* * *
“Better, is it?” Jamie’s dark-blue eyes were clouded with worry. “Is it right for ye to be sick so much, Sassenach?”
I pushed the hair back from my sweaty temples and dabbed a damp towel over my face.
“I don’t know whether it’s right,” I said weakly, “but at least I believe it’s normal. Some women are sick all through.” Not a pleasant thought at the moment.
Jamie glanced, not at the gaily painted clock on the table, but as usual, out the window at the sun.
“Do ye feel well enough to go down to breakfast, Sassenach, or ought I to tell the chambermaid to bring up something on a tray?”
“No. I’m quite all right now.” And I was. In the odd way of morning sickness, once the inexorable nausea had had its way with me, I felt perfectly fine within a moment or two. “Let me just rinse my mouth.”
As I bent over the basin, sluicing cool water over my face, there was a rap at the door of the appartement. Likely the servant who had been dispatched to the house in Paris to bring us fresh clothes, I thought.
To my surprise, though, it was a courtier, with a written invitation to lunch.
“His Majesty is dining today with an English nobleman,” the courtier explained, “newly arrived in Paris. His Majesty has summoned several of the prominent English merchants from the Cité to lunch, for the purpose of providing His Grace the Duke with the company of some of his countrymen. And someone pointed out to His Majesty that Madame your wife is an English lady, too, and thus should be invited to attend.”
“All right,” Jamie said, after a quick glance at me. “You may tell His Majesty that we will be honored to remain.”
Soon thereafter, Murtagh had arrived, dour as ever, bearing a large bundle of fresh clothes, and my medicine box, which I had asked for. Jamie took him into the sitting room to give him instructions for the day, while I hastily struggled into my fresh gown, for the first time rather regretting my refusal to employ a lady’s maid. Always unruly, the state of my hair had not been improved by sleeping in close embrace with a large, damp Scot; wild tangles shot off in several directions, resisting all attempts to tame them with brush and comb.
At length I emerged, pink and cross with effort, but with my hair in some semblance of order. Jamie looked at me and murmured something about hedgehogs under his breath, but caught a searing glance in return and had the good sense to shut up.
A stroll among the parterres and fountains of the palace gardens did a good bit to restore my equanimity. Most of the trees were still leafless, but the day was unexpectedly warm for late March, and the smell of the swelling buds on the twigs was green and pungent. You could almost feel the sap rising in the towering chestnuts and poplars that edged the paths and sheltered the hundreds of white marble statues.
I paused beside a statue of a half-draped man with grapes in his hair and a flute at his lips. A large, silky goat nibbled hungrily at more grapes that were cascading from the marble folds of the draperies.
“Who’s this?” I asked, “Pan?”
Jamie shook his head, smiling. He was dressed in his old kilt and a worn, if comfortable coat, but he looked much better to me than did the luxuriously clad courtiers who passed us in chattering groups.
“No, I think there is a statue of Pan about, but it isna that one. That’s one of the Four Humors of Man.”
“Well, he looks fairly humorous,” I said, glancing up at the goat’s smiling friend.
Jamie laughed.
“And you a physician, Sassenach! Not that sort of humor. Do ye not know the four humors that make up the human body? That one’s Blood”—he motioned at the flute-player, then pointed down the path—“and there’s Melancholy.” This was a tall man in a sort of toga, holding an open book.
Jamie pointed across the path. “And over there is Choler”—a nude and muscular young man, who certainly was scowling ferociously, without regard to the marble lion that was about to bite him smartly in the leg—“and that’s Phlegm.”
“Is it, by Jove?” Phlegm, a bearded gent with a folded hat, had both arms crossed on his chest, and a tortoise at his feet.
“Hum,” I remarked.
“Do physicians not learn about humors in your time?” Jamie asked curiously.
“No,” I said. “We have germs, instead.”
“Really? Germs,” he said to himself, trying the word over, rolling it on his tongue with a Scottish burr, which made it sound sinister in the extreme. “Gerrrms. And what do germs look like?”
I glanced up at a representation of “America,” a nubile young maiden in a feathered skirt and headdress, with a crocodile at her feet.
“Well, they wouldn’t make nearly such picturesque statues,” I said.
The crocodile at America’s feet reminded me of Master Raymond’s shop.
“Did you mean it about not wanting me to go to Master Raymond’s?” I asked. “Or do you just not want me to pierce my nipples?”
“I most definitely dinna want ye to pierce your nipples,” he said firmly, taking me by the elbow and hurrying me onward, lest I derive any untoward inspiration from America’s bare breasts. “But no, I dinna want ye to go to Master Raymond’s, either. There are rumors about the man.”
“There are rumors about everyone in Paris,” I observed, “and I’d be willing to bet that Master Raymond knows all of them.”
Jamie nodded, hair glinting in the pale spring sunshine.
“Oh, aye, I expect so. But I think I can learn what’s needful in the taverns and drawing rooms. Master Raymond’s said to be at the center of a particular circle, but it isna Jacobite sympathizers.”
“Really? Who, then?”
“Cabalists and occultists. Witches, maybe.”
“Jamie, you aren’t seriously worried about witches and demons, are you?”
We had arrived at the part of the gardens known as the “Green Carpet.” This early in the spring, the green of the huge lawn was only a faint tinge, but people were lounging on it, taking advantage of the rare balmy day.
“Not witches, no,” he said at last, finding a place near a hedge of forsythia and sitting down on the grass. “The Comte St. Germain, possibly.”
I remembered the look in the Comte St. Germain’s dark eyes at Le Havre, and shivered, in spite of the sunshine and the woolen shawl I wore.
“You think he’s associated with Master Raymond?”
Jamie shrugged. “I don’t know. But it was you told me the rumors about St. Germain, no? And if Master Raymond is part of that circle—then I think you should keep the hell away from him, Sassenach.” He gave me a wry half-smile. “After all, I’d as soon not have to save ye from burning again.”
The shadows under the trees reminded me of the cold gloom of the thieves’ hole in Cranesmuir, and I shivered and moved closer to Jamie, farther into the sunlight.
“I’d as soon you didn’t, either.”
The pigeons were courting on the grass below a flowering forsythia bush. The ladies and gentlemen of the Court were performing similar activities on the paths that led through the sculpture gardens. The major difference was that the pigeons were quieter about it.
A vision in watered aqua silk hove abaft our resting place, in loud raptures over the divinity of the play the night before. The three ladies with him, while not so spectacular, echoed his opinions faithfully.
“Superb! Quite superb, the voice of La Couelle!”
“Oh, superb! Yes, wonderful!”
“Delightful, delightful! Superb is the only word for it!”
“Oh, yes, superb!”
The voices—all four of them—were shrill as nails being pulled from wood. By contrast, the gentleman pigeon doing his turn a few feet from my nose had a low and mellifluous coo, rising from a deep, amatory rumble to a breathy whistle as he puffed his breast and bowed repeatedly, laying his heart at the feet of his ladylove, who looked rather unimpressed so far.
I looked beyond the pigeon toward the aqua-satined courtier, who had hastened back to snatch up a lace-trimmed handkerchief, coyly dropped as bait by one of his erstwhile companions.
“The ladies call that one ‘L’Andouille,’ ” I remarked. “I wonder why?”
Jamie grunted sleepily, and opened one eye to look after the departing courtier.
“Mm? Oh, ‘The Sausage.’ It means he canna keep his roger in his breeches. You know the sort…ladies, footmen, courtesans, pageboys. Lapdogs, too, if rumor is right,” he added, squinting in the direction of the vanished aqua silk, where a lady of the court was now approaching, a fluffy white bundle clasped protectively to her ample bosom. “Reckless, that. I wouldna risk mine anywhere near one o’ those wee yapping hairballs.”
“Your roger?” I said, amused. “I used to hear it called peter, now and again. And the Yanks, for some peculiar reason, used to call theirs a dick. I once called a patient who was teasing me a ‘Clever Dick,’ and he nearly burst his stitches laughing.”
Jamie laughed himself, stretching luxuriously in the warming spring sun. He blinked once or twice and rolled over, grinning at me upside down.
“You have much the same effect on me, Sassenach,” he said. I stroked back the hair from his forehead, kissing him between the eyes.
“Why do men call it names?” I asked. “John Thomas, I mean. Or Roger, for that matter. Women don’t do that.”
“They don’t?” Jamie asked, interested.
“No, of course not. I’d as soon call my nose Jane.”
His chest moved up and down as he laughed. I rolled on top of him, enjoying the solid feel of him beneath me. I pressed my hips downward, but the layers of intervening petticoats rendered it more of a gesture than anything else.
“Well,” Jamie said logically, “yours doesna go up and down by itself, after all, nor go carryin’ on regardless of your own wishes in the matter. So far as I know, anyway,” he added, cocking one eyebrow questioningly.
“No, it doesn’t, thank God. I wonder if Frenchmen call theirs ‘Pierre,’ ” I said, glancing at a passing dandy in green velvet-faced moiré.
Jamie burst into a laugh that startled the pigeons out of the forsythia bush. They flapped off in a ruffle of indignation, scattering wisps of gray down in their wake. The fluffy white lapdog, hitherto content to loll in its mistress’s arms like a bundle of rags, awoke at once to an awareness of its responsibilities. It popped out of its warm nest like a Ping-Pong ball and galloped off in enthusiastic pursuit of the pigeons, barking dementedly, its mistress in similar cry behind it.
“I dinna ken, Sassenach,” he said, recovering enough to wipe the tears from his eyes. “The only Frenchman I ever heard call it a name called his ‘Georges.’ ”
“Georges!” I said, loudly enough to attract the attention of a small knot of passing courtiers. One, a short but vivacious specimen in dramatic black slashed with white satin, stopped alongside and bowed deeply, sweeping the ground at my feet with his hat. One eye was still swelled shut, and a livid welt showed across the bridge of his nose, but his style was unimpaired.
“A votre service, Madame,” he said.