The Cavalier of the Apocalypse

by Susanne Alleyn

  * * * * *

  The weather was pleasant enough, for January, Aristide thought as he hurried into the gardens past the Palais du Luxembourg, the Paris residence of the Comte de Provence, the king's brother. A gatekeeper, there to keep the riffraff out of the grounds, eyed his shabby clothes dubiously, but at last nodded him through. A few chinks of blue showed here and there in the pearly gray skies that were an ever-present part of a Parisian winter; perhaps a thaw was finally on the way.

  Sophie was waiting for him beside the fountain's wide basin, the ever-watchful, middle-aged maid Victoire hovering a few paces away. They exchanged greetings and Sophie gestured to a bench. Aristide took a seat beside her, taking care to sit neither too close for propriety nor too far away.

  "It's really the most trivial thing," she said apologetically when they had settled themselves. "I completely forgot about it until last night, just as I was falling asleep. But you wanted to know what Lambert and Monsieur de Beaupr?au might have been talking about when they were together."

  "Yes?"

  "You see, I heard something once?ages ago?I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but the door to Lambert's study wasn't quite closed and I just caught a little of what they were saying as I passed. Lambert said something like 'I'm not sure it's a wise course of action,' and Monsieur de Beaupr?au said, 'I defer to your judgment as my superior, naturally-' " She paused. "Though it's odd: why would the Marquis de Beaupr?au call a bourgeois like Lambert his superior?"

  "Because they're both Freemasons, I imagine," Aristide said. "I suppose," he added, when Sophie still looked puzzled, "since your brother was the master of his lodge-"

  "Was he? I didn't know that. How remarkable."

  "Yes, mademoiselle, I heard it on good authority. And since the Masons seem to consider all men equal in society," he continued, "then among Freemasons Monsieur Saint-Landry held the higher rank."

  Sophie nodded. "I see now. Lambert didn't talk much about being a Freemason, but sometimes he would remind us that nowhere else could members of different levels of society mix so freely, as brothers."

  In previous centuries holy orders had offered that opportunity, Aristide mused, but for decades the higher ranks of the Church in France-and the authority, influence, and lavish incomes attached to them-had been firmly closed to everyone but the nobly born, whether or not they had the least aptitude or desire for the priesthood. More than a few prominent ecclesiastics, he reflected cynically, not for the first time, were notorious for their extravagance, loose conduct, and utter indifference to their religious duties.

  "Go on," he said, feeling Sophie's eyes upon him. "What else did you overhear?"

  "Oh! Yes. Monsieur de Beaupr?au said, 'I defer to your judgment as my superior, but I do strongly feel that the master must be brought into it. His is the first voice the man listens to, and you know he has nothing but horsehair stuffing beneath that pretty hat of his.' " She paused, blushing charmingly. "Then I heard one of them moving to the door, and I thought I'd better leave before they discovered me and were cross with me."

  "Have you any idea what they were talking about?" he inquired. She shook her head.

  "None at all. Though I know exactly when it was," she said suddenly. "It must have been the ninth of January, just a year ago. Because that was the first time Monsieur de Beaupr?au came to dinner, rather than just calling and paying a brief visit to Lambert, and it was a special dinner that day, for Eug?nie's birthday. I hope that's of some use to you, monsieur?"

  "It might be," he said, summoning a smile. Something was teasing at the back of his mind, something to do with holy orders-

  "Rohan!" he said suddenly. Sophie stared.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  " 'Nothing but horsehair stuffing beneath that pretty hat of his'!" he repeated, with a dry chuckle.

  "I don't understand."

  He turned to her and, almost without realizing it, seized her hand. "Mademoiselle, can you tell me what's the most popular fashion in ladies' hats lately?"

  She smiled at him, baffled but eager, without snatching her hand away. "Of course. Red with yellow ribbons. I'm thinking of ordering-"

  "What do they call it?"

  " 'Cardinal on the straw-' " She broke off, the blue eyes round. "Oh. Oh, my."

  "Cardinals wear red hats. Yes."

  Not, of course, that a son of the most puissant and princely house of Rohan was sleeping on a heap of straw in his comfortable apartments in the Bastille?

  "Do you think that Lambert and Monsieur de Beaupr?au were referring to him?" said Sophie.

  " 'His is the first voice the man listens to?' Rohan has absolutely nothing to recommend him except for the fact that he's a cadet of one of the most powerful families in the kingdom. By all accounts, he's a dissipated fool who certainly has 'nothing but horsehair stuffing' between his ears. It's far-fetched, I admit, but it's not impossible?"

  "But why would they have been talking about him?"

  "I scarcely want to say it, because it seems too fantastic?but I wonder if they might have been talking about the diamond necklace."

  "The necklace!" Sophie exclaimed.

  "But listen. As highly placed Masons, they both knew Count Cagliostro. Perhaps I'm jumping to conclusions here, but if 'the man' they mentioned was Cardinal de Rohan, then they could have meant Cagliostro when they spoke of 'the master,' the man whose advice Rohan trusted implicitly. The master of magic and spirituality, who claims to be the high priest of some sort of exotic Eastern Freemasonry. And the police already believe he's mixed up in the theft! Couldn't your brother and Beaupr?au have been talking about something having to do with the diamonds?"

  "But that was a year ago," Sophie protested, "when I heard them, and nobody knew anything about the necklace until just this past summer?" She broke off and stared at him, her mouth a little open in astonishment. "You're saying they were involved with it, aren't you? With stealing the necklace, I mean?"

  "They might have been."

  "But Lambert would never have done anything like that, something so dishonest and underhanded, especially not with anyone like that awful La Motte woman." Swiftly she withdrew her hand from his and folded both hands decorously in her lap. "He was the most honest man I know."

  "Perhaps this was something else," Aristide said quickly.

  "I don't even understand half of what everyone says about this beastly necklace."

  "That's because everyone says something different."

  "I wish someone would explain it to me," she said, glancing at him once more. "Eug?nie's not interested, and Marguerite says it's not fit for young ladies."

  "What did your brother say about it?"

  "He always changed the subject when it came up in conversation," she said slowly. "That's a little peculiar, isn't it?"

  Aristide nodded. "I could explain some of it to you," he told her, "although your cousin is right about there being some indelicate parts to the story."

  "I don't mind that." Sophie shivered. "Let's walk a bit, though; it's getting chilly here."

  He rose, offering her his arm, and together they strolled around the basin, past the leafless lilacs. "The root of it began in Vienna," he said, thinking back to the various illegal pamphlets he had read about the affair, all of which had breathlessly promised to reveal the entire scandalous story, just as police officials with secret liberal sympathies had disclosed it to the gutter press. "Rohan was ambassador to the Austrian court fifteen years ago or so, before Princess Antoinette married the Dauphin. And Empress Maria Theresa didn't like him one bit; she considered him a disgrace to his cloth."

  "What did he do to offend her?"

  "Well, he already had a reputation for vice, and rumor had it that in his retinue, in his private carriage in fact, he had a number of handsome young abb?s traveling with him. But a closer look would have revealed that they were not priests at all, but attractive young women in disguise." Sophie gave a shrill giggle and quickly stifled it with a small, shapely hand.

&nbs
p; "Not only that," Aristide continued, as they waited a moment for Victoire to catch up to them, "but it's possible he insulted the princess, as she was then, by taking liberties with a few indiscreet remarks. Whatever the truth of it, the queen has always hated Rohan, and has probably been behind his lack of advancement at court. He may be a cardinal, a prince of the house of Rohan-Guemen?e, a prince-bishop of the Holy Roman Empire, Grand Almoner of France, and lord of who knows how many abbeys and manors, but he's never been one of the king's ministers. And despite his really astounding lack of brains, I'm sure he's always believed he ought to be a minister by right of birth, because aristocrats like the Rohans are brought up to believe that they can and should have anything they want." He paused, hearing his voice grow bitter at the mention of unearned privilege.

  "And that's how matters would probably have remained, if Madame de La Motte hadn't gotten her claws into him."

  "Isn't she just a-a lady of bad reputation?" Sophie said.

  "She's that, certainly. But she claims to be a descendant of the Valois kings."

  "But the Valois lived centuries ago! Who cares?"

  "Oh, silly people at court care, because they're the sort of fools who believe that one's ancestors are much more important than one's personal merit. Prove you're the great-great-great granddaughter of some medieval king's illegitimate whelp, as she did, and they'll fawn all over you and give you money, entry into the right houses, introductions to the right people?even if you're actually a scheming trollop who'll sleep with anyone who will help you on your way to the top." He stopped short, feeling his face grow hot. "Forgive me, mademoiselle. That was extremely coarse of me. I ought to watch my language more."

  "You're forgiven," she told him, squeezing his arm. "You're very refreshing, Monsieur Ravel, because you speak your mind. Much more interesting than those respectable young men who call on me."

  "I'm glad to hear it," he said gravely. He gazed around them at the shrubs and empty flower beds. The ground was frozen hard beneath their feet. Despite the eventual thaw, it would be another month at least before the Comte de Provence's gardeners would be able to replant the formal beds.

  "Er?Madame de La Motte. Well, she managed to catch Rohan's eye, and became his mistress. She would sooner or later have been discarded like all his other mistresses-he's had dozens-"

  "That's disgraceful," Sophie said, making the sign of the cross. "A prince of the Church; he ought to be ashamed of himself."

  "-except she was clever enough to realize that his thwarted ambition to shine at court was the key to keeping hold of him and profiting from his generosity. So she began to hint that she was a close personal friend of the queen, and that a word from her in the royal ear might do him a great deal of good. She probably told him that Antoinette was ready to forgive him, and so on?anything she knew he most wanted to hear. And she backed it all up with letters to him from the queen. Forged, of course, but he was too much of an ass to suspect anything."

  "Wasn't there something about a woman impersonating the queen?" Sophie inquired. "Did Madame de La Motte do that?"

  "No, it wasn't she, though it was all part of her scheme for keeping hold of the cardinal's favor. She and her husband found a girl, some ignorant seamstress or milliner, who looked rather like the queen. They paid her to go to the palace gardens late one evening, dressed up in a gown like the ones Antoinette was wearing that season-that was in the summer of 1784-and say a few words to the gentleman she would see there. The gentleman, of course, was Cardinal de Rohan, who by that time was convinced that Madame de La Motte was the queen's dearest friend." He nearly said "Or even something much more, according to some rumors," but decided that that particular bit of salacious gossip was nothing Sophie needed to know.

  "Now that the cardinal had actually seen Antoinette ready to offer him her favor, or so he thought, and was certain that advancement lay just around the corner, he trusted La Motte more than ever. Of course she took advantage of that in every way she could. But it would have gone on being just another instance of a foolish man being fleeced by a greedy mistress, until the royal jewelers approached her. They'd heard the rumors that she was one of the queen's intimate friends, you see-the Valois connection helped-and they offered her a percentage of the sale, if she would speak to the queen about the diamond necklace that they had been hawking for years to every royal court in Europe. The thing was so enormous, expensive, and vulgar that even Antoinette, with her immoderate taste for diamonds, hadn't wanted it. But they thought it was worth another try, and so Madame de La Motte heard about the necklace for the first time."

  "And decided to deceive the cardinal into buying it."

  "More or less. She produced a few more of those supposed letters from the queen, and now suddenly Antoinette was asking Rohan to do her a great service. She wanted to buy the necklace, but knew the king wouldn't approve of such reckless spending, and so if a trusted friend would buy it for her-to be discreetly paid back in installments-then she could say nothing about it until it was an accomplished fact, and she was already wearing the diamonds at a court ball, and by that time the king wouldn't be able to forbid the purchase."

  "But it was all lies?" said Sophie.

  "Yes, apparently it was lies from start to finish. But Rohan, being an ass, ate it up. He imagined that such a great favor must naturally deserve another great favor-say, that of being made first minister-in return. So he told La Motte to arrange matters with the jewelers. And finally, on the strength of the cardinal's word, they delivered the necklace to Madame de La Motte's house and into the hands of one of the gentlemen of the queen's household-except that actually the man was La Motte's husband or lover, I don't know which."

  "So the La Mottes got hold of the necklace and immediately sold it?"

  "Naturally. They broke it up and her husband took most of the stones to London."

  "And then the jewelers expected to be paid."

  "Yes. But Rohan didn't pay up when the time came, because he was expecting that the queen would send payment to him. And when no one came forward with any gold, the jewelers went to the king and asked for their money, and then the whole scheme blew up like a faulty firework. The king had Rohan arrested for theft and fraud, and Rohan tried to explain, and in denying he had intended to steal the jewels, he managed instead, like a fool, to imply that the queen had behaved in a shameful and immoral manner; and that's high treason, to insult the sovereign."

  "So the queen never actually had anything to do with the necklace."

  "No," he admitted, "I don't think she did. But the king made a mess of things, too. If he'd hushed it up and simply made Rohan pay the jewelers everything they were owed, as punishment for being such a credulous imbecile, it wouldn't have become such a roaring scandal. Instead he arrested him and made the whole thing public in a feeble-minded attempt to clear the queen's name from the insinuations Rohan had made. But people are always eager to believe the worst of someone they already dislike, and now everyone assumes that the queen did have a hand in it."

  "Oh, my. What a dreadful muddle." Sophie sat on the nearest bench and arranged her skirts. "But didn't you say that Count Cagliostro had something to do with it," she said suddenly, looking up at Aristide, "and that Lambert and Monsieur de Beaupr?au were connected to him somehow?"

  "They arrested Cagliostro because he was the cardinal's chief adviser, and Madame de La Motte-after she was arrested-accused him of having planned the whole thing."

  "But you said that Madame de La Motte-"

  "Ah, but the mysterious Cagliostro makes an excellent scapegoat, doesn't he? These shady foreign adventurers might be up to anything." Sophie switched her skirts aside and he seated himself beside her again. "All he'll admit to doing, though, is having given his blessing to the cardinal's enterprise, without the least idea that the purchase was a fraud engineered by others. He says he first tried to dissuade the cardinal from such an expensive gamble. Then, because the spirits had guided him or some such claptrap, later he cha
nged his mind and announced that the ancient prophets had foreseen that Rohan would have a brilliant future because of his services to a very great lady. All of it nonsense, of course."

  "Well," Sophie said, "if the cardinal was as stupid as you're saying, then of course Count Cagliostro would have said something like that to him. You don't need to be a magician to know that. If you depend on somebody to keep you, then you keep them happy by telling them what they want to hear. I was doing that with my own nursemaid," she added with a wicked smile, "when I was six years old. I knew she'd bring me extra sugar for my bread and milk if I told her that I'd overheard Jacques, the manservant, saying she was good-looking."

  Aristide stared at her. "Maybe that's it."

  "What's it? What's what?"

  "Telling him what he wanted to hear. Maybe that's the connection between your brother and Cagliostro and the cardinal."

  "Buttering up my nurse?" she said, laughing.

  "Buttering up the cardinal. Making sure they did everything they could do to persuade him to purchase that necklace."

  "But I told you," Sophie insisted, "Lambert was not a thief! It's completely against his character. He would never have gotten mixed up with horrible people like that La Motte creature."

  "Not so they could steal it," Aristide said. Suddenly a great deal was becoming clear to him. "What if?what if they wanted the queen to have it?"

  "While poor people are starving?" she said indignantly.

  "Exactly. Don't you see? That's it-that must be it!"

  Scarcely knowing what he was doing, he reached for her with both hands and kissed her hard on the mouth. He felt her start and shrink back for an instant and drew away, afraid he had offended her, but found she was staring at him with more surprise than displeasure. Abruptly she seized his hands in hers and smiled at him. He needed no further invitation. The feel of her soft lips beneath his banished all thoughts of occasional laundresses in the faubourg St. Marcel.

  "Sophie-lovely Sophie?"

  A dry cough interrupted them and they reluctantly separated. "That's quite enough, ma'm'selle," said the maid, emerging from the shadow of a nearby tree.

  "Oh, Victoire!" Sophie exclaimed.

  "You know very well, ma'm'selle, any more of that in public and you'll get the wrong kind of reputation for yourself."

  Sophie rolled her eyes. "Chaperones!"

  "I quite agree with Victoire," said Aristide. He found he was smiling. "For the sake of your reputation, I'll restrain myself, difficult though it is."

  A distant church bell tolled one o'clock. Sophie heaved a great sigh, and gazed up at him through her lashes. "I suppose I ought to go. Though I don't want to."

  "Can I see you again? Soon?"

  "Here?"

  "Anywhere you like."

  "Here, then. No-wait-not right at this spot. People might notice."

  "By the Medici Fountain?" he said, glancing at the stone arch visible through the bare trees.

  "Yes. Tomorrow, at noon, after Mass."

  "Tomorrow, at noon." Impulsively he lifted her hand to his lips. "I-I've never done that before," he said, as she giggled.

  "I've never had my hand kissed by someone who meant it," she told him, smiling over her shoulder at him as Victoire beckoned her away. He watched her stroll toward the gates, with an occasional backward glance at him. She was taking her time about it, he thought.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~