Game of Patience (35 page)

A faint breeze, soft and damp with approaching rain, found its way into the courtyard and stirred her loose hair. Aristide thought he saw her shiver and he silently draped his overcoat about her shoulders. “This woman,” he ventured, “she might have been partially responsible for another man’s death, long before. Her husband’s, perhaps.”

Rosalie twisted about and met his gaze for an instant. “I see,” she said, after a frigid hush. “Well … if you know that much, then you also know he was guilty. They would have caught him sooner or later. She only … hastened matters along.”

Aristide nodded. “What happened then?”

“Then she turned to a friend, a faithful and loving friend, for help. You know the rest, I think.”

“And at length he left her, for no apparent reason, although they were passionately in love; and this woman resolved to revenge herself on the entire male sex simply because her lover had spurned her?” Aristide shook his head. “If every slighted woman, or man too, turned to murder, they would depopulate the world. I’m sorry, Rosalie, but I can’t condone her motives.”

Rosalie rose from the bench and strolled toward one of the round stone tables that stood in the courtyard. “She might have had more reason than that to despise mankind.”

“She ought not to blame all men for the vileness of a few.”

“You think not?” she said. She turned and leaned against the table, arms folded. “Men are all alike. When—when this woman’s lover left her, she was penniless, she didn’t know where to turn; she sought out the only man she knew who might help her. She tried to remind him of the love they’d once shared, because they did love each other for a time, and—because he refused to believe that it was her husband and not she who’d been responsible for sending him to prison—he called her a deceitful, treacherous trollop to her face, in front of his friends. At least Henri—at least her other lover had had the elementary decency to refrain from publicly calling her a whore.”

Aristide said nothing, though, despite all, he agreed with her. Why had Aubry been so needlessly cruel to her?

“They laughed at her,” she continued, “and made coarse remarks, and propositioned her as if she were a low, filthy courtesan. And then he turned to them, in her hearing, and told them her real name and her whole history, every particle of it. She could have killed him right then—she could have killed them all, and then killed herself. And soon afterward she decided to do just that—to kill herself by forcing the law to guillotine her; but she wanted to have her revenge against as many men as she could before they put an end to her.”

“And to survive, until she was caught, by living on the profits she might secure from robbing her victims?” Aristide said. “Because she knew no other way to keep herself alive, now that she no longer had a fortune or a name. It was starving in the gutter, or suicide, or murder, wasn’t it.”

“The guillotine seemed a much easier death than starvation, or throwing herself in the river. If she was going to die, as she wished, it would be a death with style and celebrity, not a sordid, lonely little suicide in an attic, or in the Seine. Who cares, or notices, if you hang yourself, or fling yourself off a bridge at midnight? But the guillotine—that’s different. That has a certain cachet to it, and fame.”

“Fame? Or infamy?”

“What’s the difference?”

Aristide digested that for a moment, and then spoke again, abandoning their careful fiction.

“You truly wish to be remembered as a criminal who died on the scaffold?”

Rosalie shrugged. “It’s better than dying poor and anonymous, with no one who cares a damn whether you live or die.”

He shook his head. “I shall never understand you.”

“I don’t ask you to. All I ask from you, now, is that you don’t breathe a word of this conversation, to anyone, ever.”

“Why?”

“That’s
my
business. But you must see that even if you were clever enough to find proof—and I don’t say that you will—proof that I didn’t murder Célie … you see, don’t you, that I still deserve that sentence, that the guillotine is waiting for me, no matter what?”

Aristide looked away.
Could I really,
he thought
, in good conscience let a confessed murderer go free, no matter what my feelings toward him—or her?

“Listen to your conscience,” she said, as if reading his thoughts. “You have such a strong instinct for justice. Stay true to yourself and let me be.”

Slowly Aristide nodded, without daring to look at her. She had known there was little chance of a happy ending to her story; it was time, he told himself, to shed naïve hopes, and surrender to the implacable truth.

“So,” he said, after a long silence broken only by the steady trickle of water into the stone basin, “this woman whom you know … she resolved to avenge herself upon every man she could, until the law might stop her. She rented a cheap room in a crowded quarter where no one cared who she was, and bought a knife, and some secondhand men’s clothes.”

“And a fair wig. Men like blondes.”

“And one night murdered and robbed a complete stranger.”

“Three strangers … if you must know.” She nodded, with a faint smile, at his look of disbelief. “Three or four weeks between each one. In different parts of Paris. Evidently the police from different sections don’t share information as often as they should.”

Aristide could well believe it; Brasseur had complained about the decentralization of the police force often enough. “Why did she not simply murder her old lover, the man who had treated her so shabbily?” he said when he had recovered his composure.

“She considered it. But he wouldn’t have let her get near him—she couldn’t have reached him and hurt him without being immediately arrested for it, and she wanted to do far more damage than that before she was caught.”

He could not decide whether it was repugnance or pity he felt. He looked at her, remembering all she had told him of her brief unhappy life, and found he could comprehend her motives: comprehend, though not condone.

“She could have killed just that one man,” he said softly, “who probably deserved it, in order to be put to death as she desired. Even an unsuccessful attempt on his life would have brought her to that. But instead of hastening her own death, she found she would rather live a little longer, in order to keep on killing, in order to feed her desire for revenge. Don’t you find that an interesting paradox?”

She glanced at him, frowned, and quickly looked away again, without speaking.

“What of the strangers she murdered, and intended to murder?” Aristide added. “They had never done her any wrong.”

“They had wronged every woman on earth, by being men who just wanted to satisfy their appetites with a miserable woman who was nothing more to them than a piece of flesh, and walk away. Don’t you think that debases all women? Do you imagine women would sell themselves as they do if there weren’t a ready market of men eager for them, and willing to pay? They deserve it.”

“I think you’re still blaming the entire race for the misdeeds of a few.”

“Why should I care? I just want to die now and find peace or oblivion, it doesn’t matter which—and I hope the guillotine will be as quick as they say it is.”

“There must be something for which you would want to live.”

“What do you think would inspire me to live? Love? You must be joking.”

“For God’s sake, other things in this world are worth seeking besides
love!
”

“Tell me what. Children, mother-love? I can’t have children. The doctor told me that when I was fifteen, when I had that stillborn baby, at the hands of an ignorant midwife, and caught a fever from it, that the fever must have hurt me somehow inside. It did something to me that meant I could never have any more babies.”

Some women would consider it a great blessing never to be pregnant, Aristide thought, but said nothing.

“And do you think, after all I’ve endured, that I would consider I was doing a child a favor by bringing it into this world?” Rosalie shook her head. “Let’s see … what else is worth living for? Doing good works? I did that; I was a nun, and then they closed the convents and threw me out. The chance of amassing some money, of a comfortable life? I doubt it. How does a woman like me earn a living that will buy her some comfort and a few modest pleasures, except by selling herself? And that I will not,
cannot
do. Do you know of any other way a penniless, half-educated woman of ‘good family,’ who knows no useful trades, can make her way in the world?”

She met his eyes, challenging him. He could think of nothing to say to her in the face of that stark truth and at last bent his head beneath her relentless gaze.

“I can see my future quite clearly,” Rosalie added quietly, “as a pathetic, useless creature living on and on, always moving to smaller, shabbier rooms as my income shrinks; and I don’t want that future. I’d rather go fast and without pain, and knowing they’ll say I was still young and pretty and vital when they cut my head off.”

“You need not have been a courtesan to find a good man who would have supported you,” Aristide said, moving closer to her. “There’s always honorable marriage. Surely some decent man—”

“You fool, don’t you
understand
?” she cried. “I want nothing to do with men. What difference is there between marriage and selling myself on the street corner? I’ve been humiliated enough, and I’ll have no more of it!”

“That’s what you really can’t bear, isn’t it?” he retorted. “The loss of your pride. My God, woman, most of the population of this world has suffered far more than you ever have. Have you ever labored until you were too weary to stand? Or seen your loved ones die of hunger or smallpox or plague? No. You’ve been humiliated in front of your ‘good society,’ and discarded by your lovers. Too bad! Let me tell you, you self-centered spoiled brat, there are far worse things in this world than that!”

She crimsoned and slapped him across the face.

“You don’t know what it’s
like
! How could you know what it is to be discarded by one after the other, to be rebuffed even by someone you loved desperately, someone who you believed was the love of your life!”

Aristide cupped a cold palm against his smarting cheek and said nothing as she raged on.

“All because of something you’d never asked to happen. Did I deserve to be raped and ruined when I was fifteen years old? How would
you
care, by no fault of your own, to be bitterly humiliated in front of everyone you ever knew? You can’t possibly know what it’s like!”

“Can’t I?” snapped Aristide.

“How on earth could you? You’re a
man
!”

“I know
exactly
what it is like,” he shouted, smacking his hands down on the stone table, “because when I was a boy my father murdered my mother!”

He paused, breathing hard. At length he leaned forward, head bowed.

“There; now you know.”

After a long seething moment he dared to raise his head again. She was staring at him, pale, lips trembling.

“I—forgive me … I—I didn’t guess—”

“Do you think I can ever say my father’s name with anything but shame? Whatever humiliation you’ve endured, it cannot have been worse than the ignominy society visits upon the family of an executed felon.”

“What … what happened?” she whispered.

“My mother had taken a lover. Father was often away, and I suppose she was lonely. He discovered their affair, and shot them both, and then tried to kill himself, but they arrested him, and executed him. Did you ever see a man broken, before the Revolution?”

Rosalie shook her head.

“They bind you to a wheel or a wooden cross, and then they take an iron bar and they smash you over and over again with it, your limbs, your ribs, your vitals, until all your bones are broken and your flesh is battered to a pulp and you die slowly, in agony, while the crowd jeers. Then they burn the body, so that you’re even denied burial in consecrated ground. That’s what they did to my father. I heard later that he took four hours to die.”

Aristide paused and met Rosalie’s mute gaze. “But at least his agony ended then,” he continued, his voice even. “My sister and I—my mother’s brother took charge of us, and it made his life no easier. By mere association with a felon who had perished on the scaffold, we all had to bear his infamy. We all had to endure the stares and whispers, and the insults, from every dirty street brat who recognized us, and every smirking servant who refused to work for us, and every schoolboy who called me filthy names, and every smug, squeamish family that sent us no invitations when my sister grew old enough to marry. Now do you think I can never understand what you have endured?”

He glanced up at the sky as a few cold droplets spattered his hand, and snatched up his hat. “It’s going to rain. You had better go inside. Goodbye, Rosalie; I won’t trouble you again.”

“Please … aren’t you coming back?”

“I can’t imagine you would want me to.”

“Please,” she said. She touched his arm. “Please don’t leave me.”

Aristide halted. At last he sighed and turned back to her.

“How could I?”

The rain spattered down suddenly, in a heavy shower, and they fled inside and returned silently to Rosalie’s cell. Faure, the public prosecutor, was waiting in the passage with Maître Tardieu and a clerk. Rosalie slowed, glancing from one to another.