Day Sixteen

"Mademoiselle la Vicomtesse Cécile de Seguemont, Miss Laura Beckett."

Valerien's tall mannish aunt came striding into the room, the spitting image of the old Comte minus the silver hair and the big mustache... she even wore a three-piece suit very like his, but with a more flamboyant collar and cuffs, a loosely knotted foulard scarf instead of a necktie, and a pair of platinum pince-nez on a long delicate chain dangling from her minimal bosom.  Her dark ash-brown hair was worn in a slightly longer style but pomaded into a similar marcel wave, and her buttonhole sported a vivid coral-colored rosebud instead of lavender.

The lady beside her was small and plump and birdlike, with frizzy strawberry-blond hair in a messy cloud around her head, a pretty face only slightly marred by deep laugh-lines, and fine lustrous brown eyes that danced merrily with mischievous humor. Dressed in a rather blowsy and colorless skirt and cardigan, with grandmotherly amethyst jewelry and a pair of reading-glasses hanging about her neck on a silk cord, she looked like a happy librarian (which in fact she is).

Tante Cécile blew through the room like a tornado, her dynamic personality subduing those she met with her brusque handshakes and slightly-too-loud greetings; Miss Laura followed in her wake like a small planet caught helplessly in orbit, blushing and tittering her way through the various introductions.  Danny found something a little contrived about their behavior, and wondered if they acted like this all the time or if it was a performance put on for some obscure reason.  They were such a stereotypical lesbian couple, conforming almost ludicrously to heterosexual gender roles, that it seemed unlikely they were for real.

But Danny was accustomed to people who act—though he knew few professional actors, many of his friends lived their lives on a stage of their own devising, conducting themselves at all times as if there were cameras trained on them recording every gesture and declamation.  So he took the two ladies in his stride and enjoyed a discussion of recent literary trends with Miss Laura while Tante Cécile teased Valerien about the Comtesse's unspoken but nonetheless obvious motive for the party.

No more new arrivals showed up, and the party started to devolve into smaller conversational groups as people settled into the widely-strewn wicker furniture and footmen started circulating with sherry and light liqueurs instead of the now-cold tea and coffee.

"Join me for a stroll?" Valerien asked Danny with a significant tilt of his head, indicating that he wanted more than a mere walk, that he had something he wanted to talk about.

"Of course," Danny handed his empty cup and plate to a passing footman and followed his friend through the tall French doors onto the terrace.  They paused here and there to sniff at a flower or talk about a fragrant herb in the raised marble planters that were arranged like a parterre garden, slowly making their way to the broad stairs that led down to the lower terrace and the real parterre gardens; Danny guessed that Valerien was making a show of a casual wandering-away rather than a purposeful exit from the tea-party.

"So, what do you think?" Valerien asked as soon as they were out of sight and sound of the glass-house, "About the women, I mean?"

"They're all very beautiful," Danny said thoughtfully, "Marie-Helene seems the most suitable at first glance, though she's rather tall."

"She struck me as slightly insipid," Valerien frowned, "Though at such brief meeting, it's hard to gauge her personality.  She works in an art gallery, real art and not modern junk, which may indicate intelligence... or may just be a sinecure for a well-connected haute-mondaine.  What about the English girl?"

"I like her," Danny smiled, "She's cute as a button, and she talks like a Wodehouse character."

"If she were a boy, I'd be all over her, but I'm not sure she'd polish up very well.  We'll have to see her at dinner.  I like her brother better."

"Marquesa says he's 'bendable,' I'm going to try to bend him," Danny arched a roguish eyebrow.

"Tsk, such a slut," Valerien shook his head and laughed gently, "I'm not sure what to make of the Italian, though.  She's gorgeous, but she's rather scary, too."

"Marquesa's got his claws out already, I'm expecting a heated competition in style."

"They're kind of alike, aren't they?" Valerien wondered, "Not their looks, of course, but their magnetism and their directness.  I wonder if she's as hard as Marquesa can sometimes be."

"She strikes me as more passionate than hard," Danny considered, then looked around him in surprise at how far they'd walked in a short time, "Are we going somewhere in particular?  You seem to be in a hurry."

"I want to visit my father before we dress for dinner," Valerien said very quietly, practically whispering, breaking off from the main path that led to the swimming pool and heading uphill toward the forest.

The Vicomte Antoine de Seguemont, Valerien's father, to whom Marquesa often playfully refers as "Rochester's Wife," lives in a beautiful little house inside a spacious walled garden; he is what Victorian psychologists would call "childish," essentially lobotomized by a drug overdose many years before, and he exists simply and apparently quite happily with a very kind keeper and an even kinder nurse in the garden, planting flowers and vegetables and drawing lovely but primitive pictures of his plants.

The Seguemonts have let it be known for years that Antoine was dead, however—as Poppy had pointed out, the family was particularly sensitive to what people think, and they did not like it to be known that they had any insanity in their family, even if it was causal rather than congenital—so the walled garden was meant to protect his existence from the eyes of strangers more than to keep him contained... in his twenty years in the garden, he has only once tried to escape, convinced that his wife was calling his name from outside.

But Antoine de Seguemont had killed his wife, Valerien's mother Virginia Allenwhite de Seguemont, during a drug-induced paranoid hallucination when Valerien was only five years old.  Valerien never said how he'd killed her, but Danny had come to understand from what was not said that the crime had been particularly brutal and that the Vicomtesse had suffered much before she died.

Since he never recovered his faculties after that, never remembered what he'd done nor even understood that his beloved Virginia was dead, he was tried as mentally incompetent and placed in a secure ward of the local hospital.  After three years in the institution, he was judged to be no danger to himself or others, and with a good deal of bribery and complicated legal maneuvers he was released into his parents' custody.  They built a fifteen-foot stone wall around four acres containing an enclosed pavilion in the grounds, and installed their son there to live out the rest of his days in peace and comfort.  A little more bribery and some carefully seeded gossip secured an obituary and a generally-accepted version of history in which the Vicomte recovered his mental faculties and then died of grief for what he'd done (not suicide, mind, which would be its own scandal to an ostensibly Catholic family, but simply losing the will to live and therefore dying).

Arriving at the solid wooden gate into the walled garden, Valerien punched some numbers into an electronic keypad, causing a heavy bar on the other side to slide back, and the gate swung open.  The light changed as they left the dense dull oak wood and entered a paradise of open air and flowers, fragrant shrubs and tidy vegetable frames.  In the center was another octagon, this time a delightful folly built in an 18th-century French approximation of the Chinese style, with whitewashed fretwork porches and upswept jade-green tiled roofs crested with pottery dragons.  Glass wind-chimes tinkled in the breeze, pendant bronze bells sang in the eaves, and wide latticework doors stood open to the colors and scents of the garden.

The inside of the Folly was surprisingly spare and modern, compared to the outside: a large living room took up the front half of the building, with an open kitchen on the right and three doors through the central wall leading to two bedrooms and a bath, and a spiral iron stair disappearing into the loft above where the Vicomte had his own bedroom and bath as well as a tiny studio in the cupola at the top of the building.  The furniture was exceedingly plain, all straight lines and flat beige fabrics, but very comfortable with down-filled cushions and rounded edges.

Valerien's father was sitting on the floor hunched over a plain square coffee-table in front of an elaborate Chinoiserie porcelain stove that was left over from the Folly's days as an open summerhouse, assiduously applying watercolors to a small wooden panel; where his sister favored their father, Antoine looked more like their mother, tall and slim as the other Seguemonts, but with the Saint-Neve spun-sugar coloring,  delicate features, and slightly protruding large hazel eyes; his long curly silver-blond hair was beginning to fade to snow white, worn in an untidy ponytail down his back, and his plain jeans and sweater were the same shade of beige as the furniture around him.  He looked rather like an angel gone to seed.

"Look, it's my son!" the Vicomte cried out joyously when he paused in his painting and noticed he had visitors, "And his handsome friend!"

"Hello, Papa," Valerien said as he embraced his father, kissing him on both cheeks before laying his head affectionately on the taller man's shoulder.

"Monsieur," Danny greeted the Vicomte when his turn came to be hugged; one never used names in the Folly, as the Vicomte seemed unable to remember his visitors' names, though he was always clear on their relationships and remembered previous visits; and he became agitated if anyone called him by his title or his Christian name—he could be called Papa, mon fils or mon frère, or more commonly Monsieur, but never Vicomte or Antoine.

The exceptions to the no-name rule were the Vicomte's housemates, Claude and Albert, since calling them "keeper" and "nurse" would also agitate their charge.  He thought of them as upper servants rather than friends, a tutor and a chef since one of them (Claude) read to him and the other (Albert) did most of the cooking, but he treated them with familiar affection, as a child would a nanny.

Danny had always assumed that Claude and Albert must be lovers, though they occupied separate bedrooms and did not display romantic affection toward each other; it just seemed so unlikely that two men could bear to be cooped up with an addle-brained aristocrat in a four-acre universe for twenty years unless they really loved each other.  And they did seem very attached, if not affectionate, and clearly loved their charge.  Neither of them were in the Folly at the moment, but they never left the Vicomte alone for very long.

"How have you been, Papa?" Valerien followed his father back to the table where the man resumed his painting as if he'd not been interrupted.

"Very well, very well," he said, scrutinizing a brush before applying it to the incredibly detailed but poorly proportioned portrait of a stalk of small bluish-purple blossoms that stood before him in a glass of water, "The peonies are starting to come out, you should see them, they're so beautiful!  And Albert is making roast lamb for dinner, can you smell it?  I hope we have cous-cous with it, I love cous-cous, especially with gold raisins in it."

"Papa, Grandmère wants me to get married," Valerien said after a short silence.

"You're too young to get married," the Vicomte replied without looking up, "Aren't you?"

"I'm twenty-eight, Papa," Valerien reminded him.

"Really?  Then maybe you should get married.  Do you want to?"

"I feel like I ought to."

"But you don't want to," the man looked up from his work and smiled, "So you shouldn't."

"You're right, Papa," Valerien laughed, "I won't. Not unless I want to."

"You should never do anything you don't want to," the Vicomte advised with a wise nod, "Except bathe.  You have to bathe, and eat Brussels sprouts sometimes, even if you don't want to."

Danny always found these exchanges between father and son very charming, but they sometimes made Valerien a little sad.  He was long accustomed to the reversal of their roles as adult and child, but sometimes found himself brooding on what life would have been like if his father were whole, if his mother were alive, if he'd had even a semblance of a normal family.  Danny tried to head off that sadness with a change of conversation when he could see his friend needed more from his father than childlike advice on bathing and Brussels sprouts.

"What are you painting, Monsieur?" Danny asked solicitously, bending over to look at the picture.

"It's called monkshood.  It has some other names, too, it's supposed to cure werewolves.  You have to be very careful with it, you can get sick if you touch it without gloves on.  But it's very beautiful, isn't it?  I wish I could match the color better. I tried squashing the blossoms into the paint, but they just turned brown."

"It's very lovely," Danny smiled, resisting the urge to reach out and pat the man on the head as one would a little boy... Danny sometimes forgot that the Vicomte was fifty-two years old rather than five; and though he knew the man wouldn't mind being patted on the head, Valerien wouldn't like Danny treating him like a child.  It was an emotionally precarious relationship they had, and one always had to tread carefully between Valerien and his father.

"Well, good afternoon, gentlemen!" Claude boomed out as he entered from the kitchen door, Albert right behind him with an armful of long-stalked flowers; they were both very big men, more muscle than fat but the kind of muscle that comes from genetics and physical labor rather than gymnasiums and supplements, plain-faced and mouse-haired, so similar in their bearing and style of speech that they could easily be mistaken for brothers, though they didn't really look alike.

"Hello, Claude; hello, Albert," Valerien greeted the two men as they came into the room; Danny just smiled at them and waved.

"Oh, look! They brought in some of the new peonies!" the Vicomte jumped up from the floor and went to bury his face in the blossoms, "Aren't they amazing?"

"Beautiful," Danny agreed.

"You should take some with you," the Vicomte told him confidentially, "Take the yellow ones.  But not the blue ones, I love the blue ones."

"Thank you, Monsieur," Danny replied, touched.

"Oh, you should stay for dinner.  Albert, is there enough lamb for my son and his handsome friend to stay for dinner?"

"Of course, Monsieur, if you wish," Albert responded, though in fact he'd only made enough for three; but he knew the visitors wouldn't stay, so it seemed kindest to humor the man.

"We can't stay to dinner, I'm afraid," Valerien told his father, "We have to go back soon.  Grandmère is having a house party." 

"She is?  You must take the pink ones for Maman, she loves pink," the Vicomte took the peonies from Albert and spread them out on the dinner-table, culling the pink ones for his mother and the yellow ones for Danny, carefully putting all the blue ones to the side and leaving the other colors scattered, chattering all the while, "She came to visit this morning with the Father when he said Mass for us in the garden. I made a little chapel in the garden with a trellis and benches, you know, and the Father consecrated it with his box of oils. He usually comes on Sunday afternoons, but today was the feast-day of a saint, I forget which one, whose special care is gardens, and he thought she'd appreciate a Mass in my garden chapel.  I like his Masses, he says them in Latin all the time.  He doesn't take my Confession anymore, though.  My sins are always the same, so he just goes ahead and prays for me.  He's nicer than the old Father.  He says touching myself isn't really bad, it's only called a sin because God wants us to remember to treat our bodies respectfully.  So I always pray afterward and that makes it alright."

"Monsieur, I'm sure your son doesn't want to hear about that," Claude gently chided him, embarrassed by the turn his monologue had taken, though Valerien seemed to not mind and Danny had to bite his tongue to keep from laughing.

"He doesn't?" the Vicomte looked bewildered by the notion that there was anything he could say that would not interest everyone, "I thought it was interesting.  I'd felt bad all those years when the old Father said touching myself made God angry and sad.  But now I find out He just wants me to pray after.  That's much nicer."

"The new Father is very nice, Papa," Valerien reached out and took his father's hand, "He's more interested in our souls than our sins.  But my friend and I have to go change our clothes for dinner.  I'll come visit you again tomorrow, alright?"

"Why do you have to change clothes? You look very nice," the Vicomte seemed worried by the idea, a troubled frown creasing his forehead.

"Because I'm silly," Valerien laughed, kissing his father and hugging him again.  He realized he'd sparked some ghost of a memory in his father's scrambled brain, and hurried to distract him from it, "I have so many clothes I have to change four times a day just so I can wear them all."

"That is silly," the Vicomte agreed gravely, bundling up the pink and yellow peonies in paper towels and handing them over to Danny, his face smoothing out again as the unhappy memory receded, "All of my clothes are the same, even when I change you can't tell."

"Good evening, Papa," Valerien said, taking Danny by the arm and towing him out of the Folly, "Good evening Claude, good evening, Albert.  I'll be back tomorrow."

"Good night, my son and his handsome friend," the Vicomte called after them.

"Are you OK?" Danny asked when they reached the gate and plunged back into the woods.

"You know, I don't even remember what he was like before, I was so young," Valerien had a small sob in his voice, "But oh, how I wish I could talk to him like he was.  I need a father right now."

"You have Poppy," Danny suggested, tears starting in his own eyes as his sympathy for his friend welled up.

"Yes, I do have Poppy," Valerien laughed, then sighed, "And I have you and Marquesa, and I have Richard to advise me as well.  I have so much, and here I am crying about what I don't have."

"And you know your father loves you.  Mine can't stand the sight of me."

"Now don't you go getting all maudlin on me," Valerien punched him lightly on the arm, "It was supposed to be my turn to be sad.  You can't be sad, too."

"Sorry," Danny draped his arm around Valerien's shoulders and pulled him close as they walked along the dimming path through the woods, "You go ahead and cry, I'll laugh."

"Let's both laugh," Valerien suggested, pulling away and breaking into a jog when they reached the rose-bush-lined marble pavement that ran between the east terrace and the pool, "Let's have a quick swim before dinner."

"Oh, boy! Skinny-dipping!" Danny cried out, chasing his friend through the wall of Italian poplars that screened the swimming-pool from the house, pulling off his clothes as he went.
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3,339 Words
22,514 Total Word Count