“Dear God,” she muttered when he had finished.
He poured himself more brandy and sipped at it, rolling the stinging liquid on his tongue. “I never did like a case based only on circumstantial evidence, no hard proof . . . especially with a capital crime. But since this Lesurques affair . . .” He shook his head, restless. “I think the law made an appalling error there. And I am as fallible as anyone else . . . it’s not cut and dried by any means . . . what if Aubry is innocent as well?” He drank down the rest of the glass and leaned back with a long sigh. “I can’t help wondering about it. The case against him made perfect sense--but the porter couldn’t identify him. I’ve been so sure; building a theory, following the trail . . . but still there’s always the possibility I’m wrong. We can try to dig up more evidence . . . but how could I live with myself if an innocent man, another innocent man, were executed because of my blundering?”
Rosalie knew better than to attempt to console him with a banal platitude. “Are you still sure Aubry did the murders?” she asked after a long silence.
“No.” Aristide rubbed his nose and held out his glass for more brandy.
“You’re trembling,” she told him.
“The damned porter should have been able to identify him, and he wouldn’t. But who else could it have been? Why couldn’t he say ‘This is the man’?”
She splashed a little of the amber liquid into his glass. “Is this porter so important? No one else saw the man? No one at all?”
“Not that we’ve been able to discover.”
Rosalie closed her eyes and leaned her head on her clasped hands for a moment. “But he is guilty. He must be.”
“God!” Aristide exclaimed, his fingers hovering at his lips, too uneasy even to bite his nails. “It’s such a hideous, sordid, pitiful little affair. . . .” He clenched his fist, grateful for the faint bracing pain of the ragged fingernails biting into his palm.
“You’ll have a nervous attack if you don’t watch yourself,” Rosalie told him after a long, suffocating silence.
“That starry-eyed young man who believed his sweetheart was a goddess, or a saint,” he added, scarcely hearing her, “and that poor, silly, sentimental girl who’d strayed and tried to pretend it never happened--”
“Ravel.”
“--and now someday, if we’re lucky, some poor wretch will pay on the scaffold for her death . . .”
Rosalie touched his arm and took the glass from his hand. “You’ve too much on your shoulders. I tell you, you need some time to clear your mind.”
“How can I leave?”
“One day, then. You could go out somewhere on décadi. Hire a carriage and drive to the Bois de Boulogne, or along the river, if the weather’s good.”
“Would you come with me?” he said, to his own surprise. She did not reply for a moment.
“If you wish me to.”
He sat silently for a few minutes longer, staring past Rosalie to the mesmerizing flicker and crackle of the flames on the hearth.
“I hate this,” he said suddenly. “Sometimes--just sometimes--I wish I could do only what that blockhead Didier does--day after day of safe, dull licenses and patrols and reports, and catching pickpockets and breaking up bread riots and telling people to sweep in front of their shops. He’s never held a man’s life in his hands. I hate this.”
Rosalie poured herself a splash of the eau-de-vie, and said nothing.
CHAPTER 18
30 Brumaire (November 20)
Four days later, when at last the sun prevailed through the ceiling of cloud and promised a décadi with mild dry weather and a measure of blue sky, Aristide hired a shabby calèche and collected Rosalie at the Maison Deluc. As he handed her into the open carriage and took his seat beside her, he noticed Madame Letellier’s curious moon face peering from between the dusty curtains in the parlor window, and pointedly ignored it.
“Have you learned anything more?” Rosalie asked him as they clattered down Rue Jacques toward the quay.
“I’ve sent someone to investigate further.”
“Investigate what?”
“Aubry offered a very poor alibi to the judge,” he told her. “I want to find two people: a brandy seller who was on Rue Honoré on the evening of the tenth, and who sold him a glass of eau-de-vie; and also a whore who plies her trade near the Pont-Neuf, and who spent the night with him at his apartment early in the month; and who may have written the letter he received on the tenth.”
“You think she was Aubry’s mysterious correspondent?”
“That’s what Aubry says.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I will if we can find her. Either or both of these two women might be able to provide him with an alibi, or deny him one.”
Rosalie looked hard at him. “After all this, do you want him to be innocent?”
He gazed out across the muddy shore as they turned onto the quay, watching the pale glitter of the sunlight on the water. “You want him to be guilty, don’t you?”
“But he did it. Who else would have wanted to murder her?”
“What you want is for Aubry to be guilty,” Aristide repeated. “What I want is the truth. To know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he’s guilty . . . or that he’s innocent. And if he is innocent, I want the proof that will keep him safe.”
“You’re too scrupulous, I think. Why not simply do your duty, and leave the rest to Providence?”
“And you are too unforgiving.”
As he spoke, he remembered his own words to Brasseur not long before: I want to lay hold of this swine and see him on his way to the Grève. Perhaps, when it was a matter of murder, he was no more forgiving than was Rosalie.
“Do you blame me?” she said.
They looked at each other in silence. “Let’s talk of something else,” Aristide said at last.
“Pleasant weather for the time of year, isn’t it?”
They held to their tacit understanding until the driver turned the calèche across the bridge that led to the Place de la Concorde, until recently the Place de la Révolution. The weathered, crumbling plaster statue of the goddess Liberty, which for two years had looked down indifferently at a blood-soaked scaffold, stood in the center of the square still. It was only a temporary surrogate for a permanent statue of marble or bronze, but Aristide doubted a more durable Liberty would ever now be erected. He looked away. A course through the vast moated square was the least troublesome route from the Left Bank to the Champs-Élysées and the western barrier, but he wished they could have driven another way.
Cool fingers slid over the back of his hand. He glanced at Rosalie. She was gazing at the statue, avoiding his eyes.
“It reminds you of your friend, doesn’t it?” she said.
Mud and blood . . . pools of blood amid the cobbles, dissolving away beneath the drizzle.
“I stood here, watching them die . . . and I didn’t have the stomach to stay.”
“Not many people of sensibility would.”
“I abandoned him.”
“He wasn’t alone. If it had been I, awaiting my turn under the axe, I think I’d have understood, and forgiven. You oughtn’t torment yourself so.” She pressed his hand, lightly, and without thinking he turned it over so that their hands were clasped, palm to palm.
They rode on in silence past the market-farms and country villas of the Champs-Élysées, taking quiet pleasure in each other’s presence, until they had crossed the customs barrier and entered the woodland. Passing the gardens and dainty miniature château of Bagatelle, at last they reached the banks of the Seine again, where in its serpentine coiling it bent sharply northeast once more, the Île de Puteaux bisecting it. A small inn stood near the ferry to the island.
After a simple luncheon of bread and fresh cheese and cold chicken, they strolled along the grassy riverbank, rustling through the fallen leaves, past fisher boys and floating barges and a few amorous couples ambling arm in arm. They walked without touching, neither q
uite ready to essay again the unexpected intimacy of their clasped hands.
“Do you think that Aubry--” Rosalie began, and stopped. “No, we said we’d not talk about it. Well then. What task will you turn to when this one is over?”
“Whatever Brasseur asks me to help him with. He had a murder some weeks ago, in a hotel, that’s been confounding him. Committed by a woman wearing men’s clothes.”
“How extraordinary. She’s disguised as a man?”
“No, she doesn’t try to disguise her sex. She simply wears masculine clothing. You weren’t, by any chance, ever a member of any revolutionary women’s club, were you?”
“No,” she said, surprised. “I went to one women’s meeting, once, but I thought it rather a waste of time. What has that to do with anything?”
“I wondered if you might have known any women with advanced ideas, women who were demanding equality with men . . . who might have advocated the wearing of male costume, or even worn it themselves.”
“Advocated male costume?” Rosalie repeated, with a brief burst of laughter that illuminated her pale features. “Certainly not. Not among those old prunes I saw. A little earnest speechifying was all they were good for. The sight of a woman wearing breeches would have given them apoplexy.”
“They didn’t demand equality of the sexes?”
“No. Personally, I’d like nothing more than equality with men, and a little justice,” she added, “but I don’t think we’ll see it in our lifetime, no matter what we do.” She glanced at him suddenly, with a sly smile. “Though a clever female criminal who wears men’s clothes is an advancement, of sorts, in equality of the sexes, wouldn’t you say?”
“I suppose it is. Certainly the sexes are equal before the criminal court.”
“And before the guillotine.”
“That, too.”
“It’s comforting to know we’ll be served no differently than men in that one regard at least.”
Aristide paused, leaning against a tree, and gazed at her. After a few moments Rosalie returned his gaze, her eyebrows creeping upward, as a few withered leaves drifted to earth between them.
“Whatever can you find so fascinating?”
“I was wondering why it is you patently despise men, yet you don’t seem to object to my company.”
She drew her shawl closer about her shoulders and huddled into it before replying, as if it were an armor that would protect her from him.
“Most men . . . most men, I’ve discovered, are selfish, lecherous, hypocritical swine. They think of nothing but themselves: their pleasures, their honor, their glory. Henri was different; he was kind, and generous. Though in the end he abandoned me for the sake of his precious man’s honor, just the same. But for a while, he made me happy.” A faint blush crept across her cheeks as she continued. “You . . . you remind me of him. You’re very like him, in some ways.”
“Am I?” he said, surprised.
“You behave like him sometimes. You and he both have a certain stillness within you, a place to which you retreat, where no one can reach you. That collected self-possession of yours . . . he had that, too. The sort of icy calm that men obey, that implies there’s steel beneath the surface.”
Aristide nearly laughed. “I’m more often a mass of taut nerves than a cool commander of men. Was your artillery officer ever plagued by self-doubt and the terror of committing some disastrous blunder?”
“I would rather see that in a man,” she retorted, “than the everlasting conceit and brutishness one usually sees.”
He started away from the tree and lightly touched her cheek. “Faith, what was it happened to you that scarred you so?” She shrank back from him. “You didn’t mind my touch an hour ago,” he reminded her softly. “You weren’t seduced as a girl, were you. You were assaulted.”
“Let’s not mince words. The word is ‘raped.’ ”
“Who could blame you for the violence done you by another?”
“Because it wasn’t violence, not really.” She crossed her arms in front of her, clutching at the shawl. “Anyone else would say I was seduced, that I’d given myself willingly, and thus it was my own fault. But it was never willing. I never loved him, or even thought I loved him.”
Aristide leaned back against the tree, arms folded and head bent, and waited for her to continue.
“I was fifteen. I was straight out of a convent school and shockingly ignorant, though I was about to be married. I still didn’t know much about the difference between men and women. I only knew what my mother taught me, that I should rather die than ever allow any man but my husband into my bedchamber.
“We were visiting friends in the country. One of the other guests had the key to my bedroom and let himself in one night. He threatened, if I didn’t do as he told me, to tell my mother what we’d done, that I’d invited him in. That would have been far worse than any physical hurt I could imagine. So he had what he wanted, and I supposed that would be the end of it, but he came back the next night, and the next, every night for six weeks. And the beastliest part of it was that he didn’t care a sou for me. He held the loftiest contempt for such an insipid, bird-brained little slut, as he called me. It was all just part of a wager.”
Aristide stirred. “You might have told your mother, or your host.”
“You didn’t know my mother. She was one of those stupid, devout, bigoted women who believed every word the priests told them about the sin of Eve, and who were convinced that every carnal sin was entirely the woman’s fault. She would have whipped me, and sent me back to the convent to do some wretched penance, and wept to all her horrible scandalmongering friends about how her daughter had been ruined, and then no one would have married me. I was terrified of her, but I thought if I could keep it a secret until I married, I would be all right; and René--the man--he told me about something whores use to counterfeit virginity--he told me to use it on my wedding night, and my husband would never know the difference.”
She paused, staring at the tree behind him, where the last dry leaves of autumn drooped from the gray branches. High above them, a sparrow chuckled and twittered.
“But then he died, and as he was dying he decided to unburden himself of his sins. So all of it was exposed, all the women he’d seduced, and the man I was to marry wouldn’t have me, because I was soiled goods and I’d been at the center of a public scandal. Nobody else respectable would have had me, either. So I took vows, and I’d be at the abbey still if it hadn’t been for the Revolution. Oh, don’t mistake me; I grew out of any silly adolescent belief in religion soon enough, but it was peaceful, and safe.”
“But your vows were dissolved in ’eighty-nine.”
Rosalie nodded. “I left when the abbey was sold off in 1791. And there I was, out in the world again, obliged to find a husband--but I hadn’t any dowry,” she added, with a sour laugh, “because I’d given everything to the Church. I thought I would never need it again. Of course my mother blamed me for coming back to be a burden on her. She’d lost half her income, land-dues and so on, because the Revolution did away with so much of that, and her new husband spent the rest. He’d only married her for her fortune. So then he decided he’d amuse himself in my bed instead.”
“He took advantage of you?” Aristide said sharply.
“I wasn’t about to let him. I’d sworn, after René, that no man was ever going to do that to me again.” She paused and her mouth hardened, though Aristide saw tears in her eyes. “Fortunately, he drank himself to death not long afterward.”
“How did you marry your lawyer?”
“After paying off all the debts, my mother and I went to live with some wealthy relatives, and they had a grown son, and--well, they wanted me out of the way, so they got rid of me by giving me a modest dowry and marrying me off.”
Aristide could think of nothing to say that would not have sounded unbearably banal. At last he dared a glance at her. She stood stiff and still, hugging herself in the crisp air.
&nbs
p; “So,” she added abruptly, her gaze still fixed to the wild long grass at her feet, limp and graying in the autumn chill, “did you find Henri?”
“I’d meant to tell you before, but this matter of Aubry put it out of my mind . . . I visited the barracks at the Palais de Justice a few days ago. They’d never heard of your Henri Longval.”
“That’s impossible. I saw him in his uniform often enough. You can’t tell me he lied to me about that.”
“I expect Longval was not his real name.”
“I did always like to think he was actually Henri de Longval, count--or marquis--or even duke or prince--of something or other. But I imagined he’d simply abandoned his title. It never occurred to me that everything about him might be a lie.”
“I’ll inquire further, if you wish. Perhaps he had reasons you know nothing of. Perhaps his family called him home. Perhaps it was simply a matter of money, of needing to marry a woman with a rich dowry.”
She slowly shook her head. Aristide heard her voice tremble as she spoke. “No. Don’t go looking for him. I wish you hadn’t. What use would finding him be, except to . . . to provoke a disgusting scene?” Abruptly, no longer able hold back her tears, she turned and hurried away. He followed her, reaching for her elbow.
“Rosalie--”
“For God’s sake,” she cried, whipping about, “what do you want from me?”
“Nothing.”
“Everybody wants something!”
“Well then, I want to see you happy! Because I care for you.”
“What could you possibly care about? There’s no such thing as unselfish love--I ought to know!”
“Damn it, not all men are self-seeking brutes! I’m not surprised you should detest all men for the misdeeds of a few--but there are decent men in this world, and I--I hope I’m one of them.”
“I don’t want love from you. I don’t want another lover, ever again. It always brings you far more misery than it ever makes you happy. Just let me be.”
GAME OF PATIENCE (Aristide Ravel French Revolution Mysteries) Page 18
