Game of Patience (36 page)

“I think I know why you’re here, citizens.”

“Citizeness,” Maître Tardieu said, “you must be brave.”

“The … your sentence will be carried out tomorrow at four o’clock,” said Faure. He looked uncommonly somber, Aristide thought. “The executor of criminal judgments will take charge of you at three. Do you wish the services of a priest?”

“Thank you, no,” Rosalie said. “But I do have one trifling request. Is it absolutely necessary that I wear that ugly red smock?”

“It’s part of the sentence for murderers.”

“Surely the most inconsequential part of it, Citizen Prosecutor,” Aristide said quietly.

Rosalie smiled. “Call it vanity if you will, but I’d like to go looking well, not draped in a shapeless rag.”

“I’ll convey your request to the president of the tribunal,” Faure said with a small half smile.

Tardieu stepped forward but Rosalie shook her head. “I won’t need your services any more. Thank you; you’ve been most conscientious. All of you.”

When they had retreated down the corridor, she dropped easily into a chair and stared out the window into the empty, twilit sky. “Tomorrow at four … finally … do you suppose the blade will be cold?”

“I don’t know,” Aristide said.

“In winter it must be cold.”

He crossed the cell to stand beside her, a hand on her shoulder. “You ought not to dwell on it.”

“It’s been mild, citizeness,” Gilbert assured her. Imagination, Aristide reflected, was not one of his strengths. “Not too cold. Fine weather for the time of year, they’ve been saying.”

She laughed. “So it is—a fine climate for dying!”

#

He woke early, before the slow winter dawn, but he stayed in bed a long while, nursing a headache and gazing at the dark shape of the wooden crucifix on the opposite wall. Clotilde, stubbornly indifferent to the prevailing anti-Christian sentiment and heedful of her lodgers’ souls, had hung one in every room she let, and he had left it hanging for the past three years to indulge her.

He studied the crucified Christ, limbs distorted in agony. Public death was kinder now; you were spared at least the hideous intimacy of betraying your torment to the staring mob.

She will die today.

The thought of it roiled his stomach and he closed his eyes. One moment she would be warm, living, breathing, the next—

Strange how the guillotine’s swift dispatch left no lingering moment for dying between the last instant of hot pulsing life and the first of stone-still, mute death.

He tasted the sourness of bile in his mouth and contemplated burying his face in the pillows, sending word to them all that he was ill, a sudden fever. Easy to tell them a quick lie, so easy to lie and escape. She had seen through his armor; she would understand.

A firewood seller began to shout his wares below in the street, a water carrier soon joining him, the strident voices piercing his throbbing head. He pressed a palm against his queasy stomach. Yes, he decided, he would simply refuse to leave his bed today.

If you shrink from this,
said a small cold voice within him,
you will never find your self-respect again.

He swallowed down the sickness and struggled upward, wincing as he swung his feet to the cold floor. He pulled on his clothes and boots so as not to shock the servant girl when she arrived with his hot water, and stood at the window, staring at the roof opposite and the empty sky above. It was a pretty sunrise, rose and gold. He turned from the window as the last golden-pink streaks faded into clouds and quotidian wintry blue, and the girl came scurrying from below with the steaming jug.

I must look my best for her,
he thought. She would be piqued if he attended her looking less than his best.

A cadaverous face, eyes gleaming within dark hollows, stared back at him from the mirror as he washed. As he tied his cravat, knotting it crisp and precise above the high collar of his black satin waistcoat, his fingertips brushed across rough stubble on his cheek and he reminded himself to visit a barber for a proper shave before he set out on the business of the day.

Three o’clock.

#

He arrived at her cell just after nine o’clock. She was still wearing her nightgown and peignoir.

“I thought they couldn’t come for me so early,” she said with a brief smile. “You look very smart. You’ll outshine me if I’m not careful. By the way,” she added, “what do you think happened last evening, after you’d left?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“I finally made the patience come out. Twice.” She touched the cards, sitting in a tidy stack in the center of the table. “It worked itself out beautifully, at last.”

A guard brought her breakfast tray. Rosalie gestured to the second chair as she sat down. “Won’t you join me? We have plenty of time. Gilbert—a cup for Citizen Ravel, if you please.”

“No,” Aristide said, raising a hand. “Thank you, no.”

“No appetite? You do look a little green.” She poured herself coffee and hot milk. “I hope you don’t mind if I take my breakfast, though. I’m famished.” She buttered a roll and began to eat.

“Well,” she said when she had done. “I must wash, and dress. If you leave now, will they let you return?”

“Certainly.”

“Then humor me, and come back in an hour. I’d like your company.”

“As you wish.”

He left the Conciergerie and paced the length of the quays, breathing in the weedy, watery smell of the river as it gently lapped at the wharves and the tethered boats. The struggling sun had vanished beneath a thick blanket of cloud as pale as river ice. He wandered past the Tuileries and stood staring down at the gardens, at the topiary hedges whose damp bitter scent rose to him on the breeze.

With a shudder he remembered the corpse-smell, heavy and sickly in the cramped chamber of the pyramid. Poor Sidonie Beaumontel, condemned to death as surely as Rosalie for what she had chanced to see. But if the slight figure with whom she had collided had not been Rosalie, who had it been? Had Aubry murdered her after all—or had he been silenced, too?

He found, to his unease, that the notion of Aubry lying dead in some out-of-the-way spot did not trouble him in the least. Though Aubry might not be a murderer, beyond all doubt a contemptible soul lurked behind the face of an angel.

And then he turned to them, in her hearing,
she had said,
and told them all her name and her whole history.

He glowered at the muddy, desolate garden, wondering how any man could treat a woman so cruelly, and then wondered suddenly: How had Aubry known Rosalie’s whole history?

Surely she would not have told him herself. A shameful past that had sent her fleeing to a convent was not something one revealed to a young man of rigid morals and lofty principles.

Or had Aubry known more than Rosalie was saying?

#

He slunk into Brasseur’s office, avoiding Dautry’s sidelong gaze.

“I didn’t expect to see you today,” Brasseur said. “I’m sorry. I know you’ve become … attached …”

Aristide pulled off his overcoat and hat and dropped them on a bench and flung himself in the nearest chair, ignoring the hat as it slid off his crumpled coat with a soft thump. “I can’t seem to sort it out …
why
…”

“Crime of passion, plain as plain. Here,” Brasseur added, “best pick up your hat before you tread on it. Good hats aren’t so easy to come by.”

“What?” Aristide said, startled.

“I said, good hats—”

“The
hat
,” he whispered, a restless hand hovering at his lips. “Not so easy to come by… .”

“Eh?”

“The hat, Brasseur, the
hat
!”

“Don’t just keep saying ‘the hat!’ What about the hat?”

“Brasseur—from the first, the porter said a young man ran upstairs, ran out again, and then returned twenty minutes later. As soon as we began to learn who the actors were in this drama, we supposed the young man had been Philippe Aubry. But Grangier said Aubry wasn’t the young man he’d seen.”

Brasseur nodded. “And you then discovered that the ‘young man’ had been Juliette Vaudray dressed in men’s clothes, and Grangier identified her in court, and she confessed. What about it?”

“Rosalie claimed she went upstairs, lost her nerve, retreated, and then returned to do the murders. It’s all quite plausible. But we all overlooked one thing. The hat.”

“What
about
the hat?” Brasseur repeated.

“It all hinges on the hat. She might have run upstairs wearing a hat, then left, and somehow lost her hat in the next quarter hour—people do lose hats. The wind blows them into the muck, or under carriage wheels, or they’re stolen. But this young man—”

“Juliette Vaudray.”

“This
person
whom Grangier saw, he—she—first came
without
a hat, then returned
with
a hat. Where’s your file?” He snatched up the dossier Brasseur pushed toward him and feverishly sifted through its contents. “Here: Grangier’s statement.” He pulled the papers from the folder. “
‘He wasn’t wearing his hat when I saw him run out; he must have been carrying it under his arm.’ Carrying it—or perhaps he didn’t have a hat at all when he first arrived, and Grangier merely assumed he’d had one because he saw one the second time. Witnesses do make assumptions with nothing to base them on, and think they’re telling perfect truth. Now how, and why, do you suddenly acquire a hat within a quarter hour, especially when you have far weightier matters on your mind than your clothes?”

“Are you suggesting,” Brasseur said slowly, “that Grangier actually saw two different people?”

“Precisely.” Aristide smacked the folder closed and dropped it on the desk. “Look: Grangier hears hurried footsteps running up the stairs. Ten minutes later a hatless, dark-haired young man in a dark coat, whom he sees only for a second or two and from the back, rushes
down
the stairs and out the door. Then twenty or thirty minutes later a dark young man in a dark coat
and a hat
returns, a fellow of the same general height and build, still in a terrible hurry. Grangier naturally assumes it’s the same young man returning; wouldn’t you? This time Grangier sees his face for an instant, enough to get the impression that it’s a young man whom he doesn’t know. But if Grangier never saw his face the first time, what’s to prevent the first, hatless man from being an entirely different person from the one who ran in wearing a round hat?”

Brasseur frowned. “But his clothes?”

“It was early evening and Grangier hadn’t yet lit the lamp in the passage,” Aristide said, stabbing a finger at the porter’s statement. “In the twilight, one dark redingote is much like another, if you’re not paying attention and you’ve had a few glasses of brandy. Black breeches, top boots. Everyone wears them. It’s possible. What if the man whom Grangier saw first, the man
whose face he never saw,
did the murders, and Rosalie was only following him?”

“But he could be anybody,” said Brasseur, glumly.

“Yes. He could be
anybody
.”

“You mean—”

“Of course. It’s obvious. Aubry. It always
was
obvious. This case ought to have been perfectly simple. Except that I was led astray by Rosalie, we all were … and by my own doubts and fears of arresting the wrong person… .”

“But the Vaudray woman is going to be executed for it! If she’s innocent, then it has to be stopped—”

“She’s not innocent,” Aristide said, feeling his throat grow tight, as if he would choke upon the words.

“You just said—”

“Do you remember what you asked me the other night, when I found the room on Rue du Cocq, and her men’s clothes?”

Brasseur stared at him for an instant before murmuring “Ah,” with a slow shake of his head. “So why confess to the murders she didn’t commit, and say nothing about the ones she did?”

“I’m damned if I can see.” Aristide began to pace from end to end of the small office. “She can’t possibly be shielding Aubry out of love for him. Would
you
shield someone who’d treated you like dirt? Who’d threatened to kill you?”

Abruptly he paused, staring at the wall. “The servant girl from Ferré’s house …” He seized the dossier again and found his notes. “She told me that as her mistress’s young man was arrested in June of ’ninety-three, he’d said, ‘You treacherous bitch, the next time I’ll kill you.’ The
next
time. Brasseur—doesn’t that sound as if she had betrayed him—or he thought she’d betrayed him—more than once? That their liaison, when Rosalie was married to Maurice Ferré, wasn’t the first time they’d had a love affair?”

Brasseur nodded thoughtfully. “You mean …” He paused, frowning, and searched through the dossier. “Saints above, we missed it—look at the letter Aubry wrote her.” He thrust the copy of the letter at Aristide. “He tells her, right there, ‘why, knowing how easy you find it to foully betray me in all things, should I look upon you now,’ and so on. ‘How easy you find it’! That’s a man who’s been burned twice, I’d say. It’s plain as day: they’d already had an affair that had ended badly, and then they must have met again, later, and patched up their differences.”