But at the cross street, we had to pull suddenly to a halt at the cry of the postillions of an elaborately painted and gilded heavy carriage, drawn by six horses at a fast trot, whose passage sent pedestrians scampering and splattered slushy mud on everything nearby.
“Make way! Make way!” We could hear new voices from the opposite direction as a second equipage, pulled by four heavy bays at full speed, careened out of the narrow street opposite. There was a scream of horses, wild oaths, and a crunching sound as the fast-moving carriages locked wheels and the lackeys from each equipage swarmed down to avenge the insult done to their masters’ honor.
“Well, here’s fun,” grumbled the driver. “We’re trapped here until they clear the street.” The uniformed lackeys had drawn their swords, and we could hear them shrieking insults as they attacked each other. Then a cheer went up from the gathering crowd of gawkers, as the master of the first carriage leaped from his vehicle and forced open the door of the second carriage, pulling out its occupant to give him a good drubbing with his walking stick.
“You fool, you’ll pay. I am the English ambassador,” gasped the second man.
“Then take that, treacherous English,” we could hear the first man cry as he struck a heavy blow with his stick. Both were soon lost to view amid their struggling servants, and interspersed with the cries of “A moi! A moi!” and “Damned lunatic!” we could hear the slither of drawn steel.
“Oh, my God, the police,” said my driver. “And we’re wedged in here tight. Draw the curtain.” I saw the driver shrink into his cloak and pull his old, wide-brimmed hat low. Sure enough, peeping from behind the curtain, I spied the baggy blue suits and white-plumed hats of the Paris police. Their sergeant, distinguished by his red stockings, ran behind them as they waded into the mêlée. As they cleared a path to the wreckage, a wiry dark man of medium height with a sharp profile, wearing the decent suit of a bourgeois of good standing, moved toward the carriages with a commanding air. He doffed his hat humbly and bowed low before the wrangling gentlemen, one of whom, in his foreign-cut doublet and expensive-looking but provincial coat, seemed somewhat the worse for wear. In the fashion of such quarrels, they both turned on the newcomer and threatened him. The wiry gentleman beat a hasty retreat, bowing backward, leaving his police to take care of the lackeys.
“Driver, driver, are you free?” a man’s voice inquired from the crowd. It was the police officer. I dropped the curtain.
“I’ve got a passenger just now.”
“Then he can walk home. Desgrez of the police requires your services.”
“It’s a lady,” said my driver.
“Oho, a lady, Latour?” The policeman had recognized my driver. “Then I’m sure your ‘lady’ won’t mind a detour by the Châtelet now, will she?” The rickety little carriage swayed as he stepped in.
“Well, well—a lady, indeed; quite a pretty little lady, too. Not your usual type, eh, Latour, to judge by her blushes? Mademoiselle, may I present myself. I am Captain Desgrez, of the Paris police. I trust your detour will not be too far out of the way. Just where were you bound?”
Without a thought, I answered in the patois of the Paris shop girl apprentice. “I’m returning to my mistress, Madame Callet. You know ’er, don’t you? Fine linens for the gentry? I was makin’ a delivery to the Hôtel Tubeuf.” As the fiacre finally jolted into motion, he took out a notebook and a little pencil and began to write up his report of the accident. Once finished, I saw he was inspecting me closely.
“That’s a rather handsome dress for the apprentice of a lingère,” he remarked in an offhand way.
“Ain’t it fine, now? I got it hardly worn in a used-clothing stall at the Halles.” I was no fool. I knew where the servants and the poor of Paris get their grand, grimy, and mismatched things.
“Do you remember which fripier it was?” The quiet voice sounded definitely sinister. Squashed into the tiny carriage with him as I was, I feared he could hear my heart pounding.
“Why, the one near the column, with the sign of the monkey and the mirror.” He looked a long time at my face. I opened my eyes and looked back. He had a narrow, intelligent face with dark, severe eyes. He wore his own black hair, cut short at the collar. If I had not known him for a policeman, I might have taken him for a seminarian—or an inquisitor.
“Might be true,” I could hear him mutter to himself. “It doesn’t seem to fit well. Still, light mourning, gray with black and gray silk ribbons…” He inspected the dress carefully. I could feel him looking at the long mended gash to the waist, where the ribbons and trim had been moved to conceal as much of the neat patching as possible. Aha, I thought. A man of logic. The most dangerous kind. We were approaching the judicial side of the great prison-fortress by the rue Pierre-à-Poisson, where the long tables of the fish sellers that were built against the fortress wall were covered with thousands of goujons, carp, and other river fish. An army of fish sellers gutted fish and shouted their wares to crowds of customers who pressed around the carriage, oblivious of it in their search for the perfect fish. The stink was unbearable. Heaps of rotting fish offal lay beneath the tables, and rats ran freely through the foul mounds of garbage.
“Tell me, Mademoiselle. Did it show signs of having been damp when you got it?”
“Damp? Oh, no. Dry as a bone. See? The ribbons ain’t run a bit, and the wool’s not stained.” I held out a sleeve to him. My God, I thought. They gave my description to the police when I vanished. Famille Pasquier—important enough to be a scandal, to be remembered by the police. But somewhere inside me, a voice was singing, “He doesn’t recognize me; I look different; he called me pretty.”
“Hmm. Interesting…,” he said, as the little carriage pulled up in the great courtyard of the Châtelet.
“Is there somethin’ wrong with my clothes?” I asked, making my voice sound alarmed.
“Why, not at all,” Desgrez replied smoothly. “They are absolutely perfect. Au revoir, little lingère. Perhaps I will have the pleasure of meeting you again someday.”
TEN
Captain Desgrez strode purposefully through the guardroom of the Châtelet to the inner door at the far end of the great stone hall. He scarcely acknowledged the greeting of the group of officers who stood as he passed, laying aside the muskets they were cleaning.
“What’s wrong with him?” asked one of the officers, putting aside his long brush and pulling a pack of cards from his pocket.
“Don’t bother him. When he’s got that look on his face, he’s on the scent of something,” replied the sergeant.
“On the scent? Then too bad for the something,” announced the first man, as he shuffled and dealt the cards.
Through the open door, they could hear the captain shouting at the chief records clerk in the rooms beyond the guardroom. Presently, Desgrez came out with a folder tied with string under his arm and vanished in the direction of Monsieur de La Reynie’s chambers.
“Ah, Desgrez, do come in. I was about to send a boy in search of you.” The Lieutenant General of Police, wearing his crimson robe of office, was as courtly as always, although he did not rise from his seat. Behind him the wall was lined with law books. Before him on the desk lay the transcript of the confrontation of two false coiners, who had previously been interrogated separately. La Reynie had marked the conflicting testimony and made note of it in the little red notebook that never left his side. It was a big case, one that involved the treasury and possibly even treason. Louvois, the royal minister to whom he reported, would be impressed. Desgrez removed his hat and bowed.
“Monsieur de La Reynie—”
“I can tell by the look in your eye, Desgrez, that you are on the track of something. Tell me, does it relate to the papers under your arm?”
“Monsieur de La Reynie, Latour the forger is back in town.” La Reynie put aside his notebook.
&nbs
p; “That gallows bait?” the chief of police responded.
“And he was driving a girl wearing a dead woman’s dress.” Desgrez opened the folder: “Pasquier, Geneviève, Disappearance Of.” A scrap of costly deep gray wool fluttered out as Desgrez laid a dressmaker’s sketch before his chief. “The identical garment, badly torn, neatly mended.”
“The case is closed, Desgrez. The body was found in the river.”
“But the dress, Monsieur, showed no signs of ever having been soaked. The braid had not run. It could have been new, apart from the mending.”
“And so you have come to request that the case be reopened, as—”
“As murder, Monsieur de La Reynie. Relatives disappear entirely too easily in this city, especially when an inheritance is involved. As I recall, the girl involved had just been left a rather choice country property the son had expected to come to him. I wish to make further inquiries.”
“Very well; your zeal is commendable. But I will have to request that you delay your work on this case in favor of a much greater matter. I have just received word that Madame de Brinvilliers has fled from her hiding place in England at last. The scandal of her escape from France was laid at our door, Desgrez.” La Reynie looked suddenly bitter.
“But…her rank…surely Louvois knows…she was assisted at the highest level…”
“They are blinded by rank, Desgrez. They believe there should be two laws, these courtiers, one for them, one for everyone else. But rank does not dazzle me, I assure you. This kingdom must have one justice, or perish. Her rank does not change the facts; the woman poisoned her family systematically to get money to support her lovers. If she were a commoner, her ashes would already have been blowing in the wind. I want you to find her, wherever she is, and bring her back for execution.”
“Where was she last sighted?”
“At Dover,” answered the Lieutenant General of Police, handing Desgrez the report of his English spies that he had taken from the desk drawer. “I have here the name of the ship. You can begin by questioning the master of the Swallow. There are also the names of several passengers here. My suspicion is that she will go to ground in a convent—foreign, but French-speaking. In which case we will eventually receive notification from the church authorities. The King himself has ordered that the most notorious poisoner in the history of the kingdom cannot be allowed to escape us.”
“There is, however, the matter of religious asylum…”
“A small matter for a man as skilled as you, Desgrez. Just leave no traces—nothing that would embarrass His Majesty. I am putting you in charge of the case. You must bring her back here at any cost.”
Desgrez bowed in assent, but deep in his memory he filed away the image of the shopgirl in the gray dress. And before he returned the folder to the records room he scrawled on it, “Callet—lingère” to remind himself of where to begin the inquiry anew.
ELEVEN
“My God, yer the cool one,” said my driver as he handed me out of the fiacre and assisted me to the door of La Trianon’s little laboratory. “You led him off this house as if you was born to it. You even sounded just like a little bit a’ girl from a linen shop in the rue Aubry-le-Boucher. Now I know what she sees in you. Keep it up, keep it up, and you’ll be queen yerself someday.” Queen? Queen of what? I asked myself, storing away the information for later use.
The news did not please my hostesses, who wrung their hands. “You’ll have to tell her; she has to be moved at once,” wailed La Dodée. “She may have brought us straight to—great God—Desgrez himself!”
“Shh. No more than necessary,” whispered La Trianon fiercely, with a glance in my direction.
“Calm yerselves, I tell you. She led ’em off. He took her for the apprentice of a lingère. I’d swear to it on the cross. She’s a clever one, she is.”
“I suppose we’ll have to take his word for it,” said La Trianon glumly over a cold supper that evening.
“We’ll know in a few days. La Reynie never lets things drag out. They might even be here tomorrow. From the arrest to the gallows—it can be only a matter of days with him.”
The name I had copied into my notebook from Grandmother’s dead hand. La Reynie. “Who is La Reynie?” I asked.
“La Reynie?” La Trianon answered. “Why, he is the new Lieutenant General of Police. The most dangerous man in Paris, because he is the most incorruptible. He answers to Louvois and to the King only.”
My mind raced in several directions at once. Grandmother had written a mysterious letter only moments before her death. She had written to the head of the Paris police, and the letter had been torn out of her hand and destroyed. What had happened to Grandmother, there in that room alone? I tried to remember any strange detail, but I could think of nothing, except the remembered rustle of taffeta outside the room as I entered to find her dying of a seizure. What were my hostesses doing, that they knew so much of the mysterious La Reynie? Surely, it must be more than brewing love potions and telling fortunes. I had to find out what it was.
“…it’s not as if a person could earn an honest living in this city,” La Dodée was complaining. “But at least rounding up beggars and imprisoning prostitutes keeps that policeman much too occupied to bother us. But still, why shave a girl’s head and lock her up for doing just what the great ladies do and get rewarded for? The King’s whore lives in splendor, and her children all have titles. What gives him the right to be keeper of morals for the nation?”
“The King does, my dear,” responded La Trianon, “and never forget that.”
“Then we must be grateful for the royal family,” announced La Dodée, “especially Monsieur.” Monsieur, the Duc d’Orléans, the King’s younger brother. Monsieur wore rouge and patches and went to balls dressed as a woman; his male lovers had poisoned his first wife. While Monsieur lived, the King did not dare to carry out the law and execute those who lived like him. The hint was enough. I looked at my hostesses with new eyes. So that was it. A single word from a passing stranger could betray them to their deaths for the way they lived together. It was almost disappointing that they were so ordinary. From all the tales I had heard, I would have expected them to have beards, or wear strange clothes.
“You’re…um…?”
“Nice girls don’t know about things like that. I thought you were better raised,” sniffed La Trianon.
“I wasn’t raised to be a nice girl. You’re thinking of my sister, who’s pretty and blond.”
“Isn’t that always the story, now?” said La Dodée. “My, you’re looking odd. Is there something you want to ask us?”
“Well, um…ah…is it true that h—, well, you know, can have babies without, well, a man?” Both women broke into shouts of laughter.
“Only the Blessed Virgin did that,” said La Dodée.
“Yes, it’s all just lies, you know. Just because they call us hermaphrodites, it doesn’t mean we are made in some strange, abnormal way. We’re really just women who can do without men, and that does upset them! Have another boiled egg. You’re looking rather pale, for all that those people across town painted you up.”
“It’s the corset they sewed me into. My back feels as if it’s on fire. And I’m so stiff, I’m afraid of falling and breaking my bones.”
“Well, it does look much straighter already. Definitely an improvement,” said La Trianon.
“Yes, we would have said so before, but we didn’t want it to go to your head,” added La Dodée.
“They said I’d have to sleep in it, and I swore I would. I’d do anything to be pretty like other girls, but now I hurt so much I wish you’d cut me out.” It had been a hard day, with many shocks. I found the tears running down my face for no reason at all.
“Oh, don’t do that. Give it a try. We make something right here that ought to put you right to sleep. Just promise
you won’t take it in the daytime. She would never forgive us if it spoiled your talent for water reading.” La Dodée always seemed sympathetic.
“Tell me—You asked a question, now I get one,” said La Trianon. “You speak so well, you must come from a good family. Why are you here alone? What makes you want to suffer pain and dishonor to join a world you know nothing about? You could be reading to your old father, or embroidering in one of those comfortable convents for rich girls…” Her words brought it all back to me, and I couldn’t answer for a while. Then I looked at her—her stiff, narrow face, her hair pushed under her white cap—and into her dark, too-old eyes.
“Revenge,” I said. “There is a man I hate. She has promised to make me strong enough to destroy him.”
“Only one?” observed La Trianon. “My, you are young.”
***
After supper, they compounded something from several of the bottles on the shelves and poured it into a glass of cordial. Seated in their little reception parlor, among the astrological charts, I felt the stuff go to work. A delicious limpness crept over my body; my brain felt all damp, and my thoughts became slow and dreamy. The pain left as if it had all been a fantasy.
“How are you feeling now?” they asked.
“Lovely. What was in that stuff?”
“Oh, this and that. But mostly opium. Remember, not in the daytime.”
“I never noticed before…your parlor looks so nice. See how the candle flames each make a little circle of light around themselves…almost like faces…”
“And that’s the girl who talked Desgrez out of following her home. She certainly seems different now.”
“Desgrez. Who is he, really?”
“Him? He’s the head of the officers of the watch, and La Reynie’s right hand, but La Reynie doesn’t mix in with the low-life. La Reynie gives the orders; Desgrez does the arresting. Beware of him, if you ever see him again. Of course, he may not look the same. They say he’s fond of disguises.” La Trianon’s face looked serious.
The Oracle Glass Page 10