Game of Patience (21 page)

Aristide circled about the sofa and cautiously patted her shoulder, wondering if he should ring for a maid. To his relief, though Rosalie went on weeping, she showed no signs of becoming hysterical. At last, hoping she would not cuff him for his audacity, he did the only thing he could think to do, and slipped his arms about her, as he had comforted his sister Thérèse when some cruel slight in their youth had sent her running to her chamber in tears.

She wept into his shoulder for a few moments. At length she gulped back her sobs and turned away from him, her face flushed.

“Are you all right?”

She blew her nose, still blinking away tears. “As well as I ever shall be.”

“Should I call one of the maids?”

“What good would they be?” she demanded, with a flash of her usual acerbity. “No, I’m all right. You’re kind to concern yourself with me.” She sank onto the nearest chair and sat gazing at the threadbare carpet.

“I’d forgotten men could be kind now and then,” she said at last, dabbing halfheartedly at her eyes with his handkerchief.

What did one say to that, he wondered.

“You were thinking of your own experience, weren’t you?” he said at length. “Not this recent love affair of yours; something crueler. Like Célie, you once fell victim to a man who ill-used you, didn’t you?”

She nodded, her eyes still fixed on the carpet.

“I doubt it’s as shameful a secret as you think,” he added. “I’ve probably heard worse. When you work with the police, after a while nothing shocks you.”

“No,” she said after a moment’s reflection, “I don’t suppose it would be particularly shocking. You’ve probably heard a dozen like it. I was still practically a child myself; a certain older man seduced me. He got me with child … it was born early, and died, and I caught a fever and nearly died, too. Afterward I entered a convent to escape the gossip. And when the convents were closed I married my late husband, because there was no place else for me to go, and no one else would have me.”

“And then?” he said as she paused, guessing there might be more to her story.

“Then … then there was Henri, who deserted me. I told you.”

“Who was Henri?”

“Henri Longval. He never spoke of his family, but he must have been a nobleman who’d abandoned his title during the Revolution. I’m sure he came of as good a family as I did. He was so handsome, so courteous. I used to tease him and call him my prince. He would laugh at that… .”

She smiled, wistful, as if enjoying some private memory. “I first met him—oh, when I’d first come back to Paris in 1791, and my stepfather, who was a beast, made some horrid advances when we were at the Palais-Royal, and I ran away from him and stumbled into Henri. And after my husband was executed in ’ninety-three, I had nothing left but my dowry. Henri lent me money when I needed it, and he found me someplace to live.”

“And you became lovers then.”

“Yes … I loved him so much. He was generous, and kind, and gentlemanly—he had beautiful manners. He was well-read, and he loved music; he played the harpsichord. I was never any good at that. And he … oh, I can’t describe him without sounding like a sentimental novel.”

“But you knew nothing about him?” Aristide said.

“He would never tell me. When we … became intimate, and I felt free to ask questions, he would laugh and turn our conversation some other way. It was almost ’ninety-four by then, when everyone was a bit nervous, and I suspected he was a secret royalist, or related to some notorious counterrevolutionary, and simply wanted to keep it quiet and lie low during the Terror.”

“But what was he? How did he live?”

“He was an artillery officer. Then he went over to the company of mounted soldiers attached to the Tribunal. Six days every week—every
décade,
rather—he was on duty escorting the carts to the guillotine, during the worst of it in ’ninety-three and ’ninety-four, and he hated that—he would describe it, sometimes, and I could tell it broke his heart to see what he saw there. ‘I helped to kill them,’ he would say. I would try to console him, and tell him over and over again that it wasn’t his fault, that someone else would have taken his place, but it never did any good.”

“He sounds like a decent man,” Aristide said.

“He
was
a decent man. A kind man. Or so I thought, until he discarded me.”

Aristide shook his head. “He must have had a reason.”

“Of course he had a reason!” she snapped. “Somehow he must have learned about my past. Someone told him what happened to me when I was fifteen, and he decided I wasn’t worthy of an ex-aristocrat. And I loved him so—I would have done anything for him.” She looked up at him, with a brief, harsh laugh. “I still love him. And hate him. It’s mad, and I’m a fool to keep on wanting him … but he was the kindest man I ever knew, and gentle, and he loved me. I
know
he loved me. But in the end, I wasn’t good enough for him.”

She drew a long breath and at last rose, dry-eyed. “Men can sleep with a different woman every night and indulge in the most revolting practices—but let an unmarried woman make one mistake, be led astray when she’s young and silly and knows nothing of the world, and she’s tainted for life and called a harlot! Isn’t that why this Aubry murdered Célie? Perhaps she expected him to forgive her because they loved each other. And instead he killed her. Do you wonder that I have little love for your sex?”

He was silent a moment.

“Citizeness … Aubry is probably enduring torment from his own conscience, as we speak, worse than any punishment a criminal court could inflict upon him.”

“You think so, do you?”

“I … I knew a man once who killed his wife and her lover, and then tried to kill himself. He’d loved her and he could no longer live with himself. I don’t suppose Aubry can, either.”

“Nevertheless,” she said, “he is still alive, and Célie is not.”

She turned, without another word, and was about to quit the room when Aristide impulsively called after her.

“Where did he live, your artillery officer?”

“What affair is that of yours?”

“Indulge me.”

She paused a moment, then shrugged. “Rue St.-Jacques-la-Boucherie, near the Châtelet. Two houses down from the church.”

“I should like to help you,” Aristide said to her retreating back. “I’d like to see you happy.”

She glanced swiftly over her shoulder at him and seemed about to say something, but thought better of it and hurried up the stairs.

#

A dull, drizzly twilight hung over the city by late afternoon. After leaving the Latin Quarter, Aristide walked down the hill to the river, crossed to the island of the Cité, and visited the barracks behind the Palais de Justice.

“I want to have a word with one of the gendarmes here,” he told the captain whom he found lounging alone by the fire in a small officers’ messroom, puffing at a pipe. “His name is Henri Longval.”

“Longval?” echoed the officer. “No one of that name in this company.”

“There must be.”

“I assure you, there isn’t. No Longval, or Longueville, or anything like it.” He pushed himself to his feet and beckoned Aristide into an office. “Look at the register if you disbelieve me.”

Aristide perused the list of names, without much hope.

“Of course,” added the captain, as an afterthought, “I’ve only been assigned here for a bit under a year. Your Longval may have left, or transferred, before I arrived. My orderly may remember him. Frenais!”

Corporal Frenais, when summoned, could not recall anyone named Longval in the company during the past five years. Aristide described Rosalie’s lover as best he could from her cursory portrait of him, but Frenais shook his head.

“That might be almost any of them. This company gets its pick of the officers, and the men too, because it’s safer duty than the army and they aren’t often sent outside the city. Strapping young fellows are thick on the ground here.”

Puzzled, Aristide thanked them and departed. He slouched across the Pont-au-Change toward the Petit-Châtelet as pedestrians hurried past him, huddling into their coat collars or stretching shawls over their heads to shield themselves from the sting of the cold rain. A few minutes’ walk eastward brought him to the church of St. Jacques-la-Boucherie, boarded up and locked, though the freestanding bell tower now seemed to be the center of some peculiar manufactory or foundry, judging from the brick furnaces that had been built about it, and the ladders of raw, unweathered wood that led up into its interior. A weather-stained notice on the church’s great doors proclaimed national property. Above Aristide, the soaring ranks of headless stone saints and angels bore witness to a Revolutionary Section Committee once devoted to guillotining not only the fleshly enemies of the Revolution but its otherworldly foes as well.

The porter two houses down remembered Citizen Longval well. Second floor back, a nice pair of furnished rooms, comfortable for a young bachelor. A good-looking young fellow, always polite as you please, though a bit closemouthed. An ambitious young officer on his way up.

Yes, he remembered the girl, too, Citizeness Clément. She’d taken one of the attics at first, but three months later she’d given it up and moved herself downstairs to Longval’s lodgings. A pretty creature, pleasant enough, and head over heels in love with the young man. The fondness was mutual, he’d say. Citizen Longval always treated her with the greatest attention.

No, Longval no longer kept rooms in the house. The girl? Yes, the girl had stayed on a while, though she’d seemed forlorn and unhappy—Longval had paid the rent through the quarter—but when the rent came due again, she’d taken herself off.

“Did either of them ever confide in you?” Aristide inquired.

Oh, no, they kept themselves to themselves. He’d never noticed them becoming overfriendly with the other lodgers. Of course during the Terror folk didn’t talk much about themselves; no doubt they had secrets to keep. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if young Longval had been an ex-aristo. But he was a fine young gentleman, in his country’s service, and surely there was no harm in him. He didn’t know why they’d separated. One day Longval had simply left, with a valise, and never returned.

“But he looked wretched,” the porter said suddenly. “Like he didn’t like it at all, what he was doing.”

“But you don’t know why?”

“He never confided in me, like I said. Regular oyster of a man.”

More baffled than ever, Aristide went home to bed.

The examining magistrate replaced the police reports on the broad, gilt-trimmed table, cleared his throat, and leaned toward the witness, fingers steepled.

“Citizen Montereau: Please state the nature of your relationship to Philippe-Marie-Jean Aubry.”

Aristide shifted position to get a better look through the narrow spy hole in an anteroom of Judge Geoffroy’s chamber. Beside him, Brasseur stood stolidly, listening, arms folded, as an indifferent clerk sat copying a heap of documents at a desk behind them.

Montereau distractedly patted at his wig, sending powder flying. “I engaged Aubry as my private secretary in February of 1789. He was a younger son of a distinguished family fallen upon hard times. He came well recommended by an acquaintance from Marseilles, a shipowner, and I was pleased with his industry, his scrupulosity, and his intelligence. I trusted his competence and his discretion so far as to take him with me on a minor diplomatic mission to Russia lasting five months. Then, after he had been with me for nearly two years, I learned from a relative that he had once fought a duel and killed a man.”

“What relative? Is this person to be trusted?”

“My wife’s great-aunt. She knew Aubry personally at the time of the duel. She came to live in my house in January of 1791 and recognized Aubry at once.”

“Go on.”

“I—I have little more to tell,” he faltered. “Only that I immediately dismissed Aubry from my household not only because he had killed a man, but because he was the challenger in the duel and because Marsillac de Saint-Roch, the man he had killed, had been a distant relation of my late wife and her great-aunt.”

Of course,
Aristide thought, remembering the portrait that hung in old Madame de Laroque’s parlor. He strained to listen over the monotonous scratching of the clerk’s ill-cut quill behind him.

“Are you accusing Aubry of a previous criminal history?” Geoffroy inquired.

“No. None on record, at least. By all accounts the duel was conducted honorably,” Montereau continued, as if reluctant to admit it, “and the matter wasn’t brought to the attention of the royal prosecutor, for the sake of Marsillac’s reputation and that of his family. Though I must add that Aubry fled Paris, and shortly thereafter left France, as I understand, to avoid any prosecution. Instead of surrendering himself to the king’s justice like a gentleman.”

“Had you any knowledge of a love affair between Citizen Aubry and your daughter Célie?”

“None whatsoever.” He burst out suddenly: “Whether or not he murdered my daughter, and I hope the law will strike him with its fullest severity if he did—I wish to state that Aubry is an unscrupulous wretch and a miserable coward, without the courage to accept the consequences of his actions! He has plenty of nerve with a sword in his hand, to be sure, but evidently he couldn’t stomach the idea of facing the public executioner if Marsillac’s family had pressed charges of murder—”