by Sarah Smith
“André,” Reisden said.
André was sketching in his notebook with a silver pencil. It was a new one, Reisden noticed. Sabine’s money for a silver pencil, to fix the castle, to make the film ...
“Your wife,” Reisden said with the slightest note of interrogation.
André looked up. “She’ll be in this scene,” he said.
“Not what I want to talk about. You neglect her.”
André blinked. “But she’s trying to poison me,” he said.
“Did you always feel this way about her?”
André’s shoulders hunched defensively. If he had felt something else, he wanted to deny it now.
“To a degree I understand she’s not your style. She’s young, she’s from the country. But you have married her, it’s her money keeping up your house,” there’s a child involved now, André, “and for her sake and yours, you should do your best to live with her and like her.”
“You won’t have the lunch analyzed,” André said.
“I will certainly have the lunch analyzed; that’s not the point.”
“I could write a play about her,” André said. “A new bride. There’s something she doesn’t like about her husband. Something wrong. So she begins to poison him.” He looked out blindly over the enormous cobbled square as though he could see the scene. “She tries to make him be close to her, but he can’t be close to her, he’s frightened”—he swayed back and forth in his seat—“and because he’s frightened it all goes wrong, and she knows it’s wrong, she feels it’s wrong. She’s afraid too.” There was white all around the pale blue iris of his eyes. “And she doesn’t know what to do, except poison him.”
André didn’t care about motivation, but once in a while he got it absolutely right. “Why is he frightened, André?”
“Why?” André made a gesture as if he were picking spiderwebs off his sleeve. “Do you want to know how she dies?”
How she dies?
Reisden nodded wordlessly.
“It’s at sunset,” André said, “here, in this square. As the sun sets, the shadows of the roofs rise out of the earth like giant men.” He showed Reisden the sketches he had been making. Shadows of the Dutch-gabled houses crawled over the cobblestones, giant shoulders and heads. André sketched busily; the shadows rose, eating the light.
In the midst of André’s drawing the guillotine glittered, ferocious as a knife.
“She comes out with Mabet,” André said. “She goes to the guillotine first. She leans down. Her feet are bare. She puts her body on the plank, extends her head out beyond the end of the plank. The executioner ties her down. She’s writhing, she’s screaming. No cut, no dummy, then, whack! The knife comes down and her head falls off, blood sprays from her neck, her head falls right into the basket,” André said exultantly.
He was making no attempt to keep his voice down. He was Necrosar, King of Terrors. From other tables in the cafe, heads turned toward them.
“André,” Reisden said.
For a moment they were the center of a ring of eyes; the other people having lunch at the cafe knew what they were hearing.
They were listening to a man thinking of killing his wife.
Mlle Françoise dies under mysterious circumstances
CYRON HAD COME DOWN late on the Saturday night, bringing his private chaplain. After Mass they breakfasted to the sounds of motor buses and horses arriving; the League for French Freedom, the Church Restoration Society, miners from Wagny-les-Mines, tenant farmers from André’s lands, old Uncle Tom Cobley and all, coming to build Montfort. It was a production. Tables of wine, cheese, sausage, bread, all donated; Cyron’s master builder and his assistants, sorting the men into work groups; fresh-cut blocks of the local chalk on sleds by the work areas; men ready to lift them into place. Cyron set the first stone of the latest Montfort repair. Helped by stronger arms, General Pétiot and the old sergeant each cemented their chalk into place; the crowd cheered them. Then the work began; soldiers, ultra-patriots, and pious architecture students labored under the strong sun, trundling wheelbarrows and cranking the rope-driven cranes. André had not been persuaded to set a stone, but Reisden did what Pétiot did.
Sabine sat on the ramparts, holding her hat down in two flaps against the wind, squinting. Reisden sat on his heels on the stones beside her, looking out over the country. It had rained a little over-night; over the fields the sky was enormous, tinged with grey and opal. The fields stretched flat in every direction; from the top of Montfort hill they were checkered blocks, mortared by hedgerows and ribbons of streams.
André gestured to Reisden from far down the hill. Sabine looked half-apprehensively at her husband. André waved to Reisden; come down, talk with me.
“Have you seen enough?” André said. “Have you seen her? Do you believe she’s poisoning me?”
Reisden wanted to give this all to Katzmann, now. He was fathoms out of his depth: not only André calling up his worst crazy times, but the enormous dark tangle of André’s relationship with Sabine. The child. Between the two of them they’d make the child’s life a horror. And Cyron was willing to send André to an asylum. If André had an heir, André was no longer indispensable.
“Look,” André said. A shabby carriage was winding its way up the hill. “Police.”
What is it about police wagons? One can always spot them. They have the air of belonging to no one in particular, of conforming to a standard; they’re orphans who have become soldiers. Two men got out. Only one was in a policeman’s uniform, but from his posture and gait, the other might as well have been.
Behind every superstition there is a reality: two gendarmes together deliver news that one gendarme would not want to give alone.
They called André aside. “Dead?” he said in Necrosar’s hollow tones, and smiled with a baring of teeth. “My wife’s friend, poisoned. Hah! Reisden, come here. This is Dr. the Baron von Reisden of Jouvet; he knows about poisons. Mademoiselle Françoise,” André explained. “She’s dead. Poisoned! They think it’s suicide, but I know differently.”
The chicken-handed dressmaker in the Grand’Place. Whom Sabine had gone to see because her clothes didn’t fit.
It was Reisden who gave the news to Sabine and went with her to talk with the policemen. Sabine put her fist to her mouth. “Suicide? No! I saw her yesterday,” Sabine said.
“She was our costumer,” André said. For him, it was only another disaster to the film. He took Reisden aside. “My wife poisoned her.”
“Why, André?” Reisden said in complete exasperation.
All three of them went with the police to Mademoiselle Françoise’s house: Reisden driving the Rolls, André in front, Sabine in back. Mademoiselle Françoise’s house stood all by itself on the Montfort road. French farmers usually live in villages; Mademoiselle Françoise had lived a hermit’s life.
Inside the house, a clock ticked in the ancient smoky shadows; the sunlight reddened a cherrywood table. One of the down-stairs rooms was a workroom, with two sewing machines catching the light from the windows. On a rack were hung uniforms and peasant costumes from the last century, and on the table was a half-finished jacket. Cheap cloth, exaggerated detail, a costume for the film.
The other room was the kitchen, dark and hung with bunches of dried herbs. By the door to the garden stood a middle-aged pop-eyed woman, wiping away tears with the heel of her hand.
“No, monsieur, she had no troubles at all! She was so happy,” Mademoiselle Huguette quavered. “She was going to treat herself to a week at the beach this summer, she’d made so much money from the costumes. And she was so proud of working for Monsieur Cyron’s film. Why should she poison herself, or poor little Merlin?” She glared at the policeman. “Suicide? Poison her beautiful cat? You should be ashamed!”
The police had taken away Mademoiselle Françoise’s body, but the cat, a black tom, still lay stretched on the flagstones under the stove, a little foam dried on its nose and mouth. Sabine knelt down, hug
ging her knees, stretching out her neck to look at the cat. André stood behind her, staring intently. André was breathing through his nose, deep breaths, as though he could smell the death in the house.
“She was my friend,” Sabine said. “Now I’m alone.”
“But how did it happen?” asked the policeman, and turned to Reis-den. “Your company has experience with poisons, Baron de Reisden?”
“Don’t touch anything,” Reisden said. “Leave it for the Sûreté.”
The policeman wiped his face, relieved.
They went out in the walled garden and stood by the rabbit hutch, out of the way, among the pungent-scented herbs. The back wall of the garden was a long sandstone shed, almost a barn; on its south side, vines twirled up a set of newly replaced strings. A woman’s bicycle leaned against the wall. Suicide? The rabbits blinked and twitched their noses in the sunlight.
Mademoiselle Huguette was interviewed, sniffing and wiping her eyes. She sewed for Mademoiselle Françoise, she said. She had arrived by bicycle from Arras on the previous Wednesday to finish the costumes for Citizen Mabet. “Mademoiselle Françoise went to town during the day, to take care of her business, so at night we were both sewing, in the daytime just me.”
Yesterday, market day, Mademoiselle Françoise had gone early to the city by the Arras coach, Cyron’s coach, which served as unofficial common transportation up and down the Arras road. She had got a ride home with a farmer, who had stopped at the house; they had all eaten cheese and drunk cider. After the farmer had left, the two women had eaten supper: fresh bread from Arras, a salad of greens, half a bottle of wine, and cold rabbit.
“But me, I ate an egg,” Mademoiselle Huguette quavered, “because I’m vegetarian.”
The commune policeman looked at her suspiciously.
The remains of the cooked rabbit, stringy and dry, were still in the cat’s dish. Reisden collected samples while Mademoiselle Huguette told the rest of her story. Both women had sewed until about nine at night, when Mademoiselle Françoise had complained that it was too dark to see. She had gone upstairs to bed. Mademoiselle Huguette had sewed for perhaps an hour more. Then she had looked in on her friend, whom she found irritable and feverish. “She was afraid that she was getting a cold; she said she felt quivery and her eyes were blurrish,” said Mademoiselle Huguette, putting her hand on her chest. “I offered to make her my special tea for colds, but she didn’t want it. And so I went to bed.” Mademoiselle Huguette broke down into frank tears.
“And the next morning?”
“There she was, fallen down in the hall, barely breathing. And poor little Merlin in the kitchen.” Mademoiselle Huguette had huddled on some clothes—she was still dressed in a skirt over her nightgown—and had gone for the priest. She had had to bicycle to Ste.-Catherine; since the separation of church and state, the priests came to the smallest towns only once every several weeks.
“You didn’t go for the doctor?” Reisden asked.
“Ah, no, monsieur; she was past that, barely breathing I tell you; it was time for the priest.”
The policeman plucked Reisden’s sleeve and explained in a whisper. “Barely breathing, you understand, monsieur, these country ladies are superstitious. If you die before the priest comes, then that’s it, God won’t take you into Heaven!”
Reisden nodded. In the Jouvet files was a case of a man found “barely breathing” but decomposed by about a week.
“What salad greens did you eat?” the policeman asked. Mademoiselle Huguette wrung her hands and protested vaguely: this, perhaps a little of that, but perhaps the other; she had been looking for eggs under the leaves. “And we had the same salad, after all, but poor dear Merlin had the end of the rabbit, poor minou!”
Yes, the policeman agreed, it must have been the rabbit. He hadn’t meant to say suicide, he apologized; it had just come out of his mouth.
Reisden left the commune policeman and Mademoiselle Huguette talking about vegetarianism. (“But what do you eat?”) The women had slept upstairs, Mademoiselle Huguette on a cot in the storeroom, Mademoiselle Françoise in the only bedroom, which was cluttered with a double bed, a dresser, a painted wardrobe, and many pictures. On the whitewashed walls were pinned colorchrome prints of the Sacred Heart, Sts. Barbara and Isidor, and the Virgin Mary, surrounded by dried herbs in bunches; there was also a panorama postcard of Malô-les-Bains. In the center was a photograph of the bachelor uncle who had owned the house before her. He wore his army uniform. Reisden wondered if he had helped to build Montfort. Reisden looked inside the wardrobe. Smells of perfume, perspiration, and garlic. A Sunday dress, plaid, with dusty frills and old-fashioned mutton sleeves. Two plain black dresses of the sort worn by shop-keepers; two skirts; several blouses with necklines surprisingly low. Two pairs of pointed shoes. On the dresser, assorted perfumes, face washes, creams, ointments, skin bleaches, and hair pomades. In the dresser, women’s lisle underwear and stockings.
In the bottom drawer, wrapped in tissue paper, was the ritually elaborate white nightgown every country Frenchwoman owns. She wears it on her wedding night, then folds it away for her burial. Françoise’s was as embroidered, as heavy with lace, as a wedding gown, and it had been used; it was crumpled, folded away hurriedly, with the smell of sex in it. Below it, hidden between the lace and the tissue paper, was a grey book he recognized.
Through Russia on a Mustang. It was inscribed, in T.J. Blantire’s handwriting and in ungrammatical French, A ma chère petite Sorcière d’une Fille.
To my dear little Witch of a Girl.
Mademoiselle Françoise, Blantire’s woman? Reisden tried to remember her. In the Grand’Place, when they had been introduced, he had been looking at Sabine. The dressmaker had been older. Thirty? He remem-bered only the heat of her thin narrow hand.
T.J. was a wild boy; Françoise Auclart had sewed herself blouses with low necklines and lived at her uncle’s solitary house. He pictured them meeting in Arras. “I’m working in the movies.” “So am I.” Theatre company love.
But now Mademoiselle Françoise was dead.
Blantyre had called her a witch.
And where was Blantire?
***
There was one more odd moment in that odd weekend. Late in the same afternoon, the guests were about to leave. Reisden, who packed light, came into the Great Hall to wait for the rest. André was already there. The Great Hall had almost escaped Sabine’s improving touch; the new chairs were Selfridge-medieval but the great walnut central table shone with five hundred years of meat grease and elbows, and if there were a few too many banners on the ancient walls, at least they were real ones.
On one side of the hall was a minstrels’ gallery. André was looking at the other side, the side with such a profusion of faded banners. He was staring at it, as though he were seeing something. Reisden looked, too, and saw underneath the banners a set of scars in the ancient plastering, marks of a staircase that had been there not so long ago: a staircase, gone now, and the outline of a door, bricked up and plastered over.
Something had been there, some room or balcony or wall. André was staring at it. “What was it?” Reisden asked. But André didn’t answer, and Cyron, coming through, gestured them both impatiently toward the coach. “Come on, come on, eh! Don’t stare!” He hurried out, taking André with him, leaving Reisden to wonder why Cyron, the builder, had torn something down.
Sex, witchcraft, death, and families
SEX. WITCHCRAFT. FEAR OF each other. Death and life and all the profundities that family life and children bring up. Family life is hard enough when one’s more or less sane and in love.
He called on Katzmann.
“She actually did poison him?” Katzmann said.
“With Spanish fly, I’d guess.”
“The symptoms aren’t very like arsenic,” Katzmann said.
“In acute poisoning, close enough. She’s apparently pregnant. She thinks he’ll deny it’s his. If he has an heir, Cyron is willing to send him to an asy
lum. Moi, je dis merde.”
“Sex,” said Katzmann. “It’s all sex. I’ll enjoy this.”
“Enjoy it quickly.”
“What happened with his mother?”
Reisden went to the Bibliothèque nationale to find out. The Paris papers said the Count and Countess had both died of cholera within a day of each other. The single odd detail was that only the time of the Count’s funeral had been given. Wouldn’t they have been buried together? And if so, why not list both names? He ordered up what the B.N. had of the local papers. The Écho d’Arras added the detail that their only son had also been ill but was recovering. The Lion d’Arras gave a slightly different story. The Count had died of cholera, but the Countess of grief.
Grief was a polite fiction, like barely breathing, and no paper had given a time and place for the Countess’s burial.
He went to see Jules and found him at the theatre with André.
André wanted to know whether there had been poison in the lunch. Reisden had sent the lunch and the charms off to Callard, the poison specialists, but had had a Marsh test done first at Jouvet.
“No arsenic,” he said.
“There’ll be poison,” André said. “It will be the same thing that killed her friend. She’s practicing for me,” he added in the tone that made audiences giggle nervously at the Grand Necro. “She sends pears in wine every week from Montfort. But I don’t eat them.”
Most families with country estates sent hampers of fresh food up to the city. Reisden and Jules exchanged glances; André’s wife was simply doing what everyone else did.
Jules held up an egg. “Bought it myself just now in the market; do you want one?” On a shelf in the corner of the office, someone had installed a gas ring. Jules reached underneath the shelf and brought out an omelette pan, butter, a not-too-clean spatula, and some herbs.