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Generally speaking, Philippe liked to revisit his mistakes, learn from them. Life was hardly worth living if he wasn’t the best, the first into the fray, the last out of it, and so it was important to understand where he went wrong so that he wouldn’t repeat it in the future.
He paced around the floor to his study in Palais Royal, pacing up and down a deep red Persian carpet, hands folded behind his back. Several classical sculptures that he hadn’t bothered to learn the names of glared at him, and he glared back.
Step One: Inviting Margrid to Palais Royal, given what had happened the last time. Not a poor decision, in and of itself. And…
She was interesting; he was fond of her.
He smiled to himself, slowly, with an edge of self-awareness. There were a hundred places he could take her, but Palais Royal was different. Palais Royal was his. Monceau was more peaceful, quieter, more private, but these were the halls he’d played in as a boy, these were the rooms that were as much a part of him as if they were his own organs, the rooms that five generations of d’Orléans had lived their lives in, four of them from cradle to grave. He could have had her in a hundred places in Paris, even in the places that he didn’t own, he would be unlikely to be turned aside. But that she would come to Palais Royal, eventually...that was inevitable.
Which then led him to…
Step Two: Letting Margrid into the library.
Risky, yes, but the payoff had been absolutely marvelous .
He hadn’t meant to lose Margrid. He had simply turned his back to discuss something with De Laclos for a moment. In that time, she must have gotten bored, slipping away from his side, and by the time he turned around, there was no sign of her.
At the time, he had shrugged his shoulders, certain that she would return in her own time. As the evening wore on, he found himself worrying at his chin throughout dinner, forcing a smile through comments that seemed to grow more and more inane (even though, any other time, he would have laughed or responded with a well-timed comment). Margrid was not one for dinner, feeling out of place with his usual group, and, after the last time she and Félicité had met, he had decided, for the sake of both women (and because of the inherent difficulty of getting blood out of any type of carpet), that it was for the best.
Speaking of which…
“What do you think, Monsieur le Duc?” Félicité gave a coy, self-effacing smile, laying a hand on his shoulder, which he instinctively pulled away from. Strange. It was Félicité; she had been, at times, lover, mother, sister, friend, and advisor to him. (The arm that she touched still bore her name on it, the words thankfully smudged over the years.) There was nothing new or unseemly about her touching him. But, in that moment, her touch seemed like one more imposition, as she tried to force him into a world that, at present, was inconvenient to him.
“I think…” he said, looking around the room, candlelight sparking off all the crystal finery, at a sea of faces that seemed to include almost everyone in his life save for the one person he most wanted to see. “I think I must apologize and take my leave. My head, you understand.”
He turned at the door and addressed them once more, the picture of poise and elegance as he gave a winning smile. “Please enjoy your dinner.”
There were, really, only a few places in Palais Royal that she could be, and it was a matter of a simple process of elimination that led him to the library. The library was Margrid’s personal sanctuary (much to Félicité’s dismay, though she for her part claimed that there were better libraries elsewhere, and he left her to them). Margrid had spent hours in there, hands skimming across the books, eyes devouring each title while she said out loud that it wasn’t that impressive. He had stood off to the side meanwhile, the moment almost too personal for him, even though it was his library. Sometimes, when she was particularly invested in a book, she would read out loud to him, something on science or philosophy, something he had never bothered to read for himself, and he would find himself gripped by it, her passion for it infectious.
No, if she was anyplace, it would be the library.
The corridors of the Palais Royal had already been lit, there was no need to ask a valet to light his way, the candles casting dim shadows along the walls, his shoes falling lightly against the carpeted floors.
Exactly as he’d guessed, she was there, curled up in a chair, still holding a book even as her chest rose and fell with the unmistakeable peace of sleep. (For the only way for Margrid Arnaud to be at peace was at rest, if then.)
“My book.” She grumbled, clutching it tighter. “Need it.”
“Margrid….” He sighed, even as a hint of a smile lingered on his face. Really, it was expected. Margrid’s first instinct was to grab whatever she could that wouldn’t grab back -- money, food, clothes, and apparently books. If she could hold onto it, she wouldn’t let it go easily. “Why do you need the book?”
In a few hours, she would be done with her first sleep, and then she would run out of the place as if she was on fire, and then they would pretend the next morning that nothing had happened.
Which, of course, meant that he was going to enjoy this for everything it was worth.
He stroked her hair. “Why do you need the book, Margrid?” He repeated again, slowly, gently.
“The cats...are invading.”
He picked her up, her body solid in his arms, and he had never in his life been so grateful for her much shorter size, for the sake of his shoulders and back. It would have been much harder if this had been Grace. (He had never done this with Grace. Loved her, in their way, liked her, even, which could be even harder at times. But not this.) “Why are the cats invading, Margrid?” He continued on, passing through the halls.
Her brows knit in concentration. “Stole….their baguettes.”
Hm. So apparently her dream self and her had more in common than he’d thought.
“How will the book help you?”
“Hit them with it.” She cuddled it with the same degree of affection that she sometimes cuddled into him with, when she forgot that she was supposed to hate affection and closeness.
It had been a project of his, the last few years, to see how many times he could earn those moments, though there’d never been one thus far that didn’t end with her pulling away as if he had kicked her. He didn’t claim to understand it, Margrid had her secrets, so did he, and he had accepted that, if he wanted to be with Margrid as opposed to any other woman, he would have to accept a certain distance. And, he could accept, it was better to give her that distance and keep her near him than to smother her and lose it.
“All at once?” He chuckled, opening the door to his bedroom. Tonight, it appeared that he would be preparing himself for bed; calling a valet would be too much of a disturbance, and Margrid had a curious aversion to servants in the room with her anyway.
“Go for...the leader.”
“How will you know the leader?” He lowered her into the bed, her body sinking down into it.
She curled up on the bed with the exact same comfort that she had the chair in the library, tucking the book just beneath her chin. “He’s in the lead.”
Well. Fair enough.
“Why a book? Surely there must be something else.”
It was, perhaps, hoping for too much lucidity on her part to ask for an answer, but it was certainly worth the effort.
“Knowledge….is power.” Margrid’s voice was weighed down with sleep, disjointed, but very certain for a woman who was apparently fighting an army of infuriated cats bent on revenge for the theft of their baguettes with nothing but her wits and a rather old, faded book that had seen better days fifty years ago. “Gonna team up with...Robinson Crusoe.”
He had to bite his cheek to keep from laughing, knowing that then she would wake and he would have to explain it in the face of her furious denials. “Perhaps that wasn’t the way that phrase was meant to be used.”
“Fuck….off….Orléans.” Her voice trailed off.
He stroked her cheek for a moment. This didn’t happen often, the times when he could show her affection without her biting back. Much less when his touch would actually cause her to smile, even if it was only slightly. (He considered it one of his many talents: Politics, aeronautics, horse riding, card playing, and, sometimes, raising a smile on Margrid Arnaud’s face, no matter how small or brief.)
Finally, shaking his head to himself, unable to resist the urge to let out at least a brief chuckle, he settled on the other side of the bed, back turned to her. It was unlikely that she would have a great response to him, as unconscious as she was, and so he doubted that--
A solid weight pushed against his back as clinging hands found his midsection.
Well, never let it be said, he thought, that Margrid Arnaud was not constantly in the business of surprising him.
“What about your book?” He chuckled.
She pressed her face against his back. “You’re warmer.”
“I certainly can’t argue with that.”
Something he had learned: Margrid did not like to be enclosed. He didn’t know why and he made the decision not to ask, as with most aspects of her life but the scant little she offered (he had long since suspected that, if she were ever in the mood to divulge, it would end up concluding with him organizing several murders), but any time that he had tried, she had found a way of getting away from him as soon as possible afterward. So, rather than trying to wrap himself around her, he let her take the initiative.
It was relearning everything that he had thought he had learned since he was 15.
It was certainly different than usual with his mistresses, on the rare occasions that he had been inclined to do this, strange. Not entirely unwelcome, as he was unused to being held, even as a child, but...strange. With Margrid, there was no conception that, because he was a Prince du Sang, because he was a man, that things would be one way or another. She threw things out of balance, as she always did, and he should have felt pathetic to have so much less power, but instead...it was rewarding.
He had tried to put a finger on the word for some time, but that was what came closest to it. Rewarding.
For all she complained, for all that she rolled her eyes and said that she didn’t like him (and yet, three years later, here they were), she spent her nights with him, curled up by his side, chose to touch him and talk to him , just as much as he had chosen her. Margrid Arnaud, the woman who wanted to be liked by everyone but chose to like no one, had chosen him. (And, perhaps, if even she could be swayed, the rest of France wasn’t so far off yet.)
Her mouth opened against his shoulder, and while normally, he would find it alluring, preparing to turn over to re-initiate things, in this particular instance, given that she was very certainly asleep and doing a very good job of dampening his shoulder, it only had the effect of causing him to sigh.
He had chosen this. And, if he was to be entirely honest with himself (since he saw little point in self-delusion), he would not have had it any other way.
“Love you, Philou.”
He stilled, every muscle of his frozen at the words that she would never have said while conscious.
He’d had an idea, for some time now, really, that Margrid was in love with him, even if their relationship wasn’t of the variety that encouraged dramatic declarations of love. Something had shifted in the balance of their relationship over the past several years, as they had settled into a long-term arrangement. Not as formal as he was used to, but settled anyway.
Perhaps simply being partners in crime gave them an intimacy that was impossible to find elsewhere, as more bound the two of them together than simple lover’s promises made in the heat of infatuation. The secrets they held between them could bring down nations, what other couple in the world could claim that? Who else, of anyone of his acquaintance, knew the things about him that she knew? Félicité and Grace knew him well, too well, at times, but they preferred to hold themselves back from the more filthy business, and while Félicité had been both lover and co-conspirator in her time, she had never been both at once, and she never involved herself in the finer details.
(He didn’t know the exact moment that he had stopped noticing other women. He rather thought that it would be like if he had stopped blinking one day, only noticeable upon the realization of it, and then impossibly bizarre afterwards upon further reflection. All he knew was that, at one ball, he had stopped and realized that the only thing that he really cared for was that Margrid wasn’t there. Men, women, anything else, they were just an endless parade of faces to smile courteously at, pay the proper respects to, and take his leave.)
He patted her hand gently. “And I you. And I you.”
She wouldn’t remember it the next morning, anyway. There were no repercussions to this, nothing to recover from or deal with. Simply the truth, rare and raw between them for once.
He turned at the end of the carpet, overlooking the mantle, before swerving to pace again, a faint smile on his face at the memory.
No. No, he didn’t regret letting her in there. It had been well worth everything.
But, of course, he turned to pace again, arms falling to his sides in exhaustion, it had led to…
He knew as soon as he stopped outside the door to the library that something was deeply, terribly wrong.
Not the least because Margrid was laughing.
Or, cackling, rather, as she was wont to do when thoroughly enjoying someone making a fool of themselves. And her usual targets, most especially but not limited to Hébert, were nowhere in sight, and while it was possible she had run into some unfortunate soul on her way there, it was more likely that she had found something in the library itself that particularly amused her.
He racked his brain trying to imagine.
One of Félicité’s books? Margrid never was one for moral instructions; he doubted that Félicité’s, admittedly, high-handed books would be to her style. He could see her thoroughly enjoying a good laugh over them, which could prove lethal if the two women were in the same room.
His stilled in horror, the thought sinking into his mind. The two of them...in the same room…
What if…
He glanced around with all the appearance of casual indifference and all the underlaying anxiety of absolute dread, finding the hall deserted. Good. Excellent. He hadn’t been worried.
But what if it wasn’t? What could possibly be in the library that she would…?
No.
No .
She couldn’t-
She wouldn’t-
He’d hidden it.
Self-delusion would do him no good. She was Margrid Arnaud. She absolutely would.
He nearly fell out of the door in his haste to rush in.
“‘ But, Mother Superior ,’” Margrid mock-simpered, “‘ Whatever will I do? I have no knowledge of the world outside the convent .’ Yeah, right. Some of the girls a few years older than me knew things it took me years to find out on the streets.”
“‘ Let me teach you, my child ,’” Margrid took on a voice filled with saintly solemnity before she shattered it with a snort. “No doubt there.”
She was splayed across a chair, a huge pile of books that had been his own private collection scattered around her.
“ Angelique took the sublime innocent-” She squinted at the text, bending down as if the words had suddenly, of their own accord, decided to leap across the page (he could live in hope), “Sublime innocent? Who’s paying these guys?”
“ And laid an indecent kiss on her mouth, tongue in tongue. ‘Oh, Mother Superior,’” She threw her hand across her forehead dramatically, swooning to match the greatest actress on stage, “‘Is this what I have been denied all my life?’ Breathed the rapturous -Rapturous angel? Fucking hell .”
Death or a very, very long trip to England was looking preferable at this very moment.
“‘ All this and more, my amiable, delicate child, all this and more.’ Now, let me see those admirable breasts. Well, she’s not wasting any time, is she? ”
He put his hand to his forehead, resisting the urge to smack himself repeatedly. Why? Why him? Why now? Why-
“‘ But Mother Superior, surely chastity must be observed, is it not a grave sin, when we have given ourselves up to the Lord? ’ Well, you’ve already tongued her mouth, nowhere to go from there but down.”
“‘ But has the Lord not created your body? Is this not his very own design?’ And she, running her hands along the darkened folds of the novice’s habit, revealed the divinity hidden within -Divinity? In a book about-? Fucking-” She shook her head, continuing on with her reading, “ And, in a surge of passion, fell to kissing and sucking along the white breasts in wanton play, admiring their admirable symmetr- THEY’RE TITS, THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO BE SYMMETRICAL. Mostly. Eh, mine are a little lop-sided, I guess. I should ask Philippe, he’s seen more than me.”
He’d heard that Timbuktu was lovely this time of year.
“‘Do you accept him into your heart?’ Are you sure it’s her heart you’re going for? And then she struck her once, then twice, lightly on the ass. ” Her face turned mock-stern, mouth setting as she made an impressive job at giving a glare that had the power to turn men to stone to the footstool in her. “ You must answer me, lest you be disobedient. Do you accept him into your heart?’
Against his own will, he found himself leaning against the wall and smiling. She was enjoying herself. She was happy .
If only she could be happy doing anything but viciously mocking his hidden pornography collection.
There were two options cleanly before him: One would be to sneak away and pretend this had never happened. It was attractive, in its way, but it was, unfortunately, the coward’s way out. And he refused to be a coward. The second was to do what he always did: Take it in stride.
She threw her hand across her breast, “‘ Oh, Mother Superior, with my heart and soul’ Just your heart and soul?”
She paged through the book, eyes scanning for something, and it was, in his opinion, the single worst game of roulette in the world to see where she would land.
Then, she found it, hand touching on a passage. “Ah!”
“ ‘This wooden instrument is of my own invention, it will draw us nearer to the divine together. Observe the length of it, the smoothness.’ The creature, What is she? A cat? Taking it in her hands, ran her small, delicate hands, so like those of a porcelain doll - Who wants to fuck a doll? Who looks at a doll and thinks ‘Yes, this is something I want to fuck?’ Did I have the wrong dolls as a kid? Nevermind, I didn’t have any dolls as a kid. But did I see the wrong dolls?”
Then, she shrugged to herself, “Along the firm base . ‘It’s so large, Mother Superior, however will it fit?’ ‘You must pray to it, offer it supplications with your tender, obedient tongue, whose charms I know so well.’ And so she took the large length in her mouth, the secretions of her mouth coating it in a glossy polish. ‘Yes, my delicate one’ Angelique made a low murmur of assent then, tousling the blonde curls that laid atop the false temple to priapus -In just as many words, you could have said ‘long, fake wooden cock.’ Just say ‘long, fake wooden cock’. “Exactly so.”
He clapped slowly, drawing her attention, and she dropped the book, scrambling around the chair, as if she meant to get off of it but couldn’t find her way and so was left to flounder around. “Excellent rendition; you missed out on a career in the theatre.”
She could have made quite a living as an actress, in another life. (Plenty of English noblemen had actresses as their mistresses, it wouldn’t be the most shocking thing if-)
She recovered herself soon enough, scowling as she lifted the book in the air, “You read this stuff for fun?”
“Only on occasion,” he said, and he did not bother to add, “ When in your absence .” That information wasn’t needed. “How-How did you get ahold of it?” He folded his hands in front of them, rocking forward in a way that in no way gave away any measure of anxiety.
“Oh, I ran out of books to read about…..my tenth or so visit” He closed his eyes, and he did not wince, “So, I started exploring. You really don’t hide your smut very well, you know that?”
He gave a polite smile, “Most people don’t look for it.” Generally “kept locked behind a closed door” was a very good reason to avoid looking for it. At least, for most people who had fear of such comparatively little things as the wrath of a prince of the blood.
“So…” Margrid flopped backward, waving the book in her hand, “This what you like?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and furthermore-”
“You know. Nuns. A little bit of hitting.” She fidgeted around the chair, “Fake cocks. This is the third book I’ve found on it. You don’t really vary things up.”
If it worked ...
He was silent, which caused her to spark up, pointing a finger at him slowly. “You do .”
He glared at her. “Really, Margrid-”
“Come on, Orléans, I’ve seen you use the chamber pot in front of me. We can’t get more intimate than that.”
He held the glare. “Use your generous imagination in the matter, it’s brought you this far.”
She scrunched her face. “Wait. Does that mean-Did Genlis ever dress up as a nun and-”
He massaged his forehead. In for a penny, as the English would say. Then, he smoothed his face into the picture of casual disaffectedness, “Félicité was too proper. No-” He stopped her before she could bring it up, “Grace didn’t either. And the Duchesse most certainly didn’t.”
Though that might have done wonders for the marriage. And possibly given his father in law a heart attack, which would further do wonders.
“Wait a minute-” She paused, thinking, which would be dangerous on a normal day, let alone- “Did you only get interested in me after I told you I spent time in a convent?”
“For the sake of your curiosity alone, no . I was.” He shuffled. “Interested in you from the first time we met. But!” He turned to her before she could ask further (He could already hear the inevitable question of “So, tossing champagne in people’s faces does it for you, Orléans?”) “I will admit that there was a certain allure once I learned it.”
She nodded, more to herself than in response to anything he’d said, and he hoped that it was over.
“So, the fake cocks…” She looked off to the side in thought. “Is that only when it’s two women, or is it just in general?”
He grimaced, trying to hide it beneath a frozen smile. “In….general.”
“So, you like-?”
“We’ll discuss that later.” In general, he kept his long term liaisons separate from whatever he did when he was more...at his liberty. As such, there were things that he would ask from a woman at a brothel that he would never ask Grace or Félicité, because while they shared the same basic profession, the latter two were too sheltered and genteel to understand certain things without shock. They were...limited, in that way. Brilliant, charming companions, but unable to understand a certain aspect of him that polite society had no place for. And he had carried that into his relationship with Margrid unconsciously, which had been ridiculous upon further reflection because it was Margrid . If there was a single person in the world who would take it well, it would be her.
“Do you have one?”
“...Not on hand.”
For the sake of their respective sanities, he had held off from introducing Margrid to his full array of contraptions. At the time, it had seemed like the best idea, especially since it had seemed that Margrid deciding to give herself to him in and of itself was a miracle, given that it seemed like Margrid was rather cold to anyone . His concern had been that she would take one look at some of his interests and promptly walk away, however with the benefit of hindsight, perhaps...
“Why the sudden interest?” If he didn’t take the offensive now, he would lose miserably.
She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. You think you have someone down and then you get some new information, and you realize there’s more to them than you thought. And sometimes you just find out they want to fuck nuns. Anyway, it’s your fault; you did have the books there where I could get them.”
...Generally speaking, the fact that he and Margrid shared a general life philosophy worked very well for their partnership. There were no moral dilemmas, no disagreements over minor quibbles, no second guessing, simply the two of them working together to come up with the best plan of action. It worked brilliantly. Any other time.
She wasn’t supposed to use it on him .
“So long as you’re amused by this.”
“Hey, I didn’t say I wasn’t willing to try it out.”
His mind froze at the words “willing to try it out” accompanied by the mental image of Margrid in a nun outfit.
“You-”
She slid off the chair, pulling him in for a kiss. “Careful, Orléans, you’ll catch flies.”
“I-you-”
“What? It might give me a chance to work my way through some of my unresolved issues.”
“You were laughing at it.”
“Come on,” she reached up to rub the back of his neck, all the tension that had accumulated there ebbing away at her touch, “Have you ever seen me reverent towards anything? You have to know me better than that. It wasn’t a bad idea. I just could have written in better and it was obvious the writer was a young man who’d probably never been in a convent a day in his life. It’s not like any of this is a surprise, anyway. I know you.”
“You never cease to surprise me,” he said, knowing that tacking any endearment at the end would cause Margrid to scurry away, when they had been otherwise doing so well that day, and he wasn’t going to ruin an excellent run.
She smirked, leaning in. “So, later tonight?”
“Tonight.” He made his voice return to its normal pitch and not the sound of a man who had just been promised the second-best thing to the crown that he could think of, “Tonight would be excellent.”
She kissed the edge of his mouth. “Good man,” she gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder, a look of realization coming over her face as she pulled her hand away quickly then, scurrying off.
He waited until well after she was gone to collapse in the chair.
Well.
He hadn’t been anticipating that .
He didn’t know whether to fall down to his knees and thank whatever merciless, wonderful higher power that had allowed for this to happen, to die of sheer humiliation, or to wait until later that night for Margrid to do it for him. In the end, he opted for ordering a glass of wine instead, downing it in a single toss of his hand and head.
Very well, he couldn’t exactly argue with the end result either. There was, in short, no part of it that he truly regretted or would take back if he could, and, he supposed it had turned out entirely satisfactorily for him. ( And for Margrid, he felt a certain swell of entirely-deserved pride in his chest at that .)
Still, however…
He took a glance at all of his extensive library of works that would not be well-received in a more formal setting, piled up on the floors of the study (which was, at that time, safely locked, just in case Margrid should decide to visit him and see).
He sighed. Something still had to be done. While enlightening, this entire thing could have been easily avoidable. Though, he reasoned, there was very little he could do to keep Margrid away on a permanent level. If she had her mind set on something, no force in the world would pull her away from it.
If there was, the two of them would never have met.
He called for a valet.
“Monsieur,” he said.
“Have these books returned to their usual place,” he said, looking upwards at the ceiling in resignation. Well, there was one place she couldn’t reach it, he smiled to himself at how often he’d seen her jumping up and down to get at something that he could have gotten just as easily if she could bend her pride enough to ask him. As short as she was, she was lucky to reach his chest without him stooping to accommodate her. It was one of their little idiosyncrasies.
Then, he paused, an idea forming itself in his mind. “Actually,” he said, “Put them all on the top shelf. Re-order things as needed.”
The valet looked at him as if he had suggested going for a pleasant night’s stroll outside Palais Royal in his nightshirt, but didn’t argue. “Of course, Monsieur.”
Orléans sat down in his study chair, folding his hands beneath his chin and smiling to himself.
Margrid could try to get ahold of them all she wanted, but she would have to use a ladder first.