“You missed Mass, too, Count Lucien,” Marie-Josèphe said, stung into a retort by the criticism of her brother. “Perhaps His Majesty will scold you as well.”
“He will not.” Count Lucien limped across the tent floor, to stand in his place beside the King.
All the while, the musicians played in the background. The sea monster trilled along with them, its song winding strangely within their melody.
“Marie-Josèphe!” Yves said. “I need you.”
She hurried between the rows of courtiers and joined him beside the dissection table.
“There you are,” he said. “Are you ready?”
“I am ready.” She kept her voice neutral, hurt by his peremptory tone, but accepting its justice. She hurried to stand at her drawing box. It held sheets of paper and her charcoals and pastels. The dry charcoal whispered against her fingers. At the convent, in Martinique, she had been forbidden to draw; at Saint-Cyr she had not had time for practice. She hoped she could do justice to Yves’ work.
“Remove the ice,” Yves said.
Two lackeys scooped away the ice and the insulating layer of sawdust from the dissection table, revealing the shroud. Others stood nearby with large mirrors, holding them so His Majesty could see the proceedings without craning his neck. The operating theater at the college of surgeons in Paris would have been more convenient for everyone else, perhaps, and would have allowed more spectators to see clearly. But at Versailles the convenience of His Majesty overruled other considerations.
At one end of the front row of spectators, Chartres watched eagerly, leaning forward, poised to leap and snatch and capture every shred of knowledge Yves offered.
He caught Marie-Josèphe’s gaze, wistfully, as if to say, I could have moved that ice. I could hold that mirror.
Marie-Josèphe tried not to giggle, thinking of the consternation if Chartres performed such menial tasks.
“His Majesty gave me the resources to discover the yearly gathering-place of the last of the sea monsters,” Yves said, “and to capture two of them alive. The male creature resisted to its death. The female sea monster survives, for it possesses no such will to freedom.”
The quartet split its melody and soared in harmony, a daring departure from the usual measured music. Marie-Josèphe shivered at the beauty and the daring. Madame — who was herself an excellent musician — whispered a startled exclamation to Lotte; even His Majesty glanced toward the quartet. The violinist faltered. The musicians had not changed the familiar piece.
The female sea monster was singing.
It is like a bird, Marie-Josèphe thought, delighted. A mockingbird, that can imitate what it hears!
The violinist found his place. The sea monster’s voice soared above the melody, then dropped far below. The soft rumble touched Marie-Josèphe’s bones with a chill.
The tang of preserving fluid, and the dangerous sweet scent of flesh near rotting, rose from the canvas and filled the air. Monsieur raised his pomander, sniffed it, then leaned toward his brother and offered him the clove-studded orange. His Majesty accepted the protection from the evil humours, nodded thanks, and sniffed the pomander.
“I will first do a gross dissection, proceeding through the sea monster’s skin, fascia, and muscles.” As oblivious to the music as to the odors, Yves pulled the canvas aside.
The live sea monster’s song stopped.
The male sea monster was even uglier than the female, its face coarser, its hair pale green, tangled, and uneven. Its ugliness did not startle Marie-Josèphe; she had helped Yves dissect frogs, snakes, and wharf-rats, slimy worms, sharks with evil toothy grins.
But she was surprised by the creature’s halo: broken glass and shards of gilt metal radiated like a sunburst around its head. She sketched, as if her hand were connected directly to her eyes: the shape of the head, the tangled hair, the rays of broken glass alternating with kinked, gilded strips.
Yves swept away the glass and the metal, as if it were random debris. He picked up a lock of the creature’s hair. A twist of gilded metal fell from the tangle. Yves pushed it aside with the other rubbish.
Peering over the edge of the fountain and through the bars of its cage, the live sea monster whistled and sighed.
Marie-Josèphe slipped the sketch of the halo to the bottom of her stack of paper, and began another drawing.
“God has given the creatures hair,” Yves said, “so they may disguise themselves in beds of seaweed. They are shy and retiring. They eat small fish, but the bulk of their diet no doubt is kelp.”
Marie-Josèphe sketched quickly: the wild hair, uneven in places as if it had been cut; the strong jaw; the sharp canine teeth projecting over the lower lip.
“When you’re done with cutting the beast,” said Monseigneur, “we can roast bits of it.”
“My apologies, Monseigneur.” Yves bowed toward the Grand Dauphin. “That’s impossible. The carcass is preserved for dissection, not for eating.”
“No doubt pickling the thing does away with all the merits of sea monster flesh,”