“Just see the way the smoke goes up, like a little blue thread. The candles could be hanging; perhaps you should put garlands in your parlor. They’d look so festive—black is so plain.”
“It’s not our business to look festive. It’s supposed to be mysterious in here. That’s what keeps the clients coming back, buying our potions and horoscopes. That little frisson of fear, that they are stepping into another world, the world of the occult. What we really need is a skull. Or maybe a skeleton. Yes, a skeleton would give the place a certain tone. It would add to business no end.” La Dodée looked speculatively at a somewhat barren corner beside a little niche with a curtain drawn across it, which a skeleton might fill nicely.
“Tell me,” I asked, feeling all warm and lazy inside, “is La Voisin secretly one of you—a hermaphrodite?”
“Her? Hardly.” La Dodée snickered. “A new man every day, that’s what she has. Picks ’em up like melons in the market and parades them home in front of that silly old husband of hers. Everyone, from titles down to nobodies. Just now she likes magicians, but for a while it was alchemists—and then she has an affair going on with the executioner. But I suppose you’d count that as business…”
“You should show more respect,” La Trianon interrupted her. “Her ears are everywhere.” She looked at me and seemed relieved to see whatever it was she saw in my face. “If you were not already aware, you soon enough shall be. We all belong to one great society, but not all are chosen for initiation into our true mysteries. Some remain forever in the outer circle, weaklings who are content to eat the scraps from our table. But she has placed her hand on you, and so this I can tell you. We of the Ancient Ways are rulers of life and death in this city, and Catherine Montvoisin is the greatest of the witches among us. She is our queen.” La Trianon’s face grew hard, exalted, with these last words, and I felt suddenly that I had been drawn into a whirlpool of insanity. My little notebooks, a frail raft of reason, could never save me from drowning in it.
That night I had strange dreams. I dreamed I was being pursued by a faceless man. Mother was in it somehow, but she had become huge and hideous. The streets of Paris had twisted into an endless maze, and I ran frantically through them in search of something precious I had lost, the faceless man hard on my heels to steal it from me if I found it. Just as it was there—what was it? A house? I turned to see the faceless man looming above me, a knife in his hand. As I shuddered and my eyes fluttered open to stare into the dark, I realized I was lying on iron bars, strapped in tight. The pain was soaking through my crushed bones like acid. I fumbled by the bedside and found the half-full bottle they had left me and slid back into the sea of eerie dreams.
***
The next day I was delivered by La Voisin’s own carriage to a new address, where I should stay for a week or so until my patroness was sure that Desgrez had been thrown off the scent.
“After all, my dear,” La Dodée said as she bundled up my notebooks with a generous-sized jar of the sleeping syrup, “you are not really one of us yet. We have taken a blood oath and trained ourselves against torture, so that we will not betray one another. But you can’t even stand a tightly laced corset.” It was true. The dull ache spread through my body, sitting or standing. The tall shoe wore blisters on my twisted foot, and the muscles of my legs, unaccustomed to the new way of balancing, burned like fire.
The new place was a room under the eaves of a big old house in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. There I was to stay with a dismal old sorceress called La Lépère, whose occupation had something to do with whatever unsavory activities went on downstairs. I never saw the one-eyed coachman again. Later I heard he’d been sent out of town and established with a concession in hired chairs at Rouen. A seamstress visited me in the new rooms with a secondhand gown in bottle green wool with vulgar yellow satin trim more suited to the Italian comedy than the street. I hated it beyond measure. This she altered to fit me, and the telltale gray dress vanished. La Lépère observed it all, saying, “My, she does set a store by this venture, Madame High and Mighty! Playing games with the gentry. High-class customers she wants; more, more, more! And me, I work so hard and never make a penny at it. I sez a prayer for every one of ’em, and pays the sexton a bit of something to see them rightly buried in a corner of the churchyard. But her—everything she touches turns to money!” She squinted at me as the seamstress knelt at my feet, marking the hem of the hideous gown for turning up. “At least she’s paying me proper for keeping you, Miss Fancy! Where you from, that you speak so high, and look so low?”
“From out of town,” I said, annoyed at her.
“That’s what they all say. Don’t see why you’d be any different, now that I think about it.”
It was a great relief to at last escape the complainings of the most unsuccessful witch in Paris and to be out again, under the high, clear December sky, bundled into a vinaigrette with the unspeakable green-and-yellow dress decently hidden beneath an old homespun cloak. The cold wind whistled between the buildings on the narrow streets and rattled at the chimneys. With one hand I clutched a bundle of my few possessions and with the other I held on to a vast hat, which, with a heavy scarf that muffled my face, was sufficient to maintain my anonymity. The man in the shafts of the vinaigrette had the family shoes on; his wife, who pushed from behind, her skirts tucked up about her powerful calves, had wrapped her feet and legs in rags. Beggars who staggered across the frozen cobblestones to extend their hands were stopped by her pungent string of insults, which always ended with “Why don’t you try working for a living, eh, you street louse?” The streets were full of women with baskets and servants in livery, for there were feasts to prepare, candles and wood to be bought, messages and invitations to be extended. Now and then a passing carriage would push everyone to the walls, for there was no place in the narrow streets to walk safely. Chairs were popular in this season, for the bearers could carry them straight up the stairs and into the house, so that callers did not have to risk their satin slippers in the icy mud.
As we passed Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs, I saw a man in a fur-trimmed suit emerge from the church, in pursuit of a lady in a scarlet cloak with a white fur muff. A carriage drew up, and the lady, without a backward glance, allowed herself to be assisted in. As the carriage pulled away, I recognized the arrogant profile of the Chevalier de Saint-Laurent. Uncle. Monster. Oh, if there were a just God, He would have blasted him there where he stood! Uncle turned on his heel, and for a moment, his scornful gaze rested on the vinaigrette. I turned my head away, but for a moment our eyes met, and fear and humiliation raced through me. Stop this, I told myself fiercely. He doesn’t recognize you. He can’t. When I looked back again, he was gone.
***
“So, it is Madame Pasquier’s daughter, the little girl who doesn’t believe in the Devil, grown large. What is a girl like that doing, having a gown made for her at La Voisin’s expense, eh?” La Vigoreux, the tailor’s wife with whom I had once pawned so many things for Mother, had exchanged the secret sign and shown me into the well-remembered establishment on the rue Courtauvilain. A fire was leaping on the hearth in the workroom that stood behind the front door. An apprentice was stitching horsehair into the hem of a vast gown of burgundy-colored satin. Measuring tapes, pincushions, and scissors lay upon the immense cutting table. Mathurin Vigoreux was due to return any moment from the Marais, where he was delivering a Christmas gown.
“I’m learning to make my own living,” I answered as she helped me out of my cloak and hung it on a peg. Spying the hideous dress, she burst into laughter.
“Not in that, I hope, unless she is planning for you to open a mummer’s booth at the Foire Saint-Germain.”
“There was an accident to my own gown,” I sniffed.
“Yes, I imagine there was, since when the daughter of feu Monsieur Pasquier vanished right about the time the contents of his will became known, the police were here
to get a complete description of her mourning gown. I was relieved when they identified her body on a slab in the Châtelet. That looked like the end of it. Suicide of despair, they said. She was devoted to him. Good, I said. The police will clear out of it. But then they were back. Worse than rats in the kitchen! The gown, it seems, was not found among the victims’ clothing that is hung on the hooks above the bodies. After seeing a scrap of material I’d had made into a little reticule, they decided the dress had simply been too valuable, and someone had stolen it from the Châtelet.” She looked at me speculatively.
“You look different from when you were last here. Thinner. Older. Straighter. She’s done something with your face. I almost didn’t recognize you for a moment there. What’s her plan? She wouldn’t go to this trouble if you didn’t have…a use.”
“I’m going to go into business,” I said, careful not to reveal too much.
“And disappear from your loving family, eh? Clearly, you are a girl who loves life—and is far cleverer than the ordinary sort. Tell me, what sort of business? Surely, you’re not going to distill rose water—not in a gown of black silk costing a thousand écus.”
“I’m going into fortune-telling. I can read water.”
Her laughter rang through the little fitting room, and the apprentice, an ill-favored youth badly marked with the smallpox, looked up. Then, apparently used to her fancies, he appeared to go back to work. “And you, not even a believer,” she said, looking at me speculatively. “The little girl who once looked me in the eye and said all fortunes were false. This is a rare joke on all of us. To think, even I never suspected, and I have watched you grow up.”
I had much to ponder as the measurements were taken and the fabric laid before me for my inspection. Even the quaint drawing of the gown, with its Spanish farthingale and little ruff, scarcely distracted me.
When faced with the illogical, one must expand the sphere of logic to include rules of logic for that which is not logic. This is the only possibility in a world that works according to the rules of rationality.
***
“Well now, look in the mirror. What do you think of yourself?” La Voisin’s voice sounded jovial and expansive. It was the afternoon of Christmas Eve, and her house was already filling with members of the “philanthropic society.” The excellent smells of an immense dinner were driving me mad, for we had begun our fast in anticipation of communion at the midnight Mass. For you must know that in those corrupt times, when libertines confessed only on their deathbeds, and soldiers and freethinkers almost never, the witches of Paris were devout Mass goers. Only the King and his court equaled them for regularity of observance: both were equally ignorant of Holy Scripture, and both believed more in the Devil than in God. But because without God there is no Devil either, the witches regularly paid the Being above His due, while they looked to the being below for their livelihood.
So the entire company had already confessed to Father Davot of the little church of Bonne Nouvelle that stood at the corner of the rue Beauregard and the rue Bonne Nouvelle. Then that worthy would join us when, after midnight Mass, we would all fall upon the splendid things that were now tempting us from the kitchen. In the meantime, my new gown had been delivered, after a frantic effort involving the hiring of three temporary assistants to help with the sewing, as well as the engagement of one of the best-known professional embroiderers in the city. It really did feel like Christmas, after all.
“Not bad, not bad at all,” pronounced La Trianon to La Dodée, as I stood before the rectangular glass in the tapestry-hung bedroom. The mirror was set in a frame like a picture. I emerged from the chiaroscuro like an ancient portrait. I was dressed in rich black, with velvet trim, all embroidered with black silk thread and jet beads, like a nobleman’s widow of times gone by. Beneath the little starched ruff that covered my neck, a heavy silver crucifix—on loan only until I could afford to procure my own—shone against the black. My hair had been done in the style of an old portrait of Marie de Medici. I had thrown back the translucent black veil attached to the tiny black beaded cap the better to see my face. All pale and strained with the pain of the heavy corset beneath the gown, it floated above the antique lace like an eerie, disembodied mask in the dark. It was an alien face, one that I hardly recognized beneath the white powder and high, artificially arched eyebrows: the look of extreme age hidden in the mask of youth. Beautiful, in its own way, and entirely unexpected. My back, still shrunken against the long iron rods that barely held it upright, looked somehow shriveled with age. A tall ebony walking stick, nearly my own height, trimmed with a ring of silver and a bunch of black ribbons, finished off the picture as well as preserving my balance and disguising the last of my limp. I looked exactly as if I had stepped from a previous century, an ancient woman preserved by hideous secret arts that had given her the semblance of eternal youth. I was totally enchanted with the dramatic effect. A woman of mystery. A new person.
“Unbelievable.” Le Sage, the magician, shook his head, looking first from me to La Voisin, and then back again, as if he couldn’t get over the change. The sorceress’s black eyes shone as she inspected her creation.
“I told you. I saw it from the first. Now it’s perfect. Have you made the arrangements?”
“Yes, I called on the Comte de Bachimont yesterday. Told him I’d found her as a boarder in a tiny attic room in the Convent of the Ursulines—nearly starving, of course. He said I must bring her to him immediately, before you heard of her, or you’d surely snatch her up to make your reputation. He’s desperately in debt and thinks he can use her to gain entree into circles he hasn’t yet borrowed from.”
“Brilliant. Now remember,” she addressed me, “not a word to the count or countess of your connection to me. They are not of us, you understand. They are connected with the Chevalier de Vanens and his crowd. Alchemists, with a laboratory in Lyons. Possibly false coiners, as well, if my suspicions are right. Once they have introduced you into better circles, drop them—but gently. You don’t want to arouse suspicion—”
Her little speech of advice was broken into by the sound of a racket from downstairs. “Damn him, he’s at it again!” she exclaimed as she bolted down the stairs, followed closely by Le Sage. “Don’t!” I could hear Margot shrieking. There was the sound of children wailing, a crashing and a banging. La Trianon and La Dodée followed down the narrow stair, and I trailed behind them, cautiously feeling my way down each step, for stairs posed the ultimate danger to my new equilibrium. By the time I arrived, the quarrel was deep in progress. The cupboard doors of the witch’s little cabinet room hung open, their locks pried off by force. Books with odd diagrams were strewn about, and stoppered bottles rolled underfoot. Antoine Montvoisin, still clutching several books to his skinny chest, was being beaten insensible by Le Sage, who battered at the frail-looking man with his walking stick while Marie-Marguerite tried to pull Le Sage off her father.
“And just what do you think you are doing?” shrieked La Voisin, white with wrath.
“Burning them. Burning the filthy things. I’m sick of this dirty business. Better a crust of bread in honor than a feast that comes straight from the Devil.”
“You’re eager enough to eat the feast when someone else provides it. Who got you out of debtor’s prison, you mewling baby? I support ten mouths, and the biggest of them is yours. What have you ever done for me but fail in business? And now I’ve made a success of my business, you can’t stand it. Put my grimoires back or, I swear, you’ll not live until tomorrow.”
“You think I don’t know what you do, you with all your fine talk and society friends? The stove behind the tapestry? The ghastly pavilion in the garden? When they come to your garden parties, they dance on corpses, those society ladies. And they are gilded monsters, just like you.”
“Put them back,” she said coldly, towering over him as he knelt on the floor, her eyes blazing. The thin little
man in the dirty dressing gown crawled along the floor, picking up the spilled books, as his daughter averted her eyes. Suddenly La Voisin turned and saw me standing in the open door.
“What did you hear?”
“Nothing,” I answered. How desperately annoying. I had traded one maniacal household for another. Didn’t anyone live decently in this benighted city? And, after all, if one is taken up by the greatest witch in Paris, one expects better. Grandeur. Mystery. No sordid domestic conflict.
“Good,” she answered. “You learn very quickly. Margot, see to the dinner. I will not have my perfect evening spoiled by any man.” She looked disdainfully at her husband, who was wiping his nose on the sleeve of his dressing gown.
I have long since been asked what dinner among witches is like. Do they feast on human flesh? Do they arrive on broomsticks? These are the prejudices of the uninformed. The witches arrived on foot, fashionably gowned, cloaked, and hooded, having strolled from midnight Mass at Notre Dame de Bonne Nouvelle the few blocks to La Voisin’s elegant little residence. The company that joined the witches there was cultivated and distinguished—avocats, an architect, and various priests and abbés, both frocked and unfrocked. Father Davot, the family confessor from Notre Dame de Bonne Nouvelle, joined us, as did Le Sage, the magician, who was also La Voisin’s latest lover.
On a well-set table, masses of candles, white, not black, were burning in handsome silver candelabra. There were hams smoked with anise, capons and ducks in savory sauce, rich soup and pastries and sweets of extraordinary delicacy. The service dishes were of silver, with the exception of several huge tureens of exquisitely painted porcelain. There was, of course, a tiny contretemps during the soup course, when Margot jostled Monsieur Montvoisin’s arm just as he was about to lift the spoon to his mouth, causing him to spill upon the lovely white tablecloth. His wife gave him an evil glare, as he looked up at Margot, and then, glancing at the puddle on the cloth, he ordered the maid to remove the soup plate with its contents untasted. “I’ll just put it out in the kitchen for the rats,” Margot said saucily, as she removed the offending dish.
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