by Sarah Smith
“I’m asking Pétiot to guard the machinery on Sunday,” Reisden said. “And watch André.” Pétiot would have men available.
“You watch him, too.”
“Ruthie and Jules and I.”
“He’ll—go—that night?”
“Katzmann has found him a place.”
That evening he didn’t sleep at all. He lay in the heat with Perdita and Toby asleep beside him and stared up at the ceiling.
He remembered that afternoon in the Grand’Place: Mademoiselle Françoise’s hot hands, Sabine’s sullen eyes, the missing button. The chemical smell of the dress. He wouldn’t have noticed it if he weren’t married to Perdita. New dye, a new dress.
She had got the dress after Blantire died, he thought.
But she had lost the button before the body was found.
Reisden thought, Did she look at his dead body?
No. Françoise Auclart had buttons of the same kind. She had lost it by the Holy Well, not Sabine.
André was dangerous. Katzmann had said so. Reisden wasn’t being Pétiot’s dog; he wasn’t abandoning André for the army contract. He could reassure himself of that. André was dangerous.
But Reisden couldn’t sleep.
Perdita investigates Sabine
ON FRIDAY PERDITA LEARNED something terrible.
She had a letter from Milly. I have heard a story about that Wagny girl. Do you know she ordered mourning before her father was dead?
Perdita, Aline, and Toby went to Arras. Mademoiselle Huguette had all of Mademoiselle Françoise’s order books. The new assistant, a good brisk girl, found the entry for Sabine’s mourning, three days before her father had died, and marked Rush.
“She murdered him!” Aline exclaimed in a whisper.
“No, how could she?” Perdita said. “Her father died of a heart attack.”
“Oh, heart attack, heart attack! Like they thought for a while Ruthie was dying of a heart attack!”
“Perhaps she sensed he was ill,” Perdita said.
But what sixteen-year-old, worried about her father’s health, went off and ordered mourning?
They collected laundry, and by that time Toby needed changing. “Aline, let’s beg Mademoiselle Huguette to use her wash-room.” While Aline dealt with Toby, Perdita sat and gossiped with Mademoiselle Huguette.
She asked about the night Mademoiselle Françoise had died. Had they done anything unusual that day? No. Eaten nothing unusual? No. Anything from someone else?
No. Just the rabbit.
“And that was one of her rabbits?” said Perdita.
“It must have been,” Mademoiselle Huguette said.
“But—?”
And Perdita asked Mademoiselle Huguette a question.
André asks Ruthie for help
ANDRÉ KNOWS WHAT IS going to happen to him. On Friday night he edits the film as usual. But this will be the last time. They don’t let madmen have inflammable film and sharp knives.
For a moment, as he pieces the film together, he escapes his troubles. He has always thought of himself not as a playwright or actor but someone who simply puts together effects for the audience, a little laughter next to a shiver of horror. Film is all about putting things together, shadows next to light, motion against motion.
Reisden always said that he couldn’t stay in the madhouse because they wouldn’t let him do chemistry.
André can’t go because they won’t let him do film.
He hasn’t captured Sabine on film yet. He knows she is mad, but she didn’t show it in her mad scene. She just looked horrified.
At him.
Katzmann has asked him questions. Do you think your wife can cause harm to other people? There’s only one true answer to that. But André waited too long, tried to give a sane answer, and Katzmann has written in his little book.
André has written plays about being mad. Just before the madman cuts the visitor’s throat in Dr. Wardrell, he says earnestly, “I am not mad.”
André is not mad.
On Saturday morning he tries to see Reisden, but Reisden has managed to disappear. He goes to see Ruthie instead. She and Jules are making up pay-packets for the extras on Sunday.
“Am I mad?” he asks them.
“No,” they answer loyally.
“Would I kill—someone? Her?”
No.
“The guillotine scene,” he says. “You’re sure she’s not going to put her head in the guillotine? If it chops off her head, I will never see you again. They’ll lock me up forever. They’ll cut my head off.”
You wouldn’t do it, Jules writes. You never hurt an actor. Never.
But André can’t stop thinking of the huge, heavy blade and Sabine’s neck. It is like Henri the engineer thinking of strangling his son, the play Reisden can’t watch anymore. “Keep me from killing her,” he confesses in a rush to them. “Keep me away from her tomorrow. Don’t let me do anything, nothing stupid, you understand, nothing insane.”
Ruthie says “You wouldn’t,” but Jules doesn’t. The two partners look at each other. Jules has a scar by his eye and a scar on his mouth; the bruises have almost faded but Jules has changed. He knows what it’s like to be cornered and beaten. Jules raises his hand slowly, yes: Jules will stop him.
“I want to ask Ruthie something,” André says. Jules leaves them alone.
“I,” he says. “In the hospital. Do you think it was flying ointment? I dreamed of your hair. You smiled at me.”
Ruthie says, “You mustn’t dream of me, Count André.”
“I am going into the asylum. May I dream of you there? Will you come to see me?”
“Of course.”
“Every Sunday, in the afternoon,” André says sadly. He has written too many plays about madhouses; he changes his mind. “No. Come during the week when they don’t expect guests. They’ll treat me better.—Can you keep my theatre going?”
They both know the answer.
“Perhaps they’ll let me write plays there.” This is wishful thinking. André knows all the interventions by which doctors try to rip the madness out of men. “The theatre won’t work without me. The audiences want Necrosar. I can still do Necrosar,” he says. “Look. ‘They are taking him away. But he isn’t mad enough. He knows what’s happening to him.’”
Necrosar would laugh but André’s throat is dry.
“They’ll take me tomorrow. After the last scene.—I want to ask you,” André says.
He is a madman, he has been one all his life. Motives have never meant anything to him; in André’s world people do things because they are mad. “I don’t know about people,” André says. Other human beings are fragments to him. “Ruthie?”
He cannot ask any more.
“Would you do anything for me?” he manages finally.
She takes a step away from him. “I would do anything for you.”
André thinks of laying his head on the bed near her hand. He can be comfortable in her presence. What does that mean? “Would you hurt me?”
She looks at him in agony and confusion. “Of course I would not hurt you.”
“If I am in the madhouse. If I can never get out. It would hurt me if I were there. Would you help me?”
“What are you asking me?”
She knows what he is asking. He mimes it finally. His hands open a bottle, an old bottle, the cork sealed with wax, and brings it to his lips. All this time he is looking at her.
“Would you bring me the bottle from my office?”
“No, no, I cannot.”
He takes her hands. “Please.”
“Count André, you do not know what you ask. Let go my hands, please, let them go.”
“I do know.”
“You do not.” She turns on him almost savagely. “There is always hope. Until the very moment of death, there is hope for such people as we are, that there will be something better, that all is not lost.”
“No,” André says, “there is no hope.”
“There is!” she says. “There is family! Friendship! Love!” She holds her head high, blazing. “I will not let you despair!”
“I should have married you,” André says, unguarded. It is one of those things one doesn’t know until one says it. “I could have married you.”
“Oh no.” She pulls her hands away. She walks away from him, into a corner. “We must count the pay-packets yet,” she says. “There is so much to do.” She turns. She has to look up at him, he is so much taller than she.
André stares down at her. “I’m frightened,” he says.
She looks up at him. “You are all my life,” she says. “Working for you is all I want.” It is not enough. She unfists her hands and holds them out to him. “You are loved, Count André. Believe me, you are loved. I will do anything for you, anything, always; but not that.”
She reaches out for him; she touches his sleeve. He puts out his other hand and touches her arm, lightly as a butterfly.
“I’ll pray for you,” she says. “You’ll be safe tomorrow.”
Sabine discovers how to live forever
SABINE KNEW WHAT WOULD happen to her. All Saturday afternoon she read the movie sections of the theatre magazines and cried. All the beautiful girls— She had been a beautiful girl too. Now in the mirror her face was dark and decaying. She was going to die.
She put a scarf over the mirror.
Papa Cyron had told her she would not have to put her head in the guillotine. But instead of the guillotine it would be something else.
“André will be nowhere near the guillotine,” Papa Cyron told her. “Pétiot’s men will watch the guillotine. They’re watching André. No one can hurt you.”
Saturday night, like every night, there was entertainment on the terrace. The soldiers wanted Sabine to tell their fortunes. She dealt the Gentleman, the Storks, the Bear; but her hands were grey, the fingernails purple with a white moon. She started to deal her own fortune. The first card on the table was the Tomb.
“Everybody, everybody, they’re showing the Ball of the Dead in the Great Hall.”
She didn’t want to go. “Come on,” Papa Cyron said. She didn’t want to see herself dead on the film. In the darkness of the shuttered hall, she closed her eyes.
“No, no, Binny, you’re beautiful, I’ve never seen anything like you!” She opened her eyes.
She was beautiful.
She was grey, but everyone was grey. On the screen she moved through the crowd of ghosts. The decapitated heads swooped at her, the roughly jerking dead people bowed to her. But she? She was alive.
Look, Sabine thought; I will always be alive.
A witch is flesh. She dies. But to be in the movies is like being burned alive young. It is a death no one forgets.
She looked up at herself, like a flower on the white screen. This is how they’ll see me, she thought.
“Papa Cyron!” she whispered. “It’s all right. I’m not afraid. Tomorrow I want to put my head in the guillotine.”
Perdita tells Reisden about the rabbit
AFTER SUPPER, PERDITA SENT Toby off with Aline and went to tell Alexander what she had found in Arras.
He was at the entertainment, which had not started yet. “Come away with me,” she said. “I have something I have to tell you.”
She took him all the way past the stables, to the drop-off of eroded hill above the road. They stood with their backs against the stables, on the little half-moon of uneroded land. No one went here. Perdita sat down in the prickly dry grass; Alexander dropped down beside her. The sun was dusky orange. It would be a fine day tomorrow for the guillotine scene.
They talked for a moment about André’s going into the asylum. “I as much as signed the order,” he said.
“Alexander, what if André isn’t crazy?”
“I wish he weren’t; he is.”
She moved her fingers nervously through the crackling grass. “Did you know Sabine ordered mourning before her father died?”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Milly.”
“Get Milly to check her facts.”
As if Milly were an idiot for finding out an inconvenient thing. “I checked Milly’s facts. Aline and I went to Arras this afternoon. Sabine did order mourning before her father died.”
“So now she has precognitions? Her father died of a heart attack. No poison.”
“You aren’t suspicious at all, Alexander?” He who was always willing to be suspicious.
“I am not.”
“Did you ever wonder who cooked the rabbit?”
“Rabbit?” he asked.
“The one that poisoned Mademoiselle Françoise. Where did it come from?” she said.
“She raised rabbits. She cooked it.”
“I do know French cooking. There are different kinds of rabbits, Alexander. The rabbits from around here are stringy; Mademoiselle Françoise would have marinated hers all day before she cooked it. But she didn’t cook it the day she died because she was at her shop. Mademoiselle Huguette didn’t cook it because she’s a vegetarian. And Mademoiselle Françoise didn’t have it left over from the previous day because she would have been poisoned the first day she ate it. It wasn’t a whole rabbit, just a part of one. So who cooked the rabbit? Where did it come from? Where did the rest of it go?”
“She bought it at the market,” he said.
“She didn’t,” Perdita said. “Aline and I went all around the market trying to find prepared foods. That’s for Paris and rich people, Alexander. This is a country town; people don’t buy cooked rabbit from shops. And even if she’d bought a piece of rabbit, who bought the rest and why aren’t they dead?”
“Don’t of all things strengthen André’s delusions. He’s done that well enough himself.”
“Does Sabine do any cooking?”
“Sabine did not poison anyone.”
“I mean does she cook ordinarily, when the caterers aren’t here?” She answered her own question. “André wouldn’t think she could poison him if she never took an interest in the food.”
“Sabine sends parcels of food to Paris from Montfort. Blackberry jellies, preserved beets, legs of lamb. But they are not poisoned, and of course she doesn’t cook them herself.”
Perdita knew better. “She does the pretty parts. After someone else has picked the fruit and hulled it and done all the work, she stirs the jam and says it’s hers. She would flirt with the cook while someone else skinned and gutted it and took the membrane off. And then she’d do a sauce and send it all to André and say ‘I cooked this for you.’”
He didn’t say anything. She’d thought he’d say something like Now André has a chance. He was André’s friend, wasn’t he?
“Sabine came to see Mademoiselle Françoise that Friday,” Perdita said. “She said a button had fallen off her dress and she needed it replaced. I think she brought some rabbit from Montfort as a present. Mademoiselle Françoise didn’t eat the rabbit on Friday, because that’s fish day; she saved it for Saturday, market day, when she would be too busy to cook.”
“All right,” he said. “Rabbit. Who ate the rest of the rabbit and died at Montfort?”
“Nobody. Because Sabine put something on only the piece she gave to Mademoiselle Françoise.”
He said nothing for a long time. “You sound like André,” he said.
“I don’t like accusing her, Alexander.”
“Then don’t.”
“But I think I might believe André,” she said.
“André is crazy.”
“Don’t you want to help him?”
“Of course I do.”
“Ruthie found a button in the cellar. She told me. By Mr. Blantire’s body.”
“I heard that,” he said. “But the one she had, she bought at the shop.”
“And something happened to Ruthie too.”
“Yes, she picked the wrong plant. Which Mademoiselle Françoise grew. Françoise Auclart was a bad lot.”
“Mademoiselle
Françoise?”
“She had buttons like that in her shop; it was her button.—Look, darling. I saw this dress with the buttons. She wore it when I met her first. Blantire was already dead, had been for a couple of weeks, but the dress was new; it stank of dye. I noticed it. I notice these things because of you. One of the buttons probably hadn’t been sewn on properly in the first place, it fell off, and Sabine came to get another. That is not evidence against Sabine.”
“I suppose.”
“The point is that André, who’s very lightly balanced at best, said in front of a hundred witnesses, including his stepfather, that he would kill his wife. Therefore he is being put in protective custody for evaluation. Full stop. A barrelful of buttons won’t change that. It’s too late to help André. He’s threatened to kill her.”
“But still—”
“A button that Ruthie says she saw but dropped down the drain. Grimoires and a canister containing an unknown substance, which Ruthie blames for her heat-stroke, and which no one else but André saw. A cooked rabbit. A cooked rabbit, Perdita.”
A cooked rabbit, as if it were nothing. Cooking is important, as taking care of the baby is important; there is a whole world of housekeeping that men don’t see.
“Mourning for her father when he wasn’t dead, Alexander? I don’t know why we’re fighting about this, because you’re going to support André, aren’t you?”
“How can I say André’s sane and Sabine is a murderer, on the evidence of buttons and rabbits? Cyron will go back to saying I’m a spy and Lucien Pétiot will back him and I’ll lose Jouvet. And the truth is André isn’t sane. I can help him by doing my job; that’s all I can do.”
She was tired of this. “You don’t need Lucien Pétiot.”
“Why?” he said. “Because Gilbert sends us diamonds? No.”
“Because you’re Richard Knight,” she said. “You have money of your own. Your father left you all his money. Uncle Gilbert told me. Do you know what he’s been doing in the last five years? He learned about money. He took the money you’d have got from your father. He bought two companies. He’s going to leave them to you, and if you don’t take them he’s leaving them to me and Toby.” One of them was a medical-supply company. Gilbert had thought it would please Alexander. They had waited to tell Alexander until he was used to Gilbert. But that had never happened. “I didn’t mean to tell you until it would make you happy—” She tugged at the chain and brought out the awful diamond pendant. “1 don’t care if I don’t make you happy. He didn’t buy me this; you did. Uncle Gilbert says it’s a month’s profit from one of the companies. He told me it would help us escape— It was a sort of joke. He doesn’t need to wait until he’s dead to give them to you. You can have them now. You can have Jouvet; and Alexander, you can spit in General Pétiot’s eye and tell the truth. And you’ve got to.”