Kit

by Marina Fiorato

  Inside was a fan. Kit took it out and spread it, carefully, with her left hand. It had ivory struts chased in gold, but the fan itself was made of thick cream paper, a humble material but made priceless by the artistry of its decoration. It was exquisitely painted with a scene of a woman with powdered hair in a sky-blue dress sitting in a leafy arbour playing a lute. Her lover, in a mauve frock coat, sang to her from a sheet of music. The scene was beautifully rendered, and even the tiny music notes had been picked out with a brush that must have been the width of a hair. She turned the fan over – the back was plain but for a tiny basket overflowing with flowers, every leaf and petal just as lovingly painted. The fan was edged with tiny gold sequins, stitched on to a narrow ribbon, like miniature coins. She turned the thing over again, opening it, closing it, letting it hang from its golden tassel. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever held in her hands. ‘Is it for me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank you, Fitzjames.’

  ‘The pleasure is mine – but it is not a gift.’ He smiled. ‘Would you thank an armourer who hands you a musket? It is a tool, a weapon for your new uniform. Or perhaps it is better to think of it as a quill and ink, for really it is a means of communication.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘When you opened the fan with your left hand, you told me to come and talk to you. When you closed it and struck it against your left palm, you told me to write to you. You have just told me to wait for you, when you touched the gold lace edging. Then, when you changed the fan to your right hand, you told me that I was imprudent.’

  She closed the fan and hung it from her hand by the tassel, her arm at full length, as if she wanted the thing away from her.

  ‘And now you have closed it and left it hanging, you are telling me that we will continue to be friends.’

  Kit’s head spun. ‘Will all those at the ball know these signals?’

  ‘Not all of the officers, of course, for some of them rose from the rank and file. But a gentleman will know.’

  A gentleman. Ross. Kit’s cheeks heated at the thought that she could send Ross such clandestine messages. Come and talk to me. Write to me. Wait for me.

  ‘Let us try,’ said Ormonde. ‘Hold the fan to your right cheek to say yes, to your left to say no.’

  Patiently, he coached her: to open and close the fan rapidly told a companion that he was cruel; to hold the fan over the left ear told a suitor the holder wished to be rid of him. To hold the handle to the lips invited a kiss. ‘Most of these, of course, will not be necessary; but you must know them so that you do not send communications accidentally. Besides, these messages will be useful to us at the ball. You can signal to me if you are in trouble. Now you try.’

  She rose and followed him to the middle of the room, then they stood facing each other as if they were about to dance a measure.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘that we are being watched.’

  Kit thought for a moment, then half-opened the fan over her face.

  He nodded. ‘And now that I have changed.’

  She held the fan to her hairline, and slid it across her forehead, but then she fumbled and dropped the fan, the ivory struts falling on to the marble floor with a smart tap. She bent at once, flustered and apologetic, but found her reaching hand trapped under Ormonde’s boot. He stood on her fingers, firmly and deliberately, hard enough to hurt. He stooped, and picked up the fan, before he took his foot away. Kit straightened, wringing her hand furiously, biting her lip in vexation.

  ‘Do not,’ said Ormonde, ‘ever, stoop to pick something up. If you drop a fan, a kerchief or even a diamond, it is for someone else to pick it up for you. You are a countess.’ He held out the fan to her, then snatched it away. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘La Comtesse Christiane Saint-Hilaire de Blossac,’ she said sullenly, to the marble floor.

  Ormonde cocked his earlobe with his forefinger. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  She looked him in the eye, chin high, haughty. ‘La Comtesse Christiane Saint-Hilaire de Blossac,’ she said.

  ‘Better. Now it is your turn. Send me a message.’

  Kit rested the fan on her lips. Her hand still hurt. I don’t trust you.

  He laughed. ‘And you are right not to.’ Then he sobered. ‘Come, let us be friends,’ he said kindly. ‘We will stop for the day, ready ourselves for dinner.’

  She made a reverence to him and he to her, as he always insisted they should when they met or parted. She could feel him watching her walk away. She stopped and turned.

  ‘Fitzjames?’

  ‘Christiane?’

  ‘What does it mean when you drop your fan in front of a man?’

  He looked at her speculatively. ‘It means that man owns you.’

  She smiled a tight little smile, nodded faintly, and left the room.

  Kit’s days were spent in the tower room, rehearsing her identity with the Duke of Ormonde, who spoke to her like a benevolent schoolmaster. Her evenings were spent at dinner and cards with ‘Fitzjames’, who treated her as a noble companion. The lessons, though, never ended. Ormonde taught her to eat with a fork as well as a knife, to sip her wine from a crystal goblet, to laugh without snorting, to bite without showing her teeth, to flatter with delicacy. After a convivial dinner at the little table by the lake, she would learn to play piquet and bezique in the warm summer evening, with gold-edged playing cards. Ormonde taught her to gamble like a lady, with low stakes and high risk.

  During the day they spoke English, and Ormonde encouraged her to remember her mother’s tricks of speech, speak with her accent and flutter her hands like her. At dinner she and ‘Fitzjames’ conversed in French, still served by Pietro alone.

  So Kit lived a strange existence, in the vast and glorious Palazzo Borromeo, with a master, a man and a parrot. Pietro was a man whose face she could not describe, even an hour after she had left his company. He was bland, shadowy, unrecognisable; a common fellow with no significant features or idiosyncrasies to mark him out. He was every man and no man, and, as such, a perfect servant to his master, whose business was so decidedly his own. Pietro would only speak if prompted, and had no conversation.

  The bird, by contrast, would shriek at her like a ballad seller, to get her attention as she passed – and though it alternated between calling her a ‘silly slut’ and a ‘damned Jacobite’, she felt they had a certain rapport. He had only a few utterances in his lexicon, but his inflexions gave his vocabulary a world of meaning, as did the cock of his head and the ruffling of his rainbow feathers. Ormonde had told Kit from the start that he would not be her friend, despite his evening pleasantries, and his taciturn servant was clearly of the same mind; so the parrot was the only friend she had at the Palazzo Borromeo.

  Now and again she had a day of leisure, when Ormonde took the boat to Stresa, where he kept his carriage in livery. Kit would wave to him from the atrium, and when she could no longer see him, she would turn and run like a child, skidding on the gravel, into the gardens. She would wander the alleys, she would dangle her hands in the cool fountains, watching the crystal water playing on her soft, lady’s hands, the calluses and chapping of soldiery smoothed away. She would breathe in the jasmine and the oleander, the honeysuckle and myrtle. She would look across the straits to Stresa, where ordinary people went about their business, innocent of the deception being practised just across the water.

  After she had been over the gardens Kit would take herself into the house and stroll through the cool grottoes entirely decorated with seashells, trailing her fingertips over the rough walls. Then she would climb the marble stairs and spin through the empty ballroom, breathing the scent of beeswax, and wander the painted salons, loving the solitude after a year of living cheek by jowl with three score men. She could not imagine the Palazzo Borromeo peopled with glittering guests, chattering and laughing and dancing. That summer, it was hers.

  On these days when her time was her own, she bathed in the milk that Pietro brought to the bathhouse, a
nd her skin was once again supple and clear and white as the milk itself. She ate alone on the terrace, finishing every dish that was placed before her, and emptying her glass. Ormonde’s regime was working: the hollows in her cheeks had filled out and the shadows under her eyes had gone, for she slept well in her feather bed. Her arms had softened and rounded again, the hard dragoon muscles relaxed into feminine contours. Her waist was still as slim as a whip, but her bosom had filled, and she could no longer count her ribs. She practised her broken English even to herself, until her Dublin brogue was almost a memory. She breathed in the mountain air every day, and would doze in her schoolroom like a cat in the shade of the terrace. She did not know where Ormonde went on those days of absence, but he would leave at dawn and return at dinner. He would never speak of these trips, any more than he ever spoke about himself; but she was in no doubt that he was laying plans for her emergence into society. From time to time, she would go to the little boathouse, to see the rowing boats bobbing at their moorings. She never took one out – it would not be seemly for her new persona – but they reassured her that she was not a prisoner. If she got too frightened, she could run.

  One night, Ormonde greeted her with a rank of green bottles on the dinner table. The bottles wore chains about their necks and wore gold-lettered labels about their stout bellies. ‘French champagne,’ announced Ormonde. ‘Tonight, I will teach you to drink.’

  At first they drank at the table. The wine was very good – clean and sparkling. It didn’t feel like real drinking. She had another, and another. After all, she’d spent enough time in taverns with the dragoons – she was sure she could hold her grog. She forgot to eat. She was warm with happiness. She would see Ross again, clothed in diamonds, and they were friends, ‘Fitzjames’ and she, whatever he might say.

  Somehow, they ended up sitting on the lake shore in the warm summer night, with the bottles between them, their fat glass bottoms pushed into the shingle, looking out into the night at the omnipresent moon on the water. Kit squinted happily against the stars. They were Ormonde’s diamonds – her diamonds – with the black looming shapes of the mountains below. She thought of Ross where he slept in those dark heights. She raised a glass to him silently. Ormonde caught the gesture and they were suddenly toasting everyone they could think of; at first, reverently, Anne of England, Eugene of Savoy, and Leopold, Holy Roman Emperor.

  Then they toasted Louis of France and his nephew, the pretender Philippe. One name was not mentioned; its absence shouting louder than the rest. But, unexpectedly, Ormonde raised his glass once more. ‘To Jack Churchill,’ he crowed, standing unsteadily. ‘Fuck him!’ The mountains bounced the obscenity back to him, loud enough so Marlborough himself, in his battle tent, could surely hear it too.

  Ormonde refilled their glasses. ‘Do you like music, Christiane? It is a subject we have not yet discussed.’

  Kit thought, fondly, of Dublin, where there was music on every corner of the Liberties. Looking out at the velvet night, she told Ormonde of her favourite songs: ‘The Humours of Castlefin’, ‘John Dwyer’s Jig’, ‘The Maids of Mitchelstown’ – the music which had sailed with her on shipboard, had climbed with her up the mountain, safe in the belly of O’Connell’s fiddle.

  ‘Hmmm,’ said Ormonde. ‘There is something lacking, then. I know these ditties and I love them too, for I am Irish; but this is not music as the cream of the French court understands it. I must open your ears …’

  ‘As you have opened my throat.’ She laughed, emptying her glass.

  ‘But music is out of my stars. I have found you a tutor.’

  She clasped his arm in protest. ‘But you are my tutor.’

  ‘But I need someone who can teach my nightingale to sing.’

  ‘I can sing!’ She needed him to know that. She did not want their lonely, lovely exile to be disturbed. She pointed her finger at Ormonde’s fine lace jabot, to underline her point. ‘I can sing. I once sung someone back to life.’ Ross, it was Ross she brought to life, and she mustn’t mention Ross. But she needed Ormonde to know she could sing. It was suddenly very important that he should know. She would sing him ‘Arthur McBride’, just as she had sung to Ross, so he should know that she was not a country mouse. She opened her mouth to sing her sweet song across the lake. But instead of a song flooding forth she puked over Ormonde’s fine lace jabot.

  She saw his eyes spark in brief anger like the flint of a matchlock, then knew no more.

  Chapter 29

  And the same to you gentlemen, we did reply …

  ‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)

  When she awoke, Kit’s head pounded. Her mouth was dry as sand, her eyes grainy and slow to open. She stumbled to the window and threw open the shutters, gulping the mountain air.

  Just as she was, in her nightgown, she walked out through the gardens, the gravel of the yew walks hurting her feet through her silken slippers. She welcomed the pain. Anything to take her mind off her roiling stomach and throbbing head.

  She would go to her favourite spot at the headland, a great fountain with numerous grottoes carved out of it, harbouring stone seashells and cherubs and dolphins spouting water. It was a place where Kit Kavanagh could go unobserved, before she resumed her labours as Christiane St-Hilaire de Blossac. But to her annoyance, someone already sat there.

  It was a lady, but a lady of singular appearance. She wore a coat and breeches of dark gold silk, buckled kid shoes, and her powdered hair was caught back in a neat queue tied with a black bow. She was dressed, in short, as a man.

  The lady turned at her approach, and spoke in English. ‘I cannot decide,’ she said with a heavy accent, ‘whether it is too grotesque to be beautiful, or too beautiful to be grotesque. What is your opinion?’

  ‘I think it is beautiful,’ Kit ventured, practising her new broken English, ‘but surpassed by the vista beyond.’ She gestured to the view that could be seen through the cataract – the lake, the mountains.

  ‘There we agree,’ said the lady. ‘I keep telling Fitz he should rip these fountains out, but he always says he does not want to offend the Borromei family.’

  Kit was more and more intrigued. Fitz. She studied the lady. She was very pale and not unattractive, but she had an oddly shaped skull with a domed forehead, and a pronounced overbite to her jaw which gave her a faintly canine look. The lady unfolded her long limbs and stood. She was uncommonly tall – taller than Kit, taller than Ross. She held out a hand.

  Kit was about to shake it heartily, then remembered, just in time, that she should offer her hand to be kissed. The lady saluted her proffered fingers in the proper fashion. Kit, as a countess, opened her mouth to present herself first, as was proper for one of superior rank. But she did not get the chance.

  ‘Lucio Mezzanotte,’ said the stranger.

  ‘La Comtesse Christiane Saint-Hilaire de Blossac,’ said Kit faintly.

  The lady smiled. ‘Bravo. You remembered. But with me, you can be Kit Kavanagh if you please. Fitz has told me everything. I am here to teach you music.’

  Why did Ormonde go to such lengths to maintain secrecy, if he was to blurt all to this beanpole of a woman? ‘But I thought that my lord duke – Fitzjames – said he was to be my tutor in all things.’

  The lady snorted. ‘Fitz can barely play the spoons. He needed a master, and here I am.’ A master. Kit smiled to herself at the identification ‘Shall we repair to the music room? I cannot hear myself think by these infernal fountains.’

  Kit stole sideways glances at her new tutor as they strolled back to the palace, past the flower beds and the sauntering peacocks. She was so slender, with snake hips and a swinging gait. Her cheek was smooth as a babe’s, her lips and cheeks rouged, her brows were plucked into two high half-moons and a heart-shaped patch rode high on one cheek. But what betrayed her the most was the necklace at her throat, some sort of pendant of glittering glass in the shape of a raindrop, a long curling tail coiling about the ribbon that held it. A silly mistake.

 
‘As we are now so much in each other’s confidence,’ Kit began tentatively, ‘I wonder if I might make a suggestion.’

  ‘Of course,’ said the lady. Her voice was like Bianca’s, the same accent of these lands, the same high and piping timbre.

  ‘This is a personal matter. It is just that once I dressed as a man … for a mumming,’ Kit said hurriedly. ‘I would pad my waist a little to hide my slim shape, and rub a little potash on my jaw each morning, to give the impression of the beard that I lacked. And I left off my jewellery.’

  The lady stopped and turned, turning dark eyes upon her, squinting slightly through her long lashes against the sun. ‘I have not the pleasure of understanding you.’

  ‘I do not mean to offend. Remember, I, too, dissemble, and to assume another character takes time; Fitzjames is teaching me how to best present myself, over many weeks, to better work my deception.’

  The finely plucked brows drew together. ‘And what is my deception?’

  ‘That … that you are a man.’

  For an instant Kit thought she’d angered her; then she laughed, throwing back her head, opening her mouth to show very small white teeth. ‘But I am a man.’

  Kit studied him, her mouth agape. Everything about him was womanish – he had no more beard than she, and the telltale knot of muscle at the throat, the lack of which she had always been at pains to disguise under her army stock, was entirely absent.

  ‘But,’ she blurted, ‘you can’t be.’

  ‘I am, though.’ He collected her confounded expression, and relented. ‘I am not being entirely fair. I am not wholly a man, but I am no woman either. I am a castrato. I was castrated in my youth to preserve my voice.’