The Oracle Glass Part 10

"So, finally up, are you? How does it feel to be one hundred and fifty years old?"

"Exactly like being fifteen. But I've got a terrible headache."

"As well you might expect. I've never seen anyone drunker than you were last night when they delivered you here. I've brought you a headache remedy. I compound them myself, and they are excellent. Here, drink this and dress. You have a busy day ahead of you. You're consulting Monsieur Lemaire today and being measured for a new gown at the tailor's. Up! Up! Yes, you have to drink it. And let this be a lesson to you. If you're to be a great fortune-teller, you must never lose control again. Leave wine alone, or you'll betray yourself in company."

I looked at the disgusting brew in the goblet. Reason enough to leave wine alone, if this were the cure. I drank it. It tasted like something dreadful sc.r.a.ped off the river bottom in summer.

"Ah, good. That's it. Now, if I could only give it a better flavor, I'd make my fortune," announced the woman. "Now, come downstairs when you're ready. We've made cocoa especially in your honor."

The headache was already pa.s.sing. I got up, felt my limbs cautiously, and found them still attached, got dressed, and descended the narrow staircase. The large room downstairs was quite astonis.h.i.+ng. It was part kitchen, part apothecary's shop. I'd never seen anything like it. There was an oven built into the wide brick wall of the huge fireplace and a tall, strange-looking stove with a tower beside it that contained charcoal, so cunningly built that the fire in the stove could be fed continuously for many days. There were long workbenches against the wall covered with curious gla.s.sware and sealed jugs. Two little girls who looked to be about ten and twelve were filling rows of small green gla.s.s vials with a funnel and ladle under the supervision of a tall, older woman who held a copper vessel full of something mysterious. A kitchen maid in ap.r.o.n and cap, having stirred some eerily sweet-scented brew in a little pot beside the great soup kettle on the hearth, was now engaged in renewing the wood in the oven, from which a strange acrid smell came and mingled with the appealing scent of chocolate. There were boxes and bales of who knows what piled in the corners, and on shelves were ranged an array of strange, globular animals folded up and preserved in jars like pickles. Above everything, suspended from the ceiling, was a fantastical production of the taxidermist's art, a hairy creation with four legs, each ending in a huge stork's foot. The creature possessed feathered wings spread wide and a sort of human face compounded of plaster and what appeared to be goat hair. On the odd stove, a pan of cocoa was warming, while beside it on a little shelf sat a heavy earthenware plate of rolls, fresh from the baker's, all covered with a napkin.

"Ah, so you like our harpy. Nice, isn't she?" The older of the two women had turned around to address me. She was tall and thin, with graying hair tucked in a little cap above her pale face. She had a shrewd look to her, as if she had seen too much and made the best of it. She had introduced herself as a widow, Catherine Trianon, and people knew her as La Trianon. The little girls laid down the funnel. "Now, now," she admonished, "you must wash your hands before you eat anything. That's a rule, when you're learning this trade." Daughters? Apprentices? And just what trade was it? Alchemical? Pharmaceutical? I couldn't tell. The girls scampered off to set a bowl beneath the tap of the immense kitchen reservoir that stood in the corner.

"How do you know it's a she?" I asked, continuing to look up at the creature's curiously nondescript underside. The taxidermist had provided the thing's belly with a discreet covering of iridescent duck's feathers.

"Because everything in the house is a she. We wouldn't have it any other way." The shorter, pretty woman that I'd first seen upstairs, who was known as La Dodee, had fetched cups from a shelf and set them out on an empty worktable.

"Hsst now," warned her older companion, "I wouldn't be so ready to gossip until I'd seen the sign." She turned to me. "Are you one of us?" I made the sign I'd been shown. "One of us, and not one of us. How long since you left the other world?" Somehow, I knew what she meant.

"Two weeks ago," I said.

"My, what a change. What were you doing two weeks ago before it all began?" La Trianon queried.

"I was planning to drown myself, but instead I'm here," I said, in a matter-of-fact voice. Somehow they didn't look as shocked as most people would. I took another sip of their excellent chocolate.

"Was it a man?" asked the shorter woman called La Dodee. "It usually is. You aren't pregnant, are you?" What a ghastly thought. Suddenly the chocolate tasted like dust. The women saw the look in my eyes and nodded to each other. "Don't worry," answered La Dodee. "You're with us now. That's not a problem in our world. Though I can't say they don't try to make trouble for us. Men, I mean. They can't bear the thought of women running a business on their own. 'Where's your license?' 'Who owns the building?' 'Are you sheltering felons or escapees here?' 'Surely you don't live entirely without men!' 'Surely we do, Monsieur Police, and our papers are all in order. We're respectable widows, following the trade left to us by our dear, departed husbands, distilling perfumes and medicines.' We wipe a tear from our eyes. We offer a bit of rose water for the wife or girlfriend. 'Have a drink on us, Sergeant; we know you're only doing your duty.' And, of course, influence helps. The influence of La Voisin. We can live as we wish. Without men."

"She says you've studied," interrupted the first woman. "So when she asked us to help you out, we said, 'Good, if she can read and figure she can help us straighten out our records.'" I looked at the untidy piles of slips of paper everywhere. I was annoyed. This was not like a coc.o.o.n waiting to hatch a glamorous b.u.t.terfly at all. La Trianon continued: "The business has gotten a little ahead of us lately. We've been so successful, you see-deliveries all over Europe. It's our quality. We guarantee quality and have never had a disappointed customer. So people rely on us. Good. I knew you'd help. We look after you, you look after us, La Voisin looks after us all. Why, we're almost a philanthropic society. Yes, welcome to our society. Do good, and you'll always do well, as my mother used to say."

Again, philanthropy. Surely, I had never met so many charitable souls in my life as in the last few days. We were interrupted by a silvery tinkle of a bell, from the front room, which was actually a shop front, done up as an occultist's parlor and decorated with astrological signs. La Dodee hurried through the parlor to the front door. "Oh, that must be Monsieur Jordain, the apothecary, with his delivery," I heard her cry as she vanished into the front room. "Thank goodness. We were all out, and we have so many orders."

She came back escorting a benign-looking elderly gentleman carrying a number of carnation pots all tied up with twine, which he put on the biggest of the worktables.

"Here you are, ladies-still fresh and lively. What's that I smell? Chocolate?"

"It's all gone," snapped La Trianon, cutting the twine and peeking into one of the pots suspiciously to judge the quality of the merchandise. I couldn't help getting a glimpse inside myself.

The pots were full of live toads.

My transformation was accomplished in a series of visits to the back room of the shop of a fas.h.i.+onable coiffeuse-bouquetiere near the Porte Saint-Denis: yet another establishment tied to Madame's "philanthropic society." There I was poked and prodded and pa.s.sed judgment upon until I wept: my face, my walk, my posture were unforgivable in a woman of fas.h.i.+on. A failed ballet master in Madame's debt was consulted and found that one leg was shorter than the other. He sent for a shoemaker, to make a padded shoe with a built-up sole, then squinted down my spine and sent for the corsetiere. This worthy constructed to his order a hideous instrument of torture with steel stays that ran straight up to my shoulders.

"There," he said, as I was sewed into it so tightly that the tears squeezed from my eyes. "'Change her so her own mother wouldn't recognize her.' That's what the old witch said, and by G.o.d, that's what I'll do!"

"But how do I get out of it?" I asked desperately.

"You don't," he said calmly. "All of my pupils are sewn into their corsets night and day until they achieve court posture. Don't worry-the bones are still soft."

"Your eyebrows-ugh, they grow like weeds," said the coiffeuse-bouquetiere as she plucked the hairs from the bridge of my nose.

"Why can't you do anything that isn't painful?" I asked, my mind on my aching back and sore ribs.

"Haven't you ever heard the old adage 'One must suffer to be beautiful'? You're lucky to have good skin. Not marked by the smallpox, though in a man a little marking is considered distinguished. The King, for example, is marked by the smallpox, and he is the model of elegance."

It made a certain sort of bizarre sense. What is a flaw in a common person is merely spice in an aristocratic one. Suddenly I knew that the Marquise de Morville, if she became rich enough, powerful enough, could redefine beauty. That was La Voisin's trick. She had no magic potion to make me truly beautiful. She would simply change the way the world saw me. It was brilliant, like a magician's illusion.

The same dilapidated hired fiacre that always took me to and from these appointments was waiting to return me to La Trianon's establishment. I'd grown used to the idea that the coachman, a one-eyed man in a rusty black cloak, never asked for payment. But this afternoon, something splendid happened. The one-eyed man hesitated to help me into the little carriage, squinting up and down as if I were a stranger.

"Well, well, well," cackled the ancient driver. "Same clothes...must be the same girl, after all. Looks considerably less like a gargoyle." As the old horse ambled off, I could hear him muttering to himself, "Not bad, not bad at all."

But at the cross street, we had to pull suddenly to a halt at the cry of the postillions of an elaborately painted and gilded heavy carriage, drawn by six horses at a fast trot, whose pa.s.sage sent pedestrians scampering and splattered slushy mud on everything nearby.

"Make way! Make way!" We could hear new voices from the opposite direction as a second equipage, pulled by four heavy bays at full speed, careened out of the narrow street opposite. There was a scream of horses, wild oaths, and a crunching sound as the fast-moving carriages locked wheels and the lackeys from each equipage swarmed down to avenge the insult done to their masters' honor.

"Well, here's fun," grumbled the driver. "We're trapped here until they clear the street." The uniformed lackeys had drawn their swords, and we could hear them shrieking insults as they attacked each other. Then a cheer went up from the gathering crowd of gawkers, as the master of the first carriage leaped from his vehicle and forced open the door of the second carriage, pulling out its occupant to give him a good drubbing with his walking stick.

"You fool, you'll pay. I am the English amba.s.sador," gasped the second man.

"Then take that, treacherous English," we could hear the first man cry as he struck a heavy blow with his stick. Both were soon lost to view amid their struggling servants, and interspersed with the cries of "A moi! A moi!" and "d.a.m.ned lunatic!" we could hear the slither of drawn steel.

"Oh, my G.o.d, the police," said my driver. "And we're wedged in here tight. Draw the curtain." I saw the driver shrink into his cloak and pull his old, wide-brimmed hat low. Sure enough, peeping from behind the curtain, I spied the baggy blue suits and white-plumed hats of the Paris police. Their sergeant, distinguished by his red stockings, ran behind them as they waded into the melee. As they cleared a path to the wreckage, a wiry dark man of medium height with a sharp profile, wearing the decent suit of a bourgeois of good standing, moved toward the carriages with a commanding air. He doffed his hat humbly and bowed low before the wrangling gentlemen, one of whom, in his foreign-cut doublet and expensive-looking but provincial coat, seemed somewhat the worse for wear. In the fas.h.i.+on of such quarrels, they both turned on the newcomer and threatened him. The wiry gentleman beat a hasty retreat, bowing backward, leaving his police to take care of the lackeys.

"Driver, driver, are you free?" a man's voice inquired from the crowd. It was the police officer. I dropped the curtain.

"I've got a pa.s.senger just now."

"Then he can walk home. Desgrez of the police requires your services."

"It's a lady," said my driver.

"Oho, a lady, Latour?" The policeman had recognized my driver. "Then I'm sure your 'lady' won't mind a detour by the Chatelet now, will she?" The rickety little carriage swayed as he stepped in.

"Well, well-a lady, indeed; quite a pretty little lady, too. Not your usual type, eh, Latour, to judge by her blushes? Mademoiselle, may I present myself. I am Captain Desgrez, of the Paris police. I trust your detour will not be too far out of the way. Just where were you bound?"

Without a thought, I answered in the patois of the Paris shop girl apprentice. "I'm returning to my mistress, Madame Callet. You know 'er, don't you? Fine linens for the gentry? I was makin' a delivery to the Hotel Tubeuf." As the fiacre finally jolted into motion, he took out a notebook and a little pencil and began to write up his report of the accident. Once finished, I saw he was inspecting me closely.

"That's a rather handsome dress for the apprentice of a lingere," he remarked in an offhand way.

"Ain't it fine, now? I got it hardly worn in a used-clothing stall at the Halles." I was no fool. I knew where the servants and the poor of Paris get their grand, grimy, and mismatched things.

"Do you remember which fripier it was?" The quiet voice sounded definitely sinister. Squashed into the tiny carriage with him as I was, I feared he could hear my heart pounding.

"Why, the one near the column, with the sign of the monkey and the mirror." He looked a long time at my face. I opened my eyes and looked back. He had a narrow, intelligent face with dark, severe eyes. He wore his own black hair, cut short at the collar. If I had not known him for a policeman, I might have taken him for a seminarian-or an inquisitor.

"Might be true," I could hear him mutter to himself. "It doesn't seem to fit well. Still, light mourning, gray with black and gray silk ribbons..." He inspected the dress carefully. I could feel him looking at the long mended gash to the waist, where the ribbons and trim had been moved to conceal as much of the neat patching as possible. Aha, I thought. A man of logic. The most dangerous kind. We were approaching the judicial side of the great prison-fortress by the rue Pierre-a-Poisson, where the long tables of the fish sellers that were built against the fortress wall were covered with thousands of goujons, carp, and other river fish. An army of fish sellers gutted fish and shouted their wares to crowds of customers who pressed around the carriage, oblivious of it in their search for the perfect fish. The stink was unbearable. Heaps of rotting fish offal lay beneath the tables, and rats ran freely through the foul mounds of garbage.

"Tell me, Mademoiselle. Did it show signs of having been damp when you got it?"