Read Online The Porcelain Dove by Delia Sherman - Free Book Online Page B

least, the distance between the hôtel Fourchet and the hôtel Malvoeux wasn't far. It seemed to me that M. du Fourchet's coachman had no sooner turned out of the rue Quincampoix than he was reining up the horses and shouting for someone to come untie the duchesse de Malvoeux's trunks while I peeked nervously from the window. Save for a single guttering flambeau, the courtyard was dark as a pit; alighting from the coach, I could see nothing of the hôtel save three stained marble steps and a scarred black door.
    The running footman mounted the steps and gave the door six new dents with the knob of his staff. Time passed; he knocked again.The door opened a little way, grudgingly, and a thin, seamed face peered around it.
    "It'll be the new mistress' servingmaid no doubt," said the face sourly. "Well, come in, girl, and bring one of those bags with you. 'Tis not my place to carry bags and boxes. Madame's servants must see to madame's things; I know nothing of women's fol-de-rols."
    Reluctantly, I followed the face into a high, dark hall lit only by a branch of candles on a gilded console. "I am Dentelle," said the face's owner, and when I neither exclaimed nor swooned, pursed his lips together like an alms-box. "I am the valet of M. le duc de Malvoeux. Madame's apartments are left at the top of the stairs. Cul-terroux!"—this to the footman, who was staggering under the weight of a banded trunk—"Have a care with that trunk. Those urns flanking the stairs are from Cathay, brought to France by the great-grandfather of M. le duc, and worth twice your miserable hide."
    Jean, my friend and faithful adviser, Jean agrees that I've caught Dentelle to the life: the face of a river pike and the soul of a dung hill cock. Timid and strange as I felt that first night, I'm proud to say I retained sufficient spirit to hate him at once.
    "Oh?" I said. "And is his great-grandsire's taste in urns the reason M. le duc is too poor to hire lackeys? Is there no one to wait upon him and his new duchesse but one miserable valet? Bah. This is not what I am accustomed to, me."
    Dentelle puffed out his chest, drew himself stiffly upright, and clapped his hands sharply together, calling the pie-faced boy and three other lackeys up from the hôtel's nether regions. "Carry this paraphernalia above," he said, disdainfully flicking his fingers at my mistress' trunks. "And one of you keep a watch at the end of the street for monsieur's carriage. Fetch some tapers, and you, Gaston, sweep the floor. Who knows what harm all this to-ing and fro-ing, all these bundles and boxes, might not do the parquet? Well, louts? Do you wait for Our Lord to come again?"
    With a great show of energy and speed, the lackeys hefted madame's luggage upstairs, glaring at me the while as though I were to blame for the valet's ill-temper. They dumped everything outside the door and slouched away, leaving me to muddle along alone. For an hour or more, I dragged trunks into the dressing-room and emptied them, hastily laying gowns in the tall presses and stuffing petticoats, stays, sleeve-ruffles, ribbons, chemises and caps higgledy-piggledy into drawers to get them out of the way.
    I've always found it a tedious business unpacking and bestowing my mistress' clothes, but never more than on my first night in the hôtel Malvoeux. The dressing-room was cramped and musty; the bedchamber was hot and ill-aired. There was no antechamber. The furniture was as grand as you please, though outmoded and sadly sparse: a bed, a tambour table, a satin-covered bergère by the fire, and a long-case clock, all of them set far apart as feuding relatives and meagerly lit by a pair of wax candles on the mantelpiece. What with the lateness of the hour and the shadows in the corners, I was as frightened and low-spirited as a whore in a Hôtel Dieu. Mme de Bonsecours feared for her sister's happiness: at the moment, I feared chiefly for my own. Olympe, Mignon, Saint-Cloud, LeBeau—all my friends and my family