Филиппа Карр - The Song of the Siren

I took the glove. “No matter,” I said. “Madame Panton will probably repair it.”

“But I have spoilt it! You have been so kind to me and this is how I repay you.”

Hessenfield said: “Madame, I beg of you. It is nothing ... a bagatelle.”

“I shall never forgive myself. After all your kindness.”

The concierge had come out to bow to Madame de Partiere.

“Please,” I said, “do not distress yourself. It has been a most enlivening journey and we have enjoyed your company.”

“Indeed yes,” said Hessenfield, “and we have done nothing. We were coming back to Paris in any case.”

“How kind you are.” She lapsed into French. “Vous lies tres aimable “

Hessenfield took her arm and led her towards the house. She turned and gave me a woeful smile.

I laughed. “Good-bye, Madame de Partiere,” I said. “It has been a pleasure.”

“Au revoir,” she said.

And that was my visit to Versailles.

I missed Mary Marton. She may have been a spy but at the same time she had been an excellent nursery governess. Clarissa asked after her a great deal.

It was hard to put off a child who had such an enquiring mind with explanations which could not sound plausible, for I could not tell her the truth. I wondered what her child’s mind would make of this account of spies and plots.

Jeanne emerged as a great help to me. She had more or less taken on the duties of looking after the child. Clarissa loved her and she had a way of dealing with the numerous questions, which were constantly plied, with answers which satisfied.

She spoke French constantly to Clarissa, who was now speaking both English and French with perfect accents so that she could have been taken for either nationality.

“It will stand her in good stead,” said Hessenfield. “And the only way to speak French is to learn it as near the cradle as possible. You never get round those vowels otherwise.”

Since she had slipped so naturally into the nursery I spent a certain amount of my time with Jeanne too, which was good for my French as it was for Clarissa’s, for Jeanne had scarcely a word of English.

She was an interesting girl in her early twenties. She had been delighted, she told me, to find a post in a fine house like this. She had been very poor before. She had been a flower seller. The cook used to buy flowers from her to decorate the tables.

“Ah, Madame,” she said, “it was my lucky day when Madame Boulanger came to buy my flowers. She was a hard one ... and paid me very little. She was one for a bargain.

I lived with my family ... there were many of us. A sad part of Paris that. You do not know it, madame. It is not for such as you. It is not far from Notre Dame ... behind the Hotel Dieu before you get to the Palace de Justice. The streets there ... they are terrible, Madame ... dangerous. We had a room in the rue de Marmousets... . The gutters were pretty, though. I used to stand and look into the gutters. The dyers were there, and their colours flowed through the gutters. Such colours, Madame, green, blue, red ... the colours of my flowers. We used to beg from the great lords and ladies.

But I never stole ... never, Madame. My mother said ‘Never steal, for though you have money for a while they will catch up with you. You will end up in the Chatelet or the Fort l’Eveque. Then your fate will be too terrible to speak of.’ “

“Poor Jeanne,” I said, “you have had a sad life.”

“But now it is a good one, madame. I have a good position and I like so much to care for the little one.”

And care she did. She used to tell her stories of old Paris, and Clarissa was enchanted with them. She would sit entranced, eyes round with wonder; there was nothing she loved more than to walk through those streets and listen to Jeanne describing everything to her.

Jeanne was extremely knowledgeable and I felt I could trust Clarissa with her. That was what I liked most. If I had to go to Versailles or St. Germain-en-Laye with Hessenfield I could safely leave her.

I sometimes sat with her after Clarissa was in bed and we would talk together. She knew so much about the stories of the past which had passed down through her family.

She was most interested in the great poison scandal which had rocked Paris some thirty years ago and had brought Madame la Voison and Madame de Brinvilliers to justice.

It was so notorious because many well-known people had become involved and suspicion had been cast even on the King’s mistress, Madame de Montespan.

Her grandmother remembered the day Madame de Brinvilliers had been taken from the prison of the Conciergerie, where she had been submitted to cruel torture, to the Place de Greve and there lost her head.

“It was a terrible time, Madame, there was not an apothecary in Paris who did not tremble in his shoes. There was fear in high places. Husbands had removed wives and wives husbands, sons and daughters, fathers and mothers who had lived too long and by whose death there could be profit. Paris was in a turmoil. It was the Italians, Madame.... They had their strange poisons. We had had arsenic and antimony ... but it was the Italians who produced the finest poisons. Poisons which were tasteless, colourless, poisons which could be breathed’in the air. It was an art with them. People were talking about the Borgias and a Queen of France too ... an Italian woman, Catherine de Medici. They knew better poisons.”

“Jeanne,” I said, “you have a morbid mind to dwell on these things.”

“Yes, Madame, but they say there is an Italian near the Chatelet who has a beautiful shop and many noble customers ... and behind his shop he works with strange substances.

He is very rich.”

“Rumours, Jeanne.”

“Maybe, Madame. But I make the sign of the cross every time I pass the shop of Antonio Manzini.”

It was interesting talk; and I was grateful to Jeanne.

When Clarissa grew older we should have to have an English governess for her, I thought.

Then I paused.

When she was older should we still be here? Should we still be trying to bring a conclusion to this adventure?

Somehow I could not imagine it. I could not think ahead.

The future was perhaps too fraught with difficulties. How could I return to England?

I had made everything too complicated there. At Eyot Abbass there was Benjie, the husband I had used and wronged. At Eversleigh there was Damaris, whose lover I had taken for a whim and ruined her life.

You do not deserve to be happy, I told myself.

Yet I was. For I loved Hessenfield so completely; and that intense burning passion which had flared up between us was becoming a deep and abiding love ... an enduring love, I told myself.

So though I could be happy in the present, I could not look ahead.

Well, wasn’t it a good plan to live in the present? Not to look ahead; not to look back. That was what I must train myself to do.

One day one of the servants brought two parcels to me. One was addressed to me, the other to Hessenfield.

I opened mine and found inside an exquisite pair of gloves.

They were beautiful-in grey leather so soft that it looked like silk. They were embroidered with pearls and were something like the ones I had to discard because Madame de Partiere had trodden on one of them. I guessed who had sent them. And I was right.

There was a note with them.

My dear Lady Hessenfield,

I have been some time in sending you an acknowledgement of my gratitude. Forgive me but this was no fault of mine. It has taken so long to get the leather I particularly wanted. Now I trust these will please you. I have sent a similar pair to your husband.

I want to say thank you for being so kind to me in bringing me back when I had that mishap with my own carriage. I was so grateful to you and how ashamed I was when to repay you I ruined your beautiful gloves.