Authors: Susanne Alleyn
“It might be useful to talk to him,” Brasseur said. “Children notice things, you know.”
Yes, Aristide thought, children often had a way of noticing things that should better have remained hidden. He swiftly fixed his gaze on a tall, royal blue porcelain vase with gilt handles, which probably had cost more than Brasseur earned in a year.
“Dear me,” Montereau added, “sometimes I don’t see her for days at a time: my late wife’s old great-aunt, Madame de—pardon me, Citizeness Laroque, lives here. She’s nearly a cripple and rarely leaves her rooms.”
Brasseur scribbled another note. “And the old lady, too, then, if she’s, er, got her wits about her. Did she know Saint-Ange?”
“No, I’m sure she never did; Saint-Ange was related to my first wife, and madame to my second.”
“Were she and Célie at all close?” said Aristide.
“Close?” echoed Montereau. “Well, she’s ninety-four; I doubt they shared a great deal in common. But Célie was fond of her, to be sure. She often visited her.”
“Then perhaps the citizeness can help us,” Aristide said, “if only by allowing us to understand your daughter better. Women, of whatever age, share secrets with each other more readily than they share them with men, especially fathers.”
“Very well, if you wish.” Montereau rang the bell again.
“You go,” Brasseur muttered to Aristide. “I’ll see to the servants. I’m sure you can manage an old dowager better than I can.”
A lackey led Aristide through corridors and up stairways to a distant wing of the house. A curtsying maidservant gestured him inside to a cozy, shabby parlor that smelled of lavender and, more perceptibly, of cats, and shyly announced him as “Monsieur Ravel.” A tiny, wrinkled, black-clad woman, wisps of white hair escaping from beneath her old-fashioned frilled bonnet, peered up at him from the white cat in her lap as he approached her wheeled chair and bowed.
“And who might you be?”
Despite her age, her voice was strong, and the eyes she turned to him were bright and lively. Calling this aristocratic old lady “citizeness” would only vex her, Aristide decided, or at best confuse her.
“I am an agent of the police, madame.”
“The police!” she exclaimed, clutching reflexively at the cat’s thick fur. The cat, disturbed, turned drowsy blue eyes toward him. Madame de Laroque clucked and took a scrap from a half-eaten plate of roast quail beside her. “No kin of mine has ever been entangled with the police,” she declared, feeding the cat. “Of course, there was that unpleasantness with poor Marsillac,” she added, waving a vague hand toward a portrait on the wall, “but he suffered for his indiscretions in the end … well! What is it you want from me?”
“My business here regards your great-grand-niece, madame,” Aristide said.
“Poor Célie,” sighed Madame de Laroque, continuing to feed the cat bits of quail. “Poor child. And after our family withstood this horrid revolution with nothing more than a few inconveniences … and I’m told so many people did lose someone close to them … after all that, to have some monster kill poor little Célie … it must have been a madman. No one could have deliberately murdered her, no one who knew her.” She paused and peered at him. “Are you wearing mourning for the king, too?”
Aristide found himself speechless for an instant before realizing she had mistaken his black suit for mourning costume. He could scarcely remember a time when he had not worn the same austere black; he had worn mourning for his mother and father, as he was told to, when he was nine years old, and somehow had never abandoned it.
“Police officials customarily wear black suits, madame.”
“A police official,” she mused. “The royal lieutenants of police are commonly
noblesse de robe,
I believe, like the magistrates, buying their titles; not
real
nobility. But most of them are of good family, if not quite genuine aristocracy. Are you a gentleman?”
“I hope so, madame.”
Somehow, Aristide thought, the Revolution seemed to have passed Madame de Laroque by without making very much impression upon her. How could one tell such a woman, anchored in the prerevolutionary past, that there was no more royal lieutenant of police in Paris, no more “nobility of the robe” in France, no more nobility at all?
“I shall give you the benefit of the doubt. You may sit down.”
Aristide took the armchair she pointed out to him, after evicting an enormous, sleepy black-and-white cat. “Please, if you would, tell me about Célie.”
“I don’t know what I can tell you. A young thing of twenty isn’t likely to seek advice from an old relic like me. The world has changed so much, you know, since I was a girl. The Grand Monarch himself was still alive in those days, think of that!” She paused, sighing and shaking her head. “To think I could live to see the day when the rabble would actually spill the king’s blood. If the Grand Monarch had been alive …” She stroked the white cat’s head and it arched its neck, purring. “I call
him
the Sun King, just as a little joke, because he’s so regal. Isn’t he beautiful?”
“He’s very handsome,” Aristide agreed. The black-and-white cat leaped onto his lap and he absently scratched its chin. “Madame, what did you and Célie talk about when she visited you? Did she confide in you?”
“Look, Mouchette likes you. What did we talk about? Oh … whatever crossed our minds. My grand-niece—her mother—died four years ago, and I imagine Célie brought me the little quandaries she’d otherwise have taken to her mother. Just small matters of friends and etiquette and so on. Once or twice she said her father had mentioned offers of marriage. She was already in love, of course, and prospective marriage does put a damper on one’s young love affairs.”
“In love?” Aristide echoed her.
Madame de Laroque uttered a sound he interpreted as a refined and ladylike snort. “She was keeping it a secret from her father, I suppose, but it was plain as the nose on your face. Five or six months she came here all smiles and misty-eyed. You can’t hide that when you’re a chit of twenty. Are you married, young man?”
Aristide shook his head. “No, madame.”
“How well do
you
know women?”
“Not well, I fear.”
The old lady snorted again. “I see. Well, I say Célie was in love, no matter what her father may know, or not know. But I’d guess something soured the affair in the end. She wasn’t at all happy the last half-dozen times I saw her.”
“No?”
“Worried, under some strain. I expect her sweetheart had discarded her, though how any man could reject a girl as pretty and tenderhearted as Célie, I’ll never know. But men are often like that. They grow bored with simple goodness and want a woman who is dangerous, a challenge. My great-nephew Marsillac was precisely that sort.” She glanced at the portrait on the wall. Aristide followed her gaze. An elegant young man of thirty, impeccably curled and powdered in the style of 1780, sat gazing coolly out from the painting. “He had a bad reputation, I fear,” the old lady continued, “though he was always courteous and thoughtful to me. But then, he was my heir,” she added dryly, and fell silent.
“He is dead?” Aristide said, hoping to start her talking again.
“Killed in a duel, after debauching one too many women. It was a highly unpleasant scandal. Dear, dear … poor Marsillac … ah, well, it was years ago. What else do you wish to ask me, monsieur?”
“Did Célie ever ask you for money?”
“Money?” said Madame de Laroque sharply. “Yes, in fact she did, not long ago. Said it was terribly urgent. I hadn’t much, but I did have a valuable necklace that I gave her. It ought to have gone to Célie’s mother, but poor Marie-Josèphe died young, too, so it would have gone to Célie in any case when I died.” She shook her head. “We seem to have had more than our share of misfortune in this family of late. First Marsillac, then Josèphe, now poor Célie. And I am convinced it was the doctor who killed Josèphe; she was expecting, and had a miscarriage, and bled to death. And that butcher thought cupping her and bleeding her was the best remedy! Poor Josèphe had had a strong, healthy child just two years before, that scamp Théodore, so I don’t see why she should have died of the next one. And she was only thirty-eight. I don’t suppose you could arrest that doctor and have him up for murder?”
“No, I fear not, madame, not after so much time has passed.”
Madame de Laroque sighed. “Pity. Give me a good trained midwife any day, not these charlatans who spout their Latin. They’ve never had a baby, have they? Let them stick to setting bones and lancing boils.”
Aristide disengaged the cat from his lap and rose, brushing away stray hairs. “I apologize once again for this intrusion—”
“No intrusion, young man. You’ve diverted me for a quarter of an hour. Perhaps,” she added with the air of a queen granting favors, “you will visit me again soon, and tell me what you’ve learned.”
“Of course, madame.”
“Célie’s to be buried tomorrow, Honoré tells me. I daresay you may join the procession if you’re able to. Ten o’clock.”
“If I’m not otherwise engaged.” He avoided funerals when he could; they reminded him far too much of matters he would rather have forgotten.
“Of course,” added the old lady, “you would spend your time more profitably in finding the wretch who killed her. Anyone who could have hurt a dear girl like that—you wouldn’t understand, I suppose, unless you’d known her. Merry and generous and kind-hearted, always, until this silly trouble with a sweetheart… . You ought to have seen her with the child, young Théodore. Most girls wouldn’t bother themselves about a baby brother who was sixteen years younger; they’re far more interested in balls, and new gowns, and dancing and weddings. But as soon as the boy came back from his wet-nurse, Célie adored him, and dandled and cosseted him as if he was a new lapdog, and Josèphe let her do as she liked. Sometimes I think she was generous to a fault—it’s a mercy he hasn’t become a spoiled little monster. But he’s an agreeable child, thank Providence, in spite of her indulging him. Have you met the lad yet?”
Aristide shook his head. “Not yet.”
“Talk to him if you can; small boys always know things. I expect you to find this brute who killed Célie, do you hear me? And send him to the scaffold as he deserves. I hear they’ve done away with hanging, and with breaking on the wheel?”
“Yes, madame.” He kept his voice steady, indifferent. “Several years ago.”
“And now every criminal is allowed to be beheaded, like a gentleman?”
“Yes.”
“That’s far too good for them,” she said with a snap of her mouth like an old, ill-tempered tortoise, and rang the bell for her maid.
“
I hope your visit didn’t distress madame overmuch?” Montereau inquired when Aristide returned, still brushing away white hairs from his waistcoat, to the study where Brasseur and the ex-count awaited him.
“Not at all. Citizen, with your permission, I think we ought to search your daughter’s rooms.”
Montereau rose and led the way. As they approached the broad, curving staircase, a small, fair-haired boy raced down it and skidded to a stop before them.
“Are you the police?” he demanded.
“My son, Théodore,” Montereau said. He let his hand linger for a moment on the boy’s disheveled head before stepping aside and murmuring, “I’ve not yet told him what has happened; all he knows is that Célie is missing.”
“Yes, we’re the police,” said Brasseur, kindly. “I am Commissaire Brasseur and these are Citizens Ravel and Dautry.”
“I want to be a gendarme or a soldier and ride on a horse,” the boy announced. “They have swords, and mustaches, and splendid uniforms. Not like those,” he added, staring from Brasseur to Aristide. The funereal ensemble worn by police officials—black coat, hat, waistcoat, culotte, stockings, and shoes, relieved only by a discreet white cravat—had remained unchanged throughout the Revolution save for the addition of a tricolor sash or cockade.
“Théodore, that’s not polite,” his father said.
Aristide summoned a slight smile. “Let him be, citizen… . It’s the mounted gendarmes who draw all the attention, it’s true, while the police go about looking like undertakers.” Though he privately thought the austere costume suited him, a little self-deprecation often served to put nervous witnesses at ease.
“But do you know what, young Théodore?” said Brasseur. “Those gendarmes in their fancy uniforms are just for show; it’s the commissaires who do all the real work, and catch the criminals and send them to justice.” He patted the boy’s cheek and moved on toward the staircase.
The boy tagged along behind them as they entered the rooms Célie Montereau had occupied. The bedchamber and boudoir were airy and feminine in white and pale spring green. The painted panels of the boiseries lining the walls complemented the figured bed curtains and the rich emerald velvet window curtains and brocade upholstery of the footstools, chairs, and love seat.
Aristide glanced over the small stack of books on a side table.
The Castle of Néville, or, The Orphan Heiress,
read one pair of tooled leather spines.
Works of the Abbé Delille.
The breathless tale of
Caroline, or, The Vicissitudes of Fortune,
filled another three small volumes. Shaking his head at youthful female taste, he shook the books one by one as Brasseur and Dautry advanced gingerly toward the wardrobe and chest of drawers. Aristide did not expect to find anything there, although sometimes girls, like his sister Thérèse, might hide secrets among their underlinen.