Pam Rosenthal (36 page)

The day progressed slowly, the women taking turns holding Marie-Laure’s hand and helping her accept the gradually deepening contractions—to breathe through them, they’d insist.

“Good, good,” they’d murmur from time to time.

Good?
By early evening she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to hug them for their patience or strangle them. Strangle them, she decided; she wanted to strangle anybody and everybody who wasn’t feeling their middles squeezed in an iron vise. Cursing softly, she turned back to the business of breathing, when she heard heavy steps on the marble stairway.

It must be Doctor Raspail, she thought. But those didn’t sound like Doctor Raspail’s measured steps. What they did sound like were…

But that was impossible. Still, the footsteps sounded (for hadn’t she heard him clomping up the staircase to his bedroom every day of her life until she’d left Montpellier?)—they sounded exactly like…

Gilles?

With the Marquise bringing up the rear.

“But…but…” She forgot to breathe, and the
but
transmuted into a howl of pain.

“Breathe!” the command issued in unintended unison from Gilles and Mademoiselle Beauvoisin, the simultaneity surprising each of them and Marie-Laure as well.

“Breathe,
chérie
!”

“Breathe dammit, Marie-Laure!”

The two of them stared at one another. Mademoiselle Beauvoisin was clearly relieved to see Gilles. And Gilles was just as clearly determined to trust no one in this vile den of aristocrats—even a disarmingly beautiful woman who seemed to know something about obstetrics.

“Here, Jeanne.” Mademoiselle Beauvoisin prodded the Marquise toward Marie-Laure’s bedside. “Take my place for just a moment, while I speak to Monsieur—”

“
Doctor
Vernet.”

So he’d passed his final examinations. How wonderful, Marie-Laure almost had time to think, before she howled again against the massive force of the next contraction.

“Um, breathe please, Marie-Laure,” the Marquise offered timidly.

Marie-Laure tried to obey, but the Marquise’s entreaties—and even Madame Rachel’s confident touch—weren’t enough to distract her from what Mademoiselle Beauvoisin was whispering to Gilles.

“Second stage…difficult transition…effaced…”

And then, “Toxemia, seems to be controlled with…but we’re not sure…pulsebeat…”

“
Bien.
”
Gilles took off his coat. Rolling up his sleeves, he strode to the pitcher of warm water on an inlaid commode. Marie-Laure expected him to stare disdainfully at the commode’s elaborate gold trim, but he seemed to have slipped off his edgy class-consciousness with his coat, and become merely an intent and very capable physician.

“Thank you, Jeanne.” Mademoiselle Beauvoisin had rejoined the pale, perspiring Marquise. “And now, we’re going to prop up Marie-Laure’s legs on these pillows and bolsters, that’s right,
ma chérie
, just pile them there…”

“And
you
,” Gilles announced to Marie-Laure, “are going to push the baby out.” He stood between her raised legs, looking down at her as though he were preparing another lesson in how to fight like a boy.

“But how…” She wanted to ask him how he’d known to come and who had told him where to find her, but the questions evaporated somewhere between her mind and her mouth. Suddenly she didn’t care how he’d gotten here, she cared about nothing except a sudden overwhelming urge to push. And it seemed that she knew how to do it. Of course, it would be more like pushing an immense pumpkin than a baby—
well,
perhaps
(ma belle
Cinderella), perhaps it
was
a pumpkin after all. What else
could
it be? For surely a baby couldn’t be so enormous.

Well, whatever it was, she knew what to do.
Yes, Gilles, I know exactly. And it
is
a
kind of fighting
, she thought, between pushes, gasps, groans, bellows, and curses.
Fighting like a woman.

How strange that the pain should cease so abruptly—exactly as Gilles had given a satisfied little grunt, the one that always signaled an experiment had been a success.
The baby isn’t inside me anymore
, she thought.
Gilles must have it in his hands.

The grunt had sounded reassuring. But suddenly she was alone and everybody was terribly busy somewhere else. She heard someone mutter, “Blue, stressed.” Finally, eons later, she heard a lusty, outraged, energetic scream, and a relieved collective sigh.

“
Look
at you,” she whispered to the tiny, waxy, purplish creature Gilles put down on her naked belly.

“Breathing all right, thank God,” she heard someone say.

“Just
look
at you,” she half crooned and half sobbed, as Madame Rachel helped her gather the baby into her arms. The child was wrapped in a heavy blanket (“These little, early ones do better if they’re kept warm,” Madame Rachel said), so all she could see was a tiny, thin face: the little features were scrunched up, exhausted by a long, hard journey. But there was no mistaking them. They were Joseph’s features, stamped as clearly on the new-made flesh as the King’s on a gold coin.

Church bells rang somewhere.

“It’s just after midnight,” the Marquise said in a dazed voice. “It’s Thursday, the day I visit Joseph.”

“And you will tell him,” Mademoiselle Beauvoisin said softly, “that another beautiful,
healthy
young lady has come to stay with us, and that she is as eager as the rest of us for his release.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Gilles was at her bedside when she woke the next morning. “The Marquise wrote to me,” he told her, “probably the very day you arrived here. It was good of her to alert me about your condition.

“Toxemia’s mysterious,” he added, pouring her a cup of coffee from the silver pot on the table, “and it can be extremely dangerous. You were lucky. They took good care of you—that actress especially.” He turned his eyes away.

She wished she could calm his offended sensibilities.
Yes, Gilles, it is what you suspect. But it’s not vile or scandalous—it’s really quite natural, once you get used to the idea.

No, better not to embarrass him. She concentrated on her coffee, the still-warm bread wrapped in a linen napkin, the little crock of sweet butter beside it on the tray.

“I checked up on the baby,” he said. “She’s doing very well, sleeping soundly. Madame Rachel has her in the next room.

“She’s little and scrawny, of course,” he added, “but you can see that she’s one of the tough ones.”

He looked away again, obviously at a loss for what to say next. She supposed it was up to her to begin. “This must come as something of a shock to you.”

He rolled his eyes.
Well, yes, that’s
one
way to put it.

His face fell into familiar lines: a responsible older sibling’s exasperation with a flighty younger one.

“Come home with me,” he demanded. “You can’t just let them keep you and the baby like house pets.” He grimaced at Figaro, curled up on the bed at her feet.

“I can’t come,” she answered. “I have to wait for Joseph. Sophie and I need to be here, for when he…in case of…”

“You’re really naming her Sophie?” He allowed himself a quick smile of pleasure before continuing. “Your…your…” Considering possible ways he might refer to Joseph and rejecting them all, he shrugged his shoulders and continued. “His prospects don’t look good, you know.

“Everybody at home talks about his case, Marie-Laure. They say it’s about time a damn aristocrat was prosecuted for something—though they admit it’s nice that he knocked off one of his own instead of taking it out on commoners. If public opinion counts for anything—and sometimes it does, even under our ridiculous Bourbon monarchy—he’ll never get out of the Bastille.”

He seemed determined to be brutal. Or maybe the facts simply
were
brutal.

“But the truth ought to count for
something
,” she retorted. “And the truth—as you very well know—is that Joseph didn’t do it. He was making deliveries to booksellers all day. His signature is probably filed away all over the city in offices like Rigaud’s.”

Damn Gilles for goading her into arguing the point. She crossed her arms, leaned back against the pillows, and glared at him.

“He didn’t do it and that’s final. Joseph’s not a murderer, Gilles.”

He glared back at her. “Still, he took advantage of
you
, didn’t he? Don’t you understand that I’ll never forgive myself for allowing you to work there? It was my duty to protect you from libertine scum like him. I would have killed him rather than let him touch you. In fact I should never have…”

She stared while his voice turned uncertain, the irony of what he’d just said becoming clear to him. And while he stammered, she could feel her own mouth shaping a small and not very tactful smile—at the memory of her determined self, maneuvering Joseph toward that pile of hay in the barn.

Quite a contrast, she thought, with whatever lurid seduction scene Gilles must imagine.

But before Gilles’s personal honesty forced him to concede that he understood the meaning of her smile, they heard the sounds of a baby’s whimpering.

“Ah,” he said quickly. “Ah good, she’s going to wake up. Sometimes you have to shake these little early ones awake to get them to eat enough.

“I’m going to book a place on a coach back home tonight.” He took her pulse as he spoke, nodding at the results. “You’re bouncing back remarkably well.

“I’ve put a deposit on some space,” he added proudly, “to rent for an office.”

Oh dear, was he really going so soon? Wasn’t he going to help her learn to take care of the mysterious creature in the next room? Just how did you hold a baby when you nursed it, anyway? How did you know when it had eaten enough? Did it hurt when they sucked, she wondered suddenly. Suppose she didn’t have enough milk in her breasts, or even worse, suppose the baby didn’t like the way it tasted? But she couldn’t ask Gilles to stay and disrupt his life more than he already had.

He took some gold coins from his pocket and laid them on the table.

“Buy yourself something new to wear,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to depend on the Marquise for
everything
.

“I’ve been tutoring some rich, dim-witted first-year students,” he explained. “Don’t want them killing their future patients, after all.”

Briskly, he turned to the next order of business.

“And while I’m in Paris, I have to buy some stockings for Sylvie. Maybe some perfume as well, and something for Madame Bellocq, and for Augustin and Suzanne too. But I don’t know…”

Marie-Laure laughed. “You don’t know which shops you can afford, which ones won’t cheat you, and which ones won’t be too snooty. Neither would I, even if I were strong enough to accompany you today. But as it happens, there is, in this household, a most expert and accomplished Parisienne shopper.”

The shopper had just appeared in the doorway to get the breakfast tray. And yes, Claudine was quite sure that the Marquise would allow her to guide Doctor Vernet through the perils and pitfalls of the capital’s shopping districts.

I hope
, Marie-Laure thought after the two of them had left her alone,
she doesn’t congratulate Doctor Vernet on his sister’s snaring a protector like the Vicomte.

Doctor Vernet.
How fine it sounded, and how wonderful that he’d soon have his own office. Her moment of satisfaction, however, gave way almost immediately to simple panic, as Sophie let out a furious and hungry yell.

Madame Rachel quickly assumed command, showing Marie-Laure how to pump her milk into a clean bowl and feed the fussy, immature little mouth from an eyedropper. Sophie was too little to take the breast the first week; it was slow, exacting, anxious work to make sure that she was eating enough. And as Gilles had said she might, she sometimes drifted off to sleep before she’d finished, needing to be coaxed awake again.

Marie-Laure learned to burp her, and to clean and diaper her. And when there was nothing to do, she simply gazed at her limbs and toes and fingers, talking and singing softly to her. A funny new chair was installed in the blue bedchamber: it had curved wooden parts at the bottom, so you could rock back and forth in it. The motion was comforting; the Marquise said the American ambassador, Monsieur Franklin, had recommended it. Marie-Laure spent hours rocking with Sophie in her arms, tracing Joseph’s features in the baby’s little face, wondering if
he’d
ever get to do so, and reading and rereading his latest letter.

…and as for our daughter—our daughter!—I can only stare at the words in wonder and wish with all my heart that I could see her.

I received a communication this week, by the way, from Amélie, telling me that the Prince de Condé is to be godfather to the new little Comte de Carency Auvers-Raimond when he makes his appearance.

Of course she assumes it will be a Comte and not a Comtesse. Poor child—they’ll probably never even look at its face. Just a quick peek under its gown and then Amélie will pack it off to a wet nurse she’ll hire on the cheap.

This is the first letter I’ve received from either her or Hubert, its sole purpose being to gloat about an impressive new social connection. No desire, it seems, to help me. Well, why should they? Evidently my imprisonment hasn’t hindered Amélie’s rise through the social ranks.