“No.” He starts on the pillows. “Well, yes, I suppose, but does a starving thief choose to steal? Does a soldier choose to kill? We do things or else we die.” He tries to twinkle at me, but I will have none of it. I saw the shadow cross his face. I watch him sharply, and wait.
“You are a nosy sparrow. Milady,” he adds quickly, “I came here because my father is off at sea, and I have three sisters and four brothers, all living on what coins my mother can scrape together darning socks and patching trousers. My siblings needed bread, and stockings for the winter. So I hopped a cart to the chateau and begged for work. We don’t have choices the way highborn lords and ladies do.”
I bristle at that. “Perhaps you have noticed, sir, that highborn lords and ladies do not have quite as many choices as you thought. A golden cage is still a cage.”
“A cage with no shortage of bread and stockings,” he says evenly.
“A cage alone.” It comes out in a snarl. I see suddenly what he is: his sympathy for me is mixed with disdain. He pities me, is sorry that my mother is dead, but it is the pity of an older sibling patting the younger one crying over a lost toy. He thinks I do not know hardship.
“I have food and clothing, yes,” I say, my voice low. “And my mother is dead. There is no difference between pain of the heart and pain of the belly.”
“And you think peasants are spared heart’s pain? We have both.”
“You have a mother!” I shout. “She is alive. She was not shot before your eyes, and your sisters were not torn from you and locked away in some godforsaken palace. But you will not spare a drop of pity because I am rich? We have death in our gilded courts, too. We have disease and cruelty, and not a breath of air or freedom. You cannot say our lives are easy any more than I can say yours is. They are lives, and so they are horrid!”
The last word is a screech. I gasp, forcing the tears to keep from falling.
Neither of us says a word for several moments. Jacques begins to move again, wandering about and straightening the pillows. Finally he turns to me. “I’m sorry, mademoiselle. Let’s not fight. Please? Everyone in the kitchens is on knife’s edge, every day. There is nothing but bile spewing and bitterness. Let’s us not fight, at least.”
He finishes the bed and sits down across from me, cross-legged. I pretend great interest in a groove in the floorboards. I feel a stab of remorse for shrieking at him. He is poor and I am rich, and we each think ourselves the sadder and the more hurt. But there is no measure for pain. How wonderful it would be if there were no limit to sympathy.
“I’m sorry, too,” I say. “And you may call me Aurélie. Please do.”
We stay on the floor, neither of us looking at the other, simply lingering, unwilling to part. We are the same in some things: we are both young and lonely. We wish to protect the ones we love. We are both unable to do so.
“Will you come with us when we escape?” I ask after a while.
He looks up, surprised. “Where to?”
“I don’t know. Wherever we go. London, I suppose.”
I must sound terribly frivolous. I don’t care. I can almost feel the sun up there, the wind and the green grasses brushing against my fingertips. I can hear the birds. I feel I could burst these walls, burst the ceiling with my shoulders.
“You would not want me along,” Jacques says, and he is looking at the same groove in the floorboard that I was so studiously inspecting. “I am no match for English chambermaids.”
“And you have a family here,” I say practically.
He stares at me. Nods. “That I have.”
A knocking sounds, somewhere in the walls, dull and faraway. He leaves me.
It is almost a week before I see him again. He unlocks the door to the boudoir and grins at me, tries to be light and jolly, but I know at once that he is neither. When he stretches himself long to reach the cornices, I see he has bruises on his hands and peeking, purple and green, from behind his collar. He will not tell me how he got them. I hope he is not being punished for the time he spends here.
“Have you found a way out?” I ask him as soon as I dare.
“No,” he says. “But I am closer. The butlers are run ragged with work. They . . . they become angry when the lower servants are slow, but there are fewer of them now and they cannot watch everything. I think some of them are being sent back up. Or perhaps they are escaping.” He studies his own hands, opening them across his knees. His fingers are brown and weathered like a farmer’s. “They will not let me near the outer chambers of the palace, or in certain wings, but I think it is only a matter of time. It is vast down here, immense. But it feels small. It feels airless.” His voice becomes soft. “I’ve been having the oddest dreams.”
I wonder if they are like my dreams. I am about to ask him when a sound from beyond the door startles us to our feet. Jacques runs for the panel. I go with him, and as he steps through my hand brushes his, and he squeezes it. Now he is gone.
I sometimes think I like him best when he is gone. I think of all the things I want to ask him, and I remember that if I were not here, if I were not a prisoner, I would not care to speak to him at all.