The Oracle Glass

by Judith Merkle Riley

  “My heart’s beating too much, Sylvie. I can feel it jumping and pounding. Hand me my cordial.”

  “You don’t need any more. You can’t have it.”

  “But I want it. Who is mistress here?”

  “You are, Madame.” Then she added brightly, as if to distract a child, or a senile old woman, “But do you know…you’ve forgotten to write in your account books, what with all that’s gone on tonight. You always do that—it ought to make you sleepy. If I did accounts, I’d be out like a candle.” Again a candle. Why light them at all, when the darkness is so permanent, and we must sleep anyway? There was a rustle as Sylvie got up and searched the room.

  “Look, Madame. Here is your coffer and your bag with the key in it. Your account books—you know you never miss a day.”

  “Very well, then, I’ll have them,” I sighed, and emptied my bag onto the bed to hunt for the key that never left my person. I could hear Sylvie’s breathing grow regular. She was lucky. She could sleep anywhere, anytime. She didn’t have a conscience. She didn’t have worries. I found the string of the key entangled with the little books I’d bought that afternoon. The word Cato on the spine of one caught my eye. Sure enough. I had acquired not the work of the Roman but the effusions of Griffon’s underground press. Observations on the Health of the State, the book d’Urbec had disowned. I looked at Parnasse Satyrique, supposedly printed in Rotterdam. The same chipped e’s and wobbly f’s. Griffon’s cheap type couldn’t be mistaken. I opened the broadside. Yes, the same type again. Griffon was still in business, and d’Urbec was writing for him. Libelles because they sell better, I thought. No one wants to know about the health of the state. Everyone wants to know about the sex life of the nobility, especially if it’s perverse. My mind went back to when I’d snatched up the books. He’d been there, minding the box, ready for a quick retreat. No hope if he’d been caught a second time. This stuff would see him hanged. I’d lifted my veil and he had recognized me and followed me. Why had he done that? D’Urbec never did anything on impulse. And he’d gone to my burial, too. My own brother hadn’t bothered. But then, why should he? Monsieur Respectable, the rising avocat. My brother wouldn’t let himself be tainted by witnessing a suicide’s burial. Had my funeral been before or after d’Urbec had turned libelliste? His interest had to be professional. That was it. What a silly predicament, Geneviève. You don’t even know when your own funeral was. Had he wept? I wondered suddenly. Why did it seem so important to me to know? No, I couldn’t imagine d’Urbec weeping. He was probably taking notes, as cold as a clockwork. How stupid you are, Geneviève. He obviously doesn’t even see Lamotte anymore. Lamotte was fashionable now, too fashionable to be seen with a libelliste, an ex-convict, even a pardoned one. Lamotte was the darling of wealthy women; he probably did readings in the salons. I could imagine him drinking wine in the ruelle of some modish lady, laughing at her jokes, flattering her friends. Beautiful, charming Lamotte. Forever beyond me.

  Sometimes, Geneviève, you outsmart yourself. You still haven’t gotten any closer to Lamotte. So much for cleverness and daydreams. And what’s more, you have that calculating d’Urbec stuck in your house instead of the gorgeous cavalier. And worse yet, you feel too guilty to throw him out because you’re sorry he was hurt on your doorstep. And he knows it, too. Oh, damn, damn. He’s managed the whole thing somehow. And for all you know, he was planning another libelle. I could see it as if I’d already purchased it from Griffon. Bumpy type with bad e’s, a nasty woodcut set about with snakes and skulls. Secrets of the Infamous Devineresse, the Marquise de Morville, Revealed; Hellish Horrors on the Rue de Chariot. He’ll up and leave tomorrow, then straight to the printer’s. That’s what you get for opening doors, Geneviève. And he had it all figured out ahead of time. Oh, damn again! It stung me to be outsmarted. And by a man, too.

  The candle was burning lower. I poured myself a bit of cordial and waited for the warm ooze to work its way through my body as I picked up the broadside on Madame de Brinvilliers that had been folded between the books. The ink had smeared, and the woodcut of the execution, depicting Samson in the act of swinging the sword, had doubled itself. Two Samsons, two kneeling women. The scaffold depicted floating, without legs, to make it easier to carve in the figures of the guards on horseback that surrounded it. Two executions, one a ghostly reverse. Reality and dream, face-to-face. Ah, the cordial must be working. The doggerel verses beneath the illustration were scarcely legible. “…from grasping pride and greed for gold, poison’d husband, brother, and father old…” plus sisters-in-law and her own daughter, rhymed just as badly. Surely not d’Urbec’s effort; he couldn’t turn a verse that bad. The marquise had had a lover, an alchemist named Saint-Croix, who’d provisioned her with all sorts of interesting poisons. This fellow Saint-Croix must have been a hardy soul—imagine, contemplating marrying a woman when you knew she’d become rich by dropping your own arsenic in the soup.

  A vision floated into my mind. Violins in livery playing at supper. The marquise, tiny, exquisite, in yellow silk cut low on her shoulders, leaning across the table to whisper something tender to Saint-Croix, all splendid in blue silk and lace, an immense curling court wig making his features look narrow and refined.

  “Some more wine, precious?” A delicate, pale little finger signals to the lackey at the sideboard. With her own hands she passes him the newly filled goblet.

  “It seems to have cork bits in it. Do sip a bit off the top and see what you think.” Saint-Croix, with a look of adoration, extends the chased silver drinking cup to her.

  “Ah, but I’m feeling a bit faint. The joy of the wedding, you understand. First I must have my drops, my love.” A slender white hand fumbles for the secret vial of antipoison.

  “How odd; I do myself. It must be the heat in the room. Lackey, open the window.” His lace-bedecked hand reaches for an inner pocket.

  Grandmother, I would like to tell you about this. I would laugh out loud to hear you cackle as I imitated the voices for you. And then your bird would cackle, too, just like you, and bob up and down shrieking “Hell and damnation! Fire and brimstone!” while you said, “Didn’t I tell you, Geneviève? Only the wicked get rich nowadays. It’s not like the old days in the Fronde. There were heroes then. Have you read this passage about damnation in Revelations?” And she’d take up her Bible from the nightstand to read about hellfire to the bobbing dance of the parrot crying “Damnation!”

  But the parrot had cried “Drink, drink!” there in the death room.

  Suddenly I felt cold. I could see it in my mind so clearly. The thought I had not allowed myself to think. The rolling cordial glass. The heart seizure. The mocking parrot had heard someone shout, “Drink! Drink!” Someone who considered Grandmother a deaf old fool. Someone in desperate haste, who pried open Grandmother’s stubborn, hard-clenched jaw to pour the contents of the cordial glass down her throat as the feeble old lady struggled in vain. Someone who snatched a letter addressed to the Lieutenant General of Police from a tightly clenched fist. Someone who knew the carriage was waiting below, who heard my foot on the stair, and hurried away with a rustle of taffeta.

  Grandmother, with her shrewd eyes and wizened face, Grandmother, bedridden among her libelles, broadsides, and court journals, had discovered what everyone else had missed. Father’s illness had been no illness. He must have been slowly poisoned; Grandmother had suspected how and was sending her suspicions to the police. And the proof that Grandmother was right was that someone—someone with a taffeta petticoat—had forced her to drink poison to cover up the crime. My mind fled from the thought. But the image of the death room, the parrot flapping wildly from the curtain rod to the bed canopy, was fixed like a mad dream in front of my eyes. How many little vials of white arsenic, of hellsbore, of wolfsbane, of “mort aux rats” did Mother keep among the rouge pots and beauty powders in the little cupboard in her ruelle? Stop, stop. Logic. The rational mind must have log
ic. But there was only one question that logic was left to resolve. Had Mother procured the poison from the rue Beauregard? I felt chilled through. I dared ask no one.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Madame.” Sylvie’s whisper woke me. It was barely light. “We have the blood off the doorstep. The trail leads from the center of the street to the corner and vanishes now. You’d think that’s where he went, not where he came from.”

  “Excellent, Sylvie. We’ll hire a chair and send him to his people this afternoon, and there’s no harm done.” My head was beginning to ache, and strange pains seemed lodged in my stomach.

  “That’s clever—let them call the surgeon and run the risk. Let’s hope the police don’t listen to those gentlemen they hauled in and conduct a house search of the neighborhood, or we’ll surely be arrested for harboring a fugitive.”

  “It’s just a pity La Reynie takes his new streetlights so seriously.” I sighed. “Though if he didn’t, the streets would be as black as pitch before the month was out.”

  Corseted and gowned in black, I was seated downstairs waiting for my first client when a knock on the door came. Somehow, it didn’t seem like the ordinary sort of knock. I heard the scurrying upstairs and realized they had seen something from the upper window. The knock sounded again. “Open, police,” demanded a voice. As if I hadn’t known the first time.

  “Mustapha, open the door to them, but slowly.” I composed myself at the table behind my glass and shrouded my face in my veil as Mustapha, resplendent in plumed turban, embroidered Turkish trousers, and purple slippers turned up at the toes, opened the latch.

  “Come in,” I called in a cold, distant voice, as Mustapha bowed before them. For a moment, they were taken aback. Good, I thought. Every moment’s delay is a moment to the better.

  “A fortune-teller—he’s bound to be in this house,” whispered one of the men to the red-stockinged sergeant.

  “I am the Marquise de Morville, and this is my house. You are welcome here, but first I beg that you state your business.” The coldness, the formality, the lack of fear slowed them. My knees were trembling. It was just as well I was sitting.

  “A marquise—Shouldn’t we…?”

  “Every house. Desgrez’s orders.”

  “We are searching for a fugitive. There was a disturbance last night—a third man…”

  “What a pity I heard nothing. But then, it is my custom to take a heavy sleeping potion at eight o’clock every evening.”

  “Odd, how many residents of this neighborhood take a heavy sleeping potion at eight o’clock. Would you lift that veil, so that we may identify you?”

  “Of course, Messieurs.” The flattery of the title I gave them, the curious atmosphere, the Turkish dwarf, the little drama of raising the veil, kept them staring. I could hear the intake of breath at the sight of my white, cadaverlike face. It was, as usual, gratifying.

  “I take it, you wish to search my house? I appreciate your protection, Messieurs, because I am a woman alone. Alone for centuries. Any miscreant might creep in through my cellar. But you, you will preserve me from the danger.”

  They looked at each other and nodded, then approached me. I handed them the key to the cellar from the little purse at my waist. They went out the narrow side door and I could hear the thump of the cellar door being thrown open and the clatter of footsteps on the narrow stone stairs down into the dusty stone vault beneath the house.

  “Mustapha, upstairs, and quickly. I will remain here for them when they emerge from the cellar and see if I can delay them further.” Mustapha nodded and went smoothly and quietly up the staircase. I rose slowly and took a deep breath. I had a terrible headache. My stomach was on fire. A cold, shuddery feeling made me tremble. I looked down. There, in the red pattern of the Turkish carpet, I saw it. A splash of dried blood, with telltale drops leading in a little trail through the crimson vines and leaves to the stairs, where they stopped short, wiped clean from the floor. Damn. I positioned myself all cold and straight over the most visible of the telltale stains, my veil thrown back. I set my face in an impassive white mask.

  “Well, Messieurs? Have you saved me, and this peaceful neighborhood?” The sergeant looked up from brushing spider webs off his cuff and gave me a hard stare.

  “Upstairs,” he barked. I followed slowly, abandoning the spot only when they were well ahead of me.

  “Come in, Messieurs; there are no secrets here.” Sylvie curtseyed in respect. I was glad we were not in hired rooms. The house of a marquise, even a false one, is searched with more respect. They prodded in the armoire among the clothes, with a bare epée. They opened the bedroom chest to find only folded blankets. They pulled out Sylvie’s trundle bed from beneath the foot of the bed and searched beneath the bed hangings.

  “What is that I see beneath the bed?”

  “Another blanket chest, Messieurs. If you wish, I will have Gilles draw it out for you.” Sylvie’s eyes were round and innocent. The sergeant tapped the box with his sword. Then he waved his hand as if it were not worth the trouble.

  “Look here—the servant’s room—” There was a flurry as one of the men produced a bucket of bloody rags from under Gilles’s bed. Sylvie rushed into the room, blushing to the roots of her boldly hennaed hair.

  “My monthly—Madame has left me no time for the laundry—” The man dropped the bucket in disgust.

  “Nothing here…Let’s try the house at the corner…”

  “I thank you for your concern, Messieurs. You have been most considerate of my china and furniture.” The sergeant pocketed my financial offering so neatly, you could hardly see it vanish. I escorted them downstairs and bid them adieu standing over the bloody stain before the stairs.

  By the time the door was safely closed, I was shaking all over, pains running inside my bones, deathly ill.

  “Madame, they are gone; there’s no need—”

  “I’m sick, Sylvie—help me upstairs.” As I collapsed onto the bed, I whispered, “Where is he?”

  “Under the bed, doubled up in the blanket box.”

  “My God, pull him out; you’ve killed him.”

  “Hardly, Madame. But he is gagged, he groaned so. He refused the opium for fear that it might make him lose his self-mastery. He’s a bold soul, Madame. I see now why he pleases a woman like you. I rather like him myself—”

  “Don’t chatter—give me my cordial and get that man out from under my bed.” Shaking, I poured the last dose out of the vial. As the fire in my insides faded, I knew with a certainty that the cordial was more than a convenience. Now I had to have it; now I couldn’t live without La Trianon’s pharmacy; I couldn’t live without the philanthropic society of La Voisin. Logic. I was as firmly in the Shadow Queen’s power as La Montespan, or as my mother, with her failed, greedy dreams. God, I could hear her laugh as if she were in the room. “Little Marquise, why does it take a clever girl like you so long to figure things out?” Oh, damn, damn. A thousand damns. Gilles had drawn the chest out into the ruelle and unlatched it.

  “Your laces, Madame. Your ruff.” I was half undone and the ruff in its bandbox by the time Gilles and Mustapha had pulled the haggard figure to a sitting position in the open chest.

  “Well, well,” he whispered as they drew my second-best handkerchief from his mouth. “This is certainly a new way to enter a woman’s ruelle. But I fear the quality of my conversation will not undermine the ever-glorious reputation of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. Oh, damn. I see you’ve emptied the cordial bottle, Athena.”

  “Madame has been taken ill suddenly,” sniffed Sylvie. D’Urbec had both hands clutched at his side, where the wound had burst open again under the bandages. The blood was running from between his fingers, and his face had turned gray. But his eyes were still fixed on me.

  “You skipped your usual dose today, didn’t you?”

&nbs
p; “None of your business, d’Urbec.” I picked my head up from the pillow and glared at him. But my face was sticky with tears and smeared white powder. Another fierce impression, ruined. When would I ever learn to do things right? “Sylvie, get him the brandy. And don’t let him drip into my chest like that.” My hairpins and veil were strewn across the bed, my dress was half undone and the stays of the steel corset undone. My mouth tasted bitter. I had made a fool of myself in front of a stranger. And not just any stranger. A damned libelliste.

  “If you write about this, d’Urbec, I swear, I’ll kill you,” I whispered.

  “It would hardly be the way for me to repay your assumption of the risks of hospitality, now, would it?” he answered in a low voice. “Credit me with some manners, even if I have turned to writing libelles in my current state of…er, financial embarrassment. Besides,” he added, “I am not actually in a position to remove myself from your chest, let alone rush to the printer’s. And you must face facts, Athena. The neighbors are watching the house. They will count every guest and every carriage. A police reward always arouses neighborly concern. Until I am capable of walking out of here after dark, you have an unwelcome house guest.”

  “D’Urbec, you planned it this way, I swear.” I sighed, as he was lifted out of the chest and I gave orders to Sylvie to have Madame’s network smuggle a mattress and surgeon’s supplies into the back of the house under cover of darkness.

  “Planned, but as usual, I have overshot the mark,” I thought I heard him whisper as they carried him into the servant’s room.