Page 56 of The Duke
Celine’s heel suddenly stopped bouncing, and she brought that foot up underneath her as well, leaving a pair of pointy yellow shoes on the floor, slightly askew. She considered Kate. “You would be arrested in Paris,” she said at last. “For cross-dressing.”
For rather a few more things than that. But Kate couldn’t help saying, “They would have to realise I was a woman, first.”
It surprised a smile out of Celine. There, then gone. And a blush that didn’t disperse.
Despite herself, Kate’s interest had been engaged. She pulled a chair over and sat, partly as a tacit signal she would listen, partlybecause she was warm with thwarted lust and still hoped she might make her advance.
Celine looked down and said, “The letter was tucked behind the frame of a painting that hung in my apartment, I found it when I took the painting down. I sold everything I could get my hands on. You would’ve found the letter easily, if you’d only thought of searching my rooms. I was still comfortable enough then that I didn’t think I’d ever use it. I just liked having it. It felt like winning a game you didn’t even know we were playing.”
The bouncing Celine had suppressed in her heel found new release in her knee. “Did you ever meet Jacques Heber? No? He was a caterer, but his real trade was in information. He became a darling of Bastien’s crowd. They thought having an acquaintance from the third estate made them enlightened. He was a horrid little man. Sycophantic and extreme. Exactly the man to thrive in Paris that year. He did thrive. He offered to keep me, and I accepted because within three months, every other man I knew was in gaol.”
It had been obvious from Celine’s appearance that first night that she had fallen on hard times. But hearing the details was… unpleasant.
“You,” Celine said with certainty, “have never fucked someone repugnant to you. You’ve never had to. Rather… it’s not only that he was repugnant to me, but that heknewit, and he liked that I let him do it anyway. It’s not even remotely like fucking for pleasure. I used to imagine it had more in common with a hateful marriage. Meeting, in the inner sanctum, not a sympathetic partner but an adversary. There is—was—a very outspoken woman in Paris, Mme Olympe de Gouges, who called marriage a tomb, where love and trust had died.” She blinked a couple of times rapidly, and then seemed to recall the point she had been making. “Fucking Heber kept me comfortable, anyway, until he was arrested as well. Revolution eats every man who tries to pat it.”
Celine drew her knees up before her, hugging them into stillness. She rested her forehead on them, and the only exposed partsof her were the stockinged toes that peeked out from beneath a ruffled hem and curled over the edge of the chair.
She looked very small folded up, the trapezoid seat clarifying how little physical space she actually occupied.
Kate’s outer defences, weathered and tempered and tested over the years, remained impenetrable. The breach, when it came, was inward. A tender caving. A desire to take one of those feet very gently between her hands and set it on her thigh. To stroke it. To coax Celine to open again and take up more space than a chair seat.
“After that,” Celine said into her knees, “there was undressing in windows and working the better whorehouses of the Palais-Royal. Police started raiding whenever virtue was up for debate. They called the queen a whore when they killed her”—she looked up, still flushed and bright-eyed, and began to laugh as though it were genuinely funny—“and meanwhile, the police are fingering the actual whores in the street to check for disease. Ah, fuck them all.” She wiped a hand over her red cheeks, where tears dried almost instantly.
“There was this one girl, Marguerite Prieur, who opened the door when the commissioner knocked. It was his first raid. He asked her,What do you do?and she replied,Everyone.” Another deep, appealing laugh, her head tipped back to open her throat, the bright eyes curved into crescents. And yet tears still coursed from her eyes unchecked, leaving sticky tracks where they dried.
Kate was utterly captivated. She might never tire of listening to Celine talk.
The cold, intellectual part of her mind was trying to urge caution. Not every part of her was so sanguine about jeopardising, in any way, the return of that letter.She walked in here a week ago and threatened your life, she reminded herself, careful and measured.You lost control in Paris. It was dangerous. You cannot afford to do it again.
But Celine had not entirely been a person to her, in Paris. Celine had not spoken to her like this, in Paris.
“And what did the great heroes of the Revolution make of brave Marguerite?” Celine said, fully unaware, as she always was, of how she had rocked Kate’s world. “Why, they thought her a well-worn hole in the mattress, that’s all. She wasn’t a woman, because the women were all at home, in a permanent state of pregnant milk-production. Even Lady Liberty, spurting water from her nipples in public squares, was sent home in favour of manly Hercules. Oh, those men rising up, declaring themselves equal to any other man born on this earth, thrusting their revolution through the nation, their great, phallic uprising; those heroic men declaring that a woman may not be political, may not be martial, may not write plays or pamphlets, and neither may she beg and neither may she receive welfare, and if she one day looks about her and discovers there is one currency she has always to hand, because her soul will never fall unawares out of the pocket of her body in the busy marketplace, and she decides to spend it, well then her body is public, and they may do with her as they please.” She gasped and stretched her chin up. Her knees rocked forward, feet hitting the floor with a damp slap. Her chest glistened, the neckline and armpits of her dress dark with sweat.
“You’re sick,” Kate said, coming to her feet.
She should have realised immediately. Celine had been clinging to consciousness the night she arrived, too nauseous even to eat. She hadn’t stayed in bed a single day since. She’d been out visiting, charming the Peckes, shopping, abetting Royce, strategizing victories, at the opera, at church… Had she been in this state even while she transformed Lord Seaton from an existential threat into a powerful ally?
“You need to rest. God damn it, Celine, you should be in bed!”
“Oh, Your Grace! I am most humbly gratified by your concern!” Celine started to cackle, and Kate realised she was standing over her, ineffectually looming. She couldn’t imagine a more helpless person than the young woman before her, sweating and shivering, her eyes bright with fever. Laughing. Impossible. A light in her eyes that could never be tarnished. A blade in her soul that could never be beaten.
Very well. If this was how Celine wanted to do it.
She picked Celine up by the waist, ignoring the feeble attempts to fight her off, and hoisted—Christ, had she been starving? How did a human body become so insubstantial?—her over her shoulder.
Celine sobbed and laughed and tried to knee her in the stomach. Kate ignored it all, then marched with grim purpose to the door, which she threw open.
“Wherewere you,” Celine gasped, half shrieking, “when the only well I could fetch water from spoiled, and I felt so sick I thought I was dying? Where were you when I begged on my knees to please suck an officer off, please, you’ve never had anyone like me, I’ll make you feel so good, I’ll take you to heaven, just so I could stay where they would feed me bread?”
She wouldn’t listen. Fury drove her, and all she would concede was that Celine must rest, and that Celine musteat.
“Where were you,” screamed Celine, openly weeping now, “when Mathilde died? Where were you when we couldn’t even afford to move her body and thegentlemen kept calling?”
Such a frenzy possessed Celine then that Kate had to put her down or risk hurting her. She stepped back two careful paces, hands held open, unthreatening. Celine watched her like a fighter who has been soundly beaten but won’t concede, retreating to his corner to gasp and shake.
They were in a hallway; she couldn’t have said which. Only Celine was in focus.
“You left me,” Celine sobbed. “You left me.”
