“Taste one and see if you can guess.” She was almost quivering with excitement.
Charles obediently took a cake. Marie-Ange looked doubtfully at the old beggar, moved a little closer to Charles’s side, and politely held out the napkin to Marin as well.
To Charles’s surprise, Marin made her the ghost of a bow and held up the proffered cake in a kind of toast.
Charles bit into the cake’s rich sweetness and his eyes widened in surprise. “It’s wonderful! A taste I’ve never had before.”
Marin nodded and muttered something around his mouthful.
“It’s the inside of my coconut! Maman chopped it up and sprinkled it on the cakes.”
“Tell her if she makes more, they will be the rage of all Paris! Thank you, mademoiselle, and our thanks to your mother.”
Marie-Ange dimpled and curtsied. “I am going to Martinique, maitre,” she confided, “the very first minute I am old enough. I will marry Antoine and we will send Maman all the coconuts she wants and she will be rich from her cakes.” With a confident smile that surprised Charles with a glimpse of the young woman she would be one day, Marie-Ange hauled up the tail of her cloak and went back to the bakery.
Marin, licking his fingers, watched her go. “That one is very pretty, but she is not Claire. I can tell by how brown her hair is. She is very kind. But not Claire. Sometimes I still find Claire.” He frowned suddenly and shook his head. “But sometimes demons steal her golden hair and when I ask for alms, they laugh at me.”
Charles waited, baffled by the way the old man’s mind twisted and turned among its phantasms.
“Fair as the moon. Sad like the moon.” Marin sighed out a miasma of rotten teeth and garlic and clutched at Charles’s cassock. “More fair than you,” he said, looking hard at Charles’s hair. “Do you know what they did to her? Do you?”
“No.” Charles gently released himself from the clutching fingers.
“Twelve years old.” Marin had turned half away and seemed to be watching the blue shadows creep across the snow in the street. “She was little, like a doll. Dwarf, some called her, but she wasn’t; she was made as prettily as any girl. Her hair was like curled moonlight and they dressed her in jewels and satin for her betrothal. To that pig Conde. He was embarrassed because she was so little. He made them put heels on her like stilts. She could hardly walk. When all the show was over and it was time for her to dance with him, the actors wheeled a little bridge up to where she sat, raised up in a wooden stand with the rest of the nobility. She had to manage her skirts and walk across it to meet her bastard bridegroom. She did, and they started to dance, with everyone watching. My Claire did the best she could, but those devil’s heels pitched her onto her face. Everyone laughed at her. The Conde was seventeen, he was nearly a man, but did he feel any pity, did he help her up? Not he; he turned red as a dog’s behind and refused to look at her.” Marin’s eyes came back to Charles. “I tried to kill him,” he said matter-of- factly.
“You-how?” And how are you still alive if you tried, Charles didn’t say.
“I was a Conde page. They dressed us up and gave us boys’ swords and placed us around the dancing floor. The swords were sharp, and when she fell and he didn’t help her, I ran at him, trying to draw, but my sword stuck in its scabbard. They only thought I was running to Claire’s rescue. So they sent me to her household. So golden, so pretty…” His lucidity vanished in a long-drawn wail. “Claire, forgive me, Sacred Heart, forgive me…”
He lunged away from Charles and flailed his way through the tumbled snow up St. Genevieve’s hill. With a sick sense of pity for the little princess and the boy the old man had been, Charles watched him go. Then, thinking uneasily about Marin’s demons and the sword story, and remembering that Marin had struck down and probably killed the man who had tried to stab him in the tavern fight, Charles rang the postern bell.
Chapter 24
In the salle des actes, the familiar lunacy of rehearsal came as a relief. Germain Morel was shouting at Henri Montmorency, who was mounted on his golden plinth and pointing his baton at his two-soldier brigade with utter disregard for music, choreography, or the dancing master’s exasperation. At the other end of the room, Jouvancy stalked back and forth in front of the stage like a displeased crow, listening to a scene from the Latin tragedy.
“No!” Jouvancy jumped onto the stage and grabbed the fledgling St. Nazarius by the back of his coat. “You are a saint! Have you never heard of humility? Dear God, are you trying to look like a fat merchant addressing his guild?” With both hands, he pushed the boy’s shoulders forward, shoved his head lower, and stepped back. “Better.”
St. Nazarius, looking now like a wild-eyed hunchback, quavered. “Yes, mon pere. Shall I go on?”
“Yes. No! You’re still not right.”
“But, mon pere,” St. Nazarius ventured from his crouch, “the saints seem proud to be saints. At least, their statues do. I mean, not like this-”
“They’re not proud till they’re dead.” Jouvancy glowered at his actor as though offering him that opportunity, then seemed to think better of it. “Watch.” In a silken transformation, the rhetoric master softened his spine, bent his neck just enough, opened his hands, and became the perfect humble saint. “Like this, do you see?”
The other actors, recognizing the start of a long ordeal for the unfortunate Nazarius, faded silently into the background. Keeping his face carefully straight, Charles moved so that Jouvancy would see that he’d arrived. The rhetoric master gave him a vague glance, as though he’d forgotten quite who Charles was, and turned his attention back to his saint.
At the dance end of the room, Morel was now standing on Montmorency’s plinth, directing the two soldiers through the steps of their Air Anime with authoritative grace and singing the music.
“Do I have to sing?” Montmorency asked in horror when he finished.
“No, Monsieur Montmorency,” Charles cut in smoothly, to keep Morel from saying what he was all too obviously about to say. “No one is asking you to sing. Monsieur Morel, shall I work with the other dancers?”
“If you would be so kind, maitre,” Morel said through his teeth. “Now, Monsieur Montmorency, let me see you direct your soldiers.” With the light of battle in his eye, he took up his small violin from a bench against the wall.
Smiling with satisfaction that Montmorency had met his match, Charles went to the other dancers. Most were going silently through their steps, though without the full execution the steps would have in performance. Marking the steps, dancers called it. Michele Bertamelli, though, was doing what he’d learned of his canarie as though the world were watching. Canaries were full of springing steps, and as Charles watched, Bertamelli nearly propelled himself through one of the south-facing windows.
“Doucement, Monsieur Bertamelli,” Charles cried, running across the floor and pulling the boy to a halt. “You are a magnificent jumper, but that is not all you must be to perform this dance!”
“But, Maitre du Luc, it only jumps, it jumps everywhere, what else does it do?” Bertamelli’s shoulders were around his ears. “So what else can I do?”
“For your jumps to be as beautiful as they can be, you must also know how to go slow, Monsieur Bertamelli. Remember, dancing is not the same as doing tricks.”
The little Italian stared at Charles in frank bewilderment.
“And jumping is like pulling a rabbit out of a hole,” Charles improvised, miming his words. “If I only reach down a little way and pull out my rabbit, well, it’s nice to see a rabbit, but it’s not all that exciting. But if I pull my rabbit out of a very deep hole, it is another thing entirely.” Charles extracted his imaginary rabbit.
Bertamelli’s eyes widened. “I see, I see!” He clapped his hands. Then his face fell. “If my jumps are the rabbit, maitre, where is the hole?”
“The hole is only a verbal figure, the kind you learn in the rhetoric classroom. You make your jumps more astonishing by being able to go slow as well as fast. So I am giving you a very very difficult exercise, mon brave,” Charles said gravely. If Bertamelli thought the exercise was so difficult that doing it well enhanced his honor, he would give his life’s blood to it.
“Watch now.” Charles walked across the salle and faced the boy. He drew himself up and began to walk. With utter concentration, so slowly, so intentionally, that every smallest movement, every lightest touch of a part of his foot on the floor was a physical revelation. Hardly breathing, Bertamelli watched, his wide black eyes seeming to
