Game of Patience (31 page)

“That’s not against the law.”

“You claimed you wrote to him on the tenth of Brumaire merely in order to resolve a quarrel between him and the late Célie Montereau. Isn’t it true, rather, that in this letter you threatened harm to the girl he loved?”

“Ask Philippe; he’ll tell you I said no such thing. If you can find him.”

“What, then, do you claim was the substance of your letter?”

“I wrote,” she said with a scornful twist of her lips, “to tell him he was a complete swine. No gentleman would write a lady a letter like the one he sent to me, when she had appealed to him for help. I didn’t take kindly to being so contemptuously brushed aside.”

“Some people might call that a motive for murder,” Judge Nourissier said dryly. “You desired revenge for his heartless treatment of you, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but—”

“And you were jealous of Aubry’s affection for Célie Montereau, were you not?”

“Of course, as any woman would be. But I didn’t kill her because of it.”

“Where were you on the afternoon and evening of the tenth of Brumaire?”

Rosalie shrugged. “I suppose I was walking in the gardens of the Luxembourg. That’s what I do most afternoons.”

“Can you furnish any proof of this? Did you meet anyone you knew there? Perhaps other regular visitors, or caretakers, might remember seeing you?”

She shrugged again. “Perhaps. I wouldn’t know.”

“Citizeness Vaudray, do you own a pistol?”

“Of course not. I didn’t kill her!”

“I shall be pleased if you can furnish proof to that effect,” said the judge, “but at present, I find sufficient evidence to hold you until you go before a jury of accusation and then, if so ordered, to trial before the Criminal Tribunal of the Département of the Seine. Search the prisoner,” he added, beckoning forward a gendarme.

“I’d prefer you didn’t touch me,” Rosalie snapped, backing away. She swiftly dropped her reticule, gloves, bonnet, and shawl on his desk. “Search that all you like. I’ve nothing else on my person.”

The gendarme glanced at the judge. Aristide stepped forward.

“Citizen Judge, surely women’s gowns today leave nothing to the imagination.”

Nourissier scowled, looked Rosalie up and down, and nodded. “Very well, then.” He gestured to the gendarme. Her little purse contained only the small ordinary items any woman might have carried with her—four hairpins, a few copper coins, a handful of assignats, two keys, a stubby pencil, a clean handkerchief, a civic identity card bearing the name rosalie clément, and a penknife.

Aristide glanced once again at Rosalie, and for an instant their eyes met before a clerk presented the judge with a transcript of her statement. She took the quill he offered her and signed the statement:
Séraphine-Juliette-Marie Vaudray, widow Ferré, called Rosalie Clément,
a signature at the bottom of each page as the secretary directed her.

Aristide went to see her after the jury of accusation had sat. He found his heart was beating a trifle faster as he followed a turnkey up the staircase toward the privileged cells. “How does she behave?”

His companion chuckled. “You’d never think she was in prison. That polite, she is. Like the fine ladies who lodged here in ’ninety-three and ’ninety-four.”

The fellow spoke as if he were an innkeeper, Aristide reflected. Perhaps it was all the same to him.

“You shout when you’re done,” said the turnkey. “I won’t be far away.” He unlocked the thick, ironbound door to the cell and stepped aside.

Rosalie was sitting near the fire, wrapped in a blanket against the wintry chill. Aristide doffed his hat as she rose. “Your servant.” The polite commonplace slipped out before he realized it. “I had your clothing and necessities sent over,” he told her, thankful to busy himself with trivial matters. “I hope they arrived safely?”

Rosalie smiled. “Yes. Thank you for taking the trouble.”

He thrust his hands in the pockets of his overcoat and gazed at her for a moment. “Immediately after we took Citizeness Villemain in for questioning, someone sent an unsigned letter to Commissaire Brasseur, accusing one Juliette Vaudray of murder. Do you know who might have informed against you?”

“I have no idea.”

“Do you have an enemy?”

“No, of course not. I’m too unimportant to have either enemies or friends. Why ask these questions,” she added, “after you helped them to put me here?”

“Because … because, despite your past association with Aubry that you never chose to tell us about, I’d like to think I was mistaken. Because of our friendship. If you know anything at all that might prove your innocence, tell me. There is, after all, little tangible evidence against you, and no eyewitnesses.”

“So now you believe I’m innocent?”

“I don’t know. But I like you, as you know, and some loose ends about this affair still trouble me, and I would like to believe you’re innocent. There’s a difference.”

She gazed at him, eyebrows rising a fraction, and at last her lips curved in the barest suggestion of a smile.

“I like you, too, Ravel.”

“If you didn’t do it,” Aristide said, “isn’t it possible that the person who sent that anonymous letter to Brasseur was the real murderer? An unknown young man was seen there, after all. You’ve no rejected admirers, have you?”

“Me?” she said with a brief laugh. “I assure you, no one takes any interest in me, once they discover that I can barely pay for my lodging in a rundown boardinghouse.” She gestured him to a chair but he shook his head and remained standing. “I didn’t kill Célie, and I don’t know who could have done it, except for Philippe. And what about this other woman, the one you found dead? You say whoever murdered Célie probably murdered her to silence her. Have you any proof that it wasn’t Philippe?”

“There’s little the police can do until they find him.”

“Yes. Gone without saying a word to his servant, or anyone. Hardly the behavior of an innocent man.”

Aristide sighed. “Rosalie … until someone identifies him as having been on Rue du Hasard on the evening of the tenth, they haven’t enough evidence to arrest him, much less convict him. But if you’re innocent after all, and he is guilty, or some other man is guilty, I want to help you.”

He took her hand in his, surprised at its warmth in the chilly stone cell. “Listen to me. Before the Revolution, the courts scarcely cared who might be guilty or innocent of a crime, so long as someone who could be a likely suspect was punished for it—the idea was that the punishment would deter others. That’s one of the abuses that we reformed straightaway. No one ought to suffer for a crime he didn’t commit. But old ways of thinking still persist … though the police and the magistrates gain nothing by sending the wrong person to trial, or to the guillotine, it happens. I imagine they’d rather see the wrong person convicted than no one at all; at least it’s proof they’re doing their job. For God’s sake, if you know anything about this matter that you’ve not mentioned, help me to help you.”

Rosalie drew away her hand and sat down again, pulling the blanket back around her shoulders. “I thank you for your kindness—but I don’t know anything.” She stifled a yawn and glanced at him apologetically. “Truly I’m more afraid of going mad with boredom than of anything else. They won’t let me do anything except walk in the courtyard once a day, for an hour. It’s enough to make one demand the guillotine immediately. Perhaps you could find me some books?”

“I might,” Aristide said. “Meanwhile … one of your guards must have a pack of cards.”

“Yes, we’ve played a few hands, but what’s the point of playing if I haven’t any money worth speaking of?”

“I was thinking of patience.”

“What’s that?”

“A game that you play alone. You saw me play it once.” He rose and shouted down the corridor for a turnkey. Obtaining a greasy old pack of cards, he sat at the table with her. “You start like this,” he began, turning over the first card, “and lay them out in four vertical overlapping rows as you please, and the object is to collect all the cards in order, from ace to genius, in four other piles above… .”

She caught on quickly and soon was eagerly placing the cards in rows and piles with a soft slap-slap of cardboard. Aristide watched as she played out the round, unsuccessfully, then another, and a third, the least successful of all, where the cards lay stubbornly across the table in long columns. She sighed and pushed them together. “This isn’t going to come out. Don’t you know a game it’s possible to win?”

“It will come out, if you play it long enough. You need luck, of course; but it also requires some skill. Keep trying.”

“Yes … I shall.” She gathered up the cards and began again.

#

Aristide shouldered his way through the milling, clamorous crowd in the public hall to François, who had secured two places on the last bench but one in the Great Chamber of the Palais de Justice. “Damn stifling crush,” François shouted cheerfully above the din of voices as Aristide dropped onto the seat beside him. “Couldn’t get any closer. I don’t suppose you thought to rent a couple of cushions? These benches are hard.”

“Your backside wasn’t one of my pressing concerns, I’m afraid.” Aristide rubbed his eyes and sighed. “I begin to think this whole affair is a great web of lies, a labyrinth of lies, and that I’m caught in the middle of it. I don’t know what to think about Rosalie. Now what am I to do?”

“Keep hunting for the man in the round hat, I suppose,” François said. “Maybe Célie really did have another admirer—somebody she wouldn’t have given the time of day. A deranged servant or such. Love can make people do funny things, inexplicable things. And thwarted love can turn some people into madmen—or madwomen. People who never had much of a grip on reality, sometimes they spin pretty illusions … and when the illusion shatters, they become capable of anything.”

Aristide opened his mouth to respond but fell silent as the five judges entered the chamber. They still wore the same costume, cape and black hat with three black plumes and tricolor cockade, as had the judges at the Revolutionary Tribunal.

The clerk of the court read out the act of accusation against Séraphine-Juliette-Marie Vaudray, widow Ferré, called Rosalie Clément, who, it was alleged, had of her own free will and with premeditation perpetrated the homicide of Marie-Célie-Josèphe-Elisabeth Montereau and Jean-Louis Saint-Ange, on the evening of the tenth of Brumaire.

“Accused, how do you plead?”

“Not guilty, Citizen President.”

Maître Tardieu, her defense counsel, adjusted his robes about stooped shoulders and proceeded with his address to the court, kindly, avuncular, more sorrowful than indignant. He painted a picture of a young widow of irreproachable and quiet habits. How was it possible this young woman could be a murderess?

Aristide studied the accused. She sat demurely on the prisoners’ bench, the picture of feminine virtue, dainty in a touch of face powder and rouge and wearing the rose-colored gown he had found in her wardrobe. Something nagged at him, some small hunch that something he had seen, somewhere, sometime, something about Rosalie, was not quite right, was out of place.

President Gohier rang his bell and the testimony of the prosecution’s witnesses began. The clerk of the court called Commissaire Brasseur.

“I arrived at the scene of the murders at quarter to nine in the morning on the eleventh of Brumaire. The apartment was in disarray, as though a violent struggle had taken place …”

Rosalie stared at her hands, clenched on the rail before her. A tear slid down her cheeks, glistening in the pale sunshine that streamed in through the windows.

Brasseur at last concluded his testimony and retreated to the witnesses’ chambers. The porter Grangier was called to the stand and the chamber fell silent. After he had repeated his story, Gohier directed him to look at the accused.

“Look carefully, citizen. Have you ever seen this woman before?”

Grangier drew a deep breath and peered at Rosalie. “I don’t think so, Citizen Judge. If she ever came to the house, I don’t remember her. She wasn’t living there. But she could have been a visitor. I don’t keep track of visitors.”

“So you have claimed,” the president said, pouncing on the porter’s statement. “Now, during this crucial afternoon and evening, you stated previously that you were asleep, did you not, and that you woke only when you heard running footsteps on the staircase?”

“Yes.”

“So any number of people, both residents and strangers, could have gone in and out of the house during the hour or two while you were asleep, without your noticing them?”

“Yes, if they knew which apartment they wanted.”

“And Citizeness Vaudray might have gone to Saint-Ange’s apartment, committed these murders, and left the house again, all without your being aware of it?”

“Yes, citizen,” Grangier admitted, avoiding the judge’s gaze.

Grangier left the witness stand and the president announced a recess for dinner. “The prosecution’s case isn’t very strong,” François muttered.

Aristide nodded. “I know. It’s all circumstantial. But if Aubry didn’t do it, who else besides Rosalie could have had a motive? And if the man in the round hat did it, who the devil is he?”