FORTY-ONE

Several months passed. Then, on one of the hottest days of summer, just as suddenly as he had vanished, d’Urbec appeared again. The city seemed bereft of all but the poor: those of the fashionable who were of a warlike disposition were at the front, the rest had left for their country estates. This time, he sent a note before he appeared at my door.

“Good day, Madame de Morville, and how is the fortune-telling business?” The man that Mustapha had shown in was dressed like some sort of Jansenist divine, in a broad felt hat, his clothes dark, unadorned, and travel stained.

“Very slow, Monsieur d’Urbec. La Montespan reigns supreme once more over the King’s affections, so court business has fallen off sadly. Allow me to offer you some lemonade—or wine, if you’d prefer. Have you traveled far?” I rang for Sylvie as we seated ourselves in my two best armchairs. Something about him seemed to fill the room, even when he was silent.

“I’ve been abroad,” he answered slowly. “It’s good to hear French properly spoken again.” Mustapha fanned himself busily, pretending not to be listening. Why had he come? I knew whatever sentiment he had had for me had vanished the night of the confrontation with Brissac. Perhaps it was information he was after, because of my knowledge of the court.

“You will be pleased to know that no one of standing will play with Monsieur Brissac anymore. He has been reduced to the lowest gaming houses.”

“So I have heard, Madame. I also heard that there was an attempt on your life.” His eyes were on the black silk sling that held my arm.

“It was nothing. A man wanting money. But my arm’s very near well now; you needn’t trouble yourself. Besides, everything turned out well in the end.”

“May everything always turn out well for you in the end.” He half bowed from his seat as he spoke. His impassive manner, impeccably polite, told me nothing. Yes, it must be information, I thought. The court news. War. Politics.

“But Monsieur d’Urbec, what of yourself? Have you accomplished a great deal abroad?”

“A great deal,” he answered softly. To break the uncomfortable silence that followed, I chattered on:

“They say you are with international banking interests, these days, Monsieur d’Urbec. I have need of someone who knows about foreign bankers. What can you tell me of Cortezia et Benson, the London bankers?”

“That’s a curious firm for you to mention. What is your interest in them?”

“There was always speculation in my family that my father concealed funds abroad before he died. My suspicion is that he intended me to inherit them.”

“Ah. You have read the will?”

“No. But I came to hear of its contents from…someone in the family. Father wisely refrained from telling me before his death.” D’Urbec leaned back in his chair, fixing me with a calculating stare.

“And thus he secured your inheritance from your grasping relatives. He was an intelligent man, your father.”

“But inadequately suspicious. He did not count on Grandmother dying with unusual suddenness before she could oversee the arrangements for the transfer of funds.”

“Why do you tell me this, Athena?”

“Because you are a man of secrets, who is interested in mysteries.” How clumsy I was—I, who prided myself on my witty conversation! Something about him unnerved me. In the silence that followed, my heart sounded too loud. Can he hear it beating? I wondered.

“And for other reasons, too, I suspect. To remind me of days long gone by, I suppose, to soften my hardness of heart. And because you still think what interests a man is money—Now, now, don’t cry; you’ll run all that dreadful white powder you’re wearing.” I felt humiliated when he offered me his big handkerchief. It was as if he had reestablished our ages. He’s older, the handkerchief said, and you are still an infant. Even so, I took it.

“Everything’s spoiled,” I said, wiping my eyes. “You don’t have to stay.”

“I didn’t have to come back, now, did I?” he said gently. “But when I heard…it made me think…” I looked intently at him. Could it truly be? I was terrified of disappointment.

“Your arm, Athena, who broke it?” His voice was soft but had a vaguely menacing sound to it.

“A…a blackmailer. But you needn’t bother with him. He’s gone. Oh, Sylvie, do please refill Monsieur d’Urbec’s glass—it’s quite empty.” Sylvie, who had been hovering within earshot, took the glass and the hint, and removed herself to the kitchen.

“Gone for good, I imagine, knowing the crowd you’re with. Blackmailers, poisoners…Has it ever occurred to you that you know the wrong sort of people?”

“You sound just like my sister. She associated only with gentlefolk, and they killed her.”

“I never said aristocrats can’t be blackmailers and poisoners, too. I just said that blackmailers and poisoners make poor associates.”

“Oh, you still talk like an idealist. It’s a fantasy, Florent. We live in a wicked world.”

“That we do, Geneviève. But have you considered it might be more bearable if we were together?” I stared at him. He looked uncomfortable, stood up, and walked to the window, staring out as he spoke in a low voice. “Why do you think I returned here? For the weather?” He turned to look at me. His face was dark and sunburned, unshaven, and his eyes, sunken with weariness, held a kind of deeply hidden sadness. “On sea voyages, a man has time to think,” he went on. “The air cools the brain, I suppose. There was a time when I was all aflame to create a fortune to offer you. Then I was equally on fire to see you dead and damned. I suppose that is the flaw in the southern character—too much heat. Lately I have associated with the congealed thinkers of the damp and foggy north. It has made me think through my life. I am approaching middle age—in two more years I will be thirty. I am weary of games. I cannot court a woman on lies. I am a marked man, without a social position or even a home to offer you. Tell me now, Mademoiselle Pasquier, whether you will accept me as I am or whether I must leave forever.”

My good hand was knotted tight on my lap, clutching his handkerchief rolled into a soggy ball. I could hear my heart thump in the long silence while I studied him as he stood there before the window. He looked careworn, and the mockery and malice had gone from his dark eyes. Around them were the first fine lines of the approaching age that he feared. Suddenly, I wanted his old self back, the impudent, innocent cynic who had been on fire to reform the world. And I wanted to be the girl I had once been, who had never seen anything worse than the naughty works she read in secret and whose only plans were to read Herodotus to her father every evening. Now we had both seen too much, and done too much, and each of us knew that about the other without a word exchanged.

“Yes, Florent, I will accept you as you are, provided you can do the same for me.” Could he know everything? Did he understand the whole of what he was promising? Suddenly, I was terrified of losing him all over again.

“That was always part of it, Geneviève.”

“You…you might take my hand,” I said in a small voice. He came and stood before my chair, taking the hand that I extended.

“It’s all damp,” he said tenderly, looking down at me.

“Florent…” I managed to stammer. I wanted him so. Was it real? Could he care for me this much, in spite of everything? I couldn’t bear for love to come and then vanish. Gravely, he knelt on one knee before me, not letting go of my hand.

“Would you consider marriage, Mademoiselle Pasquier? I am not sure to whom I should apply—your brother, who has the legal right to dispose of you in marriage, but who believes you dead, or your patroness, who seems to have a certain…moral right, if witches can be said to possess such a thing.”

“More to the point, Florent, she will regard it as an attempt upon her income and act accordingly.”

“Then I shall have to buy out your contract, won’t I, little witch?”

“I shouldn’t try that just now, if I were you. Business is slow and Madame is irritable. Besides…I…I have difficulties with the idea of marriage. So many couples seem to poison each other…”

He laughed and got up, dusting off his knee. “You certainly are far from the common…most women think only of marriage, no matter what the price. But then, that’s part of your charm: you’ve always been completely eccentric. You could never bore me, Athena. And if this is how you want things to be for now, who am I to say no?” Then he pulled the footstool close to my chair, sat down, and took my hand in both of his.

“Seriously, Geneviève, consider this: my parents are still quite pleased with each other, despite everything they have been through—it’s quite possible, you know.” His face was amused and tolerant, his voice drolly self-mocking. I looked at him and I knew he was the only man I’d ever want. I couldn’t help smiling.

“I like your parents, Florent. I imagine I’d like your brothers, too. I hope to meet them all someday. But I’m not sure I’m prepared to travel abroad just yet.”

“What? You imagine I would dare to defy Colbert and smuggle them across the border?”

“It’s something I thought of. After all, I had a father who defied Colbert. And, knowing you, you probably managed to get their last franc out as well as the entire household down to the dog and cat.”

“No, the cat we had to leave. It was not Protestant. But the dog, seeing no future for the Reformed Religion in France, was happy enough to go.” I laughed out loud. I’d judged his character right. He was the one, and only he.

“Colbert and Louvois are fools, I think. If they want to preserve the skilled workers of France, the state should offer incentives to stay, not punishment for flight.”

“And so we talk politics instead of making love.” He sighed. “I should have known this would happen. Mademoiselle, at what level of amity shall we agree to, since you seem so uninterested in marriage? ‘Constante Amitié,’ ‘Tendre-sur-Estime,’ or shall we rush on to the ‘Tendre-sur-Inclination?’”

“Oh, the Carte de Tendre. You are a wicked fellow, Monsieur, to tease me so.”

“Tease you, Mademoiselle? How so?”

“Well…you know…” and here I paused as I felt my face turn hot, “I didn’t have in mind a…a Platonic friendship…”

“Mademoiselle Pasquier,” he said, his face full of happiness, “may I have the honor of inviting you to supper?”

The summer heat in d’Urbec’s rooms had not fled with the evening. It made my bones feel loose and my mind languorous. I was intoxicated with food and drink and the nearness of him. Entering the bedroom, I spied in the shadows behind the closed shutters a curious clock of great antiquity on an inlaid table. His books were in a corner cabinet, in neat rows like soldiers, evidently arranged by subject. The heavy curtains on the bed were pulled back. For once, I didn’t want to read the spines of someone else’s books.

“That’s a strange clock you have there, Florent,” I said as he closed the door behind us. He had taken his coat off in the heat, and the neck of his shirt stood open.

“It’s quite old; it tells the movements of the planets as well as the hour. Lately I have not been able to resist the urge to collect a few rarities. Some of them have to be put in working order again. It amuses me, I suppose.” A thin sheen of sweat stood on his face and shone on the muscles of his neck and the little hollow between the collarbones.

“What is the box there?” I asked, pointing to the night table by the bed.

“It plays music,” he answered, opening it up to show the mechanism within—a row of tiny bells and hammers entangled in clockwork. His hands were wide and muscular; I was surprised at the delicacy of their movement as he showed me the working parts of the little box. “…or, rather, it will play soon,” he went on. “It needs a new mainspring and a part I am having made to order across town.” I sat down on the bed; he sat beside me and put his hand around my waist. I could feel the heat of his body and smell the soft animal scent of a man in desire.

“So much steel,” he murmured, as his hand encountered the heavy corset stays.

“It’s an easier mechanism than the box,” I answered. He said something soft, rhythmic, his voice like dark smoke. “What is that language?” I asked, looking up to see his dark eyes fixed on me.

“It is the old language,” he said, but he seemed to mean more. The language of the conquered south, of the vanished troubadours. All that was Parisian, cosmopolitan, seemed to have been stripped away like some false skin. Slowly and precisely, he undid the pins on my bodice, smiling as he translated the old chanson, his voice sensual. “…good it were, I count it, naked to hold her and behold…” The corset stays loosened, he peeled away the shift beneath. “Beautiful,” he said softly. But he had left his shirt on. With my good hand, I began to unbutton it.

“All of you, exactly as you are…” I repeated my promise, stroking the livid mark. His bare torso shone with sweat; the black hair on it felt damp on my breast. “Just as you are, forever…,” I whispered.

“My love,” he said, but it was in the old language.

“I don’t see why you’re annoyed with me, Madame. Someone was bound to tell Madame Montvoisin you’d taken up with d’Urbec again, and if it hadn’t been me, I’d have been in a lot of trouble.” Sylvie shook the featherbed viciously and then pounded the pillows until little wispy bits of down floated in the morning air. I sat at the small writing table in my ruelle, quill in hand, writing up my accounts for the weekly reckoning with Madame. Zero, zero, zero. Nothing at all. Twenty-five percent of nothing is nothing. A splendid week it had been, full of lazy breakfasts in bed, the Gazette de France crumpled among the rumpled sheets, and an open volume of Ovid still lying beside a burned-out candle on the nightstand.

“Why do you look at me that way?” I asked, as he lay contented on the pillows, his hands behind his dark head, the noonday sun picking a bright pattern across his wide chest and the crumpled coverlet that was spread over far too little of us.

“Because you are so beautiful,” he said happily. “Your face, the way the dark curls fall over it, the way your gray eyes shine, your body, your mind, your soul…” Then I could feel the warmth of love welling up again to fill everything in me, even my fingertips and the ends of my hair. I thought my heart would split apart with the flood of it.

“When I first saw you there, in the window of that great, dark house, you were like the light of a little candle, flickering bravely in the gloom. Now you shine like the sun.”

“Yours forever, Florent. No matter what.” I put my head on his heart to hear it beat while he stroked my hair. “Always and forever.” I sighed again.

“And I,” he answered, “no matter what comes.”

What did come was soon enough, although we knew it had to be. He left on another of his mysterious trips, and I did not ask where he was going, or who his patron was, although I had my suspicions. After all, what one doesn’t know one cannot be forced to tell. And in the meantime, although his entrée with the Mancinis had been spoiled by the Brissac affair, his welcome at the enemies of the Mancinis had become all the warmer, especially because he dressed well and made a point of losing large sums to the proper people, recouping from those who were out of favor.

“It is the last day before I must leave,” he had said only the day before, as he buttered a roll at breakfast. His dark eyes amused, he extended a bit of crust to Grandmother’s parrot. The bird snatched it and converted it to crumbs, which dribbled down his feathery front.

“Pretty bird, pretty bird. Clever d’Urbec. Clever d’Urbec. Geneviève, doesn’t your bird ever learn anything new?”

“Only when it pleases him.”

“He’s a stubborn creature—not unlike myself, I suppose. Come now, Lorito. Say ‘pretty bird.’ It’s high time you quit spouting Protestant hellfire and damnation.”

“Fire and brimstone!” announced the bird and went back to cracking seeds.

“Hardheaded bird. Will you miss me when I’m gone?”

“Hell and damnation!”

“Well, that’s sort of an answer,” I offered. Fall was in the air, though the days were still warm.

“Let us do something splendid, Geneviève. Let me take you driving on the Cours-la-Reine this afternoon, and then we’ll go incognito to the opera. One of Lully’s new operas is playing. They say the stage machines are a marvel. Would this please you, do you think?”

“Oh, divinely, Florent, and I have the perfect dress to wear. I’ve been saving it a long time—everyone said I was foolish, but now it’s just perfect.” But when I saw Sylvie’s eyes narrow as she took the rose silk dress from its muslin, I knew that, within the day, she would betray me to the Shadow Queen. It didn’t matter at all to me, for something very strange had happened when I put on the dress. As I stood before the mirror admiring the embroidered flowers and the glistening rose and ivory silk, I realized suddenly that I was seeing the true color, not through a wash of crimson. In the mirror I saw nothing. Nothing, that is, but a girl with a neat waist and dark, tumbled hair, looking back out of the mirror at me with shining gray eyes.

The rest of the day, bright with summer sun, had passed in a daze of happiness. As the carriage rattled past the Tuileries Palace and its gardens to mingle with the fashionable equipages on the wide, scenic avenue of the Cours-la-Reine, Florent had no eye for the scenery. Instead he took my hand.

“You said we’d meet again, driving on the Cours-la-Reine, and you were right, Florent. Now will you steal my fortune-telling business?” I teased.

“On the contrary. I said I’d meet the Marquise de Morville—and look! She’s nowhere in sight,” he said, his arm around the rose silk.

The next morning, when d’Urbec had departed and I spied the new paste buckles sparkling on Sylvie’s shoes, I knew she had done the deed and the witch knew everything. Accounting day. It always comes. But I had the memory of his face when he first saw me come from behind the screen in the dress I now knew I’d been saving all along for him. And I could still feel his kisses on my neck as he muttered, “…too young and lovely to wear black…” Accounting day didn’t matter. I felt like another person altogether. I could manage anything. Besides, I had a card up my sleeve. In the last days before d’Urbec had left, I had received the ultimate invitation. Who had informed him of me, I do not know. But Louis Quatorze himself had summoned me to Versailles to read the oracle glass.

I took a hired chair to the rue Beauregard that Wednesday afternoon, for I had dismissed my leased carriage for the weeks I had been with d’Urbec in order to save money. That afternoon, Madame was engaged in the placement of a new tall clock, which depicted the phases of the moon as well as the hours, in her black parlor. As the sweating workmen set it down in the corner by the china cupboard, she said, “No, I’ve changed my mind. Not over there, after all. Across from the window is better. Here it detracts from my objets d’art.” The heavy shutters were closed against the heat and dust, enshrouding the room in twilight. The musty smell of scented candles perpetually lighted around the feet of the statue of the Virgin reminded me of funerals and things long dead. Madame, however, was very much alive, the sweat rolling down from beneath her white lace cap as she fanned herself with one hand and gesticulated with the other.

“Oh, there you are at last, Madame Stay-Abed,” she called to me. “You’ll have to wait. I’m expecting Madame Poulaillon for her weekly…ah…consultation.” So I wandered off to the kitchen, account books under my arm, to see if there were any pastries left over from the previous day’s open house.

“There’re none left,” said old Montvoisin, greeting me at the kitchen door with the crumbs dribbling down his half-open, tobacco-stained shirt. His baggy old breeches looked as if he’d slept in them. He still had on his slippers and a napkin in place of the glossy horsehair wig he’d taken to wearing on weekdays. “Here, have some snuff instead.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cheap tin snuffbox.

“No, thank you; it makes my nose tickle,” I answered, and he shuffled off through the double doors to the black parlor.

There I heard him say as the front door was opened, “Ah, good day, Madame Poulaillon. And how’s the husband these days? Quite reformed?”

“Antoine, remove yourself,” I could hear Madame hiss. “You interfere with my business.” The double doors slammed behind him, and he meandered out to seat himself in Madame’s favorite armchair and set his slippered feet on her footstool.

“Marquise,” he said, pausing to take snuff and sneeze into a vast, filthy handkerchief, “has my daughter sent you word yet? I said to her, I said, ‘Marie-Marguerite, try the Marquise. She has ready cash and doesn’t carry tales.’” I looked up at him, puzzled, from where I sat on the smaller armchair opposite, and folded my fan.

“I’ve been busy,” I said. “I haven’t heard anything.”

“Go by La Lépère’s new place then, and don’t take Sylvie with you. She meant to send for you, I’m sure.” He looked around as if the world were all too complex for him, his faded blue eyes all runny. Then, as if it could resolve everything, he took more snuff. “Get off me, you fool cat,” he said, as the gray tom leaped from the chair back to his lap. The tom looked at him briefly with hooded eyes and bit his thumb before he managed to sweep the cat off him with a series of nervous, unhappy gestures. “I hate them, too. I hate it all,” he said and then lapsed into a somnolent silence while I wondered what to make of it all.

One of the parlor doors opened suddenly, and I knew that Madame Poulaillon must have departed out the front door with her week’s installment of arsenic. But the sorceress lacked the pleasant air of contentment she usually had after such transactions. She appeared irritated as I scrambled to stand, and she took the armchair that old Montvoisin had suddenly seen fit to vacate with a snort of annoyance. She tapped her fingers on the arm of the chair and did not invite me to sit. The sight of me seemed to enrage her further. Cautious, Geneviève, I said to myself.

“So, there you are, the second little ingrate. I suppose you know where Marie-Marguerite is. Everyone knows but her own mother!”

“Marie-Marguerite? What’s happened? I hadn’t heard.”

“Ha, I suppose you hadn’t. Too busy disporting yourself with that gutter-crawling galérien, downing wine and oysters at my expense. I make you a marquise and you throw it away on a branded criminal.”

“He’s not a criminal,” I answered, my voice cold.

“Might as well be,” she sniffed. “Anyway, Brissac will probably slit his nose for him before the month is out.” I changed the subject, in order to channel her rage in another direction.

“Isn’t Marie-Marguerite’s baby due soon? I thought she’d be home at a time like this.”

“That hussy! That ingrate! I offered my dear friend Romani ten thousand francs to make an honest woman of her, and she spurned him.” In a sarcastic high voice she imitated an adolescent’s whine. “‘I’m not going to marry a professional poisoner, Mother.’ ‘So, young lady, what do you think keeps putting the food in your face, eh? Especially now that you’re bloated like a pig and do nothing but lie around! Romani is a genius, a man of a thousand disguises.’ ‘I don’t care if he’s a genius; I want a nice man.’ Nice, bah! A pastry cook! And not even with his own shop! A journeyman pastry cook! I’ll not have my daughter marrying riffraff like that! So now she’s run off and hidden herself, although where a girl as big as a sow and as slow as a snail could hide herself in this city, I do not know! I tell you; I’ll find her, if I have to have my people search every house in town!”

“My, my, what a pity,” I responded. “She really ought to listen to people who have her good at heart.” The Shadow Queen glared suspiciously at me.

“I do hope you are not being sarcastic, Mademoiselle. When have you ever listened to me? And I imagine you’ve not a sou to show me after your recent debauchery.”

But here I played my winning card. “For the past two weeks there’s nothing, but I’ve been invited to appear before the King when he returns to Saint-Germain-en-Laye next week. He’s fond of novelties, they say, and my reputation has finally reached him.”

La Voisin drew in her breath. “Buckingham must have told him,” she whispered.

“Either him or Primi.”

“No, not Visconti. He’s a rival. He’d not promote you so high. Ah! So high! I knew it! Your accent! Your manners! There’s no substitute for the real thing, I’ve always said. And who groomed you to fly so high?”

“You did, Madame, and I am grateful. I intend to make the best of the opportunity.”

“Ah! That’s my girl, my darling girl! Truer than my own daughter—or rather, stepdaughter. Tread carefully, my dear, and you may yet replace Visconti at his side.” There’s a fantasy, I thought. A king who prided himself on never taking advice from women certainly didn’t want a female fortune-teller.

But, buoyed up by her imaginings, the Shadow Queen had become expansive. Nothing would do but to have a bottle of excellent wine brought from her cellar, and even old Antoine and her oldest son were offered a glass.

“Oh, yes, and the marzipan. I know what a taste you have for it, little Marquise!” And with a sly, sideways look she went to unlock the secret cabinet where she kept it hidden. And, bother her, she gloried in the fact that in nearly five years of acquaintance, I still hadn’t found out where she got it. The best in Paris. I could get opium, I could get arsenic, I could get pigeons’ hearts and toads’ toenails, but I couldn’t find out where she got that marzipan. She always smirked when she went to fetch it. But then, I reflected, it’s better to leave her mellow. Besides, I loved the stuff—so lovely, sticky, sweet, and rich, with the perfumed flavor of almonds and a hint of something else mysterious. I stayed until I had consumed several pieces and a glass of wine, leaving when I knew she was at last in a good mood.

La Lépère, the abortionist, had moved up in the world, both literally and figuratively. She had two rooms on the fourth floor of a narrow, shabby building that housed a ribbon maker’s establishment on the first floor. At the tiny balcony at the top of the outer staircase, I found she had already opened her door, having heard my painful progress up the many rickety flights of steps.

“Antoine Montvoisin sent me,” I said to the old woman.

“I know,” she answered. “Marie-Marguerite is here. The baby was born safe and sound last night. Come in.”

We entered the darkened room to find Marie-Marguerite, her curls dank and matted to her head, sitting up and nursing the baby. “Now see here,” announced La Lépère, “don’t she look good? And it’s a fine boy. The live ones do give more satisfaction, though I do more of the others these days. Oh, what a world! I must have done maybe ten thousand in my lifetime!” Ten thousand? Even in her lifetime, which must be nearly eighty years by now, that seemed like quite a lot of abortions. I rapidly multiplied one-half that figure times the number of other “businesswomen” I knew worked on contract for La Voisin. No wonder the chimney in the garden pavilion smoked all the time.

“See how lovely he is,” said Marie-Marguerite, looking pleased with herself. And though I thought him rather too small and red, I agreed. “I’ve named him Jean-Baptiste, after his father.” She did make a pretty picture there, with her small Jean-Baptiste. Hmm, I’d call it “The Little Madonna of the Poisons,” I thought.

“Madame de Morville, Madame,” Marie-Marguerite said, “I need to borrow money. I need a plan. You are clever; you have to think of something. I want to put my baby out to nurse secretly, where Mother can’t find him. You’re the only one who has the wit to deceive her. Help me.”

“Marie-Marguerite,” I said, sitting down beside her on the bed, “your mother isn’t going to stay mad at you forever for not marrying Romani. Sooner or later she’ll hatch another scheme and decide it’s all for the best that it turned out this way.”

“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of. She’ll think of the money and poof! I lose my baby. She’s capable of anything when she gets in that greedy mood, or an important client wants a Mass. It’s not wise to leave a new baby in Mother’s house.”

“Surely not…her own grandchild?” I asked.

“Why not? That ugly old Guibourg uses his own children by his mistress when he runs short. And they’re short now. When the court comes back, business picks up. They’ve bought up everything in the orphanages. You haven’t seen the Black Mass, Marquise, but I have. Several times. Madame de Montespan, she’s done several, and I helped get the room ready for all of them. And she’s not the only one. Mother does a lot of business. I’ll not have my beautiful baby’s throat cut just because some fat old whore wants to hold on to her pig of a lover.”

She looked down to admire the little, mewling thing at her breast. The pastry cook’s baby, eyes closed, sating himself all oblivious of the storms around him.

“Don’t send him by common carrier,” I said. “So many don’t survive the trip, you know. I’ll hire a carriage for you in secret and give you a year’s fees. Baby-farmers respect payment in advance.”

“I knew you’d help. I don’t know why; it just seemed like you would,” said Marie-Marguerite.

That evening, when Sylvie made several pointed comments about my lateness, I announced that Madame, rather than berating me, had ordered up a celebration on account of my invitation to appear before the King. It was that that had delayed me considerably.

“The King?” gasped Sylvie. “Why, I never knew! You are the sly one!”

“Fortune-tellers have to have some secrets,” I announced, as I put away my account books and flung my hat upon the bed.