“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.”
Lucien rubbed his hand across his forehead, hiding his eyes from the memory.
“But, he was her husband,” Marie-Josèphe said as gently as she could. “He couldn’t rape —”
“Don’t preach your ignorance to me.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“By their law — by your law — he couldn’t rape her. What she surrendered to was rape, all the worse because she couldn’t resist, she couldn’t object, she couldn’t refuse. Should we have comforted her by saying, Your husband acted within the law?”
“It’s God’s will, M. de Chrétien, for women to suffer.” Marie-Josèphe hoped that explaining properly might bring Count Lucien to belief. “If she were a Christian, she would have understood and submitted willingly.”
“I cannot fathom why you accept such arrant lunacy.” He spoke quietly. “If she were a Christian, you’d consign her to hell, for she killed herself.”
Recovering from her dismay, Marie-Josèphe whispered, “I am so sorry. I’m sorry for your friend’s pain, for your grief, and for my inexcusable condescension.” She took his hand. He turned away, hiding his bright tears, but he permitted her touch.
A rocket blazed across the sky.
Fireworks burst in a great floating carpet from the Grand Canal to the chateau. A hundred colors painted patterns in the sky. The roof tiles trembled with the noise. In the midst of the roar of rockets, the spectators cheered.
A burst of blue and gold formed a great expanding sphere. Small red rockets streaked over it. The low clouds reflected the light of the fireworks, an eerie, distorted mirror. The explosions formed a solid presence.
Gunpowder smoke hovered, pungent and gritty. Lucien lay back on the warm tiles and gazed into the sky.
“Is this what war is like?” Marie-Josèphe asked.
“Not in the least. It lacks the mud, the discomfort, the fear. It lacks the screams of dying men and disemboweled horses. It lacks severed limbs, and death. It lacks the exhilaration, and the glory.”
The fireworks continued, embroidering the sky with needles of color and light. A golden letter “L” and its mirror image, surrounded by flowers and starbursts, brightened the gardens to day.
Marie-Josèphe leaped up, climbed over the edge of the roof, and disappeared. Startled, Lucien followed her. In her room, she struggled into her clothes. Standing on the window seat, the cat glaring at him slit-eyed from the shadows, Lucien said, “May I help you?”
“I heard Sherzad,” Marie-Josèphe said.
Lucien buttoned her dress, distracted from her words by the touch of her hair falling over her shoulders.
“I didn’t think — she must be so frightened!” She pulled on her shoes and ran away before Lucien had retrieved his perruke from the lutenist. He put it on, thinking, You never should have revealed yourself to her without it.
Sherzad swam in the center of the fountain. She screamed a challenge. The explosions assaulted her. The roof of the tent lit up with the light of bombs and guns, Greek fire and mortars, all the weapons that had been arrayed against the people of the sea for so many generations.
She screamed again, shrieking with fury and grief.
Marie-Josèphe ran into the tent.
The Fountain gleamed with unearthly light. Apollo’s horses struck sparks from their hooves. Sherzad thrashed, sending up a fountain of luminescent water. With each blast of rockets, the shining intensified in waves.