

Louise’s sorrow about Marie-Laure’s sins would be even more difficult to bear—unearned as it was—than everybody else’s lusty, unbridled fantasies.

She reminded herself that the whole point of her nightly visits to Joseph’s room was to create an illusion. She tried to convince herself that an illusion wouldn’t be much good if even one person knew the truth.

She turned to face her bedmate. Louise had huge pale blue eyes, fringed with long black lashes. If it weren’t for the harelip that deformed the lower part of her face, she’d be a beauty. The lovely eyes were solemn, troubled. Marie-Laure hugged her.

“It’s not what you think,
chérie
,” she whispered.

And quickly, while she and Louise dressed, she explained the situation as well as she could.

“I’ll tell you more later,” she promised as they hurried down to breakfast. “But you can’t tell a soul. No, not even Martin. Absolutely not.”

It might have been a mistake, she thought, plunging her hands into the washbasin after breakfast. But she wasn’t sorry; she needed to confide in someone and with luck, Louise wouldn’t tell. All the servants loved to gossip about their masters, but they were closemouthed with their own secrets and loyal with each other’s. Marie-Laure had been reminded of this a week or so ago when Arsène, who’d been solemnly explaining something to Nicolas (it seemed to have something to do with his family) immediately became silent and chilly when she entered the dessert kitchen.

The pace of the kitchen work had become bearable again. After the preceding few days it felt almost luxurious: only the curate and the magistrate were invited to dinner tonight.

“We’ll stew the rabbits,” Monsieur Colet had said. “Cuisine
ordinaire
for the local flunkies.”

Marie-Laure held up a faceted crystal goblet and watched it bend a sunbeam into a rainbow.

No dreaming of the handsome gentleman
, she reminded herself, as Nicolas passed by on his way to go over accounts with Monsieur Colet. But she wasn’t dreaming—at least not in the way Nicolas would have thought. She was happily sifting through thoughts and insights that had lain dormant for months.

Books and stories were the things she loved best in the world. She’d spent most of her life talking about them; doing without such talk these past months had felt like starvation. How fantastic to have found someone with the same enthusiasms—someone, moreover, who’d done something as splendid as writing and publishing his own story. She knew from his wonderfully constructed phrases that he shared her reverence for writing; she would have felt honored to meet him even if he weren’t so…wonderful in other ways.

Someone to talk to, listen to, learn about.

Of course, there were
some
things about him—some physical things—that she probably knew too much about already.

But in other ways he was still an enigma. Even through all her exhaustion and confusion last night, she’d clearly discerned how prickly he was about revealing certain thoughts and opinions. She would bet a year’s wages that he was avoiding some aching memory or troubling experience. Well, she supposed that it was his business and not hers.

Back home in Montpellier, she’d sometimes stay up all night to finish a particularly interesting book, just to see how it all came out; she’d drift through the next day in a happy haze, fitting the pieces together. He’d said she was a clever reader; maybe she was just an especially persistent one.

Shrugging, she turned her attention back to the crystal goblets. He’d penned an elegant, many-faceted memoir, but Marie-Laure was surer than ever that there was one story he hadn’t been able to put down on paper. And whether it was her business or not, she knew that she wouldn’t be satisfied until she knew what it was.

Chapter Nine

As the summer wore on, Joseph was to learn a great deal about clever readers—or at least about the very clever one who visited him every night. He quickly learned that she was an eager listener, one who caught every detail and examined it for flaws and inconsistencies. She knew her subject, too—he couldn’t help but feel flattered that Marie-Laure had all but memorized some of Monsieur X’s stories. And she was endlessly, shamelessly inquisitive: having utterly disarmed him with what she understood already, she’d look at him with large, clear, innocent eyes and ask yet another devilishly simple question.

“And what did you do then?”

“But why did the Prince become so angry?”

“Was she pretty? Was it expensive? Did it hurt?”

Her attention was a goad, a stimulant. In different circumstances he might even have found it an aphrodisiac.
Stop that
, he told himself,
stop that right now.
But it was certainly amusing, even invigorating, to talk to her; her gaze made him feel quite eloquent. It made him voluble too—sometimes rather more so than he wanted to be.

He tried to limit himself to safe, impersonal subjects. Anecdotes of life at court were good choices, he thought, because the material would already be familiar to her. And not just to her: all of France—literate or not—were quickly becoming authorities on the royal family and their ridiculous, money-draining excesses. Marie-Laure shook her head at the glitter and corruption and laughed at absurdities like the Queen pretending to be a shepherdess, carrying a beribboned crook and tripping about the palace gardens with her flock of perfumed sheep.

He lingered as long as he could on such things. After all, the facts of daily life at Versailles—the spectacular entertainments and inexorable maneuverings for power and influence—were amazing in themselves, the scope and size of the place fabulous beyond imagining. “I was told,” he said, “that there are six hundred apartments there. For members of the court, you know.”

Luckily, she didn’t demand to know how many of those apartments he’d actually slept in—or
not
slept in, which had more often been the case. He’d once attempted to tally it up for himself and had been a bit shocked by the result; if asked for a numeric reckoning of his nights at Versailles, he’d appear rather like a male Scheherazade, with a thousand and one tales to recount.

He sometimes felt like Scheherazade in any case, telling a different story every night in order to avoid—well, not his own death of course, but
something
deadly, something filthy and obscene and untellable.

What had she said last winter? …
an author sometimes leaves out bits and pieces—things that were too difficult or painful…
Damn her perspicacity anyway!

In their early meetings, he tried to tell her about everything but himself.

But every good storyteller—and he was a very good one—adorns his narrative with at least a few personal details. Anyway, he comforted himself, she already knew a lot of it from his memoir. Though it was different, somehow, telling it face-to-face.