Game of Patience (18 page)

Brelot and François sat with a half-empty flask between them, laughing uproariously at a joke. The young man’s preferred tipple, it seemed, was cheap red Burgundy wine. Aristide joined them, loudly recognizing François as an old and dear friend, and called for another flask of wine. In half an hour the three of them were boasting together as if they had known each other all their lives.

“So how’s tricks?” François inquired at last, turning to Aristide. “Your new place better than the last one?”

They had agreed he was to be a down-at-heel manservant, newly engaged by an employer. “Not bad,” he said. “He lets me out now and then.”

“Heavy work?”

“No worse than anywhere else.”

“
My
gentleman,” Brelot said, anxious to remain in the conversation, “he’s not at all bad to work for. A nice, civil young gentleman with regular habits, bachelor though he is. None of this coming in and out at all hours, and rousting you out of your bed at three in the morning.”

“What’s he do?” Aristide asked. “Live on his property?”

“No, he’s a climber, if you ask me. Hangs about the swells and goes to their parties. But civil, like I said. And the ladies love him, with his looks and all.”

“Do they, now,” François said with a leer. “A lot of lady visitors?”

“Less than you’d think. Now if it was
me
…” Brelot grinned and poured himself another brimming glass of wine. “If it was me, if I was as pretty as Aubry, you’d see a lot more women about me than he’s got.”

“Maybe he likes men,” Aristide suggested.

“No, he likes women all right. I saw him once in the gardens with a young lady, arm in arm, snug as you please.”

“A young lady?”

“Pretty little thing, blond, clothes the latest shout. Gown cut down to there and up to here,” he added, elbowing Aristide in the ribs, “if you catch my drift. And my own little friend, she’s a dressmaker’s assistant, and she tells me the less of a gown you have these days, the more it costs!”

They guffawed, drowning out the clamor in the busy tavern.

“Know who she was?” said François. “An expensive trollop?”

“She didn’t look like it. No paint the way the whores wear it. But he was making sheep’s eyes; he’d got it bad.” Brelot lowered his voice conspiratorially. “But it’s none of
my
business. You want to keep your place, you keep your eyes and ears shut. And your mouth, too. Eyes, ears, and mouth,” he repeated, laboriously pointing to the features in question, “like I said, I keep ’em shut.”

Aristide grinned and poured out more wine for everyone. “Well, what’s the use of being in service if you can’t amuse yourself with your master’s scandals? Gives you something to talk about in the kitchen, or at the cabaret. My own gentleman, he got drunk last week and woke up the whole house with his singing. Enough to make you blush. I had to fetch the porter to help me drag him up the stairs and get him into bed. I ask you!”

“Well, Aubry, he’s usually home by midnight, but one night last week he didn’t come in till two,” said Brelot, not to be outdone. “But he let himself into his rooms with his own key. Must have had to wake the porter to unbolt the street door and let him in the house, but he had the consideration to let a hard-working man get his sleep. That’s quality, I can tell you. Consideration for the domestics.”

“What was he doing out so late?” Aristide inquired, hiccuping.

“Lord knows.”

“Sounds like a bit of a killjoy to me. Not whoring or having a few bottles somewhere?”

“Not him. Though something got him most particularly worked up that afternoon, I can tell you that,” Brelot continued, happily disregarding his own self-imposed rule of discretion. “He comes in from a stroll, all smiles and good humor, then twenty minutes later rushes out, without a word, and doesn’t return until the small hours. And he looked like death when I brought him his shaving water the next morning, white as a sheet. Must have had a bad evening.”

Aristide lurched to his feet, clapping François on the shoulder with a slurred “back in a moment,” and stepped with great dignity and care between the tables and out the side door to the mucky alley beyond. He was buttoning his culotte when François joined him, on the same errand.

“ ‘Looked like death’!” François repeated when he had done and they had emerged together from the sewer-stink of the alley. “That sound to you like somebody with something nasty on his conscience?”

“It certainly does. Try to find out if this uncharacteristic behavior of his took place on the tenth of Brumaire.”

An additional hour and a third flask of wine drew little else from Brelot. He had passed the stage of drunkeness where men became talkative, and grew boastful and impudent toward the serving maid. At last Aristide suggested that they should all meet at the tavern in two days’ time, if they could get the evening from their respective employers, and bade them farewell with many loud and emotional adieux.

#

23 Brumaire (November 13)

“
Citizen Ravel,” said Rosalie, pausing in the doorway of the boardinghouse’s unheated and deserted parlor, where a grim, gray maidservant had sent Aristide to wait. “Do you have news already?”

“Nothing I ought to share at present.”

“What is it you want, then?”

“To be frank, citizeness, I wanted to spend another hour in your company.”

She paused and looked at him as if he had suddenly stripped off all his clothes and capered about the room doing handstands. “Why?”

Why indeed, he said to himself. Perhaps her thirst for justice for Célie spoke to something within him.

“I think I understand,” she added a moment later, with a faint smile. “Your vocation has fashioned you into a student of human nature, and I expect you want to put me under your glass. Forgive me, but I’m not interested in becoming one of your specimens, like a two-headed piglet in a jar in somebody’s ‘cabinet of curiosities.’ ”

“I trust you’ll believe I’d rather pass an hour with you than with a two-headed piglet,” Aristide said, remembering a previous affair that had led him to the bizarre collection of scientific oddities at the Veterinary School outside Paris, and the acquaintance of an eccentric and innovative doctor who was rumored to be mad. “I called on you because I find you attractive, or at least you would be if you had some decent clothes and someone to dress your hair; and because your wits are sharp, for that’s plain to see after five minutes’ conversation with you; and because I find you agreeable, despite your tongue that’s as sharp as your wits.”

“I ought to tell you now,” she said dryly, “that I’m nearly penniless, nearly friendless, and nearly thirty.”

“So am I,” said Aristide. “Though in truth I’m far nearer forty than thirty. Shall we compare afflictions?”

Slowly she smiled again, with a soft chuckle.

“I thought to stroll in the gardens,” he continued, “but there’s a chill mist in the air. Would you care to take coffee with me, or a glass of wine?”

She said little until they had arrived at a nearby tavern and taken a table. The common room was ill-lit and close, receding into gloom beneath a low, vaulted stone ceiling, but warm from a generous fire, with a shaggy dog and cat asleep at the hearth.

“To each man his own taste,” Rosalie said after Aristide had ordered coffee for them both. He guessed she was not referring to their order. “If you insist on dogging my footsteps, then I suppose I had better give in with a good grace. At least tell me your name.”

“Ravel.”

“I know that. Haven’t you another?”

“Aristide Ravel.”

“Aristide?” she echoed him, amused. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those daft ultrapatriots who renamed themselves after classical republicans. Aristides was a famous lawgiver of Athens, wasn’t he?”

“A lawgiver and general,” he said as their drink arrived.

“But why not choose a truly mellifluous name like Anaxagoras, for example?” She daintily sipped at her coffee. “No, that’s already taken. Poor old Chaumette. All that earnest patriotism, and still he got sent to the chopper. Or what about Cincinnatus—that’s a lovely one. And of course there’s always Brutus.”

Aristide suppressed a smile. “I understand that I was christened Aristide at my mother’s request.”

“Your mother must have been quite the scholar.”

“It’s a saint’s name,” he told her, enjoying the bafflement that for an instant flickered in her face. “Some obscure Greek of antiquity. Did you not know?”

Her shapely mouth twitched into a smile. “You’re looking more respectable today than when I interrupted you in the street. Did you learn anything more about this Aubry?”

“I told you, I shouldn’t be talking about it at present.”

“That’s a pity. That was a very convincing costume, you know. Every inch the seedy errand boy. But when you’re Aristide Ravel and not some disreputable character skulking in the shadows, do you always look like a crow that’s fallen into an inkwell?”

“I confess it,” he said, refusing to be baited. The gray tabby cat on the hearth stretched itself to its feet with an inquisitive mew and padded over to them. Rosalie leaned down to stroke it, still glancing quizzically at Aristide.

“Because you appear sober and official in black? Hasn’t anyone ever told you that you look just the way people think a police spy ought to look?”

“First of all, I am not a spy—”

“I thought you said you weren’t an inspector.”

“I’m not. Once I thought I wanted to join the police and work my way up to commissaire; but now you couldn’t pay me enough to do Brasseur’s work day in and day out, inspecting tradesmen’s scales and issuing peddlers’ licenses. Sending for the knacker to haul away dead cart horses. Saints preserve me.”

“Well, ‘police agent,’ then, if you insist. Though most people would say that’s just a fancy word for a spy. Haven’t you anything else to wear?”

“No.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. Aside from one riding costume, which doesn’t get much use here in Paris.”

“You must get paid well enough for whatever it is exactly that you do,” said Rosalie. “Can’t you afford a few other suits of clothes?”

“I have two other suits, one of which is a dress suit, and four waistcoats. They’re all black. I find it simplifies matters.”

“One would think you were in perpetual mourning for something or other.”

He opened his mouth for a sharp retort, but thought better of it and took a hasty swallow of his coffee. She looked at him, tilting an eyebrow almost imperceptibly.

“I think I’ve brought up a sore subject.”

“Forgive me.” He summoned a faint smile. “I expect you know, if you’ve lived for some time in a cheap boardinghouse, that this is the customary dress of any educated man who’s down on his luck and can afford no more than one suit of clothes; and I’ve been a member of that fraternity more often than once.”

“Well, isn’t that exactly the usual sort of man, your unemployed lawyer or scribbler, who isn’t above accepting a few livres from the police to keep his eyes and ears open?” She gazed at him solemnly for a moment, then pushed the candle on their table toward him and peered at him, studying him, through the twilit gloom. “I’m teasing you, you know. Don’t you ever smile?”

“Now and then.”

“I declare you’re as solemn as Robespierre. They say he never smiled, either.”

“They’re mistaken. And I smile when I find the occasion appropriate, just as I wear something other than a plain black suit when the occasion is appropriate.”

She tilted her head, a little frown puckering her smooth forehead. “You do have a way of completely flattening people. You simply give them that grave stare of yours, and a very, very dry rejoinder, and one feels as if one has committed some unforgivable blunder.”

The corners of his mouth twitched and she pounced. “There, you’re smiling, Robespierre. Don’t worry—I won’t tell anyone.”

“Please,” Aristide said sharply, “please don’t call me that.”

“Robespierre?” she repeated, puzzled. “Why not?”

“My friend Mathieu used to call me ‘Robespierre’ sometimes, for the same reason as you did … because I don’t often smile. He’d known Robespierre, a little, before the rift sprang up between the factions, and he claimed I was quite like him. It made us laugh.”

“So why—oh. I see. This Mathieu was your friend who was—who died.”

He nodded.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t lose anyone I loved to the guillotine, myself. They left me quickly enough of their own volition,” she added unexpectedly, her voice hard. Then she reddened, as if she had said too much.

“Another coffee?” he said.

“Thank you, no. I—I should be going.”

“Do you think you’re the only soul in Paris who’s suffered an unhappy love affair?”

“What?”

“Forgive me, but it’s not hard to guess why you’re bitter, and why you won’t trust a man who tells you he finds you attractive.”

“You
are
an accomplished student of human nature,” she said at last.

“I simply observe, and try to put myself in another’s place. If I’d been hurt by someone who meant the world to me, I’d cease trusting others, too.”