The Oracle Glass

by Judith Merkle Riley

  The thin coils of smoke above the candles ascended into the eerie darkness that hovered beneath the ceiling. I felt horribly ill.

  “I feel as if I’m going to die.”

  “Good. It will teach you not to drink too much in company. How would you have had the wit to take the antivenom if in fact you had been poisoned? Even a cat has the sense to come in out of the rain.” Hearing himself mentioned, the largest of her cats, the gray tom, leaped upon her lap. “You aren’t ready yet,” I thought I heard her say. The last I remember was the rumbling rise and fall of a cat’s purring.

  ***

  I awoke the next morning on a cot in the low gray room under the eaves that housed the servants. Sylvie was shaking me.

  “Wake up, wake up! All Paris is ablaze with the news. And with your prediction. You’re famous! We have three appointments today in the city, and more at court! Oh, there are dozens of hopefuls now, all of the highest rank. What they’ll pay! Consultations with you, powders from Madame. We’ll all be rich!”

  “Oh, Jesus, don’t shout so. My head’s breaking in two. What’s the news?”

  “How could you not know, when you yourself predicted it? Madame de Montespan has been sent away from court by the King. She’s here in Paris, licking her wounds, while her rivals sharpen their claws!”

  I groaned and sat up. My head felt like an inflated pig’s bladder. Ready to burst. “How…what?” I managed to mutter.

  “Oh, it was astonishing. Père Bossuet denounced the King’s sin with Madame de Montespan from the pulpit on Easter. And he refused the King communion, just on the eve of his departure for the front in Flanders. The King can’t go into battle unshriven. They say the King begged for a separation only, as he had done once before as a condition to obtain communion. But that was in the days of Père Lachaise, who was much less exacting. Monsieur Bossuet was adamant. ‘Give up the woman,’ he said, ‘for you are in double adultery, because she is married as well as you.’ Now all the unmarried ladies have their hopes up. If I were near the King, I’m sure he’d notice me! But I’ll not have the chance, well, not unless…” Oh my, another consumer of love potions and lucky charms. You’d think the people who sell them would know how ridiculous they are. But they’re their own best customers.

  But once dressed and downstairs, I noticed that my hostess was not as active an enthusiast as Sylvie. Her two youngest boys, neither yet out of girls’ gowns and leading strings, were quarreling over a ball; their older brother, all of ten years old, was just being sent to pick up a parcel at La Trianon’s laboratory. Her stepdaughter, Marie-Marguerite, gave her an evil stare as she passed through the room with breakfast for her father on a tray.

  “Well! The marquise has finally decided to get up,” she said in a sarcastic tone. “Greetings, O illustrious one. Your sun has brightened our horizon at last.”

  “What’s bitten you this morning?” Headaches do not make me sweet.

  “How dare you!” she hissed, her eyes dangerous. “When I sent you out into the world to create new business, I did not mean for you to stir up trouble between my clients.” My head hurt too much for tact.

  “I did exactly what you said. If you don’t like it, then maybe you should keep me better informed, instead of always trying to be so devious,” I snapped.

  “The Countess of Soissons has been my client for many years. How dare you try to steal her business?”

  “I didn’t—she called me. When I sent her to you, she just laughed.” Madame’s mouth was clamped in a grim line.

  “You had no business predicting Madame de Montespan’s downfall.” Well, even with a headache, I knew what that meant. The Marquise of Montespan was her client, too. Not two women one would wish to get caught between.

  “She asked, and it was in the glass.”

  “In the glass, in the glass, was it? Don’t you remember any of my lessons? Never read someone else’s fortune for a client! You miserable little fool; you’ll bring them both down on you!” On yourself, you mean, I thought. But by now La Voisin’s rage was billowing like storm clouds. Ordinarily, I would have been frightened, but having already considered myself poisoned once, I had lost all fear. I returned her stare so fiercely that she recoiled from me. “Steal my clients! You set yourself up, don’t you! Who pulled you from the gutter, eh? Answer me! Answer me!” Everyone in the room had stopped to stare at the battle.

  “It was the river, and I wasn’t in it anyway,” I said in my most precise voice.

  “Oh, yes, we’ve studied philosophy! We’re not a poor woman who raised ourself up. We know Latin, we know Greek, like a man. We’re not common! We’re almost a Matignon on our mother’s side. Oh yes, bow to the Matignon blood in the little hussy, if you can find it anywhere!”

  “Don’t you dare insult my mother, you…you dreadful old witch!”

  “A witch, eh? There’s more honor among witches than among the Matignons, I can tell you that. I made you, do you understand, I made you! I wanted you, I saved you, I created you, and you’re mine! Why do you think the door was unlocked the morning you left home? Why do you think I was there to keep you from the river? Your own loving mother had better plans than that. Ah, the minute they read the will, she was at my door. ‘Why pay for a funeral?’ I told her. ‘Put her out and you’ll be rid of her. She’ll never be found, and they’ll never trace the death to you.’ I could see the glint in her eye. The glint of money. ‘Take back your fee,’ I said. ‘You don’t need what you came for. You can have it all without cost.’ Without cost—that’s what made her eyes shine! Money! That’s what makes a Matignon act. Money, money, and only money. The money your father left you—she’d stop at nothing to have it. And how much better at a bargain. Oh, what a thrifty little mother you have! An honorable race, the Matignons, like all the other great ones who come to see me. Oh, indeed! But you, you’ve got God-given talent, you eat and drink and clothe yourself at my expense…”

  My bones felt like ice. It fit, it all fit, like the missing piece of a puzzle. My mind shrank from it.

  “Prove it,” I said.

  The sorceress stood still, looking at me with her dark eyes. “Come with me to my cabinet, and I will show you your mother’s entry in my account book,” she said in a calm, bitter voice. With a growing numbness, I followed her into her little gilded cabinet room. It was the next to the last entry, at the top of an empty page. “Wishes to purchase inheritance powder for her daughter.” The date, after Father’s death. The last entry, “Sent away without.” Mother hadn’t been back since.

  “I never knew…I didn’t know…any of it…,” I whispered, as I leaned against the wall to keep from falling. Oh, truth, how ugly you are, when we meet like this, face-to-face. I would rather never know you.

  “No,” said the sorceress, lowering her voice and inspecting me with her shrewd, almost malignant black eyes, “you didn’t know, did you? Tell me—” And her voice became all honeyed and persuasive. “Tell me, what did you read in the glass for the Countess of Soissons?”

  “She just…asked me what would become of Madame de Montespan, and I looked and saw her leaving court in a hurry, in her carriage with four outriders, on the Paris road.” I felt cold all over. My eyes hurt. My face was wet.

  “Which she took yesterday…hmm. Blow your nose on this, and then read in the glass for me.” She extended the embroidered handkerchief she had tucked up her sleeve. She took out a water vase from the cupboard and rang for Nanon to come and fill it up. I looked into the glass that she had set before me. An image formed and shone out of the depths. Madame de Montespan, dressed in cloth of gold embroidered with gold thread, covered with diamonds, sitting regally in an armchair, with other ladies, including the governess I’d seen, standing or sitting on stools about her. A richly dressed man with dark, pockmarked Spanish features entered the room. The King.

  “I see Madame de Montespan
, all in cloth of gold and diamonds, entertaining the King before the ladies of the court.”

  “Well, that’s better.” She looked at me. “Now pull yourself together. You have appointments. And I have business. The carriages are already lining up in the street. Oh, the devil! Lucien is gone; I’ll have to send Philippe.” And with that she called in her loutish, dough-faced thirteen-year-old son, the one who was far too fat and never did anything, and spoke in a low voice. But I heard anyway, for my ears are good.

  “Go to Mademoiselle des Oeillets in the rue Vaugirard immediately. And tell her that I have means within my power to resolve her mistress’s future in the most dazzling way. And if you are not there and back by suppertime, I will stop your sweets for a month.” As he left, she said disgustedly, “That one is Antoine’s. Lazy wretch. My children disappoint me. I expect better from you. Remember, you I chose. And I have made you. You are nothing without me. Go, and wash your face. You look like a fool.” As I got up to go, she said calmly, “From now on, pretend you cannot read the futures of those who do not touch the glass. This will keep you from being forced to read the fortunes of distant enemies of your clients. After all, they may become clients in their turn. And you are not clever enough to extract yourself from the intrigues that result from reading the fortunes of third parties. Now, return in a week. I think I will have good news for you. The vengeance that I have promised you will soon be within your grasp.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  “Oh, dear Abbé, you have so relieved my soul on this point.” The fine-boned little blonde in the pale-blue satin leaned closer to the society abbé who knelt before her, holding her hand to his lips. The marquise shuddered and pulled her shawl closer around her with her other hand. Was it the chill of the stone bench in the convent garden or some premonition, some tremor of the soul that made the gooseflesh break out on her arms?

  “It cannot be sin if two hearts yearn as purely as ours. How long…how long I have admired you from afar, my dear Marquise. To save your soul for God, even at the cost of my own damnation…” The abbé rolled his brown eyes heavenward. How attractive his lean, dark face looked in the twilight. What was the scent that clung about him? Not unlike incense—it reminded the marquise of heavenly things, and somehow at the same time of this latest, divine, passion. She clasped both his hands and pulled him up beside her onto the bench.

  “Must…must I confess all?”

  “Only before God,” whispered the ardent abbé. “No man alive need know. Write it all down; plead for absolution for your sins to Him who sits enthroned above. Then seal the document and bring it to me. We will burn it together, offering up the very smoke with prayers before the seat of the Supremely Merciful One.” The abbé pressed her hand to his heart. “Feel my heart,” he whispered. “You can never doubt its sincerity; it beats only for you…”

  The whites of the marquise’s eyes flashed bright, eager, and insane in the rapidly descending dusk. Her powers of love, undimmed, even though she had passed forty. Her magnetism, her enchantment, had brought this slender, dark, worldly abbé to her lonely exile across the miles. The sexual and divine, all mixed in a mad brew, rose to her head.

  “A kiss,” he pleaded.

  “Yes,” she answered, and the embrace sent fire through her. Her youth, not yet spent. Passion, still hers. She felt the old part of her life fleeing from her like a shadow. Yes, she would free herself from it all, confess, and then flee, a new being, washed clean, with this man who made her pulses race like a young girl’s.

  “Tomorrow,” he whispered in her ear, and the soft sensation of his breath made her nerves thrill. “At the Sign of the Castle, on the road from Liège. I cannot live until the moment I hold you in my arms.”

  That night, the Marquise de Brinvilliers sat up for hours in her convent room. By the light of a candle, she listed the catalogue of her sins: sodomy, incest, murder, attempted murder. She solemnly named the dead: enemies who had offended her, strangers who stood in her way, relatives systematically poisoned for their inheritances. The list covered sixteen pages.

  Captain Desgrez returned to the Sign of the Castle.

  “So, Captain, how did it go?” asked the policeman disguised as his servant.

  “She’ll be leaving the convent grounds tomorrow of her own volition, with a written confession in her hand,” replied the false abbé. The “servant” whistled through his teeth in appreciation.

  “Well done, Captain! Brilliant!”

  “I feel like washing,” said Desgrez, running his finger under the tight neckline of his soutane.

  “You do smell rather like a gigolo. What is that stuff you’ve got on?”

  “Something my wife picked up in the rue Beauregard. Supposed to make the wearer irresistible.”

  “I have to hand it to you, Captain. You don’t overlook anything.”

  “It’s my duty,” said Desgrez, as he sat down and stared into the fire.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The news from court had crowded the street outside my house with carriages and chairs. All morning I saw clients, and in the afternoon I made house calls in the more fashionable neighborhoods. That was when I visited women who were not allowed out of their houses, who feared to be seen at a fortune-teller’s—women who were ill, or mad. But wealthy.

  My last call of the day was on a new client, a stranger who lived in a little bijou town house in the chic new suburban district on the rue Vaugirard, on the way to Versailles. A maid met me in the street and showed me in by a secret back way, trembling slightly at my gloriously mysterious appearance. Another of those houses where a jealous man fears to let a wife receive visitors, I thought. I followed the maid upstairs to a high, airy bedchamber paneled in white and gold, with an elaborately carved marble chimney, rich hangings, and fabulous carpets. On the immense, crimson draped bed, a woman sat in elaborate negligee with her back to me, her golden hair piled high. In front of one of the windows, a parrot on a tall stand was busily cracking seeds. It looked a great deal like Grandmother’s parrot.

  “Awk!” exclaimed the parrot. “Hell and damnation! Fire and brimstone!” It sounded rather like Grandmother’s parrot.

  “Be quiet, you dreadful thing!” the woman said, and turned to look at me with red-rimmed eyes. It was Marie-Angélique.

  “Oh, you’ve come at last. You, who have told so many the future, who have saved so many futures. Save mine, Madame, for I am the unhappiest woman in the world.”

  Silently, I put down my little case beside her dressing table and lifted my veil. She turned and stared a long time. “I know you,” she said, looking puzzled. “My God, you look exactly like my dead sister. But she was twisted, and you are straight.”

  “Unlace this diabolical corset, and I would be twisted again, without a doubt, Marie-Angélique.”

  “Alive! Oh, I knew it; I always knew it!” She got up to embrace me, then hesitated.

  “But just imagine being a hundred and fifty years old! I was quite taken in, as is all of Paris! You’re ever so fashionable, you know. It establishes a person to have a fortune done by you—just like having the right dressmaker or embroiderer. How did you ever come to this?”

  “Why, I studied, Sister—and I took up an apprenticeship.”

  “Oh, Geneviève.” She began to laugh. “How many scrapes I’ve pulled you out of! And here’s another of your pranks—No. I won’t tell on you, and that’s a promise.” She put both her hands on my shoulders, holding me at arm’s length to look me over and laughed to see me so odd. But then she sobered, and said, “You haven’t been home? You haven’t heard?”

  “I’ve not been home since I fled that morning.”

  “Then you did flee. I always suspected that. It was when I saw those little books—the ones you always hid in the attic—were gone, that I thought you might have run away. And I never saw your dress among the clothing of the corpses
hung on the hooks above the slabs. I even told the captain there, a Monsieur Desgrez, and he seemed very interested. And I just couldn’t believe it was you, no matter what they said. The foot was wrong…I told the captain that, too. And I always believed I’d see you again. You’re that way, you know—you always come back.” We sat down together on the bed.

  “But how did you come here, Marie-Angélique?” I asked. “Is it true what they say, the Duc de Vivonne himself is keeping you?” Marie-Angélique looked suddenly troubled.

  “Oh, Geneviève, it is exactly like when Isabelle was kidnapped by the Sultan of Constantinople and found true love only at the expense of grief.” She sighed. “And after I paid all the family’s debts, too—or, rather, dear, lovely Monsieur de Vivonne did when I asked him.” She shook her head sadly. “And to think I never understood. I have accursed beauty, Geneviève, just like the story. Accursed.” She began to wipe away the tears with the back of her hand. “Did you know our brother, Étienne, declared me dead and even had a funeral for me?” She sighed. “It’s so bourgeois of him, it’s just humiliating.” She got up and began to pace the floor, wringing her hands.

  “Sometimes Mother’s maid sneaks away to see me. She says Étienne called Mother a pander and has shut her up in Grandmother’s room, just as if she were in prison. He says he’ll wash away the stain in blood and a thousand other impertinences to Monsieur de Vivonne. He even sent him an insulting letter! At first, Monsieur de Vivonne just laughed and said if Étienne were a man of the world, he’d be quiet and enjoy the advantages of a high connection. But then last week, when he had a little party of his friends and their lady friends in his box at the opera, right in the middle of Mademoiselle Lenoir’s aria, I heard one of his friends laugh at him about the fuss Étienne is making, and then he shot me such a sharp glance and said he was growing weary of the whole adventure. Now what will I do, Geneviève? I must know my future. None of my old friends will even speak to me…he doesn’t want me to go visiting…he hasn’t bought me even a new pair of shoes in the last month. Even Grandmother’s parrot reproaches me—” and she sat down again beside me, dissolving into hysterical sobs.