“That was when the truth came out, publicly, about what Marsillac had been doing with her--in my own house, I may add!--and the girl immediately took the veil. It was the only thing she could do, after such a disgrace. So I daresay Aubry’s illusions about her were rudely shattered.”
Sometimes they spin pretty illusions, François had said, using nearly the same words, and when the illusion shatters, they become capable of anything.
“Madame, what was the name of the girl--the girl whom Marsillac debauched?”
“Vaudray,” she said, with a soft sigh. “Juliette de Vaudray.”
You treacherous bitch, the next time I’ll kill you.
She had known him since they were almost children, known his character intimately. Aubry had killed a man already, because of what he had seen as her weakness; she had known he was capable of killing, and from a duel incited in brokenhearted rage it was only a step to half-crazed, passionate murder . . . but her own rancor and misery had blinded her, for a fatal instant, to the consequences of her own spite.
Madame de Laroque sighed, breaking into Aristide’s thoughts. “A charming boy, as I said. But prone to fly into a passion when provoked. Though it’s all forgotten now.” The cat woke and yawned, gaping a wide pink mouth. “People forget so fast,” the old lady added, absently scratching the cat’s head. “Imagine what I thought when I came to live here with Honoré and Josèphe, and saw young Aubry sitting cool as you please in Honoré’s study! Of course Honoré dismissed him when I--”
She straightened and pushed the cat from her lap as one hand gripped the arm of her chair. “Young man, are you about to tell me that Philippe Aubry was the man with whom Célie was in love?”
“Did Monsieur Montereau not tell you?”
“Bah, Honoré never tells me anything. He thinks I’m too old and frail. But yes . . . yes, it’s the likeliest thing in the world. Young Aubry was the sort of high-minded ninny she’d have adored . . . and I daresay he was ready to fall in love with another pretty, innocent young creature who wouldn’t disappoint him this time.” She peered up at him, her old eyes bright. “Was it the same sorry tale, then? Was Célie not as pure as she seemed?”
Aristide shook his head. “I fear not.”
“And so he learned of it, and killed the man who had defiled her . . . and this time killed her, too?”
As simple as that, he thought, ten minutes later, as he hurried back to the courtyard and the waiting fiacre.
And the bitter, unhappy woman who once had been Juliette de Vaudray, who discovered too late what she had done--she had known Aubry, known his guilt, known his character; and when it had become apparent that, through her own actions, Aubry would escape the nets of justice, she had chosen to punish him in her own unique fashion. A punishment that was, for her, all at once revenge, atonement, and deliverance.
Aristide glanced at his watch. It was nearly two o’clock.
CHAPTER 27
An empty cart waited in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice, the single horse standing patiently, flicking away flies with its tail. Sanson’s assistant Desmorets leaned against the cart, arms folded, head lowered, staring at his feet. Aristide hurried past him to the door at the bottom of the steps.
He encountered Sanson near the prison clerk’s office. The executioner turned at the sound of his footsteps.
“Good day,” Aristide said, wincing at the banality of the words as soon as they had left his lips. Sanson nodded. Like Aristide, he wore only black, save for his cravat. Aristide could not help thinking it suited him, though he looked taut and wretched; or perhaps “haunted” was a better word. It was rumored that executioners found it especially distressing to put a woman to death.
“They tell me you’ve been visiting her,” Sanson said, his voice hoarse, scarcely above a whisper. “Are you going to see her?”
“I’ve already been; I’m returning.”
“How is she?”
“Very calm, the last I saw.” He met Sanson’s eyes for the first time and was startled at the torment he saw in the young man’s pale face, in the bluish shadows beneath his eyes that spoke of disquiet and sleepless nights.
“Sanson . . . this woman--I’ve often spoken with her. She’s not afraid. She’s sick of life; I can’t say I understand her despair, but I do know that she wants death, that she welcomes it.”
“Should that cheer me?” he said. “Make the job easier?”
“No, of course not. Forgive me.” Aristide stole another glance at his watch. Half an hour; all he needed, he thought.
#
“You’re late,” Rosalie said dryly as Aristide entered her cell. “I was beginning to think you’d lost your nerve again.”
She had rouged her cheeks and lips, and smudged a little lampblack about her eyes until they shone large, dark, and lustrous. Her long hair fell about her shoulders. She was wearing shirt and breeches and gleaming riding boots, with unbuttoned waistcoat and collar hanging open.
Aristide stared at her a moment. “Forgive me, but do you intend to wear those clothes? To exhibit yourself in male costume?”
“The great advantage of being condemned to death,” she said calmly, “is that you’re free to do anything you wish. What more can they do to me?”
“They’ll call you brazen, a whore, a lesbian. Are you sure you want that?”
“I should like to die in the clothes in which I had my revenge.”
Aristide turned. “Gilbert, do you think we might have a half hour alone together, in privacy?”
“I’ll be at the end of the corridor,” Gilbert said, and stumped away. “My hearing’s not so good, you know.”
“Rosalie . . .” Aristide began, when Gilbert had vanished into the gloom.
“Thank you for returning.”
“I talked to Madame de Laroque just now,” he said after a moment’s silence. “She told me all about you--or enough to allow me to reason out the rest.”
She cast him a quick sharp glance.
“It was you whom René Marsillac de Saint-Roch ruined, and whom Aubry loved; for whose honor he fought Marsillac and killed him in 1785, and ruined his own career and future, at least until the Revolution unexpectedly provided him with new prospects. Madame de Laroque told me that once Aubry had fled the country, he declared, in a letter he sent to Marsillac’s family, and yours, and all the news journals that would print it, that he had killed Marsillac for your sake but that you had proved to be a corrupt, wanton, deceitful whore, and that he wouldn’t have you for all the wealth of the Indies.” He paused. An ugly crimson blush crept into Rosalie’s cheeks.
“I don’t suppose it made any difference to Aubry,” Aristide added, “that you hadn’t been a willing victim of seduction, that Marsillac had raped you as surely as if he’d held a pistol to your head. To somebody like Aubry, a woman should have died rather than give up her ‘honor.’ ” He thrust cold hands in his pockets and paced the length of the cell, turning to face Rosalie once more.
“You disguised yourself in coat and breeches and murdered Célie because you were bitterly jealous of her, and Saint-Ange died because he was a witness to your crime.”
“Yes.”
“No,” Aristide said.
“That’s the truth!”
“No, it’s not.”
“The porter recognized me.”
“Yes; he identified you as the young man he saw rushing up the stairs toward Saint-Ange’s apartment. He was right, of course. But the young man came twice; let’s not forget that.” He gestured to a chair. “Why don’t you sit down? This may take a little while.”
She did not sit down, but leaned against the back of the chair, her eyes never leaving him as he paced back and forth.
“It was such a simple affair, really,” he said. “A simple, obvious crime of passion, a trail easy to follow. A matter of people behaving exactly as anyone might have predicted they would. It should have been resolved within the fortnight. Until you muddied the trail.” He paused, wai
ting for her to insist once again that she had committed the crime herself, but she said nothing.
“Aubry sent you that letter,” he continued. “Because he hated you for, as he thought, betraying him not once but twice. First with Marsillac--breaking his heart and making a fool of him by becoming Marsillac’s whore--no matter that Marsillac had terrorized rather than seduced you into submitting--and ruining his future by driving him into fighting that rash duel.”
Rosalie nodded. “To Philippe, nothing was ever his fault.”
“And then you betrayed him, or so he decided, by giving him up to the authorities in ’ninety-three, this time putting his very life in danger. But why did you keep his letter? If a former lover had sent such a letter to me, I’d have burned it, praying that the flames would scorch his vitals to cinders.”
“To remind myself how much I despised him,” she said with the faintest of smiles.
Aristide nodded. “Yes, I suppose you might. Then, I think, not so long afterward, Célie asked you for help. She didn’t dare ask anyone who might have revealed her secret to her father. She confessed to you that she was in trouble, that Saint-Ange was extorting money from her, and why, and where she went to pay him. And she told you, whether intentionally or inadvertently I don’t know, that Aubry was her secret fiancé. I don’t suppose she had the faintest idea who you were, or that you and Aubry shared a past.
“Now you possessed Célie’s secret, that she had lost her virtue years before to a seducer, and what was more, had had a child by him and--with her mother’s connivance--had successfully deceived the world as to the child’s true identity.”
Rosalie drew a quick breath. “How--”
“I’ve known that for some time. One only had to look at Saint-Ange to see the resemblance.”
“She was terrified it would come out . . . the scandal would have ruined her whole family.”
“You knew Célie’s secret now,” he continued, “and all you could think of was the satisfaction it would bring you to fling it in Aubry’s face. In that heartless letter of his, he laid extraordinary stress upon the innocence and virtue of the girl he intended to marry. How better to hurt him than to tell him he was a colossal fool, that his precious, perfect Célie had been deceived and traduced just as you had been, was no more a virgin than you had been? So on the tenth of Brumaire, you wrote to him--anonymously, I suppose--and told him the truth about Célie, and that Saint-Ange was the man who had had her and who was extorting money from her to keep her secret safe--what better proof than that? ‘Go to Saint-Ange, on Rue du Hasard, and ask him about it yourself,’ you probably said. And then you found an errand boy in the street and sent the letter off to Aubry, enjoying your revenge.
“But I don’t think you savored it for long. It must have occurred to you rather quickly, once the first flush of triumph had faded, that Aubry was not one to closet himself away and brood over the world’s villainy. You remembered that the moment he learned Marsillac had had you, he flew off in a blind rage to challenge him. And suddenly you feared what he might do. But it would never do to go and warn Célie against him, for then it might all come out again, the sordid old tale, who you were, and what you had just done. Better to try to prevent Aubry from doing anything rash. You sent another street boy to his house to intercept him, but he had already left.”
He paused for breath. She watched him, expressionless.
“There was only one place where he could be. He’d gone to confront Saint-Ange, of course, and offer him challenge, just as he had confronted Marsillac. You decided to follow him, in disguise, and stop him, or warn Saint-Ange, whatever was necessary. You hurried to Rue du Cocq and threw on one of the men’s suits you kept hidden there, and a hat to shadow your face. Then you sped to Rue du Hasard and ran into the house, past the porter, up the stairs to Saint-Ange’s apartment, but they were already dead.
“I expect Aubry went merely to threaten Saint-Ange and challenge him to a duel; but by great ill luck Célie herself was there, paying Saint-Ange, and in his rage and misery Aubry simply snapped. He was carrying a loaded pistol, and in his delirium of fury he killed her. Perhaps he almost imagined that he was killing you, whom he believed to be the source of all his past misery and hardship, rather than Célie. Then--well, shooting Saint-Ange was no more than disposing of a bit of filth. And twenty minutes later, you arrived, and found you were too late.”
Aristide paused and gazed at Rosalie. She said nothing.
“It all made sense,” he added quietly, “as soon as I wondered if the young man whom the porter saw had, in fact, been two different people. The light was failing, and he’d had some brandy, and Aubry is not much taller than you are. Two slim, dark-haired young men wearing dark coats look much alike if you only get a glimpse of them, and you’re not paying them much attention.”
“You have no proof that I was not the one who killed them.”
“No. Except for your own nature.”
“My nature?” she echoed him with a wry smile.
“You hate men for how they’ve used you--but you couldn’t have murdered Célie. She’d been a victim, as you once were, of a callous libertine. You must have seen yourself in her as soon as she confided in you. You might have been bitterly resentful of her, but you could never have made her your victim. After all,” he added, “you began to throw suspicion on yourself as soon as we detained Hélène Villemain, whom you didn’t even know, but who was as innocent as any newborn kitten. You couldn’t bear the thought of a blameless woman being wrongly accused of Célie’s murder, and took steps to ensure her release. You sent those rather amateurish anonymous letters to Commissaire Brasseur yourself. They were sent from the district post office in the same section as Rue du Cocq.”
“And if Philippe were guilty and not I, why would I allow myself to be executed for his crime?”
Aristide paused for an instant. “Of course I wondered about that. At first I supposed that if you wanted to see Aubry suffer as much as he had made you suffer, years ago, with his moral arrogance and his self-conscious rectitude and his intolerance and priggishness, you would be delighted to see him condemned and executed for what he had done. And you did keep trying to steer my suspicions toward him, because you knew perfectly well he was guilty. You did a masterful job of it--not giving me too much information, not enough to draw attention to yourself; just enough to set us on the trail.
“But as I grew to know Aubry a little, you see, it occurred to me that because of those very qualities, that lofty rectitude of his, he might torment and punish himself far more cruelly than any court ever could. The guilt of having murdered the girl he loved, and the hideous chagrin of discovering his precious moral integrity was a sham . . . I think it might be worse for him to live with that than to die for it.”
Rosalie nodded. “You’ve seen through him quite well.”
“And the one thing worse even than that would be to see someone else, some innocent person, suffer for his crime, and yet to lack the courage to come forward and confess. Because he’s a physical coward, you know. Rushing out and fighting a duel in the heat of passion is one thing; facing the scaffold is quite another. His terror of death, and of the shame of public execution, is so great that I believe he would let you die in his stead, thinking that you’re sacrificing yourself for love of him, and then suffer the torments of Hell for the rest of his life because of it. And that,” Aristide concluded, “that is exactly what you want.”
She looked up at him calmly.
“You may believe that if you wish.”
“I believe it because I know that you were already indifferent to your own life before this whole business began. And I believe it because I can think of no other plausible reason why you would confess to murdering Célie, and yet forbid me to reveal that you were the hotel murderess; why you would destroy all the evidence at Rue du Cocq except that which would condemn you for Célie’s murder. Because for your revenge to be absolute, Aubry must believe you are a lily-white innocent u
nder the law, guiltless of any crime.”
Rosalie smiled.
“This is all very interesting . . . but if it had happened that way, why would I not have simply declared to the police, or to a judge, straightaway, ‘I told Philippe Aubry the ugly truth about Célie and Saint-Ange, which would have enraged him, made him angry enough to kill’?”
“For two reasons I can imagine . . . One, because even your testimony might not have convinced a judge and jury. You didn’t actually see him commit the murders. No one saw him, and the porter would always be ready to swear that it was not Aubry he’d seen. All the evidence was circumstantial; and most judges are being more cautious since Lesurques was executed. Even with the truth laid bare, there might not have been enough evidence to convict Aubry. He might still have escaped punishment.”
“And the second reason?”
Aristide ceased his pacing and dropped into the nearest chair, head bent and hands clenched between his knees.
“You couldn’t bear to confess the truth, to confess your part in it,” he said, staring down at the floor. “You couldn’t bear that everyone would know your actions had driven him to murdering Célie, and then Sidonie Beaumontel. If you’d told the truth, every particle of it, from writing that letter to the moment you found them dead, you couldn’t have borne that shame, knowing what Célie’s family would have thought of you, what everyone would have thought of you. I think . . . I think you’d rather die to absolve yourself of their deaths, though you never touched them, than live a lifetime--or even a week--with the guilt.”
“Do you think that’s so very compelling a motive?” Rosalie said.
“Oh, yes.” He glanced up at her for a moment and swiftly looked away again. “I know exactly what sort of torment is devouring you. Because I live with that guilt, and know how bitter it is.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You see . . . my mother died, and my father became a murderer, and died on the scaffold, because of me.”
“You!”
“I was only nine. It was childish chatter. I had no idea what it implied, that Monsieur Godeau had been visiting frequently while my father was away, and that once I’d seen him in the house, half dressed, early in the morning. So I babbled it all out to my father when he came home from one of his journeys. He deduced the rest, and lay in wait for them, and then he killed them. But it was I who killed them, really, and him, too. . . .”
GAME OF PATIENCE (Aristide Ravel French Revolution Mysteries) Page 28