Last Pages. Oscar Mandel

said the Judge.

      2

      THE FORTY-FIVE-YEAR OLD Aimée de Tourville was not simply fine-looking; she had eyes and lips that showed her, even to the most obtuse observer, to be a creature of high spirits. She was probably more attractive and more striking in her dark-haired maturity than she had been as a young girl. Her daughter, growing up under that radiance, showed more reticence in looks and dress, as well as an intelligence that kept to few words.

      Who were these women?

      Candor is best. The Marquise Aimée de Tourville was in fact Aimée Binette, only child of an honest Lyon locksmith, who married her off, naturally enough, to a Lyon jail-keeper named Jean Pichot when she turned seventeen. High luck befell her two years into her marriage when the Vicomtesse de Brion was incarcerated for poisoning her husband instead of only crying over his brutalities, as the law required. Before the vicomtesse was hanged, Aimée spent hours, days and months in the lady’s cell. That bold woman taught the whip-smart turnkey’s wife to speak, walk, sit, behave and even think like an aristocrat. As a result, even before Monsieur Pichot died, she easily became the mistress of an aging nobleman, a relation of the vicomtesse, who had occasionally called on the lady in her cell. Aimée had taken over her father’s rather successful keyshop, but the baron enabled her to live at a station higher than what selling keys, even many keys, would have allowed.

      Intimacies with the baron—the aging baron, as mentioned before—satisfied only a fraction of Aimée’s large capacities for pleasure. Though ever kind and charming to the gentleman (Aimée had a heart) she became the mistress of one of her much younger clients, a sturdy sergeant by the name of Christian Deudon. A couple of years later—in 1752, to be precise—the baron was called to Paris by the king and Madeleine was born, tenderly acknowledged by both the baron and the sergeant. The girl was destined so to resemble her mother, physically speaking, that the question of who was her father would have been impossible to resolve by the method of comparison. Aimée never did resolve it.

      In the last days of the year 1756, the sergeant slapped his lieutenant’s face. This pre-Jacobin act obliged the couple and their baby to flee to Montreal, where Aimée taught the sergeant what she knew about the business of selling keys and repairing locks. But unable to bear the cold, Deudon, though sturdy, succumbed to a weakness of the lungs. He left mother and child a dented sword and a tunic with braids out of which Aimée made a pretty skirt for the baby.

      In 1760, during a dreadful winter in the first year of English rule, mother and daughter nearly froze to death. But this low kind of death was not meant for Aimée. General Thomas Gage had given an order—in French and English—that beef was to sell at no more than ten sous the pound. Aimée had not been in Montreal long enough to deserve special favors from the butchers. To keep her baby alive, she ran from one to the other, an ounce here, a slice there, sometimes as far as the Arsenal, knee-deep in snow or falling on the ice. Yet somehow she was always dealt the worst cuts, meat that stank in spite of the cold, never a bite more than her ration, and her pittance handed over the counter with sour distrustful faces. Pretty soon, however, she noticed a detail. Every butcher displayed an alms box for the hospital or the Ursulines that no eye could miss. Aimée thought, “How wonderfully generous they all are! Everybody’s freezing and starving, but never a trip to the butcher’s without a few pious coins into those boxes.” One day she saw one of the good ladies of Montreal drop a coin and throw the butcher a wink. That wink was sufficient. Aimée sent a note to Monsieur Maturin, who was Gage’s secretary, named herself, humble widow of a late sergeant in the light infantry, the butcher got ten lashes, the alms boxes disappeared, and Aimée quietly entered the Governor’s service, sending elegant and witty notes at STORIES 25 a regular pace concerning the doings and the temper of a restive French population. The two called it “taking the pulse” of the people. They also took that of each other.

      Presently General Gage was transferred to New York. Aimée, though she kept her little étage in Montreal (one never knows), followed soon after. That was where the key-shop persona disappeared once and for all, and where the Marquise de Tourville settled with her daughter in unpretentious but comfortable quarters, enjoying a monthly retainer quietly paid by the British crown. Tutors gave little Madeleine lessons in French and English. Aimée herself mastered the new language with ease. As a Frenchwoman she appeared in New York, and made sure that she so appeared, as the natural enemy of England and the admirer of the Sons of Liberty, very active in New York in the years of the Quartering Act, the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, the Tea Act and other offenses to colonial interests. Aimée’s social life was thoroughly American. This was not difficult for her, because the Patriots, in New York and elsewhere, were decidedly among the “best people,” among whom she moved with the brilliant grace that was natural to an uprooted aristocrat. On two occasions—one in a drawing-room, the other in a ballroom—she was thrown in with French nobility—a count and his wife, and then a baron; but she had foreseen such meetings, and had memorized from the Armorial général de la France, while still in Montreal, all that she felt she would ever need to sustain her personage with panache. A few of the “best people” just mentioned were compelled to move from drawing-room to prison as a result of notes from Aimée to Gage. But her personal meetings with Gage remained, needless to say, rare and discreet: New York, in those days, was poorly lit at night.

      When Gage became Royal Governor of Massachusetts—in the year 1774—Aimée continued her work in New York, but she received regular dispatches from him. She did not much care that Madeleine, now grown into a much-admired but very uneasy young woman, was acquainted (somewhat vaguely) with her game, disliked it, feared to talk of it with her, and was openly charmed and thrilled (such is youth) by the ideals of Liberty. Indeed, her unconcealed sympathies helped Aimée’s work. Aimée herself, need one say it? thought both parties fools for whipping themselves into states of political excitement, but fools, she believed, were manna for the clever.

      By 1775, rebellion in and around Boston was at a boil. Gage sent Aimée on a mission to Nantucket for which he believed her to be well suited.

      3

      WEAMISH HAD TAKEN a seat facing the two women. Aimée brought a sealed letter out of her reticule, and invited the Judge to break the seal and read. Weamish obeyed, cried out “From Governor Gage!” and sprang to his feet. Aimée was amused.

      “Do read it, sir. I know its content, of course, but shall be glad to hear it in so many words. Don’t fidget, Madeleine.”

      The Judge began to read. “The person who has given you this letter is the Marquise Aimée de Tourville—”

      “Marquise!” uttered Weamish, gaping but delighted.

      “Come, my dear Judge, we are two-legged animals all the same. Read on.”

      The letter continued as follows: “The Marquise de Tourville” (and here Weamish, still erect, bowed to Aimée), “accompanied by her daughter” (and now he bowed to Madeleine), “is sent to the island of Nantucket with verbal orders that you are requested to obey without question. She will name the gentlemen who are the objects of our present concern and inform you of the high importance we attach to her mission.”

      This was followed by a noise of something falling outside the parlor door. Aimée pointed and Weamish strode to the door and bruskly opened it. There stood Mamack. “What were you doing behind that door?” thundered the Judge. “I dropped my chisel,” said the eavesdropper sheepishly, picking up the tool and dashing out of the house.

      “War, Judge Weamish, war,” said Aimée.

      “To be sure; although an untutored Indian—”

      “Will you be so kind as to sit beside me?”

      “Certainly. And allow me to assure you at that you will be punctiliously obeyed.”

      “Here is the heart of the matter,” said Aimée; but at this point Jenny, not accustomed to knocking, entered holding a large tray. “Chocolate and buttered buns,” she announced.

      “Get out! Not now!” the Judge roared.

      “Tut tut,” said Aimée, “why not now?