The Moon and the Sun (51 page)

“I could not bear it if you did,” she said.

“I swore I’d never put you in danger,” Lucien said. “Lies are dangerous.” He took bread and cheese and meat pastries and fruit from the saddlebag. “But we’ve had enough difficult truths. Let us play at being carefree peasants. No intrigue, no etiquette, no court —”

“No money, no food, no shelter,” Marie-Josèphe said.

“Another difficult truth,” Lucien said. “We’ll play at being courtiers on a picnic.”

He drank a long draught of his wine and refilled their glasses. He reached into his pocket, drew out a heavy folded piece of parchment, and handed it to Marie-Josèphe.

She unfolded it and read it and glanced at him with gratitude.

“Sir, I’m so grateful —”

“It was but a moment’s effort,” he said. “The decree of manumission for your sister means nothing if your brother withholds his signature.”

“He will give it,” she said.

When Sherzad decided she was in no danger of having M. de Baatz’ salve inflicted upon her, she swam closer, asking curious questions.

“Would you like to try our food?” Marie-Josèphe offered Sherzad a piece of bread.

Sherzad tasted it and spat it out, pronouncing it fit for fish-food. She liked cheese even less, rejecting it even for fish. Marie-Josèphe handed the sea woman her goblet.

Sherzad sniffed. She thrust her mouth and chin into the goblet and upended it, drinking as the red wine spilled out over her throat and her breasts like blood.

“Do show her how to drink, Mlle de la Croix,” Count Lucien said. “This is excellent wine. I don’t mind if she guzzles it, but I wouldn’t have it wasted.”

Sherzad did better on her second attempt, draining the goblet and demanding more.

“No, it’s your first time,” Marie-Josèphe said. “It will make you silly, if you aren’t careful... All right, just a little.” She and Sherzad shared a goblet of wine. Sherzad sang, comparing the effects of drinking wine to those of eating a certain luminescent creature from the deep, deep sea.

Sherzad leaned on the bank of the canal, humming and whistling softly. She took Marie-Josèphe’s hand and pressed it against her cheek, against her lips. She pushed the sleeve away from the lancet wound. The cut had nearly healed, and the inflammation had disappeared.

“Do you see? Count Lucien cured it.”

Sherzad snorted, slid into the water, and swam away. Sunlight gilded her.

A little drunk herself, Marie-Josèphe lay back on the rug, supported on her elbows.

The tent stood over the Fountain of Apollo, its sides open to the breeze. Within the cage of Sherzad’s late prison, Apollo and his chariot drove widdershins. Marie-Josèphe scowled at the statue.

“Why do you frown?” Count Lucien chided her gently. “I planned a moment to ease your worries.”

“Apollo is driving the wrong way.” She drew a path across the sky, from sunrise to sunset. “He should follow the sun, not oppose it.”

“He faces the King,” Count Lucien said.

“The world follows rules that have nothing to do with kings.” Marie-Josèphe picked up an apple and let it drop to the carpet, picked it up, dropped it again. “The laws of motion, the laws of optics, the motion of the planets — gravity. M. Newton proved it.

His Majesty might command this apple, Defy nature’s law, do not fall! He might command all he likes. Nevertheless, it would fall.”

Count Lucien watched her quizzically.

“I am investigating the nature of gravity,” Marie-Josèphe said haughtily. “As M.

Newton did.” She took a bite of the apple. It crunched between her teeth, juicy and tart.

“If he has already done it,” Count Lucien said, “can you not leave these dangerous questions to him?”

Marie-Josèphe leaned toward him eagerly. “M. Newton discovered what gravity does — but he himself admitted he doesn’t know what it is. It would be wonderful, I think, to discover its nature. Is it a force? Is it the hand of God?” She spread her arms as wide as she could reach. “M. Newton made his discoveries by studying the planets —the largest things we know. Perhaps one should look at the smallest things!” She brought her hands close together. “Something causes the attraction. If distance attenuates it, might proximity concentrate it? Perhaps one could see it. If I had the use of Mynheer van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope —”

“If it’s there to be seen,” Count Lucien said, “why has Mynheer van Leeuwenhoek not seen it?”

“Because he wasn’t looking for it.” Suddenly shy — she had never confessed her ambition to anyone else — Marie-Josèphe spread her hands, releasing everything she had said. “Pay no attention —”

“Have you no faith in my philosophical inclinations, Mlle de la Croix?” Count Lucien said mildly. “Am I incapable of understanding your theories?”

“I don’t yet understand them myself, sir.” Marie-Josèphe glanced away, chastened.

“They require time and work. I have too little of the former and too much of the latter.”

Unwilling to say more about her unlikely dreams, Marie-Josèphe rose and fetched her drawing box from where it had fallen when she confronted the Chevalier. She searched beneath the remnants of her musical score for a fresh sheet of paper. The ripped pages fell onto the Persian rug. Marie-Josèphe gathered them up.

“What is that?” Count Lucien asked.

“His Majesty’s cantata. My wretched composition.”

“It doesn’t satisfy you?”

“I thought — thanks to Sherzad — I had achieved something beyond my ability,”

she said. “Now I don’t know what to think.” She offered him a page of the score. “See for yourself.”

He waved it off. “I haven’t the talent to imagine a piece from its written notes.”

“M. Coupillet says I’m an amateur, a woman, and he says the piece is too long... In that he’s quite right.”

“How does that make it wretched?”

The melody soared in Marie-Josèphe’s mind, melding with the song Sherzad sang from halfway down the Grand Canal.

“He hardly looked at it!” she exclaimed. “He said he wouldn’t direct it, he said women cannot — and he demanded, and I refused...”

“His Majesty admired —”

“Is His Majesty any different from the others?” Marie-Josèphe cried. “Does he want the music, or does he want my — my particular gratitude?”

“You’ve many reasons to be grateful to him —”

Marie-Josèphe bit back an angry response, an angry denial.

“— but has he demanded your... particular gratitude?”

“He’s been chivalry itself,” Marie-Josèphe said, embarrassed. “What I said was unworthy of him.”

“Even his detractors —”

“Detractors? Of His Majesty? In France?” Marie-Josèphe exclaimed.

Nonplussed, Lucien fell silent. He chuckled. “Everyone agrees His Majesty possesses superlative judgment of music. If your piece is too long, shorten it. Ask the aid of young master Scarlatti, who is too young yet to be concerned with any woman’s particular gratitude.”

“You underestimate Master Démonico. I did show it to him. He admired it. When he plays it, oh, it sounds... but Master Démonico plays celestial music for his finger-practice.” Marie-Josèphe scribbled a note to Domenico, sent it away with a servant, then squared the pages of the score and returned them to her drawing box.

“Thank you for your good advice, Count Lucien. I’m glad you don’t reserve it for the King alone.”

“You may show me your gratitude —”

Marie-Josèphe looked up sharply.

“— by playing the composition for me,” Lucien said easily.

“Master Domenico’s skill —”

“— is extraordinary. I admit it. I’d rather hear the music from your hands.”

“It is very long.”

“So much the better.”

He poured more wine and looked out over the Grand Canal. They sat together in companionable silence and finished their picnic.

Marie-Josèphe sipped her wine and nibbled one last pastry. The servant, out of breath, returned with an answer to her note, a page bearing Domenico’s brave attempt at courtly language in his scrawled childish handwriting: “Signorina Maria must not worry another single moment, I fancied she would wish me to play her composition, because everything having HIS MAJESTY’s glory as its end is marvelously exciting; and when the desire to please Signorina Maria is joined to it, what further aim could one have?”

Marie-Josèphe showed the note to Count Lucien, folded it, and slipped it into her bodice, amused by Domenico’s response and grateful for it.

The sun was halfway through the sky.

“I must go,” Count Lucien said. “I must prepare for Carrousel.”

“And I must attend Mademoiselle.” Marie-Josèphe picked up a stick of charcoal.

“But, please, sit still a moment. Let me draw your hands.”

“They are hardly my best feature,” he said. “I might at least have had dainty hands and feet.”

“Your hands are beautiful.” She sketched, but his rings distracted from the lines.

She took his hand, amazed at her boldness — I must be drunker than I thought! she said to herself — and removed one of his rings. The warmth of his fingers caressed her palm.

He might as well have caressed her face, her breasts, for heat flushed across her cheeks and her throat.

He submitted to her whim until she touched the sapphire ring set in gold, the one he always wore.

“I never take it off,” he said. “His Majesty gave it to me when I returned to court.”

“Very well,” Marie-Josèphe said, disappointed, for her will could never compete with the King’s. She put his other rings back on his fingers. She closed the drawing box on the music score, and on the unfinished drawing of Count Lucien’s hands.

25

A long line of open carriages drew up around the eastern end of the Grand Canal. His Majesty graciously hosted His Holiness; they rode alone in a carriage magnificently gilded, its sides and wheel-spokes studded with diamonds. It occupied the central spot, with the best view. The royal family and other visiting monarchs flanked the King’s carriage. His Majesty’s courtiers arranged themselves in the second row. Servants hurried among the fantastic carriages, offering wine and pastries, fruit and cheese.

Marie-Josèphe rode in Monsieur’s coach, squeezed between Madame and Mademoiselle, facing Monsieur and the Chevalier de Lorraine. She wished desperately that she were riding Zachi, her afrit. She would gallop away to the pigeon loft and wait for news from the galleon.

In the next coach, with his wife Mme Lucifer, Chartres lounged lazily, exchanging languorous glances with young ladies of the court. He ignored Mlle d’Armagnac and her peacock feathers. Marie-Josèphe supposed he had found another mistress. Chartres noticed Marie-Josèphe’s coldness no more than he responded to Mlle d’Armagnac’s wistful sighs; he had not even noticed, or if he noticed he had not mentioned, that Marie-Josèphe no longer visited his observatory, she never looked into his compound microscope, she never borrowed his beautiful slide rule.

Marie-Josèphe’s coldness to Lorraine provoked him. With every jog of the carriage, he moved his feet closer to hers, till the soles of her shoes pressed back against the riser of the carriage seat. He rubbed his toe against her ankle. At the same time, he whispered to Monsieur and casually slipped his fingers beneath Monsieur’s gold-embroidered coat to caress Monsieur’s thigh.

Madame left off admiring her new diamond bracelet.

“Your feet are too big, M. le chevalier,” Madame said. “Kindly give us a bit of room.” She rapped his knee sharply with her fan. Marie-Josèphe’s love for Madame brought the tears she was fighting close to spilling over. She bit her lip to keep from crying.

“Madame, you wound me — my feet are renowned for their daintiness.” Lorraine drew his feet away from Marie-Josèphe’s ankles. “Perhaps you have my feet confused with another part of my body.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Madame, affronted. “Your tongue, I have no doubt.”

Monsieur gave his wife a glance of amused disbelief. Lorraine for once was speechless. Lotte trembled with laughter repressed as forcibly as Marie-Josèphe’s tears.

Blushing, Marie-Josèphe suddenly suspected what Lotte was laughing at, and why she could not laugh aloud. Madame, who serenely feigned ignorance of any second meaning to her comment, would not like to know that Mademoiselle understood it.

“Look at Queen Mary!” Lotte said. She pointed to the carriage of James and Mary, next to His Majesty’s. “She’s a pirate, that woman! Can’t you make dear Haleed give me a few more minutes of her time?”

“If Mme la Reine tries to stand up,” Madame said drily, “she will topple over.”

Mary of Modena wore a headdress impossible in its height and grandiosity.

Ribbons and lace spilled down her back and fluttered from wires an armslength above her head. If she were riding in a closed coach it would never fit.

“Mlle Haleed chooses her own commissions,” Marie-Josèphe said apologetically to Lotte. Her brother might refuse to sign the papers, but Marie-Josèphe considered her sister free in name if not in fact.

“Madame the Queen,” Lotte said, “is more generous with her rewards —”

“Generous with His Majesty’s money!” Madame said.

Haleed rode in the Queen’s carriage, bearing her handkerchief. Marie-Josèphe, astonished, could not choose between delight for her sister’s triumph and terror for her risk.

I should be delighted and terrified, Marie-Josèphe thought, for triumph carries risk as certainly as failure.

The footman placed the steps. Marie-Josèphe climbed from Monsieur’s carriage and hurried to the bank of the Grand Canal.

“Sherzad!” she called. She sang to the sea woman. For long minutes she feared Sherzad would not come to her, but finally the sea woman’s tails flicked a spray of water at her feet.

“Sherzad, will you leap for His Majesty?”

Sherzad swam, rolling over and over, her hair streaming around her. Two hundred paces from the end of the canal, she turned and swam toward His Majesty’s coach, speeding at a terrific rate. She leaped, surging from the water. She landed with a tremendous splash. Amazed, the guests exclaimed and applauded.

Marie-Josèphe found Count Lucien, mounted on Zelis and attending His Majesty.

She searched for reassurance, for a nod to say the galleon had found Sherzad’s treasure.