I hesitate, cursing myself for this slip of the tongue. There was no need to allow this stranger such an undue glimpse into my mind. Not when the morbid fancies it devises are the only things I can still afford to call my own.
“It’s all right, p’tite,” she coaxes. “You can tell me of your thoughts. I will not turn them against you, I swear it.”
I hesitate another moment, but there is something beguiling about her interest. She looks about nineteen, a little older than most of the young women indentured here; at thirteen, I am among the youngest, though little Berthe is only ten. In the sallow gleam of firelight reflected by the tallow, the girl’s face is stern and wary. Her mouth sits slightly askew, dragged sideways by the sliver of a scar where someone must have split her lip. But though she is as flushed as any one of us, with damp hair plastered to her head, there is something oddly regal about her bearing.
As if she is some secret queen merely disguised as a wretch.
“Yes,” I admit, casting a look over my shoulder to make sure no one else is listening. The foreman, Etienne, is still nowhere to be seen, though he usually drifts stealthily about the floor like some malign wind. “Beelzebub, because he is le Diable’s general and his right hand.”
“So we are in hell, then,” she surmises with a solemn nod. “And Prudhomme our presiding Lucifer, I suppose. Stands to reason, sure enough; certainly reeks like the very pit in here. Tell me, p’tite, how long have you been here?”
“Three years,” I reply, gritting my teeth as the tallow resists my stir. “Since the bonnes soeurs at the orphanage indentured me to the maître. There is a contract, they said, a sum I must repay for my freedom. But if there is truly such a paper, I have never seen it.”
“Such an irony, to be sentenced to this miserable enfer by a clutch of nuns,” she mutters, her mouth twisting viciously against the seam of her scar. “I’ll tell you, should I ever find myself cast into true perdition, you had best believe I will have earned my own way there, rather than allowing myself to be tricked by a man again.”
“What happened to you?” I cannot keep myself from asking. “How did you come to be here?”
“I gave my heart to a gutless canaille with a cherub’s face,” she grinds out, spitting into the tallow. “He dragged me to the gaming halls in Montmartre nearly every night, gambled on my sight. But even a gift of prophecy like mine may sometimes grow clouded with such overuse. And then when I could not always see which cards would come, the bastard sold me to repay his debts! Can you imagine such a bedamned, shortsighted fool, to sell a divineress into servitude?”
A divineress. I sneak another look at her, wondering if it could be true. If those shrewd eyes, the sense of steel and outrage about her, are truly the marks of a sorceress rather than a mere survivor.
“And to be indentured to one such as Prudhomme …” She shakes her head bitterly. “You are right to liken him to the devil, p’tite. I have heard vile rumors of him for years, never thinking myself unlucky enough to wind up in his domain. They say he likes to inflict punishment for his own twisted pleasure.” Her eyes narrow with revulsion. “Sometimes, even, to kill.”
I swallow hard, an icy flurry coursing down my spine despite the stifling heat. I have only seen the maître a handful of times, a smallish man strutting about the floor in his thread-of-gold waistcoat and red-soled shoes. Bewigged and powdered like a fop, yet gimlet-eyed in his inspection of the candles. The rest of the time the overseers act as his hands, whisking away the comeliest older girls from the floor and ferrying them to his rooms. Most times the girls return, wan and mute but dressed in finer chemises, allotted larger portions of our morning gruel at dejeuner.
Sometimes they do not.
“Maybe it’s only stories,” I attempt, more to reassure myself than because I believe it. Several of the girls around me have heard her, too; I can see them turning over their shoulders to flick fearful glances at her, murmuring uneasily among themselves. “Empty breath and bluster. People will say anything to stir up scandal.”
“Not to a divineress, they won’t,” she counters. “Most would not risk crossing the likes of Agnesot Brodeur with lies.”
The girl at the cauldron next to mine scoffs through her plump lips, rolling her eyes disdainfully. Seventeen-year-old Eugenie is as lovely as the icons of Marie-Madeleine that hung on the orphanage walls, her face a dainty oval, eyes enormous and velvety brown.
“A divineress among us! How very lucky we are, to have such a sorceress amidst our ranks,” she croons mockingly. “And what are your powers, Agnesot, besides poor taste in men? Perhaps you can inflict the overseers with such dreadful cauchemars that they wet themselves in the night, and wake too afraid to whip us? Or no, that is too modest. Perhaps you can fly.”
Agnesot laughs lightly, almost to herself. “That depends,” she replies, twitching one shoulder in a careless shrug, “on what I am called to do. What do you wish for, Eugenie? What do you want most, in all the world?”
There is something about the way she says Eugenie’s name, like a menacing caress, that unnerves the other girl. I can see Eugenie tremble, as if nails have been raked down her spine. She blinks rapidly, struggling to compose herself.
“A … a husband, I suppose,” she finally manages, faltering a little. “A wealthy one like the maître, so I need never be anyone’s drudge again.”
“Easy enough,” Agnesot replies, inclining her head. “It will be done.”
Eugenie stares at her with flat incredulity, then sweeps her gaze theatrically around the room. “And yet here I still stand, with beef
