Chapter Six: Very Worth His Service
Jacqueline stayed at the Café until late in the afternoon. She and Marthe remained at their table for the better part of two hours, when the baker said she thought she'd better start the evening's bread. The pair moved into the kitchen, talking above the chef's snores, throwing dough back and forth, and generally enjoying themselves. Jacqueline helped out as well as she could with one arm, and in return received a haphazard lesson in baking. Once in the kitchen Marthe never stopped moving: mixing, kneading, sliding batches of dough into ovens and pulling out shining golden loaves in every shape imaginable.
She also maintained a steady stream of conversation, pausing once in a while to offer Jacqueline a buttered roll or slice for her approval, or to ask impatiently for a few more eggs or a clean side towel. Jacqueline kept up, having the most fun she could remember in a long time; besides the free food, always welcome to a penniless Musketeer, it felt so 'good' to speak freely with another girl--who wasn't trying to flirt with her. Jacqueline talked about her family, or lack of one, and listened to Marthe's tales about her domineering father and seven younger brothers and siblings.
When the chef showed signs of stirring, Marthe piled Jacqueline's arms full of baguettes and brioche and bundled her out the back door, joining her a moment later carrying a brown paper package. "These are for- well, I don't know his name. He doesn't come in as often as the rest of the cadets, but when he does, he sits by himself, or with the three of you. Tall, brownish hair, brandy-brown eyes?"
"Oh, Siroc," Jacqueline mumbled, trying to juggle everything.
"Oh, Siroc," Marthe sighed, in quite a different tone, and went on before Jacqueline could inquire. "Whenever I set out a tray of strawberry napoleons, he comes over and stares at them, like he's trying to eat them with his eyes, but he never buys one. So give him these. Say they were surplus or something."
"Are they?" Jacqueline wanted to know.
"No, I baked them specially. I do hate to see a person go away hungry." She balanced the package on top of the bread.
"I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon," Jacqueline muttered, as a bellow of "Noret!" came from inside and, with a wave and a grin, Marthe disappeared through the door.
Jacqueline smuggled her edible treasure trove into headquarters, depositing the bread on the table in the common room beside a kettle of stew someone had recently pulled off the hearth, meeting no one. On her way to deliver the package of "surplus" to Siroc's lab, however, a trio of grimy figures accosted her, vaguely recognizable beneath the dirt as her comrades. "Where have you been?" she asked, looking them up and down.
"Where have 'you' been?" d'Artagnan retorted, as Ramon replied that they'd been helping him clean the dungeons and Siroc muttered something about a miracle cleanser.
Jacqueline chose to address d'Artagnan, fixing a commiserating smile on her face. "I've missed out on all the fun, then." She clapped him on the shoulder as she went past, balancing the napoleons on her sling as she did. "Stew and bread on the table, if you're hungry," she called over her shoulder to the other two, jerking her thumb back toward the common room, and she could almost see Ramon begin to salivate.
Jacqueline continued down the hall, unsure quite why she hadn't given Siroc the napoleons then. They weren't even from her, but Marthe's interest in him had rankled, for reasons Jacqueline could not comprehend. So she put the subject out of her head, persuading herself that she'd wanted to be sure that, since Siroc was so fond of the pastries, Ramon did not scarf all of them. Jacqueline knew he would if given half a chance, Siroc being easily distracted at table by a word or an idea, and prone to leaving his food totally untouched at the end of a meal.
Jacqueline, stuffed with tidbits from the Café, was not hungry herself, so she decided to give d'Artagnan a bit of time to calm down and clean up before she joined her friends for dinner. Sitting carefully on the bed, she unknotted her sling and laid it aside so she could get her floury jacket off. It would have to be washed, Jacqueline decided, glad she didn't have to get it to the laundress's before muster tomorrow.
Moving her right arm in slow circles, the only exercise Siroc had proscribed, Jacqueline stripped the tie from her hair with the other hand and shook out the chestnut mane. Unbound, it fell nearly to the small of her back. She wondered if she should cut it—and then recoiled violently from the idea, irrationally repulsed. When she was growing up, everyone had always told Jacqueline that she had her mother's hair. Jacqueline had liked this, since her flowing hair was almost the only thing she could remember about her mother.
Tying it back up, she decided that if d'Artagnan made a snide remark about it, or wisps got in her eyes when she fenced, that she'd club it back instead of merely pulling it into a horsetail. 'Not that I'll be doing much fencing for a while,' she thought, knotting the sling into place, an awkward task with only one hand. Catching up the napoleons, she ducked out, meaning to leave the package in the lab while Siroc was absent.
Once in the hall, though, Jacqueline froze. The thud reverberated down the hallway, repeating itself after a moment, coming from the direction of Siroc's laboratory. Concerned, Jacqueline poked her head in the door to find the still slightly smudgy inventor leaning on the wall beside it. She cleared her throat. "What's wrong?"
He turned, raising his hand to cover the large red spot on his forehead, ostensibly pushing his hair back. "Oh, it's the distillery. Mankind has been building them for hundreds of years, and I can't even manage a minor innovation!"
"Relax." Jacqueline reached out and squeezed his shoulder. "It's not worth beating yourself up over." She nodded toward the mark the wall had left, not quite hiding a smile.
"The problem is distressing for purely personal reasons," he muttered.
"Then maybe this will cheer you up." Jacqueline proffered her package. "Café Nouveau was having a sale and, well, a little bird told me you liked strawberry napoleons."
"You bought me strawberry napoleons," he said, looking from them to her.
Jacqueline shrugged, realizing too late that she hadn't owned up to a particularly manly act.
Siroc stared for a moment more at the packet, while she wondered if she should make a joke, and then he looked up, eyes light. "Thank you very much." He smoothed his apron as she set them on the table. "Is there something I can do for you?"
Jacqueline thought quickly. "I, ah, I'd like to borrow a book."
"You'd like to borrow a book," he repeated, nonplussed, since she'd only memorized the alphabet a couple days before. But upon seeing the glint in Jacqueline's eyes, Siroc decided to go along. "I'm afraid my library is limited to science and philosophy," he said, turning to the shelves. "What kind of book were you looking for?"
"Philosophy," Jacqueline decided. It sounded marginally less intimidating. "Can you recommend something?" 'Something with short easy words, and perhaps illustrations?' she did not add as she joined him.
Siroc scanned the shelves, tapping his chin speculatively. After a moment's thought he took down a volume that seemed identical to the rest, holding it for a moment before passing it to her. The gilt-edged leather folio cradled in his slender artist's hands, a striking image that made Jacqueline feel impossibly gauche and unlettered as she took it in her own calloused, square-fingered ones, was gone all too quickly.
"Sir Francis Bacon's 'Essays'," the inventor announced. "There will almost certainly be a selection from Bacon on the 'Examen'."
"Bacon?" Jacqueline hazarded a guess. "An Englishman?"
Siroc nodded. "The father of modern science. He pioneered the method of inductive investigation- using experiments to verify a hypothesis." Jacqueline blinked to keep her eyes from glazing over, trying to at least do him the courtesy of paying attention, even if she understood only one word in three. "His program called for a survey of knowledge, separating the genuine from the erroneous and preserving this knowledge as the starting point of future investigations. Bacon's essays exemplify this: concise formulations of facts that have practical value to man."
"In English?" Jacqueline asked when he came up for air.
Slightly deflated, Siroc rolled his eyes. "No, it's a French translation."
Feeling a bit better, Jacqueline opened the book at random and began to pour earnestly over it. Siroc watched her, in the middle of a serious moral conflict. He had bought a primer yesterday, a slim volume filled with bright illustrations and simple sentences like 'The pig sat in the mud.' and 'See the cart, Jean!' He knew that such books were used to teach children to read. He also knew that he had something of a special case on his hands.
His comrade was intensely proud, even worse than d'Artagnan, and several years older than Siroc. And he had asked for a book of philosophy. Siroc imagined taking this book from his friend and replacing it with one bearing a pink, smiling rabbit on the cover. He thought about how he would react should such a thing be done to him.
He was, he reflected, something of a special case himself. He could not remember being taught to read, or a time when he could not look at a word without hearing it in his head. So he was perhaps not the best person to teach Jacques to read. But Jacques had asked him, and Siroc had taken up the project with his usual interest and, with his usual tenacity, would see it through.
So, leaving the reader in the drawer, he crossed to Jacqueline, turning the book right side up in her hands and said, "Start with 'Of Studies.' It concerns the value of reading." 'And, more importantly, it's short, and the language is simple.'
And Jacqueline smiled, leaning closer to look at the page he indicated, thinking that she could perhaps do this after all.