Vonda McIntyre - The Moon and the Sun

Count Lucien watched her quizzically.

“I am investigating the nature of gravity,” Marie-Josèphe said haughtily. “As M. Newton did.” She took a bite of the apple. It crunched between her teeth, juicy and tart.

“If he has already done it,” Count Lucien said, “can you not leave these dangerous questions to him?”

Marie-Josèphe leaned toward him eagerly. “M. Newton discovered what gravity does—but he himself admitted he doesn’t know what it is. It would be wonderful, I think, to discover its nature. Is it a force? Is it the hand of God?” She spread her arms as wide as she could reach. “M. Newton made his discoveries by studying the planets—the largest things we know. Perhaps one should look at the smallest things!” She brought her hands close together. “Something causes the attraction. If distance attenuates it, might proximity concentrate it? Perhaps one could see it. If I had the use of Mynheer van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope—”

“If it’s there to be seen,” Count Lucien said, “why has Mynheer van Leeuwenhoek not seen it?”

“Because he wasn’t looking for it.” Suddenly shy—she had never confessed her ambition to anyone else—Marie-Josèphe spread her hands, releasing everything she had said. “Pay no attention—”

“Have you no faith in my philosophical inclinations, Mlle de la Croix?” Count Lucien said mildly. “Am I incapable of understanding your theories?”

“I don’t yet understand them myself, sir.” Marie-Josèphe glanced away, chastened. “They require time and work. I have too little of the former and too much of the latter.”

Unwilling to say more about her unlikely dreams, Marie-Josèphe rose and fetched her drawing box from where it had fallen when she confronted the Chevalier. She searched beneath the remnants of her musical score for a fresh sheet of paper. The ripped pages fell onto the Persian rug. Marie-Josèphe gathered them up.

“What is that?” Count Lucien asked.

“His Majesty’s cantata. My wretched composition.”

“It doesn’t satisfy you?”

“I thought—thanks to Sherzad—I had achieved something beyond my ability,” she said. “Now I don’t know what to think.” She offered him a page of the score. “See for yourself.”

He waved it off. “I haven’t the talent to imagine a piece from its written notes.”

“M. Coupillet says I’m an amateur, a woman, and he says the piece is too long… In that he’s quite right.”

“How does that make it wretched?”

The melody soared in Marie-Josèphe’s mind, melding with the song Sherzad sang from halfway down the Grand Canal.

“He hardly looked at it!” she exclaimed. “He said he wouldn’t direct it, he said women cannot—and he demanded, and I refused…”

“His Majesty admired—”

“Is His Majesty any different from the others?” Marie-Josèphe cried. “Does he want the music, or does he want my—my particular gratitude?”

“You’ve many reasons to be grateful to him—”

Marie-Josèphe bit back an angry response, an angry denial.

“—but has he demanded your… particular gratitude?”

“He’s been chivalry itself,” Marie-Josèphe said, embarrassed. “What I said was unworthy of him.”

“Even his detractors—”

“Detractors? Of His Majesty? In France?” Marie-Josèphe exclaimed.

Nonplussed, Lucien fell silent. He chuckled. “Everyone agrees His Majesty possesses superlative judgment of music. If your piece is too long, shorten it. Ask the aid of young master Scarlatti, who is too young yet to be concerned with any woman’s particular gratitude.”

“You underestimate Master Démonico. I did show it to him. He admired it. When he plays it, oh, it sounds… but Master Démonico plays celestial music for his finger-practice.” Marie-Josèphe scribbled a note to Domenico, sent it away with a servant, then squared the pages of the score and returned them to her drawing box. “Thank you for your good advice, Count Lucien. I’m glad you don’t reserve it for the King alone.”

“You may show me your gratitude—”

Marie-Josèphe looked up sharply.

“—by playing the composition for me,” Lucien said easily.

“Master Domenico’s skill—”

“—is extraordinary. I admit it. I’d rather hear the music from your hands.”

“It is very long.”

“So much the better.”

He poured more wine and looked out over the Grand Canal. They sat together in companionable silence and finished their picnic.

Marie-Josèphe sipped her wine and nibbled one last pastry. The servant, out of breath, returned with an answer to her note, a page bearing Domenico’s brave attempt at courtly language in his scrawled childish handwriting: “Signorina Maria must not worry another single moment, I fancied she would wish me to play her composition, because everything having HIS MAJESTY’s glory as its end is marvelously exciting; and when the desire to please Signorina Maria is joined to it, what further aim could one have?”

Marie-Josèphe showed the note to Count Lucien, folded it, and slipped it into her bodice, amused by Domenico’s response and grateful for it.

The sun was halfway through the sky.

“I must go,” Count Lucien said. “I must prepare for Carrousel.”

“And I must attend Mademoiselle.” Marie-Josèphe picked up a stick of charcoal. “But, please, sit still a moment. Let me draw your hands.”

“They are hardly my best feature,” he said. “I might at least have had dainty hands and feet.”

“Your hands are beautiful.” She sketched, but his rings distracted from the lines. She took his hand, amazed at her boldness—I must be drunker than I thought! she said to herself—and removed one of his rings. The warmth of his fingers caressed her palm. He might as well have caressed her face, her breasts, for heat flushed across her cheeks and her throat.

He submitted to her whim until she touched the sapphire ring set in gold, the one he always wore.

“I never take it off,” he said. “His Majesty gave it to me when I returned to court.”

“Very well,” Marie-Josèphe said, disappointed, for her will could never compete with the King’s. She put his other rings back on his fingers. She closed the drawing box on the music score, and on the unfinished drawing of Count Lucien’s hands.

A long line of open carriages drew up around the eastern end of the Grand Canal. His Majesty graciously hosted His Holiness; they rode alone in a carriage magnificently gilded, its sides and wheel-spokes studded with diamonds. It occupied the central spot, with the best view. The royal family and other visiting monarchs flanked the King’s carriage. His Majesty’s courtiers arranged themselves in the second row. Servants hurried among the fantastic carriages, offering wine and pastries, fruit and cheese.

Marie-Josèphe rode in Monsieur’s coach, squeezed between Madame and Mademoiselle, facing Monsieur and the Chevalier de Lorraine. She wished desperately that she were riding Zachi, her afrit. She would gallop away to the pigeon loft and wait for news from the galleon.

In the next coach, with his wife Mme Lucifer, Chartres lounged lazily, exchanging languorous glances with young ladies of the court. He ignored Mlle d’Armagnac and her peacock feathers. Marie-Josèphe supposed he had found another mistress. Chartres noticed Marie-Josèphe’s coldness no more than he responded to Mlle d’Armagnac’s wistful sighs; he had not even noticed, or if he noticed he had not mentioned, that Marie-Josèphe no longer visited his observatory, she never looked into his compound microscope, she never borrowed his beautiful slide rule.