Paris, March 1778
HE STILL DIDN’T KNOW why the frog hadn’t killed him. Paul Rakoczy, Comte St. Germain, picked up the vial, pulled the cork, and sniffed cautiously, for the third time, but then recorked it, still dissatisfied. Maybe. Maybe not. The scent of the dark-gray powder in the vial held the ghost of something familiar—but it had been thirty years.
He sat for a moment, frowning at the array of jars, bottles, flasks, and pelicans on his workbench. It was late afternoon, and the early spring sun of Paris was like honey, warm and sticky on his face, but glowing in the rounded globes of glass, throwing pools of red and brown and green on the wood from the liquids contained therein. The only discordant note in this peaceful symphony of light was the body of a large rat, lying on its back in the middle of the workbench, a pocket watch open beside it.
The comte put two fingers delicately on the rat’s chest and waited patiently. It didn’t take so long this time; he was used to the coldness as his mind felt its way into the body. Nothing. No hint of light in his mind’s eye, no warm red of a pulsing heart. He glanced at the watch: half an hour.
He took his fingers away, shaking his head.
“Mélisande, you evil bitch,” he murmured, not without affection. “You didn’t think I’d try anything you sent me on myself, did you?”
Still…he himself had stayed dead a great while longer than half an hour when the frog had given him the dragon’s blood. It had been early evening when he went into Louis’s Star Chamber thirty years before, heart beating with excitement at the coming confrontation—a duel of wizards, with a king’s favor as the stakes—and one he’d thought he’d win. He remembered the purity of the sky, the beauty of the stars just visible, Venus bright on the horizon, and the joy of it in his blood. Everything always had a greater intensity when you knew life could cease within the next few minutes.
And an hour later he thought his life had ceased, the cup falling from his numbed hand, the coldness rushing through his limbs with amazing speed, freezing the words “I’ve lost,” an icy core of disbelief in the center of his mind. He hadn’t been looking at the frog; the last thing he had seen through darkening eyes was the woman—La Dame Blanche—her face over the cup she’d given him appalled and white as bone. But what he recalled, and recalled again now, with the same sense of astonishment and avidity, was the great flare of blue, intense as the color of the evening sky beyond Venus, that had burst from her head and shoulders as he died.
He didn’t recall any feeling of regret or fear, just astonishment. This was nothing, however, to the astonishment he’d felt when he regained his senses, naked on a stone slab in a revolting subterranean chamber next to a drowned corpse. Luckily, there had been no one alive in that disgusting grotto, and he had made his way—reeling and half blind, clothed in the drowned man’s wet and stinking shirt—out into a dawn more beautiful than any twilight could ever be. So—ten to twelve hours from the moment of apparent death to revival.
He glanced at the rat, then put out a finger and lifted one of the small, neat paws. Nearly twelve hours. Limp; the rigor had already passed. It was warm up here at the top of the house. Then he turned to the counter that ran along the far wall of the laboratory, where a line of rats lay, possibly insensible, probably dead. He walked slowly along the line, prodding each body. Limp, limp, stiff. Stiff. Stiff. All dead, without doubt. Each had had a smaller dose than the last, but all had died—though he couldn’t yet be positive about the latest. Wait a bit more, then, to be sure.
He needed to know. Because the Court of Miracles was talking. And they said the frog was back.
The English Channel
THEY DID SAY that red hair was a sign of the devil. Joan eyed her escort’s fiery locks consideringly. The wind on deck was fierce enough to make her eyes water, and it jerked bits of Michael Murray’s hair out of its binding so they did dance round his head like flames, a bit. You might expect his face to be ugly as sin if he was one of the devil’s, though, and it wasn’t.
Lucky for him, he looked like his mother in the face, she thought critically. His younger brother, Ian, wasn’t so fortunate, and that without the heathen tattoos. Michael’s was a fairly pleasant face, for all it was blotched with windburn and the lingering marks of sorrow, and no wonder, him having just lost his father, and his wife dead in France no more than a month before that.
But she wasn’t braving this gale in order to watch Michael Murray, even if he might burst into tears or turn into Auld Horny on the spot. She touched her crucifix for reassurance, just in case. It had been blessed by the priest, and her mother’d carried it all the way to St. Ninian’s Spring and dipped it in the water there, to ask the saint’s protection. And it was her mother she wanted to see, as long as ever she could.
She pulled her kerchief off and waved it, keeping a tight grip lest the wind make off with it. Her mother was growing smaller on the quay, waving madly, too, Joey behind her with his arm round her waist to keep her from falling into the water.
Joan snorted a bit at sight of her new stepfather but then thought better and touched the crucifix again, muttering a quick Act of Contrition in penance. After all, it was she herself who’d made that marriage happen, and a good thing, too. If not, she’d still be stuck to home at Balriggan, not on her way at last to be a Bride of Christ in France.
A nudge at her elbow made her glance aside, to see Michael offering her a handkerchief. Well, so. If her eyes were streaming—aye, and her nose—it was no wonder, the wind so fierce as it was. She took the scrap of cloth with a curt nod of thanks, scrubbed briefly at her cheeks, and waved her kerchief harder.
None of his family had come to see Michael off, not even his twin sister, Janet. But they were taken up with all there was to do in the wake of Old Ian Murray’s death, and no wonder. No need to see Michael to the ship, either—Michael Murray was a wine merchant in Paris, and a wonderfully well-traveled gentleman. She took some comfort from the knowledge that he knew what to do and where to go and had said he would see her safely delivered to the Convent of Angels, because the thought of making her way through Paris alone and the streets full of people all speaking French—though she knew French quite well, of course. She’d been studying it all the winter, and Michael’s mother helping her—though perhaps she had better not tell the reverend mother about the sorts of French novels Jenny Murray had in her bookshelf, because…
“Voulez-vous descendre, mademoiselle?”
“Eh?” She glanced at him, to see him gesturing toward the hatchway that led downstairs. She turned back, blinking—but the quay had vanished, and her mother with it.
“No,” she said. “Not yet. I’ll just…” She wanted to see the land so long as she could. It would be her last sight of Scotland, ever, and the thought made her wame curl into a small, tight ball. She waved a vague hand toward the hatchway. “You go, though. I’m all right by myself.”
He didn’t go but came to stand beside her, gripping the rail. She turned away from him a little, so he wouldn’t see her weep, but on the whole she wasn’t sorry he’d stayed.
Neither of them spoke, and the land sank slowly, as though the sea swallowed it, and there was nothing round them now but the open sea, glassy gray and rippling under a scud of clouds. The prospect made her dizzy, and she closed her eyes, swallowing.
Dear Lord Jesus, don’t let me be sick!
A small shuffling noise beside her made her open her eyes, to find Michael Murray regarding her with some concern.
“Are ye all right, Miss Joan?” He smiled a little. “Or should I call ye Sister?”
“No,” she said, taking a grip on her nerve and her stomach and drawing herself up. “I’m no a nun yet, am I?”
He looked her up and down, in the frank way Hieland men did, and smiled more broadly.
“Have ye ever seen a nun?” he asked.
“I have not,” she said, as starchily as she could. “I havena seen God or the Blessed Virgin, either, but I believe in them, too.”
Much to her annoyance, he burst out laughing. Seeing the annoyance, though, he stopped at once, though she could see the urge still trembling there behind his assumed gravity.
“I do beg your pardon, Miss MacKimmie,” he said. “I wasna questioning the existence of nuns. I’ve seen quite a number of the creatures with my own eyes.” His lips were twitching, and she glared at him.
“Creatures, is it?”
“A figure of speech, nay more, I swear it! Forgive me, Sister—I ken not what I do!” He held up a hand, cowering in mock terror. The urge to laugh made her that much more cross, but she contented herself with a simple “mmphm” of disapproval.
Curiosity got the better of her, though, and after a few moments spent inspecting the foaming wake of the ship, she asked, not looking at him, “When ye saw the nuns, then—what were they doing?”
He’d got control of himself by now and answered her seriously.
“Well, I see the Sisters of Notre Dame, who work among the poor all the time in the streets. They always go out by twos, ken, and both nuns will be carrying great huge baskets, filled with food, I suppose—maybe medicines? They’re covered, though—the baskets—so I canna say for sure what’s in them. Perhaps they’re smuggling brandy and lace down to the docks—” He dodged aside from her upraised hand, laughing.
“Oh, ye’ll be a rare nun, Sister Joan! Terror daemonum, solatium miserorum…”
She pressed her lips tight together, not to laugh. Terror of demons—the cheek of him!
“Not Sister Joan,” she said. “They’ll give me a new name, likely, at the convent.”
“Oh, aye?” He wiped hair out of his eyes, interested. “D’ye get to choose the name yourself?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
“Well, though—what name would ye pick, if ye had the choosing?”
“Er…well…” She hadn’t told anyone, but, after all, what harm could it do? She wouldn’t see Michael Murray again once they reached Paris. “Sister Gregory,” she blurted.
Rather to her relief, he didn’t laugh.
“Oh, that’s a good name,” he said. “After St. Gregory the Great, is it?”
“Well…aye. Ye don’t think it’s presumptuous?” she asked, a little anxious.
“Oh, no!” he said, surprised. “I mean, how many nuns are named Mary? If it’s not presumptuous to be named after the mother o’ God, how can it be highfalutin to call yourself after a mere pope?” He smiled at that, so merrily that she smiled back.
“How many nuns are named Mary?” she asked, out of curiosity. “It’s common, is it?”
“Oh, aye, ye said ye’d not seen a nun.” He’d stopped making fun of her, though, and answered seriously. “About half the nuns I’ve met seem to be called Sister Mary Something—ye ken, Sister Mary Polycarp, Sister Mary Joseph…like that.”
“And ye meet a great many nuns in the course o’ your business, do ye?” Michael Murray was a wine merchant, the junior partner of Fraser et Cie—and, judging from the cut of his clothes, did well enough at it.
His mouth twitched, but he answered seriously.
“Well, I do, really. Not every day, I mean, but the sisters come round to my office quite often—or I go to them. Fraser et Cie supplies wine to most o’ the monasteries and convents in Paris, and some will send a pair of nuns to place an order or to take away something special—otherwise, we deliver it, of course. And even the orders who dinna take wine themselves—and most of the Parisian houses do, they bein’ French, aye?—need sacramental wine for their chapels. And the begging orders come round like clockwork to ask alms.”
“Really.” She was fascinated: sufficiently so as to put aside her reluctance to look ignorant. “I didna ken…I mean…so the different orders do quite different things, is that what ye’re saying? What other kinds are there?”
He shot her a brief glance but then turned back, narrowing his eyes against the wind as he thought.
“Well…there’s the sort of nun that prays all the time—contemplative, I think they’re called. I see them in the cathedral all hours of the day and night. There’s more than one order of that sort, though; one kind wears gray habits and prays in the chapel of St. Joseph, and another wears black; ye see them mostly in the chapel of Our Lady of the Sea.” He glanced at her, curious. “Will it be that sort of nun that you’ll be?”
She shook her head, glad that the wind-chafing hid her blushes.
“No,” she said, with some regret. “That’s maybe the holiest sort of nun, but I’ve spent a good bit o’ my life being contemplative on the moors, and I didna like it much. I think I havena got the right sort of soul to do it verra well, even in a chapel.”
“Aye,” he said, and wiped back flying strands of hair from his face. “I ken the moors. The wind gets into your head after a bit.” He hesitated for a moment. “When my uncle Jamie—your da, I mean—ye ken he hid in a cave after Culloden?”
“For seven years,” she said, a little impatient. “Aye, everyone kens that story. Why?”
He shrugged.
“Only thinking. I was no but a wee bairn at the time, but I went now and then wi’ my mam, to take him food there. He’d be glad to see us, but he wouldna talk much. And it scared me to see his eyes.”
Joan felt a small shiver pass down her back, nothing to do with the stiff breeze. She saw—suddenly saw, in her head—a thin, dirty man, the bones starting in his face, crouched in the dank, frozen shadows of the cave.
“Da?” she scoffed, to hide the shiver that crawled up her arms. “How could anyone be scairt of him? He’s a dear, kind man.”
Michael’s wide mouth twitched at the corners.
“I suppose it would depend whether ye’d ever seen him in a fight. But—”
“Have you?” she interrupted, curious. “Seen him in a fight?”
“I have, aye. BUT—” he said, not willing to be distracted, “I didna mean he scared me. It was that I thought he was haunted. By the voices in the wind.”
That dried up the spit in her mouth, and she worked her tongue a little, hoping it didn’t show. She needn’t have worried; he wasn’t looking at her.
“My own da said it was because Jamie spent so much time alone, that the voices got into his head and he couldna stop hearing them. When he’d feel safe enough to come to the house, it would take hours sometimes before he could start to hear us again—Mam wouldna let us talk to him until he’d had something to eat and was warmed through.” He smiled, a little ruefully. “She said he wasna human ’til then—and, looking back, I dinna think she meant that as a figure of speech.”
“Well,” she said, but stopped, not knowing how to go on. She wished fervently that she’d known this earlier. Her da and his sister were coming on to France later, but she might not see him. She could maybe have talked to Da, asked him just what the voices in his head were like—what they said. Whether they were anything like the ones she heard.
NEARLY TWILIGHT, and the rats were still dead. The comte heard the bells of Notre Dame calling sept and glanced at his pocket watch. The bells were two minutes before their time, and he frowned. He didn’t like sloppiness. He stood up and stretched himself, groaning as his spine cracked like the ragged volley of a firing squad. No doubt about it, he was aging, and the thought sent a chill through him.
If. If he could find the way forward, then perhaps…but you never knew, that was the devil of it. For a little while, he’d thought—hoped—that traveling back in time stopped the process of aging. That initially seemed logical, like rewinding a clock. But, then again, it wasn’t logical, because he’d always gone back farther than his own lifetime. Only once he’d tried to go back just a few years, to his early twenties. That was a mistake, and he still shivered at the memory.
He went to the tall gabled window that looked out over the Seine.
That particular view of the river had changed barely at all in the last two hundred years; he’d seen it at several different times. He hadn’t always owned this house, but it had stood in this street since 1620, and he always managed to get in briefly, if only to reestablish his own sense of reality after a passage.
Only the trees changed in his view of the river, and sometimes a strange-looking boat would be there. But the rest was always the same and no doubt always would be: the old fishermen, catching their supper off the landing in stubborn silence, each guarding his space with outthrust elbows, the younger ones, barefoot and slump-shouldered with exhaustion, laying out their nets to dry, naked little boys diving off the quay. It gave him a soothing sense of eternity, watching the river. Perhaps it didn’t matter so much if he must one day die?
“The devil it doesn’t,” he murmured to himself, and glanced up at the sky. Venus shone bright. He should go.
Pausing conscientiously to place his fingers on each rat’s body and ensure that no spark of life remained, he passed down the line, then swept them all into a burlap bag. If he was going to the Court of Miracles, at least he wouldn’t arrive empty-handed.
JOAN WAS STILL reluctant to go below, but the light was fading, the wind getting up regardless, and a particularly spiteful gust that blew her petticoats right up round her waist and grabbed her arse with a chilly hand made her yelp in a very undignified way. She smoothed her skirts hastily and made for the hatchway, followed by Michael Murray.
Seeing him cough and chafe his hands at the bottom of the ladder made her sorry; here she’d kept him freezing on deck, too polite to go below and leave her to her own devices, and her too selfish to see he was cold, the poor man. She made a hasty knot in her handkerchief, to remind her to say an extra decade of the rosary for penance, when she got to it.
He saw her to a bench and said a few words to the woman sitting next to her, in French. Obviously he was introducing her, she understood that much—but when the woman nodded and said something in reply, she could only sit there openmouthed. She didn’t understand a word. Not a word!
Michael evidently grasped the situation, for he said something to the woman’s husband, which drew her attention away from Joan, and engaged them in a conversation that let Joan sink quietly back against the wooden wall of the ship, sweating with embarrassment.
Well, she’d get into the way of it, she reassured herself. Bound to. She settled herself with determination to listen, picking out the odd word here and there in the conversation. It was easier to understand Michael; he spoke slower and didn’t swallow the back half of each word.
She was trying to puzzle out the probable spelling of a word that sounded like “pwufgweemiarniere” but surely couldn’t be, when her eye caught a slight movement from the bench opposite, and the gurgling vowels caught in her throat.
A man sat there, maybe close to her own age, which was twenty-five. He was good-looking, if a bit thin in the face, decently dressed—and he was going to die.
There was a gray shroud over him, the same as if he were wrapped in mist, so his face showed through it. She’d seen that same thing—the grayness lying on someone’s face like fog—seen it twice before and knew it at once for death’s shadow. Once it had been on an elderly man, and that might have been only what anybody could see, because Angus MacWheen was ill, but then again, and only a few weeks after, she’d seen it on the second of Vhairi Fraser’s little boys, and him a rosy-faced wee bairn with dear chubby legs.
She hadn’t wanted to believe it. Either that she saw it or what it meant. But four days later, the wean was crushed in the lane by an ox that was maddened by a hornet’s sting. She’d vomited when they told her, and couldn’t eat for days after, for sheer grief and terror. Because could she have stopped it if she’d said? And what—dear Lord, what—if it happened again?
Now it had, and her wame twisted. She leapt to her feet and blundered toward the companionway, cutting short some slowly worded speech from the Frenchman.
Not again, not again! she thought in agony. Why show me such things? What can I do?
She pawed frantically at the ladder, climbing as fast as she could, gasping for air, needing to be away from the dying man. How long might it be, dear Lord, until she reached the convent, and safety?
THE MOON WAS rising over the Île de la Cité, glowing through the haze of cloud. He glanced at it, estimating the time; no point in arriving at Madame Fabienne’s house before the girls had taken their hair out of curling papers and rolled on their red stockings. There were other places to go first, though: the obscure drinking places where the professionals of the court fortified themselves for the night ahead. One of those was where he had first heard the rumors—he’d see how far they had spread and would judge the safety of asking openly about Maître Raymond.
That was one advantage to hiding in the past, rather than going to Hungary or Sweden—life at this court tended to be short, and there were not so many who knew either his face or his history, though there would still be stories. Paris held on to its histoires. He found the iron gate—rustier than it had been; it left red stains on his palm—and pushed it open with a creak that would alert whatever now lived at the end of the alley.
He had to see the frog. Not meet him, perhaps—he made a brief sign against evil—but see him. Above all else, he needed to know: had the man—if he was a man—aged?
“Certainly he’s a man,” he muttered to himself, impatient. “What else could he be, for heaven’s sake?”
He could be something like you, was the answering thought, and a shiver ran up his spine. Fear? He wondered. Anticipation of an intriguing philosophical mystery? Or possibly…hope?
“WHAT A WASTE of a wonderful arse,” Monsieur Brechin remarked in French, watching Joan’s ascent from the far side of the cabin. “And, mon Dieu, those legs! Imagine those wrapped around your back, eh? Would you have her keep the striped stockings on? I would.”
It hadn’t occurred to Michael to imagine that, but he was now having a hard time dismissing the image. He coughed into his handkerchief to hide the reddening of his face.
Madame Brechin gave her husband a sharp elbow in the ribs. He grunted but seemed undisturbed by what was evidently a normal form of marital communication.
“Beast,” she said, with no apparent heat. “Speaking so of a Bride of Christ. You will be lucky if God himself doesn’t strike you dead with a lightning bolt.”
“Well, she isn’t his bride yet,” Monsieur protested. “And who created that arse in the first place? Surely God would be flattered to hear a little sincere appreciation of his handiwork. From one who is, after all, a connoisseur in such matters.” He leered affectionately at Madame, who snorted.
A faint snigger from the young man across the cabin indicated that Monsieur was not alone in his appreciation, and Madame turned a reproving glare on the young man. Michael wiped his nose carefully, trying not to catch Monsieur’s eye. His insides were quivering, and not entirely from either amusement or the shock of inadvertent lust. He felt very queer.
Monsieur sighed as Joan’s striped stockings disappeared through the hatchway.
“Christ will not warm her bed,” he said, shaking his head.
“Christ will not fart in her bed, either,” said Madame, taking out her knitting.
“Pardonnez-moi…” Michael said in a strangled voice, and, clapping his handkerchief to his mouth, made hastily for the ladder, as though seasickness might be catching.
It wasn’t mal de mer that was surging up from his belly, though. He caught sight of Joan, dim in the evening light at the rail, and turned quickly, going to the other side, where he gripped the rail as though it were a life raft and let the overwhelming waves of grief wash through him. It was the only way he’d been able to manage these last few weeks. Hold on as long as he could, keeping a cheerful face, until some small unexpected thing, some bit of emotional debris, struck him through the heart like a hunter’s arrow, and then hurry to find a place to hide, curling up in mindless pain until he could get a grip on himself.
This time, it was Madame’s remark that had come out of the blue, and he grimaced painfully, laughing in spite of the tears that poured down his face, remembering Lillie. She’d eaten eels in garlic sauce for dinner—those always made her fart with a silent deadliness like poison swamp gas. As the ghastly miasma had risen up round him, he’d sat bolt upright in bed, only to find her staring at him, a look of indignant horror on her face.
“How dare you?” she’d said, in a voice of offended majesty. “Really, Michel.”
“You know it wasn’t me!”
Her mouth had dropped open, outrage added to horror and distaste.
“Oh!” she gasped, gathering her pug-dog to her bosom. “You not only fart like a rotting whale, you attempt to blame it on my poor puppy! Cochon!” Whereupon she had begun to shake the bedsheets delicately, using her free hand to waft the noxious odors in his direction, addressing censorious remarks to Plonplon, who gave Michael a sanctimonious look before turning to lick his mistress’s face with great enthusiasm.
“Oh, Jesus,” he whispered, and, sinking down, pressed his face against the rail. “Oh, God, lass, I love you!”
He shook silently, head buried in his arms, aware of sailors passing now and then behind him, but none of them took notice of him in the dark. At last the agony eased a little, and he drew breath.
All right, then. He’d be all right now, for a time. And he thanked God, belatedly, that he had Joan—or Sister Gregory, if she liked—to look after for a bit. He didn’t know how he’d manage to walk through the streets of Paris to his house, alone. Go in, greet the servants—would Jared be there?—face the sorrow of the household, accept their sympathy for his father’s death, order a meal, sit down…and all the time wanting just to throw himself on the floor of their empty bedroom and howl like a lost soul. He’d have to face it, sooner or later—but not just yet. And right now he’d take the grace of any respite that was offered.
He blew his nose with resolution, tucked away his mangled handkerchief, and went downstairs to fetch the basket his mother had sent. He couldn’t swallow a thing himself, but feeding Joan would maybe keep his mind off things for that one minute more.
“That’s how ye do it,” his brother Ian had told him, as they leant together on the rail of their mother’s sheep pen, the winter’s wind cold on their faces, waiting for their da to find his way through dying. “Ye find a way to live for that one more minute. And then another. And another.” Ian had lost a wife, too, and knew.
He’d wiped his face—he could weep before Ian, while he couldn’t with his elder brother or the girls, certainly not in front of his mother—and asked, “And it gets better after a time, is that what ye’re telling me?”
His brother had looked at him straight on, the quiet in his eyes showing through the outlandish Mohawk tattoos.
“No,” he’d said softly. “But after a time, ye find ye’re in a different place than ye were. A different person than ye were. And then ye look about and see what’s there with ye. Ye’ll maybe find a use for yourself. That helps.”
“Aye, fine,” he said, under his breath, and squared his shoulders. “We’ll see, then.”
TO RAKOCZY’S SURPRISE, there was a familiar face behind the rough bar. If Maximilian the Great was surprised to see him, the Spanish dwarf gave no indication of it. The other drinkers—a pair of jugglers, each missing an arm (but the opposing arm), a toothless hag who smacked and muttered over her mug of arrack, and something that looked like a ten-year-old girl but almost certainly wasn’t—turned to stare at him but, seeing nothing remarkable in his shabby clothing and burlap bag, turned back to the business of getting sufficiently drunk as to do what needed to be done tonight.
He nodded to Max and pulled up one of the splintering kegs to sit on.
“What’s your pleasure, señor?”
Rakoczy narrowed his eyes; Max had never served anything but arrack. But times had changed; there was a stone bottle of something that might be beer and a dark glass bottle with a chalk scrawl on it, standing next to the keg of rough brandy.
“Arrack, please, Max,” he said—better the devil you know—and was surprised to see the dwarf’s eyes narrow in return.
“You knew my honored father, I see, señor,” the dwarf said, putting the cup on the board. “It’s some time since you’ve been in Paris?”
“Pardonnez,” Rakoczy said, accepting it and tossing it back. If you could afford more than one cup, you didn’t let it linger on the tongue. “Your honored…late father? Max?”
“Maximiliano el Maximo,” the dwarf corrected him firmly.
“To be sure.” Rakoczy gestured for another drink. “And whom have I the honor to address?”
The Spaniard—though perhaps his accent wasn’t as strong as Max’s had been—drew himself up proudly. “Maxim Le Grand, a su servicio!”
Rakoczy saluted him gravely and threw back the second cup, motioning for a third and, with a gesture, inviting Maxim to join him.
“It has been some time since I was last here,” he said. No lie there. “I wonder if another old acquaintance might be still alive—Maître Raymond, otherwise called the frog?”
There was a tiny quiver in the air, a barely perceptible flicker of attention, gone almost as soon as he’d sensed it—somewhere behind him?
“A frog,” Maxim said, meditatively pouring himself a drink. “I don’t know any frogs myself, but should I hear of one, who shall I say is asking for him?”
Should he give his name? No, not yet.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “But word can be left with Madame Fabienne. You know the place? In the Rue Antoine?”
The dwarf’s sketchy brows rose, and his mouth turned up at one corner.
“I know it.”
Doubtless he did, Rakoczy thought. “El Maximo” hadn’t referred to Max’s stature, and probably “Le Grand” didn’t, either. God had a sense of justice, as well as a sense of humor.
“Bon.” He wiped his lips on his sleeve and put down a coin that would have bought the whole keg. “Merci.”
He stood up, the hot taste of the brandy bubbling at the back of his throat, and belched. Two more places to visit, maybe, before he went to Fabienne’s. He couldn’t visit more than that and stay upright; he was getting old.
“Good night.” He bowed to the company and gingerly pushed open the cracked wooden door; it was hanging by one leather hinge, and that looked ready to give way at any moment.
“Ribbit,” someone said very softly, just before the door closed behind him.
MADELEINE’S FACE LIGHTED when she saw him, and his heart warmed. She wasn’t very bright, poor creature, but she was pretty and amiable and had been a whore long enough to be grateful for small kindnesses.
“Monsieur Rakoczy!” She flung her arms about his neck, nuzzling affectionately.
“Madeleine, my dear.” He cupped her chin and kissed her gently on the lips, drawing her close so that her belly pressed against his. He held her long enough, kissing her eyelids, her forehead, her ears—so that she made high squeaks of pleasure—that he could feel his way inside her, hold the weight of her womb in his mind, evaluate her ripening.
It felt warm, the color in the heart of a dark crimson rose, the kind called sang de dragon. A week before, it had felt solid, compact as a folded fist; now it had begun to soften, to hollow slightly as she readied. Three more days? he wondered. Four?
He let her go, and when she pouted prettily at him, he laughed and raised her hand to his lips, feeling the same small thrill he had felt when he first found her, as the faint blue glow rose between her fingers in response to his touch. She couldn’t see it—he’d raised their linked hands to her face before and she had merely looked puzzled—but it was there.
“Go and fetch some wine, ma belle,” he said, squeezing her hand gently. “I need to talk to Madame.”
Madame Fabienne was not a dwarf, but she was small, brown, and mottled as a toadstool—and as watchful as a toad, round yellow eyes seldom blinking, never closed.
“Monsieur le Comte,” she said graciously, nodding him to a damask chair in her salon. The air was scented with candle wax and flesh—flesh of a far better quality than that on offer in the court. Even so, Madame had come from that court and kept her connections there alive; she made no bones about that. She didn’t blink at his clothes, but her nostrils flared at him, as though she picked up the scent of the dives and alleys he had come from.
“Good evening, Madame,” he said, smiling at her, and lifted the burlap bag. “I brought a small present for Leopold. If he’s awake?”
“Awake and cranky,” she said, eyeing the bag with interest. “He’s just shed his skin—you don’t want to make any sudden moves.”
Leopold was a remarkably handsome—and remarkably large—python; an albino, quite rare. Opinion of his origins was divided; half of Madame Fabienne’s clientele held that she had been given the snake by a noble client—some said the late King himself—whom she had cured of impotence. Others said the snake had once been a noble client, who had refused to pay her for services rendered. Rakoczy had his own opinions on that one, but he liked Leopold, who was ordinarily tame as a cat and would sometimes come when called—as long as you had something he regarded as food in your hand when you called.
“Leopold! Monsieur le Comte has brought you a treat!” Fabienne reached across to an enormous wicker cage and flicked the door open, withdrawing her hand with sufficient speed as to indicate just what she meant by “cranky.”
Almost at once, a huge yellow head poked out into the light. Snakes had transparent eyelids, but Rakoczy could swear the python blinked irritably, swaying up a coil of its monstrous body for a moment before plunging out of the cage and swarming across the floor with amazing rapidity for such a big creature, tongue flicking in and out like a seamstress’s needle.
He made straight for Rakoczy, jaws yawning as he came, and Rakoczy snatched up the bag just before Leopold tried to engulf it—or Rakoczy—whole. He jerked aside, hastily seized a rat, and threw it. Leopold flung a coil of his body on top of the rat with a thud that rattled Madame’s spoon in her teabowl, and before the company could blink, he had whipped the rat into a half-hitch knot of coil.
“Hungry as well as ill-tempered, I see,” Rakoczy remarked, trying for nonchalance. In fact, the hairs were prickling over his neck and arms. Normally, Leopold took his time about feeding, and the violence of the python’s appetite at such close quarters had shaken him.
Fabienne was laughing, almost silently, her tiny sloping shoulders quivering beneath the green Chinese silk tunic she wore.
“I thought for an instant he’d have you,” she remarked at last, wiping her eyes. “If he had, I shouldn’t have had to feed him for a month!”
Rakoczy bared his teeth in an expression that might have been taken for a smile.
“We cannot let Leopold go hungry,” he said. “I wish to make a special arrangement for Madeleine—it should keep the worm up to his yellow arse in rats for some time.”
Fabienne put down her handkerchief and regarded him with interest.
“Leopold has two cocks, but I can’t say I’ve ever noticed an arse. Twenty écus a day. Plus two extra if she needs clothes.”
He waved an easy hand, dismissing this.
“I had in mind something longer.” He explained what he had in mind and had the satisfaction of seeing Fabienne’s face go quite blank with stupefaction. It didn’t stay that way more than a few moments; by the time he had finished, she was already laying out her initial demands.
When they finally came to agreement, they had drunk half a bottle of decent wine, and Leopold had swallowed the rat. It made a small bulge in the muscular tube of the snake’s body but hadn’t slowed him appreciably; the coils slithered restlessly over the painted canvas floorcloth, glowing like gold, and Rakoczy saw the patterns of his skin like trapped clouds beneath the scales.
“He is beautiful, no?” Fabienne saw his admiration and basked a little in it. “Did I ever tell you where I got him?”
“Yes, more than once. And more than one story, too.” She looked startled, and he compressed his lips. He’d been patronizing her establishment for no more than a few weeks, this time. He’d known her fifteen years before—though only a couple of months, that time. He hadn’t given his name then, and a madam saw so many men that there was little chance of her recalling him. On the other hand, he also thought it unlikely that she troubled to recall to whom she’d told which story, and this seemed to be the case, for she lifted one shoulder in a surprisingly graceful shrug and laughed.
“Yes, but this one is true.”
“Oh, well, then.” He smiled and, reaching into the bag, tossed Leopold another rat. The snake moved more slowly this time and didn’t bother to constrict its motionless prey, merely unhinging its jaw and engulfing it in a single-minded way.
“He is an old friend, Leopold,” she said, gazing affectionately at the snake. “I brought him with me from the West Indies, many years ago. He is a Mystère, you know.”
“I didn’t, no.” Rakoczy drank more wine; he had sat long enough that he was beginning to feel almost sober again. “And what is that?” He was interested—not so much in the snake but in Fabienne’s mention of the West Indies. He’d forgotten that she claimed to have come from there, many years ago, long before he’d known her the first time.
The afile powder had been waiting in his laboratory when he’d come back; no telling how many years it had sat there—the servants couldn’t recall. Mélisande’s brief note—Try this. It may be what the frog used—had not been dated, but there was a brief scrawl at the top of the sheet, saying, Rose Hall, Jamaica. If Fabienne retained any connections in the West Indies, perhaps…
“Some call them loa”—her wrinkled lips pursed as she kissed the word—“but those are the Africans. A Mystère is a spirit, one who is an intermediary between the Bondye and us. Bondye is le bon Dieu, of course,” she explained to him. “The African slaves speak very bad French. Give him another rat; he’s still hungry, and it scares the girls if I let him hunt in the house.”
Another two rats and the snake was beginning to look like a fat string of pearls. He was showing an inclination to lie still, digesting. The tongue still flickered, tasting the air, but lazily now.
Rakoczy picked up the bag again, weighing the risks—but, after all, if news came from the Court of Miracles, his name would soon be known in any case.
“I wonder, Madame, as you know everyone in Paris”—he gave her a small bow, which she graciously returned—“are you acquainted with a certain man known as Maître Raymond? Some call him the frog,” he added.
She blinked, then looked amused.
“You’re looking for the frog?”
“Yes. Is that funny?” He reached into the sack, fishing for a rat.
“Somewhat. I should perhaps not tell you, but since you are so accommodating”—she glanced complacently at the purse he had put beside her teabowl, a generous deposit on account—“Maître Grenouille is looking for you.”
He stopped dead, hand clutching a furry body.
“What? You’ve seen him?”
She shook her head and, sniffing distastefully at her cold tea, rang the bell for her maid.
“No, but I’ve heard the same from two people.”
“Asking for me by name?” Rakoczy’s heart beat faster.
“Monsieur le Comte St. Germain. That is you?” She asked with no more than mild interest; false names were common in her business.
He nodded, mouth suddenly too dry to speak, and pulled the rat from the sack. It squirmed suddenly in his hand, and a piercing pain in his thumb made him hurl the rodent away.
“Sacrebleu! It bit me!”
The rat, dazed by impact, staggered drunkenly across the floor toward Leopold, whose tongue began to flicker faster. Fabienne, though, uttered a sound of disgust and threw a silver-backed hairbrush at the rat. Startled by the clatter, the rat leapt convulsively into the air, landed on and raced directly over the snake’s astonished head, disappearing through the door into the foyer, where—by the resultant scream—it evidently encountered the maid before making its ultimate escape into the street.
“Jésus Marie,” Madame Fabienne said, piously crossing herself. “A miraculous resurrection. Two weeks before Easter, too.”
IT WAS A SMOOTH passage; the shore of France came into sight just after dawn the next day. Joan saw it, a low smudge of dark green on the horizon, and felt a little thrill at the sight, in spite of her tiredness.
She hadn’t slept, though she’d reluctantly gone below after nightfall, there to wrap herself in her cloak and shawl, trying not to look at the young man with the shadow on his face. She’d lain all night, listening to the snores and groans of her fellow passengers, praying doggedly and wondering in despair whether prayer was all she could do.
She often wondered whether it was because of her name. She’d been proud of her name when she was small; it was a heroic name, a saint’s name, but also a warrior’s name. Her mother’d told her that, often and often. She didn’t think her mother had considered that the name might also be haunted.
Surely it didn’t happen to everyone named Joan, though, did it? She wished she knew another Joan to ask. Because if it did happen to them all, the others would be keeping it quiet, just as she did.
You didn’t go round telling people that you heard voices that weren’t there. Still less that you saw things that weren’t there, either. You just didn’t.
She’d heard of a seer, of course; everyone in the Highlands had. And nearly everyone she knew at least claimed to have seen the odd fetch or had a premonition that Angus MacWheen was dead when he didn’t come home that time last winter. The fact that Angus MacWheen was a filthy auld drunkard and so yellow and crazed that it was heads or tails whether he’d die on any particular day, let alone when it got cold enough that the loch froze, didn’t come into it.
But she’d never met a seer—there was the rub. How did you get into the way of it? Did you just tell folk, “Here’s a thing…I’m a seer,” and they’d nod and say, “Oh, aye, of course; what’s like to happen to me next Tuesday?” More important, though, how the devil—
“Ow!” She’d bitten her tongue fiercely as penance for the inadvertent blasphemy, and clapped a hand to her mouth.
“What is it?” said a concerned voice behind her. “Are ye hurt, Miss MacKimmie? Er…Sister Gregory, I mean?”
“Mm! No. No, I jutht…bit my tongue.” She turned to Michael Murray, gingerly touching the injured tongue to the roof of her mouth.
“Well, that happens when ye talk to yourself.” He took the cork from a bottle he was carrying and held the bottle out to her. “Here, wash your mouth wi’ that; it’ll help.”
She took a large mouthful and swirled it round; it burned the bitten place, but not badly, and she swallowed, as slowly as possible, to make it last.
“Jesus, Mary, and Bride,” she breathed. “Is that wine?” The taste in her mouth bore some faint kinship with the liquid she knew as wine—just as apples bore some resemblance to horse turds.
“Aye, it is pretty good,” he said modestly. “German. Umm…have a wee nip more?”
She didn’t argue and sipped happily, barely listening to his talk, telling about the wine, what it was called, how they made it in Germany, where he got it…on and on. Finally she came to herself enough to remember her manners, though, and reluctantly handed back the bottle, now half empty.
“I thank ye, sir,” she said primly. “ ’Twas kind of ye. Ye needna waste your time in bearing me company, though; I shall be well enough alone.”
“Aye, well…it’s no really for your sake,” he said, and took a reasonable swallow himself. “It’s for mine.”
She blinked against the wind. He was flushed, but not from drink or wind, she thought.
She managed a faint interrogative “Ah…?”
“Well, what I want to ask,” he blurted, and looked away, cheekbones burning red. “Will ye pray for me? Sister? And my—my wife. The repose of—of—”
“Oh!” she said, mortified that she’d been so taken up with her own worries as not to have seen his distress. Think you’re a seer, dear Lord, ye dinna see what’s under your neb; you’re no but a fool, and a selfish fool at that. She put her hand over his where it lay on the rail and squeezed tight, trying to channel some sense of God’s goodness into his flesh. “To be sure I will!” she said. “I’ll remember ye at every Mass, I swear it!” She wondered briefly whether it was proper to swear to something like that, but after all…“And your poor wife’s soul, of course I will! What…er…what was her name? So as I’ll know what to say when I pray for her,” she explained hurriedly, seeing his eyes narrow with pain.
“Lilliane,” he said, so softly that she barely heard him over the wind. “I called her Lillie.”
“Lilliane,” she repeated carefully, trying to form the syllables like he did. It was a soft, lovely name, she thought, slipping like water over the rocks at the top of a burn. You’ll never see a burn again, she thought with a pang, but dismissed this, turning her face toward the growing shore of France. “I’ll remember.”
He nodded in mute thanks, and they stood for some little while, until she realized that her hand was still resting on his and drew it back with a jerk. He looked startled, and she blurted—because it was the thing on the top of her mind—“What was she like? Your wife?”
The most extraordinary mix of emotions flooded over his face. She couldn’t have said what was uppermost—grief, laughter, or sheer bewilderment—and she realized suddenly just how little of his true mind she’d seen before.
“She was…” He shrugged and swallowed. “She was my wife,” he said, very softly. “She was my life.”
She should know something comforting to say to him, but she didn’t.
She’s with God? That was the truth, she hoped, and yet clearly to this young man, the only thing that mattered was that his wife was not with him.
“What happened to her?” she asked instead, baldly, only because it seemed necessary to say something.
He took a deep breath and appeared to sway a little; he’d finished the rest of the wine, she saw, and she took the empty bottle from his hand, tossing it overboard.
“The influenza. They said it was quick. Didn’t feel quick to me—and yet, it was, I suppose it was. It took two days, and God kens well that I recall every second of those days—yet it seems that I lost her between one heartbeat and the next. And I—I keep lookin’ for her there, in that space between.”
He swallowed. “She—she was…” The words “with child” came so quietly that she barely heard them.
“Oh,” Joan said softly, very moved. “Oh, a chuisle.” “Heart’s blood,” it meant, and what she meant was that his wife had been that to him—dear Lord, she hoped he hadn’t thought she meant—no, he hadn’t, and the tight-wound spring in her backbone relaxed a little, seeing the look of gratitude on his face. He did know what she’d meant and seemed glad that she’d understood.
Blinking, she looked away—and caught sight of the young man with the shadow on him, leaning against the railing a little way down. The breath caught in her throat at sight of him.
The shadow was darker in the morning light. The sun was beginning to warm the deck, frail white clouds swam in the blue of clear French skies, and yet the mist now swirled and thickened, obscuring the young man’s face, wrapping round his shoulders like a shawl.
Dear Lord, tell me what to do! Her body jerked, wanting to go to the young man, speak to him. But to say what? “You’re in danger, be careful”? He’d think she was mad. And if the danger was a thing he couldn’t help, like with wee Ronnie and the ox, what difference might her speaking make?
She was dimly aware of Michael staring at her, curious. He said something to her, but she wasn’t listening, listening hard instead inside her head. Where were the damned voices when you bloody needed one?
But the voices were stubbornly silent, and she turned to Michael, the muscles of her arm jumping, she’d held so tight to the ship’s rigging.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasna listening properly. I just—thought of something.”
“If it’s a thing I can help ye with, Sister, ye’ve only to ask,” he said, smiling faintly. “Oh! And speak of that, I meant to say—I said to your mam, if she liked to write to you in care of Fraser et Cie, I’d see to it that ye got the letters.” He shrugged, one-shouldered. “I dinna ken what the rules are at the convent, aye? About getting letters from outside.”
Joan didn’t know that, either, and had worried about it. She was so relieved to hear this that a huge smile split her face.
“Oh, it’s that kind of ye!” she said. “And if I could—maybe write back…?”
His smile grew wider, the marks of grief easing in his pleasure at doing her a service.
“Anytime,” he assured her. “I’ll see to it. Perhaps I could—”
A ragged shriek cut through the air, and Joan glanced up, startled, thinking it one of the seabirds that had come out from shore to wheel round the ship, but it wasn’t. The young man was standing on the rail, one hand on the rigging, and before she could so much as draw breath, he let go and was gone.