The Oracle Glass

by Judith Merkle Riley

  “I have not a soul but you to tell about her,” I said, taking the glass. “Who else could understand her goodness, her sweetness? Her beauty was her curse.” The brandy was strong and made me cough. He refilled my glass, and his own as well.

  “Not her beauty, no. Her family. Your brother, if you will pardon me, Mademoiselle, is an unnatural monster with a stone for a heart.” He looked into his glass, as if he could see images in the bottom of it. “There are many such, nowadays. If I had the pen of Molière, I could make him comic. That is the role of art, is it not? To make monsters comic, so we can bear them, and our own cheap griefs into grand tragedy, so that others will weep with us.” He swirled the remaining liquid in the glass and then, as he took up the decanter, again, stared long into my face. Then he looked away at the tiny window, as if he were seeing into another time, and his voice was low. “Two sisters, like white roses, blooming in a dark, unnatural place. I can still see your faces peeping from the window, pulling the curtain back, just so. I always imagined her high in the tower, reading romances, waiting for her prince.” He sipped again from his glass and poured more for me, too. “Mademoiselle Pasquier,” he said in a low voice, “I dreamed of being that prince, even though I was only the son of an upholsterer.”

  The strong brandy made my broken bones melt into his soft armchair. At last, I could feel the tears running down my face. He handed me his handkerchief and poured himself another drink.

  “I wrote her…my dreams. Poetry. I schemed, I plotted, I wrote all night by the light of my only candle, to make myself great enough to be received in her home…your home…” Lamotte had poured himself several more drinks. He sat on the bed, amidst the rubble of discarded shirts, open books, and rumpled nightclothes, bent almost double, his head buried in his hands, speaking between sobs. “I was different then. I could have been anything for her, anything. And now…she hasn’t even a tomb.” He looked up at me, his face tear-stained. “Tell me, did she read my letters?”

  What could I say? André, my sister was trained from birth to want more than you could offer? It was I who saved your notes from the fire? I would have given everything I had if one line of that poetry had been written for me. Which of us, André, was the greater fool? But crushed by his grief, and mine, I lied.

  “She always kept them in her bosom, so she could read them over often.”

  “I knew it. The cynic was wrong. ‘The heart of a lover has eyes to see the truth,’ I told him, and he laughed. He told me I was a fool for not seeing reason, and I hated him for it. ‘If I were choosing,’ he said, ‘I’d take the younger sister. She has the better mind and the faithful heart.’ But he was wrong, and now I can forgive him utterly. He poisons his world with reason and has suffered terribly for it. I cannot resent him anymore.”

  The cynic. He could only mean d’Urbec. Why did the thought of him bring with it a pang of guilty sadness, even here, when my heart was drunk with loss, with brandy, with the intimacy of hearing Lamotte’s secrets? And yet even deeper in me was the long-suppressed voice of desire. Like a demon emerging from a subterranean cavern, it was battering its way out from some hidden place within, shaming me even as it made my mind crafty. I want him, it said. Not now, not at a time like this, I said to it. Betray her, it said. She’s dead anyway. Get away from me, you disgusting thing, I answered it. I got up to pour myself more from the decanter on the little table. I could barely stand.

  “Console me, Geneviève. I am as cold as if I were already in the tomb with her.” Lamotte shivered violently as he reached up and grabbed my free hand, causing me to lose my balance and sending the glass crashing to the floor. He caught me as I fell toward him on the bed and set me on his lap, his arms around me. I put my head on his shoulder. I could feel him stroking my hair, as if consoling a child. His tears were damp on the back of my neck.

  “Console me,” he said. “Console me.” His hand had moved down the front of my neck to my bosom. It felt warm, human.

  “Not that way,” I said in a faint voice, still battling the demon. Now his face was at my bosom; his rough cheek against the tender skin made me weak. The beautiful cavalier of the window. Mine. At the most terrible price in the world. I shivered.

  “Feel my tears,” he said, as the warm damp spread across my bosom. Some tiny something in the tone of his voice seemed to hint of the professional persuader. He’s using you, I thought. But the demon said, have him. When else will you have a man like this?

  “I…I can’t do this. For God’s sake, stop. I can’t bear getting pregnant. Not when I’ve seen—”

  “So smooth, so white. Like cream.” His hand had worked its way beneath my skirt. “Warm. Human. Alive.”

  “No,” I said, but my leaping heart battered at my ribs. The demon, triumphant, flew free. My body shuddered with passion as his hand reached its goal.

  “Beautiful,” he mumbled as he laid me backward, and I felt his weight on me. “Don’t fear anything…in all this time…since I lost her…I’ve learned a thousand tricks…to please the ladies. They run no risks with me. You needn’t fear…anything…” The pins of my bodice had been scattered to the floor. My skirts and petticoats lay crumpled about me like a bank of multicolored flowers. The fear dissolved in the heat of new joy. But even though his hands and lips roved everywhere, his eyes remained closed. And I knew, even as he entered the last stronghold, that he was trying to reassemble Marie-Angélique with his hands, his mind, his passion. His face, damp with tears and sunken with grief, was still beautiful.

  “André,” I whispered as the frenzy overtook us both.

  “Angélique!” he cried, as he withdrew and the wasted seed stained the bedclothes. He had been as good as his word. He would not leave me pregnant. But it was my sister that he had possessed, not me. Even so, as I looked at his face, all relaxed and full of gratitude as he began to sink into sleep, I felt no regret at all, not a bit. The afterglow of warmth still coursed up and down my body. Uncle, I thought, you were wrong. The most beautiful man that ever haunted my dreams has wept with me, has begged for me, has fulfilled me, and is grateful to me. I was happy at that moment, terribly happy. Burn in hell, Uncle, my mind whispered softly. At this moment, André Lamotte is mine. No other moment matters. I don’t care.

  “André, André,” I whispered. “Don’t sleep. Your entertainment. The duchesse. You must be up.” I shook him by the shoulder. His eyes flickered open.

  “Oh, it’s you. Geneviève.” A long look passed between us. Both of us knew everything. “I am grateful. What can I do for you now? What can I give you, poor as I am, to repay you for saving what is left of me?”

  “You can help me brush off this dress and put it on and summon a chair to take me home. Then you must be a monument of wit at your supper party tonight.”

  “Oh, my God, the entertainment! The duchesse!” he cried, as if the whole situation had suddenly sunk into his mind at last. I smoothed out Sylvie’s bright Sunday petticoats.

  “Surely, even she doesn’t begrudge you a tumble with the servants on your day off. I’ll go out by the back way, and no one will suspect that anything more than that has happened.” He looked horrified.

  “You…you think of everything. So self-possessed…it’s unnatural. It reminds me of the way that blasted d’Urbec calculates. Always rational.” Again, d’Urbec. Why did my insides twist so?

  “André, I know it was Marie-Angélique you wanted. I lay no claims on you; I’ll not embarrass you. Just remain my friend. That’s all I ask.” He looked at me, stricken. In that moment, his face looked old. There were circles under his eyes. The gay mustachios were limp. He sagged with the weight of good living that had encumbered him. The ponderous middle age of the idle was not far off.

  “You have the honor and heart of a man,” he said. “In a world of false, envious, malicious women and treacherous, smiling courtiers, I will treasure your friendship. D’Urbec w
as a wiser man than I. I go to dance attendance on a selfish rich woman…and you, I hope you find a man worthy of your heart, Geneviève.”

  Only a poet would wish such a silly thing, I thought as the bearers set me down before my own front door. Still, the moment of sentiment pleased me. And I had kept his handkerchief.

  ***

  A morbid sadness clung about me like mist all that long autumn. Wherever I turned, I saw Marie-Angélique’s face. I fled from the shops and fairs; the spending of money lost its pleasure. I’d see a display of lace, a silver brooch, a sumptuous length of brocade, and I’d think, before I could stop myself: My, wouldn’t Marie-Angélique like that—I must tell her about it. Her ghost seemed to haunt the galerie of the Palais, the walkways of the gardens. I could see us again, two girls in springtime, pretending to admire the roses but admiring the elegant strollers more. “Look, Sister, do see that lovely bonnet; when I’m rich, I’ll have one just like it. Oh! Do you suppose that dashing young officer with the crimson cloak is staring at me?” “When I’m rich, I’ll have one just like him,” I’d conclude her sentence in my sour little voice. “Oh, Geneviève,” she’d say with a laugh, “you are so droll! Let’s have one each!” And I could hear the echo of her laughter as I stumped along the rain-washed paths, searching among the dead leaves and empty pavilions as if I could find her hiding somewhere there.

  I took to sleeping past noon; my servants turned away clients whispering that Madame was very ill. In the afternoons, I wandered aimlessly in the gardens of the Tuileries or the Palais-Royal. When I’d tired of walking, I took the carriage and drove mindlessly about the city or took the road to Versailles, only to return without accomplishing any business. Even the bird, my one consolation, moped on his perch on the tall stand that stood by the table in my upper room, his feathers puffed up, saying nothing and refusing bread crusts from my hand. Once, heavily veiled, I hired porters to carry me through my old neighborhood. We went the length of the rue des Marmousets, but I made them stop at so many places that they thought me mad, and I had to double their tip. Our house still looked the same, tall and dark, the little gargoyles crouched on either side of the ancient Gothic portals. I saw my brother at a distance, walking from the house toward the Palais de Justice with a portfolio under his arm. The porters set down the chair at the very place where Lamotte and his two friends had stood, and I looked up half expecting to see the heavy curtains part and our two white faces peep from the corner of the dark window.

  “Go by the Three Funnels, then double back past the Pomme de Pin,” I said, “but don’t stop there; I just want to see the open door.” The door where I had first seen them, the three friends, young, full of hope, and laughing. One of the porters gestured toward his temple with a forefinger before picking up the shafts.

  Then one day, after nearly two weeks had passed, the inevitable happened. Shortly before noon I felt myself being shaken awake. I looked up to see the witch of the rue Beauregard towering above the bed like an evil dream, with Sylvie hovering guiltily in the background.

  “Get up, get up, there’s business to be done! Do you think I established you so that you could lie in bed all day? The King’s attention wanders like a weathercock; every woman at court is running to have her fortune told. It’s high tide, and you catch no fish!” I mumbled something, but that only set her off worse.

  “It’s the height of stupidity to mope about what can’t be undone. Make money, buy her a monument, and get on with it. You have servants to pay, a household to run, and a debt to me! And as far as I’m concerned, if you’ve gone and rotted your brain out on that wretched opium elixir of La Trianon’s so that you can’t work anymore, why, then, you might as well make an end of it, you little fool. Drink down the whole bottle, I say!” Sylvie, her eyes wide with horror, tried to grab the bottle, but La Voisin froze her with a single stare.

  “My brain is not rotted, you—you witch! It’s twice what anyone else’s is, even if I drank a hundred bottles!” In a rage, I pulled myself up to sitting.

  “As you probably already have—”

  “I’ll have you know, I’m tapering off! And at least I don’t sit up every night drinking wine until I’m red in the face, singing filthy drinking songs with the executioner!”

  “So now you’re claiming opium is more genteel, eh? My lovers are my own choice; I’ve had comtes and vicomtes, I’ll have you know. If a man pleases me, I take him. I am powerful enough to make my own choices. Whereas you are too cowardly to make yourself a duchess. But oh, I forget; you’re an aristocrat…I suppose that’s why you keep your sexual adventures in the family?”

  “I’ll kill you for that!” I shrieked, and leaped out of bed to attack her. She stepped back and pulled a vicious little knife from her sleeve.

  “Ha! Come closer, sweetheart, and see who kills whom,” she said, her black eyes commanding.

  “I swear, I will.”

  “An entire waste of time,” she announced calmly. “You’d do better to kill your uncle, who introduced your sister into the life she led for his pocket money and tried to destroy you to get his hands on what your father left you.”

  “How do you know about Uncle?”

  “You forget, little ferret, that he’s a client, too. I know all my client’s secrets. But he paid badly. I don’t miss him. Send him a charitable basket of my little pâtés in prison and be done with it.” She put the knife back in her sleeve. It made an odd sound as it slid home in the hidden sheath. A businesslike sound. Damn, I thought, as my head cleared. Once more, I’ve just danced like a puppet on her string. She knew exactly how to get me up and working again. She must have planned it all, the confrontation, the quarrel, before she came. When will I learn not to be used by her?

  “You…you’re horrible…”

  “And you are not?” she taunted, as she cocked her head to one side and put her hands on her hips. “But at least now you’re out of bed. Sylvie, get her dressed—the gray silk—while I see if Nanon is finished in the kitchen.” As I watched her vanish through the bedroom door, I felt totally annoyed. Damn her, anyway. Oh, damn again; I forgot she was already damned. Double damn, then.

  A curious odor of burned cork was wafting upstairs. “Sylvie, what’s that I smell…is it coffee?” A rustle of taffeta petticoats announced the return of the sorceress, and her voice answered from beyond the dressing screen.

  “Turkish coffee. I’ve been much taken by it lately. I have brought Nanon along to brew you a potful. You are going to drink it. I may have a little myself. I am very fond of it.”

  “But…but isn’t it expensive?” I asked. She had come behind the screen now to inspect the progress Sylvie had made with my stays and petticoats.

  “Of course it is. But it makes the mind powerful. Yours is pretty much reduced to mush. I’ve used an entire quarter pound. Don’t worry, I’ll just add it to your bill.” Sylvie was now engaged in hooking the dozens of buttons on my gray silk dress.

  “My hair…” I said, clapping a hand to the disaster on my head.

  “For now, just knot it in back, Sylvie,” La Voisin commanded. “The lace cap is sufficient. The marquise does not need to go out today; she will be receiving callers at home…” The taffeta bustled officiously as she left us alone behind the screen to complete my toilette. I could hear a clatter as La Voisin’s chambermaid, Nanon, set down a little tray on the table beyond the screen. I emerged to see two steaming pots, two white china cups, and La Voisin, who had just seated herself in my best armchair.

  “You don’t understand,” I said as I seated myself opposite her. “My sister’s dead…” Nanon poured hot milk and hot coffee together from the little pots with a practiced hand. “…my beautiful sister. And she was killed by—”

  “I know, I know. The Duc de Vivonne. Not the first, not the last. Don’t imagine you can take vengeance on him—he’s not only powerful, he knows too many pe
ople of the wrong sort.” Odd words from La Voisin, considering she wasn’t exactly the right sort herself.

  The sorceress set her coffee cup back on the saucer with a clatter. The noise made the parrot poke his head out of his feathers. He made a soft noise, like “urk, urk, urk.” He stretched out first one yellow foot, then the other. Then he tilted his head and peered at La Voisin with his ancient black eyes, and she returned the stare with black eyes that suddenly seemed just as ancient. “Drink, drink,” said the bird. La Voisin looked amused, stood up suddenly, and flicked a few drops of coffee into the little water bowl at the end of his perch. The bird stretched out his green head and put his heavy orange beak into the water. The witch queen chuckled, “Leave Vivonne to his wife, my dear. She has been wanting her liberty for some time.” I stared at the sorceress with new eyes. She smiled benignly and folded her hands across her stomach. I took another cup of coffee.

  “So now,” she announced briskly, “on to business. You’ll find it’s mightily restorative. The news at court is that the King is feeling old, now that he is nearly forty. He thinks a change of women will restore his vanished youth. Most men do at that age. So his attention wanders once again from La Montespan. Until now, she has maintained her hold by keeping his affairs within her household. But now her lady-in-waiting, La des Oeillets, has come to bore His Majesty. No, no, she’s nothing—he hasn’t even acknowledged his children by her.”

  “Hellfire and damnation!” announced the parrot, bobbing up and down on his perch. The sorceress smiled approvingly at him.

  “So now he is fascinated by Madame la Princesse de Soubise. Her family is poor; she repairs their fortunes with the collusion of her husband. The prince goes out for the night; she wears her emerald earrings to signal the King that he will be gone. But lately the earrings have not been seen. It is clear: either the King or the husband is tiring of the affair. So the game begins afresh—you may expect a number of consultations.”

  “You didn’t read this in the cards.”