Chapter Six
When Celine woke, she was so comfortable her body experienced it as pain.
Her ankles rubbed across fine, warm linen.
The mattress cradled her. Pillows as deep and soft as dreams bloomed around her, and all was enclosed in heavy drapes, her own drowsy universe.
Did every person who had woken in a bed this morning understand the primal gratitude they should feel?
When she at last opened her eyes, she pushed the bed curtain aside with a heavy arm and looked at the clock.
Just gone eleven, its chiming must finally have woken her.
It was a mantel clock in the style of Thuret, upright and potbellied, standing on small peg feet and wearing a crown of finials.
She had inspected it in a dreamlike delirium last night and hadn’t taken in the huge fireplace upon which it sat: carved of pale marble, two half-naked women with lovely tits holding the mantel aloft between them.
A deep, self-satisfied shiver ran through her, and she came up onto her knees, impatiently opening all the bed curtains. She looked about her as though her bed were a raft, and while she slept, it had sailed her into some distant safe harbour, exotic and unknown.
A rug covered the entire floor, though it was a large room. The walls were painted an indeterminate colour—a cool blue, or grey—and were decorated with white geometric moulding. The restraint felt almost unbearably mature. The vast ceiling, the silence, the elegance were all the more deeply felt.
Bowlegged chairs sat about the room on their dainty feet, and against the far wall was a long sofa covered in silk a shade darker than the walls. Beside the window was a woman’s writing desk, well furnished with new paper and ink, upon which Celine’s exhausted candle from last night still sat.
Last night, she had thought the footman would show her to the attic and lock her in. Instead, this.
A brisk knock came on the door, and though she’d expected it, her breathing quickened. She had known the duke would want to make use of her while she was here. She would greet the duke with something crude and abrasive—Here for a fuck?—or should she pretend to be asleep? Sick?
Before she could settle on a response, the doors opened and the world spilled in.
Maids in caps and aprons, their happy chatter lighting up the room even before the drapes were opened.
In sunlight the walls became a gorgeous pale green, the polished wood of the furniture a deep, warm brown.
One maid built up the fire, and two others began laying bathing things on a cloth-draped table.
Her fright began to warm and melt into giddy amazement.
For the past year she had lived like a rat, her degradation total. This morning, she had woken in the house of a duke. The signs were all about her in the happy, well-fed servants and the high, clean windows and the logs of wood in the fire. Such stupid, gorgeous, excessive luxury.
She had given herself these things.
A tall, pale maid with red hair came directly to the bed and began arranging the pillows so that she might sit comfortably upright. Lavender wafted behind her, the scent so clean and fresh she could’ve been put whole through the ironing press that morning.
Unbidden, Celine thought of waking up in Dieppe three mornings ago.
Down by the harbour, her cheek pressed into hard stone.
She’d realised slowly that someone had taken her coat from her while she slept, and she hadn’t even woken.
Corpses lay like that—on stone, poured out and uncaring.
She’d sat up, heart thumping, dizzy until the seaside stink slapped her awake.
She wasn’t the only one in that alley waiting for her chance to board a ship; others sat quietly talking, or sleeping, or dead.
She’d paid the last of her money to be hidden inside a coil of rope. In it, she could see nothing but thin strips of light, which lit the hairy edges of the rope. No horizon to give context to the sudden lurch and drop and rise of her body. Nothing to smell but hemp and rot.
She’d tried not to think anymore—I want you to launch me on society and help me make an excellent marriage—about what she was sailing towards, what she would say, how she would even get an audience with the duke.
Instead, she’d thought about how her mother used to hide coins inside balls of spun wool.
She wouldn’t have survived another night in Dieppe, but she hadn’t been sure she would survive the trip across the Channel, either.
No thought could have been more unwelcome.
She allowed the English maid to help her upright and drank in sunlight. She had come for everything she could get, and she wasn’t going to spoil it with dark thoughts. She would suck down every last sweet drop, and then grind the dry remainder between her teeth and swallow that down as well.
A tray was placed across her lap, and then it became impossible to think anything.
Upon it were pastries topped with fruit (pregnant apricots, glistening pears, jewelled raspberries); thick slices of warm bread with slabs of butter; a bowl of porridge with a spool of honey on top; and a cup as delicate as eggshell, into which a stream of coffee was being poured.
She looked up at the maid who was pouring the coffee and found herself the subject of that maid’s quite open regard. It was the redheaded girl, whose fantastical colouring was somewhat spoiled by a pair of mud-brown eyes. “Good morning, miss,” the maid said in rickety French. “Eat please.”
Celine tore the bread between her fingers, and as the body pulled apart, it released the loamy scent of fermentation. Life.
She stared at it, this golden, giving thing she held within her hands, and didn’t know if she could do something this intense in front of other people. Putting life into her body. Devouring it. Making herself part of the world again.
She bit into the bread. Closed her eyes.
It was too overwhelming to be something she enjoyed. She could only endure it. She could only feel her heartbeats tearing up her chest, like an animal scrabbling up the bank of a river that had tried to drown it. Happiness drowning out her mouth, her mind.
“Coffee?”
She gasped, dragged her eyes open, and nodded. The smell was one pleasure, the taste and temperature another, but as great was the pleasure of holding fine china, touching her lips to the delicate blue edge.
So silly and frivolous.
She stuffed more food in her mouth, trying to push down the wail rising with some force up her throat.
While she ate, the maid chatted brightly, mixing English words into her French with a seeming lack of self-consciousness.
Celine listened, absorbing the harmless talk the same way she had absorbed the carpet and the coffee and the tall, quiet ceilings.
“I worked here since seven years,” the maid was saying, “when I first left home. You very lucky to be guesting here. I won’t work for anyone else. Her Grace is a very good one, always generous and kind.”
She thought of the duke last night, her eyes like shards of ice, saying, You will live to regret this very much indeed.
Generous and kind? This na?ve girl had no idea who she worked for. Not only was the duke not generous and kind, she had let her childhood friend Bastien go to the guillotine. She had ravished Celine, then left her to die.
“I’ll have more coffee, please,” she cut in, suddenly glutted on the maid’s happy nonsense. What had the duke said about Bastien, instead of saving him? I’m glad someone’s going to shut him up permanently.
She shivered.
The sooner she never had to think about the duke again, the better.
She had just bitten into the apricot pastry when a knock sounded on the door—No, not yet—and a moment later a fat, soberly dressed young woman walked in.
She was dressed in a man’s breeches, stockings, waistcoat, and coat.
Her brass buckles shone, and her hair was pulled back neatly into a ponytail, tied with a green velvet ribbon.
In the face of this self-possessed servant, Celine felt suddenly at a disadvantage, like the sweet apricot in her mouth had made her vulnerable to attack.
“I’m Miss Everett, Her Grace’s valet,” the woman said.
Her French was native, but she pronounced her name in the English manner.
It had the effect of a single word in a sentence written at the opposite slant to the rest. “You will accompany Her Grace to call on an acquaintance this morning, and she has asked me to see to your toilet. Has everything been to your liking?”
Making social calls? Already? That was good. That was very good. My God, the blackmail was working. She washed the sweetness down with coffee and said with great understatement, “Quite.”
Miss Everett’s eyes warmed a little, as though she had heard more than Celine intended. “I’ve ordered a bath brought up. It’ll be here momentarily.”
Even as she spoke, the door opened and a full-sized bath came through on the shoulders of two footmen. Celine’s skin felt suddenly parched. Maids trooped in behind and poured water, steaming and fragrant, from copper pails they carried in pairs.
When they had left again, Miss Everett said, “Adele will perform the duties of a lady’s maid for you while you stay under the duke’s roof.”
The red-haired maid curtseyed. She was pretty, with a stylish, sophisticated air that set her apart from the other maids—until she turned her mud-brown eyes on the object of her curiosity or opened her mouth to speak.
“Adele speaks French, though may I suggest, Miss Genet, that you endeavour to improve your English as soon as may be.”
“I am pleasure to help you learn, miss,” Adele said, beaming. Her smile further marred the picture of sophistication, as she was missing one of her canine teeth.
The offer, made with such straightforward kindness, moved Celine.
Her English was already quite good. In her early days as a courtesan, her bread-and-butter had been young English gentlemen making their grand tour of the Continent.
But Adele couldn’t know that. She reached out and clasped the maid’s hands.
“My sweet Adele,” she said, and gave the girl an impromptu kiss on the back of each hand. Adele’s eyebrows rose nearly all the way to her hairline. Celine winked and switched to English. “I am the excellent student.”
The bath was heaven.
She sank all the way down so the scalding water rose above her breasts, marking a crisp line on her skin below which she turned strawberry-pink.
Adele scrubbed her hands and feet, vigorous and thorough.
She scrubbed off the harbour and the ship, the road out of Paris, the garret, the rat droppings, the effluvium from Mathilde’s body.
She talked the whole time, which helped keep Celine’s mind off the story her body was telling.
Miss Everett, who had been watching with the strict attention of a convent school nun, came forward and inspected Celine’s fingers one by one. “Scrub her again,” she said.
Afterwards, Adele sat Celine forward and methodically washed every inch of her hair, scrubbing her scalp last of all with blunt fingertips. She lathered in sweet-smelling soap, then rinsed it out with fresh water that rushed over Celine, surrounding her, warm and fragrant.
She took a visceral joy in feeling clean. When was the last time she’d really been clean?
It was Mathilde who used to bully her, Louise, and Marie into carrying pails of water up the five flights of stairs to their garret room to wash.
Bodies first, clothes after. Mathilde who resented and chastised them because they stank worse than a wet dog, and if they didn’t keep clean, disease would come.
Mathilde, who had died.
“Bring her to the dressing room,” Miss Everett said, then disappeared through a door by the fireplace, which Celine had assumed was a closet.
“Dressing room?” she echoed, startled. It was enough to scatter the dark thoughts that had been circling. She had a dressing room?