The Secret of the Glass (48 page)

“No, Gaston. Please, no.”

Jeanne heard the whispered plea of her mother, and courage surged through her veins.

She flung open the door. Her father’s arm was drawn back, poised to strike her mother once more.

“
Non, père, non
. It is me you hate, strike me,” Jeanne yelled.

Gaston turned to her with a growl, arm still raised, white-knuckled fist high in the air. Adelaide flew from her chair, launching herself between father and daughter. Jeanne stumbled as her mother’s body forced her back. Reaching out, she grabbed her mother’s shoulders, trying in vain to remove her mother as the target of her father’s violence.

“Stop!”

The shout came from the door. All eyes turned to the young man standing in the aperture.

“Raol.” Jeanne whispered her brother’s name, lowering her head in relief to rest upon her mother’s back.

“
Père,
come.” The dark-haired, amber-eyed young man whose features so matched Jeanne’s own came across the room in a few long strides. He reached up, gently pulling his father’s arm down as he turned the man away from mother and sister. “You must come. The
Conseil d’État
is beginning. People are wondering where you are.”

Raol’s words caught Gaston’s attention. He moved his gaze to his son. Slowly, the ravages of rage disappeared from his face, strained jaw muscles relaxing into prominent jowls as the snarl on his lips slid into a smile.

“Ah, Raol, I would be lost without you. You have brought your father the only pleasure he has ever known.” Gaston took a step, heading toward the door on the arm of his son. With shocking abruptness, he turned on his heels, the monstrous mask of fury back upon his face, gazing at Adelaide and Jeanne with undisguised loathing. Both women jumped back.

“She is your fault, your doing.” To Adelaide he spoke of Jeanne as if she were not there, could not hear. “If you cannot control her, you will suffer the consequences.”

Gaston turned his gaze from his wife to his daughter, nostrils flaring as if assaulted by a foul odor, eyes narrowed and piercing.

“Come,
père
, come,” Raol urged, placing his large hands firmly on his father’s shoulders, turning and steering the older man back in the direction of the door. With a look over his shoulder, he offered his mother and sister a shy smile that peeked out from under his fluffy, sable-colored mustache, a tender panacea offered to their anguish.

Jeanne knocked softly on the closed door.

In the desolate silence left behind by her father and brother, she and her
maman
had embraced in their shared survival, two soldiers rising from a desecrated battlefield. Jeanne began to apologize, but the ravaged and bruised appearance of her mother’s face had stolen all words from her tongue. Her mother had kissed her lips, left the room, and closed her bedchamber door. Jeanne had waited anxiously for her mother, but she could wait no longer; the words of regret were stuck in her throat like a half-chewed piece of food, and she longed to spew, ridding herself of the choking guilt.

“
Maman?
” she called softly, knocking once more, opening the door a crack this time, without waiting for words of encouragement.

Adelaide lay on her back on her bed, motionless save for the slight rise and fall of her chest, her eyes shut tight. Jeanne tiptoed to the bedside, peering down at her mother. Fresh tears sprang to Jeanne’s eyes as she saw the large bruise spreading like a dark purple stain on the side of her mother’s face. Jeanne turned and took the few small steps to the pedestal in the room’s corner holding a water pitcher and basin. Gathering a cloth from the shelf beneath, she poured cool water into the basin, soaking the cloth. Turning back to the bed, Jeanne gasped, dropping the cloth to the hard wood floor. Her mother stared at her with lifeless intensity.

“Ah, dear
maman
, you are awake.” Jeanne rinsed the cloth out in the basin, ridding it of the clinging dirt from the floor. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she gently placed the cloth on her mother’s marred skin.

“Why do you antagonize him so?” Adelaide’s voice sounded meager and strained, uttered without gesture or expression.

“I do not mean to,
maman
, truly I do n-not.” Jeanne’s voice caught in her throat, her dark eyes avoiding her mother’s golden ones. She held the cloth to her mother’s face until the heat of their bodies stole the coolness from it. Jeanne dunked it in the chilly water, bringing it back to her mother.

“Can you ever forgive me?” Jeanne’s swelling tears of attrition spilled over and ran a course of repentance down her cheeks.

The corners of her mother’s mouth rose in the slightest of smiles. Adelaide brought a hand up, cupping her daughter’s face.

“Do I not always?” Lowering her hand, Adelaide braced herself, pushing against the silk coverlet to sit up straight. She leaned against the carved wood of the headboard, gripping her head as if it were about to fly from her shoulders.

“Do you want me to call for the physician?” Jeanne rose from the bed, deeply alarmed at the whiteness of her mother’s usually golden skin, especially pale against the blackness of the darkening bruise.

“No, no. I am fine. We must not let anyone see me.” Adelaide almost shook her head, but the pain stopped her at the first movement. She reached up and captured her head with her hands, as if to keep it from falling off.

“I will always forgive you,
ma petite
. But I do not know how much longer I can protect you.” Adelaide raised a shaky hand to her daughter. Jeanne took it, sitting once more by her mother’s side. “Things are not as they were when you left for the convent. Your father’s situation is more precarious than ever.”

Adelaide spoke freely with no fear of interruption from her husband. As a member of the state council and a fairly well-placed courtier, he would be wherever the King was. Gaston rarely returned to their rooms except to sleep, too afraid to not “be seen.”

“The King has wrenched all power from the noblemen.” Adelaide spoke through tight, white lips. “It is but a masquerade he acts, letting them believe they advise him. The Fronde has left our King paranoid and controlling.”

Adelaide, the daughter of the Comte de Clemont, a distant cousin to the King, was a part of a prestigious society of women, the
Bas Bleu,
and privy to the very inner circles of the royal family, a fact that only served to alienate the married couple more.

Adelaide leaned toward her daughter, grasping the young hands. Jeanne started slightly at the feel of the cold, bloodless skin. She recovered, putting her mother’s hands in her own, capturing them in her younger, warmer ones, wishing she could give back to her mother all she had received.

“They are powerless men, these nobles, reduced to petty games and intrigues to give their life any meaning. They are humiliated and frustrated by the machinations the King forces them into. It is no wonder they lash out at any around them less powerful than they.”

“But we are his family,” Jeanne burst out, her words flying from her mouth like wayward birds and she unable to catch or contain them.

“Who is more powerless than their wives and daughters?” Adelaide scrunched her shoulders up toward her ears. “Your father is one of the few noblemen still to serve in Louis’ government, and it is only because he possessed a financial education. His position is tenuous at best. Why do you antagonize him so by speaking thus?”

“It is not my intent,
maman.
” Jeanne turned from her mother, walking to the open doorway, poised in the egress as if to take flight. “And it is not my fault.”

It was not her fault that her father suffered at the hands of the King. Louis XIV ruled by absolute monarchy, rumored to have proclaimed forthrightly,
“L’État, c’est moi”—
I am the State. It was his complex set of unwritten laws and codes of behavior: who may enter the room when, who may sit, who must stand, who may eat and when. Noblemen now held only honorary positions and pensions. Life was nothing more than a struggle for trivial distinction and privileges.

Louis would do anything to keep the nobility from uniting against the Crown, as they had during the Fronde over thirty years ago. The memories of the ten-year-old King, of the deprivation and despair during those years, colored all his decisions; he ruled by them. He had dedicated his life to punishing them for it.

He filled his high council, the
Conseil d’en haut,
with promoted commoners, usurping the nobles, finding it easier to dismiss an elevated commoner than to strip a comte, and all his descendants, of the title. It was the reign of the lowborn bourgeoisie, as the Duc de Saint-Simon had so aptly named it. The rest were the King’s puppets, dancing to the threat of court banishment or a life in the Bastille. These impotent men could but displace their frustration on those weaker than they, their women.

Jeanne turned back to her mother, hands pressed against her stomach as if, under the yellow embroidered bodice, her intestines fought to gain their freedom. Her long shadow, cast by the guttering candles, shook upon the wall behind her. With small, rapid movements she shook her head back and forth, long brown curls flowing like waves about her head.

“I am not like the other girls. There is…something…wrong with me.” Her deep brown eyes pleaded for understanding.

Adelaide’s mouth formed a ghost of a smile, a benevolent acceptance of a mother to her wayward child.

“I know,
ma chère,
I know. But you can try. Why did you not try harder at the convent?”

“Ah,
morbleu!
” Jeanne’s hands flew dramatically in the air. “I could not stand it,
maman
. The girls, they are beyond stupid. They are ludicrous, puerile. They fainted in horror at the least little thing, or worse, giggled incessantly for hours and hours.”

Jeanne ran the few steps back to the bed, falling upon it with such force that her mother bounced upon the feathers.

“I cannot bear a life where the most momentous decisions I have to make are what to wear and what to serve. It is too meaningless and trivial. I want to learn things, study, be a part of the world. I can n—”

Adelaide raised a hand, silencing her daughter.

“Do you think you are the first woman to wish to break the shackles imposed upon us by the virtue of possessing a womb?” Her mother’s words hissed out from between closed teeth. “If so, you are greatly deceived.”

Jeanne saw her mother’s frustrated tears, the vein popping on her forehead, and her red splotchy skin and, for the first time, saw the true anguish in her mother, anguish at her own wasted life.

The young, suddenly frightened girl did not know what to do to relieve the pain of this woman, this angel who had given her life and so much more. She did the only thing that came to mind.

Jeanne stuck out her tongue and rolled her eyes as she’d seen the King’s jesters do.

Her mother’s face went blank—then split wide as she barked a laugh of pure delight. Her eyes popped open, and one long, slim hand flew to her chest as if to contain the swift skip of her heart. The shroud of despair lifted. Still laughing softly, she gazed upon her daughter with soulful eyes, bright with the turmoil of her emotions. Adelaide reached out for her daughter and pulled her into a tight embrace.

“Oh,
ma petite,
you are and always will be the breath and death of me.”

Jeanne smiled from the safety of her mother’s bosom, memories of such sanctuary taken there over the years flitting through her mind like passing scenery. She inhaled the musky, flowery scent of her mother and squeezed back with all the force of her overwhelming love.

“I will try harder,
maman
. I really will.”

Adelaide clucked her tongue, reveling in the healing force of her daughter’s touch.

“
Non, ma chère Jeanne
, you most probably will not.”

Two

S
he stood before the cloudy mirror wondering if the distorted reflection she saw in it was her own or if it had magically captured the image of another, one of the perfectly mannered, perfectly obsequious courtiers clogging every inch of Versailles. The sage-green silk bodice hugged her tightly, fitting to the exact form of the binding corset beneath it. Satin ribbon trimmed the low-cut bodice, elbow-length sleeves and hem and created bows embellishing the full skirt and slight train. The large felt hat in the same sage green boasted one fluffy white ostrich feather.

Jeanne peered more closely at her face; her eyes looked darker, deeper, and her skin glowed with tawny effervescence.

“Hmph,” she grunted to the woman staring at her, acknowledging that her mother did know how to dress to bring about the best in one’s appearance.

Jeanne, neither familiar nor comfortable in such elegance, had promised her mother a few hours ago that she would try harder, and she would. With a determined flick of her chin, and a giggle as the aigrette wiggled high above her head, she left the unfamiliar reflection behind.

Exiting through one of the many doors of the lower gallery into the back courtyard of Versailles, Jeanne hid her face in the large shadow cast by the brim of her millinery. The sun blazed white, and her eyes squinted in defense. Through narrowed lids, a colorful mosaic appeared before her—red, blue, green, yellow: every color of the spectrum blurred in her vision. Slowly her pupils adjusted to the light and her full, wide mouth turned up in a bow.

Courtiers. Like petals fluttering around the pistil, these creatures, prodigiously garbed in every color of the rainbow, blazed brightly in silk, satin, and brocade. Women with piled-high hair adorned with all manner of hat and lace, and men with their long, flowing curls blowing in the breeze and topped with plumed hats, vied for prominence.

Jeanne inhaled deeply, nostrils quivering in delight at the freshness of both air and water. She took her first step toward the entourage as they assembled between the two grand pools of the Water Parterre, the first section of the immense gardens spanning over two hundred and fifty acres. Her heart beat wildly, and she felt moisture forming under the layers of clothing she wore. This was her first social outing since her return, her first time among the gossiping courtiers, and she anticipated a cold reception.