“I’m pleased to meet you,” Belle said, forcing a smile. At first they didn’t respond and then Jacque mumbled something unintelligible as he squinted at Belle.
“Now you cooperate with Mlle. Mackay. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mother,” they groaned in unison as their mother walked out of the room.
“Come on then, we might as well get started,” Belle said as she urged them to get settled in their desks.
“You’re just a servant. Don’t think you can boss us around.” Jacque scowled as he sat down.
“Yeah, don’t try telling us what to do because we won’t do it,” Henri said. He jutted his chin forward, screwing up his face.
“It would serve you right if your face froze like that. You’re not a pretty sight, Henri,” Belle said as she handed him the book. “Start at the top of the page.”
“The cat--jumped--over--" He threw the book down. “I don’t like to read.”
“Why?” Belle asked.
“It bores me, that’s why,” Henri said.
“Reading is a wonderful thing. You can learn about the whole world once you master reading,” Belle said.
“I don’t care.”
“Jacque, I am sure you can do better than that,” Belle said. “Start here.”
“The cat jumped over--” Jacque wasn’t reading; he was repeating Henri’s words. “This is too hard. Why don’t you just read to us? We like that."
Appalled by the situation, Belle thought of Nan, her sister, who read well, and these boys were much older. Teaching them to read was going to be much more difficult than she had anticipated. They were a couple of spoiled brats; she had little tolerance for their behavior. At their desks, they splattered ink from their ink wells and scraped their feet on the bare floor trying to irritate Belle, and it was working.
“That does it! I’m going to talk to your mother about your behavior,” Belle threatened.
“Don’t do that,” Jacque pleaded.
“We’ll read! We’ll read,” Henri said. Hesitantly, they took turns reading through the assigned paragraph. They were terrible! Belle had no use for laziness and the situation aggravated her. If the boys weren’t shiftless, they were stupid.
When she told them to read silently, they made spit wads instead from corners torn from the pages of their books and spat them at her through a piece of pipe.
“If you make any more spit wads, I will make you eat them.” They did and she did. Not without pulling a little hair and putting a knee in Jacque’s chest and sitting on Henri, but they ate them. When she dismissed them, Henri gave Belle a silly grin and then stuck out his tongue. She returned the gesture. They had squared off with each other. Belle knew she’d earned some respect from them, but teaching them to read was going to be another matter.
Belle asked to meet with the Du Cartiers to discuss the boys and they were quick to oblige. Monsieur Henri Du Cartier seemed genuinely interested in what she had to say. He was a giant of a man with a sullen face. He made Mme. Du Cartier seem diminutive as she sat beside him. Large featured, well-groomed, he had the poise and polish of the gentry. Belle had the feeling from Madame’s demeanor that Madame was especially miserable that day and wanted everyone else to be.
“I don’t feel that I am making any progress with the reading.” Belle was direct; she knew no other way. “I think ye may need to employ a real teacher.”
“We’ve had teachers, Mlle. Mackay,” Monsieur Du Cartier retorted. “And more tutors than I care to tell you about. We want you to continue to work with them every day. More hours, if necessary. Whatever it takes, you must teach them to read. Do you understand?”
His eyelids fluttered as he spoke and Belle realized he never looked right at her. Did he think he was too superior? And what made him think that she could be successful where so many others had failed?
“I’ll do me best, but I am concerned that there is more to the problem than I can cope with.”
Mme. Du Cartier exploded. “There is nothing wrong with our boys! Nothing at all! They are perfectly normal. How dare you?”
“Oh, I didn’t mean they’re not. It’s only my inability to know how to teach them.” Belle pressed the palms of her hands together, trying to keep her composure.
“Well, carry on, Mlle. Mackay. Make them try harder. I expect results."
“About my wages? What am to be paid?” Belle asked.
“Two dollars a week. Three, if I see progress.”
M. Du Cartier took his wife by the elbow and led her from the room.
Belle opened the study room window to freshen the air as she wondered how she could teach boys who didn’t want to learn. Her eyes rested on Jacque and then on Henri as though looking at them might make them suddenly receptive. She assigned a paragraph for them to read, telling them she would test them on it when she returned in ten minutes. She walked down the hall to her room and brushed her hair to pass the time. The futility of her efforts annoyed her. Laziness was not acceptable in her family and she didn’t know how to deal with it.
"So you’ve met the mister,” Mme. Deuville said, looking up from her steaming kettle on the stove as Belle entered the kitchen.
“Yes, I met him all right but I don’t know what to make of him.”
“I wish I was free to tell you things that I’m not. Steer clear of him. He’s up to no good where the servants are concerned.”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind what I mean. Just do as I say or you’ll be the sorry one. “
Mme. Du Cartier appeared at the kitchen door. Belle quickly filled a glass with water and returned to the back staircase. As she climbed up the stairs, she could hear Mme. Du Cartier’s shrill voice lashing out at the cook.
A wild scream came from the study room. She ran there to find Jacque in hysterics. “Henri fell out of the window,” he yelled. His eyes were wild as he pointed out the window to the ground below.
Belle rushed to the window. Three flights below, Henri’s body was lying motionless on the ground, his arms and legs bent at strange angles, probably broken in the fall. She gasped in terror and flew down the stairs, two at a time. The poor boy is dead, he must be dead! No one could fall that far and live to tell about it.
It seemed like an eternity before she reached the body. The poor soul, it appeared that every bone was broken. Hesitantly, she reached out her hand and touched Henri’s body. Something was strange; she felt it move. Henri wasn’t dead. He threw his arms in the air, got to his feet and jumped up and down, laughing at her. How could this be? Hadn’t he fallen out the window? Oh, what a dirty trick! He hadn’t fallen at all. He’d likely crept downstairs while he was supposed to be reading and lain on the ground. And then, on cue, Jacque screamed. She’d been duped! If she hadn’t been on the point of hysteria, it was almost funny. It took Belle a while to see the humor in it; that came after she led Henri back up three flights of stairs by his left ear.
“You rotten scamps,” Belle laughed. “You scared the life out of me! You’ll be sorry. I’ll get you.” As macabre as it was, Belle found she had a new tolerance for the boys.
The boys’ reading seemed to be improving little by little. When Belle discovered they were interested in stories about knights and dragons, she introduced them to “King Arthur and The Round Table.” They almost forgot to be belligerent.
It was late October, the end of her second month at the Du Cartiers’. The days shortened. It was almost dark as the boys came home from their day at school. They walked down the path at the edge of the cornfield. They passed a scarecrow as they kicked rocks along the way, taking their time.
An eerie bloodcurdling scream filled the air. It was followed by a witch-like cackle, the kind that’s felt down the backbone all the way to the shoes. The scarecrow sprang to life and came at them, flailing its arms, limping, staggering, screeching. It was grotesque and it was alive. They ran, but it hovered right behind them, reaching for them, grabbing at their clothes, humping closer, close
r. It picked up Henri and threw him to the ground. Jacque ran as if his life depended on it but the monster caught up, staggering close behind him, bumping into him, wheezing, moaning, groaning. It grabbed him, squeezing the life out of him, it lifted him into the air and threw him headlong into the fish pond.
Hovering above him, it gave a bone-chilling cry of a wounded animal and as its arms flogged wildly in the air, its body undulated. With a final cackle and screech, it disappeared into the cornfield and into darkness.
Belle was even. How Tommy would have loved her performance.
From her window, Belle watched M. Du Cartier training his red setters. It reminded her of the Highland Games she and her family had attended at Glamis Castle in Scotland. The Royals and their entourage had been there on holiday and Tommy and Belle had caught a distant glimpse of them in all their regalia.
Men of great strength threw the tabor. Scottish lassies danced to a piper. The crowd gathered to watch the Border Collie Trials while the sound of bagpipes came from a nearby hillock. The dogs were disciplined, as smart as human beings, performing their tasks. They came to their masters after each event and were rewarded with kind words, pats on the head and a roughing of fur.
Du Cartier used his dogs for bird hunting, while the dogs in Scotland were primarily sheep and cattle dogs. Belle walked down the stairs and out into the grounds to watch her employer.
He was beating them with a heavy chain. “That’s how you teach them to mind,” he explained to Belle when he realized she was standing there. “They have to know who is in charge.” The dogs slithered on the ground as they moved away from him and then cowered when he called them back. He threw out a feather-covered ball, signaled them to go after it by pointing the direction and blowing a whistle, then waited for them to retrieve it. The dog that brought it back got a pat on the head and the other dog got the chain again.
This hulk of a man disgusted her. A dog would respond without beating; she knew that. She turned to leave but Du Cartier called her back. Feeling his eyes on her, she looked at him as he looked away. “I don’t think you should treat your dogs that way,” she blurted.
“Not that it’s any of your business, Mademoiselle, but if you are going to train hunting dogs, you have to beat them into obedience.”
The duplicity of the man was confusing. He was so polite one moment and brutal the next? Du Cartier seemed to enjoy hurting the dogs. She couldn’t watch him anymore. Going back to her room, she wondered as she climbed the stairs, would Jacque and Henri grow up to be like him? Could she steer them away from such brutality or was it a trait already showing up in their personalities?
The Du Cartiers had gone to Chicago, and the boys to school. It had rained hard during the night. The sunshine coaxed Belle out of her dreary room. She walked by the kennel looking for the dogs. She petted them through the fence, opened the gate and went inside. They were glad to see her. Putting them both on leash, she took them out of the kennel and onto the grounds that circled the house and then led them down the driveway to the junction.
The sound of hoofs beating at the hard earth shattered the silence. A farmer in his wagon pulled by a team of horses came toward her and she guided the dogs into the weeds to get out of the way. Impulsively, she hailed him. The farmer pulled up on the reins. “Whoa,” he shouted and the horses jerked to a stop in the middle of a puddle spewing mud everywhere. “Good morning, missie. It’s a fine day.” The farmer looked down from his wagon, questioning her with his raised eyebrows.
“Aye, that it is. I was wondering . . . sir, these dogs . . . they’ve been abused. Would you please take them with you wherever you’re going?” she pleaded.
“I don’t know that I can do that. They don’t belong to you, do they?"
“No, they don’t,” she confessed, “but the man that owns them beats them with a chain. Please, sir? He’ll kill them before he’s through.”
The farmer stretched his neck to look up the long driveway. “They belong to that Du Cartier fellow, don’t they?”
Belle nodded.
The farmer rubbed his chin studying Belle. The silence between them made Belle nervous. Finally, he said, “You saw him beating those dogs with a chain?”
“Yes, I saw him.”
Without another word, the farmer loaded the dogs into his wagon. He turned and said, “I know a young boy who has lost his father. He could use the love of a couple of hounds right now. Fortunately, he lives a good piece from here. We both might get in a lot of trouble over this. You know this is stealing, don’t you, missie?”
“Yes, I know. “
“Bless you, girl.” With the dogs at his feet, the farmer reined his horses back into motion and disappeared down the road.
Belle wondered, as she walked back to the house, what M. Du Cartier would do when he discovered his dogs were missing. She didn’t care.
Mme. Du Cartier had hurriedly thrown her sharkskin cloak about her shoulders as she ran downstairs to the waiting carriage. It was an hour’s ride to the theater where she and her important friends would sit in loge seats at the season’s first opera. Belle watched the carriage disappear as she played croquet with the boys. As the light began to fade, Belle sent them off to bed and sat on the steps to watch the sunset. The porch light danced off something in the bushes. She reached down and touched it and it fell through the greenery to the ground. She retrieved it, and discovered a huge ruby set in gold surrounded by diamonds. It had to be real; there was a feeling of quality about it. “It’s grand,” she thought. “Bet it’s worth a pretty penny.” Something this beautiful would likely pay her way to Idaho. How wonderful it would be to leave this place. Slipping it gently into her sweater pocket, she went inside.
Belle didn’t sleep too well. Her thoughts seesawed between her overwhelming desire to leave the Du Cartiers and visions of what it meant to keep the brooch. She saw herself in prison being flogged for the deed. She saw herself going to a happier place, finally meeting the Doigs in Idaho. It could be so easy.
Making her way down the back stairs the following morning, she still hadn’t decided what to do about the brooch. She could hear Mme. Du Cartier screeching in the dining room. “What’s the matter, Cookie?” Belle whispered to Mme. Deauville, so the other servants sitting around the kitchen table could hear. “Did ye butter the wrong side of the toast again this morning?”
The cook smirked and threw her hands in the air.
Before Belle realized she had made a decision, she stood before Mme. Du Cartier, pulled the brooch from her sweater pocket, held her outstretched hand displaying the treasure. “I think ye lost your handsome brooch.”
Mme. Du Cartier snipped, “Where did you find it--on the lapel of my cloak?”
“Oh, no, Madame,” she gasped. “I found it by the front step in the bushes.”
“Oh, really. How do you suppose it got there?” Mme. Du Cartier grabbed the brooch, motioning Belle away with her hand.
“I think it came off your cloak when you were leaving last night to go to the opera in such a hurry.”
“Oh, I guess it might have.” Mme. Du Cartier scoffed as she continued to eat her breakfast.
Belle’s cheeks grew hot. Not a thank you, only an accusation that she had stolen it. She wished she’d kept it. But as she walked away, she felt unburdened. This wasn’t about being thanked. That didn’t matter. It didn’t matter either what Madame said. What was important was she knew that she had conquered temptation and she liked that.
From the pantry, Belle could see Monsieur Du Cartier raging into the dining room, flushed with anger. “The dogs are gone. If I get my hands on the person responsible--”
“Maybe they just ran away. They were such a nuisance to you anyway,” Mme. Du Cartier said.
“I don’t think they ran away. I’ll offer a reward. Money talks. Someone let them out. Stole them. I’m sure of it. When I find out who did it, they’ll live to regret it.” Du Cartier was out the door and storming toward the gardener’s shed.
Belle wondered if the gardener had seen her and if he had, would he tell Du Cartier? A man so big and furious was frightening. What would he do to her if he found out?
Monsieur Du Cartier didn’t question her about the dogs. Evidently, it hadn’t occurred to him that she could be responsible. But she would live in fear as long as she remained at the mansion. She must leave and soon. She thought about how his eyelids continuously fluttered when he spoke to her. It was peculiar the way he never looked directly at her. Yet, she could feel his eyes studying her when she wasn’t looking at him. It made her uneasy.
She met him on the narrow stairs that led to her room and he asked how his sons were doing. Belle hesitated before she blurted, “They’re rude and lazy. I don’t think they have the desire to learn.”
Out of Innocence Page 5