"Only the Blessed Virgin did that," said La Dodee.

"Yes, it's all just lies, you know. Just because they call us hermaphrodites, it doesn't mean we are made in some strange, abnormal way. We're really just women who can do without men, and that does upset them! Have another boiled egg. You're looking rather pale, for all that those people across town painted you up."

"It's the corset they sewed me into. My back feels as if it's on fire. And I'm so stiff, I'm afraid of falling and breaking my bones."

"Well, it does look much straighter already. Definitely an improvement," said La Trianon.

"Yes, we would have said so before, but we didn't want it to go to your head," added La Dodee.

"They said I'd have to sleep in it, and I swore I would. I'd do anything to be pretty like other girls, but now I hurt so much I wish you'd cut me out." It had been a hard day, with many shocks. I found the tears running down my face for no reason at all.

"Oh, don't do that. Give it a try. We make something right here that ought to put you right to sleep. Just promise you won't take it in the daytime. She would never forgive us if it spoiled your talent for water reading." La Dodee always seemed sympathetic.

"Tell me-You asked a question, now I get one," said La Trianon. "You speak so well, you must come from a good family. Why are you here alone? What makes you want to suffer pain and dishonor to join a world you know nothing about? You could be reading to your old father, or embroidering in one of those comfortable convents for rich girls..." Her words brought it all back to me, and I couldn't answer for a while. Then I looked at her-her stiff, narrow face, her hair pushed under her white cap-and into her dark, too-old eyes.

"Revenge," I said. "There is a man I hate. She has promised to make me strong enough to destroy him."

"Only one?" observed La Trianon. "My, you are young."

After supper, they compounded something from several of the bottles on the shelves and poured it into a gla.s.s of cordial. Seated in their little reception parlor, among the astrological charts, I felt the stuff go to work. A delicious limpness crept over my body; my brain felt all damp, and my thoughts became slow and dreamy. The pain left as if it had all been a fantasy.

"How are you feeling now?" they asked.

"Lovely. What was in that stuff?"

"Oh, this and that. But mostly opium. Remember, not in the daytime."

"I never noticed before...your parlor looks so nice. See how the candle flames each make a little circle of light around themselves...almost like faces..."

"And that's the girl who talked Desgrez out of following her home. She certainly seems different now."

"Desgrez. Who is he, really?"

"Him? He's the head of the officers of the watch, and La Reynie's right hand, but La Reynie doesn't mix in with the low-life. La Reynie gives the orders; Desgrez does the arresting. Beware of him, if you ever see him again. Of course, he may not look the same. They say he's fond of disguises." La Trianon's face looked serious.

"Just see the way the smoke goes up, like a little blue thread. The candles could be hanging; perhaps you should put garlands in your parlor. They'd look so festive-black is so plain."

"It's not our business to look festive. It's supposed to be mysterious in here. That's what keeps the clients coming back, buying our potions and horoscopes. That little frisson of fear, that they are stepping into another world, the world of the occult. What we really need is a skull. Or maybe a skeleton. Yes, a skeleton would give the place a certain tone. It would add to business no end." La Dodee looked speculatively at a somewhat barren corner beside a little niche with a curtain drawn across it, which a skeleton might fill nicely.

"Tell me," I asked, feeling all warm and lazy inside, "is La Voisin secretly one of you-a hermaphrodite?"

"Her? Hardly." La Dodee snickered. "A new man every day, that's what she has. Picks 'em up like melons in the market and parades them home in front of that silly old husband of hers. Everyone, from t.i.tles down to n.o.bodies. Just now she likes magicians, but for a while it was alchemists-and then she has an affair going on with the executioner. But I suppose you'd count that as business..."

"You should show more respect," La Trianon interrupted her. "Her ears are everywhere." She looked at me and seemed relieved to see whatever it was she saw in my face. "If you were not already aware, you soon enough shall be. We all belong to one great society, but not all are chosen for initiation into our true mysteries. Some remain forever in the outer circle, weaklings who are content to eat the sc.r.a.ps from our table. But she has placed her hand on you, and so this I can tell you. We of the Ancient Ways are rulers of life and death in this city, and Catherine Montvoisin is the greatest of the witches among us. She is our queen." La Trianon's face grew hard, exalted, with these last words, and I felt suddenly that I had been drawn into a whirlpool of insanity. My little notebooks, a frail raft of reason, could never save me from drowning in it.

That night I had strange dreams. I dreamed I was being pursued by a faceless man. Mother was in it somehow, but she had become huge and hideous. The streets of Paris had twisted into an endless maze, and I ran frantically through them in search of something precious I had lost, the faceless man hard on my heels to steal it from me if I found it. Just as it was there-what was it? A house? I turned to see the faceless man looming above me, a knife in his hand. As I shuddered and my eyes fluttered open to stare into the dark, I realized I was lying on iron bars, strapped in tight. The pain was soaking through my crushed bones like acid. I fumbled by the bedside and found the half-full bottle they had left me and slid back into the sea of eerie dreams.

The next day I was delivered by La Voisin's own carriage to a new address, where I should stay for a week or so until my patroness was sure that Desgrez had been thrown off the scent.

"After all, my dear," La Dodee said as she bundled up my notebooks with a generous-sized jar of the sleeping syrup, "you are not really one of us yet. We have taken a blood oath and trained ourselves against torture, so that we will not betray one another. But you can't even stand a tightly laced corset." It was true. The dull ache spread through my body, sitting or standing. The tall shoe wore blisters on my twisted foot, and the muscles of my legs, unaccustomed to the new way of balancing, burned like fire.

The new place was a room under the eaves of a big old house in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. There I was to stay with a dismal old sorceress called La Lepere, whose occupation had something to do with whatever unsavory activities went on downstairs. I never saw the one-eyed coachman again. Later I heard he'd been sent out of town and established with a concession in hired chairs at Rouen. A seamstress visited me in the new rooms with a secondhand gown in bottle green wool with vulgar yellow satin trim more suited to the Italian comedy than the street. I hated it beyond measure. This she altered to fit me, and the telltale gray dress vanished. La Lepere observed it all, saying, "My, she does set a store by this venture, Madame High and Mighty! Playing games with the gentry. High-cla.s.s customers she wants; more, more, more! And me, I work so hard and never make a penny at it. I sez a prayer for every one of 'em, and pays the s.e.xton a bit of something to see them rightly buried in a corner of the churchyard. But her-everything she touches turns to money!" She squinted at me as the seamstress knelt at my feet, marking the hem of the hideous gown for turning up. "At least she's paying me proper for keeping you, Miss Fancy! Where you from, that you speak so high, and look so low?"

"From out of town," I said, annoyed at her.

"That's what they all say. Don't see why you'd be any different, now that I think about it."

It was a great relief to at last escape the complainings of the most unsuccessful witch in Paris and to be out again, under the high, clear December sky, bundled into a vinaigrette with the unspeakable green-and-yellow dress decently hidden beneath an old homespun cloak. The cold wind whistled between the buildings on the narrow streets and rattled at the chimneys. With one hand I clutched a bundle of my few possessions and with the other I held on to a vast hat, which, with a heavy scarf that m.u.f.fled my face, was sufficient to maintain my anonymity. The man in the shafts of the vinaigrette had the family shoes on; his wife, who pushed from behind, her skirts tucked up about her powerful calves, had wrapped her feet and legs in rags. Beggars who staggered across the frozen cobblestones to extend their hands were stopped by her pungent string of insults, which always ended with "Why don't you try working for a living, eh, you street louse?" The streets were full of women with baskets and servants in livery, for there were feasts to prepare, candles and wood to be bought, messages and invitations to be extended. Now and then a pa.s.sing carriage would push everyone to the walls, for there was no place in the narrow streets to walk safely. Chairs were popular in this season, for the bearers could carry them straight up the stairs and into the house, so that callers did not have to risk their satin slippers in the icy mud.

As we pa.s.sed Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs, I saw a man in a fur-trimmed suit emerge from the church, in pursuit of a lady in a scarlet cloak with a white fur m.u.f.f. A carriage drew up, and the lady, without a backward glance, allowed herself to be a.s.sisted in. As the carriage pulled away, I recognized the arrogant profile of the Chevalier de Saint-Laurent. Uncle. Monster. Oh, if there were a just G.o.d, He would have blasted him there where he stood! Uncle turned on his heel, and for a moment, his scornful gaze rested on the vinaigrette. I turned my head away, but for a moment our eyes met, and fear and humiliation raced through me. Stop this, I told myself fiercely. He doesn't recognize you. He can't. When I looked back again, he was gone.

"So, it is Madame Pasquier's daughter, the little girl who doesn't believe in the Devil, grown large. What is a girl like that doing, having a gown made for her at La Voisin's expense, eh?" La Vigoreux, the tailor's wife with whom I had once p.a.w.ned so many things for Mother, had exchanged the secret sign and shown me into the well-remembered establishment on the rue Courtauvilain. A fire was leaping on the hearth in the workroom that stood behind the front door. An apprentice was st.i.tching horsehair into the hem of a vast gown of burgundy-colored satin. Measuring tapes, pincushions, and scissors lay upon the immense cutting table. Mathurin Vigoreux was due to return any moment from the Marais, where he was delivering a Christmas gown.

"I'm learning to make my own living," I answered as she helped me out of my cloak and hung it on a peg. Spying the hideous dress, she burst into laughter.

"Not in that, I hope, unless she is planning for you to open a mummer's booth at the Foire Saint-Germain."

"There was an accident to my own gown," I sniffed.

"Yes, I imagine there was, since when the daughter of feu Monsieur Pasquier vanished right about the time the contents of his will became known, the police were here to get a complete description of her mourning gown. I was relieved when they identified her body on a slab in the Chatelet. That looked like the end of it. Suicide of despair, they said. She was devoted to him. Good, I said. The police will clear out of it. But then they were back. Worse than rats in the kitchen! The gown, it seems, was not found among the victims' clothing that is hung on the hooks above the bodies. After seeing a sc.r.a.p of material I'd had made into a little reticule, they decided the dress had simply been too valuable, and someone had stolen it from the Chatelet." She looked at me speculatively.

"You look different from when you were last here. Thinner. Older. Straighter. She's done something with your face. I almost didn't recognize you for a moment there. What's her plan? She wouldn't go to this trouble if you didn't have...a use."

"I'm going to go into business," I said, careful not to reveal too much.

"And disappear from your loving family, eh? Clearly, you are a girl who loves life-and is far cleverer than the ordinary sort. Tell me, what sort of business? Surely, you're not going to distill rose water-not in a gown of black silk costing a thousand ecus."

"I'm going into fortune-telling. I can read water."

Her laughter rang through the little fitting room, and the apprentice, an ill-favored youth badly marked with the smallpox, looked up. Then, apparently used to her fancies, he appeared to go back to work. "And you, not even a believer," she said, looking at me speculatively. "The little girl who once looked me in the eye and said all fortunes were false. This is a rare joke on all of us. To think, even I never suspected, and I have watched you grow up."

I had much to ponder as the measurements were taken and the fabric laid before me for my inspection. Even the quaint drawing of the gown, with its Spanish farthingale and little ruff, scarcely distracted me.

When faced with the illogical, one must expand the sphere of logic to include rules of logic for that which is not logic. This is the only possibility in a world that works according to the rules of rationality.

"Well now, look in the mirror. What do you think of yourself?" La Voisin's voice sounded jovial and expansive. It was the afternoon of Christmas Eve, and her house was already filling with members of the "philanthropic society." The excellent smells of an immense dinner were driving me mad, for we had begun our fast in antic.i.p.ation of communion at the midnight Ma.s.s. For you must know that in those corrupt times, when libertines confessed only on their deathbeds, and soldiers and freethinkers almost never, the witches of Paris were devout Ma.s.s goers. Only the King and his court equaled them for regularity of observance: both were equally ignorant of Holy Scripture, and both believed more in the Devil than in G.o.d. But because without G.o.d there is no Devil either, the witches regularly paid the Being above His due, while they looked to the being below for their livelihood.

So the entire company had already confessed to Father Davot of the little church of Bonne Nouvelle that stood at the corner of the rue Beauregard and the rue Bonne Nouvelle. Then that worthy would join us when, after midnight Ma.s.s, we would all fall upon the splendid things that were now tempting us from the kitchen. In the meantime, my new gown had been delivered, after a frantic effort involving the hiring of three temporary a.s.sistants to help with the sewing, as well as the engagement of one of the best-known professional embroiderers in the city. It really did feel like Christmas, after all.

"Not bad, not bad at all," p.r.o.nounced La Trianon to La Dodee, as I stood before the rectangular gla.s.s in the tapestry-hung bedroom. The mirror was set in a frame like a picture. I emerged from the chiaroscuro like an ancient portrait. I was dressed in rich black, with velvet trim, all embroidered with black silk thread and jet beads, like a n.o.bleman's widow of times gone by. Beneath the little starched ruff that covered my neck, a heavy silver crucifix-on loan only until I could afford to procure my own-shone against the black. My hair had been done in the style of an old portrait of Marie de Medici. I had thrown back the translucent black veil attached to the tiny black beaded cap the better to see my face. All pale and strained with the pain of the heavy corset beneath the gown, it floated above the antique lace like an eerie, disembodied mask in the dark. It was an alien face, one that I hardly recognized beneath the white powder and high, artificially arched eyebrows: the look of extreme age hidden in the mask of youth. Beautiful, in its own way, and entirely unexpected. My back, still shrunken against the long iron rods that barely held it upright, looked somehow shriveled with age. A tall ebony walking stick, nearly my own height, trimmed with a ring of silver and a bunch of black ribbons, finished off the picture as well as preserving my balance and disguising the last of my limp. I looked exactly as if I had stepped from a previous century, an ancient woman preserved by hideous secret arts that had given her the semblance of eternal youth. I was totally enchanted with the dramatic effect. A woman of mystery. A new person.