Pam Rosenthal

by The Bookseller's Daughter

  The introductions rolled on; amazing that the famous names had actual faces and bodies attached to them. It was fun to smile, to murmur modest replies to compliments, even to flirt a little.

  She helped the Marquise usher people into the grand salon with its murals painted from mythology. Chairs had been set up in conversational groups; footmen served glasses of champagne and cups of tea, in deference to Doctor Franklin’s preference. But neither the ambassador nor Joseph had arrived yet.

  An argument about taxation broke out among bankers, statesmen, and economists. The Marquise stepped in to smooth things over, suppressing an all-too-evident desire to fan the disagreement into raging controversy.

  “Come over here, Marie-Laure,” Mademoiselle Beauvoisin called from the midst of a different group: handsome, rather over-dressed people whose mobile faces and extravagant gestures seemed to demand adulation. Actors, some of whom were appearing in the wildly successful Marriage of Figaro.

  “And so,” Mademoiselle Beauvoisin concluded her story with a flourish, “she faced the Baron Roque’s murderer alone, in this very house.” The actors applauded, but the sound of their clapping was drowned out by a sudden hubbub at the door.

  Papa!

  L’ambassadeur! Doctor Franklin!

  One mostly heard the delighted squeals of young ladies. But formidable older ones glided quickly across the room as well. The Marquise hurried to greet him.

  The American ambassador would have disappeared completely in a sea of lace and silk and kisses if he were not so tall. Surprisingly upright for a man of seventy-eight, he wore an unadorned dark red coat, his sparse gray hair falling to his shoulders, his famous spectacles worn low on his nose. You wouldn’t suspect that he had gout, Marie-Laure thought, if it weren’t for the attentive young man at his arm—his grandson and secretary, one of the actors said.

  “Would you like to be introduced to him?” the playwright Caron de Beaumarchais turned to her.

  “Oh yes,” she breathed. “Oh, please, Monsieur.”

  As the whole room seemed to be moving in Franklin’s direction, they made slow progress. The playwright took Marie-Laure’s arm and drew her into line with the others waiting to greet the ambassador.

  “Aristocrats,” he murmured, casting his eye over the crowd that surrounded them, “are a bunch of big children in search of ceaseless amusement. I created Figaro’s lecherous master, so you can take my word for it. But I am an adult: I purchased the de in my name and I know the value of a livre—and of a woman. So when your Vicomte tires of you, please consider paying me a visit.”

  She forced herself to maintain a cool, bland expression. This, she told herself, was what it would be like to be Joseph’s official and paid-for mistress.

  “Ah, it’s Beaumarchais,” a friendly voice interrupted her reflections, “one of the authors of our revolution.”

  The two men embraced while the ladies surrounding them chirped and twittered like birds pecking at a fruit tree.

  “But what do you mean, Papa?” an ethereal blonde in pale blue satin demanded. “How could Monsieur Caron de Beaumarchais be the author of a revolution? A revolution isn’t a play.”

  A chorus of voices broke in, each endeavoring to capture Franklin’s attention.

  “Ladies, ladies,” the ambassador protested, “you may kiss me all at once, but my French is too weak to allow me to understand when you all speak at the same time.

  “And as for our dear Beaumarchais…” he started to say, when suddenly he caught sight of Marie-Laure’s face.

  “Ah. I believe that this new Mademoiselle knows what I meant.”

  Beaumarchais hastened to introduce her.

  “And my little remark, Mademoiselle Vernet?” the ambassador asked.

  “It was as clear as it was witty, Monsieur Franklin. Monsieur Caron de Beaumarchais procured weapons and supplies for the American colonies back in 1776, when this was a dangerous and unpopular thing to do. And as this effort constituted one of his finest moments (and perhaps his most gentlemanly), it entitles him to be called an author—in the sense of a progenitor—of your country’s revolution.”

  Beaumarchais winked at her. A bit apologetically.

  “How did you learn so much about us, Mademoiselle?” Monsieur Franklin asked.

  “My father taught me—he was a bookseller,” she added. One or two of the young ladies moved a few steps away from her. “And,” she concluded in English, “a fervent believer in ‘certain unalienable rights.’”

  “A bookseller’s daughter?” The old man grinned at her, also speaking in English now. “Well, this is an unexpected pleasure. And I thought all I’d meet tonight were the daughters of Ducs and so forth.”

  The chirps and twitters grew louder, as the ladies demanded to know what the exchange in English had been about.

  “Nothing, nothing at all,” Temple Franklin, the grandson, assured them. “It’s simply that my grandfather needs to take a chair for ten minutes to rest his leg.” He guided Marie-Laure and the ambassador to a pair of seats in a corner. “And a taste of the English language to refresh his prodigious brain.”

  “He’s careful, you see,” she heard Temple Franklin whisper to Beaumarchais, “never to express his antiaristocratic prejudices in French. It’s part of the secret of his success in this country.”

  “And you ladies,” Beaumarchais announced loudly, “will have to make do with Monsieur Temple Franklin and myself. But only for the tiniest, most miniscule, of instants. Ten minutes, I promise you, and then your cher papa will be back to collect all the kisses you owe him. With interest.”

  The ambassador sipped his tea.

  “I did need to sit down. But more than that, I needed a moment away from the crowd. For you French do like to speak all at once. A little conversation in English with a pretty young lady will set me up for the rest of the evening and allow me to be a diplomat once more. So you see, you owe these moments to me, as your private contribution to the fortunes of the American republic.”

  For a moment she didn’t think she’d be able to say anything at all. But he drew her out with questions, and with anecdotes about his own businesses—stationary, printing, bookselling. He was as interested as she was in paper and typeface, and of course in the development of literacy.

  There hadn’t been any bookshops in Philadelphia when he’d settled there fifty years ago, and so he’d begun America’s first subscription library. Of course there were booksellers there now—the city had grown amazingly—but to his mind they could use even more of them. And he liked knowing that he had helped to make reading a fashionable pursuit in the new nation’s leading city. He’d even published an edition of Richardson’s Pamela—though, to be honest, he’d been left with an overstock. American readers weren’t the world’s most sophisticated.

  “I think the less sophisticated readers were my favorite customers in some ways,” Marie-Laure told him. “But I enjoyed helping everybody. I felt rich and happy doing it, and privileged to be part of the world of letters.”

  “My wife Debbie took care of the shop in front, while I worked with the printing presses in back. She sold stationary and printed matter, and very ably too, when she was alive.”

  Marie-Laure couldn’t tell whether his sigh was one of grief or of remorse, for having left his wife behind while he’d been in Europe so many years. She gazed curiously at him, but he was too shrewd to reveal any more of himself.

  “I do hate the idea of aristocracy, you know,” he said now. “It offends me, not so much politically—your country has a right to its traditions—but from a scientific point of view. I once wrote in Poor Richard that any nobleman who traces his lineage back to the Norman Conquest is actually descended from more than a million persons who were living then. He ought to acknowledge all of them—great, small, and middling—as his ancestors.”

  She laughed delightedly. “Joseph’s father claimed that he could trace their family’s ancestry back to Charlemagne—and Aeneas.”

>   The ambassador laughed too. “Tonight I must work out the mathematics of descent from Charlemagne. But I’m afraid it wouldn’t be possible to compute the ancestry of a descendent of Aeneas.

  “Who is Joseph?” he asked after a brief pause.

  She felt her rouged cheeks grow warm. “I mean the Vicomte d’Auvers-Raimond, the gentleman whose release we’re celebrating.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  But here was Temple Franklin, come to deliver his grandfather back to the twittering ladies. The ambassador climbed slowly to his feet.

  “Good evening, Marie-Laure. It has been a pleasure to know you a little.” Benjamin Franklin smiled as he steadied himself against his grandson’s arm. She stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek.

  “Au revoir, Monsieur Franklin,” she whispered. “And thank you.”

  For what, she wasn’t exactly sure. A modicum of self-confidence, perhaps. A reassuring glimpse of herself and the convictions she intended to live by.

  Joseph still hadn’t arrived by suppertime, but even without him the party had been an enormous success. “What’s important,” the Marquise told Marie-Laure, “is that all of Paris has assembled to celebrate his innocence and acquittal. But the only person he’s really going to care about seeing is you.”

  Marie-Laure smiled. All of Paris was hardly here tonight, she thought, as images from the raucous streets superimposed themselves upon the well-dressed and distinguished crowd in the grand salon. The Marquise’s Paris was very small.

  “I’m going upstairs to see to Sophie,” she said. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

  In truth, Sophie wouldn’t be waking so soon. But Marie-Laure had had enough of the party. Meeting anyone else would be an anticlimax after the American ambassador.

  I should call Claudine to help me take off this gown, she thought, wandering distractedly around the blue bedroom as she checked, for the thousandth time, the preparations she’d made for tomorrow.

  It was stupid to wait up here dressed like this. The wide skirts of her dress wouldn’t fit in the rocking chair and it would be ridiculous to nurse Sophie in all this finery, like an elaborately attired Marie Antoinette posing with her children for a domestic portrait in oils. But there was something too final about taking it apart. She knew that the elegantly gowned and bejeweled woman in the mirror wasn’t really herself, but she couldn’t help it; she wanted to look this way just a little longer. Just until Joseph came home.

  It was almost an hour later, and growing dark outside, when Sophie woke up. Marie-Laure lit a lamp. Carefully, gingerly, she swathed herself in towels, lowered herself and her wide dress onto the side of the chaise longue, and brought the hungry baby to her breast. “Yes it is pretty, isn’t it, chérie?” she whispered, as Sophie fixed her fascinated eyes upon the sapphire necklace, batting her fist at it as she sucked.

  A small sound across the room made her start and look up. How long had Joseph been leaning against the doorway with his arms crossed? He was going to have a scar on his cheek, she thought.

  “Excuse me for spying, but I rather lost myself, watching the two of you.

  “I’ve been down at the reception,” he added. “I had to speak to people. Jeanne, of course, and Monsieur Franklin.”

  “Of course,” she said. If she stayed with him, she’d always be waiting while he spoke to “people.” But she wouldn’t think about that now.

  “Come over here,” she said, “so you can see Sophie.”

  He stood behind her and peered down at the baby. “Her eyes are blue,” he whispered.

  “We thought at first that it was that false blue that infants all have,” she replied. “Everybody thought she’d have black eyes because she’s so like you. But she surprised us.”

  “Your eyes.” His voice trembled. “She’s like you and like me at the same time. How astonishing.”

  “She’s going to smile any day now,” she told him. “She was born so early that she’s more like a six-week-old than a ten-week-old. At least that’s what Madame Rachel tells me. But she eats very well.”

  As though to demonstrate her skill, Sophie narrowed her eyes and sucked all the harder. Marie-Laure winced.

  “Ah,” she crooned, “gently, darling. Doucement, doucement, chérie.”

  “Does it hurt?” the veteran of duels and military engagements asked anxiously.

  “Sometimes,” she said. “Yes, a bit. But it’s not a bad kind of hurt.”

  She smiled up at him as she put Sophie to her shoulder. He became silent, entranced and rather intimidated by the mysterious arts she’d mastered—burping, cleaning, diapering.

  “We can put her back to sleep now,” she told him. She almost asked if he’d like to hold the baby but she held back at the last moment, quietly watching him bend over the lace-hung wicker basket to kiss his daughter good night.

  They stood a few feet apart in the center of the blue bedroom, shy and deliberate as on their first night. Marie-Laure removed the towels she’d swathed herself in.

  “I’ve been afraid to disarrange it,” she murmured. “It took so much work, you know.”

  He breathed shallowly, taking the last few steps toward her. “It’s beautiful. You’re beautiful.” He pulled at a ribbon at her bodice, “Let me disarrange it.”

  The clothes came off slowly: silk, ribbon, and lace drifting to the dark carpet like flower petals in a breeze. She became a bit afraid, when the stays and panniers and petticoats came off, of how he would respond to the rounded belly she hadn’t quite gotten rid of, but he smiled delightedly and bent to kiss it. Straightening up, he squeezed her heavy breasts in his hands and kissed them too.

  “Stand still,” she said hoarsely, quickly unknotting his cravat, “it’s my turn to undress you now.”

  Coat, waistcoat, shoes, stockings, shirt. She brushed her lips briefly over his neck, his chest and belly, feeling the muscles tremble at her mouth’s touch.

  “You are good at this,” he said, as she bent to unbutton his breeches. “I mean,” he laughed, “at the unbuttoning part.”

  But of course he hadn’t only meant that. They stared at each other for a moment before she pulled the breeches down over his thighs.

  “No,” he said now. “I mean you’re good at the whole thing—just like that maid said you were. You wrote to me about it. Do you remember?”

  Good in bed, as Claudine had inelegantly expressed it. Well, perhaps she was. She shivered, disturbed and yet a bit aroused to have her measure taken so coldly.

  And then she lost herself in the sight of him. Lithe and beautiful, taut and erect, he preened beneath her gaze, his swollen, purplish member rising from the black tangle of hair below his flat belly. So lovely, she thought—elegant as a sultan’s curved scimitar, the tracery of veins so clearly, so intricately, molded in the dark flesh. She remained on her knees, bold and humble at the same time, and breathed him into her mouth.

  He lengthened under the strokes of her tongue, thickened within the ring of her painted lips. She sucked, pulled at him, played with him, voracious as Sophie had been.

  She slowed down, caressed him more fully, more carefully; she let him take the lead now, to explore her mouth, probe at her throat. She breathed his smells, her mouth happily remembering, busily relearning, his shape, his taste. Mon Dieu, it had been a long time.

  He took her head into his hands, moving it back and forward, quickly and then slowly and then quickly again. He sighed triumphantly as the hairpins tumbled out, the carefully arranged coiffure giving way to luxuriant anarchy. His sighs grew darker, deeper, shading to moans, growls, shuddering roars from deep within his belly. She hugged him to her, pulling him closer, crushing her breasts against his thighs. Closer, she thought, as tremors began to cascade from his center, she wanted him closer, she wanted to drown in him. She clung to his legs as though she were lashed to a ship’s mast in a storm; she drank the tides and torrents that spilled into her mouth, live and salty as the sea.

  She swallowed, breathed deep
ly, like a swimmer coming to the surface. He pulled her to her feet, nuzzled and nibbled at her mouth.

  “Is it terribly egotistical to enjoy the taste of myself?” he murmured. Bodies entwined, they were taking tiny, clumsy steps toward the bed.

  “Probably it is,” he laughed as they collapsed together onto the satin coverlet. “But now I’m ready for something sweeter.”

  He hadn’t changed. He was still selfish and insistent, hungry and deliberate, and demanding equally robust appetites from his partner. Slowly, patiently, with teasing, maddening self-confidence, he moved his hands, his lips, over her, his eyes wide and bright, amused, delighted as always by the spectacle of her desire.

  He disappeared from view. She arched her back, throwing her arms over her head to steady herself against the bed’s carved headboard. Slowly, adoringly, he kissed her belly, licked at the mound of her sex; his warm breath on her skin was as provocative as his lips and tongue. Phrases from his letters drifted through her mind. My tongue, my lips, wander happily…

  Ah yes.

  I linger for a moment…and you gasp, arch your back…but no, not yet…

  Not quite yet. Her ragged breathing quickened to deep, shuddering gasps and hoarse groans. His hands cradled her buttocks, lifting her, immobilizing her. And still he waited—sly, teasing, infuriating—taunting her with hundreds of little kisses on her thighs.

  It was a challenge, a humiliation almost, not to insist that he hurry; it was a duel she’d always lose in the end, when he’d bring her to the limits of her “stiff-necked shopkeeper’s pride” and strip every bit of shame and rectitude from her.

  “Now,” she almost screamed, “right now.” Obediently, he parted her with his tongue. Slowly, precisely, drawing an ecstatic shudder from her, he licked at the aching, swollen knot of flesh at her center. She wasn’t going to last; she’d dissolve immediately. No matter. She’d lost the battle but she’d won the war.