The Oracle Glass Part 7

"Never, Father. I can't imagine how."

"I educated you to suit myself, Genevieve, and not the world's ways. It was selfish, now, I see."

"Father, never so. You are the best, the kindest father in the world."

"But a foolish one. Do you understand, Genevieve? I never imagined dying. I thought I might enjoy your company and conversation much longer. What a selfish man I was! But now-now I see all. I didn't fit you for the cloister, my daughter. I had you taught the truth instead of superst.i.tion. Science, geometry, the new thought. Now what will become of you? You are fit neither to become a nun nor a wife. I beg your forgiveness, my daughter."

"Father," I answered, trying to ignore the p.r.i.c.king feeling in my eyes, "there is nothing to forgive. You've given me a home, your regard, and my own mind, which is the greatest treasure of all."

"Yes, the greatest treasure of all. Though notoriously hard to eat or wear or keep the rain off with, my daughter." His old wry smile flickered and faded. "Yes, the greatest treasure of all, and rarer than you know."

"I must interrupt." Mother had entered the room silently through the open door. She stood watching as Father fell into a fitful sleep, then turned to me impa.s.sively and said, "Genevieve, it is time to fetch the priest. He will not last the night."

Father sank rapidly in the next few hours. I showed in the priest, still brus.h.i.+ng the first snowfall of winter off his biretta. The family stood at the head of the deathbed, with the servants weeping at the foot. I found that, for myself, not a tear would come. Father was gone. Outside, the white flakes fell silently through the gray sky; inside, they were droning prayers. I seemed to hear Father's mocking laugh, a freethinker's laugh, rolling through the room as he discovered the universe beyond the body. Did Mother hear it, too? Her eyes rolled suddenly toward the ceiling, she paled and clasped her hands, before she regained her composure. Oh, Monsieur Descartes, you do not have all the answers.

"An orderly mind can solve all problems," I could hear my father's voice repeating patiently in my head. My little book, you have another problem. When the priest had departed I wrote beneath M. de La Reynie:

The body, the mind, the soul-how connected? Method of trial; to be discovered.

"And now, Mademoiselle, you will tell us where it is." It was midnight; Father's corpse was still laid out on the bed in the room beyond, candles burning at its head and feet, as if to disperse the eternal darkness. I had been brought out of bed, still clad in my nightdress, and was backed into the windowless inner corner of Father's cabinet. Every drawer was opened in his desk, the books lay in heaps on the floor, having been methodically searched for sc.r.a.ps of paper between the leaves. A little coffer lay overturned and empty on one of the bookshelves. My uncle was tapping the panels and the furniture for any hollow sound that might reveal a hidden compartment. Before me was my mother, my brother standing behind her. They looked grimly conspiratorial.

"Where what is?"

"Don't play the innocent." Mother's voice was hard. "You know where the foreign account is. The money he hid from Colbert and the King. He told you where the treasure was before he died. I heard him whispering to you: He said 'treasure.' Don't think you can hide my son's inheritance to your advantage. Tell it now, or I a.s.sure you, you will not live to enjoy it."

"He never told me anything of the sort. There's no such thing."

"My brother, she is obstinate, as I predicted." Uncle turned from his work of vandalizing Father's library and fixed his narrow, calculating little eyes on me.

"I have your permission, Monsieur?" He turned to my brother, the new head of the house of Pasquier. Grown stolid and old with his new elevation, my brother nodded formally. It was then I saw my uncle pick up the long ash rod.

The next few days were spent in the company of the mice in the locked tower room. They sent Marie-Angelique to whisper through the door, "Genevieve, Sister, we've always been friends, haven't we? Just tell them, and everything will be all right again." But I could hear Uncle's heavy boots on the stair behind her.

"Sister, there isn't anything. Father told me he'd left me with the treasure of philosophy."

"Oh, Sister, then there's no hope," I heard her answer, sobbing.

Then one evening, when I had lost track of time, the door swung open. My uncle stood stooped over in the low door, his walking stick under his arm, a candle in his uplifted hand. His s.h.i.+rt was hanging open out of his unb.u.t.toned doublet. His breath was heavy with wine. His eyes glowed with menace.

"Tell me," he said, in a heavy, intimate tone. "You're wise to keep it to yourself. What has your mother ever done for you? It's me-I'm your friend." No one's friend, I thought, repelled by him. "Dear little niece, how will you get it if you have no man to travel for you? Share it with me, and it will only be divided two ways." He set down the candle and moved toward me. I backed away into the corner. He pressed me against the wall and began to paw at my b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I couldn't escape the disgusting smell of his breath. "Tell me, tell me. We'll share the fortune, we two." Oh my G.o.d, I thought. He thinks that lovemaking will make me tell. I was horrified. "Come now," he said. "You know you want this. All women do."

"There's no secret, Uncle. There never was," I said, trying to push him away, turning my face from his. "Can't you understand?"

"There must be. There is! You're hiding it!" he cried, holding me tightly as he fumbled at my dress, as if I had somehow concealed the money in there.

"What are you doing?" I cried. "I have nothing. Can't you see?"

"There must be a paper. You have a paper with the name of the banker," he said, his voice slurred as he tried to force his hand into my dress.

"Get off. There's nothing!" I shouted, as I tried to push his hands away.

"Quit hiding it, you little b.i.t.c.h! I have to have it!" He grabbed at my throat and tried to batter my head against the wall, but I hit him in the face with all my strength and wrenched away. As I tried to flee, he clutched at my dress and it tore to the waist. The sound seemed to send him into a frenzy.

"Nothing, nothing! There's nothing after all! You deceived me! She deceived me!" I made a dash for the open door, but he overtook me in a few quick steps and threw me to the floor.

"Let me go, for G.o.d's sake. Let me go." My voice was strangled, his hands were pressing my throat shut. Dear G.o.d, I thought, he'll kill me here, and all for a fantasy of that ghastly money.

"Let you go? Let you go? You cheat-" His eyes were distended, insane. "Oh, yes, I'll let you go-Cheat-Liar-Thief-Devil's sp.a.w.n-" As I struggled against him, his repulsive heavy body pressed me into the floor. "I'll let you go," he panted, "when...you've...repaid me-" My screams made his eyes glitter with pleasure. I was smothered in the foul breath that came from between his wolfish yellow teeth; the pain seemed to split my body in two. "Snotty b.i.t.c.h-Steal my money-"

When at last he got up, he b.u.t.toned his breeches and said, "Quit sniveling. You ought to be thanking me. Who else would bother to have an ugly freak like you?" Bruised and battered, clutching my torn dress to me, I could feel the hate rising up in me like a tide.

"I swear, I'll pay you back for this," I whispered. He laughed.

"A woman's vengeance? And just whom will you tell? I'll say that you begged me for it. Begged me, you ugly s.l.u.t. You'll be a laughingstock. Keep silent or be ruined, dear Niece. There's not a soul will ever believe you."

The cold gray light of a winter's dawn had filtered into the tower room. A light snow had sifted onto the tall, peaked rooftops of the rue des Marmousets, so that they looked like peaked cakes covered with powdered sugar. I opened the tiny tower window and looked down. Below, the street was silent and white under the gray sky, with the first tracks of morning cutting through the white to the black, frozen muck beneath. I tried the door. This time it clicked open. Uncle had slammed it when he left, but he must have forgotten to lock it. Very well, then, it was fated. Silently, I put on my cloak, then retrieved my little notebooks from their hiding place and tucked them into the remains of my dress. There was only one way left to silence the echo of Uncle's evil laughter in my head. Lucretia's way.

I crept quietly down the long, winding stair into the maze of rooms below-through Grandmother's tall red room, where the parrot moped in a covered cage. Around the corner and down, through a servants' antechamber, then through a door past Father's empty bed. Then through Mother's sitting room, downstairs, and through the dining room and the tall reception room, now cold and still. Good-bye, good-bye. They were up in the kitchen below the stairs. I could hear the clatter of pans. I limped, all hunched over, to the front door. Lifted the latch onto the icy street. Goodbye, house; good-bye, street.

Turn at the rue de la Lanterne. Ah, there it is. The old friend. The Pont Neuf, with the cold wind whistling across it, the cakes of ice floating in the brown water beneath it. The players were gone. The charlatan with the monkey, the portable booths with the pretty things, the mountebanks, the pamphlet sellers. The first beggars were out. Legless. Armless. A woman with a maimed child. Old soldiers. An old woman stumbled across the slushy tracks left by the first carriages. Cries. Wagons loaded with firewood crossing. Make way, old woman!

I stood a long time at the bridge rail. The sun rose higher, a faint circle of white in the slate gray sky. It looked dark and cold, the river. The Romans knew how to do it better, I thought. A hot bath, perfumed. Open a vein. And as the red stained the water, lean back and fall asleep slowly to the lulling music of harps. We are not yet as civilized as the Romans...

The rattle and clatter of an approaching carriage barely interrupted my reverie. I was s.h.i.+vering terribly. There was no other way. After all, what was the difference? I was born a mistake. Well, the mistake would be put right now...But the cry of a coachman and the sound of stamping hooves and champing bits broke into my thoughts like shards of ice.

And then I heard a voice behind me, from the carriage window: "It's cold, the river. I'd think a clever girl like you could do better than that."

It was the fortune-teller from the rue Beauregard.

CHAPTER EIGHT

"Get in," said the fortune-teller, "or would you rather finish what you'd intended?" Her lackey had opened the door of her carriage, a discreet vehicle painted rather somberly in black with red and gold trim. A handsome pair of matched chestnuts in bra.s.s-trimmed harness breathed steam into the icy air. I could see where she sat inside, in a heavy cloak trimmed with silk cord and broad hat over a woolen scarf that hid most of her hair. A fur-lined lap robe was thrown back to reveal her feet, in red leather boots, resting on a little metal box full of warm coals. She gestured to the seat opposite her, where a similar robe lay. "I have in mind to make your fortune, if you wish-unless, of course, you have a deep desire to join the other drowned corpses laid out in the cellar of the Chatelet. Most damp and unattractive."

"I don't deserve to live." My voice sounded faint.

"No more or less than anyone else in this city," she said in a careless tone. "What is it this time? Murder? Rape? Blackmail? Incest? Trifles-the commonest of the common in this great capital. What makes you think you can set yourself above everyone else, wringing your hands and flinging a perfectly good life away in a nasty, chilly river?" I stared at the padded brocade interior of the coach. It looked cozy and warm. Then I looked back over the snow-covered rail of the bridge. "Who are you to judge yourself?" she went on persuasively. "G.o.d gave us all life, and the judgment is His. But it is I who will give you fortune and happiness, if you will get in and hear what I have to say." She leaned forward to inspect me, as if she could spy out from my disheveled appearance all that had happened. Then she gestured impatiently. "Make up your mind, and be quick about it. You're letting the cold in. I don't like weak people who can't make up their minds. Jump or get in." I got in.