The Black Tower

by Louis Bayard

  And just like that, all the distresses in the ring’s surface acquire a meaning.

  “A teething ring,” I say.

  “Worth a fair sum, too,” says Vidocq, rolling it across the plain of his palm.

  The Baroness’s blond brows form high tight arches. “It’s pure gold, if that’s what you mean. However, its value derives largely from its original owner.”

  “A baby?” he asks.

  “He was a baby then.”

  “And did you know him?”

  “I met him once or twice. I knew his mother slightly.”

  “She must have been well-off if she could give her son a hunk of gold to chew on.”

  The Baroness pauses. And when she resumes, a new quality has crept into her tone: a sense of words beneath words.

  “She was well-off, as you say. For a time. The ring, though, was a gift from the child’s grandmother.”

  And now an even longer pause—a full half minute—before she breaks it herself by reaching into the drawer of a curio cabinet and extracting a pair of opera glasses, of ancient provenance.

  “Here,” she says, proffering them to Vidocq. “The grandmother’s emblem has been engraved in miniature. You may see for yourself.”

  The glasses, being too small for his ox-head, give him the look of a harassed chemist as he lowers his face toward the table. For several long seconds, he gazes. A crevasse appears between his brows.

  “You should be able to discern a double eagle,” says the Baroness. “Quite different from Signore Buonaparté’s emblem. Do you recognize it now, Monsieur?”

  Closing his fingers round the ring, Vidocq gives a dazed nod.

  “You have spent some time there, perhaps?” she asks.

  “A few weeks. Fighting with the cuirassiers of Kinski. I got to know their insignias quite well.”

  “Kinski?” I stammer. “But that’s Austria.”

  “Of course,” says the Baroness, sweetly. “We are looking at the heraldic emblem of the Empress Maria Theresa.”

  “See for yourself,” says Vidocq.

  I press the opera glasses against the bridge of my nose, and the miniature universe of the ring comes rushing toward me. The two-headed eagle…the Teutonic cross…

  “And the child’s name,” says the Baroness. “You can just make it out.”

  Sure enough, a line of letters appears on the ring’s inside rim. Some of them are gnawed away, but enough remain to make out what was once there….

  LO IS CHA L S

  “Louis-Charles,” I whisper, and the words seem to pool on the table beneath me, reflecting the name back to me. “The dauphin.”

  From behind me comes the Baroness’s voice, edged with irony.

  “I believe, after all these years, the word king may now be in order.”

  And, as if it were answering a cue, the ring slides from view. When I next look up, it’s resting in Vidocq’s palm; in the next second, it’s being flung against the nearest section of wall. With it goes the last reserve of Vidocq’s decorum, for the word that now emerges from his mouth is something that should never be uttered in the same room as a blue satin stool.

  “Shit!”

  “In a manner of speaking,” says the Baroness. “Yes.”

  CHAPTER 11

  The Lost Dauphin

  IF THE BARONESS has chosen to excuse Vidocq’s vernacular, she is simply being true to her times.

  You see, these early days of the Restoration are meant to be a great forgetting. We are meant to forget that a world was overturned, that a king and queen were carried to the Avenger, that the Place de la Révolution ran red with blood, that the rich man and the bishop quaked before the artisan and the peasant.

  We are meant to forget that, from the ashes of this conflagration, emerged an upstart who overran half a continent and made monarchs tremble before his name and cost France nearly a million of its men.

  We are meant to forget—all of it—everything that happened between 1789 and 1815, between the Bastille and Waterloo. No hard feelings. Let the Restoration begin.

  And here’s the interesting part: Forgetting can be quite easy. In just the last two years, without a backward glance, we have thrown out our monogrammed Bonaparte dinner plates, our eagle pictures. We’ve torn down the emperor’s statues, stripped every N from the Louvre walls, painted royal over every imperial. We have cheered our new king as loudly as we once execrated our old one.

  It has been, in part, a blessing to do this, for living in historic times is no life at all. Better to pretend it never happened.

  Only we can’t, hard as we try. In the end (and by now, you’ve figured this out) there is no forgetting. History lies low but always rises up.

  And so, when we least look for it, we are visited by the specter of a boy. A boy whom, more than anyone else, we would like to forget.

  His name was Louis-Charles, Duc de Normandie. He was a prince from storybooks: lovely and flaxen, bright of eye, rudely healthy. He was baptized in Notre-Dame. He had armies of servants: chamber-women, ushers, porters, room boys, servants to dress his hair and clean his silver and do his laundry—his own personal cradle rocker. He gamboled through groves of orange trees, he had eight black ponies at his call. He rode in carriages, and palaces were his playrooms.

  He never asked for any of it, he was merely born into it, but the revolutionaries, in their wisdom, found him guilty nonetheless. Guilty of living in luxury while so many thousands of France’s children suffered. What better punishment than to make him suffer, too?

  They sent him to a fortress called the Temple. Night and day they set a guard over him. They stripped him of his title and dignity, they beat and starved him. They didn’t dare execute him, as they had his parents. (The world was still watching.) They merely created the conditions in which he would die—and then they watched him die. Slowly, in agony and squalor, cut off from those who might have given comfort.

  And when they had sucked the last breath from him, they tossed him in an unmarked grave, to mingle with strangers’ bones. No tomb, no marker. No prayer. Equal to the end. He was ten years old.

  As a nation, we’ve worked hard to forget this boy. You can understand, then, why someone like Vidocq, who has ridden each new wave of history without losing his footing, should resent being called back, like an inn guest who hasn’t paid his bill. A modern man, he wishes to speak of the future. Which, I don’t need to tell you, is the past.

  “A COUPLE OF EAGLES,” he mutters.

  He’s repented enough of his outburst to retrieve the ring from the floor. His fingers close round it now.

  “And a fancy cross,” he adds, more loudly. “And I’m supposed to believe a boy’s risen from the dead.”

  “I can only tell you that Leblanc believed it,” says the Baroness. “To his great cost.”

  And as though she’s already dismissed us, she lowers herself onto the bench that sits unmoored in the center of the room. She squares herself toward the wall and extends her arms, and in a flash, it becomes clear what used to be there.

  A pianoforte.

  “I remember when the rumors first reached us in Warsaw,” she says. “All these high-pitched whispers. The prince is alive! Everyone had it on the highest authority, and everyone’s story was the same. A little cabal of royalists had managed to switch the prince with another boy and spirit him to safety. We were told it was only a matter of time before our monarch returned to claim his throne.”

  She rests her hands on her invisible keyboard. The fingers begin to flutter.

  “Well,” she says, “it all sounded very mystical to me. And, of course, as the years went by, no dauphin ever emerged, which did nothing to diminish the faith of certain individuals. There was a duchess, I remember, who would declare at all her soirées that our boy-king was due back the following week. Next week, I tell you! After many months of this, I said, ‘My dear, if he insists on taking so long, I fear Jesus Christ will get here before he does.’ She never did invite me back.�
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  Her fingers flutter into stillness. She gathers them into her lap.

  “For my part, I always assumed the rumors were propaganda to pick up ou spirits. God knows we needed it.”

  Vidocq is standing by the window now, rubbing the water vapor from each casement. You can hear the friction of his knuckles against the glass.

  “Madame,” he says, “do you know how many dauphin pretenders have come out of the wormholes already? I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a few myself. One was a tailor’s son, one belonged to a clockmaker. There was a boy who claimed to have the pope’s mark on his leg, but it was a scar from poaching rabbits. Mathurin Bruneau, maybe you’ve heard of him? A shoemaker’s son. Very celebrated trial down in Rouen. You will find him now holding court in the dungeon of Mont-Saint-Michel.” Sneering, he raps his fist against his chest. “If you’ve got another lost king to peddle, Madame, you’ll have to knock on someone else’s door.”

  “I am peddling nothing,” she answers, the first touch of frost crisping her voice. “It was Leblanc who believed, not I. And if he was wrong,” she says, rising and fronting him, “may I ask why he is dead?”

  She waits, with great courtesy, for his answer. Then, tilting her head in deference, she adds: “Surely, there would have been no need to kill a man who was laboring under a delusion.”

  Vidocq’s arms are locked across the spur of his belly. A long stream of breath issues from his nostrils.

  “Tell me this,” he says. “How would Leblanc know anything about Louis the Seventeenth? You said he wasn’t an aristo.”

  It’s the first time I’ve seen her flinch. That old epithet of the Revolution—aristo—strikes her like a clod of dirt. She pauses to gather herself. Then, in the coolest possible voice, she replies:

  “Leblanc would be only too glad to tell you, I’m sure. If he could.”

  “And the only proof he had was this damned ring? He might have stumbled over that anywhere. I’ve seen Marie-Antoinette’s old plates turning up in the beet market at Les Halles.”

  “He swore to me he had other tokens. When I asked him to show them to me, he told me it would have to wait. He was too occupied in finding someone.”

  “Who?”

  “The man who could conclusively identify this missing king.”

  “And who was this man?”

  A touch of exasperation abrades her voice now.

  “Dr. Hector Carpentier, of course.”

  Until this moment, I believe they’ve even forgotten I’m in the room. And as they give me the full gift of their attention, I feel the air around me warming and cooling at once.

  “It’s absurd,” I mutter.

  But the air won’t stop roiling, and my voice climbs once more into that register of guilt.

  “He had the wrong man, I tell you. I was—I was three when Louis the Seventeenth died. I never—how could I possibly speak of someone I’ve never met?”

  “No,” muses the Baroness. “You couldn’t be expected to do that.”

  She turns toward her looking glass now. Briefly tousles her strawberry-blond curls, stretches the skin across her cheekbones. Fingers away every last corruption of city air. And still she neglects to arrange her mouth, which is slightly askew as she turns back to me.

  “And now, Doctor, at the risk of being trite, may I ask: What did your father do during the Revolution?”

  CHAPTER 12

  The Reeducation of a Parrot

  GROWING UP IN a quiet house on a quiet street, I became, through no choice of my own, a connoisseur of silence. From the earliest age, I could distinguish early-morning from late-evening silence. A husband’s silence from a wife’s. Hope versus despair…if you listen long enough, everything gives off its own timbre of quiet.

  But I’ve never known anything quite like Vidocq’s silence, which lasts from the time we leave the Baroness’s apartment to the time we turn up the Rue Soufflot. A silence of containment, with all manner of emotions vying against it. Imagine a pig’s bladder, noiselessly expanding before your eyes. This silence grows quite terrible, and there is, if anything, a profound relief when it breaks.

  “Why didn’t you tell me your father had the same first name?”

  Still in his old-man garb is Vidocq, but there’s nothing old about this voice, which rattles off the market stalls, knocks the melting pot from a street tinker’s charcoal fire…claws through the shawl of fog that still hovers round the Panthéon’s dome.

  “Why didn’t you tell me there was another Dr. Carpentier in the world? You didn’t—you didn’t think I might want to know such a thing?”

  “But he wasn’t a doctor.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means—it means he gave up medicine when I was still quite young. He ground glass for a living. For as long as I knew him, no one ever called him Doctor Carpentier.”

  AND HERE I MUST interject and call myself…a liar.

  Because, every once in a while, about as often as the sun aligns with the moon, someone not too deeply ingrained in my family’s circle—a mason, a mendicant, a functionary with the Ministry of Justice, someone concatenated to him in ways too obscure for me to fathom—would slip and call my father “Dr. Carpentier.” To his face.

  I always studied him closely in those moments, and yet I find it hard even now to describe his reaction. He never corrected the mistake, he simply let it hang there in a perfect suspension. At first you might have thought him insulted; only later would you realize he was embarrassed, as if an old nanny had reemerged and called him back, with a single name, to the days of chasing pigeons.

  What I mean to say is it cowed him, this name.

  You will understand, then, why I learned never to associate my father with the word doctor. And why, when I made it my life’s goal simply to break through the carapace that surrounded him, I could think of no more effectual mallet than to declare myself…a doctor.

  “Hm.”

  That was my father’s first response when I told him I was enrolling in the École de Médecine. The second was this:

  “Hm.”

  I will confess that his usual veil of abstraction did lift for a few moments. His eyes were pinked with alarm, as though I had coughed up sputum. And then he could no longer look at me.

  He would have been less concerned, maybe, if he’d known how long it would take me to become a physician. Indeed, in these early days of the Restoration, it seems unlikely I ever will.

  So when a dead stranger, a certain Monsieur Leblanc, chooses to grant you a title before you’ve earned it, you may be excused, I hope, for accepting the promotion. Yes, I’ve quite enjoyed being Dr. Carpentier, if only for a few days. I like to think I’ve been enjoying it for both of us.

  And if I never worried overmuch about that other Dr. Carpentier…well, grant me this. Even my father wanted nothing to do with him.

  “WHEN DID HE flop?”

  That’s Vidocq’s voice, black and guttural, pulling me back to the here and now. I stare at him, uncomprehending.

  “Die,” he explains. “This papa of yours, when did he die? How long has he been eating dandelions by the roots?”

  If you want death broached from an oblique angle, Vidocq is not your man.

  “A year,” I tell him. “A year and a half.”

  “What a fine empirical mind you’ve got. A year. A year and a—”

  “Eighteen months, will that do? And twenty-one days and—eleven hours…”

  Frowning softly, he fingers his Saint-Louis cross.

  “Not much fuss, I expect, with the funeral,” he says.

  “He didn’t want any. At least Mother didn’t. We had a little service, it was five minutes, no more.”

  “Who was there?”

  “No one. Mother and me and—and Charlotte, that’s all.”

  And someone else. A fourth figure, stirring now from memory’s vault. Shrouded and comma shaped, leaning over the open coffin and breathing in that peculiar odor of wool and p
araffin…

  “Father Time.”

  “Ohh,” snarls Vidocq. “It’s to be allegory, is it, Doctor?”

  “No, he’s—Father Time’s a friend of the family, that’s all. He has a real name….”

  “Which is?”

  “Umm, Professor Racine, I think. No, wait, it’s Corneille.…”

  And then another thought comes hard on, surprising me with its force.

  I wish my father were here.

  “There were no notices in the newspapers?” asks Vidocq, in a quieter tone. “No memorial services?”

  I shake my head.

  “So…” He removes his shako, glances heavenward. “Word must have been slow to reach the—the lamented Monsieur Leblanc. He went to his death looking for a man who was already dead. The angels weep.”

  And now another voice enters the picture. Not the voice of angels.

  “Good afternoon, Monsieur Hector.”

  Nankeen stands before us in a cloud of swallowtail, framed almost perfectly by the Panthéon’s portico. Gold buttons and a lace jabot and a trailing indolence—he must have just slept through a lecture on torts.

  “You’re not going to introduce me?” Smiling, he angles his spectacled nose toward Vidocq. “May I ask whom I have the honor of addressing?”

  “You’ll have the honor of my foot up your ass if you don’t move along.”

  It’s important to point out he hasn’t raised his voice a fraction, but his intent is clear enough to mottle Nankeen’s pale brow. Who would have expected this from a veteran of Louis XV’s army—who, by the looks of things, is eighty if he’s a day?

  “See here.” A bitter smile crawls across Nankeen’s face. “I don’t believe there’s any call for that.”

  Vidocq seizes him by the lapels of his swallowtail coat and hoists him straight up in the air. Nankeen’s boots, suspended a foot above the ground, execute a pas seul. His eyes twitch, the very threads of his clothing recoil…but the smile never quite unfixes itself, even through the gale of Vidocq’s roar.