Inspector Marot glanced questioningly at the Commissioner and my father.
“Possibly ether,” said my father. “Or chloroform.”
When Louis regained consciousness, he was in the chapel. And there he remained, for all three of the weeks he had been missing. Every evening and every morning, someone placed a little food, a pitcher of water, and a clean chamber pot for him, but when he drank the water, he became drowsy and fell asleep. He quickly figured out the connection but did not know what to do; there was nothing else to drink.
The worst part was the cold and the fear of what would happen to him. He was a child of the streets, and he knew that there were people who harmed children for their own pleasure.
Once he had poured the water out of the pitcher without drinking it and only pretended to sleep. It was the man with the dog who came to open the door. Louis had lain completely still and had even attempted to snore a little. He had heard the faint rattling when the man set down the water and a tin plate with food and emptied the chamber pot, but he had not dared to move, because the dog stood over him, sniffing his breath suspiciously.
There was the sound of steps. The man came closer. Louis squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath.
“A child,” the man had murmured. “How can one do it when it’s just a child.”
Then he went back to the door.
“Iago, heel,” he said, and the dog left Louis alone. The next day the fairy tale book had appeared next to the pitcher of water when Louis woke up.
“I had thought that I might try to get away, m’sieur,” said Louis. “But the dog . . . I was so afraid of the dog. I did not dare. And the rest of the time . . . I just drank the water. It was easier.”
“You did the right thing, my boy,” said Marot. “Your job was to survive. To find you and free you was the task of the police.”
A task the police had not managed particularly well, I thought bitterly. It was pure luck that the Commissioner had found Louis Mercier while he was still alive. But Marot’s words comforted the boy and eased the guilt he clearly felt over his own fear.
“Where is the man now?” asked Louis. “Did you catch him?”
“He is dead,” said Marot.
“Good,” Louis said and did not ask anything else.
Marie Mercier and Louis were sent home in the inspector’s own carriage, escorted by a constable. Louis was weak and barely able to stand, but what he needed most of all was rest and safety, and a sufficient amount of food and drink and loving care.
“He will be better off at home,” said my father. “A hospital would only make it worse.”
Marie Mercier was clearly relieved.
“Thank you,” she said again. “Many, many thanks.”
The past weeks had left their mark on her. The steely discipline that maintained her beauty regime had slackened. Her face was swollen, and her tears had created grimy tracks in the powder on her face. Her hair had not been washed for a while, and she had probably slept inadequately and eaten too little, but there was still something about her that made the men look at her a little longer and a little more frequently than perhaps they ought to. Even my father was distracted, I noted. And absolutely no one looked at me.
I was unsure whether to feel relieved or deserted. I needed help. I had seen naked people transform themselves into wolves, and I seriously feared for my mental health. But at the same time I knew that I could not speak of what I had seen to anyone and that I would just have to hope this peculiar condition would pass when I was less shaken and exhausted.
Otherwise you will end up in the madhouse.
I pushed the thought away and was able to collect myself enough to stand. Louis and Marie Mercier were just then leaving, Marie with her arm around her son’s shoulders. In the doorway, Louis half turned around.
“Thank you, mademoiselle,” he said. “I could hear your voice, it was just that I couldn’t answer.”
Something fell into place inside. A feeling that I had after all managed to save something, that not everything had been in vain.
“Goodbye, Louis. Take good care of yourself and of your mother.”
It was my intention to go upstairs to my own bed and my own room. But I did not get that far. The front door had barely closed behind Louis and Marie Mercier before someone with an aggressive fist hammered to be let in.
“Inspector! Commissioner!”
When both these gentlemen were called, in that tone of voice, it could mean only one thing: a crime with a deadly outcome.
And so it was. A few seconds later, an out-of-breath policeman stood in our salon and gave his report.
“I regret to have to tell you that young Adrian Montaine has shot and killed the Wolfman,” he said, and then faltered a bit before correcting himself. “Eh . . . I mean . . . Emile Oblonski.”
It was clear that he had needed to rack his memory for a few seconds to remember that the Wolfman was human and had a human name.
I was so tired that I was almost incapable of unhooking that miserable corset. Elise had gone to bed long ago, and I did not want to wake her up. I stood in the middle of my own room and wept stupid helpless tears because everything was just too difficult.
Pull yourself together, I admonished myself. Breathe in. Breathe out. Hold your breath. Push the hook out of the eye. You have done it a hundred times.
It helped. The hook and the eye parted company. And when I was finally able to shed my whalebone armor, and my breasts parted and fell more naturally into place, Cecile’s folded pages dropped to the floor at my feet.
I had not forgotten about them. But I had also not told anyone that I had them. They were a secret we shared, she and I, and I did not want to let the men into our confidence unless I had to.
I put the pages on my bedside table and poured some water into the basin of the washstand. I undressed completely and washed myself from head to toe, wishing that I could also wash my hair. Unfortunately, that required greater quantities of water and preferably Elise’s help, so it would have to wait for morning. While I washed, the picture of Cecile’s naked, wet body kept intruding.
Living, free, and in transformation.
There had been nothing in the way of hymns or soaring angel wings in the vision I had experienced, and rationally I knew very well that it was the peculiar manifestation of an exhausted brain and a shaken mind. That Emile Oblonski had died at about the time I saw him come to meet Cecile . . . was an unsettling coincidence. Nothing more.
I observed my naked body in the wardrobe mirror and thought of the professor. Of August. Who presumably was now sleeping peacefully somewhere in Heidelberg and had no idea that his half-hearted fiancée had reason to fear for her mind. I wondered whether one might be married without being impregnated and conquered. And if so, what I would then do about Papa.
Nothing decisive emerged from these thoughts. At last I put on my nightdress and went to bed. Elise had already turned back the bedspread, and the sheets crackled against my body, clean and soap scented. I turned up the wick of my bedside lamp and sat down to read the last words that Cecile had left behind in this world.
Rodolphe had walked out. He had left her in the cold pavilion, in the murky shadows behind the boards that protected the interior against the snow and damp of winter. She was still breathing in painful gasps and had trouble focusing on anything else.
This was not at all as it was supposed to be.
Yes, he had filled her. For a few floating seconds he had brought her across that red-and-black threshold where she could disappear and lose herself, where only the body mattered. She could still feel his seed as a greasy stickiness between her thighs.
But everything else. The violence and the anger with which he had used her. The words he had screamed at her then. Whore, swine. Is that the way you want it? He had thrust himself into her with such force that her abdomen had been hammered against the bench, and she knew there would be bruises, deep bruises that it would be difficult to explain to
the other girls at the convent. Especially Anette, the little uptight snitch, who would no doubt probe and whisper and tattle, and feel so holier-than-thou about it that it was enough to make you throw up.
And his contempt. His coldness. As if only he had the right to feel desire.
She knew it, of course. Knew that when he put his arms around her from behind and tried to force his hand between her legs, he expected her to stop him, expected her to resist. Knew very well that he had supposed that she would say no when he asked if she wanted to sit for a while in the pavilion. But this was the man she was meant to be with for the rest of her life. She had to know. If they could . . . If she could, with him. And at first it had seemed all right, and she thought maybe it will be fine, maybe he is enough, and then she would be able to give up the other feeling. Give up Emile.
But then.
It was when she understood the magnitude of the gap . . . the infinite gap between what she could have and what she wanted. That was when she began to cry. And then he had become even harsher and had said even worse things. Had called her a hole, a sewer. A public toilet anyone could use.
At that point she knew that they would never be married, and the thought filled her most of all with relief, at least until she thought about what Maman would say. She hoped she would have the chance to tell Papa first. Then he could speak to Maman.
That was not the way it went. When she reached the Descartier family home, she was not let in. Their coachman was there, ready to drive her home, and it turned out that he also brought a letter for her parents that formally ended the engagement. The letter gave no reason, and Cecile was not capable herself of coming up with a plausible explanation. Her thoughts rattled around in her head, and no words emerged, only various sensations—a chill, a sudden cramp, a crawling of the skin that she could not translate into words. But Maman’s eagle eye had noted the two unbuttoned hooks on the back of the dress that Cecile had not been able to reach herself.
“Did he get carried away?” she asked. “Did he take advantage of you?”
Cecile was not able to answer. A “yes” was as much a lie as a “no.”
“I will go over there,” said Maman, and she could not be dissuaded. Perhaps she really believed there was some misunderstanding that she could correct, perhaps she even imagined that she might magnanimously forgive a shy and remorseful young man on her daughter’s behalf and allow that these things sometimes happened but that it really only demonstrated that these two young people were made for each other.
When she came home, she was stone. Ice. Iron. The hardest, coldest, most unbending material there was. One nostril had acquired the tic that Cecile recognized from some of her childhood’s darkest and most confusing memories, and this time it did not go away. She did not give Cecile more than a single scathing look before she disappeared into Papa’s office.
A few minutes later, Papa called her. When Cecile saw his face, something loosened inside her, and the words came tumbling.
“I am sorry, Papa. Sorry. But it was not just me. Rodolphe wanted—he tried—it was both of us . . .”
She sank down at his feet and put her arms around his legs the way she had done when she was little. He understood her so much better than Maman, had always done so, understood that she could not sit still and embroider for hours, understood that she turned black inside if she was not allowed to escape the house and the convent and the stodginess at least once in a while.
Today was different.
“Make sure she learns her lesson,” said Maman, and placed the cane on the desk before leaving the room.
Cecile got up hesitantly. It had been many years since he had hit her. She must have been nine or ten the last time it happened.
“Papa,” she said and was still not quite able to grasp that he intended to punish her in that way. She had done nothing that Rodolphe had not done as well. Didn’t he understand that?
He pulled out the chair and set it in front of the desk. Sat down himself and motioned for her to lie across his lap as if she were still a little girl who could be spanked.
“No,” she said. “Papa, no.”
He looked at her for several seconds.
“You must learn that a daughter of this house cannot behave as you have done,” he said, and she recognized her mother’s phrase beneath his. A daughter of this house. “You have a choice. You can obey me now, as is suitable for a young woman. Or you can leave. And if you leave, you will not come back.”
He meant it. It was not just her mother’s will that lay behind his words. What she had done was so offensive to him that he literally could not stomach it.
She had never been able to suffer banishment, did not possess the strength to tolerate solitude. Even as a child she had much preferred the cane to the horrible isolation of being locked in her room.
Even now she could not stand it. The threat alone was enough. She took a few uncertain steps and got down on her knees at his side. Bent over his lap.
As he had done when she was little, he pulled down her underwear. She heard his breathing change when he saw the signs of what had happened in the pavilion. She had not dared to ask for a bath, because she did not want Odette to see the bruises and tattle. A quick scrub in cold water was all that she had been able to manage, and she suddenly knew that he would be able to smell it, would recognize the sour-sweet scent of semen and sex.
The first blow made her cry out. She did not remember that it had ever hurt so much when she was small, and surely he had not used all his strength and released all of his despairing anger back then as he did now. The second blow was much less violent, the third really just a smack. But the second before he pushed her away, she felt it.
She was lying across his lap, so she felt it at once.
Felt it. Felt him.
A movement that ought not to be there. A nudge, a rising, a momentary excitement.
They stared at each other, two people lost beyond redemption, each in their separate way. He because he would never be able to get past this moment, would never be able to erase it and make himself and her believe that it had not happened. She because she knew in a second’s bitter clarity that she no longer was a daughter of this house but a stranger who could never return.
She did not run from the room. She carefully straightened her clothes without looking at him. Then she walked out and closed the door behind her. She gave the hansom cab driver her pearl bracelet in exchange for driving her back to school, and two days later she left the convent behind as well. With Emile.
I stared at the creased, slightly damp pages.
Here was the secret that had made the whole family crumble. It was those few moments of unforgivable sin that had sent Cecile into an exodus that she did not return from alive. This was what had troubled her father so deeply that he attempted to blow the memory out of his brain with a pistol. And this was what had made her brother a murderer. Back in the house on Boulevard Saint-Cyr, Madame Montaine was left with a man who might die at any moment and would probably never return to life. And the little sister, the silent child whom no one really saw . . . How I wished that someone or something would watch over that girl.
“Cecile and Emile. We rhyme. We belong together, and now we live like Hansel and Gretel in a gingerbread house. But there is no witch here.”
That is what Cecile had written about the first days in the hunting cabin. But later their idyll grew less Eden-like.
“Imo was here with food. It is a long trip for her when the weather is so merciless, but she is a helpful soul, bless her. Emile does not like her and usually leaves when she comes. But what would we do without her? It is so cold here. Constantly so cold, even when the oven door is almost red-hot. I get chilblains on my hands and fear for my health. Imo gave me a little bottle of tonic; it is soothing and allows me to sleep, which is otherwise almost impossible. Today I slept for two hours while she just sat looking at me and held my hand. I was still tired and my head felt heavy when I woke up, so s
he lay down next to me, and I helped her. But now I am constantly getting nosebleeds; that cannot be healthy. Emile got angry and sad when he saw the marks; he and Imo do not understand each other at all. And my boots have disappeared. Emile says that Imo must have taken them, but why would she do that? I think he did it because I began to talk about returning to the sisters. He fears that we will be punished and that he might be jailed. Imo says that people are saying he abducted me. I ought to write a letter, but I do not dare. Half the time I just want to go home, and the other half I remember why I cannot go home, and then I despair again.”
A gap. And then, in a hand much less assured:
“We lie together, Emile and I, and then everything is better for a little while. That is the only thing that warms me now, but I start to cough so much from it. He holds me so that I can breathe better, but he cannot make the cough go away. I want to have him inside me all the time so I know that I am not alone. And sometimes he stays in there for hours even if we are just lying still. But he has to go out. Imo does not come anymore. Why, I don’t know. We have almost nothing to eat, only what he catches. He eats everything raw—mouse, beetles, worms—but I cannot make myself do that. It is only when he catches a bird or something else that can be plucked and cooked that I can get it down. He tries to take care of me, but it is not easy.”
And the last words:
“Want to go home. Have pleaded and begged. Emile says he will try. Oh, God. It is enough now. It is enough.”
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