Pam Rosenthal (21 page)

His eye slid down the page of last-minute exclamations and well-wishes. And then back up to her observations about Monsieur X and “love’s exigencies.”

He stood up, bowing to his brother and sister-in-law. “A thousand pardons, Monsieur and Madame,” he murmured, “but I must leave you to each other’s charming devices. I need to…”

He didn’t know what he needed to do. Walk, ride—or plunge into the river and swim until the cold water calmed his blood. For he’d just had an idea that was either completely wonderful or entirely crazy. He wasn’t sure which, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to puzzle it out among the present dreary company.

As though drunk on his thoughts, he stumbled out of the room, after waiting what felt like a week for an uncharacteristically slow Arsène to open the door for him.

The impending journey—just three days hence now—meant an enormous amount of packing for the servants, not to speak of washing, ironing, and mending. Madame Amélie’s wardrobe would fill seven trunks. Small items like jewelry needed to be inventoried and packed carefully. The necklace the old Duchesse had promised for the bride would be carried in Monsieur Joseph’s pocket during the nine-day coach ride to Paris. Lisette, the old Duchesse’s chambermaid, had invited Louise and Bertrande for a glance at it that morning while her mistress was at her prayers—for she’d be returning to the convent the next morning.

“The colors, the sparkles,” Louise marveled later in the dessert kitchen, “it’s like bits of a cathedral window I once saw in Aix. Those blue stones are like wearing a piece of paradise against your throat.”

Even Bertrande was awestruck. “I should think that if you sold it you’d get enough to feed all of France.”

“It’s too beautiful to sell,” Louise said dreamily. “It’s something for a man to give to someone he loves.”

“Instead of to a fat old thing he’s been forced to marry,” Bertrande snapped.

“Shhhhh!” It sounded rather harsh in Louise’s mouth, but the other two women knew what it meant. And sympathetic silence reigned as a pale, exhausted-looking Marie-Laure came in from the scullery for a cup of reheated coffee to help her through the workday.

Poor thing,
thought Louise,
I wish she’d confide in me, but she thinks I’m too pious to bear hearing the truth of these past weeks. And perhaps she doesn’t know how she weeps in her sleep, the hours before daylight.

She’ll get over him
, thought Lisette, and all the better for her, too.
And next time she’ll be wiser and get more than a few scraps of lace and velvet out of Monsieur Whoever-It-Is.

As long as she’s been careful
, thought Bertrande, letting herself remember, just for an instant, the child she’d left, one gray early morning long ago, on the steps of an orphanage. But the memory was too sharp to be endured for more than an instant, so she stood and quit the room, dragging Louise with her, and scolding her soundly for the poor state of the carpets in the chateau’s north wing.

It’s ending. Perhaps it’s already over.

The flat words seemed to accompany every breath Marie-Laure took, lodged like something hard in her chest. Was it her imagination, she thought as he had something difficult to tell her?

Perhaps
, she thought,
he doesn’t want to see me anymore—perhaps, in his mind, he’s already living with his new wife in Paris.

Well, she could hardly disapprove of that. He should be thinking of her and not of me, she told herself; even a loveless, arranged marriage deserves some respect.

Not that he hadn’t been ardent or energetic last night. On the contrary: he’d plowed her until she was raw. Which was exactly the trouble. Whatever else was inspiring him, his lovemaking didn’t have the
esprit
she’d become accustomed to, the sweet attentiveness or sly wit.

He’s not thinking about me anymore
, she thought.
Perhaps I shouldn’t visit him tonight.

But she knew that she would. For at this point in time—only two more nights before his departure—she’d settle for whatever she could get.

The interview with the police inspector had been as diverting as the Duchesse had hoped: diverting and even—in a louche sort of way—rather exhilarating. “Yes, Monsieur Lebrun,” she’d murmured, “of course my husband and I knew the Baron Roque. A very old family you know. It was a great shock.”

She’d allowed her shoulders to slump, as though weighed down by the magnitude of the crime. It was difficult, she told him, for a person of sensibility to hear such sordid things, from someone so close to the official investigation.

And was it true about the blood in the crème brûlée?

The inspector nodded gravely.
Mais oui,
Madame, in
that
respect it had been just as the scandal sheets had reported. But in other ways it was even more interesting…

Basking in her attention, he’d painted a vivid picture of the crime, pausing only for sips of coffee and bites of excellent pastry. Horrible, the Duchesse agreed, to think of the Baron gagged and bound to his chair as he slowly bled to death from a hideous stump of a wrist; his murderer had severed the hand from his right arm.

She nodded. The Baron had been the vilest of old-guard snobs, with a corrosive sense of humor. His jokes about her own less-than-aristocratic forebears had been repeated in high circles, and everyone (though not a common police inspector, she suspected) knew that he’d sworn never to call upon her.

“Didn’t he have a bodyguard?”

“Yes, and a huge hulking professional of a fellow too. Who’d suddenly been taken ill that day. They’d even had the doctors—the bodyguard had been vomiting horribly.”

“And the hand was never found?”

“No, Madame la Duchesse. Which may provide a clue, for he always wore a brilliant ruby ring on that hand—we’re expecting the ring to turn up at a fence sooner or later. We suspect a crime of passion, given the Baron’s record of amours, but we’re not ruling out simple theft. It’s a most valuable ring.”

“But how does one cut off a hand?”

“Slowly and most painfully in this case, Madame. With a knife, it seems, though the weapon has never been found. All we know is that a tall, dark man was seen fleeing the Baron’s Montpellier townhouse soon after the murder.”

The truth was that the police had made no progress at all. The case, which had dragged on now for more than half a year, had become a severe embarrassment.

It didn’t help matters that the Baron had been hated by his servants and peasants. The murderer must have had some help from the household staff; at the very least, the police surmised, his servants had looked the other way. Nobody had been very forthcoming under interrogation, but they’d all worked up convincing alibis nonetheless.

The Baron had no close family. And his distant relatives, all of them squabbling to lay claim to his property, could all prove they’d been many leagues away from Montpellier the day of the murder. A chambermaid had died a week or so before, but that had proved to be a suicide, not a murder, and didn’t seem to have any bearing on the case. So there were virtually no clues to what looked embarrassingly like a miniature revolution.

“Which is why, Madame la Duchesse, we’ve been investigating common people who might have a grudge against the Baron. And given our suspicions of complicity by his household staff, we’re particularly interested in servants.

“Of course,” he added apologetically, “we hadn’t thought we’d have to take the investigation to this side of the Rhone, but…”

Unfortunately she’d had no information for him. No, all her servants had been accounted for, the day of the murder. Well, surely she’d know, Monsieur, if any of them had been off to visit family members or anything like that. And the only newcomer to her household was an insignificant girl in the scullery—quite common enough, but certainly not the tall, dark man he was looking for. But she’d certainly keep a sharp eye out—and yes, it would be quite permissible to interrogate the household staff. He might even search their quarters and their possessions. She, and of course her husband, were leaving for Paris, quite soon—a wedding, very charming, yes, another very old family—but she’d tell her general manager to cooperate in any way he could.

He’d nodded gratefully. “Yes, thank you, Madame la Duchesse, I’d hoped to get your husband’s permission—or yours, of course. Always need the cooperation of the ruling nobility when one is out of one’s local jurisdiction.” But that, he hastened to assure her, was as it should be—Inspector Lebrun had only the most profound respect for local authority.

The Duchesse could hardly restrain herself, that night at dinner, from repeating the inspector’s story. She’d already explained it all to Nicolas, but the horrific details only got more interesting the more one dwelt on them. Being at the table, she was forced to elide the goriest parts; her enthusiasm, however, more than made up for her lack of specificity.

“They think it was a tall, dark man.” She helped herself to the hothouse asparagus Arsène held out for her, put down the serving implements, and turned to Joseph with a smirk.

“I hope
you
have a suitable alibi, Monsieur le Vicomte.”

What was that?
He looked up, startled to be dragged away from his thoughts—of the dimples below the small of Marie-Laure’s back, and of burying his tongue in one of them after slowly kissing his way along the bumps in her spine.

He’d teased himself with images of her all through dinner, distracting himself from the decision that faced him, and paying barely a whit of attention to the conversation.

Where were we? Oh yes, the unspeakable Baron Roque.

Hubert turned to him. “Actually, you were in Montpellier just around the time of the murder, weren’t you? I seem to remember Madame de Rambuteau saying something like that in one of her letters.”

Joseph shrugged. “I was delivering smuggled books, as every bookseller in Montpellier can attest. No thank you, Arsène, no more asparagus for me.”

His father might have liked the idea of smuggling forbidden literature; a pity he’d never told him. Amélie pretended to be scandalized, but Hubert tried for a thoughtful expression.

“I don’t approve of it. Not for the general run of people, anyway. Subversive literature erodes their respect for authority.

“Nor,” he continued, “does it sound like the best of alibis. For if you actually ever were accused of the murder, you’d have to get those booksellers to testify for you in court. And why should they let on that they were buying illegal books?”

Mon Dieu
, it was all so boring. Still, he supposed Hubert was right.

“Well, that would rather compromise my alibi, wouldn’t it? My only other defense, Monsieur and Madame, is that I’d had enough of the Baron years before, having once bested him quite decisively in a duel. He was a tiresome gentleman, really; I pity anyone who’d have to endure his company for the length of time it would take to dispatch him.”

A chorus of laughter greeted this sally.

“Then you’re clearly not the murderer.” Hubert nodded. “And your secret is safe with us.”

Should have denied I was there
, Joseph thought.
My secret’s probably only safe as long as I bring in that dowry.
Still, he was going to bring in the dowry so in the end it didn’t really matter. “Thank you, Monsieur, I trust that it is.”

And rather more politely, over his shoulder, “Yes, I’m quite finished, thank you, Arsène.”

His participation in the conversation no longer required, he retreated back into his meditations while Arsène served the fish course and Amélie complained about the state of the chateau’s carpets.

The dimples above the swell of her buttocks. The swooping curve of her nape below her waves of hair. The weight of her legs slung over his shoulders as she lifted herself to receive him. Her eyes. Her lips.

He moved his hand over the cut-crystal goblet. No, no more wine.
And get your mind off those dimples as well, Joseph.
He’d need a clear head if he were to make this all-important decision.

His thoughts occupied him through the rest of dinner, and later as well, as he made his way back to his bedchamber through a precarious, half-demolished corridor, the walls swathed in scaffolding and drop cloths, the silvery stone soon to be hidden from sight by the Duchesse’s mirrors and molded plaster.

Chapter Sixteen

What a relief, he thought an hour later, finally to have made up his mind.

And now that he had, he was astonished that it had taken him so long to do so. Absurd even to consider doing otherwise, and foolish to dither about it until the last minute. Well, almost the last minute: he, Hubert, and Amélie would be departing the day after tomorrow.

Still, better late than never. What was important was the decision he’d made. He grinned, imagining himself telling Marie-Laure about it. But perhaps, he thought at the next moment, she wouldn’t be as surprised as all that. She knew him so well, after all; she was probably wondering why he hadn’t announced it already.

He had Baptiste lay out the new dressing gown: satin, and of a brilliant blue the tailor had told him was called “Queen’s Eyes.” It was the sort of thing a gentleman might wear on his wedding night, to do his duty by a blushing, innocent bride. But perhaps you could consider tonight a sort of wedding night. The start of a new life for the two of them.