Amandine (2 page)

Toussaint found him easily enough, his inquiries illuminating the boy’s parentage. Hideous parentage. Did he know? Did the boy know who we were? Had he been sent by his family to vindicate the fleshly little wench who was his sister? Schadenfreude. Is that what brought him to us?

It’s nearly over now. The boy is gone, Toussaint saw to that. And now with the creature soon to be gone, Andzelika will go on with her life. Andzelika and I will go on, uninjured. As though it never happened. As though they never happened, neither the boy nor the creature. No trace. No trace at all of this Droutskoy bastard. Andzelika will know nothing, nothing at all of what I have done, what I shall do today. From your hellish place, can you understand why?

Still averting her gaze from the infant, the woman, exhausted by her reverie, rests her thin shoulders against the divan, head tilted back. In supplication? She closes her eyes, and they move under the nearly transparent lids as if she were dreaming. She feels the infant’s gaze.

For what I have done, for what I shall do today, forgive me, Andzelika. How indifferent you have been to anything but news of the boy. I’d thought she would fight to see her child, to hold her child, yet she stays rapt in her besotted illusion. She waits for him. In these past five months since its birth, she has made no more than trifling demands about it. Once she asked (as though he were due on the evening train from Warsaw and we two were in the glad habit of speaking about the baby and about him), “Do you think Piotr will be pleased with her, Mother?” I looked down to finger the mass of dark red peonies lying in the basket hung over my arm
.

Andzelika trusts me to care for the child. When we left Krakow nearly two weeks ago, I told her I was taking it from the hospital where it was born and where it had remained—too weak to be moved, I’d said—to a clinic in Switzerland. To save it. Surgery for its imperfect heart. It’s true about the infant’s heart. The greater truth is that I have decided against surgery. Against saving it. Rather I shall save my daughter. In any case, its survival beyond its first year, even with intervention, is improbable, say the doctors. So be it. God’s will be done. No credentialed orphanage would have it. Despite all Toussaint’s gilded offers to see to the disposal of the creature through private and reputable adoption channels, there were no takers. And into unscrupulous hands I would never place her. I can hide her, deny her, leave her to the Fates but never to the blackguards
.

The woman abruptly opens her eyes, jerks her head forward.

Ah, let me look at you, let me dare to look at you. How beautiful you are. My long fingers. Andzelika’s long fingers. Her eyes. How you stare at me. Ah, a smile? Is that a smile for your
babcia
? Not even your smile will loosen my resolve. Such incubus would have been saved if only Andzelika had accepted the procedure. Swift, private. But I had to acquiesce. So fragile, Andzelika. But why, why have I gone to such trouble over this tiny damaged thing? The machinations, the endless signing of checks, the strangling doubts, a sea voyage, days of this fiendish hush among us in this automobile. I’ll stare right back at you, you beautiful little beast. There, how do you like it? You see, there is no chink in my armor against you. No chink. A small chink. Too small. Do you think you know me? You shall never know me
.

T
HE THIRTEENTH-CENTURY CONVENT OF ST.-HILAIRE AND ITS PRESTIGIOUS
adjunct boarding school for
les jeunes filles de la noblesse
are situated above a small village in southwestern France, scant kilometers from the city of Montpellier on the river Lez. Though the convent offers no official asylum for orphans or abandoned children, more than once a swaddled infant has been left near its doors in a basket, in a wooden fruit crate with nearly legible notes pinned to its wrappings, a few francs folded in newsprint tucked inside. The good sisters would then set about to place the child. A few days, a few weeks it wanted, the baby barely interrupting the hushed strides of their anchoritic life of work, prayer, and meditation. Yet this afternoon an infant will be delivered to the care of the good sisters in a very different manner.

The Packard moves through the great iron gates, stops under the portico of the front entrance to the convent. The chauffeur steps out quickly to open the door to a robust uniformed nurse, who holds the
infant, its layers of white and rose-colored robes spilling richly onto the folds of her dark blue cape. From the auto then steps a tall, lean man, smoothing the breast of a long, velvet-collared coat, adjusting his homburg, running his gloved hands over his thin white mustaches. Finally, another woman descends from the auto. This one is perhaps forty, her egregious beauty still fresh save the darkness around her large, soft black eyes, eyes like those of a deer, and the
triste
clench of chastely rouged lips. She wears a short silver fox jacket over a gray faille suit, a cloche she’s pulled low to her brow. She is Contessa Valeska Czartoryska.

The countess takes the chauffeur’s arm, and they proceed ahead of the others. The doors under the ivied portico open before the bell is pulled and by a shuffling hunchback priest in a soutane mutilated by greedily snuffed suppers the party is led quickly inside. The priest leads the nurse and her charge directly from the receiving room through double white-enameled doors, which he closes behind them without a sound.

An old nun appears, the starched white wings of her headdress juddering as she walks, the wimple pressing into the flaccid flesh of her face. Saying nothing, she nods, leads the countess—who is still holding the arm of the chauffeur—into the temperate discomfort of the drawing room. The man in the homburg follows. The countess and the old nun sit across from one another. The man, homburg in one hand, the other pulling more violently at his white mustaches, sits somewhat distant from them. The chauffeur withdraws. There have been no introductions. Though the countess knows very well the status and character of the old nun, who is called Mater Paul, the nun knows nothing of the countess. Not her name, her title, her nationality.

The countess begins to speak and, as she does, the man with the homburg translates her words into French—softly, and with great facility—for the benefit of the old nun.

“I won’t take too much of your time, Mater Paul. I believe that you understand my exigency. And also what I’m willing to pay for that exigency to be carried out. I trust the curia has instructed you sufficiently.”

“I understand, madame. I understand very well.”

The man translates for the countess, though she hardly waits for him to finish before she speaks again. As though she has no need of him, as though his service is a fool’s errand. Still, they keep to the game.

“Tell me then, what it is that you understand?”

As the man poses the question to Mater Paul in French, the old nun pulls a handkerchief from beneath the wide sleeve of her habit, presses it to her upper lip. To her forehead. The language the woman speaks is thoroughly unintelligible to the nun. She’d suspected that she’d be meeting with a foreigner, but somehow she’d thought an Englishwoman, a German, a Belgian. This language sounds somehow like Russian or some other Slavic tongue. Something exotic. Decidedly not European. In any language, it is clear that the woman commands. Yet it is
she
, Mater Paul, who commands this house. This school. The offering is large, though. Formidable. She cannot risk it by reminding the woman of her own position. Rather Mater Paul breathes deeply, spreads large, misshapen hands over the rough brown cloth of her robes, fixes pluvial eyes upon the soft black ones of the benefactress. She is prepared.

“From this day forward you shall never again see or hear of this child. Even should it be you who inquires, insists, legally or otherwise, to see her or be informed of her. This includes all persons connected with you or your family, or who claim connection to you or your family or the child as well as any advocate retained by you or your family or any representative of the State. Essentially, the child shall no longer exist once you leave this room. She shall be given a legal identity that will never be revealed to you or any of the parties whom I’ve already mentioned. The only fact that shall appear on her invented records is her birth date: May 3, 1931. No records, absolutely no original records or copies of original records pertaining to the child will be filed here. Of course, madame, I cannot speak for the documents already archived in the civil offices in the place where the child was born. I assume there are similar laws about registering births wherever it is that you come from. I cannot be responsible for them.”

The countess knows that the old nun hopes there will be some slip, some fleeting indication of whence they come. Curious old wench.

“Nor do I
expect
you to be responsible for them, Mater Paul. Proceed. What about the child herself?”

“Since neither I nor anyone else here knows of the circumstances of her birth—neither place nor parentage—I shall, perforce, inform her of her ‘invented’ birth, of the sad events that left her an orphan. There will be no physical evidences of her history. No photos or letters that might later be traced or upon which she might attempt verification. Nothing. The child will have no past save a contrivance, a fable.”

“And who will it be who tells her the
fable
, Mater Paul?”

“I, of course. I will be the one.”

“And should your death occur before the time the child can comprehend it, who shall be entrusted to tell the story?”

“As has been requested, it will be Sister Solange to whom the duty will pass.”

“Yes. Little Solange. And should I have a change of heart, Mater, should I, some weeks or months or even years hence, have a change of heart and return here to retrieve this child, to take it back—do you understand, Mater?—what shall you do to prevent me or my representatives?”

“I would do what I do, what we do, should anyone seek, anyone at all seek entry, unwelcomed, into this place. I would see that you were prevented. The authorities would be summoned. The police. The inviolable impedimenta of the curia would be employed, madame. Of that I can assure you. The child shall never be surrendered to you. To anyone. From the moment it was carried through our doors, it became our legal, spiritual ward.”

“Very good, Mater.”

The countess looks away from the old nun and gazes about the room as though she’s only just noticed where she is. And why. She sees the terra-cotta tiles of the floor worn and waxed to the same brown as the nun’s robes, the cold white walls, the empty hearth. She is quiet for too long to suit the nun, who wants only the passing of the
promised funds and the woman’s swift departure. From half-downcast eyes, the nun peruses the woman in the fox jacket, thin, silken legs crossed just above the knee, the edges of gray lace garters showing from beneath her skirt.
Yes, women like her don’t have to marry Jesus
.

“And what assurance do I have, Mater Paul, that the funds which I have in my purse and the subsequent and untraceable funds which shall be transferred to the coffers of the curia,” she asks with a backward tilt of her cloched head, “twice each year until,
until they are deposited no longer
, what assurance do I have that the child will be cared for, educated, raised,
treated
as I have instructed?”

“You have my word, madame. Just as the funds sent to the curia for the purpose of restoring the apartment for the child and her nurse here in the convent were dispersed and the furnishings acquired from the shops and the
antiquaires
in Montpellier were put into place according to Madame’s wishes, so shall these ‘subsequent’ funds be dispersed according to Madame’s wishes. I repeat,
you have my word.”

The countess with the soft black eyes smiles for the first time.

“You’ll forgive me, Mater Paul, but, as much as I shall consider the inexorability of your word, I have also established, shall we call it, a
fail-safe
. Here within these walls, Mater. A person who knows what to look for, what criteria to use in judging the execution of your
word
. This person knows how to
effect
things should effecting be necessary. Even you, especially you, shall never know who this person is. I’ve become something of an expert in espionage over these past few months, a trader in the discreet market of buying and selling confidences. Double confidences. Yes, I’ve prepared thoroughly for the child’s welfare, Mater. At least half her blood is good. Half her blood comes from me and mine, Mater.”