“Yes, but he is still an infant,” Freyja said sadly. “We must spare no effort in preparing Monsieur Marcus to meet his grandfather, Stéphanie. You will move in—straightaway.”
Together, Fanny and Madame de Genlis poked and prodded him, firing off questions and comments so rapidly in English (the questions) and French (the comments) that Marcus couldn’t keep up. Marcus stopped trying to anticipate whether the next topic would be his experience with women (tragically limited, they agreed), his education (shockingly poor), or his manners (quaintly old-fashioned, but really he must stop bowing to servants).
“It is a very good thing Le Bébé doesn’t require sleep,” Madame de Genlis commented to Fanny. “If we work night and day, he might be ready to meet your father le comte at midsummer.”
“We do not have six months, Stéphanie,” Fanny said.
“You will be lucky to have six days” was Fran?oise’s dour prediction.
“Six jours!” Madame de Genlis was appalled. “Fran?oise, you must do something! Talk to Madame Marthe. She will get Philippe and Ysabeau out of Paris. Perhaps they could go to court?”
“Ysabeau hates Versailles. Besides, news travels between Paris and the palace too quickly,” Fanny fretted.
“Surely they would enjoy spending the winter months in Blois, or even at Sept-Tours? You could suggest it, Fanny,” Madame de Genlis insisted.
“Father would know I was up to no good,” Fanny said. “No, Stéphanie, we must be brave and ruthless, and teach Le Bébé all we can as quickly as we can. The fear of discovery will sharpen our focus and enliven us to new possibilities. Energy and persistence will conquer all obstacles, as Dr. Franklin says!”
Marcus’s days and nights passed in a dizzying whirl of activity. He didn’t much care for the Latin, the French, or the dancing lessons. The fencing lessons were better. But his favorite moments were discussing politics and philosophy in Fanny’s opulent library. Marcus had never seen so many books in one place. Madame de Genlis was quick-witted and well-read, which meant that Marcus had to work hard to keep up with her, even when the subject of their conversation was Thomas Paine. But it was their outings into the city streets that Marcus loved above all else.
“Paris is the best teacher,” Madame de Genlis proclaimed as they crossed over the Seine and into the narrow, twisting thoroughfares of the ?le de la Cité.
Together, they watched cows being butchered and the prostitutes in Madame Gourdan’s brothel taking their afternoon ablutions. Fueled by his unfulfilled desire for Fran?oise, they spent a glorious morning amid the bateaux-lavoirs on the Seine, drinking in the heady scents of starch and soap and giving washerwomen a few sous in exchange for a cup of their blood. Gunpowder was next, after they stumbled across a tense duel while hunting at dawn in the Bois de Vincennes. Print shops followed, the damp pages and tang of the ink drawing Marcus like iron filings to a magnet.
Though Marcus had seen a few news sheets roll off the presses in Philadelphia, Paris’s booksellers operated on an entirely different scale. Books in French, Latin, Greek, English, and languages Marcus couldn’t recognize were typeset in wooden racks. Sometimes the metal letters were still glistening with ink from their previous jobs. Then it was off to the press to be aligned, inked, and imprinted. Reluctantly, Marcus handed over his copy of Common Sense to a bookbinder so that it could be kept from falling apart. He watched the man select the stiff backing for the new leather cover and paste fresh paper down to protect the worn contents. When the bookbinder returned it, now wrapped securely in brown leather stamped with gold, Marcus held in his hands a volume that would not be out of place in the finest of libraries.
Marcus was so entranced by the world of books that Fanny paid a beefy printer with a daughter in need of a dowry half a year’s earnings so that he could drink his blood and imbibe a truer sense of what it was to be involved in the book trade.
“Alors. It was an experiment,” Madame de Genlis said with a tinge of disappointment after Marcus confessed that most of what he’d seen in the man’s blood concerned his wife—a real harridan, if he were to be brutally honest—and his futile efforts to get out of debt.
“We shall try again,” Fanny said, unfazed by failure.
Nothing was off-limits to him so far as Fanny and Madame de Genlis were concerned—even though Marcus’s keen sense of smell led him around by the nose, as Gallowglass had feared. He found the scent of young women irresistible.
“I know just the place to go,” Fanny confided to Madame de Genlis. “A brothel where the women are young and enthusiastic.”
Then Marcus smelled something even more enticing than a woman.
“Stop. What is that?” Marcus discovered he could slow Fanny’s progress by planting his feet so firmly on the street that his shinbone cracked under the stress.
“The H?tel-Dieu.” Madame de Genlis pointed to a vast, fire-scarred building stretched along the banks of the Seine in the shadow of Notre-Dame cathedral. Parts of it had collapsed. The rest of it looked like it might tumble into the river at any moment.
“Hotel?” Marcus asked.
“The hospital,” she replied.
“I want to go inside,” Marcus said.
“Just like his father.” Fanny looked disappointed at Marcus’s decision to leave off his pursuit of women in favor of death and disease, but then her face brightened. “Perhaps there is something to be learned from the similarity? What do you think, Stéphanie?”
Aromas of camphor, lint, coffee, and spices assaulted Marcus’s nose when he entered, followed by the sweet smell of decay and darker notes of opium and death. He drank it in, along with layers of copper and iron scent.
So much blood, he realized, each person’s subtly different.
Marcus trailed through the wards, using his nose—that powerful part of the vampire body—rather than a manual examination to diagnose illnesses and patients’ conditions.
The hospital was enormous—larger even than Philadelphia’s Bettering House, or the hospital the army had occupied in Williamsburg—and night had fallen before he was through exploring. By then, Marcus’s coat was stained with blood and vomit—he hadn’t been able to ignore the patients’ pleas for water and care. He was also ravenous, and wanted to go to a tavern and order a pint of beer and a piece of well-seasoned beef, even though he knew it would no longer satisfy his hunger.
He got Josette instead.
* * *
—
MARCUS WAS IN THE LIBRARY the next morning, conjugating Latin verbs, when there was a commotion in the front hall.
A petite woman burst into the room, followed by Fanny’s footman, a strange-looking fellow named Ulf whose arms were too long for the rest of his body. Trailing behind was another small, elegant female.
A wearh.
“You see! There he is!” the woman cried, clasping a folded piece of paper to her breast. She was draped in yards of red-and-white-striped silk and wore a redingcote along with a ridiculously tiny cocked hat set on her powdered wig at a jaunty angle. The woman was childlike in her appearance, with small features. “He is just as my Gilbert described, is he not? I knew him the moment I spotted him from my carriage, entering the H?tel-Dieu.”
The female wearh inspected Marcus through a filmy veil that floated from the brim of her hat and covered her piercing green eyes.
“Madame de Clermont, Madame la Marquise, let me call—” Ulf said, flapping his large hands in consternation.
“Ysabeau!” Fanny arrived in a whirl of pale blue and green. She was followed at a more sedate pace by Madame de Genlis, who continued to sport the colors of the Revolution and was today dressed in naval blue with golden braid. A model of a ship in full sail was pinned to her wig in lieu of a hat.
“And the Marquise de Lafayette.” Madame de Genlis swept her skirts into one hand and curtseyed. “What brings us this honor?”