Part 5 - Au Sol

 Laurent took me to a salon flooded with light in the stony avenues behind the palace of the Tuileries, and introduced me to a handsome, dark-eyed young man named Valentin. Valentin pulled up his loose cotton sleeve and traced the painted shape of a thick green vein down his pale forearm, and took me alone into a back room, behind a low-lit washroom. The room was all in silks and brocades, and he hummed in my ear, and kissed my neck at the tender place where the jaw ends.


I closed my eyes at the touch of his lips, because they were only the second pair of gentle lips I had known, and so hot with life, unlike the careful, cool ones I had grown to love. I felt my skin warm under them, a tickling sensation which made me swallow hard, and took my words away. I let him take me by the hips and hum a slow waltz, because Laurent trusted him, and assured me my safety in the hands of this bloody courtier, who he had known for some years. I was as a snake hypnotized by the flute, head following his, and he spun me around in lazy circles, whispering my virtues in language I recognized from Laurent's lips.


It distressed me a little to know that such words had been whispered in rooms such as that one, and that they came with easy fluidity  to me on Valentin's voice. But after some time it was alright, because I was happy to be turning circles with him by candlelight. He smelled like wig powder, and I blew some from his collar. I asked him if he wore wigs at court, and he said yes. And I said that I thought he was a handsome young man, which I had never said before to anyone, and he was pleased at that, and asked if he could kiss me on the lips, and I said no. He asked if I would like to know about court life, and I said that I would. And I told him that my mother used to say that my father had been a favorable servant of Louis XIV, le Grand, and so I had always been curious about life at court, though I didn't know if it was true or a falsehood told to boost my poor ego as a boy.


"There were a few second sons of second sons who were tall like you when I was a boy," he laughed, "but I wasn't at court much then. Those were turbulent times. Was your mother tall?"


"Yes," I said.


He talked about gathering at the royal table at supper, time and again, when the court was in residence, standing in watch while the young king, Louis XV, took his dinner. "Afterward," he said, "there is a mad scramble to put one's fork in a dish. He passes leftovers to us as if we are hunting dogs. Have no illusion that such a life is all powder and sugar." He called me "cher", and I asked him not to, lulled by the rocking of his hips to rest my chin on his strong shoulder.


"How came you to know my master?" I asked him.


"Do you call him 'master'?" he asked, humming voice deep and friendly.


"He is the head of our house, sir," I said. "The master of my house."


"How many are there in your house?" The tone of his voice didn't change, and it didn't occur to me that for all the years Laurent had been bedding down with him, he knew nothing at all about us.


"Three."


"Three? And what is the look of the other one? And what is his age?"


"Dark like you. Dark hair," I said. "We are no age," as I had been told, "and every age."


"But you are not like Laurent, your master. Surely, he is far older. Compared with him, you are the softer and sweeter." He called me "pet" as Laurent had called me "pet" and I twitched at it, blinking my eyes lazily with the smell of his blood, which was everywhere in the room to me. He said that he had heard old whispers about Laurent since he was a child at court, that there had been a jewel of truth buried in the intrigue of quiet talk, about an ageless, shimmering pearl who kissed blood away from the willing flesh of rich, handsome fellows who could keep their mouths shut.


"Are you rich?" I asked.


He turned me and dipped me a little, which made me laugh, because I had never been wooed. "Rich enough," he said. "Rich enough for our bijou. May I share him with you? If you won't, I will certainly die. You won't let me call you any names. Tell me what I should call you, if I may ask you to do so. Perhaps you will be my bijou, and I will put love for him away, and give you the jewels meant for his palm."


I said no.


" 'Mais non, mais non, je suis pour lui, pour lui, ' bien sur," he said, pitching his voice like mine, trying to imitate my timbre. " 'No, no, I'm his, his,' of course you are. I am only making love, little pearl. I know you are for him, as we all are."


I wanted to say, "You don't understand, because you have never had a taste, a drop, you know nothing," but he had me on a wide settee then. It was a settee in the new style, thicker cushioned, and my hair was in my face, stifling my response. It had become hard to breathe, in the warm darkness, and the candles were too hot, throwing their smoke to the low ceiling, and I felt that I was beginning to choke as he unbuttoned my collar, with clumsy fingers. He tried to kiss me on the mouth, and I pushed him away roughly with my hand under his chin, cradling his skull in my hand, which made him cry out as if attacked. When I looked at him then I saw fear on his face, like an animal, and because my head was swimming, I took that forearm he had first offered me, which had weakly come near to drive my hand away, and I bit him hard on the terminus of the long green map of a vein he had drawn me, which smelled of the tincture of ink it was. And he screamed, and his hot blood pooled up in my mouth, my first blood, which surprised me, and made me swallow it, and swallow it again, and he continued to cry out as if I were murdering him. Which I was.


Then I felt a familiar hand at the back of my neck, and a familiar voice whispering in my ear, and saw a familiar head, and Laurent was there kissing the screaming mouth, and quieting it, but I saw that hardly at all, with my eyes canted upward, like Saint Therese at the swoon, my chest heaving with the effort to breathe. And I saw that Laurent made to kiss the collar I had earlier opened, and I threw the arm away, jerking Valentin from his lips, and cried out a wordless protest, because I was stricken by the sight. Laurent turned to me with his mouth open, to say something, but I was gone on the floor in the intervening seconds, screaming.


Because even now the blood brings me to my knees, the way it burns through the body, ringing in my ears and destroying my sense of balance and size, pushing its way into every far capillary and all tender, cool places, throwing my terrestrial senses into a world of pulsing flame. I heard myself making sounds like a frightened animal as if from the lips of someone else, far away. I have learned since to take small droughts slowly, to enjoy the sense of being pricked over with gentle, curious pins, to know it as a lovely pain, but I had been half-starved by Laurent, locked in my room, and had drunk into delirium because of angry passion. And when I came to myself again, I was crying in my master's arms. He is my master. Even now. Oh, Laurie. How I would that you could hold me now. I need you, as ever.


The courtier was still there, living, holding his arm over his head, fashionably pale with his head tipped back against the wall. Laurent held me tightly on the settee, because I had been convulsing for some time, and he knew that I had returned from delirium, because I dissolved into bubbling tears against him. He fanned my face with his hand.


"Put out the lights," I begged, and the candles guttered without his ever having touched them.

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