A Citizen of the Country

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A Citizen of the Country Page 38

by Sarah Smith


  He stood outside their door and listened to her. He opened it an inch. She was crying with so much abandon that she did not hear him. He had never wanted her to love someone who wasn’t a hero. He had never trusted her much, and she knew it. And still she cried like this, in pain, crying for an ordinary man. He was facing something much more serious than he had left, unbreakable, undeniable, that he did not comprehend at all, and he was afraid of it, less ready to have her love him than he had been to have a son.

  She dropped her hands and held them out. “Alexander,” she whispered. He thought for a moment she had seen him and then realized she was only saying his name.

  “Perdita,” he said.

  Reisden and Perdita make plans

  SHE SHRIEKED AND PUT her hand over her mouth; then she reached out to find him. She clasped her arms convulsively around him. She was still sobbing; he felt her ribs hiccup under her thin nightgown. They clung to each other, saving each other or drowning. He began shaking too. They both lay down, collapsed almost, on the bed, among the clothes she’d been sending to be dyed black. “Love,” he said, “oh love.”

  “André and Jules?" she said, muffled against his chest.

  “They’re alive too.”

  “Where have you been?” It sounded a bit like an accusation.

  “In the boves. The cheese,” he said. “André found the water by the smell of cheese. You saved us.”

  “You were in the boves all this time?”

  “Not all of it, André and I have been screwing up royally since. Perdita, things are bad.”

  “They can’t be bad with you here.”

  “Listen. For all this summer I’ve been being blackmailed.”

  “About Richard?”

  “For once this isn’t about Richard. Jules and indirectly André have been blackmailed as well. We were being asked to find out a secret of Montfort, a military secret, and to give it to someone. It exists; we finally found it, this past couple of days, and unfortunately we found the wrong one.”

  “What is the secret?”

  He shook his head. “Listen. The point is Pétiot and Cyron didn’t want anyone to know what we’ve found out. They’ll sacrifice André for it and they’ll gladly sacrifice me.”

  He thought of the black-bordered faire-part with his name on it, still down on the gate. A temptation. We have a chance, he thought. A choice. “André was safe as long as he was dead,” he said. “You and Toby and Jouvet are as long as I am.”

  “No,” she said, holding tight to him. “No. Stop saying that. I’ve thought you were dead for two weeks, I won’t have you dead, I won’t.”

  He held tight to her. “But—”

  “No buts!”

  They said nothing, only lay in each other’s arms, as close as if they were skin against skin, body to body. And then she said the thing he knew, in spite of his unworthiness.

  “It doesn’t work,” she said. “You tried running away. You tried dying. It doesn’t work, Alexander. Why don’t you just stop?”

  Because it’s the one thing I can do. The cleverest thing. Let myself be killed.

  But I’m Toby’s father.

  “Because I’m intellectually lazy and emotionally stunted, darling— Forget it. What shall I do?”

  “Not die and not go away. What should you do?”

  “Save André,” he said without needing to think. “He’s going to be blamed for Sabine.”

  Perdita nodded.

  “Here’s what will happen if he’s arrested. He’ll be tried for murder, I imagine; perhaps Jules as well.” Perdita nodded. “We testify he’s not homicidal. Cyron and Pétiot come down with both boot heels on Jouvet. At the very least Cyron will say I’m a spy again. It’ll come down on all of us, love, and it’ll come down on Toby. Is this what you want?”

  She gave him the courtesy of not giving him a quick answer. He moved back from her and looked at her face.

  “There’s more,” he said. He had to tell her. She looked up at him apprehensively. He wondered whether all this, this form of trusting her, was one more scheme to drive her away.

  “The blackmail,” he said, and took a deep breath. “It was true. I was a spy, once.”

  He held her hand and told her: about Leo, about how he had been chosen to be Franz von Reisden’s son; about looking at his friends’ fathers’ newspapers to see their opinions and opening the back door for men like Gehazy. Her face was very still and white. She closed her eyes. “Leo was a decent man,” he said. “He believed in what he did. I didn’t. It took me years to decide that.—Dotty was in it too. In this climate I’ll bring her down with me.” Dotty and Tiggy, he thought; Tiggy who was eight years old now, like Richard, no more capable of facing such a thing than Richard. “Should I do this and have it come out? Is it the right thing to hurt so many people because I want to save one man? I want you and Toby, but should I not care what chaos I spread in your lives?”

  She kept her eyes closed. She breathed raggedly as if she would have been crying if he had not been there. It must have been minutes be-fore she spoke. “I don’t want things to come out that badly,” she said slowly. “I don’t want you dead—don’t ever say that anymore. But. . . oh, just but.”

  He nodded. “I’m sorry. I am more than you bargained for.”

  “It has nothing to do with you!” she exploded. “Not much. It’s— it’s me; France, the language, music, even Toby; sometimes I just want to run away, and it doesn’t help that you say I should; and now this. Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m sorry, I missed you so much, and here you are and I felt guilty because I had been so angry at you and now I’m doing it again.”

  She burst into tears, deep wrenching sobs. She drove her head against his shoulder as if she were banging her head against a wall. He held her, being the solid thing she needed. He realized he had reached one of the limits of his marriage. If he left her on her own, or threatened to, she would find some other anchor. “I am here,” he said to her over and over again. “I’m not going away. I’m here.”

  Here to make your life worse.

  She finished, finally, and lay limp as Toby against his arm. “People can be so hard on each other,” she said, apologizing or explaining. “I didn’t tell you about Boston. It was bad. They think they’re so right about not giving women the vote, and we know we’re right.”

  “Yes,” he said. Right is on everyone’s side. They call that war.

  “Did you think you were right?” she said. “When you did—what you did for Leo?”

  “I suppose. I didn’t have anything better,” he said. “I wanted— I don’t know, family—” that was exactly what he wanted still. “Leo was the closest thing.”

  “Gilbert’s family,” she said, “and you have to have him.”

  I have Toby, he was about to say, I have you. But he didn’t.

  “Why did you decide you couldn’t—” she couldn’t use the word “—do that for Leo anymore?” she asked.

  “Tasy,” he said.

  “Uncle Gilbert,” she said. “He was all right with Harry until you came back; I mean not all right, but— You came back. Ever since then, he does things because of you. He let you go because he knew you didn’t want to stay. He let me go with you. And now, I think, his coming here, Harry mistreated him but he didn’t leave for that; he left for you. You can’t imagine how he came to New York, Alexander, he didn’t take anything but his dog, not even his clothes. He went on a boat; you know he’s frightened of boats. You make him—” she thought of a word “—honest.”

  “We would all be happier if he could be content with Harry.”

  “No.” Her voice quavered. “We wouldn’t be happier, he might pretend but we would all know it was pretense. The only reason I stay in Paris is because I love you. There, I’m being honest. You pay attention.”

  Honest, he thought. Do I make you honest? Honesty, loyalty, choosing someone and not letting them go: That was what I wanted. Family. It was more than Toby’s hand in his
. Family was more than the closest thing to it, it was itself and only itself, and it was frightening, it was a risk like the edge of a precipice.

  “You’re right I don’t trust you,” he said before he could persuade himself she didn’t need to know this. It had been what he thought of daily since their marriage, when he thought of her, but saying it to her felt as if he were driving her away. “You want Gilbert. You’re—” he hesitated and said it “—you’re blind; you can’t see on the street. You’re ten years younger than I am, Perdita. There’s so much you don’t know.”

  “That’s all true,” she said, and the tears stood in her eyes. “I know that.”

  And you say you love me. He had been about to add something that William would have been proud of; I am vile, I am ruining your life. Fuck, darling, doesn’t that prove how wrong you are.

  “But what you say I am to Gilbert,” he said, “you are to me.”

  There was much more to say, but that was all they could say now. He told her the rest of the story instead. “You were right about the rabbit.” He told her about the Auclart uncle, the coven A with its aphrodisiac flying ointment, and the tunnels under the farmhouse. He told her about T.J. Blantire’s past and the coven ritual.

  “And she killed Mr. Blantire?” Perdita said.

  “She at least locked him in the well cage. André thinks she fed him rabbit too.”

  “She was a murderess. And I let her hold Toby,” Perdita said.

  Toby’s mother and father lay together in silence.

  “She couldn’t even lie very well.” He thought of Sabine the night before she died. I didn’t do anything wrong, she’d said, indignant, sad. Perhaps her premonition of death had been the beginnings of a sense of guilt, responsibility disguising itself as punishment. Perhaps she would never have felt anything at all, except pity for herself.

  Whether she had a moral sense or not, Jouvet should have protected her the way it had tried to protect André. Reisden had had two patients to protect. He had cared for only one of them.

  “How did she die?” he asked. “What went wrong with the guillotine?”

  “Someone took some of the bunting from the platform and stuffed it into the lever that opened the lunette. The lever jammed and the lunette didn’t open.”

  “And it was done at the last minute, because the mechanism worked when we checked it. Anyone could have murdered her,” he brooded.

  “Anyone,” Perdita agreed. “Two of General Pétiot’s soldiers were guarding the guillotine and they said they would have seen. But they were all watching André. Anyone could have ducked under the platform behind them and not been seen because of all the bunting hanging down.”

  “How do they say André did it?”

  “With tricks, like at his theatre,” Perdita said. “Or with someone helping him. Jules. Ruthie.”

  “Ruthie?”

  “Ruthie to jam the lever. Jules not to notice and to pull the guillotine rope. At least they aren’t saying you did it, but Aline won’t even read me what the newspapers are saying. Milly told me Ruthie’s landlady has asked her to move. I was going to tell her she was welcome here.—Who did kill Sabine, Alexander?”

  “I don’t know.” He thought of the Necro, gimmicked in every part. “That’s what we have to do, isn’t it, find who killed her.”

  “That won’t be easy,” Perdita said, “finding someone more believable than André. All these people are crazy.—Alexander, are you hungry? Did you have dinner?”

  He sat in the kitchen while she fixed him an omelette. He watched her strike the match and light the gas, and he held his breath and thought of matches, of gas, of all the layers of fear and distrust that made him think her risky. Everyone was risky but William. William said so. “I missed you,” she said at the stove. “Every time I cooked anything, it wasn’t for you.”

  “Thank you for taking care of me.” He followed her with his eyes. All the implications of being taken care of, of being a child, helpless, at William’s mercy. Better to keep caretaking at bay. No. William had damaged him in ways he hadn’t even considered.

  She had kept the newspapers. He scanned the front pages while she cooked. The German situation in Morocco was bad and getting worse. Lloyd George, the British prime minister, had unexpectedly sent a fiercely warmongering warning to Germany. Kinderlin-Waechter, the moderate German negotiator, wasn’t being backed by his government and was threatening to resign. French and Russian government officials were returning to their capitals in the middle of what should have been summer vacation. Joseph Caillaux, the French peacemaker, wasn’t getting any help from his government. And even Maurice Cyron was adding his voice to the chorus. In Calais he had talked to a political gathering: I, a poor actor of soldiers’ roles, an old man, I will gladly put on the uniform of a simple private again.

  Who killed Sabine?

  “We’re at war. So far it’s a polite little war, off in Morocco, but war is its own motive. A soldier doesn’t need an excuse for killing; he does it for his country.”

  She put the omelette in front of him and sat down beside him. “Will there be a war here?”

  “If there is, you and Toby are going to America. Promise me. With Gilbert. I’ll ask Gilbert for help on that.”

  He ate and washed the plate, looking at the drinkable water splashing into the sink.

  If there was a war, and it was a short one, the Germans would win it.

  They went into Toby’s room. Reisden picked his sleeping boy up and held Toby’s warm sweaty weight against his chest. Toby stirred, then woke abruptly and reared back to look at his father. “Yes, it’s Papa,” Reisden murmured. Toby smiled at him. “Da da da da da!” “Yes,” said Reisden, “and I love you.” Let there not be a war, he thought. Let there not be a war.

  It was late and hot. They drew back the curtains of the French windows and let in the trace of evening breeze. Toby and he talked for a few moments; then the cooler air made Toby yawn and he settled back to sleep on Reisden’s shoulder. Reisden closed his eyes and felt the breeze on his face. Eating had exhausted him. He held Toby on his shoulder, with his son’s small warm breath dampening his cheek, listening to the sounds of the Paris night traffic from the boulevard St.-Germain, feeling the fresh breeze.

  He must decide what to do; must call Ruthie. Tonight? Wait for tomorrow.

  Who killed Sabine?

  Montfort. Cyron would have been very careful to control who saw it, for how long. Ideally Françoise Auclart should have been the one to show it to Blantire, lead him down to the third cellar, give him a tantalizing glimpse of Cyron’s huge project, which he could report back to Izvolsky or the Germans.

  But it was Sabine who had taken Blantire there.

  Sabine had been risky and Cyron hadn’t known it until she’d married André. Sabine had been a witch, who knew other witches, and witches meet underground, witches want water from the Holy Well. Sabine would have learned Cyron’s secret and wouldn’t have been able to keep it to herself. Sabine had been sleeping with a spy.

  Sabine knew that there was no fortress on the Montfort road, and had let a spy know it.

  Cyron had been in the Grand’Place, with Sabine, by the guillotine, just before they both had climbed the stairs. He would have known how to move when everyone’s attention had been distracted by André. It would have taken only a moment to jam cloth into the machine.

  Motive, means, and opportunity.

  Cyron?

  Reisden thought about Cyron dancing with Sabine at André’s birthday party; Cyron coaching Sabine in the mad scene; Cyron reassuring Sabine she wasn’t going to die. Sabine turning to Cyron just before she put her head under the blade, holding his hand, smiling up at him, saying something to him.

  Cyron, the good soldier, the heroic citizen of France.

  I can’t suspect Cyron, he thought. No. Let him not have done it; let me not have to say so— Because what would it mean? It would mean, he thought with sudden icy clarity like a cold shower, that Cyron
couldn’t possibly risk André being innocent.

  The telephone rang. “Will you?” he said. “Give me Toby.” She went down the hall to pick up the phone in his office.

  “Ruthie?” she said, and looked back in his direction helplessly. He took the phone and listened.

  “Have you heard anything?” he heard Ruthie saying. “Is André alive, is your husband alive? My brother?”

  Reisden listened silently to Ruthie’s flood of words. Roselle, the old housekeeper at the château, had been to see Cyron. Ghosts, floating candles— Reisden put his palm over the transmitter. “Tell her you’ll telephone her back,” he said.

  Perdita talked to Ruthie and hung up the phone. “Why couldn’t we tell her?”

  “Because Cyron killed Sabine,” he said.

  “No, he couldn’t have! He cried for Sabine,” Perdita said. “You should have heard him cry for her.”

  “He’s an actor. I’ll put Toby down.” She followed him into Toby’s room. He laid his baby gently in the crib. Toby stirred and muttered; they stood without speaking until he settled down.

  Reisden took Perdita’s arm and they both moved away from Toby, to the door of the room. “He was by the guillotine and could jam the mechanism. Then André and Jules disappeared, which was convenient. But now they’re alive and Cyron knows it—I have to go to Montfort.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No, stay here with Toby. We can’t take him. I don’t have proof,” he thought aloud. “None. And I won’t get any.”

  “What will happen?” she asked.

  This was one of the things she didn’t know. He did. Leo would have had André and Jules shot trying to escape arrest.

  How long did André and Jules have? Until tomorrow morning maybe. At least they weren’t at Montfort and whoever was hunting André would look at Montfort first.

  He stood in the door of his son’s nursery with Perdita next to him. Men fight wars for their sons, for the yellow-painted nursery crib and the teddy bear and the familiar sounds from the street. For the chance to do one’s work. For one’s friends; for one’s country. “I don’t blame Cyron,” he said softly. “He doesn’t want France invaded. He’s a soldier.— Pétiot will provide Cyron an ironclad alibi for every moment of that afternoon. I will be done for if I accuse him. But if I make the real secret of Montfort public,” he said, “the Germans will know there’s nothing to stop them on the Arras road.”

 

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