Game of Patience

by Alleyn, Susanne

  #

  21 Frimaire (December 11)

  The morning session was slow in starting. At length the president and Faure, the public prosecutor, took their seats and the trial resumed.

  “Citizen President,” said Faure, “owing to the extraordinary nature of some evidence that has just come to light, the prosecution has an unusual request to make of the court. The police yesterday discovered a secret domicile let by the accused, which contained a number of significant garments. The prosecution requests that the accused be ordered to dress in these garments for identification by a certain witness.”

  President Gohier frowned. “Have you proof the prisoner let this lodging?”

  “The landlord of the house in question has given a signed statement, and is present and ready to testify.”

  “Call the witness,” said the president. Barbier entered and was sworn: Jean-Baptiste Barbier, owner of a furnished lodging-house on Rue du Cocq, in the Section des Droits de l’Homme.

  Yes, he recognized a certain person in the chamber, that young lady. She was a lodger of his. She lived in Amiens, or so she said, and only came up to Paris perhaps once a month. Two or three times he had seen a young fellow going to her lodging, or coming out of it, late at night. She claimed he was her brother. All the personal property found in the room was the property of the citizeness, or perhaps of her brother. There were only two keys to the room; Citizeness Clément—Vaudray—had one, and he kept the other himself.

  “Citizen Prosecutor,” said the president, “having established to the satisfaction of this court that the items in the room in question are the property of the accused, or the property of a man allegedly the brother of the accused, what is the request of the prosecution?”

  “That the accused don a certain suit of clothes found in this lodging, presented as evidence, for the purposes of identification,” said the public prosecutor, bobbing from his chair. Maître Tardieu leapt to his feet.

  “May I remind the prosecutor, and the court, that it is illegal to compel an accused person to undertake any action which may furnish evidence against him.”

  “So it is,” said the president. “Have you no other evidence against the accused, Citizen Faure?”

  “There is the evidence of the garments themselves,” Faure declared, indignant. “The eyewitness Grangier is sure to identify them. The prosecution merely asks the court to allow these garments to be worn by their owner in order to facilitate—”

  “Citizen President!” cried Maître Tardieu.

  “If necessary,” the prosecutor continued, doggedly, “the prosecution requests permission to hold the garments against the accused’s person, in order to demonstrate that they are of the proper size—”

  Rosalie rose to her feet. “I have no objection to the public prosecutor’s request.”

  “Citizeness,” Tardieu cried, “I must protest! The prosecution wishes you to incriminate yourself.”

  “I can’t deny that the clothes were found in a room I’d let,” she said, smiling, “and Citizen Faure seems determined to have his own way. Citizen President, if I may be allowed somewhere to change my clothes in decent privacy?”

  Aristide gnawed at his fingernails. A dull throbbing hammered at his head and he closed his eyes. What could have prompted her to cooperate with the public prosecutor’s demands?

  A quarter hour passed. Suddenly a murmur rose from the spectators’ benches and rippled about the chamber as Rosalie returned.

  “Christ!” François hissed beside him.

  In male attire she seemed lean and boyish. The suit fit her slender body and long legs faultlessly. Buttoned across her breast and hanging gracefully in a cutaway from her slim hips, the green redingote’s long lines concealed her feminine figure. Hat in hand, she strolled into the center of the chamber.

  “Death of the devil,” François muttered as Aristide pressed cold fingertips against throbbing temples. Rosalie unpinned her hair, shook it loose, and clapped the hat on at a debonair angle. The president rang his bell for silence as the public prosecutor recalled the witness Grangier.

  “That’s the one!” Grangier exclaimed before the president could address him. “See, I wasn’t dreaming. I know his face. That’s the young fellow I saw on the stairs the day Citizen Saint-Ange was killed! The man with the round hat!”

  “I object, once again,” shouted Maître Tardieu over the clamor that rose at Grangier’s words, “to the accused’s being compelled to incriminate herself!”

  Rosalie doffed the hat, bowed gracefully to Grangier, and sauntered back to the dock. The astonished gendarmes drew back to let her pass.

  Gohier informed her that she might withdraw to change her clothes, but she smiled. “That won’t be necessary. I’m quite comfortable as I am.”

  Tardieu darted an anguished glance at her. She ignored him and leaned forward on the rail before her.

  “Citizen President, I won’t waste any more of the court’s time. It’s plain the game is up. I am guilty.”

  Aristide drew in his breath as about him a hissing whisper of many voices grew and crested and died away.

  “It was I, not Philippe Aubry or anyone else, who murdered Célie Montereau and Louis Saint-Ange. Nor do I have a brother; the clothes are mine. I am guilty; make an end of this.”

  The chamber echoed with footsteps as the spectators rose from their benches and pushed forward, craning their necks for a closer glimpse of her. President Gohier angrily rang his bell but the crowd pressed on, unheeding.

  “Citizeness,” said the president, “tell the court, if you please, how you committed these murders.”

  “Certainly.” She straightened and rested her fingertips on the rail. “I was once in love with Philippe Aubry, some three years ago. Because of a terrible misunderstanding brought about by my late husband, Philippe discarded me, but I never ceased loving him. When I learned he’d returned to Paris, I went to him to remind him that he had once loved me. Not only did he turn me away, but a few days later he sent me a letter, the letter that’s already been read here, in which he repulsed me in the most contemptuous terms.

  “This past summer Célie Montereau told me she was secretly engaged to be married. On the the ninth of Brumaire, she asked me for advice, and told me that Saint-Ange was extorting money from her because of an indiscretion in her past. In her distress, she also told me her fiancé’s name; it was Philippe Aubry. I was furious, though I didn’t show it, to learn he might prefer a naïve child like Célie to me.

  “I believe I went mad with jealousy then. I couldn’t bear any more. The next day, I wrote to Philippe and told him I knew he was in love with Célie, and that he had better look out for her safety. I wanted to hurt him as much as possible. Then I went to the room I’d let on Rue du Cocq and disguised myself in a suit of men’s clothing, which I frequently wore for my own protection when I walked alone in the city; and took a small double-barreled pistol that I kept for the same reason, and went to Rue de l’Université and followed Célie when she left her father’s house.”

  “Why did you keep the room on Rue du Cocq?” inquired the president.

  “I let it to store my costume, and to have a private place in which to change my clothes. My landlady,” she added, with a dry smile, “is narrowminded and given to prying through her lodgers’ effects, and I fear she wouldn’t have taken kindly to discovering articles of male attire in my room. She would have assumed, incorrectly of course, that I’d let a man into my room. She would have asked me to leave the boardinghouse; and it was all I could afford, and I was reasonably comfortable there and didn’t wish to risk eviction.”

  “Very well; continue.”

  “I followed Célie to Rue du Hasard, where she had gone to pay Saint-Ange. I climbed the staircase after her to Saint-Ange’s apartment, but she had already gone inside and the door was shut. Then my nerve failed me and I ran downstairs and out of the house. I walked through the neighboring streets for perhaps a quarter of an hour.

&
nbsp; “At last my jealousy grew so strong that I returned to the house, climbed the stairs to the landing, and knocked on the door. Saint-Ange let me in. I walked straight inside, saw Célie, and shot her. But Saint-Ange had seen everything. He tried to get away, and pushed some furniture in front of me, but my pistol had two barrels and I shot him, too, to defend myself and silence him.”

  Aristide glanced up sharply, frowning, remembering a contused wound and the evidence of a pistol aimed coldly and deliberately, from a finger’s breadth away, at the center of a man’s forehead.

  “Then I crept quietly down the staircase and returned to Rue du Cocq. After I changed my clothes again, I went back to the Maison Deluc for supper and I threw my pistol into the river as I crossed the Pont Nôtre-Dame.” She withdrew her hands from the rail and straightened. “That’s all. Is that sufficient?”

  “But how do we know,” the president demanded, “that you’re not merely shielding Citizen Aubry, whom you claim to have loved, and who has also been suspected of this crime?”

  “Faith, would I choose to shield the man who wrote me that letter?” She laughed sourly. “I know every word of it. ‘I wish only that your path and mine should never cross again,’ ” she recited. “Are those the sort of words to inspire self-sacrificing love in a woman’s heart? I assure you I don’t do this out of love for Philippe Aubry. But I don’t want this process to drag on, and I don’t wish to see anybody punished with death for a crime that wasn’t his.”

  “Very well,” said the president, after a moment’s deliberation. “The jury may consider the accused’s testimony as it pleases. You realize, citizeness,” he continued, “that you are confessing to premeditated murder, a capital crime.”

  She nodded, once. “I understand perfectly.”

  #

  The jury was out only half an hour.

  They filed back to their benches, casting uneasy glances at the empty prisoners’ dock. The accused would not be recalled into court before the jury’s verdict was read. Aristide felt his stomach turn over.

  “What is the decision of the jury?”

  The foreman rose, clutching a sheet of paper.

  “Séraphine-Juliette-Marie Vaudray, widow Ferré, called Rosalie Clément, is convicted of having of her own free will, without any necessity of personal defense, and without any provocation received, but with full premeditation, perpetrated the homicide of Marie-Célie-Josèphe-Élisabeth Montereau and Jean-Louis Saint-Ange, on the evening of the tenth of Brumaire, at Rue du Hasard, Section de la Butte-des-Moulins, in Paris.”

  When the spectators’ excited babble had died down and the president had rung his bell for the last time, the gendarmes returned from the waiting room, Rosalie between them. She had not changed her clothes.

  “Séraphine-Juliette-Marie Vaudray, called Rosalie Clément,” said Gohier, “you have been found guilty of premeditated murder.”

  You would think, Aristide brooded, that the world would shift slightly—that the earth would tremble underfoot, perhaps, or all the colors change their tint a little. But nothing remarkable happened that he could discover, except that the crowd let out a little hiss, as if expelling an indrawn breath.

  “For the crime of premeditated murder,” the president continued, “the Criminal Tribunal of the Département of the Seine condemns Séraphine-Juliette-Marie Vaudray, widow Ferré, called Rosalie Clément, to death. She shall be taken to a place of public execution, clothed in a red shirt, and there be decapitated as the law ordains.”

  Silence.

  Won’t she say something, Aristide wondered.

  She inclined her head toward the judges. “I thank the court for its patience.”

  “Mercy!” someone cried. No matter how heinous the crime, some crackpot would always cry it. And others, jaded voyeurs with a taste for blood, would as noisily demand—

  “Death!”

  “Mercy!”

  “Death!”

  “The accused reserves the right to appeal her sentence,” Maître Tardieu shouted above the growing hubbub.

  Condemned prisoners were allowed three days to register an appeal, Aristide knew. He flinched at the shouts assailing his ears. The clamor was intolerable. Mercy mercy mercy and death death death mingled into a single chaotic roar.

  Three days … the Terror was two years past and the Criminal Tribunal would cling for dear life to the civilized system of appeal and delay and formalities.

  Three days.

  CHAPTER 25

  23 Frimaire (December 13)

  It was more difficult to gain access to prisoners under sentence of death, but with Brasseur’s help Aristide obtained it and, three days after Rosalie’s trial, once again hurried through the chilly corridors.

  “How is she?” he asked the turnkey who led him to the condemned cells.

  “The citizeness?” The man pushed aside his woolen cap and scratched his head. “Calm. She doesn’t seem to mind it a bit.”

  They had taken her back to the Conciergerie, but not to her old cell. She was lodged on an upper floor in a cell separated from the corridor only by steel bars, the better to keep watch on her. A little midday light gleamed from a window somewhere down the corridor, and the cell had its own small high window with a pot of crimson geraniums some well-wisher had sent her. Aristide was grateful she had been granted the additional light, though he could not suppress a queasy twinge as he saw the cot, table, and chairs set up in the corridor for a twenty-four-hour guard.

  The guard sat with palms on thighs, watching her with a phlegmatic stare. “Just ask Gilbert here if you want anything,” the turnkey said, elbowing the guard, and disappeared.

  Aristide glanced into the cell. Rosalie sat with a shawl and blanket wrapped about her as she ate the last morsels of a mutton chop on a well-laid tray. She had donned her pink gown again. Though part of Aristide’s mind rebelled against the idea of a woman dressed as a man, another part of him had found it somehow alluring. In women’s clothes Rosalie, though tolerably pretty, was no conventional beauty; in redingote and breeches she had possessed a certain sharp, alien grace.

  “Rosalie,” he began, “I need to talk to you.”

  She blew on a spoonful of soup and cautiously tasted it. “By all means. I hope you don’t mind if I eat my dinner before it gets cold. In fact, why don’t you join me?”

  He clutched at one of the bars. “I didn’t come here to share your dinner. I’ve spoken with your defense counsel, with Maître Tardieu.”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “He’ll speak with you tonight, when your appeal is ready to be signed.”

  “My appeal?”

  “Your appeal for clemency. The public prosecutor exceeded his authority by demanding that you wear those clothes. You must appeal—I’ll pay any necessary costs.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?” Aristide echoed her, bewildered.

  “Why should I appeal? I did it. Let’s get it over with.”

  He clutched harder at the cold metal, steadying his hands. “Rosalie … you didn’t tell the court one word about the murders that I hadn’t told you first. Why did you kill Saint-Ange?”

  She dimpled. “If you’d just murdered a rival, would you allow a witness to the murder to go free? Saint-Ange, of all people! He would have been demanding hush money from me within five minutes.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “Happen?” She paused, infinitesimally. “Just as I said in court. I shot him as he tried to get away from me.”

  “How did you shoot him?”

  She looked at him as if he had asked an especially stupid question. “What part of him did I shoot, do you mean? I shot him in the head.” She pointed to the center of her forehead. “Right there.”

  “Was it so easy, then?”

  “It was a lucky shot. I just—shot him.”

  “How far away were you?”

  “I don’t know … a few paces?”

  Rosalie, he said to himself, if you
had truly murdered him, you would have hit him with your pistol, watched him strike his head against the marble-topped buffet, seen him fall stunned to the floor. You would have known that you had held that pistol against the center of his forehead and fired it in icy, vengeful anger, as the exploding powder scorched and blackened his skin like that of a chicken roasting on a spit.

  “Where did you get the pistol?” he added.

  “I bought it from a man in a tavern, some time ago.” She gazed at him, her look saying I challenge you to prove me a liar.

  “And you claim you threw it in the river?”

  “Off the Pont Nôtre-Dame, on the way home.”

  “Where did you learn to fire a pistol?”

  “An acquaintance taught me, in ’ninety-three. He said it was dangerous for women to go out alone.”

  She had an answer for everything, he thought. She was a cool liar, to be sure—but she had known nothing of the blow to Saint-Ange’s temple, and the wound on the back of his head.

  “And are you going to claim you murdered Citizeness Beaumontel, as well?”

  “That wasn’t part of the indictment,” she said with a smile.

  “But if someone asked you?”

  “She saw me outside the house. It was pure bad luck that she saw me again when I was visiting the Palais-Égalité in disguise, in the same coat; she probably wouldn’t have recognized me if I’d been wearing a gown. I couldn’t run the risk.”

  “You strangled her.”

  “Yes. And dragged her inside the pyramid. I’m quite strong, you know.”

  She was simply repeating everything he had told her on the day he had found the corpse. “So you followed her home from the Palais-Égalité? To what address?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said calmly, though he saw her swallow. “Somewhere in the faubourg Honoré.”

  Aristide shook his head. “No. You’d remember. You’re lying.”