Danielle, one of three young maids employed to tend the animals and gardens and assist in meal preparations, had been in the paddock on a stool, scrubbing the udder of one poorly producing cow and slapping flies from her face when she saw the man amid the naked pear trees and thought, My God, but he is beautiful! Thank you for this gift today! She left the stool and the muddy bovine for the orchard, stopping several yards away and drawing her wool shawl about her shoulders.
'Good morning,' Danielle said. 'Are you lost?'
The man raised his hand in tentative greeting — a fine, strong hand it was, a working man's hand with dark knuckle hair and calluses — and said, 'Not now that I've beheld you.' He smiled, and Danielle could see that his teeth were fine and white. Her mother, before she had died, had told Danielle that good teeth meant a good heart.
Danielle didn't back away nor did she turn her gaze to the ground as the finer of France's daughters would have done in the presence of a strange man. She was not a maid in the sense the Maid of Orleans had been; Danielle had had her lovers, most of them young doctors at Bicetre and an occasional nurse, who brought her to their private offices within the heavy walls of the institution, made over her lush body on firm, practical sofas, then laughed at her and sent her back to the barn with a slap to the ass. The Revolution stated there was to be no more class distinction, and Paris had turned nearly upside down with its fervent attention to la chose publique , 'public things' which had to be monitored for counter-revolutionary thought and action, yet Danielle and her sister maids at the hospital farm found their lives little changed. The gnats and flies were as thick as before, the cows as dirty, the pears in the orchard as worm-ridden, and the doctors as lustful towards girls in maid garb.
The young man beneath the pear branches was quite handsome, with dark hair, a black beard, and gentle, crinkling eyes. He had obviously scaled the stone wall, and had torn the knee of his breeches.
'Are you thirsty, sir?' Danielle asked. The man nodded, and she led him past the dirty cow and the stool to the well. Here he put down his worn leather satchel and drank countless dipperfuls which she supplied from the dented tin bucket. Her fingers brushed his once as she passed the dipper, and the hairs on her knuckles stood up at attention.
'What brings you here?' she pressed as he sipped. 'You're not a lost patient with a simple mind, are you, to stumble back to the hospital from which you were attempting escape?'
He saw that she was joking, and he smiled broadly and shook his head.
'No,' he said. 'I'm from the north, and have come to Paris for work as my home and shop were burned in a fire just a week ago, leaving me without means. I am a cobbler by trade. An accident it was, with the wind knocking a lantern from the window on to the floor. Christ, such a loss.' He paused to wipe stray drops from his beard. 'But I cannot make it over, cannot make it right. So I brought a few things with me to the city. From the road I spied soft and browned pears, hiding in the tall grass from last autumn, and climbed the wall in hopes of plucking some without being spied. Then I saw you and was glad I'd been seen.'
'Rotten pears!' Danielle raised a brow. 'The third estate cannot say they eat such things now, for dire poverty is of the old time! Shush!'
'They cannot say, but they certainly can eat, yes?'
Danielle smiled, then tipped her head. 'This is a hospital, and a prison. There are shoes always in need of repair. I would think you could find work here, if you would like?'
'I might like that very much,' said the man.
Up the boxwood-lined path from the pigs' paddock strolled the two other maids, Marie and Clarice, each steering a waddling sow with a stick. But they only smiled at Danielle, allowing their friend her time, and trudged on to the stoop and rear door that led to Bicetre's kitchen. The pigs were poked and prodded into small wicker cages by the door, where they would await a fate their grub-fed brains could not fathom.
Danielle offered the man a place to rest in the empty weanling calves' barn and left him alone several hours until she found a spare moment between her farming and kitchen duties. She carried with her a slab of ham, some bread, and a bottle of wine beneath her skirt, pilfered from the enormous cellar beneath the kitchen. The two shared food and drink in the straw. And then kisses, caresses. She learned that he was Alexandre Demanche, twenty-two, an orphan raised in the countryside outside Beauvais. He had been engaged but never married, for the young woman had died of consumption three weeks before they were to wed. Alexandre learned that she was Danielle Boquet, born in Paris to a patient at Bicetre who expired during childbirth, leaving Danielle to be raised by various matrons about the institution who taught her to cook, garden and manage livestock. In all her nineteen years, she had only set foot off Bicetre's property to attend weekly mass. She was, she admitted, afraid of the city and its people, but felt safe behind the stone walls of the Little Farm.
In the morning Danielle presented Alexandre to Claude LeBeque, the pudgy little man who was in charge of the massive loads of laundry produced within the thick walls of the hospital and prison. She stopped him at the hospital's front gate. Behind him on the street milk carts and fish wagons rattled back and forth in the cold spring sun, and children were tugged behind mothers with baskets on their arms and hats pinned to their hair.
LeBeque pulled at his substantial, red-splotched nose, then sniffed at being detained. 'This man needs work? You're good for what, Monsieur?'
'Good with shoes,' said Alexandre.
'So you say?'
'Someone must supply clothing and shoes to the inmates,' said Danielle. 'Who would that be?'
LeBeque pulled his nose again, then a small smile found his cracking lips. He dabbed at his fleshy forehead with a filthy handkerchief and purred, 'That would be me.'
Alexandre stepped forward. 'I understand this place houses a good many people and therefore, I suspect, a good many shoes. I mend shoes and I make shoes. Have you a need for such as myself?'
LeBeque shrugged and raised a brow in a way that seemed to tease. 'Oh, I might find a place for you. I'll send word soon. Don't go too far, sir.'
With permission to stay on the premises and await hiring, Alexandre made a tidy bunk for himself in the empty barn. He used a blanket Danielle brought from her own room in the cellar and rolled his cape into a pillow. She helped rake and toss out the mouldy straw and pile up fresh that she'd brought in from the sheep's shed. A roost of swallows, perturbed at losing nesting space, squawked, swooped, and evacuated with a swirl of scissored tails and batting of sharp wings.
