Game of Patience (39 page)

All at once Aristide understood, understood everything: Rosalie’s prince, her strong handsome lover, was her executioner.

Rosalie drew a sharp breath and stepped back a single pace. Five hundred years of tradition and prejudice were not so easily unlearned in an instant.

“Henri?” she said, puzzled, her voice high and soft like a child’s.

“Forgive me,” he repeated. “How could I tell you what manner of man I was?”

“Who is ‘Longval,’ then?” Aristide said in the frigid silence.

“It’s an old family name,” said Sanson, without turning to him. “Sanson de Longval. All of us have used it, at times.”

A chill silence hung among them, like a winter fog on an empty road. Aristide imagined he might have heard her heart thudding.

“Tell me one thing,” Rosalie whispered. “Tell me you love me.”

Sanson bent his head to hers, with a sigh of immense weariness and perfect despair. “Juliette … I do love you, I confess it.”

“Don’t lie to me to spare my feelings. I want the truth.”

“On my honor.”

Aristide saw tears on Sanson’s cheek. He looked away, wishing desperately to be anywhere but in that close stone chamber with a man and a woman who had forgotten his existence.

“I—I feared you would thrust me away in disgust if you knew whose son I was,” said Sanson. “My father, my family, we’ve been outcasts all our lives. How could I ask you to share that? I knew I wasn’t worthy of someone like you. I was so terrified of losing you that at last—when I had to take my father’s place—I pushed you away rather than see you shrink from me in horror.”

“Oh, Henri,” she sighed. “You know we’re twin souls, you and I. How could you think I would do that?”

“Do you imagine it’s not happened before?”

The stillness seemed to howl in Aristide’s ears until she spoke again, in a gentle murmur.

“Dearest, I’m not afraid. Do what you have to do.”

“How can I be the author of your death—”

“No.
I
am the author of my death. You wouldn’t be here if I’d not chosen to do what I did. I absolve you. You are merely—a solicitous friend, a guiding hand.”

Silence ruled for a moment, for the length of a kiss.

“Juliette … I must cut your hair.”

So this is the moment,
Aristide realized, or the penultimate moment—for in a cell there was always tomorrow, always another day of waiting, but your hours were numbered when at last they stripped you and bound you; then you knew, to the depth of your being, that you were on your way to the knife.

He slipped away, through the open door, and fled down the corridor and out of the prison.

He did not look at the waiting cart but strode forward through the May Courtyard, head down, toward the side gate. Shrill voices babbled in his ears, voices of the idlers who had gathered to catch a glimpse of the condemned. Hands reached for him, pawing at him. He shook them off, dizzy, as the world trembled and blurred around him. He had eaten nothing all that day, he remembered.

He stopped, squeezed his eyes shut for a moment to regain his equilibrium, and went on, to collide an instant later with Philippe Aubry.

They stared at each other, speechless. Pointing and gibbering, the crowd surged past them. Aubry was white and gaunt as death, his coat streaked with dust, the thick dark hair hanging limply about his haggard face.

“Couldn’t you stay away?” Aristide said at last. He shouldered the young man aside and pushed his way toward the gate through the relentless babble of the crowd. A voice rose nearer him but he paid it no attention until someone plucked at his sleeve.

“Ravel!”

At last he fathomed the sound of his own name and he paused.

“It’s true?” Aubry demanded. “Tell me! They’re really … going to do it?”

“You mean, cut her head off?” Aristide said. “Yes. Of course they are.”

“What the devil is your game?”

“My game?”

“You know as well as I do that”—he lowered his voice to a furious whisper—

“
that she never did it. It—it was I who killed them. You must know that by now.”

“And then you were too much the coward to admit to it.”

Aubry flinched and Aristide continued, pitiless. “Damn you. If you’d turned yourself in like a man of honor—if you’d confessed to an unpremeditated crime of passion—thrown yourself on the mercy of the court—they might have been lenient with you! But instead you killed another innocent—you strangled the Beaumontel woman—a cold-blooded, calculated murder for the sake of preserving your miserable skin. After all your talk of virtue and integrity. A fine example, Aubry!”

“How dare you let her sacrifice herself to save me!”

Aristide laughed suddenly, a harsh lacerating sound that hurt his chest and grated in his ears, and seized the young man’s wrist. “How dare I? You little worm, do you still have the colossal conceit to believe she’s sacrificing her own life for you?”

He turned, dragging Aubry behind him from the courtyard to the street beyond, toward the Pont-au-Change, the bridge to the Right Bank.

“I—I don’t understand …” Aubry gasped, trying to pull away from his grip.

“Go live on your precious virtue now, and think over and over again, until the day you die, how you murdered the woman you adored, and then didn’t even have the nerve to accept the penalty.”

Aubry stopped suddenly and jerked him backward, lips quivering, eyes burning.

“I’ve looked death in the face more often than once.”

“But never as a certainty,” Aristide said, pulling him inexorably along once more. “You’ve never waited in a cell, like your Brissotin friends, like
my
friend, and known, without a shadow of a doubt, that you will die in a day, or an hour, in the middle of a public square, with strangers gawking at you. And the thought of that, the thought of watching your death—such a public death—creep nearer, and nearer, terrifies you beyond measure, doesn’t it?” He paused at the end of the bridge. “Your precious integrity has escaped you in the end, and you know you’d be dragged off to the Grève weeping and begging for mercy.”

Aubry twisted away but Aristide seized him again and drew the miniature pistol he kept concealed beneath his coat. “All right, that’s enough,” he said, sliding the pistol into a pocket, near to hand. “You’re coming with me. And if you try to get away, I will empty this pistol into your guts, where it will hurt you very badly indeed before it kills you in a few days’ time. Or perhaps I’ll aim it toward your balls—if you have any, which I’m beginning to doubt.”

“They’ll take
you
up for assault and murder!”

“Come to think of it, I have little to lose.”

“Where are you taking me?” Aubry gasped, breathing hard but offering no more resistance.

“The Grève—where do you think?”

“I beg you—stop this charade.”

“Why should I?”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because I care enough about her to grant her what she most wants!”

They had reached the end of the bridge. He thrust Aubry forward, along the quay. The sound of the procession rose not far behind them.

The Place de Grève. The waiting crowd. The guillotine. Aristide shouldered himself and his unwilling companion toward the low barrier that surrounded the scaffold, growling “Make way!” when they did not yield before a black suit.

“Now,” he told Aubry when they had reached the forefront of the crowd, with a clear view of the guillotine, “you are going to stand here and watch.” Aubry closed his eyes and he seized the young man by both arms and turned him toward the scaffold.

“
Watch,
damn you!”

She was standing, head high, cropped hair dancing about her face in the brisk breeze. The public prosecutor had acceded to her request; she was not wearing the red shirt.

Sanson stood beside her in the cart, one hand gripping the rail, his other arm about her shoulders. From time to time she turned to him and they spoke together. It was a pity, Aristide found himself thinking, that the journey was so short.

The cart rolled to a stop. He might have reached out across the paling and touched it. “Don’t let go,” he thought he heard her say, as someone lowered the cart’s tailboard and Sanson stepped forward.

She saw them as Sanson was handing her down from the cart. Her gaze darted from Aristide to Aubry and back again. She gave Aristide a fleeting half smile and deliberately turned her head away, and Aristide knew she had put them out of her mind, had forgotten Aubry, forgotten her revenge, forgotten everything but the touch of her lover’s hand on her bound wrists.

Aubry ceased struggling with him and stood petrified, his face the color of the overcast sky.

Ten steep steps to the platform. Sanson guided her to the top, his hand always touching hers, though his handsome face was rigid as carved bone. As his assistants reached for her she balked for an instant, long enough to turn and rise on tiptoe and brush her lips across his cheek.

The assistants took hold of her, leading her to the upright plank, buckling the straps, though Sanson kept a hand resting lightly on her shoulder. Sanson stepped away and the plank tipped forward beneath the blade.

“Oh, God,” Aubry whispered.

Aristide had almost forgotten his presence. He tightened his hold, turning him pitilessly toward the guillotine.

A click, a scrape, a dull thud, the three sounds coming so fast upon each other that they were scarcely distinguishable. The crowd applauded.

No one raised the severed head for the spectators to see; that disagreeable, centuries-old custom had ceased with the Terror.

Aubry bent double and retched. His own stomach sour with nausea, Aristide turned away and closed his eyes. When at length he looked about him, the spectators were beginning to drift away and a boy was sponging down the guillotine. The two assistants loaded a long, covered wicker basket into the back of the cart.

Aubry lurched to his feet and Aristide seized hold of him again before he could escape.

“You have no right to hold me!”

“I’ll think of a reason.”

Sanson spoke briefly to the driver and with a gesture sent the cart on its way. Turning, he exchanged a swift silent glance with Aristide before crossing the straw-littered cobbles to him.

“Ravel.”

His gaze flicked to Aubry, who shrank back. He looked the young man up and down for a moment with a hard, impassive stare. “Who’s he?”

“Someone who should have been guillotined today,” said Aristide.

“That’s interesting,” Sanson said, “because last month I was out riding in the afternoon, at Monceau, and I passed a woman struggling with a man in the lilac grove near the follies. I supposed it was lovers’ horseplay and thought nothing more of it until I heard about that woman who’d been found murdered in the gardens. Then I told the police what I’d seen, and described the man… .”

“Did you,” Aristide whispered.

“I look forward to seeing you once again,” Sanson added, to Aubry. “Right here.”

Aubry wrenched his arms from Aristide’s grip and dodged away amid the thinning crowd. Aristide plunged after him but realized in a moment that he had lost him and halted, dizzy, gasping for breath.

“Never mind,” said Sanson, striding up behind him. “He can’t run forever.”

#

Aristide returned to the wine shop under the shadow of the Châtelet later that evening, after the winter twilight had faded into rain and dark. Wordlessly he joined Sanson at his secluded corner table and they sat staring at the wine stains in the battered wood. The candle beside them gently sputtered.

“Is justice served?” Sanson said a long while later.

“Yes.”

“No regrets, no remorse?”

“Only for Célie Montereau and Sidonie Beaumontel.”

“Not a thought for the other one? The murdered man?”

“No more than you have, when you drop your blade on a felon’s neck.”

Sanson nodded. “She paid with her head for what she did, while I’m paid a salary for what I do; but she and I are not so different, are we?”

“You are a servant of the law, like me.”

“Don’t tell me the ends are not the same. We’re both killers, she and I, whether we like it or not. I’m not so new to this trade. I assisted my father for years, even after I’d joined the Guard to escape it.”

He paused, brooding, still avoiding Aristide’s eyes.

“How many during the Terror?” he continued. “How many innocent people did I help to execute while serving the law? She often said we were twin souls … it was truer than we knew.”

#

The message arrived at Rue Traversine the next morning.

Aristide trudged into Brasseur’s office, shut the door behind him, and leaned against it without speaking. Brasseur set his quill down and began to straighten his papers. Outside the window, the fine rain fell silently, glistening on the stones below. “So,” Brasseur said at last, “were you right? It was all about revenge?”