“I trust you’ll believe I’d rather pass an hour with you than with a two-headed piglet,” Aristide said, remembering a previous affair that had led him to the bizarre collection of scientific oddities at the Veterinary School outside Paris, and the acquaintance of an eccentric and innovative doctor who was rumored to be mad. “I called on you because I find you attractive, or at least you would be if you had some decent clothes and someone to dress your hair; and because your wits are sharp, for that’s plain to see after five minutes’ conversation with you; and because I find you agreeable, despite your tongue that’s as sharp as your wits.”
“I ought to tell you now,” she said dryly, “that I’m nearly penniless, nearly friendless, and nearly thirty.”
“So am I,” said Aristide. “Though in truth I’m far nearer forty than thirty. Shall we compare afflictions?”
Slowly she smiled again, with a soft chuckle.
“I thought to stroll in the gardens,” he continued, “but there’s a chill mist in the air. Would you care to take coffee with me, or a glass of wine?”
She said little until they had arrived at a nearby tavern and taken a table. The common room was ill-lit and close, receding into gloom beneath a low, vaulted stone ceiling, but warm from a generous fire, with a shaggy dog and cat asleep at the hearth.
“To each man his own taste,” Rosalie said after Aristide had ordered coffee for them both. He guessed she was not referring to their order. “If you insist on dogging my footsteps, then I suppose I had better give in with a good grace. At least tell me your name.”
“Ravel.”
“I know that. Haven’t you another?”
“Aristide Ravel.”
“Aristide?” she echoed him, amused. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those daft ultrapatriots who renamed themselves after classical republicans. Aristides was a famous lawgiver of Athens, wasn’t he?”
“A lawgiver and general,” he said as their drink arrived.
“But why not choose a truly mellifluous name like Anaxagoras, for example?” She daintily sipped at her coffee. “No, that’s already taken. Poor old Chaumette. All that earnest patriotism, and still he got sent to the chopper. Or what about Cincinnatus—that’s a lovely one. And of course there’s always Brutus.”
Aristide suppressed a smile. “I understand that I was christened Aristide at my mother’s request.”
“Your mother must have been quite the scholar.”
“It’s a saint’s name,” he told her, enjoying the bafflement that for an instant flickered in her face. “Some obscure Greek of antiquity. Did you not know?”
Her shapely mouth twitched into a smile. “You’re looking more respectable today than when I interrupted you in the street. Did you learn anything more about this Aubry?”
“I told you, I shouldn’t be talking about it at present.”
“That’s a pity. That was a very convincing costume, you know. Every inch the seedy errand boy. But when you’re Aristide Ravel and not some disreputable character skulking in the shadows, do you always look like a crow that’s fallen into an inkwell?”
“I confess it,” he said, refusing to be baited. The gray tabby cat on the hearth stretched itself to its feet with an inquisitive mew and padded over to them. Rosalie leaned down to stroke it, still glancing quizzically at Aristide.
“Because you appear sober and official in black? Hasn’t anyone ever told you that you look just the way people think a police spy ought to look?”
“First of all, I am not a spy—”
“I thought you said you weren’t an inspector.”
“I’m not. Once I thought I wanted to join the police and work my way up to commissaire; but now you couldn’t pay me enough to do Brasseur’s work day in and day out, inspecting tradesmen’s scales and issuing peddlers’ licenses. Sending for the knacker to haul away dead cart horses. Saints preserve me.”
“Well, ‘police agent,’ then, if you insist. Though most people would say that’s just a fancy word for a spy. Haven’t you anything else to wear?”
“No.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. Aside from one riding costume, which doesn’t get much use here in Paris.”
“You must get paid well enough for whatever it is exactly that you do,” said Rosalie. “Can’t you afford a few other suits of clothes?”
“I have two other suits, one of which is a dress suit, and four waistcoats. They’re all black. I find it simplifies matters.”
“One would think you were in perpetual mourning for something or other.”
He opened his mouth for a sharp retort, but thought better of it and took a hasty swallow of his coffee. She looked at him, tilting an eyebrow almost imperceptibly.
“I think I’ve brought up a sore subject.”
“Forgive me.” He summoned a faint smile. “I expect you know, if you’ve lived for some time in a cheap boardinghouse, that this is the customary dress of any educated man who’s down on his luck and can afford no more than one suit of clothes; and I’ve been a member of that fraternity more often than once.”
“Well, isn’t that exactly the usual sort of man, your unemployed lawyer or scribbler, who isn’t above accepting a few livres from the police to keep his eyes and ears open?” She gazed at him solemnly for a moment, then pushed the candle on their table toward him and peered at him, studying him, through the twilit gloom. “I’m teasing you, you know. Don’t you ever smile?”
“Now and then.”
“I declare you’re as solemn as Robespierre. They say he never smiled, either.”
“They’re mistaken. And I smile when I find the occasion appropriate, just as I wear something other than a plain black suit when the occasion is appropriate.”
She tilted her head, a little frown puckering her smooth forehead. “You do have a way of completely flattening people. You simply give them that grave stare of yours, and a very, very dry rejoinder, and one feels as if one has committed some unforgivable blunder.”
The corners of his mouth twitched and she pounced. “There, you’re smiling, Robespierre. Don’t worry—I won’t tell anyone.”
“Please,” Aristide said sharply, “please don’t call me that.”
“Robespierre?” she repeated, puzzled. “Why not?”
“My friend Mathieu used to call me ‘Robespierre’ sometimes, for the same reason as you did … because I don’t often smile. He’d known Robespierre, a little, before the rift sprang up between the factions, and he claimed I was quite like him. It made us laugh.”
“So why—oh. I see. This Mathieu was your friend who was—who died.”
He nodded.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t lose anyone I loved to the guillotine, myself. They left me quickly enough of their own volition,” she added unexpectedly, her voice hard. Then she reddened, as if she had said too much.
“Another coffee?” he said.
“Thank you, no. I—I should be going.”
“Do you think you’re the only soul in Paris who’s suffered an unhappy love affair?”
“What?”
“Forgive me, but it’s not hard to guess why you’re bitter, and why you won’t trust a man who tells you he finds you attractive.”
“You are an accomplished student of human nature,” she said at last.
“I simply observe, and try to put myself in another’s place. If I’d been hurt by someone who meant the world to me, I’d cease trusting others, too.”
“Knowing that love has wounded everyone else at one time or another doesn’t ease the pain.”
“Sometimes telling your sorrows to someone else does.”
“It’s nothing you’ve not heard before.”
“But it hurt you very much, or you’d not take such pains to pretend it was a trivial matter.”
“I was in love,” she said rapidly, “I thought no two people could love each other as we did; and one day not long ago he left me, without a word. Without any warning. One da
y he simply wasn’t there. Later he sent me a letter, with no address on it, telling me he loved me, but he could never see me again, and that I shouldn’t try to find him. Just like that.” She gazed across the table at Aristide, unsmiling, challenging him. “So have you a woeful story of your own to compare?”
“I?”
He remembered his mother lying where she had fallen, his father standing over her weeping.
“No, not of my own.”
“It doesn’t hurt any less for talking about it to a prying stranger,” she said abruptly, and stalked away. Aristide absently stroked the tabby cat as it wound itself about his ankles, and reflected that Rosalie seemed in a great hurry for someone who led a drab and uneventful life.
CHAPTER 14
François had agreed to meet him late that afternoon, before going on to join Brelot at his cabaret. Aristide found him nursing a glass in the back of a dim, smoky tavern on Rue Mouffetard.
“So,” said François, drinking down the last of his beer and beaming at him through the haze of stale tobacco fumes, “would you like to know how I managed at the Hôtel de Montereau?”
Aristide waved away the approaching barmaid and slid onto a bench opposite him. “Already? You do have a way with maidservants, don’t you.”
“Well, the younger housemaid, Sophie, the plump blue-eyed one, she’s a nice warm armful—”
“I told you to flirt with the maids, not sleep with them!”
François grinned. “Eh, what’s the difference? Little slut practically dragged me into the bed. Anyway, she likes to talk inbetweentimes.” He drew a few bits of dirty paper from a pocket and signaled the barmaid back. “Two more glasses of beer, love. My friend’s paying. So, Montereau has three estates, one in the Limousin, one in Brittany, and one somewhere near Tarbes. The boy Théodore was born in May 1790, while Montereau was in Russia and madame was taking the sea air with her convalescent daughter at the smallest property, the one in Brittany. Sophie says it’s one of those plaster-and-beam manor houses that isn’t much more than a country cottage. Rustic simplicity and all that; only two old servants who live there and keep the place going. What the devil d’you want to know all this for?”
“Never mind.” Aristide permitted himself a brief smile at the confirmation of his guesses. “What about the lady’s maid?”
“Oh, Sophie was fluent on that subject,” François said with a chuckle. “Seems madame was ill-tempered during her pregnancy. It does that to some women, I gather. She kept her own maid, but she dismissed not one, but three maids of her daughter’s during a space of four months.”
“Three? Dear me.”
“Dismissed one who’d been with the girl a year with some feeble excuse, hired another, claimed she was unsatisfactory, and sacked her after a month. And the same with the third, who got the sack because madame said she couldn’t sew a straight seam. The whole household was shaking in its boots, wondering who’d go next. Then the girl fell ill and madame said a maid wasn’t necessary until she recovered.”
“What about Madame Montereau’s own maid?”
“One of those devoted old gorgons, I understand. Been with her since she was a child and would have fought like a she-wolf to protect her. When the mother died, she became Célie’s maid and stayed on till two years ago, when she retired to the country to keep house for her brother.”
Aristide nodded. Everything, thus far, confirmed his guesses about Célie Montereau’s mysterious illness. “And Saint-Ange?”
“The black-sheep relative?” François said. “Well, he was given to inviting himself to the house more often than he was welcome.”
“As a house guest, you mean?”
“Weeks on end, Sophie said. Took all the advantage he could of Montereau’s hospitality. But an aristo like Montereau can’t just show family the door, even distant cousins; it would cause talk. Oh, Sophie also mentioned,” he added with a leer, “that Saint-Ange was a stallion in bed.”
“Sleeping with the servants?” Aristide echoed him, raising an eyebrow. “How vulgar of him.”
“Well, you can see that Montereau would be a target for a sponger; he’s rich, and he has pretty servant girls and a damn fine cook. Anyhow, that was sometime in ’eighty-eight and ’eighty-nine, when everything was in an uproar in Paris. Then suddenly, in the autumn of ’eighty-nine, Saint-Ange announces he’s going to buy a sugar plantation and take up farming, and is off on the first boat to Saint-Domingue, and that’s the last the family hears of him. What does all this rubbish have to do with the price of tea in China?”
“That’s none of your affair.” Aristide paused, grimacing and waving away the dense smoke that had drifted toward them from a neighbor’s pipe. “In fact, I think you ought now to forget everything you’ve learned. Did you get anything else out of the porter at Aubry’s house?”
“Nothing much. Aubry doesn’t get many callers. Generally he doesn’t entertain much, being a bachelor, and a clean-living lad like Brelot said; he goes out for his fun. Deschamps does remember a street boy coming to the house and asking for Aubry, a fortnight ago, but Aubry had already gone out, all in a great hurry. When Deschamps said he didn’t know where Aubry was, the boy cleared out without leaving a message. He remembered it because it was just an hour, or a bit more, after some other messenger boy had left a letter for Aubry.”
“A letter? From the post?”
“No, delivered by hand. It was décadi, so there was no post that day.”
“Décadi?” Aristide said sharply. François nodded. “The tenth, then. And Aubry picked up this letter? You mean Aubry received a letter on the tenth, went upstairs and presumably read it, and then rushed out shortly afterward, before the second errand boy arrived?”
“Looks that way,” François agreed. “I see what you’re getting at—you think he rushed out because of something in the letter.”
“Do your best to pump Brelot some more tonight. I want to know exactly what day Aubry ran out in such haste; and if it was also the day that he didn’t return until very late. See if you can pin him down to a date. He ought to remember what happened on a décadi more readily than he’d remember a regular workday.” He reached in a pocket for a crumpled note. “Here’s five livres to tide you over. I haven’t any coin at the moment,” he added when François looked dubiously at the paper. “This will have to do. Although you seem to have enjoyed yourself well enough without running up many expenses; I suppose Sophie fed you, too?”
François winked. “The Montereaus won’t miss those chickens. Will you be at the cabaret tonight, then?”
“You can manage by yourself. I need to see Brasseur.”
#
As he expected, Aristide found Brasseur in his office at Rue Traversine, laboriously composing a report.
“Yes,” he told him as he settled himself in the armchair, “you were absolutely right about the Montereaus’ little secret. François has just told me that the late Madame Montereau had a fiercely devoted maid of her own, but dismissed her daughter’s maid and engaged two others in quick succession during her own alleged pregnancy.”
“Maid?” Brasseur echoed him, bewildered.
“A lady’s personal maid is the person most likely to know her mistress’s most intimate secrets … such as the times of her monthly courses … or the lack of them … or their persistence when they ought not to be present. And to know the shape of a woman beneath her chemise.”
“Ha.”
“But a ‘devoted old gorgon,’ as François put it, is likely to protect her mistress, and her mistress’s secrets, with her last breath. And Théodore happened to be born not in Paris, but at the smallest and most remote of the family holdings. It’s obvious, if you think about it. Toward the end of Célie’s ‘illness,’ her mother—allegedly pregnant—whisks her away, well muffled in shawls, to recover in the healthful country air.”
“And during the country holiday,” said Brasseur, nodding, “madame gives birth to the boy, or so everyone is led to think,
with the collusion of the faithful maid. But instead it’s the ‘convalescing’ daughter who produces the kid, in deep secrecy, and they go home with the new heir, and it’s all worked out to everyone’s satisfaction and everything’s covered up nicely … until Saint-Ange turns up again. You do think he was the father?”
“It adds up. François reports that he was a frequent, though unpopular, house guest at the Hôtel de Montereau in 1789. Sometime during the summer Saint-Ange seduces Célie, who is straight out of the convent and making sheep’s eyes at her father’s handsome secretary, who barely notices her. Saint-Ange keeps on amusing himself with Célie right under her father’s roof until the poor child discovers she’s pregnant … September or October, I suppose, if Théodore was born the next May… .”
“And as soon as she tells him she thinks she’s in trouble,” Brasseur said, glancing at the notes in his dossier, “the swine conveniently disappears and makes tracks for Saint-Domingue.”
“Yes. Whether or not he ever went to the West Indies is another matter, but you can be sure he wouldn’t have shown his face in that house again.” Aristide sighed. “Somewhere in Brittany, I’ve no doubt, lives a rustic midwife, who was once paid very well, six years ago, to attend the lying-in of a young girl whose name she never knew. And somewhere else is a closemouthed old woman guarding a family’s secrets. I expect it happens more often than we’d like to think. So,” he added, “imagine Saint-Ange threatening to tell the world that Montereau’s beloved son and heir is, in fact, his bastard grandson by way of his unmarried daughter.”
“How do you suppose Saint-Ange learned of it?”
“All he had to do was look at young Théodore,” Aristide began, and stopped in mid-sentence. “Théodore. I am a complete fool. The name means ‘God’s gift.’ A welcome gift indeed, to a couple who’d given up hope of more children.”
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