He thrust the chair aside and returned to his pacing, still not daring to meet her gaze. “I’ve never told that to a soul. I’ve lived alone with that guilt for almost thirty years. You try to reason your way out of blame, to convince yourself that you acted innocently, that it might have come about no matter what, that committing murder was someone else’s choice, not yours; but you can never free yourself of that burden. I live every day haunted by the terror that someone, somehow, will learn it was my fault. And I think you must believe yourself as guilty of Célie’s death, and Citizeness Beaumontel’s death, as I believe myself guilty of the death of my parents.”
Rosalie stared at him. At last she sat down in the chair he had pushed aside, with a long sigh.
“Are you now going to tell all this to the prosecutor and the president?”
“No.”
“Thank you.”
“I think it was Montaigne who wrote, ‘Some defeats are more triumphant than victories.’ Why should I deny you what you wish?”
“You’re right,” she said. “If I’d never unleashed my spite and told Philippe what I knew about her, he would never have done what he did, and that other woman would still be alive, too . . . I’m as guilty of Célie’s death as if I’d pulled the trigger myself. I would have killed myself right there in Saint-Ange’s apartment, I was so sick with shame . . . or given myself up for the hotel murders and let them guillotine me . . . if only I hadn’t wanted, more than anything else, to see Philippe punished for what he did. But instead he managed to evade justice, so I had to do it, somehow . . .”
He turned to her, in time to see the first tears glimmering in her eyes. She squeezed her eyelids shut, to no avail. A great painful sob escaped from her and she pressed the back of her hand against her mouth.
He touched her shoulder. “Weep if you want . . . There’s no one to hear you, not even Gilbert.”
She stumbled toward him and clutched unseeing at his shoulders, her slender body shuddering with sobs.
“I thought revenge would bring me happiness . . . I wanted to make them all as wretched as they’d made me, I wanted to ruin them and take away their lives as they ruined me and took away the life I should have had. And I thought that when I tasted revenge, I’d be happy at last, because I’d won. But I’m not . . . I was happy for a moment, and then it meant nothing; then I was empty, and purposeless, like a broken pitcher, and there is nothing any more in this world that I want, and nothing I can feel but a black cloud that surrounds me and chokes me. . . . Oh God, I want to die and find peace, and even an hour is too far off. . . .”
She buried her face in the folds of his coat. He held her tightly, saying nothing, smoothing her hair. Gradually her sobs abated and for a long while she huddled against his shoulder. He felt her body’s warmth through his shirt, and the beating of her heart.
Doors opened and closed a long way off, the creaking and thudding growing louder. Rosalie stepped away from him and sat at her small table to repair the ravages her tears had made to her powder and rouge. Calm once more, she rose and pulled on her coat, brushing away the last specks of dust before the mirror.
Footsteps sounded, steady, light, approaching. Aristide looked at his watch. Quarter to three: they were early.
For a moment all was silent but for the muffled sound of voices, and then the footsteps again in the corridor. The lock clicked and the door creaked open. Rosalie turned from the mirror.
Sanson had come alone, without clerk or priest or assistant trailing him. He doffed his hat.
“Forgive me.”
Brasseur claimed he had sometimes seen condemned criminals, hardened men who had preserved their sang-froid all through trial and prison, collapse at their first sight of the executioner. But Rosalie had not collapsed; she had not even paled, but stood staring at him, the color rising in her cheeks.
“Forgive you?” To Aristide’s astonishment, she gave Sanson a smile of pure joy. “I knew you would come, at last.”
He seemed to wince.
“You don’t understand.”
“Understand what?”
“It’s my duty to come here today,” he told her softly, “my curse that I must come here for you.” He reached out as if he would touch her cheek, her hair, but swiftly drew back his hand. “Haven’t you guessed, even now?”
“Guessed?” she echoed him, staring at him, somber and pale in his black coat and spotless white cravat.
All at once Aristide understood, understood everything: Rosalie’s prince, her strong handsome lover, was her executioner.
CHAPTER 28
Rosalie drew a sharp breath and stepped back a single pace. Five hundred years of tradition and prejudice were not so easily unlearned in an instant.
“Henri?” she said, puzzled, her voice high and soft like a child’s.
“Forgive me,” he repeated. “How could I tell you what manner of man I was?”
“Who is ‘Longval,’ then?” Aristide said in the frigid silence.
“It’s an old family name,” said Sanson, without turning to him. “Sanson de Longval. All of us have used it, at times.”
A chill silence hung among them, like a winter fog on an empty road. Aristide imagined he might have heard her heart thudding.
“Tell me one thing,” Rosalie whispered. “Tell me you love me.”
Sanson bent his head to hers, with a sigh of immense weariness and perfect despair. “Juliette . . . I do love you, I confess it.”
“Don’t lie to me to spare my feelings. I want the truth.”
“On my honor.”
Aristide saw tears on Sanson’s cheek. He looked away, wishing desperately to be anywhere but in that close stone chamber with a man and a woman who had forgotten his existence.
“I--I feared you would thrust me away in disgust if you knew whose son I was,” said Sanson. “My father, my family, we’ve been outcasts all our lives. How could I ask you to share that? I knew I wasn’t worthy of someone like you. I was so terrified of losing you that at last--when I had to take my father’s place--I pushed you away rather than see you shrink from me in horror.”
“Oh, Henri,” she sighed. “You know we’re twin souls, you and I. How could you think I would do that?”
“Do you imagine it’s not happened before?”
The stillness seemed to howl in Aristide’s ears until she spoke again, in a gentle murmur.
“Dearest, I’m not afraid. Do what you have to do.”
“How can I be the author of your death--”
“No. I am the author of my death. You wouldn’t be here if I’d not chosen to do what I did. I absolve you. You are merely--a solicitous friend, a guiding hand.”
Silence ruled for a moment, for the length of a kiss.
“Juliette . . . I must cut your hair.”
So this is the moment, Aristide realized, or the penultimate moment--for in a cell there was always tomorrow, always another day of waiting, but your hours were numbered when at last they stripped you and bound you; then you knew, to the depth of your being, that you were on your way to the knife.
He slipped away, through the open door, and fled down the corridor and out of the prison.
He did not look at the waiting cart but strode forward through the May Courtyard, head down, toward the side gate. Shrill voices babbled in his ears, voices of the idlers who had gathered to catch a glimpse of the condemned. Hands reached for him, pawing at him. He shook them off, dizzy, as the world trembled and blurred around him. He had eaten nothing all that day, he remembered.
He stopped, squeezed his eyes shut for a moment to regain his equilibrium, and went on, to collide an instant later with Philippe Aubry.
They stared at each other, speechless. Pointing and gibbering, the crowd surged past them. Aubry was white and gaunt as death, his coat streaked with dust, the thick dark hair hanging limply about his haggard face.
“Couldn’t you stay away?” Aristide said at last. He shouldered the young man aside and pushed hi
s way toward the gate through the relentless babble of the crowd. A voice rose nearer him but he paid it no attention until someone plucked at his sleeve.
“Ravel!”
At last he fathomed the sound of his own name and he paused.
“It’s true?” Aubry demanded. “Tell me! They’re really . . . going to do it?”
“You mean, cut her head off?” Aristide said. “Yes. Of course they are.”
“What the devil is your game?”
“My game?”
“You know as well as I do that”--he lowered his voice to a furious whisper--
“that she never did it. It--it was I who killed them. You must know that by now.”
“And then you were too much the coward to admit to it.”
Aubry flinched and Aristide continued, pitiless. “Damn you. If you’d turned yourself in like a man of honor--if you’d confessed to an unpremeditated crime of passion--thrown yourself on the mercy of the court--they might have been lenient with you! But instead you killed another innocent--you strangled the Beaumontel woman--a cold-blooded, calculated murder for the sake of preserving your miserable skin. After all your talk of virtue and integrity. A fine example, Aubry!”
“How dare you let her sacrifice herself to save me!”
Aristide laughed suddenly, a harsh lacerating sound that hurt his chest and grated in his ears, and seized the young man’s wrist. “How dare I? You little worm, do you still have the colossal conceit to believe she’s sacrificing her own life for you?”
He turned, dragging Aubry behind him from the courtyard to the street beyond, toward the Pont-au-Change, the bridge to the Right Bank.
“I--I don’t understand . . .” Aubry gasped, trying to pull away from his grip.
“Go live on your precious virtue now, and think over and over again, until the day you die, how you murdered the woman you adored, and then didn’t even have the nerve to accept the penalty.”
Aubry stopped suddenly and jerked him backward, lips quivering, eyes burning.
“I’ve looked death in the face more often than once.”
“But never as a certainty,” Aristide said, pulling him inexorably along once more. “You’ve never waited in a cell, like your Brissotin friends, like my friend, and known, without a shadow of a doubt, that you will die in a day, or an hour, in the middle of a public square, with strangers gawking at you. And the thought of that, the thought of watching your death--such a public death--creep nearer, and nearer, terrifies you beyond measure, doesn’t it?” He paused at the end of the bridge. “Your precious integrity has escaped you in the end, and you know you’d be dragged off to the Grève weeping and begging for mercy.”
Aubry twisted away but Aristide seized him again and drew the miniature pistol he kept concealed beneath his coat. “All right, that’s enough,” he said, sliding the pistol into a pocket, near to hand. “You’re coming with me. And if you try to get away, I will empty this pistol into your guts, where it will hurt you very badly indeed before it kills you in a few days’ time. Or perhaps I’ll aim it toward your balls--if you have any, which I’m beginning to doubt.”
“They’ll take you up for assault and murder!”
“Come to think of it, I have little to lose.”
“Where are you taking me?” Aubry gasped, breathing hard but offering no more resistance.
“The Grève--where do you think?”
“I beg you--stop this charade.”
“Why should I?”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because I care enough about her to grant her what she most wants!”
They had reached the end of the bridge. He thrust Aubry forward, along the quay. The sound of the procession rose not far behind them.
The Place de Grève. The waiting crowd. The guillotine. Aristide shouldered himself and his unwilling companion toward the low barrier that surrounded the scaffold, growling “Make way!” when they did not yield before a black suit.
“Now,” he told Aubry when they had reached the forefront of the crowd, with a clear view of the guillotine, “you are going to stand here and watch.” Aubry closed his eyes and he seized the young man by both arms and turned him toward the scaffold.
“Watch, damn you!”
She was standing, head high, cropped hair dancing about her face in the brisk breeze. The public prosecutor had acceded to her request; she was not wearing the red shirt.
Sanson stood beside her in the cart, one hand gripping the rail, his other arm about her shoulders. From time to time she turned to him and they spoke together. It was a pity, Aristide found himself thinking, that the journey was so short.
The cart rolled to a stop. He might have reached out across the paling and touched it. “Don’t let go,” he thought he heard her say, as someone lowered the cart’s tailboard and Sanson stepped forward.
She saw them as Sanson was handing her down from the cart. Her gaze darted from Aristide to Aubry and back again. She gave Aristide a fleeting half smile and deliberately turned her head away, and Aristide knew she had put them out of her mind, had forgotten Aubry, forgotten her revenge, forgotten everything but the touch of her lover’s hand on her bound wrists.
Aubry ceased struggling with him and stood petrified, his face the color of the overcast sky.
Ten steep steps to the platform. Sanson guided her to the top, his hand always touching hers, though his handsome face was rigid as carved bone. As his assistants reached for her she balked for an instant, long enough to turn and rise on tiptoe and brush her lips across his cheek.
The assistants took hold of her, leading her to the upright plank, buckling the straps, though Sanson kept a hand resting lightly on her shoulder. Sanson stepped away and the plank tipped forward beneath the blade.
“Oh, God,” Aubry whispered.
Aristide had almost forgotten his presence. He tightened his hold, turning him pitilessly toward the guillotine.
A click, a scrape, a dull thud, the three sounds coming so fast upon each other that they were scarcely distinguishable. The crowd applauded.
No one raised the severed head for the spectators to see; that disagreeable, centuries-old custom had ceased with the Terror.
Aubry bent double and retched. His own stomach sour with nausea, Aristide turned away and closed his eyes. When at length he looked about him, the spectators were beginning to drift away and a boy was sponging down the guillotine. The two assistants loaded a long, covered wicker basket into the back of the cart.
Aubry lurched to his feet and Aristide seized hold of him again before he could escape.
“You have no right to hold me!”
“I’ll think of a reason.”
Sanson spoke briefly to the driver and with a gesture sent the cart on its way. Turning, he exchanged a swift silent glance with Aristide before crossing the straw-littered cobbles to him.
“Ravel.”
His gaze flicked to Aubry, who shrank back. He looked the young man up and down for a moment with a hard, impassive stare. “Who’s he?”
“Someone who should have been guillotined today,” said Aristide.
“That’s interesting,” Sanson said, “because last month I was out riding in the afternoon, at Monceau, and I passed a woman struggling with a man in the lilac grove near the follies. I supposed it was lovers’ horseplay and thought nothing more of it until I heard about that woman who’d been found murdered in the gardens. Then I told the police what I’d seen, and described the man. . . .”
“Did you,” Aristide whispered.
“I look forward to seeing you once again,” Sanson added, to Aubry. “Right here.”
Aubry wrenched his arms from Aristide’s grip and dodged away amid the thinning crowd. Aristide plunged after him but realized in a moment that he had lost him and halted, dizzy, gasping for breath.
“Never mind,” said Sanson, striding up behind him. “He can’t run forever.”
#
Aristide returned to the wine s
hop under the shadow of the Châtelet later that evening, after the winter twilight had faded into rain and dark. Wordlessly he joined Sanson at his secluded corner table and they sat staring at the wine stains in the battered wood. The candle beside them gently sputtered.
“Is justice served?” Sanson said a long while later.
“Yes.”
“No regrets, no remorse?”
“Only for Célie Montereau and Sidonie Beaumontel.”
“Not a thought for the other one? The murdered man?”
“No more than you have, when you drop your blade on a felon’s neck.”
Sanson nodded. “She paid with her head for what she did, while I’m paid a salary for what I do; but she and I are not so different, are we?”
“You are a servant of the law, like me.”
“Don’t tell me the ends are not the same. We’re both killers, she and I, whether we like it or not. I’m not so new to this trade. I assisted my father for years, even after I’d joined the Guard to escape it.”
He paused, brooding, still avoiding Aristide’s eyes.
“How many during the Terror?” he continued. “How many innocent people did I help to execute while serving the law? She often said we were twin souls . . . it was truer than we knew.”
#
26 Frimaire (December 16)
The message arrived at Rue Traversine the next morning.
Aristide trudged into Brasseur’s office, shut the door behind him, and leaned against it without speaking. Brasseur set his quill down and began to straighten his papers. Outside the window, the fine rain fell silently, glistening on the stones below. “So,” Brasseur said at last, “were you right? It was all about revenge?”
GAME OF PATIENCE (Aristide Ravel French Revolution Mysteries) Page 29