Game of Patience (29 page)

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Citizen:

You have arrested an innocent woman. Citizeness Villemain did not commit this horrible crime. Look farther afield to discover the monster who murdered Célie Montereau.

#

“Whoever it’s from,” Aristide said, “he’s a bit tardy.”

“Who do you suppose wrote it? A friend of the Villemains?”

He shrugged. “Probably. It’s a pity he didn’t share any useful information with us, such as who this ‘monster’ may be.”

“I doubt he knows himself. Some crank will always think the police will make or dismiss a case on his word alone.” Brasseur crumpled the letter and threw it on the fire.

#

The next day’s weather had turned rainy and cold and Aristide had intended to pass the time quietly at home in his shabby armchair, with a generous fire and the newspapers from the past fortnight, but a messenger boy interrupted him early in the morning with a note from Brasseur. Exasperated, he hastily tied his cravat, threw on his coat and hat, and stalked downstairs. By the time he arrived at Rue Traversine, fifteen minutes later, he was chilled and irritable.

“Another anonymous letter’s come,” Brasseur told him, before he could tartly remind his friend that the weather was filthy and he did not relish being denied his occasional day of leisure. “Perhaps more helpful than the first.”

Aristide read the letter. It was in the same looping script, probably the writing of someone who wished to disguise his hand, and equally as brief.

#

Citizen Commissaire:

If you want to find the real murderess of the citizens Montereau and Saint-Ange, you would do well to lay the hand of the law upon one Juliette de Vaudray, who knows more than she is saying.

#

“So,” Brasseur demanded, echoing Aristide’s thoughts, “who the devil is Juliette de Vaudray?”

“And who has betrayed her?”

“Think it’s worth pursuing?”

“A name … we can’t afford to ignore it. But who
is
this woman?”

“Well,” said Brasseur, “it sounds as if he thinks we already know her.”

“Know?”

“Or at least know of her. Maybe she’s hiding behind an assumed name.”

Aristide pulled the dossier of the case toward him and sifted through Brasseur’s notes. “One of Saint-Ange’s other victims, perhaps?”

“No, not one that I know of. Well, if she was Citizeness Beaumontel, then the question’s moot. But I doubt this Juliette de Vaudray is Hélène Villemain, or Célie’s great-aunt.”

“No,” Aristide agreed with a faint smile, “I can scarcely see the old lady pulling a pistol out of her pocket.”

“What about this other friend of Célie’s, Citizeness Clément? She’s been keeping a few secrets from us. I’d guess
she
knows more than she’s saying.”

She knows much, much more than she’s saying,
Aristide thought,
and damned if I can fathom her game.

He suddenly recalled that Madame Letellier, Rosalie’s stout fellow boarder, had mentioned that Rosalie had changed her name after her husband’s execution. A thing natural enough to do, perhaps, if a widow was ashamed of a husband who had been condemned as a common criminal rather than a political victim of the Terror. And many ex-nobles had discreetly dropped the aristocratic “de” from their names when, after the fall of the monarchy in 1792, it had become increasingly more perilous to be thought of as an aristocrat and potential enemy of the Revolution. But he had assumed, he realized, mentally chastising himself—
never assume!
—that Rosalie Clément had once been Rosalie Ferré.

What might it mean if Rosalie Clément had once been Juliette Ferré, née de Vaudray?

“I’m going to the Palais de Justice to follow a hunch,” he told Brasseur.

#

After the usual tedious round of approaching one official after another, three hours later Aristide found himself in a dim, dusty storage chamber at the law courts, an anxious clerk hovering about him as, one by one, he lifted the massive red record books from their shelves.

Revolutionary Tribunal, October-December 1793
. Some patriotic registrar had carefully inked 10 vendémiaire-11 nivôse, year ii of the republic onto the leather binding, below the offending Christian months. Aristide opened the book and began to skim the pages.

He found Maurice-Étienne Ferré, lawyer, among those condemned on 9 Frimaire, formerly 29 November. “I want to see the dossier of this man,” he told the clerk, hoping he might find a footnote mentioning names of the members of Ferré’s household.

After a further search through several cabinets, the clerk placed a thick folder before him. The record of Ferré’s arrest lay near the top of the pile of papers, together with the transcript of the trial and the signed order of execution.

#

Maurice Ferré, advocate, residing at No. 8, Rue des Capucines, Section de la Place-Vendôme, arrested this 18 August 1793, on suspicion of corresponding with and sending gold out of the country to enemies of the Republic. Seals put upon his domicile and premises searched. Records of correspondence with émigrés discovered by representatives of the Office of the Public Prosecutor in the residence of the said Ferré, with the assistance of the citizeness Juliette Vaudray, wife of the said Ferré.

#

Aristide sat back and frowned at the document a moment. The mere fact that Rosalie Clément was Juliette Vaudray proved nothing more than that the anonymous letter-writer knew they were one and the same.

But why would Rosalie have murdered her friend?

Because Juliette Vaudray had, as he had suspected, once known Philippe Aubry?

His gaze strayed over the report once again.
With the assistance of Juliette Vaudray, wife of the said Ferré
.

He leafed past the records of Ferré’s arrest to those of his trial, taking notes as he read. It seemed the usual shabby tale of a selfish and grasping man whose financial misdeeds, merely unethical before the Terror, had become worthy of death in 1793. The fatal letters lay before him in the folder: a dozen or more in three different hands, postmarked Brussels and Cologne, detailed plans to smuggle gold across the frontier to Belgium, Germany, and Holland.

Spouses were forbidden to testify at trial against their partners. But she had done the nearest thing to it: she had guided the authorities to the evidence that had led to Ferré’s arrest. In the autumn of 1793, such a denunciation would have been deliberate, calculated murder, a swift and certain death sentence.

He had come searching merely for a name, an identity, the solution to a puzzle, and had found far more than he had wanted to know. He winced, as if she had slapped him.

Aristide hired a fiacre to the Place Vendôme and trudged in the rain along Rue des Capucines toward the tree-lined Boulevard. On the north side of the street, the buildings of the former Capucin convent, national property since 1790, had become the Mint—or rather the printing works that had spewed out millions of nearly worthless assignats. A row of comfortable bourgeois apartment houses stretched along the opposite side.

He paused before number eight as a maidservant threw open a pair of shutters at a first-floor window. “
’Morning, citizen,” she said, as he tipped his hat to her, and heaved a pail of dirty water into the street. “Watch your boots, there.”

“I’m already wet.”

She grinned, with a quick grimace at the unrelenting drizzle, and muttered something about nasty December weather. Before she could vanish inside the house again, he inquired if she might have known one Ferré, a former tenant of the house.

She shook her head, uninterested. “No, I was engaged here eight months ago. I don’t know any Ferré.”

“This citizen was guillotined in the Year Two—three years ago.”

“Saints preserve us,” she exclaimed, eyes widening with relish. “What did he do?”

“Sent gold abroad to émigrés.”

“Serves him right, then. Well, I’m sorry, but I never heard of him. But you might ask upstairs,” she added. “Marthe, the cook at the second-floor flat, she’s been there for years.”

“Do you think you could introduce me?” Aristide asked her, summoning a smile and reaching into his pocket. “It’s worth a good deal to me.”

He parted with five sous as she let him in through the carriage gate to the courtyard and led him upstairs, crying, “Marthe, got a moment? A gentleman here wants to talk to you.”

Aristide stepped into the kitchen, blinking through the haze of steam and wood smoke. The cook turned from her stockpot and peered at him from beneath her mobcap’s frills, with the habitual suspicion of the domestic or peasant confronted with authority.

“Citizeness,” he began, “I understand you might remember the previous tenant of the first-floor flat, Citizen Ferré?”

“Who are you?” she demanded, brandishing a large wooden spoon as she might have shaken a pike in a bread riot three or four years before. “A police spy?”

He reached into his pocket again. “His name was Ferré?”

“Ferré, that’s right,” the cook said, still clutching the spoon as she eyed the coin he placed on the table. “But he’s long gone. They arrested him back during the troubles, years ago. I heard he ended up looking out the little window.” She grimaced and drew her finger across her lean throat. “They took everything, you know, all the furnishings, even his wife’s fine gowns, and turned everybody out. ‘National property,’ they said. Doesn’t seem right.”

“Do you know what happened to Ferré’s wife?”

“Me? No.” She returned to the kettle of soup bubbling gently at the opposite side of the hearth. “I don’t know where they went except for Angélique, what was the kitchenmaid there, because I took her on myself; happened ours had just run off with a soldier and I was short-handed. Angélique! Come here and answer the gentleman.”

A mousy girl turned from silently peeling potatoes and bobbed Aristide a curtsy. “How well did you know Citizen and Citizeness Ferré?” he inquired, reaching into his pocket for the third time and jingling the few remaining coins.

“Oh, I never saw much of them,” she admitted reluctantly. “I just worked in the kitchen. I saw her sometimes, but she was talking to the cook, not to me.”

“What did she look like? Was she an attractive lady with dark brown hair and dark eyes, about twenty-five years old?”

Angélique nodded. “That could be her.”

“What can you tell me about her?”

The girl pursed her lips for a moment, thinking. “I wasn’t but thirteen then, and I slept in the kitchen. She was a deal younger than monsieur, I remember that much.”

“Did they seem affectionate together?”

“I wouldn’t know that. I never saw them together but once or twice. But some said he had a little friend on the side, and so did she.”

“That’s right,” interrupted the cook, softening at the prospect of passing on some juicy rumors. She stirred the soup kettle and plumped herself down on the nearest stool. “Marie-Madeleine, who was housemaid there then, she said her mistress was carrying on with some young fellow under her husband’s very nose. That was what the great to-do was all about.”

Aristide wheeled about. “What ‘great to-do’?”

“Why, Madame Ferré, she used to have guests to dinner every week, mostly gentlemen who were something in the government, and Marie-Madeleine said madame seemed specially taken with one of them. Must have been the talk of the household.”

“They were lovers?”

“Well, that Ferré, he was twice her age and a dry stick of a man. You can’t hardly blame her for looking somewhere else for amusement, and Marie-Madeleine said the fellow she took up with was pretty enough… .”

“What happened there?” Aristide demanded. “Ferré discovered his wife had taken a lover?”

“Oh, yes, citizen!” Angélique said, glancing up from the potatoes. “Gilles, the footman, he told us all about it. Monsieur found her hiding this young man, that she’d been carrying on with for months—ever so handsome, I heard—and the young man was wanted by the government, because it was right after all that ado at the palace, and so monsieur sent for the patrol and had the young man arrested!”

“All that ado at the palace” might mean one of any number of revolutionary upheavals during the past several years. “When did this happen?” Aristide said cautiously. “When they overthrew Robespierre?”

“Oh, no, before that. When they threw the traitor deputies out of the Convention. Spring of ’ninety-three.”

“You mean the second of June?”

“That’s right, when they threw out the Brissotins like the dirty traitors they were.”

“And this young man was wanted—you mean by the Jacobin government? Because he was associated with the Brissotins?”

“Yes, that’s what Gilles said. And madame was so upset. Because the young man said something to her just before they took him away: ‘The next time, I’ll kill you!’
”

“ ‘The next time, I’ll kill you,’
” Aristide repeated. “You’re sure?”

“That’s what Gilles said. It was so exciting, you can’t imagine,” the girl added, a rosy flush rising in her pale cheeks. “I mean, I’m sorry for the poor young man, but maybe he wasn’t as nice as madame had thought he was. ‘You treacherous bitch, the next time I’ll kill you.’ Those were his very words, at least as Gilles told us.”