She hurried into the living room, where she found Clarie wrapped in an old maroon woolen shawl, huddling in the big, soft chair by the fire. This was the same chair Clarie used to offer to her almost every afternoon at teatime. For just an instant after Madeleine glanced at the chillier spot to which she would be consigned, she thought of retrieving her scarf. But she shunted this desire aside. She did not want to appear to be criticizing her friend during her travail.
“Darling,” Madeleine said, as she reached down to take hold of Clarie’s hand, “are we feeling any better today?”
“No. How could I?” Clarie, who had always been so cheerful, had become relentlessly mournful. Her large, brown almond-shaped eyes, always her best feature, were now rimmed with red and circled in the gray of her fatigue. Her nose, a bit long even though it tipped up at the end, seemed even longer now. As did her oval face. She hadn’t even bothered to put her hair up. Instead it hung in one thick dark braid, lying dormant on her shoulder. Clarie could not go on like this.
“My poor sweet, try to take solace in the fact that you can always have other children.” Madeleine crossed both hands over her heart as she sat down. “I have every faith that you will.”
“It won’t be Henri-Joseph, my baby. And why do you keep saying that, you and Bernard’s mother? How do you know?”
Clarie sounded genuinely angry. This was so unlike her.
“Because, my dear,” Madeleine said gently, “we both have faith in you, as does your doctor. You are young. You are strong.” Madeleine caught her breath before going on, for she could not help thinking, You are married to a man who loves you. A judge who is making his way up the ladder, who will some day provide you with all the comforts. Sometimes Madeleine felt a little impatient in spite of herself. Didn’t Clarie understand that she had so much more than Madeleine could ever hope to have? At least Martin’s mother, an impoverished widow with a son who had never taken her wishes into account, understood this.
“Why did this happen to me and my son? Why?” Clarie blurted out, and then drew the shawl around herself more tightly as she folded in on herself and turned her head away.
Madeleine sloped forward, grasping the arms of her chair and staring at her friend as she tried to think of what to say. She was not so fanatical as to believe that Clarie was being punished. She could have repeated what everyone else was saying, “These things do happen. No one knows why.” But deep in her heart Madeleine believed there was more to it. That everything happens for a reason. That maybe this was the way God intended to purify and save Clarie’s soul. And maybe Madeleine was the humble instrument of His Divine Plan. She bowed her head. How could she have forgotten, even for an instant, that she had the one thing that Clarie did not have: faith. A truly generous person would want to give this gift to those who needed it most.
“Did I do something wrong? Was I a bad person? Did I not do everything I should? Didn’t I love him enough?” Clarie began to weep.
“No, no, dear. You did nothing wrong. But—”
“But, what?”
Was this the moment? Madeleine clasped her hands together and pressed her eyes closed. May I have the wisdom and courage to find a way to fulfill Your Wishes. “There are ways for you to find solace,” she began carefully. “In faith and in prayer. We baptized your little Henri-Joseph. He is happy now. He is an angel. You know that, don’t you?”
“That’s what Bernard’s mother kept telling me,” Clarie whispered as she turned away again, as if dismissing Madeleine’s words.
“He is an angel,” Madeleine insisted. “Pure and happy. He’ll be waiting for you in heaven.”
Tears streamed down Clarie’s cheeks. “All I can think of is that he was never well. He was always sick. He was always suffering. I tried so hard to feed him and hold him and comfort him. He suffered so. He didn’t deserve to suffer.”
“Oh, my dear, my poor dear.” Madeleine searched frantically inside the pocket of her skirt for a handkerchief. Retrieving it, she went to Clarie. “Here take this.” She watched as Clarie dabbed her eyes and blew her nose. “You are right, his life was too short. But eternity is forever. He will never suffer there. He’s probably looking down at you right now, wanting to touch you with his tiny hand and comfort you. Wanting you to smile again. And he is not the only one. Remember how the Blessed Mother suffered for Her Son. She understands what you are going through. She can help you.”
Clarie rolled the handkerchief into a tight fist. “Can you really believe that?” Her shawl fell open, revealing the crumpled white flannel nightgown she had been wearing for days. She was so angry, so aggressive, so unlike herself.
“Yes, I do,” Madeleine said quietly, inspired enough by her own words to hold her ground. “The love of Jesus and Mary is there for us, offering comfort and grace, if only we allow them to come into our hearts.”
If only she could get Clarie to look at her, to see her faith, then she might believe, she might get better. Madeleine scanned her surroundings for some aid, some support. Nothing. Windows looking out upon a street where Jewish and profane goods were bought and sold. The lamps, the end chairs, the shelf of books, undoubtedly secular books. Not one sacred object in sight. It was as godless as the Republic Bernard Martin represented. She needed to get Clarie out of here. If not today, then tomorrow.
Rose’s sudden appearance interrupted Madeleine’s thoughts.
“The stew’s ready, ma’am,” she said, with eyes so wide they seemed to be pleading, inviting Madeleine. Had she found an ally? In silent agreement Madeleine and Rose entered the dining room.
As soon as they got there, Rose whispered, “See if you can get her to take a bite. This is from last night. She didn’t eat a thing.”
“Of course,” Madeleine said, before pressing her hand against her own rudely rumbling stomach. She could see the tiny kitchen and the steaming pot on the stove. And smell it. “Do you think we should eat in here or by the fire?” she asked, treating Rose almost as an equal in their struggle to help Clarie.
“Makes no difference to me, ma’am,” Rose said as she reached for an envelope lying on the dining-room table. She gave it to Madeleine. “Maybe before lunch you can get her to read this. Maybe it will cheer her up.”
Madeleine stared at the letter. It was from the head of their normal school at Sèvres. The itch of curiosity made Madeleine almost forget the growling in her stomach. Unlike Clarie, she had never been a favorite. Mme Favre only deemed to write her to answer her pleas for a placement. Madeleine ran her finger over the return address. She was dying to know if the letter mentioned her. “Mme Martin hasn’t opened it yet? When did it arrive?” Madeleine asked, trying to keep her voice down despite her excitement.
“This morning. She’s afraid…. She said her headmistress did not know….”
“I’ll read it first,” Madeleine assured the maid. “I’ll make sure it won’t upset her. You set up the table in here.” She wanted nothing to disturb her examination of the letter.
She walked back into the living room. “My dear, I see you’ve gotten a letter from Mme Favre.”
Clarie hadn’t moved. She stared at the floral pattern on the dark carpet that covered the center of the living room. “Yes,” Clarie answered. “I thought Bernard should read it first. He says that I shouldn’t do anything that will upset me.”
“You never know. It could just be a bit of gossip about our old comrades. Why don’t you let me have a look?” The letter trembled in her hand as she perched on the edge of her chair.
Clarie shrugged. “I don’t want to hear anything about the baby,” she murmured.
“Then you won’t,” Madeleine said, as she unsealed the letter, trying hard despite her eagerness not to tear the envelope. She lifted the first page up to the light. It was all about the baby, wishing Clarie continued good health and an easy and safe delivery. Then Mme Favre, in her self-appointed role as the adviser to her favorites, counseled Clarie that whether she decided to be a “Rousseauist” wh
o breast-fed her child, or hired a wet nurse, or used the modern glass bottles, she would make the decision that was right for her and her child. It was love that made children thrive.
Madeleine let out a humph.
“What?” Clarie looked up.
“Nothing new, dear, not yet,” Madeleine said, protecting Clarie from Mme Favre’s pieties. She made a show of going on to the second page. First, she skimmed through it looking for her name, which was not there. Then she saw what may have been the real purpose of the letter, and gasped.
“What? Tell me!”
If Clarie hadn’t been so insistent, Madeleine might not have revealed the letter’s astonishing proposal. She might have kept it to herself, at least for a little while, until she figured out what it meant to her.
Madeleine set the letter on her lap, still clutching it in her right hand.
“She says, my dear, that there is a post in literature and history opening in Paris next year, and she wants to recommend you for it.”
“Oh.” Clarie turned away, indifferent.
“Is that all you have to say? She’s asking you if you want to apply to teach in the best school for girls in all of France!” Had Madeleine had time to collect herself, she would have suppressed the disbelief and envy that raised her voice above its usual well-bred, calm timbre. But her mind was astir. What did this mean for her? If Clarie left, could Madeleine claim her post in Nancy? And why, why, when she had been the eldest student in her class at Sèvres, one of the most experienced, one who had taught for many years in private boarding schools, why hadn’t she been asked?
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t care.”
“But Paris!”
“And Bernard?” Clarie sighed, as if she were bored with the whole discussion and wanted to put an end to it.
Madeleine scoured the letter again. “She says to wish him well for her, and that perhaps he, too, could find a post in the capital.”
Clarie shook her head. They both knew this was virtually impossible. Getting on the list for the Palais de Justice in Paris took years. And connections.
“Well,” said Madeleine, somewhat recovered, “it must be nice to know that Mme Favre thinks so highly of you.” She willed her hands to refold the letter exactly as it had come out of the envelope, and she slipped it back into its cover.
Before the birth, before Henri-Joseph, such an unexpected boon for Clarie would have served as a reason to commiserate with Madeleine about how unfair life had been to her. There was none of that now. Only that blank stare, the sighs, the withdrawal. This could not go on.
“Ma’am, the dinner’s ready.”
Madeleine heard Rose’s irritatingly timid voice behind her. She got out of her seat and offered her hand to Clarie. “Come, dear, let’s get some food inside of you.”
She looped her arm into her friend’s as they moved slowly toward the kitchen. “Would you like me to write Mme Favre and tell her about Henri-Joseph?” Madeleine reminded herself why she had come, to help.
Clarie shook her head. “Bernard is going to do it. He promised.” She sat down at the table and watched as Rose set a steaming bowl of beef, potatoes and carrots in front of her and Madeleine. She gave a weak smile to her guest as she picked up the spoon. “Like old times,” she said.
Clarie was remembering her manners. There was hope.
Madeleine put down her spoon, forsaking the first mouthful. She reached over and placed her hand over Clarie’s.
“I’ll tell you what we must do, my dear. We must make a plan. Get you out of here. Tomorrow when I come at four, I expect you to be fully dressed. We’ll take a walk, look in the shops, and go around the corner to the cathedral. Then we’ll light a candle for Henri-Joseph and pray to the Virgin together.”
Clarie picked up her spoon and stared into the bowl. All Madeleine had to do was to turn her indifference into acceptance.
26
MARTIN SWORE THIS WOULD BE his last session with Hémonet. He had spent a day and a half questioning the priest and going over police reports. During that time, Jacquette and his men had grilled ten of the most vocal habitués of the working-class cafés. None had a particular motive for stalking and killing Ullmann and Erlanger. Neither did the venomous bookseller, Villiers, whom Martin had placed in the tender inquisitorial care of his inspector. As for Martin’s witness, by late Wednesday afternoon, Hémonet had deteriorated into a shaking, red-eyed mess, reeking of his own vomit. “Drink,” Jacquette told Martin. “Give him a few days and he’ll get over it.” But when? Martin wanted answers now. Did the priest have associates? Had he incited anyone in his parish to do violence against the Israelites? Or did Hémonet possess the cunning and nerve to stalk and kill two men on his own?
As before, their encounter threatened to end in a shouting match:
“What do you know about the incident in the Place Saint-Jean?”
“Nothing! Like I told you, I heard it from another priest.”
“A priest you claimed died last year.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” voice more tremulous, as the head of clumped brown hair lolled this way and that, like one of the hysterics in Charcot’s famous asylum photographs. The torn and stretched-out sweater, undoubtedly the product of his mother’s or sister’s knitting needles, added to the aura of madness, which Martin suspected the cunning priest was knowingly spinning around him.
“Don’t pull that act on me!”
“What?” a smile oozed across Hémonet’s lips as saliva dribbled from one side of his mouth into his filthy beard. “See these?” The priest raised two impotent, trembling hands. “Who could I kill? I’m a sick man.” His laugh ended in a sneer.
A sneer Martin had seen all too often. Are all Israelites the enemy? he had asked last time. Even women and children? Children grow up to be cheats, exploiters, traitors, the priest answered, and women are their breeders. We should drive them all out, let them crawl over the border with whatever they can carry on their backs, and keep the rest where it belongs. Here, for real Frenchmen.
“Look at you,” Martin hissed in exasperation, despite his knowing that the priest was beyond shame. “You’ve ruined yourself with drink. You’ve dishonored your Church, your country, your mother, whoever has been good to you.”
“Look at you, Jew-lover,” Hémonet spit out, “you have no idea who they are and how they have you and everyone else in this courthouse on a string. A string, a string,” he intoned, “idiot little marionettes on a string—”
“That’s it. Get him out of here.” Thank God Martin had taken the precaution of always having a brawny guard in his chambers. He would not have to wait long to get the priest out of his sight. With little effort, the young blond policeman lifted Hémonet out of the chair and yanked one of his quivering hands behind his back.
“Jew-lover, Jew-lover, Jew-lover, Jew-lover.” At first the epithet blared out as sharp as a trumpet call, but by the time the policeman had dragged Hémonet into the foyer, his words had slurred almost into a snore. Martin closed his eyes and clenched his teeth until he heard the door slammed shut.
“Charpentier, a summary today. Then we’ll let him rot in a cell until I can figure out what to do with him.”
Martin hardly needed to give this order. His clerk had been diligently taking notes and just as certainly taking in the inefficacy of the interrogation. Martin pulled his cravat away from his stiff white collar and scratched at the beard under his chin. Not only had he failed to find any connection between the two murder victims and the priest, he had not even come up with a list of associates to hand over to his inspector for investigation and surveillance. Instead, Martin had become convinced that Hémonet had acted alone and that his only weapon had been his pen. Martin could well imagine how it had been, the once-ambitious priest stuck in a shabby country parish, imbibing the communion wine by candlelight as he spewed his hate and paranoia into his notebooks. Only the bishop’s interdict had stopped him from causing more damage. Jacquette assured Martin that the
re were no more copies of Nancy-Juif in the bookshops. As for the ostracized Hémonet, he had become so isolated that he had, according to his repeated, invective-filled testimony, not even read a newspaper for months and had no knowledge of the Thomases, or their pitiful wet nurse, or the ritual murder rumor that seemed to have started it all.
Martin put his elbows on his desk and rubbed his eyes. There had to be a connection somewhere. How else could it be that Ullmann and Erlichman were killed so soon after the death of the Thomas boy? Martin reached for the pile of reports he had pushed to the side of his desk. He tapped his fingers on top of them while he settled his taut stomach to the task of reading through them one more time. He had to squeeze some clue out of them, just one tenuous connection between the victims and the anti-Israelite invective. Martin’s fingers stilled as he stared at the white, blank wall in front of him. If he didn’t find connections, if the killer was still out there, would other Israelites be in danger? Was it even remotely possible that he would lose another friend, that David Singer might be danger? That once again, his actions had not been swift enough, decisive enough.
He lifted the first sheet, written in Jacquette’s firm strong hand, a report on a tanner who worked and drank with Pierre Thomas. Martin had to focus on what he was doing. Forget the disgust that Hémonet aroused in him. Put Clarie and the baby out of his mind. She’d understand, some day.
And if he found nothing? He’d concede that Jacquette had been right all along, that they should be looking for a murderer closer to home. Contrary to Didier’s views, against Singer’s expressed wishes, he’d order a full scale investigation of the Jewish community, whatever that meant. Even though Singer had exhorted him not to excuse the haters and accuse the Israelites. If I do it, Singer, Martin thought to himself, it will be to keep you safe.
The Blood of Lorraine Page 21