Beauty, Beast, and Belladonna

by Maia Chance

  The drum boomed, and the villagers rioted and twirled in circles around Bernadette and the boar. Bernadette appeared green. The boar was becoming skittish. Marcel stood a few paces off and watched.

  Tolbert slid around the pile of rubble and crouched by Gabriel.

  “Tolbert,” Gabriel said.

  “We meet again, Lord Harrington. You are not a man who gives in easily.”

  “Nor you, I daresay.” Tolbert’s chin tufted whiskers, his hair was lank, and he stank of sour feet. “Have you been roughing it, Tolbert?”

  “I am accustomed to sleeping out of doors when necessary.”

  “Guarding your cave from the woodcutters?”

  “Yes. And I am so pleased to hear you at last acknowledge that it is mine.”

  “What about the shrine?” Gabriel asked, just to be certain.

  “Pah! You continue to believe that was my work, even as these insane peasants carouse in a circle around a boar?”

  Good point.

  “I am here for my jawbone,” Tolbert said. His shiny black eyes were fixed, unblinking, on the bone hung about Marcel’s neck.

  “It was always about the jawbone and the cave,” Gabriel said. “Never about the legendary beast?”

  “The beast is extinct. But it once lived. I have the fossil evidence—or, I shall, once I wrest it from that fool blacksmith’s neck.”

  “You didn’t murder anyone?”

  “I have neither the time nor the inclination. My interests are scientific.”

  Perhaps. Yet Gabriel knew that scientific obsession was not very different from other sorts. “What about your mysterious parcel in Bordeaux?”

  “It is not mysterious, Lord Harrington. What ever gave you that idea? It is a handmade rock pick from Scotland. My previous one broke. I do hope it has not been injured in transit from England.”

  The crowd was growing more raucous, and the boar was tugging at its ropes.

  “Have you learned anything about this—well, this cult?” Gabriel asked Tolbert.

  “It is of a somewhat recent date. Perhaps twenty years old. Begun by Marcel after he nearly died ingesting belladonna berries. He claims to have stepped through the door into the divine realm and spoken, face-to-face, with the goddess. She sent him back to the land of the living to begin his cult. Rubbish, of course. Poisoning oneself is not divine, but stupid. I suspect the cult is a way for Marcel to lord control over others in the village. He is a brute, and secretive. He is a true provincial, too. Resentful and suspicious of anyone who is not from his native valley.”

  Lucile must’ve pushed Gabriel down the castle steps that day. Gabriel had intruded too deeply into the village lore. Likewise, Larsen must have been shot by a villager who was resentful of him hunting on their forestland. Lucile had been lying about Madame Genepy losing her memory, too. That had been a smoke screen. The tale was the same as it had always been.

  Crunching footfalls made both Gabriel and Tolbert turn. Four gendarmes clustered at the top of the tower steps, faces slack at the sights and sounds of the villagers dancing.

  Tolbert licked his lips. It could be his last chance to get his hands on the jawbone before the police, perhaps, confiscated it as evidence. He rushed forward, elbowing and stumbling through the crowd. Screams and curses. The drumbeat stopped. The boar had broken free of its ropes, and its two handlers struggled to placate it. Tolbert took a flying leap, felled Marcel, ripped the jawbone free, and held it up to the moon, giggling shrilly.

  Gabriel dashed through the throng and wrapped his arm around Bernadette. “Come with me, Mademoiselle Gavage,” he murmured.

  “Lord Harrington,” she sobbed.

  Marcel swatted the jawbone from Tolbert’s hands. It arced through the air and landed at the boar’s hooves. The boar sniffed it. There was a long, breathless pause, everyone watching. The boar ate the jawbone.

  * * *

  Ivy was just behind Ophelia. Her footfalls were ladylike, almost silent, and she panted through her teeth.

  At the bottom of the steps, Ophelia swung her head left and right. She went left and along a vaguely familiar passageway lit by moonlight through archer’s slits. Ivy’s lilac scent rose up behind her.

  Here was a doorway. Please let it be the way out. Ophelia slipped through. No. No. A close dark space, walls on three sides—why was it so familiar? She swung around.

  Ivy’s silhouette blocked the only way out. “The latrine, Miss Flax? Mm. Fitting that you do keep coming here, since you are nothing but a coarse little bit of dung.” Ivy grabbed Ophelia’s sleeve and twisted. Fabric bit into flesh. Ophelia yelped and tried to jerk herself free. Ivy held fast. She was doubling Ophelia over and pushing her head towards the latrine hole. Death-cold wind gusted up through the opening. Rocks, whitewashed by moonlight, glowed far, far below on their slide into the river.

  “Get off!” Ophelia cried, bucking her head and jabbing her elbows like chicken wings.

  “Miss Flax!” Penrose’s voice cried nearby.

  “Mon Dieu!” screamed a woman—Bernadette.

  Ophelia twisted hard and sent Ivy crashing against the latrine seat. Masonry crumbled. Rocks showered.

  “Help!” Ivy screamed. She was sprawled across a huge chunk of masonry that had cracked free of the wall. She slid headfirst towards the abyss.

  Ophelia snatched for Ivy’s ankle, but she was too late. A long, sickening wail. Rumbling stones. The professor was yanking Ophelia back onto his chest, and then the entire latrine structure fell, along with Ivy, into space.

  * * *

  A carriage stood in Château Vézère’s drive. Lights flickered in the windows.

  “That must be Dr. Duclos’s carriage,” Penrose said to Ophelia.

  Ophelia, sore and rattled, dismounted. Ivy’s final scream wouldn’t stop playing in her mind. “Would you take my horse to the stables, Professor Penrose? I wish to speak with Mr. Banks before the police arrive.” The gendarmes and Inspector Pierot had broken up the villagers’ festivities at the castle and arrested a bundle of men, including Marcel, for ransacking the château and kidnapping Bernadette.

  “Allow me to join you,” Penrose said. His shoulders were set, and beneath a dark wash of stubble, he looked pale. “If Banks makes a confession, it will be useful to have a witness.”

  “All right.”

  They left their horses in the dark stables and went to Banks’s bedchamber. He was shrunken beneath the blankets, but his eyes were open. The sick nurse was sound asleep in her chair.

  “Damned doctor finally brought the right medicine,” Banks said in a raspy voice.

  “Medicine for your heart?” Ophelia asked. She and Penrose went to the bedside.

  “Yes.”

  Ophelia took a big breath. She told Banks that his daughter was dead, and under what strange circumstances. Then she accused Banks of murdering Knight’s impostor, Jack Potter, and Madame Dieudonné.

  At first, Banks was immobile with shock, but disgust gradually settled over his spent features. “She meant to kill me? My own little Ivy?”

  “You arrived at Château Vézère with two bottles of heart medicine,” Ophelia said. “Ivy disposed of one when she planted it upon Mr. Knight’s person in the orangerie, in order to muddle things up for the police. The second bottle of heart medicine, she took from you a few days later.”

  “My own daughter.” Banks breathed in and out through cracked lips. “My own daughter wished to kill me. She was everything to me, everything. Even if she were alive still, I would think of her now as dead to me. Deceitful, wicked child.”

  “But you’re the murderer, Mr. Banks,” Ophelia said. “And I don’t reckon Miss Banks wished to kill you at all. In a roundabout fashion, she was trying to save you.”

  “By taking away the medicine upon which I depend?”

  “I think she meant to keep you ill, see
, and thus free from suspicion, while she busied herself with directing everyone’s attention to the villagers. I found the medicine in your bedchamber, you see—she must have kept it after planting it in Forthwith’s pocket in order to confuse the police, when they announced they would search the château after you shot Madame Dieudonné. That’s when she placed your diamond cuff links in Henrietta’s chamber, too, I reckon. She stole your cuff links, not Jack Potter. She must’ve meant to give the medicine back to you before you grew irretrievably ill.”

  In a mad way, Ivy had done it all to save her darling papa. Even bringing him to the brink of death. “Mr. Banks, did you know the man you poisoned with belladonna-tainted wine was not really Mr. Cecil Knight?”

  “What a brazen little miss you are, trying to extract a confession.” Banks’s lip curled.

  “Did you know?” Ophelia repeated.

  “Bah! What does it matter, now? Ivy’s gone. My life, my fortune—I built it all for her. Aren’t you going to mourn her, Lord Harrington?”

  “I will,” Penrose said softly.

  “What about the man you poisoned in the orangerie?” Ophelia said, afraid that Banks’s talkative mood would pass. “Did you know he was called Jack Potter?”

  “Well of course! Do you take me for damned fool?” Banks’s belligerent words didn’t match his feeble voice. “Jack Potter. Low, despicable, vile. Do you know what he took from me?”

  “Something to do with cotton, wasn’t it?” Ophelia said.

  “How’d you know that? Yes, cotton. Five years ago, during the American War Between the States, there was a British embargo on United States cotton—cut off funds to the rebels and all that. As a result, Egypt finally got a leg up in the cotton trade. I stood to get rich importing Egyptian cotton to my mills in England. I’d never had business dealings in America, but I had plenty of contacts in Egypt already, since I already imported their silk. I hired Jack Potter to arrange shipping routes for all that Egyptian cotton to get to my mills in England. He double-crossed me. Arranged for another mill owner to pay him for all my hard-won contacts. The other mill owner—Kennington’s his name—stole all the business out from under my nose. God, I lost out on a fortune!”

  “But aren’t you still wealthy?” Ophelia asked.

  “Doesn’t matter! Think what I could have amassed! Had to watch Kennington build a damned palace with money that ought to have been mine. Giraffes in his garden! Dishes of gold, they say!”

  Banks had been so sour and angry towards Larsen, Ophelia realized, because he was envious of any man richer than he. They hadn’t known each other, as Forthwith had suggested, but to Banks, it didn’t matter. Banks craved to be the biggest—the richest—fish in the sea.

  Banks said, “I vowed to avenge myself on Jack Potter. To bide my time, to do it well, and to beat him at his own greedy games. I knew he was living in Marseille—knew it for a year. By chance my solicitor in London—”

  “Mr. Montgomery?” Ophelia asked.

  “Yes. Montgomery mentioned that another client, Sir Percival Christy, was having his charge met at a ship in Marseille and escorted back to England for school. Saw my chance. Sent a letter, supposedly from Montgomery, to Jack Potter—but I addressed it to Mr. Knight. Made it look like the wrong address. I knew Jack Potter couldn’t resist the reward I mentioned. Set a deadline, too—got all my ducks in a row. Said I’d come on this hunting trip. All I needed to do was bring Potter to me so I would never be discovered.”

  “You bought up all the train tickets between Avignon and Lyon, and so blocked travel to Paris for days,” Ophelia said.

  “I thought that was a brilliant move.”

  “And, because of the way you phrased that fake letter from the solicitor in London, Potter believed time was running out to collect the reward in London.”

  “I knew he would choose to take the stagecoach route rather than wait indefinitely for the train. After all, he believed that money would not wait in London forever, and if there is anything Potter cared about in his shriveled little soul, it was money.”

  “Then you bribed the driver to cut the whippletree rings in front of the château gates.”

  “Potter drew closer, ever closer. Do you understand how difficult it was for me to suppress my excitement that evening?”

  Did Banks truly reckon Ophelia would feel sorry for him? What a nut.

  “If that—that daughter of mine had not gone and muddled it all up, then you would not have gone nosing about. I would not have been forced to kill Madame Dieudonné.”

  “You killed her because she knew what you’d done.”

  “That fool of a stagecoach driver must’ve told her about the bribe, and she must have pieced something together. In bed together, they were.”

  Penrose cleared his throat.

  Ophelia said, “Then you made a fuss over those rare roses in the orangerie, because you knew Potter couldn’t resist going and stealing a few to sell the seeds in London.”

  “Yes.”

  “Potter also stole jewelry from others,” Ophelia said. “As well as Tolbert’s jawbone fossil.”

  “Greedy, I told you,” Banks said. “Once I had Potter in the orangerie, well, I had him in the palm of my hand. He remembered me well, of course, although he’d kept it hidden, since, after all, he was disguised as a vicar. Potter a vicar? Ha! Better to dress up a ditch rat like the queen. In the orangerie, I proposed future business dealings. We toasted with wine. Then I stood aside to enjoy the reward for all my careful planning.” Banks closed his eyes.

  The police would take him to the police station later, when he was strong enough to walk. For now, living with the death of his daughter was punishment enough. That was that. Ophelia felt adrift.

  Ophelia and Penrose went downstairs. When they reached the entry foyer, they heard men’s shouts outside. Penrose wrapped his arm around Ophelia’s shoulders as they went outside together.

  A parade of about a dozen woodsmen marched up the drive, carrying torches. Larsen led a large, sinewy gray wolf by a rope. The wolf hung its head, and its ears were slicked back. Its bony shoulders rocked.

  “That is the biggest wolf I’ve ever seen,” Ophelia said.

  “You’ve seen wolves before, Miss Flax?”

  “Once or twice. In the circus.”

  “Of course.” Penrose’s weary voice lilted with mirth.

  “Bagged the scoundrel!” Larsen shouted. “This is the beast that has savaged the livestock these few nights past! I will take it to the zoological gardens in Paris!”

  The wolf panted.

  “Poor thing,” Ophelia murmured.

  “Do not even begin to think of adopting a savage wolf, Miss Flax.”

  The thought had crossed her mind. “Don’t you begin to think, Professor, that this wolf cannot account for that jawbone.”

  “Well, it cannot. The livestock that were killed had their throats torn, as wolves do to their prey. But the livestock had also been gored by tusks. The world still holds magic, Miss Flax. There are still things at the edges of our vision that science and reason cannot account for.”

  “Suit yourself, Professor,” Ophelia said. But then, here she was, Ophelia Flax of Littleton, New Hampshire, standing on the steps of a grand château in the middle of French nowhere, with an English earl’s arm around her shoulders. Reason could not account for this.

  32

  Two weeks later

  Henrietta, despite having somehow gained several pounds in the Sarlat jail, not to mention having her complexion and her spirits ruined, made good on her promise to pay Ophelia. So not only did Ophelia find herself back in Artemis Stunt’s stuffy Paris apartment with her original nest egg; she had tripled it.

  Of course, she was now the reluctant owner of a petulant poodle, too. But Meringue had shown himself to be mighty trainable if the treats were worth the trouble. He looked much m
ore winsome with his new, close-cropped haircut, too.

  Professor Penrose had left Château Vézère for England in a hurry, the day after Ophelia had solved the murders, to escort Abel and the parakeet to the Warbridge School. But he’d promised to return to Paris in two weeks’ time, look Ophelia up in Artemis Stunt’s apartment, and, well, he’d simply asked if he might go for a walk with Ophelia. She’d said yes. Their parting had been awkward, with lots of darting eyes and unsure words. That was the trouble with sleuthing with someone: Once all the excitement died down, you were left with nothing safe to confabulate about.

  Ophelia wagered that Penrose meant to ask her to marry him. She’d had her answer ready all along, ever since he’d hinted at it in the bell tower in Sarlat. And now that she’d had that amazing little snippet of news about her brother Odie—Odie, who she had believed died in the war!—well . . .

  Still, when Ophelia found Professor Penrose’s calling card beside her plate one morning at breakfast, her belly swooped like swallows.

  “Ah, your earl,” Artemis said with a knowing smile. “Come to collect his prize?”

  “I’m not a prize.” Ophelia’s ears burned.

  “Oh, I don’t know. When you have gotten plenty of sleep and you aren’t in one of your stubborn humors, you can be—”

  “No, I mean that I am a person. Not a prize.”

  Artemis refilled her coffee cup. “I don’t understand.”

  Ophelia didn’t bother explaining. Artemis, Henrietta, just about every factory girl, lady circus performer, and actress she’d ever known—they’d all wished to be a prize, a glorified thing that some fellow would marry and whisk away and put up on a bric-a-brac shelf for safekeeping. That wasn’t living. That wasn’t love.

  Penrose called at ten o’clock. The weather was gloomy as he and Ophelia walked into the small park near Artemis’s building. Penrose seemed aloof and unable to meet Ophelia’s eyes. They spoke of the events at Château Vézère. That was safe terrain.

  “Abel is well?” Ophelia asked.

  “Yes. Situated at school—which he was glum about, but he did indeed discover a heretofore unknown species of stag beetle, and evidently he will name it.”