“Have you experimented with it yet?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“It made me unable to hold in my urine.”
“Who gave it to you?”
“A wandering alchemist who came to visit two weeks ago.”
“A fraud or-“
“He is well reputed. He remarked that, with so many pregnant women in the house, I might have need of it.”
“’Twas the Red?”
Dr. Alkmaar’s eyes darted from side to side before he answered with a very slight nod.
“Give me the drug.”
It was some sort of plant extract, very bitter, but after about a quarter of an hour it made me go all loose in the joints, and I became light-headed even though I had not lost that much blood yet. So I was not fully conscious when Dr. Alkmaar did the turning, and that suited me, as it was not anything I wanted to be conscious of. My passion for Natural Philosophy has its limits.
I heard him saying to the midwife, “Now the baby is head down, as it should be. God be praised, the cord did not emerge. The baby is crowning now, and when the drug wears off in a few hours, the contractions will resume and, God willing, she will deliver normally. Know that she is delivering late; the baby is well-developed; as frequently occurs in such cases, it has already defecated inside the womb.”
“I have seen it before,” said the midwife, a little bit insulted.
Dr. Alkmaar did not care whether she was insulted or not: “The baby has got some of it into his mouth. There is danger that when he draws his first breath he shall aspirate it into his lungs. If that happens he shall not live to the end of the week. I was able to get my finger into the little one’s mouth and clear out a good deal of it, but you must remember to hold him head-down when he emerges and clear the mouth again before he inhales.”
“I am in debt to your wisdom, Doctor,” said the midwife bitterly.
“You felt around in his mouth?The baby’s mouth?” Marie asked him.
“That is what I have just said,” Dr. Alkmaar replied.
“Was it… normal?”
“What do you mean?”
“The palate… the jaw…?”
“Other than being full of baby shit,” said Dr. Alkmaar, picking up his bag of lancets and handing it to his assistant, “it was normal. Now I go to bleed the French Ambassador.”
“Take a few quarts for me, Doctor,” I said. Hearing this weak jest, Marie turned and gave me an indescribably evil look as she closed the door behind the departing Doctor.
The crone took a seat next to me, used the candle on the nightstand to light up her clay-pipe, and set to work replacing the air in the room with curls of smoke.
The words of Marie were an encrypted message that I had understood as soon as it had reached my ears. Here is its meaning:
Nine months ago I got into trouble on the banks of the Meuse. As a means of getting out of this predicament I slept with Etienne d’Arcachon, the scion of a very ancient family that is infamous for passing along its defects as if they were badges and devices on its coat of arms. Anyone who has been to the royal palaces in Versailles, Vienna, or Madrid has seen the cleft lips and palates, the oddly styled jaw-bones, and the gnarled skulls of these people; King Carlos II of Spain, who is a cousin to the Arcachons in three different ways, cannot even eat solid food. Whenever a new baby is born into one of these families, the first thing everyone looks at, practically before they even let it breathe, is the architecture of the mouth and jaw.
I was pleased to hear that my son would be free of these defects. But that Marie had asked proved that she had an opinion as to who the father was. But how could this be possible? “It is obvious,” you might say, “this Etienne d’Arcachon must have boasted, to everyone who would listen, of his conquest of the Countess de la Zeur, and nine months was more than enough time for the gossip to have reached the ears of Marie.” But you do not know Etienne. He is an odd duck, polite to a fault, and not the sort to boast. And he could not know that the baby in my womb was his. He knew only that he’d had a single opportunity to roger me (as Jack would put it). But I traveled for weeks before and weeks after in the company of other men; and certainly I had not impressed Etienne with my chastity!
The only possible explanation was that Marie-or, much more likely, someone who was controlling her -had read a decyphered version of my personal journal, in which I stated explicitly that I had slept with Etienneand only Etienne.
Clearly Marie and the midwife were working as cat’s-paws of some Frenchman or other of high rank. M. le comte d’Avaux had been recalled to Versailles shortly after the Revolution in England, and this Chevalier de Montlucon had been sent out to assume his role. But Montlucon was a nobody, and there was no doubt in my mind that he was a meat marionette whose strings were being pulled by d’Avaux, or some other personage of great power at Versailles.
Suddenly I felt sympathy with James II’s queen, for here I was flat on my back in a foreign palace with a lot of strangers gazing fixedly at my vagina.
Who had arranged this? What orders had been given to Marie?
Marie had made it obvious that one of her tasks was to find out whether the baby was sound.
Who would care whether Etienne’s bastard child had a well-formed skull?
Etienne had written me a love poem, if you can call it that:
Some ladies boast of ancient pedigrees
And prate about their ancestors a lot
But cankers flourish on old family trees
Whose mossy trunks do oft conceal rot.
My lady’s blood runs pure as mountain streams
So I don’t care if her high rank was bought
Her beauty lends fresh vigor to my dreams
Of children free of blemish and of blot.
Etienne d’Arcachon wanted healthy children. He knew that his line had been ruined. He needed a wife of pure blood. I had been made a Countess; but everyone knew that my pedigree was fake and that I was really a commoner. Etienne did not care about about that-he had nobility enough in his family to make him a Duke thrice over. And he did not really care about me, either. He cared about one thing only: my ability to breed true, to make children who were not deformed. He, or someone acting on his behalf, was controlling Marie. And Marie was now effectively controlling me.
That explained Marie’s unseemly curiosity about what Dr. Alkmaar had felt when he had put his fingers into the baby’s mouth. But what other tasks might Marie have been given?
The baby trying to escape from my womb, healthy as he might be, could never be anything other than Etienne’s bastard: a trivial embarrassment to him (for many men had bastards) but a gross one tome.
I had bred true, and proved my ability to make healthy Arcachon babies. When Etienne heard this news, he would want to marry me, so that I could make other babies who werenot bastards. But what did it all portend for today’s baby, the inconvenient and embarrassing bastard? Would he be sent to an orphanage? Raised by a cadet branch of the Arcachon family? Or-and forgive me for raising this terrible image, but this is the way my mind was working-had Marie been ordered to make certain that the child was stillborn?