Minuet Page 2

“Send her to the kitchen. I’ll call the Runners,” Degan suggested.

  Harlock took one last, long lingering look at the child. The eyes did the trick. Marie had such eyes as that. Cat eyes. He beckoned to the goggling butler and asked him to see Lady Sally to a chamber, to bring her hot water, a maid, and clean clothing.

  “But what of food? J’ai la grande faim,” she protested vociferously.

  “You’ll want to scrub up first,” Harlock pointed out. He began scratching at his neck as he spoke. Degan looked at him in alarm, and stepped farther back.

  “Mais non! First I want to eat! I die of hunger! Vraiment.”

  “You can’t eat in that condition. You’ll catch hydrophobia,” Degan said sternly.

  “Ah, mon Dieu,” the child said weakly, and sank carefully to the floor in a dead faint. Or a good imitation of one. As the butler darted forward, one large yellow eye opened a fraction to observe him.

  There was an excited shouting for wine, brandy, water, feathers to be burned and a vinaigrette, which last two items were not to be found in a gentleman’s establishment. The bundle of rags was lifted to the sofa, a glass of brandy was held to the lips, and she gulped greedily, without even the customary fit of coughing expected from a female.

  “C’est une bonne eau-de-vie, ça,” she complimented Lord Harlock as she drained the glass, wiping her mouth on her sleeve. Then she sat up straight. “Now I have the bath, while you command food, yes?”

  “Certainly, my dear,” the stunned lord agreed.

  The slight frame, draped in hanging shreds of gray, arose and walked jauntily out the door. “Hein, citoyen,” she called to the butler. “Where is my room?”

  She was gone, and Degan and Harlock exchanged incredulous glances, tinged almost with fright.

  “What do you make of that?” Degan asked, the first to recover speech.

  Harlock sat silent a moment, then put back his head and laughed. “What do I make of it, sir? I’ll tell you what I make of it. I make it I am no longer a childless father. Funny there’s no word for it. A fatherless child is an orphan but a childless father is nothing.”

  “You can’t accept that fellow’s word—”

  “The eyes have it. Marie’s eyes, down to the long lashes and feline slant. My little Sal had just such an eye. She is my daughter.”

  “I don’t believe it was even a female. He wore trousers.”

  “Damme, Rob, if you wore a skirt it wouldn’t make you a woman! We’ll have to take her word for it, won’t we? Unless you want to check it out for yourself.”

  Degan scowled in disapproval of such a statement. To imply that a skirt hid something different from a pair of trousers was already more ribaldry than he liked. “She must be examined by a doctor for contagious diseases, certainly. And another thing, John—this might very well be some trick to get money out of you. Some damned Frenchie who has got ashore with a half-baked story of being able to free Marie for a price—a high price, you may be sure.”

  “No, sir, those are the eyes of an Augé. If she ain’t Sal, she’s a double. I’ll hear what she has to say.”

  He soon heard milady’s first command. An upstairs maid came with a curtsy to inquire what Lady Céleste was to wear, as she had brought no gowns with her. “She says she’d like to wear one of her mother’s gowns, sir,” the maid suggested uncertainly.

  “Impossible. They’re all put away in camphor. Lend her a servant’s dress for the present. It will do well enough.”

  The maid bobbed and left, to return not three minutes later with the word that Lady Céleste would prefer not to wear a servant’s dress, if it pleased his lordship.

  “Damme, it don’t please me!” he shouted. “Get her into a dress and send her down here at once. I want to talk to her.”

  The harried servant remounted the grand staircase once more, to have a bar of soap hurled at her head, though in truth Minou missed her target on purpose, and did it only to show that she meant to be taken seriously. “Long enough I have worn rags!” she said imperiously. “Get me one of my mama’s gowns, tout de suite.” Though she sat to her shoulders in water and had her hair covered in suds, she emanated an air of authority.

  The servant said apologetically, “They’ll smell, milady. And be all wrinkled as well.”

  “Press it, and bring me perfume.”

  “There’s no perfume in the house, milady, and the attics are all dark, with bats.”

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est que bats?” she demanded.

  The servant flapped her arms, saying, “Black bird, bad.”

  “Ah, chauue-souris,” Minou said with a shudder. She then looked all around the room, at the brocade hangings of the canopied bed, the gold satin window draperies, a rather pretty Chinese scarf with a flowered pattern and a long fringe that decorated a mahogany bureau in the corner. “Très bien. Some pins, a needle and filet.”

  “Feelay, mum?”

  “Thread, vaurienne.”

  The requested items were brought while her hair was rinsed, her body scrubbed, her nails nearly rubbed from her fingers in an effort to remove the grime, till at last she emerged from the tub with a large towel encasing her from head to ankles. It was necessary to sink to servants’ undergarments, but it was soon clear to the astonished group of servants attending Lady Céleste that these ignominious cotton undergarments were to be the only decent stitch on her body.

  They were commanded to yank the draperies from the windows and the Chinese shawl from the table, and insert pins and filets where milady directed. Considering that three orders came from belowstairs to hurry it up, milady took her time about the proceedings, standing in front of a mirror, turning over a piece of material to make a tuck here, a pleat there, as though she had all the time in the world.

  While still half draped, she ordered food, insisting she could not wait a moment longer. With a wing of chicken held between her fingers, she continued her toilette. At length she stood before them swathed in gold satin draperies that began well below her shoulders, and finished three feet behind her in a train. With all this finery, no shoes could be found to fit her, and she went in the housekeeper’s best Sunday silk hose, without shoes. Her hair had been toweled dry to be brushed into a tousle of curls the shade of burnished copper. It sat in a wreath of glistening ringlets like a cap on her head.

  “My, don’t you look pretty, mum,” the upstairs maid said, smiling in pleasure.

  “Pas trop mal,” Minou decided, as she took a last turn before a pier glass. She gave a little shrug of satisfaction and sallied forth to greet her father, just ninety minutes after leaving him. The lengthy interval convinced Lord Harlock the girl was indeed Marie’s daughter.

  Chapter Two

  While Lady Céleste prepared her toilette, their lordships sat below discussing her appearance at Berkeley Square, with the elder trying to convince Degan that she was indeed Sal, and Degan trying equally hard to warn the elder to caution.

  “For your sake, I hope she is not,” Degan said curtly. “A daughter running around the countryside unchaperoned in boy’s clothing, and drinking brandy as though it were water, will do you little credit. It’s infamous carrying-on. And what the devil is keeping her? She’s been up there for hours.”

  “She is Marie’s daughter too,” Harlock pointed out with a patient smile.

  Suddenly she appeared at the doorway. Harlock turned pale and said, “Bless my soul! What a turn she gave me. The image of her mother.”

  Degan arose without quite knowing he did it, to pay homage to the entrance of a lady into the room. The sex at least of the person standing before them was in no doubt. A pair of white shoulders, dainty and well formed, were not the only clue. The gold satin curtain was stylishly draped over her curving bosom, tightly cinched at the waist. No male had such a body, and no female either that Degan had ever seen. The Chinese shawl, heavily fringed, trailed from her fingers. The head was held at a coquettish angle, tilted to one side, and an arch smile was on her lips. The face, free
of tangled mats of hair and dirt, was seen to be kittenish in shape, with high cheeks tapering to a small pointed chin. She took two steps into the room, then lifted her arms and did a pirouette. “You like, Papa? Yes?” she asked.

  “Charming, my dear,” Harlock said warmly, and walked toward her.

  She tried a step forward to greet him, and found her shoeless feet caught up in the train as a result of her turn. She would have gone falling to the floor if he had not been there to catch her. “Ah, quelle gauchérie!” she said, and laughed up into his face before stooping over, with a quite careless disregard for her hastily constructed gown, which plunged with the movement. Degan averted his head in alarm that approached panic, to examine a very inferior Italian painting of the Ponte Vecchio for ninety seconds, till she had regained her posture and her gown.

  “At least we won’t need a doctor to tell us she’s a woman, eh, Degan?” Harlock joked.

  “Your daughter was a girl, sir, if I recall,” was his stiff, embarrassed answer.

  “But certainly I was a girl. How else does one become a woman?” she asked, with a contemptuous flicker of a glance toward Degan.

  “How old is she?” Degan asked his cousin.

  “Dix-neuf,” she answered. “I can speak for myself, me. I was nineteen years old le quinze Ventôse.”

  “Eh? Your birthday is in March,” her father pointed out.

  “We have a new calendar in France,” she told him. “Dating from 1792 we have the new calendar, twelve months with thirty days each, three décadis. Started to date from the proclamation of the Republic, on September 22, 1792, but not commenced till last October, we started in the year two. We missed year one.”

  “That leaves five days over,” Degan said, listening with interest to this.

  “Six in leap years,” she said. “They throw them in at the end of the year—sans-culottides they are called, for the sansculottes.”

  “Damned nonsense,” he muttered.

  “Damned smart nonsense,” she answered knowingly, unaware of the widening of Degan’s eyes at her outspoken language. “The Sans-Culottes now work nine days in a row instead of six, with one day off each décadi, and pretend to love it. If they don’t, Sainte Guillotine convinces them. Eh bien, let us speak of other things.” She walked forward and sat down, disposing her long train in a heap on the floor, and sticking her stockinged feet into the pocket for extra warmth.

  “What’s this? No shoes?” Harlock asked, with an admiring peep at a pair of trim ankles.

  “I am the sans-chaussure, Papa, not a sans-culotte, I assure you.”

  “But where are your shoes?”

  “I have no clothes. None at all. I wear your curtain, and Miss Pringle’s petticoats, somebody else’s stockings, and the bureau’s scarf. You will buy me some lovely gowns, yes?”

  “To be sure, my dear, I will.”

  Degan sat on confounded and highly displeased at a discussion of a young lady’s undergarments. “We have matters of greater import than your wardrobe to discuss,” he said rather sharply. “We are eager to hear whether your mother and Edward are alive.”

  “Of course they are! What do you think, that I sit here smiling, me, if my maman and cher Édouard are not alive? Nom d’un nom, he is inhuman, this one,” she said to her father.

  Degan’s eyes flashed at her belittling manner of indicating his presence, but the father spoke up. “Why don’t you tell us all about it, Sal?” He was smiling so inanely at the girl that Degan saw he must listen closely to her story for inaccuracies. His suspicions were not wholly abated to discover the person was a female. She had very little in common with a lady in his view.

  “I tell you everything, Papa,” she said, patting his knee in a fashion that bore, in Degan’s mind, traces of a streetwalker, though to be sure this was no more than an impression. He had no actual acquaintance with such low creatures.

  “Where are they?” Degan asked.

  She turned a white shoulder purposefully on him and addressed her remarks to her father. Over the back of her chair, he saw the shoulder and six inches of back, every inch of both naked. He had a fleeting sensation that she had lost her gown again, and arose to put her shawl around her nakedness. She looked up at him out of the corner of her eyes and smiled. “Merci, monsieur,” she said. He felt suddenly warm under his collar, and took up a seat at a good safe distance from this daughter of Satan.

  “Maman and Édouard are at the Maison Belhomme in Paris,” she began. “It is an insane asylum just north of St. Antoine, on the rue de Charonne.”

  “They’ve never gone mad!” he exclaimed, turning pale.

  “Mad? Oh no, Mama is as sly as ever. It is not really a madhouse. Well, partly it is, but the doctor Belhomme, he is as clever as may be. He has the connections, tu comprends? It is where prisoners with money find safety. He has friends in high places.”

  “I don’t understand. Is it an asylum or a prison?” Degan asked, focusing all his attention on her story.

  “It was an asylum,” she explained, with very scanty patience. “After the Conciergerie was overfull, and Luxembourg Palace turned into another jail, also soon fall, and half the abbeys in France stuffed full of political prisoners, Dr. Belhomme had the idea to turn his asylum into a prison for patients supposedly too ill to stand trial.”

  “What happened to his lunatics?” Degan asked.

  “His business was falling off. He was not half full at all, which is why he started the prison. Others have died since or been taken home. Still a few remain, pushed off up to the attic, where they do not stay, but make a great nuisance belowstairs. In the autumn of ‘93 Belhomme opened his doors to prisoners. That was when things turned really bad, you must have heard?”

  “We assumed your grandfather was executed with the Girondists last October,” Harlock said. “Did Armand get to Belhomme’s?”

  “No, it was not open yet. He went to the guillotine. Right after the purge Belhomme opened his doors. The radicals enacted the Law of Suspects, virtually taking away any measure of safety for anyone. Mama and Édouard and myself were denied certificates of good citizenship because of Grandpère Augé. You can’t move without the certificate. We were required to appear before the Vigilance Committee, and thrown into the Conciergerie.”

  “Good God, you were never in that black hole! They say there is no escaping the Conciergerie,” Harlock marveled.

  “We escaped, Mama and Édouard and I, but it was very dear. Mama’s friends negotiated with Belhomme to accept us into his maison—at five thousand livres each!”

  “How much would that be in our money, Degan?” Harlock asked.

  “About three hundred pounds.”

  “Each,” Minou pointed out, “and the monthly charge half that again. And we have been there nearly ten months. Imaginez un peu...”

  “English, Sal,” her father reminded her.

  “Where did you get so much money, with all properties confiscated?” Degan asked suspiciously.

  “All property was not confiscated,” she pointed out, disliking these interruptions to her story. “Grandpère’s lands and money—that was gone, but Mama had her jewels. If she had deposited them at the Assembly as a gift to the nation like the others we might have been spared, but she only left off paste replicas—Grandpère suggested it. We had done all the other things of the patriots, and thought we might escape. We quit wearing powdered wigs first, then gave up wigs entirely, and wore the hair unpowdered. The sans-culottes decided it was a waste of flour to powder the hair, when there was not enough flour for bread. We put off our panniers and took the silver buckles off our shoes to put on the tricolor rosettes like everyone else, and Édouard even switched from breeches to pants like a workman, hoping to be mistaken for a sans-culotte, but—”

  “Just what is this sans-culotte you keep speaking of?” her father asked, his head reeling.

  “Oh Papa, how ignorant you are in England! Sans-culotte is another name for revolutionary. A journalist, a royalist jour
nalist bien entendu, made up the name as an insult, but the revolutionaries took it as their name, and soon the aristos were dashing out to buy up pants and suspenders to try to pass for what they were not.”

  “So, what happened after you got into this insane asylum?” Degan prodded her on.

  “Oh, it was charming there. No bars, no guards—a very nice establishment, with a garden and orchard for strolling, and music and cards in the evening, and the food not so very disgusting. There were no maggots in the bread, at least. But the greatest attraction chez Belhomme was safety. His ‘patients’ were never called to trial, you see. Their accusations became conveniently ‘lost’ in the public prosecutor’s office. Belhomme was in league with Fouquier-Tinville, of course, paying him I don’t know what huge sum to go along with the scheme. Except for the insane, who had a habit of escaping from their rooms and charging into the saloon, it was not at all bad. Visitors were allowed, and the inmates quite charming. The duchesse d’Orleans is there, Papa, carrying on an affair with Rouzet, the deputy—imagine! We had a lovely actress, Mademoiselle Lange, who would perform for us in the evenings. The comte de Volney was there—he wrote about ruined empires and things, rather a bore actually. And we were allowed company, but no balls.”

  “Your mother and Edward, they are still there? They are safe?” Harlock demanded eagerly.

  “Yes, they are safe enough, but the money runs low. The jewels are all gone, and the last payment is only good till the end of July. He uses the old calendar, Belhomme. Lots of people do. It is very dear—seventy-five hundred livres a month for the three of us. And he will not be put off, that Belhomme, who is not at all bel. The duchesse de Châtelet refused to pay, and was promptly shipped off to a real prison, where she was condemned to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal. It is all business with Belhomme. He is not amenable to flirtation. Mama tried that stunt,” the girl said frankly. “Of course, he has an archwife, who is every bit as sly as himself.”

  “How can we get money to them?” Harlock asked.

  “Mama said you would contrive, Papa,” Minou said, with a ravishing smile of trust.