Game of Patience (30 page)

“So he thought that the lady had betrayed him, not Ferré?”

“I suppose so, citizen. But it was monsieur who had done it, because then madame and monsieur had it out. We could all hear them going at it, shouting at the top of their lungs, but mostly her. She was calling him a spiteful, underhanded worm, and a coward, and a villain, and all kinds of horrible things.”

“I don’t suppose you would remember this young man’s name?” Aristide said.

“No, I never knew it.”

“What’s all this about?” the cook demanded. “Don’t you go hounding Angélique, she’s a good girl.”

Aristide smiled. “I believe Citizeness Ferré may be my distant cousin,” he improvised, “for whom I’ve been searching for some months now. Her uncle died and left her a small legacy.”

“Well!” exclaimed the cook. “That’s generous of you, I’m sure. See here, are you wanting to know anything else? Because we’ve work to do, or the master’s dinner will be late. Saints, girl, give me those potatoes and go set the table!”

Aristide lingered for another five minutes but learned little more of importance about Citizeness Ferré, née Juliette Vaudray. At last he took his leave and returned to the Left Bank, thinking hard.

The skies had cleared to a damp pearly gray by the time he reached the Luxembourg Gardens, where a few fashionable strollers promenaded amid the beds of the season’s last windblown pansies and primroses, enjoying the mild weather before winter set in. He found an empty bench not far from the gates, where he could keep watch on the passersby, and settled down to wait.

As he had expected and hoped they would, Madame Letellier eventually heaved into view, her niece straggling behind her, like a dinghy dragged behind an ocean-going warship. He rose and doffed his hat.

Madame Letellier paused, beaming as she recognized him. “Monsieur Ravel, I think? And why are you not calling on Madame Clément?” she added with a coy smile and a glance back at her niece. “Laure, say good day to Monsieur Ravel!”

The girl stumbled forward and offered a limp hand. Aristide bent over it with what enthusiasm he could muster and in turn offered her his arm.

“Might I escort you both around the gardens?”

Madame Letellier accepted with alacrity and they rambled about the formal beds, exchanging commonplaces. At last Aristide deposited Laure upon a bench near the central fountain.

“How long have you known Citizeness Clément?” he inquired carelessly.

“She only came to Citizeness Deluc’s establishment this summer—” Laure began.

“Madame Clément?” interrupted Madame Letellier. “Her husband’s brother-in-law was my second cousin. I knew Monsieur Ferré, her husband, that is, but only to nod to. I thought I recognized her when she first took a room at Madame Deluc’s, so finally I asked her if she was Madame Ferré.”

“What did she say?” Aristide asked her as she paused for breath.

“She told me yes, she was Ferré’s widow, and she’d changed her name, and asked me to keep it quiet. Didn’t want to be known as the wife of a criminal, I suppose. Although plenty of people of very good family lost their lives in the Terror, God rest them,” she added, hastily crossing herself.

“Perhaps she was more concerned about the scandal,” he ventured.

“Scandal?”

“The young man who was reputed to have been her lover … I understand Ferré betrayed him.”

“Oh, yes, I did hear about that!” She turned away from Laure, who was staring morosely into the murky waters of the fountain, and added in a dramatic whisper to him, “They say Ferré must have discovered them in a
compromising position
. He had the boy arrested and locked up!”

“But Aubry was never tried at the Revolutionary Tribunal, was he?” Aristide inquired, in the same conspiratorial whisper.

“No, I heard Monsieur Aubry escaped and fled Paris not long afterward… .”

She chattered on, eagerly, but Aristide stared into the pool, his chest tight. Finding his suspicions confirmed left him feeling as though someone had kicked him in the stomach.

He had been very nearly right, he thought. But it was not Hélène Villemain who had committed murder for the sake of long-harbored spite, but Rosalie. Rosalie, who, supplanted by a younger, prettier—wealthier?—woman, had murdered her old lover’s sweetheart and then done her best to see him condemned for the crime.

Suddenly he remembered words Rosalie herself had once said to him:
Only lovers can turn so violently from love to hatred.
Yes, he thought, she would know.

Rosalie.

At last Madame Letellier slowed, like an automaton whose springs had run down, and Aristide abruptly took his leave of her and her ward and strode off through the trees.

#

“
Brasseur,” he said, striding into the office without knocking, “I think you’d better hear what I learned today.”

He rapidly summarized what he had discovered about Rosalie at the Palais de Justice, at Rue des Capucines, and from Madame Letellier. “She and Aubry carry on an affair,” he said at last, “until her husband catches them together and promptly turns Aubry, who is now a wanted man, over to the patrol. In revenge, Rosalie denounces Ferré when she learns what he’s been up to with his friends across the frontier.” He paused and took a swift swallow of the watered wine that Brasseur had pushed toward him.

“But imagine how she must have felt when she learned, probably from Célie Montereau herself, that Aubry now cares nothing for her, that he loves Célie instead.”

“And this is the man,” Brasseur said, nodding, “for whose sake she’d sent her own husband to the guillotine.”

“Brasseur, if you were a woman capable of denouncing your husband in revenge for an injury, might you not also be capable of murdering a rival in love, and of carrying out a pitiless vengeance on the lover who had spurned you?”

When Aristide had concluded, Brasseur fetched Dautry and they sped across to the Left Bank to call upon the commissaire of the Thermes-de-Julien section, who brought an inspector and a pair of soldiers with them to Rue des Cordiers.

“Are you Rosalie Clément?” Commissaire Noël said without preamble as the door to the attic opened and Rosalie peered out. “I order you, in the name of the law, to follow me before the justice of the peace. You are wanted for questioning in connection with the murders of Célie Montereau and Louis Saint-Ange, in the Butte-des-Moulins section, on the tenth of Brumaire last.”

“Murders!” Madame Deluc shrieked behind them. They ignored her and crowded into the room. The inspector took up a place beside the open door.

“Murders?” Rosalie echoed her, astonished.

“Stand aside, citizeness,” Noël told her. “We must search your lodging.”

“How dare you!”

“We’re the police; we have every right to search through all your effects for evidence—now that’s enough of that!” he added, as suddenly she turned and was through the doorway in a flash, only to run straight into the arms of the guardsman who had been posted at the head of the stairs for just such an eventuality. “You can’t get away, so you may as well just wait quietly and not give us any trouble. Now are you going to cooperate, or do we have to put the bracelets on you?”

She had ceased struggling as soon as the guard seized hold of her arms, but glared at the four men in mute fury. The two commissaires set to work, Dautry hovering behind them with notebook and pencil ready. Avoiding Rosalie’s gaze, Aristide joined them.

The room was small and modestly furnished. In half an hour they had searched through her belongings, from the chest at the foot of the bed to the hidden crannies of the writing-desk and washstand, to the pages of the three battered books that stood neatly on a shelf beside the bed.

“A few letters from Célie Montereau,” Brasseur said, glancing through them. “Women’s chatter.”

“Célie and I were friends,” Rosalie said. “Is that against the law?”

Aristide inspected her wardrobe, but found nothing more unusual than a carmagnole jacket and two gowns of muslin and lawn, one white and one pale rose, summer gowns at least five years old, altered, like her India cotton dress, to something approaching the prevailing neoclassical fashion. He looked further and found a straw bonnet, a pair of dainty kid slippers, and two pairs of darned gloves. The two small drawers at the bottom of the wardrobe brimmed with assorted chemises, fichus, handkerchiefs, and stockings.

“There’s nothing to find here,” Commissaire Noël grumbled at last, just as Aristide felt the rough texture of paper beneath his fingertips as he searched through the underlinen.

“You think not?” he said. He lifted two chemises away and extracted the creased letter hidden below them, nodding in satisfaction as he saw the handwriting:
To Citizeness Clément, at the Maison Deluc, Rue des Cordiers, Section des Thermes-de-Julien.
He unfolded it.

#

Citizeness,

I write to you today in order to inform you that I do not intend to see you again. Kindly cease your persistent attempts to reach me or to seduce me with false promises and appeals to old sentiments. What childish affection we once shared is in the past, is over and done with, and best forgotten; why, knowing how easy you find it to foully betray me in all things, should I look upon you now with anything other than horror, contempt, and hatred?

I once believed you the brightest angel in the heavens, until my trust was so cruelly betrayed, until the scales were torn from my eyes and I saw my angel was soiled and corrupt. I do not intend to allow you ever again to betray me. I am marrying a young woman dear to my heart in three months’ time and wish only to make a new beginning, praying that your path and mine should never cross again. Perhaps, in my dear fiancée’s youth and innocence, I shall once more find that pure angel that, long ago, I so mistakenly thought I had found in you.

I remain your obedient servant.

Aubry

#

“So,” Aristide said. He stood thinking for a moment, suddenly back in his own room on Rue d’Amboise surrounded by his books, his well-worn old volume of English plays. A verse in one of the plays—“Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned”—yes, that was it—“nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorned.”

“Brasseur—a letter like this one might drive me to murder, too.”

“I’ve seen that writing before,” said Brasseur, taking the letter.

“Certainly you have. It’s Philippe Aubry’s.”

“You have no right to read my private correspondence!” Rosalie cried.

“When it’s a question of murder,” Aristide said without looking at her, “indeed we do.”

“I thought you were my friend, Ravel.”

“And
I
thought
you
were innocent, Citizeness Clément.”

“A nice sort of letter for a gentleman to send to a woman,” Brasseur muttered. He refolded the letter and slipped it into his coat. “Citizeness,” he told Rosalie, “you’d better come along with us. So what was the idea, then—murder the girl, and let young Aubry be topped for it? Or have you done away with him, too?”

Rosalie clasped her hands in front of her and drew a deep breath without replying.

“Just as you suggested about Hélène Villemain,” Brasseur added to Aristide. “The spurned woman and all that. We only had to look a little farther for the right woman. Well done.”

He busied himself with taking notes and sending the inspector downstairs to ensure that none of the lodgers left the house, and conferring with Commissaire Noël as they prepared to question witnesses. Aristide nodded mechanically at Brasseur’s brisk remarks, too weary and sick at heart to congratulate himself at having found Célie Montereau’s killer at last. Without further words, as the commissaires hurried off with Dautry he turned away and plodded down the winding staircase.

#

They took her, the next day, to a justice of the peace. Aristide watched her, uneasy at her chilly composure. It was not such a strong case, he knew, built as it was on the evidence of an anonymous denunciation, a few hazy recollections of an illicit love affair, and a single letter. But Judge Nourissier, he recalled, unlike Judge Geoffroy, had a reputation for severity.

“Citizeness Clément, is it not true your real name is Juliette Vaudray?”

“Yes,” she said after an instant’s hesitation. “That’s my name. I adopted another name after my husband, Maurice Ferré, was guillotined in 1793—the Year Two, I mean—for plotting against the Republic. I was frightened and wanted to dissociate myself from him and his reputation. Is that a crime?”

“It is if you intentionally change your name to evade the law. You are suspected of the murders of Célie Montereau and Louis Saint-Ange, and have been summoned here on the strength of the evidence the police found among your belongings. What have you to say for yourself?”

“This is nonsense. I didn’t murder Célie.”

“Do you deny you know Philippe Aubry, and were once in love with him?”

She lifted her chin a fraction. “I can scarcely deny it, can I, when you find his correspondence among my belongings. We’ve known each other for some years.”

“In your previous testimony, you claimed you had no personal acquaintance with Citizen Aubry. This has been proven to be a lie by the statements of Henriette Letellier and your own former domestic, Angélique Morin. On the contrary, in 1791 you entered into an adulterous liaison with Citizen Aubry which was only broken off when Aubry was arrested on the seventeenth of June, 1793.”