Chapter Twenty-Six #2
“After that,” Celine said into her knees, “there was undressing in windows and working the better whorehouses of the Palais-Royal. Police started raiding whenever virtue was up for debate. They called the queen a whore when they killed her”—she looked up, still flushed and bright-eyed, and began to laugh as though it were genuinely funny—“and meanwhile, the police are fingering the actual whores in the street to check for disease. Ah, fuck them all.” She wiped a hand over her red cheeks, where tears dried almost instantly.
“There was this one girl, Marguerite Prieur, who opened the door when the commissioner knocked. It was his first raid. He asked her, What do you do? and she replied, Everyone.” Another deep, appealing laugh, her head tipped back to open her throat, the bright eyes curved into crescents.
And yet tears still coursed from her eyes unchecked, leaving sticky tracks where they dried.
Kate was utterly captivated. She might never tire of listening to Celine talk.
The cold, intellectual part of her mind was trying to urge caution.
Not every part of her was so sanguine about jeopardising, in any way, the return of that letter.
She walked in here a week ago and threatened your life, she reminded herself, careful and measured.
You lost control in Paris. It was dangerous. You cannot afford to do it again.
But Celine had not entirely been a person to her, in Paris. Celine had not spoken to her like this, in Paris.
“And what did the great heroes of the Revolution make of brave Marguerite?” Celine said, fully unaware, as she always was, of how she had rocked Kate’s world.
“Why, they thought her a well-worn hole in the mattress, that’s all.
She wasn’t a woman, because the women were all at home, in a permanent state of pregnant milk-production.
Even Lady Liberty, spurting water from her nipples in public squares, was sent home in favour of manly Hercules.
Oh, those men rising up, declaring themselves equal to any other man born on this earth, thrusting their revolution through the nation, their great, phallic uprising; those heroic men declaring that a woman may not be political, may not be martial, may not write plays or pamphlets, and neither may she beg and neither may she receive welfare, and if she one day looks about her and discovers there is one currency she has always to hand, because her soul will never fall unawares out of the pocket of her body in the busy marketplace, and she decides to spend it, well then her body is public, and they may do with her as they please.
” She gasped and stretched her chin up. Her knees rocked forward, feet hitting the floor with a damp slap.
Her chest glistened, the neckline and armpits of her dress dark with sweat.
“You’re sick,” Kate said, coming to her feet.
She should have realised immediately. Celine had been clinging to consciousness the night she arrived, too nauseous even to eat.
She hadn’t stayed in bed a single day since.
She’d been out visiting, charming the Peckes, shopping, abetting Royce, strategizing victories, at the opera, at church …
Had she been in this state even while she transformed Lord Seaton from an existential threat into a powerful ally?
“You need to rest. God damn it, Celine, you should be in bed!”
“Oh, Your Grace! I am most humbly gratified by your concern!” Celine started to cackle, and Kate realised she was standing over her, ineffectually looming.
She couldn’t imagine a more helpless person than the young woman before her, sweating and shivering, her eyes bright with fever.
Laughing. Impossible. A light in her eyes that could never be tarnished.
A blade in her soul that could never be beaten.
Very well. If this was how Celine wanted to do it.
She picked Celine up by the waist, ignoring the feeble attempts to fight her off, and hoisted—Christ, had she been starving? How did a human body become so insubstantial?—her over her shoulder.
Celine sobbed and laughed and tried to knee her in the stomach. Kate ignored it all, then marched with grim purpose to the door, which she threw open.
“Where were you,” Celine gasped, half shrieking, “when the only well I could fetch water from spoiled, and I felt so sick I thought I was dying? Where were you when I begged on my knees to please suck an officer off, please, you’ve never had anyone like me, I’ll make you feel so good, I’ll take you to heaven, just so I could stay where they would feed me bread? ”
She wouldn’t listen. Fury drove her, and all she would concede was that Celine must rest, and that Celine must eat.
“Where were you,” screamed Celine, openly weeping now, “when Mathilde died? Where were you when we couldn’t even afford to move her body and the gentlemen kept calling?”
Such a frenzy possessed Celine then that Kate had to put her down or risk hurting her. She stepped back two careful paces, hands held open, unthreatening. Celine watched her like a fighter who has been soundly beaten but won’t concede, retreating to his corner to gasp and shake.
They were in a hallway; she couldn’t have said which. Only Celine was in focus.
“You left me,” Celine sobbed. “You left me.”
The sophisticated quality that came from Celine’s depth of experience, her quick mind and faceted personhood, was nowhere to be found. She was like a child.
Kate felt a repulsive embarrassment, and she was moved in a way that felt literal: an internal rearrangement, a melting, a brightening, a creation myth taking place somewhere in her guts.
After a long silence, Celine spoke again, composed now, and this time it was somehow as though she were the parent and Kate the child.
“When I am married,” Celine said, “I’ll have people who will come and sit with me when I’m sick, who will bring me broth and tell me I’m not dying and tell me how glad they are that I’m still here.
Do not imagine desire, or even romantic love, holds any sway over me. ”
She turned and walked away, somehow still upright, somehow still moving. A thin, unsteady figure making her way alone, catching herself occasionally on the wall. Then she stumbled, and stopped, and fell heavily against the wall. Kate started running and caught Celine just before she hit the floor.
She gathered the unconscious body into her arms and stood. Full of a hot and helpless rage she looked down at the woman she held, and in her brand-new heart, Celine’s words resounded: Who on this earth will tell me how glad they are that I’m still here?