Pam Rosenthal (39 page)

Which made it all the more infuriating that the Duchesse had chosen to desert poor little Comte Alphonse Louis whatever-it-was. And that she’d had the gall to announce that “duty” compelled her
to go to Paris, with only Arsène and Hortense for support.

With only…

Sophie began to cry.

“Yes, yes,” Marie-Laure called to her.

“Absolutely,
chérie
,” she cooed as she lifted her from the white basketwork cradle where she slept, “just as soon as we let a little air into this stuffy room.”

Opening the doors that led out to the balcony, she caught a vague glimpse of something stirring in the shadows.

Some leaves, perhaps. The Marquise had said the wisteria needed trimming. The vines had become almost tropical in this hot weather; someone could climb the walls by holding on to their woody stems.

And someone had.

A tall, dark-haired man stepped in from the balcony.

For a dazed moment she thought it must be Joseph. But of course it wasn’t Joseph. It was—ah,
a tall, dark man. Of course. The Baron’s murderer
.

And what Louise had been going to say was: “We wondered how long you’d pretend it wasn’t so,
like Arsène’s sister
.”

Arsène’s sister Manon.

All the servants at the chateau must have known about Manon, she thought. All of them except for the literate girl from the city, the one who wasn’t party to their secrets—and who had been too absorbed in her own romance to notice what was going on.

If I’d been wiser
, Marie-Laure thought guiltily,
I might have been able to help Joseph.

Arsène looked dreadful. She could hardly recognize the handsome, circumspect footman from the chateau. His skin was livid, cheeks sunken, teeth bared. A knife blade glinted at his hand.

Clearly, his revenge on the Baron hadn’t satisfied him. Holding the baby close, she wondered what he saw when he looked at her. Nothing good, she decided.

His eyes seemed to soften for a moment, though, when they fell on Sophie. Thank heaven, she thought. Somehow she was sure he wouldn’t harm Sophie.

“The baby’s hungry, Arsène.” She tried to keep her voice casual, offhand. “Let me feed her.”

He nodded.

“But don’t try screaming for help.” He locked the door to the hallway.

She shook her head, sat in her rocking chair, loosened her dressing gown, and lifted Sophie to her breast.

Too restless to sit, he planted himself a few feet in front of her, a dark looming presence, his knife and eyes glinting unsteadily, like the light of a guttering candle.

“And so you’re installed at Versailles with the Duchesse?” Absurd, she thought, to be making polite conversation. Still, perhaps he needed to talk. The trouble was that she’d never really spoken to him before. Among the clatter and hum of the dessert kitchen, he’d been a silent, circumspect, and rather straitlaced presence.

“Versailles must be quite a change for you,” she added. “A change from the chateau at Carency, I mean.”

He shrugged. “No change. Just a deeper circle of hell.”

He cast a contemptuous glance over her pretty dressing gown. “But
you’ve
done rather well for yourself, haven’t you?”

“The Marquise is very generous.” She stroked Sophie’s flower-petal cheek with a fingertip.

“
Her.
” He sneered. “I’ve heard the gossip about
her
. Her and the other one, too. What sorts of filthy things did you have to do with them to get them to be so generous?

“But perhaps you enjoyed it,” he continued. “Perhaps you were as shameless with them as you were with your precious Vicomte.”

She supposed she had been shameless with Joseph. Well, love
was
shameless, wasn’t it?

“My sister wasn’t like that,” he told her.

He stopped, his eyes betraying the awful fear that perhaps his sister
had
been like that—perhaps she’d been worse—with the Baron Roque. Marie-Laure kept her eyes on his face, waiting until he could speak again.

“But at least,” he continued, “Manon had the…the decency…the modesty…the respect for a brother who loved her more than anything in the world…”

He seemed to have lost the ability to speak.

“To kill herself.” Marie-Laure finished his sentence when it became clear that he couldn’t.

“To kill herself rather than tell you that the Baron Roque had gotten her pregnant.” She said it as gently as she could, allowing herself to feel something of the grief beneath his hatred.

For a moment he looked almost grateful that she’d said it. And then a shudder of unspeakable rage contorted his features.

“She wasn’t a whore like you,” he said, “flaunting your happiness for everyone to see and then—even after he deserted you—still so proud of carrying his bastard.”

“He
didn’t
desert me. He would have come to help me. If…if
you
hadn’t planted the ring on him.” She felt rather foolish, having taken so much time to figure that part out.

He chuckled. “When the inspector came to search us, Nicolas told me to hide it in the forest. All right, I said, all right, it’s all taken care of. He’d be furious—all those silly fools would be furious to know what I really did with it.”

Ah.
Somehow it mattered to her, that only Arsène was responsible for Joseph being in the Bastille. Not Nicolas, Bertrande, Louise…

He snorted; her relief must have been obvious. “Oh yes, they all wanted to help you. They’d sit around the dessert kitchen, jabbering about you and your Vicomte like it was a fairy story with a happy-ever-after ending. I kept trying to make them understand that anybody who consorts with aristocrats is a fool or a traitor.”

“My brother,” she heard herself saying pleasantly, “is in complete agreement with you.

“But Nicolas supported you, in any case,” she added. “At least enough to lie about where you’d been at the time of the murder.”

He nodded. “He wrote down in his records that I was sick that week. Other fellows did my work for me. They’re good, I’m not saying they’re not, but they’re weak. They understood my business with the Baron Roque, but they were soft on their own precious Vicomte. I couldn’t make them understand that it’s all the same thing.”

For a moment there was just the sound of her chair rocking back and forth, while she shifted Sophie to the other breast.

“And so you think I should suffer as deeply as your sister did,” she said.

“You’ll
never
suffer as she did,” he told her. “You’ll die quickly. I don’t have time for anything else.”

She tried to concentrate upon the chair’s comforting rhythms, and on keeping her breathing slow and even. Sophie continued to suck, her big trusting eyes trained steadily on Marie-Laure’s face.

Oddly, even Arsène calmed down a bit.

“She was a bit feebleminded, you know, though by and large people didn’t notice it.” His voice became confiding, conversational.

“They only saw how beautiful she was. Statuesque, I guess you’d say. I was proud of her, of course, but I was scared too. I didn’t want her to work for the Baron; I tried to get the Gorgon to hire her, but of course she wouldn’t, and of course the Baron wasn’t going to hire me—he wouldn’t want anybody to look out for her… I learned later,” he said flatly, “that the Baron used to joke about her with his cronies. Said he’d found the perfect woman—no mind at all to interfere with his pleasures.”

She must have made some sort of outraged sound. He paused, stone-faced.

“But when her pregnancy began to show more than he found attractive”—his voice became harsher—“he gave her a gold
louis
and threw her out. She used the money to buy arsenic.”

She stopped rocking and stared at him, ignoring Sophie’s restless whimpers.

“The baby’s had enough,” he told her then. “Burp her and put her in her cradle.”

She looked down at the baby in surprise. He was right; Sophie
had
had enough.

“I learned all about babies,” he told her, “when I was eight. I fed Manon with a bottle of goat’s milk after our mother died. She wouldn’t have survived without me—not that our father would have cared, or even noticed.” He shrugged. “And not, I suppose, that it mattered in the long run.”

Absurdly, he handed her a towel to protect the shoulder of her robe. “I’ve been a servant for too long,” he said with a grimace, “but I’m finished with all that now.”

Hearing his story had drained her of energy. But it seemed that her only hope was to keep him talking.

“And then what will you do?” she asked. “Besides be a servant, I mean.”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he reached out a powerful hand. She shrank back and held the baby tightly, while he methodically stroked an index finger along Sophie’s little spine, bringing a string of bubbles up and out of the baby’s mouth.

“Now put her into her basket and kiss her good night,” he said.

His voice was cold, final, and quiet.

Good night.

Slowly crossing the room to Sophie’s basket, she breathed the clean, innocent baby smell, all milk and lilies of the valley. Good night, Sophie Madeleine, little cookie, cabbage, angel—funny, all the names you gave a baby when you cuddled and cooed to it. She knelt to kiss the little face, already half asleep; to stroke, one last time, the tiny eyebrow with its precise flaring arch. She felt his eyes on her from across the room. She heard his shallow, excited breathing—his eagerness to destroy the girl who’d gotten away with what his sister had died for.

Good night, Sophie.

All over Paris, bells tolled eleven. Sophie stirred, whimpered a bit, and then closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.

Marie-Laure raised her head from the basket and turned back to face Arsène. Was she imagining it, or was there a shadow on the balcony behind him?

She had to keep his attention fixed on her.

She spoke more loudly. “The misery won’t go away after you kill me, you know. You won’t bring her back.”

Yes, there was definitely someone out there. A man had climbed up while the bells had been ringing. Clever of him, she thought wildly; no one had heard him over the sounds of the bells.
But how ever had he managed to escape?
No matter. She was sure. The shadow that was rapidly becoming flesh and creeping silently behind Arsène, raising his knife (
but how had he managed to get a knife?
) was clearly…

“Don’t kill him, Joseph!”

It must have been me who screamed that, she thought.

For a tiny slice of time, she could see a spark of surprise in Joseph’s eyes—before Arsène whirled around, all a blur, to lunge for him. Joseph leaped back. They circled each other warily, thrusting with their knives, knocking over furniture as they went. Sophie began to scream, and Marie-Laure ran to the basket, pushing it into a corner and shielding it behind her.

Advance and repel. Thrust and parry. Joseph fought coldly, elegantly, his moves like dance figures, while Arsène lumbered about, single-minded, outraged. Their styles were so ill-matched that she couldn’t tell which of them had the advantage.

She heard cries and pounding at the door Arsène had locked. The Marquise, Mademoiselle Beauvoisin. And every servant in the house.

She inched away from her corner, carefully drawing Sophie’s basket with her. But it was a slow business, because the two men were moving closer to her now and she needed to keep herself between them and the screaming baby.

A surprisingly quick move from Arsène; a thin red slash appeared on Joseph’s cheek.

Was it deep? Was Arsène gaining ground?

Joseph’s expression was impassive. The pounding at the door had stopped. Perhaps—she hoped—they’d gone to get the police.

The two men were on the floor now, wrestling, grunting, both of them smeared with blood, their knives terrible at such proximity. There must be a way to help Joseph, she thought: perhaps a well-placed vase to Arsène’s head, as in a comedy. No, this wasn’t comedy. She saw Joseph’s hand squeezing Arsène’s wrist, trying to get him to drop his knife. Was he strong enough?

An angry grunt from Arsène now—Joseph must know something about dirty fighting, she thought—and the knife clattered to the floor, with a bloody, panting Joseph pinning Arsène beneath him and clearly possessing the advantage.

The relief that flooded through her was oddly shaded with resentment.
Of course he has the advantage,
she thought,
he was
born
with the advantage.

She picked up Sophie and opened the door. Not a moment too soon: a police inspector was aiming his pistol at the lock. The Marquise had a poker in her hand, while Mademoiselle Beauvoisin had armed herself with a curling iron. There were a few more policemen, Monsieur du Plessix cowering behind them.

“Arsène has confessed to killing the Baron Roque,” she told the police inspector quietly. She opened her mouth again, to say something else, she supposed, but there were no more words. Just tears—for Manon and the brother who had loved her so much.