Authors: Susanne Alleyn
“Is it certain, then?” The color rose in her cheeks and as quickly faded as she eagerly stepped forward. “They’re going to arrest this Aubry?”
“I shouldn’t mention any names.”
“You think I’m likely to run to the man who murdered my friend,” she retorted, “and warn him?”
“Without mentioning any names … we need to confirm some particulars, but yes, it’s likely they’ll arrest him. Of course, once they question him, he may offer some perfectly sound explanation for his movements.”
She sat on the sofa and gestured Aristide to one of the chairs. “His movements?”
He seated himself and soon found himself, despite his reservations, telling her what they had learned.
“What was in the letter?” Rosalie inquired when he was done.
“I don’t know. But I can guess. It seems to have upset him. If indeed he rushed out to commit murder as soon as he’d read it, I’d be willing to guess he’d learned—”
A stout middle-aged woman swept into the parlor, a mousy girl of eighteen behind her, and took a stand at the other end of the sofa with a brisk “Good day, madame.”
“Good day, Citizeness Letellier,” said Rosalie, frostily, evidently accustomed to her fellow boarder’s manner. “Good day, Laure.”
“So you have a visitor, do you?” Madame Letellier inquired sweetly. “How unusual.”
With scrupulous courtesy that did not quite disguise her vexation, Rosalie introduced Aristide to Madame Letellier and her niece. “But we mustn’t disturb you,” she added smoothly, before Madame Letellier, with a glance at her diffident and unmarried charge, could proceed to ask Aristide who and what he was. “Citizen Ravel was just about to escort me to the gardens. We’ll leave you in privacy.”
He played along with her subterfuge and waited, hands clasped behind him, in the chilly parlor while she fetched her jacket and shawl. Madame Letellier plumped herself down on the sofa and eyed him.
“Are you a relative?”
“No, merely an acquaintance. A friend we shared in common died quite suddenly, not long ago.” He suspected that the gossip would be all over the boardinghouse by nightfall if he were to mention the word “police.” “Doesn’t the citizeness receive many callers?”
“Never the one, save the young lady who called sometimes in her own carriage. You’d think there would be a gentleman visitor, of course, but she doesn’t show any signs of wanting to remarry, though she’s not bad-looking. But I suppose it’s her lack of fortune.” Madame Letellier sighed wheezily. “Not that Madame Ferré—Madame Clément, I mean—”
“Ferré?”
“Hasn’t she told you? She changed her name after her husband was condemned by that horrible tribunal—as I was saying, Madame Clément never behaves without the utmost decorum. We have two young bachelors in this house, students, and several more among the folk who take only their dinners here; and a few of them have flirted with her from time to time. But she won’t give them the time of day. Now if they would just pay as much attention to my Laure …” She glanced at the girl again, who blushed and gazed miserably at the floor.
“I’m sure someone will soon pay the proper attentions to Citizeness Laure,” Aristide said, retreating as he spied Rosalie at the bottom of the staircase.
“Tedious old cow,” Rosalie remarked once they were well free of the boardinghouse and on their way to the gardens. “The worst magpie in the house. I hope you didn’t tell her you work for the police.”
“Not a word.”
“That was considerate of you. Now—you were about to suggest Aubry had learned something from that letter. What did you mean? That it had told him … about Célie?”
“The affair seems to be connected to that, yes.” Aristide paused for a moment at the gates to the gardens and bought a double measure of roasted chestnuts from a man with a handcart, carrying them away in his upturned hat. “But it wasn’t Saint-Ange who wrote that letter; his servant swears he hadn’t written anything for at least two or three days before he was murdered, and it only takes a day at most for the district post to cross Paris. So who did? And who else knew the truth?”
They strolled farther past the fading flowerbeds, discarding chestnut hulls as they went. “But such a secret as that,” said Rosalie. “Célie would never have told anyone. She certainly never told me. Let one rumor get about, true or not, and your reputation is shattered forever. You’re only guessing at what this letter said, aren’t you?”
They paused at a bench beside the Medici Grotto, the hatful of roast chestnuts upside down between them. She absently peeled another chestnut as she gazed into the murky basin of the fountain, foul with decaying leaves. “Perhaps this letter merely repeated some rumors about her to Aubry,” she suggested at last. “Célie could be giddy at times, you know. A spiteful acquaintance might have played on some foolish but perfectly innocent behavior of hers, and let Aubry believe the worst.”
“Could Célie have had any enemies?”
“Everybody in fashionable society has enemies. No matter who you are, an ugly woman will envy you your beauty, or a poor man will envy you your fortune, or an unhappy woman will envy you your lover, or an ill-tempered shrew will envy you your sweet disposition. Célie was pretty, amiable, and wealthy. Plenty of people, women especially, must have envied her to the point of hatred, and while they’d fall short of murder, they wouldn’t have hesitated to sow a few rumors about her.”
“But if that’s the case, this letter-writer must have known that Philippe Aubry was in love with Célie,” Aristide said, reaching into his hat for another chestnut. Rosalie reached for one at the same moment and their fingers brushed. Her hand was warm, despite the autumn chill, but it twitched away at his touch. Carefully, without pulling out a chestnut, she withdrew her hand and huddled into the folds of her shawl.
“And Célie kept their love affair a secret even from her closest friend, Citizeness Villemain,” Aristide continued, behaving as if nothing had happened, although her touch had sent a tingle through him. “I think you were the only person she told about it. Perhaps someone among Aubry’s friends, rather than Célie’s, knew of the affair.”
“Revealing disagreeable secrets is the sort of spiteful thing a woman would do if she wanted a young man for herself.” Rosalie’s voice was steady, remote. “A woman might have seen them together and guessed the rest. If Aubry is as attractive as you say, plenty of women must wish he would look their way.”
“It’s too cold to sit here,” Aristide said, seeing her shiver. He unbuttoned his overcoat. She made a few token protests as he draped it about her, but gratefully pulled it around her shoulders. “Would you care to stroll a bit more? Or shall I walk you home?”
“Our daily platter of roast gristle is served at one. I ought to go back, or that old cat will start to gossip.”
He shook the last bits of the chestnut hulls from his hat and donned it, then impulsively offered Rosalie his arm. After an instant’s hesitation she slid her arm within his, though he could feel how rigid it was, and together they walked back toward the gates.
#
Brasseur had received word from François by the time Aristide returned to Rue Traversine. “The final confirmation,” Brasseur told him, waving a crumpled letter. “François says he’s narrowed the manservant’s recollections down to the tenth, as close as can be hoped for. We’ll see what Aubry himself has to say.”
“Are you bringing him in, then?” Aristide said.
“If the commissaire of his section agrees. Would you care to come along to identify him? You’re the only one here who knows him by sight.”
Aristide did not, in truth, wish to accompany them on their errand, but he nodded. “If you want.”
One of the soldiers they had brought with them hammered at the door. Aristide waited at the rear of the group, behind the commissaire of the Théâtre-Français section, a second soldier, Brasseur, and the bewildered porter, fighting to keep his composure as the sound assailed his ears like the nailing of a coffin lid.
Why did I agree to this,
he wondered, rubbing icy hands together in an unsuccessful attempt to warm them.
The door opened. “These citizens,” the porter faltered, “they say they have an order to take Citizen Aubry in for questioning.”
Astonished, Brelot fell back, protesting that his master was still at breakfast, as the two soldiers pushed their way inside the apartment, Commissaire Dumas and Brasseur behind them. “We want Aubry,” said Dumas.
“I am Aubry,” the young man said, coming forward, a bowl of breakfast coffee in one hand. He was still in shirtsleeves, his cravat hanging untied about his neck. His clothes were plain but elegant in their simplicity; clearly he disdained the fantastically exaggerated styles the dandies and
incroyables
had adopted. Brasseur glanced at Aristide and he nodded.
“That’s he.”
Brelot peered at him, recognizing his voice. Abruptly his features took on the mingled fear and contempt that Aristide had grown accustomed to seeing when folk discovered they had spoken too freely before a police spy.
An agent of the police,
he corrected himself.
Aubry’s unnatural pallor grew more waxen still. “Why are you here, and what do you want?”
How I detest this part of it,
Aristide thought, his own nerves wound tight as a harpsichord string. Dumas stepped forward and threw open his overcoat to reveal the tricolor sash draped across his chest.
“I am Commissaire Dumas of the Section du Théâtre-Français. Are you called Philippe-Marie-Jean Aubry, residing at the Cour de Rouen?”
The formal phrases were reassuring.
“Yes, of course.”
“I order you, in the name of the law, to follow me before the justice of the peace. You’re summoned for questioning in relation to the murders—”
“Murders!”
“—of Marie-Célie-Josèphe-Élisabeth Montereau and Jean-Louis Saint-Ange on the tenth of Brumaire. Come with us, if you please.”
“Come with you where? I’ve done nothing. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Do you deny that you knew Citizeness Montereau, then?” Dumas inquired, glancing at a secretary who began to scribble notes.
“No—no, of course not. Where are you taking me?”
“To the commissariat of this section, and before the justice of the peace within twenty-four hours,” Brasseur said. “He’ll decide the rest.”
Brasseur’s voice sounded suddenly alien, a cold and passionless monotone.
No wonder I wouldn’t ever want Brasseur’s job,
Aristide brooded;
I am like a squeamish huntsman, who lives for the chase but who can’t abide the bloody carnage of the kill.
“Very well,” said Aubry, after a moment’s hesitation. “Plainly there has been some mistake. I want to clear my name before this nonsense goes any farther.”
“That’s for the magistrate to decide,” Dumas said, impassive.
“Let me dress. Is it cold today?”
“Yes, citizen. Cold and wet.”
Aristide eyed the man whom he had sworn, a fortnight before, to find, and clasped icy hands behind his back.
Please, God, let him be the right one; let there be no doubt about him, no doubt at all.
Out of the corner of his eye he caught both their reflections in a tall mirror set in the wall; he looked, he realized, as ashen as the prisoner.
#
“
They detained Philippe Aubry for questioning today,” he told Rosalie, once again facing her across the boardinghouse parlor. He could not help but notice that she kept the faded, seat-sprung sofa between them.
“He did it, then.”
“All the evidence points that way.”
“When will they try him?”
“First he must go before a magistrate in his section, tomorrow, along with the principal witnesses for the police case against him. If the judge thinks our case valid, he’ll formally arrest Aubry and send him on to a jury of accusation, which will decide if he should be tried before a full jury at the Criminal Tribunal.”
“Such a waste of time,” she declared scornfully. “If you say the evidence is against him, why shouldn’t he be tried immediately?”
“The process is intended to safeguard the innocent from overzealous public prosecutors,” he told her, adding ruefully, “and overzealous police, too.”
“It didn’t help that poor man whom they guillotined because they thought he was a bandit.”
“The Lyons Mail affair was mismanaged,” he said, swiftly thrusting aside the memory of Sanson’s quiet words:
We’ve executed an innocent man.
“Lesurques was unlucky; he was arrested almost by chance. But here we have the right man, beyond doubt; a man who knew Célie, wrote her letters. Brasseur obtained some specimens of his handwriting and they match the letters I showed you. And it looks as if he can’t account for where he was on the evening of the tenth. Never fear, he’ll get what’s due him.”
“The guillotine, I hope. That’s all such a man is fit for … a man who could murder someone like Célie …” Abruptly she squeezed her eyes shut and bent her head.
“The beast,” she burst out a moment later, “the
beast
! She loved him, and he killed her. She never deserved that … she was good and kindhearted and happy, and she had everything, she ought to have been happy, and she loved him with all her heart, and he
killed
her… .”