Elizabeth Massie - Naked, on the Edge

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 some browned pears, still clinging to branches, 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 days! 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 came 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.

From his satchel he removed a journal, pen, ink well and pouch of ink powder and placed them on a protruding beam. A small black volume, tied shut with a string, joined these items on the shelf.

“I will call this home for now,” he said with a touch of resigned satisfaction.

Danielle linked her fingers together and said, “Take rest. I will come back to see you as soon as I am able.”

Bearing a beeswax candle encased in a sooty lantern, Danielle sneaked out from the hospital to join him that evening when duties were done. Madame Duban, the head cook, demanded that the girls in her charge retire to their cots in the cellar at nine, and had always threatened dismissal at any hint of disobedience. But Danielle would not be denied, and when the old woman was snoring soundly in her spinster’s bed, Danielle took several bits of bread and the light and crept outside into the tainted glow of the Paris moon. She followed the path to the barn, happy that the little building would not be needed for another few weeks when the first of the spring calves were old enough to wean and were placed in the barn to keep them from their bawling mothers.

The lantern was hung on a rusting latch on the stall door, and then Alexandre drew Danielle to himself with gentle strokes to her auburn hair. “My sweet,” he said into her neck. She kissed his arms and the backs of his solid hands, then moved them across her body to the warm and secret places beneath her loose fitting blouse and simple wool skirt. They loved until late, when she brushed off her skirt and hurried back to her cot beneath the hospital’s kitchen.

Monsieur LeBeque appeared on the path near the barn the following morning. Danielle was milking one particularly ill-tempered cow and Marie was beside her, pouring milk into the churn for tomorrow’s butter. The chubby man had spruced himself up since the previous morning. He had combed his thinning hair and had put rouge on his cheeks. It seemed as if the ruffled shirt he wore had seen the inside of a wash tub as recently as a week’s time. He planted his cane tip into the dirt beside Danielle and demanded, “Where is the young cobbler you brought to me yesterday?”

Danielle paused in her squeezing. “You have decided to hire him?”

The man stamped his cane and frowned. “You mean to question me?”

“No, sir,” said Danielle, and looked away long enough to roll her eyes in Marie’s direction. Marie put her hand over her mouth so as not to giggle. “He sleeps in the calves’ barn, sir.”

“And where is the calves’ barn?”

Danielle pointed down the path.

An oily nod and the man meandered off up the path. “He shall be employed,” whispered Danielle as she began squeezing again. The thin stream of milk sizzled into the bucket; the cow’s tail caught her across the cheek. “He shall be able to stay here!”