Eliza had seen, on occasion, crying of an altogether different nature: wild, hair-pulling, clothes-rending, spine-warping tear-rage. It had never happened to her, though, and she did not really ken it, until that evening when she walked down to the paddock out behind the stables of the Duc d’Arcachon, on the Plateau of Satory, and found herself standing face to face with Pasha: an albino Arabian stallion whom she had last encountered at dockside in the harbor of Algiers, eleven years ago. She and her mother had been snatched from the beach of Outer Qwghlm by a coastal raiding-galley of the Barbary Corsairs, and taken off into slavery; but presently they had learned that these Corsairs were operating in concert with a Christian ship. For they had spent the entire journey to Algiers being molested in a dark cabin by an uncircumcised man with white skin, who liked to dine on rotten fish. Delivered to Algiers, they had been assigned to a banyolar and become assets of some enterprise there, of which it was not possible to know very much, save that it imported certain goods-including slaves-from Christendom, exporting in exchange silks, perfumes, blades, delicacies, spices, and other luxuries of the East. When Eliza had reached puberty, she had been traded to Constantinople in exchange for this stallion-though according to what the Duke had just claimed, the exchange had been much more complicated than that, which only added insult to injury, since it implied that Eliza, by herself, was not worth as much as this horse. She had vowed then and there to find the smelly man in the dark cabin and kill him one day. Christendom being a large place-France alone had twenty millions of souls-she had supposed that finding the villain might take a while.
She had been wrong-footed by the easiness of it. She had only been in Christendom for seven years! And it had only taken her two years to meet her first de Lavardac, and three or four to lay eyes, from a distance, on the duc d’Arcachon himself. Had she been a little more perceptive she might have recognized the duc for what he was, and done him in, a long time ago.
What had she been doing instead? Socializing with Natural Philosophers. Putting on airs. Making money; all of which was now gone.
The tears that came over her, then, when she let herself into the paddock, and came face to face with Pasha, and saw and knew all, were to normal everyday tears as the burning of Mr. Sluys’s house had been to the flame of a candle. It raged up in her so fast that it seemed, for a few moments, as if it might have the power to burst free from the confines of her body and make blades of grass bend double and flood the pasture with salty dew, make Pasha crumple to his arthritic knees, blow the fences down, make the trees sag and groan as in an ice-storm. Which might have been better for Eliza; but as it was, this self-feeding vortex of sorrow, humiliation, and rage could not escape her ribcage, and so it was her ribs that took all the punishment. For once it was a good thing to be wearing a corset, for without that reinforcement she might have broken her own back with these sobs. Like the burning house of Sluys, she howled, she creaked, and the tears coming out of her felt no less hot than streams of molten lead. Fortunate it was for Eliza that all of the guests were gathered some distance away, deafened by their own happy uproar. The only witness was Pasha. A younger horse might have been spooked by the transmogrification of the Countess de la Zeur into a Fury, a Medea. Pasha merely turned sideways, the better to keep Eliza within view, and nuzzled the green grass.
“I have not the remotest idea what has come over you, mademoiselle,” said a woman’s voice. “It is quite the strangest reaction I have ever seen, to a horse.”
The Duchess of Oyonnax had timed the intrusion well. A minute before, Eliza wouldn’t have been able to stop herself even if the entire guest list had suddenly appeared around her. But the outburst had insensibly faded to a long slow run of sobs, which skidded to a halt when Eliza realized she was being watched.
She straightened up, took a deep breath, shuddered it out, and hiccuped. She must look red-faced and perfectly ridiculous; this she knew. She must look as if she hadn’t aged a day, in body or mind, since her first encounter with Pasha. This made her wince a little bit; for on that day, she had lost her mother forever; and now, all of a sudden, here she was with a bigger, older, richer and stronger woman, who had materialized just as suddenly and inexplicably as Mum had vanished eleven years ago. This was perilous.
“Say nothing,” said Madame la duchesse d’Oyonnax, “you’re in no condition to, and I don’t desire to know why this horse has such an effect on you. Given who it belongs to, I can only assume it is something unspeakable. The details are probably gross and tedious and in any event they are not important. All that I need to know of you, mademoiselle, I have seen on your face before, during and after dinner: that in general you are strangely fascinated by tales of women in a condition of slavery. That in particular you have found yourself in a like predicament; for you do not love Etienne de Lavardac, but will soon be cornered into marrying him. That you loathe his father the Duke. Please do not attempt to deny these things, or I am very much afraid that I shall laugh out loud at you.”
And she paused, to give Eliza the opportunity; but Eliza said nothing.
The Duchess continued: “I understand situations of this type as perfectly as Monsieur Bonaventure Rossignol understands cyphers. I phant’sied my predicament unique in all the world, until I came to Versailles! It did not take me long to understand that no one need put up with such unfair situations. There are ways to arrange it. No one lives forever, mademoiselle, and many do not deserve to live as long as they do.”
“I know what you are talking about,” said Eliza. Her voice sounded quite strange at first, as though it belonged to a different Eliza altogether, one who had just been born screaming out of the old. She cleared her burnt throat and swallowed painfully. She could not keep her eyes from straying over to the shack where the Duchess had her soap made.
“I see that you do,” said the Duchess.
“There is nothing you could say to me that would change my intentions.”
“Of course not, proud girl!”
“My ends are fixed, and have been for many years. But as to means, it is possible that I might benefit from advice. For I do not care what happens to me; but if I pursue my ends through means that are obvious, it could lead to the little one in the orphanage being injured.”
“Then know that you are in the most tasteful and cultivated society the world has ever seen,” said the Duchess, “where there is a refined and subtle way of doing anything that a person could conceive a wish for. And it would be disgraceful for one of your quality to go about it in a rude and obvious style.”
“I would that you know one thing, which is that this is not about succession. It is not a matter of inheritance. It is a question of honor.”
“This is to be expected. You loathe me. I have seen it in the way you look at me. You loathe me because you believe that my late husband’s money was the only thing that I cared about. Now, you want my advice; but first you are careful to stipulate that you are better than I, your motives purer. Now, listen to me, Mademoiselle la comtesse. In this world there are very few who would kill for money. To believe that the Court of France is crowded with such rare specimens is folly. There used to be, at court, many practitioners of the Black Mass. Do you really think that all of these people woke up one morning and said, ‘Today I shall worship and offer sacrifices to the Prince of Evil?’ Of course not. Rather, it was that some girl, desperate to find a husband, so that she would not be sent off to live out the rest of her life in some convent, would hear a rumor that such-and-such person could prepare a love potion. She would save her money and go into Paris and buy a magic powder from some mountebank. Of course it had no effect at all; but she would cozen herself into believing that it had worked a little bit, and so conceive a desperate hope, and a desire for something a little bit stronger: a magic spell, perhaps. One thing would lead to another, and in time she might find herself stealing the consecrated Host from some church, and taking it to a cellar where a Black Mass would be sung over her naked body. Errant foolishness all of it. Foolishness leading to evil. But did she set out to do evil? Did she ever conceive of herself as evil? Of course not.”