Bright-Face: Chapter III

Chapter III


The brass-ringed spyglass of Admiral Daragon of the king’s Royal Maritime Forces moved back and forth, very rapidly. The Admiral was a broad-lipped man, with bushy whiskers, eyes set at a perpetual squint, and a narrow, unforgiving manner of speech.

Nevertheless, it was he who had saved the king’s life at sea, when Louis XVII and his ex-prison guard had been nearly lost in a storm. The Admiral, then Captain Daragon of the Republic, had conveyed him across the ocean, and now served as one of his most privy advisors.

This position, he noted of late, was progressively being diminished by the prestige and services of Lord Wilmore, the English savant. His Lordship’s military service in favor of the New French State, long before it was a State, against his own countrymen, had sufficiently impressed the high authorities of the king’s court at Montréal, that the king himself had bestowed upon his Lordship a title, the Moonwort Impériale.

Admiral Daragon bit the edges of his lips in vexation. He was a man shorn of his mustache, temporarily, in accordance with his current residence at court, and as such, inclined to chew where its edges no longer hung. From his tall-masted white-clapboard house, made of the remnants of La Poire*, his late ship, his long spyglass twitched out at the city’s streets—left to the city—right to the palace—left again. The morning passed; yet still, he waited, certain that some plot was afoot.

At long last, from a low brown building opposite, there came an answering flicker. “That scoundrel; he hopes to spy upon the king,” said Admiral Daragon to himself, and, in a fury of satisfied indignation, dressed himself in his official sash of black velvet, pinned with the green leaves of a moonwort-shaped amulet, and descended from his room. “La Poire, Gilles,” he told his manservant.

“The carriage, monsieur?”

“What, do you think I am imbecile?”

The long-suffering Gilles, shaking his mop of hair, went off to order the handsome carriage that the Admiral, in his new-found royal patronage, had had occasion to order: the groom, Armand, drove it out. Or, perhaps, we should say, drove her out. Daragon allowed himself one fond glance at the figurehead, salvaged from his ship, which had been attached to the front of his land conveyance. The Poire, according to his whim, had been the name he had given to his handsome Republic ship, and to its beautiful figurehead, his best love. She now sailed forth once more, proudly, through the streets of Montréal—a wooden statue of a scantily clad young woman clutching a pear in her upraised hands.

“The palace, Gilles,” Daragon now said, seating himself comfortably within. The manservant avoided looking at that magnificent building, just yards from the Admiral’s own home.

“Very good, monsieur.”

Quite unbeknownst to the Admiral, Lord Wilmore sat at home on the edges of Montréal, picking at a lavish spread in his palatial breakfast-room. He would not move his fork to a chop or bit of tomato without first drizzling it with maple syrup—a fine local touch, he thought.

A footman, stood nearby, unmoving, while His Lordship finished his meal. After he had set aside the plate, Lord Wilmore spoke into the room, as if finishing up a conversation begun earlier.
"And so, I think it very wise that we not alert our discerning friend as to this, mmm?"

“Yes, my lord,” replied the footman.

One of the scantily clad statues near the wall might as well have spoken, for all
the notice Lord Wilmore took. He commanded his greatcoat and official sash, “For I must go out.”

“Are you to see His Majesty, sir?” asked the footman as he dutifully assisted his master with the specified garments.

“A merchant, Nathan, a stock-merchant. Then, His Majesty.” Nathan fumbled with one of the clasps of the greatcoat; in an instant, Lord Wilmore’s blow had him upon the ground. “Hurry, man, I do not wish to be late.”


In Saint-Pélerin, far from the intrigue of court, Béatrice and Antonin walked near the high walls of the town—more an illusion of a barrier than one in truth, for the towering unsettling greens of the trees flung themselves over their edges, and the sounds one heard were of the wilderness rather than the city.

The two old friends, now reunited, walked in unfathomable silence—Béatrice tentative, eyes to the ground, Antonin hands in pocket, lost to his own thoughts. It had been several days since the evening of the dinner at the Chrysafes’ house, and they had not had much occasion to speak. Now, however, it was difficult to make conversation—difficult to force the tongue to articulate thoughts that had spanned years.

At length, Antonin, gratefully finding a neutral subject to communicate, told Béatrice of M. Hébert’s proposed journey to Montréal. “We shall easily return in time to embark upon our expedition this season,” he said confidently.

“It is a very long journey, to Montréal,” responded Béatrice, dismayed. “Even with the King’s new road—you shall be weeks in travel.” Antonin shrugged, aiming a kick at a round pebble. It clattered off the wall and fell to the ground, spinning gold shards.

“Two weeks, I’ll wager, at most,” he said, though it was Béatrice who had traveled the roads most recently. “In any case, I am glad…glad of the excuse to leave. Saint-Pélerin is so small—it—cramps.” At Béatrice’s expression of concern, he felt himself obliged to explain further—“Home, you know. And my parents…I sometimes wish I had none. Especially now, as I fear I may reveal my secret, at any moment—"

“Your secret—you have something to tell your mother? You feel you would be better off…alone?” asked Béatrice, her heart beating very fast in her throat.

“Oh, I did not mean that, Béatrice—I did not mean that I wish I had no parents. Forgive me, Béatrice,” amended Antonin hastily, seeing where he had been thoughtless.

“No, do not—I took no offense, but, please, what did you mean?”

Antonin left off all his flippancy now, and leant against the wall next to her before saying seriously, “Something to conceal. Something that I have seen…”

Béatrice was still, gazing quizzically at him, her stomach twisted by a surging horror. “Something that you have seen?”

Softly, he said, “My reflection.”

“Your—reflection?”

“Come—do not be a new sort of Echo, Béatrice,” he said laughingly, to her distress. “It is my right to see, is it not? This is a modern Age. Prophecies are for fools, and those who believe in them are even greater fools.” Thus, in a few words, he dismissed his life’s mold of nineteen years.

“When?”

“Last month, just before we received your letter. Nothing happened. It was a lie, told by trickster who wished my family to worry, for her own amusement. It is all false, Béatrice.”

“Why?”

Now, Antonin smiled, seeing her anxiety. “Come—nothing has changed—nothing bad will occur. It was all nonsense, that prophecy. But I must swear you to silence, for you know how my mother would fall into hysterics, if she knew.”

“Bright-Face—"

“For heaven’s sakes, do not call me that!”

“Yes,” she promised reluctantly. Antonin took her hand, and they walked through side-streets until they had reached a printer’s shop (for the town had two, one belonging to the newspaper, the other owned by a private party, a certain Lord Wilmore). It was one of the few shops gifted with glass windows all around, and, freed of superstitious inhibitions, the two looked in beneath a ledge.

Béatrice gazed wistfully at their faces, side-by-side in the glass—she thought, as she often had to herself, “He is so beautiful, and she so marred. If only they might thus stand, together, for all their lives”—but on next glance, she saw Antonin staring at his own features with a frightening intensity—his golden eyes were lit as if with a strange fire, hungry to trace the lines of which he had been deprived for so long.

“Let us walk a different way,” said Béatrice, suppressing a shiver. As they moved away from that shadowy glass, she reproached him: “Could you not wait?”

“Until I am old and grey, and ready to die, do you mean? If I cannot know myself, then what sense is there in living? For all I knew, I might have been—an unspeakable monster, a very devil. I did not know, Béatrice.”

She nodded, touching her own mark, and found no reply. They walked on in silence. At the corner before they turned into the Greek Quarter, Antonin looked through the open public-house windows with an expression of longing—Béatrice’s heart smote her as, following his gaze jealously, she beheld the merry-faced girl who had caught Antonin’s interest; she realized that she could never be first in his affections. She restrained the urge to take him by the sleeve and pull him away, an familiarity that, a year past, she would not have hesitated to take.

Instead, Béatrice related the odd behavior of the raven that had pecked at her window so insistently several nights past. “When morning came, he was still there, and would not depart, however I tried to make him see that he was not wanted. He cocked his eyes at me, and—smirked, I think, if a raven can smirk—and would not be moved until after I returned from Lauds.”

“Perhaps it was the devil,” said Antonin, with some relish, as they walked on.

“You are too gloomy—indeed, it was not!”

“And you are too serious. You will not tell my mother?”

Béatrice hesitated, but conceded, “I will not.”

They parted ways, Béatrice to return to the convent, Antonin to his mother’s house.



* The Pear

© 2009, I.M.S.