"I'm all right," I said. "Tell Mother."
She nodded eagerly, and pausing only long enough to draw the sheet modestly over me, she hurried from the room. The drapes had hardly swung closed behind her when Raymond emerged from under the bed.
"I must go," he said. He laid a hand upon my head. "Be well, madonna."
Weak as I was, I rose up, grasping his arm. I slid my hand up the length of forge-tough muscle, seeking, but not finding. The smoothness of his skin was unblemished, clear to the crest of the shoulder. He stared down at me in astonishment.
"What are you doing, madonna?"
"Nothing." I sank back, disappointed. I was too weak and too light-headed to be careful of my words.
"I wanted to see whether you had a vaccination scar."
"Vaccination?" Skilled as I was at reading faces by now, I would have seen the slightest twitch of comprehension, no matter how swiftly it was concealed. But there was none.
"Why do you call me madonna still?" I asked. My hands rested on the slight concavity of my stomach, gently as though not to disturb the shattering emptiness. "I've lost my child."
He looked mildly surprised.
"Ah. I did not call you madonna because you were with child, my lady."
"Why, then?" I didn't really expect him to answer, but he did. Tired and drained as we both were, it was as though we were suspended together in a place where neither time nor consequence existed; there was room for nothing but truth between us.
He sighed.
"Everyone has a color about them," he said simply. "All around them, like a cloud. Yours is blue, madonna. Like the Virgin's cloak. Like my own."
The gauze curtain fluttered briefly and he was gone.
26
FONTAINEBLEAU
For several days, I slept. Whether this was a necessary part of physical recovery, or a stubborn retreat from waking reality, I do not know, but I woke only reluctantly to take a little food, falling at once back into a stupor of oblivion, as though the small, warm weight of broth in my stomach were an anchor that pulled me after it, down through the murky fathoms of sleep.
A few days later I woke to the sound of insistent voices near my ear, and the touch of hands lifting me from the bed. The arms that held me were strong and masculine, and for a moment, I felt afloat in joy. Then I woke all the way, struggling feebly against a wave of tobacco and cheap wine, to find myself in the grasp of Hugo, Louise de La Tour's enormous footman.
"Put me down!" I said, batting at him weakly. He looked startled at this sudden resurrection from the dead, and nearly dropped me, but a high, commanding voice stopped both of us.
"Claire, my dear friend! Do not be afraid, ma chère, it's all right. I am taking you to Fontainebleau. The air, and good food—it's what you need. And rest, you need rest…"
I blinked against the light like a newborn lamb. Louise's face, round, pink, and anxious, floated nearby like a cherub on a cloud. Mother Hildegarde stood behind her, tall and stern as the angel at the gates of Eden, the heavenly illusion enhanced by the fact that they were both standing in front of the stained-glass window in the vestibule of the Hôpital.
"Yes," she said, her deep voice making the simplest word more emphatic than all Louise's twittering. "It will be good for you. Au revoir, my dear."
And with that, I was borne down the steps of the Hôpital and stuffed willy-nilly into Louise's coach, with neither strength nor will to protest.
The bumping of the coach over potholes and ruts kept me awake on the journey to Fontainebleau. That, and Louise's constant conversation, aimed at reassurance. At first I made some dazed attempt to respond, but soon realized that she required no answers, and in fact, talked more easily without them.
After days in the cool gray stone vault of the Hôpital, I felt like a freshly unwrapped mummy, and shrank from the assault of so much brightness and color. I found it easier to deal with if I drew back a bit, and let it all wash past me without trying to distinguish its elements.
This strategy worked until we reached a small wood just outside Fontainebleau. The trunks of the oaks were dark and thick, with low, spreading canopies that shadowed the ground beneath with shifting light, so that the whole wood seemed to be moving slightly in the wind. I was vaguely admiring the effect, when I noticed that some of what I had assumed to be tree trunks were in fact moving, turning very slowly to and fro.
"Louise!" My exclamation and my grip on her arm stopped her chatter in mid-word.
She lunged heavily across me to see what I was looking at, then flopped back to her side of the carriage and thrust her head out of the window, shouting at the coachman.
We came to a slithering, dusty halt just opposite the wood. There were three of them, two men and a woman. Louise's high, agitated voice went on, expostulating and questioning, punctuated by the coachman's attempts to explain or apologize, but I paid no attention.
In spite of their turning and the small fluttering of their clothing, they were very still, more inert than the trees that held them. The faces were black with suffocation; Monsieur Forez wouldn't have approved at all, I thought, through the haze of shock. An amateur execution, but effective, for all that. The wind shifted, and a faint, gassy stink blew over us.
Louise shrieked and pounded on the window frame in a frenzy of indignation, and the carriage started with a jerk that rocked her back in the seat.
"Merde!" she said, rapidly fanning her flushed face. "The idiocy of that fool, stopping like that right there! What recklessness! The shock of it is bad for the baby, I am sure, and you, my poor dear.…oh, dear, my poor Claire! I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to remind you…how can you forgive me, I'm so tactless…"
Luckily her agitation at possibly having upset me made her forget her own upset at sight of the bodies, but it was very wearying, trying to stem her apologies. At last, in desperation, I changed the subject back to the hanged ones.
"Who?" The distraction worked; she blinked, and remembering the shock to her système, pulled out a bottle of ammoniac spirits and took a hearty sniff that made her sneeze in reflex.
"Hugue…choo! Huguenots," she got out, snorting and wheezing. "Protestant heretics. That's what the coachman says."
"They hang them? Still?" Somehow, I had thought such religious persecution a relic of earlier times.
"Well, not just for being Protestants usually, though that's enough," Louise said, sniffing. She dabbed her nose delicately with an embroidered handkerchief, examined the results critically, then reapplied the cloth to her nose and blew it with a satisfying honk.
"Ah, that's better." She tucked the handkerchief back in her pocket and leaned back with a sigh. "Now I am restored. What a shock! If they have to hang them, that's all well, but must they do so by a public thoroughfare, where ladies must be exposed to such disgustingness? Did you smell them? Pheew! This is the Comte Medard's land; I'll send him a very nasty letter about it, see if I don't."
"But why did they hang these people?" I asked, interrupting in the brutal manner that was the only possible way of actually conversing with Louise.
"Oh, witchcraft, most likely. There was a woman, you saw. Usually it's witchcraft when the women are involved. If it's only men, most often it's just preaching sedition and heresy, but the women don't preach. Did you see the ugly dark clothes she had on? Horrible! So depressing only to wear dark colors all the time; what kind of religion would make its followers wear such plain clothes all the time? Obviously the Devil's work, anyone can see that. They are afraid of women, that's what it is, so they…"
I closed my eyes and leaned back in the seat. I hoped it wasn't very far to Louise's country house.
In addition to the monkey, from whom she would not be parted, Louise's country house contained a number of other decorations of dubious taste. In Paris, her husband's taste and her father's must be consulted, and the rooms of the house there were consequently done richly, but in subdued tones. But Jules seldom came to the country house, being too busy in the city, and so Louise's taste was allowed free rein.
"This is my newest toy; is it not lovely?" she cooed, running her hand lovingly over the carved dark wood of a tiny house that sprouted incongruously from the wall next to a gilt-bronze sconce in the shape of Eurydice.
"That looks like a cuckoo clock," I said disbelievingly.
"You have seen one before? I didn't think there were any to be found anywhere in Paris!" Louise pouted slightly at the thought that her toy might not be unique, but brightened as she twisted the hands of the clock to the next hour. She stood back, beaming proudly as the tiny clockwork bird stuck its head out and emitted several shrill Cuckoo!s in succession.
"Isn't it precious?" She touched the bird's head briefly as it disappeared back into its hidey-hole. "Berta, the housekeeper here, got it for me; her brother brought it all the way from Switzerland. Whatever you want to say about the Swiss, they are clever woodcarvers, no?"
I wanted to say no, but instead merely murmured something tactfully admiring.
Louise's grasshopper mind leaped nimbly to a new topic, possibly triggered by thoughts of Swiss servants.
"You know, Claire," she said, with a touch of reproof, "you ought really to come to Mass in the chapel each morning."