“Youthful foolishness. I was barely fifteen.”
He had never told anyone the truth, that he took the blame for his brother’s foolishness. He was the eldest, after all; it was his responsibility to help Guy find his place in His Majesty’s court. At that he had failed. Guy bore the worst punishment; His Majesty never exiled him, but Lucien sent him home to Brittany and refused all his entreaties for a second invitation to Versailles.
“His Majesty’s punishment worked to my great advantage,” he said. “He sent me with his embassy to Morocco. To learn diplomacy, he said. We travelled through Arabia, Egypt, the Levant.”
“The greatest mathematicians in the world lived in Arabia,” Marie-Josèphe said.
“Until M. Newton.”
“I didn’t have the honor of meeting Arabic mathematicians,” Lucien said. “But I met sheiks and warriors and holy men. I rode with the Bedouins. My sword was forged in Damascus. I lived in a hareem.”
“A hareem — but how?”
“On our journey, we all fell ill, with a dreadful flux — I’ll spare you the details.”
“I know the details.”
“I am sorry to hear it. The Sultan took us into his household. A less brave and ethical man would have put us out to die. Some of us did die, but his altruism saved most of us. His physicians watched over the grown men. The women of the household cared for the boys, the pages, for in the house of a devout Mahometan, the men live in one part of the house, the women and girls in another. Young boys live in the women’s quarters until they reach a certain age and develop a certain attention.
“As a youth,” Lucien said with dry directness, “I was rather small. In the chaos of illness and darkness and death, I was mistaken for a page of ten, rather than a young man of fifteen. No one in the embassy could say it was a mistake and call me back. We were too sick. I came to my senses all unaware, wondering if a god really did exist —”
“Of course He does!”
“Then He is Allah, and He brought me into His garden to mock my disbelief. I awoke in the women’s quarters.”
“They made short work of putting you out, I’m certain.”
“No — how could they? I’d be killed, or worse. The women — the Sultan’s wives, his daughters, his brothers’ wives, his sons’ wives — would be disgraced. They could be divorced. Or stoned to death.”
“How did you escape?”
“I did not. I stayed until the last day of the embassy, when I crept out over the rooftops and joined the caravan home. The women kept my secret. I became their secret.
They were women of intelligence and kindness and passion, locked away from the world, kept at the mercy of men’s whims.”
“And you were a youth of a certain age and attention.”
“Indeed I was.”
“Tempted into sin. At the mercy of their whims.”
Lucien laughed. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. I honor their mercy and their whims. They awakened me. Before that time, I’d never lived for a moment when my body didn’t pain me.”
“You’re no better than their husbands, who imprisoned them!” Marie-Josèphe cried.
“You took your pleasure from them and placed them in danger.”
“I took nothing. Ours was an exchange of gifts. My gifts were clumsy and ill-made to begin with, I admit, but they were sincere, and my beloved friends were patient. I learned nothing of diplomacy during those months. Instead, I learned the art of rapture.
I learned how to give it and how to receive it. I learned how much more it’s worth when it’s both given and received.”
Lucien fell silent. Marie-Josèphe tried to make herself feel disgusted and offended, as she knew she should, but his story moved her.
How much I would have cherished a secret friend, in the convent, she thought. Not a man! Not for... Not for rapture. For affection, for conversation, for friendship, for all the things forbidden me because they would distract from the love of God. If a pagan, a heretic, had appeared in my cell and begged for asylum, I would have hidden her and protected her.
“If you lived in rapture, why are you sad?” she demanded, for Lucien stared across the water with a far-away and melancholy expression.
Lucien remained silent for so long, she thought he would not reply.
“The amiable Sultan’s eldest son, the crown prince... He took a young wife, that is, a new concubine... She was fourteen, homesick, but she could never go home — she’d been enslaved, and sold. She had been used to liberty... Her gaze was like a trapped bird. We became friends.”
He stopped to govern his voice.
“She had as little experience as I. Her sister wives could tell her what to do to please her husband, when he demanded her presence and compelled her first submission.
They could have told him how to please her, even when he claimed her virginity. But he never listened to their wisdom. He took her. He forced her. He raped her.”