The Black Tower (20 page)

C
HARLES IS LURED
to an adjoining room, the Baronne de Préval is hustled out back in a soft squall of wool, I’m tasked with replacing the Villon etching over the peephole, and Vidocq…well, he props his feet on the lip of the desk and bends his shoulders back and says:

“The problem, Hector, the real
problem
is there’s no body.”

“What do you mean?”

“Marie-Antoinette’s remains, those were found. Same with the King’s. But they’ve never found Louis-Charles’ body. And without a
body
…” He squints his eyes down. “Without a body, we can’t say for sure the dauphin died all those years ago. We can’t say anything for sure.”

He swivels round in his chair and contemplates the pink penumbra around Sainte-Chapelle.

“The Baroness is right,” he says at last. “The Duchess is the one woman who can tell us if our boy is the real article. And she’s the last one I’d dare approach.”

For another minute he sits there, weighing all the considerations. Then, with a slow-mounting growl, he says:

“Tell Charles he’s going on another trip tomorrow.
Northward
this time.”

“May I tell him where?”

“The abbey of Saint-Denis. See if that sets his balls aquiver.”

C
HARLES
I
CAN’T
speak for, but something in
me
certainly vibrates. How could it not? The town of Saint-Denis is the final resting place of France’s rulers. Charles Martel, Henry the Second, Louis the Fourteenth…one by one, the mummified husks of our kings have been deposited in these dripping crypts.

For a time, it’s true, the revolutionaries turned the basilica into a Temple to Reason, then a town hall, then a military hospital. Wheat was threshed on its floors. But a Gothic church can never entirely escape its origins, and the Bourbons have had the good sense to make it once more the mausoleum it so devoutly wants to be.

Saint-Denis is only six miles from Paris, but the trip, in its early stages, is all hills. Vidocq’s horse isn’t used to them. It groans in its harness, lurches and slides, swallows down oceans of water. Some two hundred yards short of the Montmartre buttes, we have to get out of the carriage and walk. But the road decants as we pass through the Porte Saint-Denis, and the buildings fall away, and Charles is able at last to doze off—with the same unconditional surrender he showed on the trip from Saint-Cloud.

“Christ,” says Vidocq. “Does he do anything but sleep?”

At a little after ten, the Seine crooks west, and before us spreads a plain, swirling round a walled town. From inside the walls come vendor cries, the stinging sound of a whip, the inquiries of cows. And then, when you least expect it, the abbey bells: shivering everything else into nothing.

“Time to get to work,” says Vidocq.

Reaching under his seat, he draws out a cardboard tube, from which he extracts a map, marked at intervals with charcoal.

“The necropolis is
there,
” he says, spreading the map between us. “You can’t go straight in, you have to come at it through the abbey. Now this
particular
crypt has a gate leading out of the Lady Chapel…
there,
you see? The gate is locked, usually, but today the verger has orders to leave it open, from eleven to twelve.”

“Why don’t they just open it when she comes?”

“She hates calling attention to herself. It’s why she dresses so drably, she wants to slip past with no one the wiser. Now listen to me. Under no circumstances are you to follow her. Your job is just to hang around till she comes out again.”

“And then what?”

“You fasten Charles onto your arm, you take a little stroll. Right in front of her, the quickest of passes. Say ‘Good day, Madame’ if you like, but don’t mention her name
or
her title. Bow—smile—walk on. Is that clear?”

Through the morning musk, the town wall sharpens into view. Like something scissored out of an old codex.

“What if something goes wrong?” I ask.

“I’ll be there in the nave with you. Something happens you can’t handle, give me a signal.”

“What signal?”

“How the fuck should I know? Pat your head, pinch your
ass,
will that do, Monsieur Give-Me-a-Signal?”

“There has to be an easier way,” I murmur.

Frowning, he scrolls up the map, pushes it back into its tube.

“If she recognizes him, Hector, our job is going to be a lot easier. And if she
doesn’t
recognize him—well, we’ll come to that in due course.”

T
HE FIRST CREATURE
to greet us inside the town walls is an Ile-de-France ewe that clambers up the side of our carriage, giving a bleat of such unvarnished welcome that it jars Charles straight awake.

“Where are we?” he cries.

“In the graveyard of kings,” Vidocq says. “You’ll love it, I promise.”

Ten minutes later, Charles is tugging on my sleeve.

“Can we go now?”

Because there’s nothing to see, really. Thanks to the carnage of the Revolution, the niches are empty, the floors are scarred, flagstones are missing from the choir. There’s no altar or organ or screen. I think that must be why I like the place. You can see it fresh.

“Well, we can’t go just yet,” I say. “There’s a lady I want you to see.”

“That old one, you mean? Saying all those Agnus Deis?”

“
Another
lady. She hasn’t got here yet.”

“Then how do you know she’s coming?”

Under normal circumstances, I’d defer to Vidocq, but he’s already separated himself from us. And at this remove, he looks exactly the German banker he’s pretending to be. Strawberry blond hair, a boxwood shrub of a mustache…he’s even given himself a new walk. The only sign that it’s Vidocq under that cambric shirt and white piqué vest is the right foot, dragging slightly after the left.

“She promised to come at the dot of eleven,” I say. “That’s just ten minutes away.”

To make the time pass, I tell him of the great men who were once buried here. I speak of Charles Martel and Hugh Capet…Henri the Second and Louis the Fourteenth. They might as well be census figures.

“Is it eleven yet?” he asks.

“Soon.”

“But when?”

I can hear the testiness in my voice now. “Did you behave like this with Monsieur Tepac? I’m sure
he
took you places.”

“Not
cathedrals,
” answers Charles, sulkily. “We went fishing once, but that was nearly as dull. I believe the
fish
were bored, too. I think they swallowed the hooks just to—hold on! Is that her?”

W
HAT WILL AMAZE
me afterward is how he knew it was a woman. The five personages processing down the side aisle are notable for their plain and shapeless dress, and the small bent figure in the center is virtually hidden under a black mantilla. Vidocq was right on this point, anyway: She travels light.

“Yes,” I say. “That’s her.”

“Well, then, what are we waiting for?”

He’s all set to race after them, but I catch him by the arm.

“Not just yet. She has to pay respects to her parents first.”

“And where are
they
?”

“Down below.”

He stares at me, uncomprehending.

“They’re
buried
there,” I explain.

“And how long does it take to pay respects?”

“Depends,” I say. “On how respectful you’re feeling.”

As the mourning party files into the Lady Chapel, the rear guard glances back, and I switch my eyes toward the immense rose windows overlooking the transept. I make a show of studying them, but really, I’m just ticking off the seconds: one…two…three….

I don’t even reach ten, because it suddenly occurs to me I’ve forgotten something.

Charles.

I take a step toward the west door. He’s not there. Another step toward the triforium. Not there.

I scan the pews and aisles, I peer down the apse…and then I turn to the one place I’ve been avoiding. Which is exactly where I find him: scurrying into the Lady Chapel.

It won’t do to sprint. Long strides are the most I can allow myself, and as I move toward the high altar, I’m waving my arms at Vidocq, but he’s contemplating the clerestory, and I see Charles draw open the iron gate and disappear into the darkness, and I nearly cry out, but all I can do is keep moving.

The gate is still ajar when I get there. Breathing out mold and damp—and the same suggestion of rot that washed over me in my first carriage ride with Vidocq. I take a single step forward. The darkness surges round me.

“Charles,” I whisper.

How I wish I’d stopped for a candle! There’s not a single torch in the place. I move one step at a time, and even so, I nearly come to a bad end when, out of nowhere, a descending staircase appears. Grabbing for the wall, I haul myself erect. A pool of cold, piquant air billows up from below,
seals
me on that top step, as if it were marbling me round.

“Charles…”

Out of the murk, ghostly shapes bleed free, and it is with a deeper chill that I realize what they are. Sepulchers. Bearing France’s illustrious dead.

It was here the revolutionaries came, fifteen years ago, tearing open tombs, hammering effigies into crumbs, emptying royal hearts and entrails from lead buckets, throwing bone after bone into great open pits. Erasing more than a thousand years of history in thirteen days.

Why, then, do I feel like the one being erased? I could hammer this darkness, and it would simply absorb me, cell by cell.

“Hector?”

He speaks only once, but I fasten onto that sound and haul myself toward it, stone by stone. The scrape of my boots has a liquid resonance, so that, as I descend, I have the sense of being a cataract, spilling ever downward, waiting for a receptacle.

Which is nothing more than a trembling hand. And a trembling voice.

“It’s so dark here. I hate it.”

“I know. Let me see if…”

Rummaging through my pockets, my fingers close round a sulfur match. I swipe it—twice—against the stone wall, and the light carves away the darkness, and I find myself staring up at an inscription: “Here lie the mortal remains of…”

In the next instant, I’m swinging the light away, but it’s not Charles who pops out at me but a stranger. Discernible only as an oval of white, with a mouth-chasm.

I
see
the scream before I hear it. The uvula vibrating, the soft palate receding.

From behind us come confused shouts. A pair of rough hands flings me to the ground; another pair flattens Charles. I feel the press of cold stone and a blade against my neck and, above me, a voice of unusual cultivation.

“Move another inch, and you
will
die.”

S
O BEGINS MY
first audience with the Duchesse d’Angoulême.

Although, if I’m to be strictly accurate, my
first
audience took place four years earlier—on the third of May, 1814.

For a steep sum, my mother and I rented a window seat in a pothouse overlooking the Rue Saint-Denis, where we proposed to join a few million of our fellow citizens in welcoming King Louis the Eighteenth.

Happiest of days. The Corsican had been sent off to Elba, the Bourbon exile was done. Let the forgetting begin! From every window there fluttered a white flag or white flowers…white curtains, carpets, bed linens. As if the homes in Paris were disemboweling themselves for joy.

At precisely ten o’clock the King’s carriage came through the triumphal arch of the Porte Saint-Denis, drawn by eight white horses.
Long live the King!
came the roar.
Long live the Bourbons!

Our eyes then turned, by common consent, to the small thin woman in the King’s carriage. The last time she’d met this many Parisians, they were dragging her to the Temple. Now they were throwing open their arms. She had outlived the Directorate and the Consulate and the Empire. She was our Antigone, our Clio, our
new
Marianne.

And yet, as she passed down the Rue Saint-Denis—clutching her white parasol, averting her head—she left in her wake only an itchy muttering. My mother, in the end, had one thing to say on the subject of the Duchesse d’Angoulême….

“Such a bonnet!”

Well, having spent the previous eight years in Buckinghamshire, the Duchess was sporting the small headwear favored by the English. No one had told her that Parisian women preferred bonnets the size of funerary urns.

The bonnet, of course, would have mattered nothing at all if there had lain beneath it the face of our imaginings. This was what we saw instead: a stern, grief-parched woman, still in her thirties but already closed to light. Madame Royale (as she was known from birth) may have quit the Temple; the Temple had never quit her.

Her marriage to her cousin, the Comte d’Artois’ son, was barren in every respect, and since her return to France, the Duchess has abstained from virtually all social functions, preferring to devote herself to acts of charity. She visits hospitals and workhouses, she prays for souls, and twice a month, she makes the pilgrimage from the Tuileries to Saint-Denis—always with the smallest possible retinue—to pay respects to her parents.

On this particular day, however, her devotions are interrupted by the arrival of two men, unknown to her, who are repaid for their presumption by being thrown to the ground.

“Please,” I stutter. “Apologies. No harm meant.”

But my voice scarcely registers amid the cloud of sound and is trumped finally by the man who stands directly over me—the man who has just threatened our lives.

“Who are you?” he demands to know.

No gainsaying the authority in that timbre.
The voice of French civilization,
I think.

“How do you come here?” he asks.

From out of the darkness comes an answer:

“My name is Charles Rapskeller.”

How near he sounds! Squinting, I can just make out his head, squeezed against the musty stone.

“And this is Hector,” he says. “You mustn’t be cross with him, he was only trying to help. I have a way of getting lost sometimes, I can’t seem to help it.”

“Getting lost is one thing,” says the voice of civilization. “Coming down a flight of steps in complete darkness smacks of
purpose
.”

In the end, we are saved by another voice, calling after us.

“There you are!”

A high, brittle sound, suffused with Rhine water. Such a perfect simulacrum of German banker that it’s not until Vidocq is actually standing over me that I know who it is.

“Ha! I turn my back for a moment, and you run off like a pair of highwaymen! Just wait till your mama hears about this.”

“And you are?” inquires the voice of French civilization.

“Alois Herrhausen. Of the Schaaffenhausen bank.”

“And these are your sons?”

“My God, no!
Nephews,
Monsieur. My dear sister, upon learning I had business in Paris, begged me to take them to Saint-Denis, so that a prayer might be offered for their recovery.”

“And what are they recovering from, Monsieur?”

“Oh, it’s—it’s a bit…” A pall of embarrassed silence, punctured by a stage whisper. “Dropped on their
heads,
the both of them. By the same midwife. And with the same result.”

“They seem entirely rational to me.”

“That’s the tragedy of it, Monsieur. On the surface, all’s well. Down
below
…” A soft whistle. “Nobody home but the bats.”

And now another voice emerges. Female and tentative and, at the same time, harsh. Like a crow calling after her young.

“I’m sure no harm has been done.”

I
T’S ONE OF
the least-remarked perils of reading. You meet people often enough in print, you believe you really know them. So it is with me and Madame Royale. I feel as if I’ve blundered into her life, the way one stumbles into a water closet, mistaking it for a parlor.

And so, when the guard releases his grip and suffers me to rise—when the Duchess’s pale, swaddled face swims toward me once more—I find myself casting my eyes down, for fear of what she will find there.

“Truly,” she says, “there was no need for me to shout in such a manner. I was merely taken aback.”

“And who could blame you, Madame?” Vidocq gives a mighty click of his heels. “In such a place as this, one expects only ghosts and goblins, not a pair of bungling
taugenichts
. I do apologize. They meant no harm.”

And now, for the first time, the voice of French civilization becomes flesh and blood. Which is to say a man of perhaps fifty years steps into the light. Dark-complected and full-lipped. The torso pulls slightly back, as if to deny the violence promised by the right leg, which is thrust forward. He’s
taut,
in a way one no longer expects aristocrats to be, with just enough curl in his hair to hint of
sauciers
and tailors.

“I would entreat you,” he says, “to keep closer watch on your nephews in the future.”

“Never fear, Monsieur. Tomorrow morning, they’ll be packed on the first mail coach for Strasbourg, and they will never trouble you again, I swear on God. Do you hear me, rogues? Now come along, we’ve just enough time to make the stage….”

N
O STAGE AWAITS
us, but Vidocq’s carriage is stationed just where we left it, and from there, we beat a straight path to the city gates. It isn’t until we’re five minutes outside of Saint-Denis that Vidocq raps on the roof of the carriage and orders the driver to stop.

“Charles. Go play.”

And so he does. Plunges into the surrounding meadow with the air of a medical student excused from his last examination.

“Well,” says Vidocq, watching him grimly. “Our boy is a bit more complicated than he looks.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because unlike
you,
I was watching him. And I’m telling you he spied his moment. I’m telling you he waited till your head was turned, and he made a beeline for the Duchess.”

“He was restless to leave, that’s all. I told him we couldn’t go until we’d seen her. He was—he was shortening the process.”

“Oh, is that it?”

For another minute, we watch him crawling through rye, querying each wildflower.

“He didn’t seem to recognize her,” I venture.

“True.”

“Nor she him.”

“That’s also true. The only face that really consumed her was
yours,
Hector.”

Stooping, he plucks a clover blossom, twirls it between his index and middle fingers.

“Your father
met
Madame Royale, didn’t he?”

I nod.

“And how closely do you resemble him, Hector?”

“Well…quite a…quite a bit, I’m told.”

“Very good. Now maybe you can explain why the sight of your father should bring a tear to the Duchess’s eyes.”