Game of Patience

by Alleyn, Susanne

  What might it mean if Rosalie Clément had once been Juliette Ferré, née de Vaudray?

  “I’m going to the Palais de Justice to follow a hunch,” he told Brasseur.

  #

  After the usual tedious round of approaching one official after another, three hours later Aristide found himself in a dim, dusty storage chamber at the law courts, an anxious clerk hovering about him as, one by one, he lifted the massive red record books from their shelves.

  Revolutionary Tribunal, October-December 1793. Some patriotic registrar had carefully inked 10 vendémiaire-11 nivôse, year ii of the republic onto the leather binding, below the offending Christian months. Aristide opened the book and began to skim the pages.

  He found Maurice-Étienne Ferré, lawyer, among those condemned on 9 Frimaire, formerly 29 November. “I want to see the dossier of this man,” he told the clerk, hoping he might find a footnote mentioning names of the members of Ferré’s household.

  After a further search through several cabinets, the clerk placed a thick folder before him. The record of Ferré’s arrest lay near the top of the pile of papers, together with the transcript of the trial and the signed order of execution.

  #

  Maurice Ferré, advocate, residing at No. 8, Rue des Capucines, Section de la Place-Vendôme, arrested this 18 August 1793, on suspicion of corresponding with and sending gold out of the country to enemies of the Republic. Seals put upon his domicile and premises searched. Records of correspondence with émigrés discovered by representatives of the Office of the Public Prosecutor in the residence of the said Ferré, with the assistance of the citizeness Juliette Vaudray, wife of the said Ferré.

  #

  Aristide sat back and frowned at the document a moment. The mere fact that Rosalie Clément was Juliette Vaudray proved nothing more than that the anonymous letter-writer knew they were one and the same.

  But why would Rosalie have murdered her friend?

  Because Juliette Vaudray had, as he had suspected, once known Philippe Aubry?

  His gaze strayed over the report once again. With the assistance of Juliette Vaudray, wife of the said Ferré.

  He leafed past the records of Ferré’s arrest to those of his trial, taking notes as he read. It seemed the usual shabby tale of a selfish and grasping man whose financial misdeeds, merely unethical before the Terror, had become worthy of death in 1793. The fatal letters lay before him in the folder: a dozen or more in three different hands, postmarked Brussels and Cologne, detailed plans to smuggle gold across the frontier to Belgium, Germany, and Holland.

  Spouses were forbidden to testify at trial against their partners. But she had done the nearest thing to it: she had guided the authorities to the evidence that had led to Ferré’s arrest. In the autumn of 1793, such a denunciation would have been deliberate, calculated murder, a swift and certain death sentence.

  He had come searching merely for a name, an identity, the solution to a puzzle, and had found far more than he had wanted to know. He winced, as if she had slapped him.

  CHAPTER 22

  Aristide hired a fiacre to the Place Vendôme and trudged in the rain along Rue des Capucines toward the tree-lined Boulevard. On the north side of the street, the buildings of the former Capucin convent, national property since 1790, had become the Mint—or rather the printing works that had spewed out millions of nearly worthless assignats. A row of comfortable bourgeois apartment houses stretched along the opposite side.

  He paused before number eight as a maidservant threw open a pair of shutters at a first-floor window. “ ’Morning, citizen,” she said, as he tipped his hat to her, and heaved a pail of dirty water into the street. “Watch your boots, there.”

  “I’m already wet.”

  She grinned, with a quick grimace at the unrelenting drizzle, and muttered something about nasty December weather. Before she could vanish inside the house again, he inquired if she might have known one Ferré, a former tenant of the house.

  She shook her head, uninterested. “No, I was engaged here eight months ago. I don’t know any Ferré.”

  “This citizen was guillotined in the Year Two—three years ago.”

  “Saints preserve us,” she exclaimed, eyes widening with relish. “What did he do?”

  “Sent gold abroad to émigrés.”

  “Serves him right, then. Well, I’m sorry, but I never heard of him. But you might ask upstairs,” she added. “Marthe, the cook at the second-floor flat, she’s been there for years.”

  “Do you think you could introduce me?” Aristide asked her, summoning a smile and reaching into his pocket. “It’s worth a good deal to me.”

  He parted with five sous as she let him in through the carriage gate to the courtyard and led him upstairs, crying, “Marthe, got a moment? A gentleman here wants to talk to you.”

  Aristide stepped into the kitchen, blinking through the haze of steam and wood smoke. The cook turned from her stockpot and peered at him from beneath her mobcap’s frills, with the habitual suspicion of the domestic or peasant confronted with authority.

  “Citizeness,” he began, “I understand you might remember the previous tenant of the first-floor flat, Citizen Ferré?”

  “Who are you?” she demanded, brandishing a large wooden spoon as she might have shaken a pike in a bread riot three or four years before. “A police spy?”

  He reached into his pocket again. “His name was Ferré?”

  “Ferré, that’s right,” the cook said, still clutching the spoon as she eyed the coin he placed on the table. “But he’s long gone. They arrested him back during the troubles, years ago. I heard he ended up looking out the little window.” She grimaced and drew her finger across her lean throat. “They took everything, you know, all the furnishings, even his wife’s fine gowns, and turned everybody out. ‘National property,’ they said. Doesn’t seem right.”

  “Do you know what happened to Ferré’s wife?”

  “Me? No.” She returned to the kettle of soup bubbling gently at the opposite side of the hearth. “I don’t know where they went except for Angélique, what was the kitchenmaid there, because I took her on myself; happened ours had just run off with a soldier and I was short-handed. Angélique! Come here and answer the gentleman.”

  A mousy girl turned from silently peeling potatoes and bobbed Aristide a curtsy. “How well did you know Citizen and Citizeness Ferré?” he inquired, reaching into his pocket for the third time and jingling the few remaining coins.

  “Oh, I never saw much of them,” she admitted reluctantly. “I just worked in the kitchen. I saw her sometimes, but she was talking to the cook, not to me.”

  “What did she look like? Was she an attractive lady with dark brown hair and dark eyes, about twenty-five years old?”

  Angélique nodded. “That could be her.”

  “What can you tell me about her?”

  The girl pursed her lips for a moment, thinking. “I wasn’t but thirteen then, and I slept in the kitchen. She was a deal younger than monsieur, I remember that much.”

  “Did they seem affectionate together?”

  “I wouldn’t know that. I never saw them together but once or twice. But some said he had a little friend on the side, and so did she.”

  “That’s right,” interrupted the cook, softening at the prospect of passing on some juicy rumors. She stirred the soup kettle and plumped herself down on the nearest stool. “Marie-Madeleine, who was housemaid there then, she said her mistress was carrying on with some young fellow under her husband’s very nose. That was what the great to-do was all about.”

  Aristide wheeled about. “What ‘great to-do’?”

  “Why, Madame Ferré, she used to have guests to dinner every week, mostly gentlemen who were something in the government, and Marie-Madeleine said madame seemed specially taken with one of them. Must have been the talk of the household.”

  “They were lovers?”

  “Well, that Ferré, he was twice her age and a dry s
tick of a man. You can’t hardly blame her for looking somewhere else for amusement, and Marie-Madeleine said the fellow she took up with was pretty enough… .”

  “What happened there?” Aristide demanded. “Ferré discovered his wife had taken a lover?”

  “Oh, yes, citizen!” Angélique said, glancing up from the potatoes. “Gilles, the footman, he told us all about it. Monsieur found her hiding this young man, that she’d been carrying on with for months—ever so handsome, I heard—and the young man was wanted by the government, because it was right after all that ado at the palace, and so monsieur sent for the patrol and had the young man arrested!”

  “All that ado at the palace” might mean one of any number of revolutionary upheavals during the past several years. “When did this happen?” Aristide said cautiously. “When they overthrew Robespierre?”

  “Oh, no, before that. When they threw the traitor deputies out of the Convention. Spring of ’ninety-three.”

  “You mean the second of June?”

  “That’s right, when they threw out the Brissotins like the dirty traitors they were.”

  “And this young man was wanted—you mean by the Jacobin government? Because he was associated with the Brissotins?”

  “Yes, that’s what Gilles said. And madame was so upset. Because the young man said something to her just before they took him away: ‘The next time, I’ll kill you!’ ”

  “ ‘The next time, I’ll kill you,’ ” Aristide repeated. “You’re sure?”

  “That’s what Gilles said. It was so exciting, you can’t imagine,” the girl added, a rosy flush rising in her pale cheeks. “I mean, I’m sorry for the poor young man, but maybe he wasn’t as nice as madame had thought he was. ‘You treacherous bitch, the next time I’ll kill you.’ Those were his very words, at least as Gilles told us.”

  “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.