The Eight Read online

  “Lily isn’t the only person I know who plays chess,” I told him. “In fact, I have a friend who used to play competitively.…”

  “Indeed?” said Llewellyn a little too quickly. “Anyone I know?”

  I shook my head. Blanche was about to speak when Harry handed her a glass of bubbly. She smiled and sipped her drink.

  “Enough,” said Harry. “Let’s toast the new year, whatever it brings.”

  We finished off the champagne in about half an hour. Finally we collected our coats and went outside, piling into the limousine, which had magically appeared in front. Harry instructed Saul to drop me first at my apartment near the East River. When we arrived in front of my building, Harry got out and gave me a big bear hug.

  “I hope your new year should be a wonderful one,” he told me. “Maybe you’ll do something with that impossible daughter of mine. In fact, I’m sure you will. I see it in my stars.”

  “I’m going to be seeing stars soon if I don’t get to bed,” I told him, trying to suppress a yawn. “Thanks for the eggnog and champagne.”

  I squeezed Harry’s hand, and he watched as I went into the darkened lobby. The doorman was asleep, sitting bolt upright on a chair just inside the door. He didn’t budge as I crossed the large, dimly lighted foyer and got into the elevator. The building was as silent as a grave.

  I pushed the button, and the doors grumbled shut. As the elevator climbed I pulled out the cocktail napkin I’d shoved into my coat pocket and read it once again. It still didn’t make any sense, so I dismissed it. I had enough problems without imagining more to worry about. But as the elevator opened and I walked down the shadowed corridor to my apartment, I wondered fleetingly how it was that the fortune-teller had known that the fourth day of the fourth month was my birthday.

  FIANCHETTO

  The Aufins [Bishops] are prelates wearing horns.… They move and take obliquely because nearly every Bishop misuses his office through cupidity.

  —Quaendam Moralitas de Scaccario

  Pope Innocent III

  (R. 1198–1216)

  PARIS

  SUMMER 1791

  “Oh, merde. Merde!” cried Jacques-Louis David. He threw his hand-tied sable brush across the floor in a frenzy of frustration and leaped to his feet. “I told you not to move. Not to move! Now the folds have come undone. Everything is ruined!”

  He’ glared at Valentine and Mireille, posed on a high scaffold across the studio. They were nearly nude, draped only in translucent gauze, carefully arranged and tied beneath the bosom to resemble the fashions of ancient Greece so popular in Paris just then.

  David bit the side of his thumb. His dark, disheveled hair stuck out in all directions, and his black eyes flashed wildly. The yellow-and-blue-striped foulard, tossed twice about his throat and tied in a haphazard bow, was streaked with charcoal dust. The wide tapestried lapels of his green velvet jacket were skewed.

  “Now I shall have to arrange everything all over again,” he complained. Valentine and Mireille did not speak. They were flushed in embarrassment, gazing with wide eyes at the open doorway behind the painter.

  Jacques-Louis glanced impatiently over his shoulder. There stood a tall, well-formed young man so astonishingly handsome as to appear almost angelic. Golden hair of abundant thickness fell in ringlets tied in back with a simple ribbon. A long, purple silk cassock flowed like water over his graceful form.

  His eyes, an intense, unsettling blue, rested calmly upon the painter. He smiled at Jacques-Louis with bemusement. “I hope I’m not interrupting,” he said, glancing at the scaffold where the two young women stood, poised like deer about to take flight. His voice contained that soft, well-spoken assurance of the upper classes, who assume their presence will be greeted with more enthusiasm than anything they might have interrupted.

  “Oh, it’s only you, Maurice,” said Jacques-Louis irritably. “Who let you in? They know I’m not to be disturbed when I am working.”

  “I hope you do not greet all your luncheon guests in this manner,” replied the young man, still smiling. “Besides, this doesn’t look very much like work to me. Or should I say it seems the kind of work I’d gladly put my hand to.”

  He looked again at Valentine and Mireille, drenched in golden light flooding through the north windows. He could see the outline of their quivering forms through the translucent cloth.

  “You’ve put your hand to enough of that sort of work, it seems to me,” said David, picking another brush from the pewter jar on his easel stand. “But be a good fellow—go over there to the scaffold and rearrange those draperies for me, would you? I’ll direct you from here. The morning light is nearly finished, anyway. Twenty minutes more and we’ll break for luncheon.”

  “What’s that you’re sketching?” asked the young man. As he walked slowly to the scaffold, he seemed to move with a slight but painful limp.

  “It’s a charcoal and wash,” David replied. “An idea I’ve had for some time, based on a theme of Poussin. The Rape of the Sabine Women.”

  “What a delectable thought,” said Maurice as he reached the scaffold. “What would you like me to rearrange? It all looks quite charming to me.”

  Valentine stood on the scaffold above Maurice, one knee forward and her arms thrust out at shoulder height. Mireille, on her knees beside Valentine, held her arms forward in a beseeching gesture. Her dark red hair tumbled over one shoulder, barely concealing her naked bosom.

  “That red hair must be pulled away,” David called from across the studio, squinting his eyes at the scaffold and swishing his brush through the air as he gave directions. “No, not so far. Only to cover the left breast. We must see the right breast completely exposed. Completely exposed. Pull that drapery down farther. After all, they are trying to seduce soldiers from battle, not open a convent.”

  Maurice did as he was told, but his hand trembled as he pulled away the gauzy fabric.

  “Move away. Move away, for God’s sake, so I can see it. Who is the painter here?” cried David.

  Maurice moved to one side and smiled weakly. He’d never seen lovelier young women in his life, and he wondered where on earth David had found them. It was known that society women queued up outside his studio hoping to be portrayed as Greek femmes fatales in one of his famous canvases, but these girls were too fresh and unsophisticated to be of the jaded Parisian nobility.

  Maurice should certainly know. He’d fondled the breasts and thighs of more society women than any man in Paris, numbering among his mistresses the Duchesse de Luynes, the Duchesse de Fitz-James, the Vicomtesse de Laval, and the Princesse de Vaudemont. It was like a club to which membership was always open. Maurice had been quoted as saying, “Paris is one place where it is easier to possess a woman than an abbey.”

  Though he was thirty-seven, Maurice looked ten years younger, and he’d taken advantage of his youthful good looks for more than twenty years. There had been a lot of water under the Pont Neuf in that time, all of it highly enjoyable and politically expedient. His mistresses had done as much for him in the salon as in the boudoir, and though he’d had to acquire the abbey on his own, they had opened the doors to the political sinecures he coveted and would soon gain.

  Women controlled France, as Maurice knew better than anyone. And though it was against French law for a woman to inherit the throne, they sought their power through other means and selected their candidates accordingly.

  “Now adjust Valentine’s drapery,” David called impatiently. “You’ll have to go up onto the scaffold, the steps are back there.”

  Maurice limped up the steps onto the massive scaffold, several feet above the ground. He stood behind Valentine.

  “And so you are named Valentine?” he whispered in her ear. “You are quite lovely, my dear, for someone with a boy’s name.”

  “And you are quite lecherous,” Valentine replied saucily, “for someone in the purple cassock of a bishop!”

  “Stop whispering,” yelled David. “Fix the fabric
! The light is nearly finished.” As Maurice moved to touch the cloth, David added, “Ah, Maurice. I haven’t introduced you. This is my niece Valentine, and her cousin Mireille.”

  “Your niece!” said Maurice, dropping the fabric between his fingers as if it had burned him.

  “An ‘affectionate’ niece,” he added. “She is my ward. Her grandfather was one of my dearest friends, but he passed on some years ago. The Count de Remy. Your family knew him, I believe?”

  Maurice looked at David in amazement.

  “Valentine,” David was saying, “this gentleman arranging your draperies is a very famous figure in France. A past president of the National Assembly. May I present Monsieur Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. The Bishop of Autun.…”

  Mireille leaped to her feet with a gasp, pulling the fabric up to cover her bare breasts. At the same time, Valentine let out a piercing shriek that nearly split Maurice’s ears.

  “The Bishop of Autun!” cried Valentine, backing away from him. “It is the Devil with the cloven hoof!”

  The two young women leaped from the scaffold and ran barefoot from the room.

  Maurice looked across the studio at David with a wry smile. “I don’t ordinarily have such effect upon the fairer sex,” he commented.

  “It seems your reputation has preceded you,” David replied.

  Seated in the small dining room beside the studio, David gazed down over the Rue de Bac. Maurice, his back to the windows, sat stiffly on one of the red-and-white-striped satin chairs surrounding the mahogany table. Several bowls of fruit and some bronze candlesticks were scattered about the table, and a service of four was set with lovely dishes patterned in birds and flowers.

  “Who could have expected such a reaction?” said David, pulling at an orange rind with his fingers. “I apologize for the confusion. I’ve been upstairs, and they’ve agreed to change and come down for luncheon, at any rate.”

  “How does it happen that you’ve become guardian over all this pulchritude?” asked Maurice, twirling his wineglass and taking another sip. “It seems too much joy for one man to bear alone. And nearly wasted upon someone like yourself.”

  David glanced up at him quickly and replied, “I couldn’t agree more. I’ve no idea how to manage. I have searched all over Paris for a suitable governess to continue their education. I’m at my wits’ end ever since my wife left for Brussels some months ago.”

  “Her departure wasn’t related to the arrival of your lovely ‘nieces,’ was it?” said Talleyrand, smiling at David’s plight as he twisted the stem of his glass.

  “Not at all,” said David, looking very depressed. “My wife and her family are staunch Royalists. They disapprove of my involvement in the Assembly. They don’t think a bourgeois painter like myself who’s been supported by the monarchy should openly support the Revolution. My marriage has been under a great strain since Bastille Day. My wife demands that I renounce my post in the Assembly and discontinue my political paintings; those are the conditions she sets for her return.”

  “But my friend, when you unveiled The Oath of the Horatii in Rome, crowds came to your studio at Piazza del Popolo to strew flowers before the painting! It was the first masterpiece of the New Republic, and you are her chosen painter.”

  “I know that, but my wife does not.” David sighed. “She took the children along to Brussels, and wanted to take my wards as well. But the terms of my agreement with their abbess was to keep them in Paris, and I’m paid a generous stipend to do so. Besides, here is where I belong.”

  “Their abbess? Your wards are nuns?” Maurice nearly burst out laughing. “What delicious folly! To give two young women, brides of Christ, into the care of a forty-three-year-old man who’s no relation. What was this abbess thinking?”

  “They aren’t nuns, their vows were not taken. Unlike yourself!” David added pointedly. “It appears this dour old abbess was the one who warned them that you were the Devil incarnate.”

  “Granted my life has not been all it should be,” admitted Maurice. “I am nevertheless surprised to hear it spoken of by abbesses in the provinces. I’ve tried to be somewhat discreet.”

  “If you call it discreet to litter France with unpapered brats while delivering extreme unction and claiming to be a priest, then I really can’t say what might be called overt.”

  “I never asked to be a priest,” Maurice said somewhat bitterly. “One must make do with one’s inheritance. The day I remove this robe from my body for good and all, I shall feel really clean for the first time.”

  At that moment Valentine and Mireille entered the small dining room. They were dressed alike in the plain gray traveling clothes the abbess had provided them. Only their shining tresses added a spark of color. Both men rose to greet them, and David pulled out two chairs.

  “We’ve been waiting nearly a quarter hour,” he chastened them. “We are now ready to behave ourselves, I hope. And do try to be polite to the Monseigneur. Whatever you may have heard of him, I’m certain it would pale beside the truth. But he is our guest nonetheless.”

  “Have they told you I’m a vampire?” asked Talleyrand politely. “And that I drink the blood of young children?”

  “Oh, yes, Monseigneur,” replied Valentine. “And that you have a cloven hoof. You walk with a limp, so it must be true!”

  “Valentine,” said Mireille, “that is extremely rude!”

  David put his head in his hands and said nothing.

  “It’s quite all right,” said Talleyrand. “I shall explain.”

  He reached across and poured some wine into the glasses that sat before Valentine and Mireille, then continued. “When I was a small child, I was left by my family with a wet-nurse, an ignorant country woman. She left me atop a dresser one day, and I fell off and broke my foot. The nurse was afraid to notify my parents of the accident, so the foot was never properly set. As my mother was not enough interested to look in on me, the foot grew crookedly until it was too late to mend it. And that is the entire story. Nothing very mysterious, is there?”

  “Does it give you much pain?” asked Mireille.

  “The foot? No.” Talleyrand smiled a little bitterly. “Only the result of the foot. I lost my right of primogeniture because of it. My mother set about giving birth to two more sons in rapid succession, passing my rights to my brother Archimbaud, and to Boson after him. She could not accept a crippled heir to the ancient title of Talleyrand-Perigord, could she? The last time I saw my mother was when she came to Autun to protest my being made a bishop. Though she’d forced me into the priesthood, she’d hoped I would remain buried in obscurity. She insisted I was not sufficiently pious for the post of bishop. She was quite right, of course.”

  “How awful!” cried Valentine in heated voice. “I should have called her an old witch for that!”

  David raised his head from his hands, looked at the ceiling, and rang the bell for luncheon to be served.

  “Is that what you would have done?” Maurice asked her gently. “In that case, I wish you had been there. I confess it’s something I rather longed to do myself.”

  When everyone had been served and the valet had departed, Valentine said, “Now that you’ve told this story, Monseigneur, you don’t seem as wicked as we’d heard. I confess I find you very good-looking.”

  Mireille looked at Valentine in exasperation, and David smiled broadly.

  “Perhaps Mireille and I should thank you, Monseigneur, if indeed you were responsible for closing the abbeys,” Valentine went on. “If not for that, we would still be at Montglane, pining away for the life in Paris we had dreamed of.…”

  Maurice had put down his knife and fork and was looking at them.

  “Montglane Abbey? In the Bas-Pyrenees? Was that the abbey you came from? But why are you no longer there? Why did you leave?”

  His expression and the intensity of his questions made Valentine realize she had made a grievous error. Talleyrand, despite his good looks and charming manner, was still t
he Bishop of Autun, the very man against whom the abbess had warned them. If he learned that the two cousins not only knew of the Montglane Service, but had helped remove the pieces from the abbey, he would never rest until he discovered more.

  Indeed, they were in great jeopardy just by the fact that he knew they had come from Montglane. Though their own pieces of the service had been carefully buried beneath the plantings in David’s garden behind the studio, on the very night of their arrival in Paris, there was a further problem. Valentine had not forgotten the role she’d been assigned by the abbess, to serve as a collection point for other nuns who might have to flee and leave the pieces behind. So far that had not happened, but in the state of unrest in France, it might at any moment. Valentine and Mireille could not afford to be under the observation of Charles Maurice Talleyrand.

  “I repeat,” said Talleyrand sternly when the two girls sat in painful silence, “why have you left Montglane?”

  “Because,” Mireille replied reluctantly, “the abbey has been closed, Monseigneur.

  “Closed? Why was it closed?”

  “The Bill of Seizure, Monseigneur. The abbess feared for our safety—”

  “In her letters to me,” David interrupted, “the abbess explained she’d received an order from the Papal States instructing the abbey be closed.”

  “And you accepted that?” said Talleyrand. “Are you a republican or not? You know Pope Pius has denounced the Revolution. When we passed the Bill of Seizure, he threatened to excommunicate every Catholic in the Assembly! This abbess is treasonous toward France by taking such orders from the Italian papacy, which as you know is overrun with Hapsburgs and Spanish Bourbons.”

  “I should like to point out that I’m just as good a republican as you,” David said hotly. “My family are not of the nobility, I am a man of the people. I stand or fall with the new government. But the closing of Montglane Abbey had nothing to do with politics.”