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the man struck the animal with the bow again—across the front paws this time. The bear roared in irritation but reared up. On two unsteady legs, the beast took several mincing steps as the owner scratched out a poor tune on the viol and sang in a warbling baritone:
    â€œJe puis trop bien, Madame
    Comparer a l’image que fait Pygmalion”
    Perenelle shook her head at the poor bear and the poorer performance, but tossed a denier into the viol case—maybe the coin would mean the bear would be fed that night. She walked on, listening to the calls of the merchants. It had rained the night before, and she skirted the pools of water and the piles of offal in the street’s central gutter, lifting up the hem of her dress. The two maidservants with her followed, chattering to each other and giggling as they cast their gazes back to the dancing bear—or more precisely, to the young man. “He has a lovely bum, don’t you think?” she heard the older of them, Marianne, say to the other; Marianne was fourteen, and (Perenelle suspected) rather too interested in what men and women did in their beds. Perenelle
tsked
and frowned at the girls; they ducked their heads with a last glance, hiding their faces under the brim of their wimples, and hurried after her.
    The market was crowded with throngs of Parisians, which was a delightful change from three years before, when the terrible pestilence afflicted the city. That appalling spring and summer, it was whispered, over 700 people within the city walls had died each and every day. In those horrible times, the stench of death stretched black tentacles through the streets of the city and those who could fled from the terror.
    Perenelle remembered those days too well; they still haunted her dreams. She had been married to Marlon then, but her husband had been taken by the pestilence like so many others, his body racked with fever while horrid, dark mushrooms of stinking pustules sprouted from his armpits, neck, and groin. Perenelle’s father, Cosme Poisson, had been an apothecary and alchemist; she’d learned some of the craft from him in her childhood—her mother had died birthing her; her father had never remarried, and Perenelle had taken on the role of helpmate for Cosme until he’d died, five years before. By the time Marlon became sick, most of the physicians had either died or fled the city with the others, and there’d been no one to help. She’d mixed potions to take the fever from Marlon’s body, to ease his breathing, to reduce the swellings.
    She might ease his symptoms, but she could not cure him.
    Marlon’s eventual death had been a blessing given his suffering, but she hadn’t witnessed his passing. The fever had taken her, too, though her symptoms had been less severe and she’d eventually recovered, but long after Marlon’s body had been taken from the house. She didn’t even know in which of the several mass graves outside the city walls he’d been buried.
    For months afterward, she’d lived with the guilt that she’d survived while he’d died. It wasn’t that Perenelle grieved horribly for Marlon; she’d married him, a mere musician, in the heat of a youthful infatuation and against her father’s wishes. After the initial fire had faded, she found that while she
liked
Marlon, she also didn’t truly love him, but there was no good escape from the iron bonds of marriage. Still, she’d been with him for eight years before he was snatched away by the plague, and she liked to believe that it was her presence and her support that had helped Marlon rise within the court before his untimely death, an entertainer whose ballads were often requested, even by the king.
    But in a Paris seemingly half-emptied by the horrors of the pestilence, she found herself lonely and lost. She’d thought that she was essentially already dead: twenty-eight, widowed and childless, her