A Citizen of the Country

by Sarah Smith

  Reisden walked toward him, certain that this was wrong, too, and Gilbert turned and walked back toward him. They met in the center of the park, by a bench and a bed of flowers.

  “What can I do?” said Reisden. “What else can I do?”

  “No,” said Gilbert, “you are right— It is only—”

  The dog looked from one to the other of them, distressed. Gilbert sat down on a bench and put his hand over his eyes. Reisden knelt down on the gravel and soothed the dog by patting its head and ears. The dog sniffed his face; he put his arm around its neck, holding on to it. Gilbert’s dog. The gravel cut into his knees. He stood up, dusting off, turning away.

  “I killed your father,” he said to Gilbert, “and now I have to get rid of you. Isn’t it odd.”

  Gilbert drove his fist into his palm, cupping his fist with his palm, helpless against the past.

  He sat down, on the other end of the bench from Gilbert again. In the middle of the bed of flowers was a smiling copper bust of some local worthy, twenty years old or so. The copper had verdigrised to a streaked mid-green, and dark streaks had formed on the stone plinth, in less time than William and Richard Knight had been dead. Above them, in the trees, the birds were singing and chirping and getting along with their lives. It was time he and Gilbert did the same.

  “I’ve told Perdita what this is about. She doesn’t understand it. I’m glad she doesn’t. She loves her whole family. Including you. But will you please go home?”

  “I shall miss her so.”

  “She will miss you.” He ventured, because he knew Gilbert would understand it, “We will all miss each other. It’s not that. She could visit you. But she’d bring Toby, out of some misguided—I don’t know what; honesty; she can’t see. In two or three years Toby will notice that you look like me. And that’s the conversation I don’t know how to have with him. Not at the age when he’ll notice. I don’t know how I’ll ever have it.”

  “We will all miss each other,” Gilbert said, and called him by his name, “Alexander.”

  And for a moment all his care seemed so unnecessary. Never mind, he wanted to say to his uncle. Buy an apartment in Paris. Come to visit. When Perdita goes to America I’ll visit you in New York. We are all we have.

  “If you should ever need me,” Gilbert said, “I will be there. At any time. If we have not spoken in years, Alexander, if you should ever need me, promise to call me; I will come.”

  “If you need me I will come, too. If ever—” He thought of the gas in the cellar, the dismal Moroccan situation. “If ever I need to call on you, I will; I promise. And if there’s ever a time Perdita and Toby need someone and I’m not there—”

  Gilbert’s eyes widened; he shook his head.

  “Listen. Please listen. You know what happened yesterday. If there’s need, make sure they’re all right.”

  “Yes,” Gilbert said. “I will take care of them. I promise.”

  “But until then—”

  “I understand,” Gilbert said.

  Reisden had left his croissant somewhere; a concentration of pigeons around the other bench suggested where. Gilbert tore his in half and they ate in silence. Gilbert fed the crumbs to the birds while Elphinstone watched patiently with his head between his paws. Reisden scattered the crumbs from the baker’s paper wrapping for the birds too, feeling awkward, not something he had done before. The birds flew away. The paper must have looked like a hawk to them. You do it better, Reisden told his uncle silently. You’re better with the birds. Better at being kind.

  They walked back toward Gilbert’s hotel, where there was a telephone. He called Perdita, who would be up by now. “Hello, love.” He was here in Arras, he said, with Gilbert. Yes, they had been talking. They had gone out for breakfast. No, not to a restaurant.

  “And what will he do now?” she asked. “Must he go away?”

  He heard what she wanted. “Yes, love, he must go away.” She had heard the answer in the silence before he spoke.

  “Without my seeing him?”

  She had to understand. Gilbert had understood; between the two of them they had to explain the necessity to her.

  He covered the transmitter with his hand. “She’d like to see you. Will you stay here today with us, for Bastille Day?” And help me talk to her?

  Of course he would. Gilbert had promised to help, anytime, for anything.

  “Yes,” Reisden said into the phone. “Today.”

  I want my boy’s life to be different from mine, Reisden had written to Gilbert just after Toby had been born, and in the middle of it, still writing, he had realized that the very last person he could bring into that process was Gilbert, and he had put the pen down, and so the silence had come between them.

  But he had been wrong. He needed Gilbert. Only Gilbert could help make the silence lasting.

  I was not trying to cut off communication with him, Reisden thought. I was trying to put off the end.

  Ruthie at the Holy Well

  NO ONE HAD THOUGHT to tell Ruthie Aborjaily that the blackmailer had the secret and her brother was safe now. From the walls of Montfort, she heard Boomer O’Connelly’s cannons firing to celebrate the fall of the Bastille. One more day until Jules had to meet the blackmailer at the Place Victor-Hugo and tell him the secret of Montfort.

  They had looked everywhere, and finished looking every place but one.

  The police had left Montfort and the actors were gone. From her window, Ruthie saw the Rolls puff out the Jerusalem Gate with Monsieur Cyron, General Pétiot, and Count André. The coach returned and left again with a load of upper servants, and the young maids and servingmen left in groups, arm in arm, for the eight-mile walk to Arras. No one would be in the cellars but Ruthie.

  She dumped the knitting out of her knitting bag and put into it Dr. Reisden’s copy of the cellar map, the electric torch, two candles, a tin candle-stick, a ball of string, and a box of matches. On second thought, she added her extra pair of glasses, her largest ball of yarn, and her only bottle of perfume, a present years ago from Count André. She put a kerchief over her hair to protect against bats.

  Count André had left the key; Ruthie ventured into the cellars. She shone her light down the Mysterious Tunnels, which were practically collapsing. The torch lit crumbling chalk ceilings and beams stained with white-rimmed damp. In some places, chicken wire had been stretched between the beams because chunks of stone had fallen from the ceiling, but the wire was rusting through. She looked at the Torture Chamber and the Haunted Crypt. She looked at everything, until all that was left was the Holy Well.

  Engineers from Countess Sabine’s mines had pumped out the carbon monoxide in the cellar, but Ruthie was taking no chances. She lit a candle at the top of the third stairs and watched the wick carefully. If the flame were starved for air and climbed to the end of the wick, she would go back to the stairs immediately.

  The candle flame burned calmly. Ruthie set the candlestick down in the hollow of the cellar steps and squared her shoulders. An old wrought-iron torch-stand stood at the bottom of the stairs; she tied the end of her ball of knitting yarn to one of its legs and, paying out the yarn with one hand and taking the candlestick with the other, set out among the ghostly white columns.

  The pumping out of the bad air had helped, but near the Holy Well the air still smelled very bad. Ruthie took her perfume out of her purse and dabbed it under her nose fiercely. Poor Mr. Blantire, she thought. For a moment she was back in her own past, a girl of ten, fleeing toward the border with her seven-year-old brother. All along the road there had been bodies, and the smell. She took a good deep breath of Violettes de Valois and thought of Count André giving it to her; she touched the carved flowers on the stopper and thought of how she would put it back on the dresser in her bedroom, when she was upstairs again, and then she would be safe. Mr. Blantire had died here, but he had just been overcome, it was nobody’s fault, no one had meant him harm, there had been no Turks, no murder, no—

  Mr. Bl
antire’s body had left a stain by the door. She stepped over it carefully, shivering a little. She stood the candle on the top of the wooden box—she had to stand on tiptoe to reach it—and shone the torch around the enclosure of the Holy Well.

  Iron bars around the well. Thick chalk columns holding up the roof. She felt the frustration her brother and Dr. Reisden had: what was she looking for?

  She circled round the iron cage, examining it from outside. What could be here that had drawn Mr. Blantire to it? It was a well in a cellar, with a cage around it.

  The beam of her torch fell on the dusty floor, and on the dark irregular stain that Mr. Blantire’s body had left. Just by the door of the cage.

  She wondered why he hadn’t tried to make his way to the stairs. The door to the cage had been open; the police had mentioned that.

  Why would he have died? He would have had time to stagger up the stairs, as Count André and Dr. Reisden had.

  Ruthie looked at the lock. It was bright with scratches.

  On the inside.

  “You were locked in,” Ruthie said.

  It couldn’t be.

  “You died because someone locked you in.”

  Who would do it? She knelt down by the stain, not touching it, but close. The stain curved as the door did. She saw him, pressing his body against the door, shouting maybe, and no one had come. Until the fumes had overcome him.

  She folded her hands, closed her eyes behind her glasses, and prayed for his soul as she had for the souls of the dead when she was a little girl; it had been good to remember later, but it hadn’t stopped the Turks then, and it didn’t help her now.

  She reached down her candle, and as she did her foot hit something and it rolled and clinked and glinted in the corner.

  A button. Ruthie picked it up and held it on her palm. An old-fashioned dressmaker’s button; little girls had worn them on their dresses in rows when Ruthie was first in Paris. It was a distinctive design, a pink rose in clear faceted glass. Mademoiselle Françoise would have liked such a thing; she had loved frills and her uniforms had always had twice as many buttons as necessary.

  Had Mademoiselle Françoise been here? When?

  When she had locked him in.

  Mademoiselle Françoise had seemed so harmless, always flirting and vain of her looks, but not a bad woman.

  But someone had locked him in.

  Mademoiselle Françoise, here with her lover, playing at being his dear little witch of a girl.

  Perhaps she had only meant it as a joke—had locked him in, for a joke, a game—but then--

  Ruthie shivered and put the button in her pocket. She must tell Dr. Reisden about this.

  She climbed the stairs tiredly. She had found nothing, no secret of Montfort, nothing to help her brother or Dr. Reisden, only a love story that had ended terribly. She went into the washroom to wash her smudged hands and face. There were no towels. She pulled her handkerchief out of her pocket—

  And the button clinked into the basin and fell down the drain.

  But she remembered what it had looked like, a glass button, glinting like a diamond, and caught inside, a rose.

  Bastille Day

  REISDEN HAD TO MEET Katzmann when his train arrived, which would be a little after one in the afternoon, but his family had the day until then, the only day all of them would ever have together.

  “I will help her understand,” Gilbert said. “She does understand, you know. . . .”

  They met Perdita and Toby at the railroad station. The sun was shining, and in the paved courtyard outside the station the workers’ bands were practicing. Toby giggled and wriggled, wanting to get down and play with Elphinstone.

  They walked slowly down the green Boulevard Carnot toward the Citadel, taking turns pushing the baby carriage with its load of diapers, extra clothes, and baby food, and Toby sat up and crowed and stripped off his shoes and socks and threw them over the side. Elphinstone limped along behind. Other families were also heading toward the parade ground, on foot or in carriages. Perdita leaned into the baby carriage, bumping it over the cobblestones. Reisden took over. I should have taken the car, he thought, but he’d been too tired, and Gilbert fit with Perdita and Toby into the category of people that he would rather not drive.

  Toby didn’t want to sit in the carriage, he wanted to get down and explore. He tottered along, almost walking, holding to both of Gilbert’s index fingers to keep himself up. Gilbert had to walk bent over to keep up with him. Reisden knew that position, which was backbreaking. It was like watching himself with his son.

  “Ahaa!” Toby said, wobbling along at breakneck speed.

  “Ah-aah!” Gilbert agreed, puffing to keep up with him.

  Perdita stopped to listen to them, silent on Reisden’s arm, holding him as if to tell him to stop and listen too. Perdita had brought Toby to Boston and let Gilbert come to Paris, to show them they could be happy together. But love, he thought, you’re wrong.

  “Pétiot is pushing forward my French citizenship,” he said. “He has written the juge d’instruction a fulsome letter, saying that I am a paragon of integrity and that he won’t rest until I am French. Then you’ll be able to be French too.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Good.” She smiled at him, bravely, but like a person who is deciding to have an operation. France is as good as we shall have, love; the country we can belong to together. We can’t have America. Not together.

  Four women in white marched past them, holding up placards and wearing green-and-white sashes. LA PARTIE FÉMINISTE, he read, and WOMEN WANT THE VOTE. He told Perdita that the Feminists were there. “Next year you’ll march with them.”

  She smiled at him, but faintly, sadly, distracted.

  The highlight of Bastille Day in any French town with a garrison is an army revue. At Arras it was held on the Petit Champ de manoeuvres, the big open field just outside the Citadel. The grass was crowded with families. Pères de famille shepherded their wives, wives’ sisters, mothers, mothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, and incredible crowds of children. Proud mothers held twins in arms, pushed babies in prams over the bumpy grass, or shook their fingers at school-age boys and girls. On the picnic ground, the grass was bright with white dresses and soldier-blue school uniforms. Red-white-and-blue flags fluttered everywhere. Every old man wore his lapel ribbons or his medals from the Franco-Prussian War; the younger men, with nothing but colonial wars to decorate them, looked envious, and the little boys jingled their school medals and agitated their flags. Reisden watched the fathers.

  They found a spot for their picnic, spread a tablecloth, and sat on it. Toby plumped down on his behind, put his fingers in his mouth thoughtfully, then grinned, fell forward onto his hands, and crawled toward Gilbert. “Ah-aah!” he crowed triumphantly, pulling himself up by Gilbert’s shoulder, and planted a wet, dirty baby slobber, somewhere between a kiss and a hug, on Gilbert’s face.

  They have the same smile, Reisden thought.

  The cannons fired, startling Toby; the bands began to arrive on the field, playing “The Marseillaise.” The crowd waved flags and cheered, Vive la France! Reisden bought all four of them flags from a man with a tray of them. Perdita and Gilbert waved theirs with the air of Presbyterians at high mass, trying to fit in. Reisden did not wave his or shout vive la France; he was not that sort of man. Toby tried to put his flag in his mouth.

  “Oh, dear boy, you must not eat that,” Gilbert said.

  “Aaah!”

  “The dye is full of horrible poisons, and you will stick the point through the roof of your mouth—”

  Toby blinked at Gilbert and kept gumming the flag. Reisden took it away from him. Toby wailed, beginning to be tired or hungry or overwhelmed by the crowds. Reisden walked him up and down, jiggling him to distract him. “Come to years of discretion, Toby, don’t put things in your mouth.” Toby needed changing again.

  A reviewing stand had been set up under a green awning, and all the dignitaries of the town were gathered under it. Fro
m a distance Reisden saw Pétiot, Cyron, and, improbably, André, pale but irreproachable in morning dress with his hair clubbed back. Pétiot made a speech; Cyron made a speech, which was enthusiastically clapped by everyone close enough to hear it. Vive la France! Vive la République!

  The scarlet cavalry burst out of the Citadel and caracoled down the field. Behind them came the infantry in lines of sky blue and red and the artillery pulling wheeled cannons. Reisden had been to Austrian and German revues and to one Bastille Day parade at Longchamp, out of curiosity. In peacetime it was the showy cavalry who got the loudest applause; today it was the guns.

  The Figaro was predicting confidently that there would be no war in Morocco. But that was Paris and this was Flanders, the Theater of Blood, land fought over since Roman times. Beefy old men with mustaches whipped their flags back and forth and shouted To Strasbourg! Vive l’armée! To Alsace! Vive la France! A girl ducked under the ropes to kiss a soldier. A very old drunk glittering with decorations swayed by their picnic blanket, weeping and singing “The Battle-Trumpet” as he headed off to piss against a tree. Row after row of soldiers wheeled, marched in close order, and knelt to fire blanks toward the east.

  Gilbert’s worried eyes followed the clouds of gunsmoke.

  After the revue, they walked back toward the city center. They found an open-fronted café in the Place de la Vacquerie and had a long, leisurely Flemish lunch under the awning. Toby single-mindedly transferred the contents of his plate to his bib, his clothes, and Gilbert’s lapel, then sprawled angelically in his pram, asleep in the heat, while Elphinstone licked the flagstones under their table and lapped water from a bowl. Around them, in spite of the noon sun, Arrageois burghers drank beer and forked up flammenküchen, flatbreads fried with meat and cheese.

  Gilbert asked questions about the countryside. What was the history of this area? Reisden, exhausted in the heat, left them for Perdita to answer, but she didn’t know. She would have known the answers to questions about New York. They fell silent. Perdita was wearing Gilbert’s teardrop necklace, tucked into the neck of her blouse. She tugged at it and ran her fingers along the length of its silver chain.