A Citizen of the Country

by Sarah Smith

  The ash of St. John's fires; Perdita and Toby arrive in Arras

  BY THEN IT WAS past eleven at night. Perdita and Toby would arrive around four in the morning. Reisden wasn’t going to drive them to Montfort; he drove into Arras and booked a room for them at the only hotel in Arras still doing business at midnight.

  The Grand Hotel de Commerce, off the Grand’Place, was unfashionable and comfortable: dining room with one long table already set for breakfast; lounge with a gramophone and a shelf of railway novels. Tonight it was crowded with wool-factors and tradesmen who had come for the Saturday market. Reisden negotiated a long-distance call to Paris.

  “Becker? Would you come down here for an exhumation?” Eddie Becker, alias Eddie Profane, was the best exhumation man in Paris. “Thirty-five years ago, maybe cholera, maybe poison, just your thing.” He switched to English, which the operator probably would not know, assuming the operator was listening in. “Do you mind its being a bit unofficial? The son has authorized it. One of them is in a crypt, one will need digging up.”

  Becker agreed to come Sunday night, for discretion getting out at Vimy and bicycling to Montfort. Reisden hefted the key André had given him. It weighed a pound at least and was flaking with rust. “Bring machine oil. And a burglary kit.”

  He washed off the Montfort chalk-grit in the bath. (It was already obvious that Montfort didn’t have enough baths.) He dressed again and lay down on the bed to get a few hours’ sleep, and then he thought about how he would get Perdita and Toby from the station to the hotel.

  There were no taxis for hire at four in the morning in a provincial town.

  He went down and sat in the Renault, which was parked in the plaza. After ten years, he could still see and feel and hear the accident that had killed Tasy. He had been driving, back in the days when the world was full of experimental cars and any fool drove them. He got out and checked the Renault, shining his electric torch carefully into every part of the engine, lying down on the stones to look at the undercarriage.

  Nothing ever finishes. A little boy sees his mother give his father medicine, and no one believes him that it’s poison; and probably it’s not, but thirty-five years later he is still saying it, this time about his wife. Alexander Reisden crashes a car and kills his first wife. Years later, he won’t drive Perdita and Toby. It makes one despair of cures.

  He drove the car to the station and parked in the forecourt, by stacked crates of vegetables going to Paris. A wagon waited for freight; the horse was asleep in the shafts. In the station, the grills were down on the ticket window and the coffee-seller, and the green plush benches were almost deserted; one commercial traveler was stretched out, newspaper under his shoes and over his head. A middle-aged woman was sitting under the light, taking notes on a clipboard. He blinked and recognized Ruthie.

  “Hello, Dr. Reisden!” She smiled her shy smile and laid her work aside. Some vital forgotten thing was coming for Count André, she said; she was making sure it got to Montfort safely. He said he was meeting his family. She asked after them, then folded her hands in her lap and asked him directly: “How is Count André?”

  In need of whatever comfort she could give him. “He could use feeding.”

  She nodded, businesslike; anything having to do with food, tea, or comfort was Ruthie’s preserve. “I’ll make—” She corrected herself. “I’ll teach his wife to make my special chicken soup.”

  “Not yet. He still thinks she’s poisoning him.”

  “He won’t forever—will he?—and I mustn’t put myself forward at her expense when he does. I don’t want to do anything wrong, he is our greatest friend,” Ruthie said. “And Madame Sabine I think is very kind. Do you know, she gathered ashes from the Saint-John’s bonfire for the production?” He remembered; ashes from the St.-John’s fire protected those one loved. Ruthie looked in her bag and came up with a bulky envelope. “She gave me some for Jules.”

  “How is he?”

  “Worrying about Count André. He wants to come; should he?”

  “Yes, he’d help. Meanwhile sprinkle ashes on André,” Reisden said.

  They sat in silence for a while; she tucked the envelope in her purse, finished with her notes, and brought knitting out of her bag. He leaned against the back of the bench and closed his eyes, hearing the even ticking of the needles, as soothing as hearth fire. She should have been somebody’s, he thought, perfectly conscious of what Perdita would make of that somebody’s. Women did not belong to people, Perdita would say. But Ruthie should have belonged to someone.

  “He lost his parents,” Ruthie said. “So hard for him. It does get better,” she said, knitting away steadily.

  “You lost your parents early too?” he asked.

  “When Jules and I were seven and ten, almost everyone was massacred in our village.” She counted stitches, her round face as calm as if she had been talking about the weather. “Our parents, and our aunt and her son, and our neighbors.”

  He looked at the scar of grey in her hair. She had always had it.

  “How do you—?” He hesitated. “How do you bear that?” he said.

  “It would be impossible to live without forgiving,” Ruthie said.

  “You don’t blame them?”

  “I blamed myself,” Ruthie said, “for a long time.”

  So did André.

  “I lost mine early too,” Reisden said. “I’m always afraid it’ll happen again.” Ruthie nodded. “Perdita goes out on the street, with her eyesight. I think, don’t do that.... What can one do? Nothing. Worry. Be afraid. Nothing. There’s no one to forgive.”

  Ruthie put down her knitting and rummaged inside her purse as if she were giving a child throat lozenges, and put the envelope into his hand. He opened the envelope and looked at an aspirin tin, closed with tape.

  “It won’t do any harm,” Ruthie said, smiling. He felt like a child; he distrusted being a child, holding this little tin of magic protection.

  “Witches, Ruthie?” he said, putting it down.

  Ruthie took the box and pried at the tape with her fingernail, pulling it away, taking off some of the paint with it. She opened the box, took a bit of the grey powder on the end of her finger, and lightly touched his forehead, as if she were changing his mind by daubing his skin. “There, Dr. Reisden. Now you do the same to Madame Perdita and your baby.” She clicked the box shut again and gave it to him, suddenly blushing and smiling shyly, helplessly. “Heavens! I’ll go back to my knitting.—I think,” she said, “it is only one must do the best one can.”

  When it grew time for the train to arrive, he waited outside by the car. He laid the box with the ash onto the seat. The train pulled in, late. He hung back, watching Aline get off, then Perdita with his Toby slumped in her arms. Her shoulders were round with tiredness. Aline went off to make sure the luggage was unloaded. He crossed the pavement to meet them.

  “Alexander!” she said. She leaned against him. “Have you had any sleep?” Yes, he lied. “Then you hold the baby.”

  “I have a hotel for us,” he said, and went on before he could think any more about it, “I’ll drive you there if you like.” If you like was cowardice. It was all cowardice. He helped her into the car.

  “What’s this?” she said, feeling the little box; she handed it back to him, and as she did, it opened, spilling ash onto her hands. He had not precisely meant it.

  “Nothing,” he said, and closed the box again. The ash was on his fingers too; he smudged her cheek and marked his son’s sweaty forehead. He would have done that anyway, touching them for tenderness’ sake because they were there. Her hand on his arm marked him.

  The mile took him fifteen minutes to drive. The motor clattered and choked in first gear. They could have walked to the hotel faster. They pulled up in front of the hotel; he set the brake very carefully; he helped them all down. Perdita, who had heard him say time and again that he absolutely would not drive her, said not a word. He wasn’t sure whether he would have liked to be p
raised for his courage or whether it would have irritated him. Toby snuggled into his arms. The concierge let them in; they dragged upstairs to their rooms—Aline to hers, the baby and Perdita to share the bed with him.

  Neither Perdita nor he got undressed; she took off her hat and shoes, laid Toby down on the bed, lay down next to him, closed her eyes, and was asleep. He lay beside them, looked at Toby sprawled over most of the bed, got up, took one of the drawers out of the bureau, put a folded blanket and a pillowcase in it, and gently laid his son in it. “Sleep well, love; Papa and Mama are here.” He lay down again. “Perdita?” She made a sleepy sound. The ash was still on her cheek. “Hold me,” he said, and he held her, and sleep wrapped them all round like arms.

  There is no meat loaf in Paris

  GILBERT SAW ALEXANDER LEAVE Paris. The green porte-cochère of Jouvet opened; the car eased into the street; Alexander closed the door and got in the car and left without looking in his direction.

  Perdita’s maid came out five minutes later, when Gilbert was still debating what he should do. Madame would speak with him later, Aline said. But now— “Elle pleure!” Aline said, making tear-tracks with a finger down her plump cheeks. Gilbert left a note and went away, feeling to blame for everything.

  He walked miserably with Elphinstone through the strange city, and eventually found himself hungry and near a restaurant. He hesitated outside, looking at the menu. Elphinstone thumped down under one of the tables on the terrace.

  Father’s ghost hovered, faint in the sunlight. You could never do anything right, Father accused. How could a grown man, an old man, walk out of his house and leave his city with nothing but his dog?

  He should go home. . . . The ghost across the table nodded vengefully.

  But first Gilbert had to eat something. He worked through the names on the menu, consulting his pocket dictionary, looking for a dish that would suit both him and Elphinstone. In the middle of it he remembered that Father had always eaten the same dish every noon. Meat loaf on toast.

  He looked in his pocket dictionary.

  The French have no word for meat loaf.

  Gilbert looked at the menu in wonderment. It was a very elaborate menu, with a colored picture on top and the dishes written below in purple ink. Perhaps there would be meat loaf tomorrow, but there was none today; he consulted the dictionary until he was quite sure of it. And perhaps there was no meat loaf in all of Paris. Gilbert thought how Father might sit furious over an empty plate, clashing his knife and fork and calling for his dinner, but there would be nothing in Paris to feed Father.

  Gilbert was always rather surprised when anyone had heard of him, but at the American Embassy they knew who he was. They sent a nice young man out with him. “Are you sure I am not giving you difficulties?” Gilbert said.

  “No, sir, it’s an honor.”

  By that afternoon he had rented a furnished apartment. Father roared at the waste of money.

  But it is my money now, Gilbert thought. It is mine. It is my life. For the second time in two weeks he used a public telephone. It worked quite differently than in Boston, but Gilbert persisted and prevailed. A voice rumbled over the phone from Jouvet. “Madame Perdita nest pah ici. Elle est pahtee pour linstant.”

  “Mr. Daugherty?”

  “Bert Knight! Well, I swan! Perdita was just leaving to come find you.”

  “Uncle Gilbert?” Perdita was breathless. “Alexander wants me to come to the country with him.”

  “Of course you must go, dear. I am not going away for the present.”

  “Oh, thank you,” she said. “I shall work on him.”

  Work on him, Gilbert thought. He should go home; he should not bother them. He thought of Perdita’s face, pleading as she threw down the necklace she didn’t know was diamonds. You must tell him yourself! “I will speak with him,” he said to the vacant telephone line, though he did not know how or what to say.

  Gilbert went out to Courbevoie for dinner with Roy Daugherty and Roy’s pleasant French landlady, and during the course of the evening he spoke with Roy about Alexander and Perdita. Jouvet was in financial difficulties. The company was not recovering from its expansion as quickly as it ought. “If Alexander were not bothered by money,” Gilbert said.

  “Druther eat his own guts than take Knight money.” Roy Daugherty snorted. “He got his pride. Y’ask me, Bert, he got it screwed on tailwards and upside down.”

  “He has reasons,” Gilbert said, thinking, All the same, it is not Father’s money anymore; it is mine. Am I only what Father was? “Is there anything I can do for him?”

  “Well, you can help me go lookin’ for this file of André’s.”

  So that was how Gilbert spent his first few days in Paris, at Jouvet. He knew a great deal about Jouvet already. For four years, until Toby had been born, Alexander had written to him about it, enough to make him curious, and now he saw all of it. It was imposing, but there was kindness in it. There was never any dark corner to frighten someone who might be frightened. Downstairs the nurses and doctors treated their patients kindly. Upstairs, in the testing rooms and the labs, they burrowed after medical mysteries with Elphinstone’s persistence and celebrated their victories with jokes and beer. They sent a daily report to Alexander and put the jokes in. He has friends here, Gilbert thought. Roy Daugherty took Gilbert upstairs to Alexander’s private office, and Gilbert saw the new books with Alexander’s bookmarks in them, Alexander’s notes spread over his desk; Alexander educating himself about madness.

  In the past few years, Gilbert had seen many places where people worked and money was made; he liked Jouvet as well as any he had seen.

  “You think he’s workin’ too hard at Jouvet? Bein’ obsessive, they call it round here.”

  “No, no, I do not think so. Father was overwhelming,” Gilbert said. “You cannot imagine how overwhelming, how wholly Father ruled one— Alexander is learning how not to be overwhelmed.”

  “Huh.”

  Roy showed Gilbert the secret door upstairs to Alexander and Perdita’s apartment. On the stairs Gilbert saw his own picture, overexposed and huddled down in a corner, a shameful thing. He saw the red doorknobs, evidences of care and love. Alexander was a good man, doing a good thing. Though he had driven past Gilbert on the street and turned his eyes away.

  Alexander was not overwhelmed, but Gilbert wondered whether Alexander too did not sometimes see Father’s wild eyes in the mirror, and he thought of Alexander turning his face away on the street. He has Father in him, Gilbert thought, and he sees Father in me.

  And every day, while he was at Jouvet, one or another of the technicians, or the office clerks, or even Alexander’s secretary looked at him, speculating.

  They see Alexander in me too, Gilbert thought.

  This is exactly what Alexander fears.

  Eddie Profane

  ON SUNDAY EVENING, WHEN everyone at Montfort was supposedly asleep, Reisden, Eddie Becker, and André broke into the crypt. In the theatre, grave robbing takes no more than prying off a coffin-lid. Hah. They had to find the right coffin, of which there were far more than needed: X, Count of Montfort, and Y, Count of Montfort, and countesses and sisters and aunts in their crumbling boxes. André’s father had been buried in a crude chalk sarcophagus and the lid had been mortared down. They chipped around under the lid, which took several hours. Then they sent André outside, ostensibly to stand watch. Becker half slid off the lid, looked inside, said, “Oh bugger,” put on gloves and a disinfectant mask, lay down on the coffin lid, reached inside, and began taking samples, another process rightly glossed over in the theatre.

  In theory you can test for arsenic forever; it’s a metal and doesn’t decay. But in acute arsenic poisoning the metal hasn’t had time to settle into the tissues, so if one finds it at all, it’s in the stomach con-tents or the intestines. Reisden tried not to let his imagination loose on the scraping sounds from inside the sarcophagus. “Oh gloriously-buggerit,” Eddie Profane muttered. “Reach me that ligh
t, won’t you?” Cholera, on the other hand, does not persist at all; it is readily killed by drying out, or by burying the body in a shroud wetted with bichloride of mercury. So rummaging through the remains of the intestines, if Becker could find them, would be relatively safe. If Henri-Julien de Montfort had died of cholera, and not, say, of something that happily wets up and becomes virulent again.

  They contemplated the crossroads. Becker looked at them and shook his head. “You’d need a backhoe. I’ll do the husband first.”

  André was waiting under the broken arches of the abbey, looking up at the moon-sketched outline of the towers. They collected him and silently went inside, where all three of them scrubbed down with carbolic soap in the bathroom. Eddie Becker lacerated the outside of the steel specimen case with soap and a heavy brush. André looked at it with a face Hamlet would have envied: sorrow, fury, just a little repulsion. Murder most foul.

  “How long will it take you to do the testing?” André asked Reisden.

  “Becker’s taking it to Paris.” The Marsh test for arsenic is easy, but André wanted to test for a list of poisons a foot long.

  They went out into the Great Hall. André took a last look at the specimen case, then looked up, behind the banners, to the scars of a disappeared staircase and the mark of a bricked-up room.

  Perdita on location

  MY DEAR MR. DAUGHERTY—Perdita wrote to him and Uncle Gilbert. I am translating for Mr. Krauss the cameraman, who doesn’t speak French beyond “on tourne.” I go about with him from morning to night. There is nothing that could be mistaken for a laundry closer than Arras. We ferry mounds of diapers there. Alexander is even more busy than I, since he has been given some of the jobs that Mr. Fauchard would have done. So you can imagine our days. We barely see each other and have hardly spoken.