The Black Tower (24 page)

“W
ELL, WHY SHOULDN’T
I have known?” says Mother, smiling darkly. “You think I don’t have a brain in my head?”

“But I thought Father was under strict orders….”

“When you get married, Hector, you’ll understand. A man may be following orders, but no one will ever read him better than his wife. Every hesitation, every little withholding, she hears it. Of course, she always imagines the
worst
. Then she finds—she finds she didn’t imagine the worst after all.

“Oh, Hector,” she whispers. “There’s so much to tell.”

May 22, 1795. The day after my third birthday, and in its beginnings, a day like any other. Clothilde (our former maid) scraping grease off the stove; me, building a tower of old eggshells; Mother, tweezing the dead blossoms from the geraniums.

“Duty calls,” says Father, gulping down the last of his coffee. Reaching for his greatcoat and bag, he kisses her in the usual manner: three quick collisions of lip.

“Off to the hospital,” he adds.

And with that tiny superfluity, he once again betrays himself. Why would a man announce he’s going to the place he goes every morning? Unless he’s not really going there?

“Good-bye,” she hears herself say.

She’s about to turn away when she notices he hasn’t quite closed the door after him. She puts her hand to the knob—and to her surprise, finds that her hand won’t budge. For several long seconds, she interrogates it. Then she calls out to Clothilde:

“I’ve just remembered. Monsieur Beaucaire wants me to pick up that brooch. My mother’s old brooch? The one that had to be recast? It’s only a few blocks, I should be back within the half hour. No
more
than an hour…”

It pains her to admit that she’s every bit as bad at lying as her husband. She kisses me on the forehead. She announces (again!) that she’ll be back within the hour. On her way out, she reaches for a shawl. Not because the morning is cool but because she has already begun to see the wisdom of concealing herself.

And as she follows that familiar greatcoated figure down the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, she finds herself, without any prompting from Vidocq, observing the principles of surveillance: keeping a safe distance from the quarry, avoiding direct eye contact, rearranging her appearance. So many precautions, and none of them needed. After many months, Dr. Carpentier has ceased to care if anyone is following.

She tracks him up the Vieille Estrapade, down the Rue d’Ulm, right on the Rue des Ursulines…and then, at the corner of the Rue Saint-Jacques, she watches in dismay as he hails a passing cab. Before she can plan her next course, he has bundled himself inside and closed the door after him. Whirling, she finds, like a fairy-tale contrivance,
another
cab—smaller, seedier—the driver slouched on his box, scoring his cuticle with an apple knife. Reaching into her apron, she draws out three silver coins: the money she has set aside for the wine merchant.

“Where do you care to go, Madame?”

Madame.
She stares at the wedding ring on her finger.

“I was—”

In the end, she can only point at the carriage that is now speeding northward on the Rue Saint-Jacques. The driver requires no further instruction. He cracks his whip three times and sets the horse at a gallop. A block later, he’s calling down to her:

“Got ’em!”

He, too, understands the principles of chase. Never let the other fellow know he’s being followed. At times, he slows the horse to such a leisurely canter she feels compelled to question him.

“Do you see it? Is it still there?”

And he calls down, easy as water:

“Still there, Madame.”

She is glad, after all, that she doesn’t have to look at him. If she puts her mind to it, she might imagine herself on a simple excursion, with no destination and no end, except the pleasure of being driven. The vehicle crosses the Pont Notre-Dame, turns right on the Rue Saint-Antoine, and she tries to crowd her mind with the prospect of shops and cafés—all those foresworn pleasures.

Five minutes later, without warning, the carriage jolts to a standstill.

“What’s wrong?” she calls up.

“They’ve stopped, Madame.”

At first, she sees only a massive stone wall, through whose gate her husband is even now being ushered. The gate closes after him, and her eyes, rising, take in the spectacle of that ugly black square tower, erected all those centuries ago by the Knights Templar…the crosses resting atop the turrets like ships’ masts…an ambience of ancient quarrel.

The Temple.

The implications of her act suddenly radiate outward. She has been spying on her husband, who is, by all appearances, an agent of the Directory. Which makes her guilty of treason. For which, in these otherwise confused times, there is but one punishment.

“I’m sorry,” she tells the driver. “I made a mistake. It must have been another carriage.”

She asks him to take her back. At once. Not to her house, no, to the corner where she engaged him. Once there, she hands over all her coins and hurries home—harassed the whole way by the memory of the fortress. How, she wonders, can anyone enter such a place and come out alive?

But he does. Strides through the front door at his usual time, a half hour before noon, looking the same as when he left. She can scarcely trust her senses.

“Oh, you’re trembling,” he says, taking her hand in that efficient grip of his. “Have you caught cold?”

The tremor passes after a few minutes…only to overtake her again four years later, when her young son, on a late-summer whim, veers down the Boulevard du Temple. Chasing after him, she finds herself stopped once more by the sight of that charred tower. Feels once more the chill, climbing rib by rib.

“Come, Hector.”

She drags him down the street and around the corner, refusing to look back.

T
RAVEL FORWARD ANOTHER
eighteen years. The boy is grown, the mother has reached a certain age, and the shudder is still there, guttering the tallow candle that stands between them on this Friday evening, agitating the moth inside the ivory lampshade.

“But you only saw him go inside,” I say. “How did you know what he was doing there?”

“It couldn’t be anything else. Everyone knew the dauphin lived there. Everyone knew how sick he was.
Someone
had to look after him. Who better than your father?”

“And you never told him.”

She gives her head a slow shake. “It would have been a betrayal, I suppose. Or so it seemed to me.
Now,
of course—well, now I wonder if things might have been different if I had told him.”

From the hallway, the clock is tolling the tenth hour. Around us, the candlelight is the color of cognac. Upstairs, everyone else is asleep: Charlotte and Father Time and the law students. And Charles, turned as usual on his left side, dead to the world.

“May the twenty-second,” I say.

“Yes,” she says, raising her eyes suddenly toward mine. “Eighteen days before that boy died. There’s some wine, Hector. On the buffet.”

A bottle of Beaune, still breathing. The act of setting it before her carries me back to my first encounter with Vidocq. He was seated in this very chair, sloshing down wine and raw potato and, for all his filthy manners, making the room seem shabbier than him.

“The night before that boy died,” says Mother, “your father came to me. It was just after supper. He was very plain, very brief. He told me he had business to take care of that very evening. Very
important
business, he said, the nature of which he couldn’t divulge except to say—how did he put it?—
it was not without danger
. Oh, and there was a good possibility he might not return, and if he didn’t come back by morning, then I was to take you and leave at once for my uncle’s in Grenoble.
Don’t even stay to pack,
he said.
Leave at once
.”

She raises the glass to her lip, rests it there a few seconds.

“He even gave me money for the trip: a bag of silver! And then he kissed me good-bye. And he left. I suspect he didn’t want to draw things out any longer than he needed to. In case his resolve failed.

“Well, I ask you, how was I to sleep after
that
performance? And to make matters worse, that very night, you came down with a fever.
Roasting
with it, you didn’t even have the strength to cry. So I held you and…” Her eyes widen at the memory. “I rocked you asleep. Yes, and I set you in your crib, and I didn’t want to leave you, so I—I lay down on the floor next to you. And I think I must have fallen asleep myself because I didn’t hear him come back.

“He was standing in the doorway. It must have been around three in the morning. I saw him, I—I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t even get off the floor. And then he spoke, it was only three words.
All is well,
he said. He looked down at you, asleep in your crib. He touched you on the brow. And then he went to bed.

“As for
me,
well, I never even got off the floor. I lay there till morning.”

She runs her finger round the rim of her wineglass.

“Well,” she says, “two days passed, and the papers were full of the dauphin’s death. I read the news to your father over breakfast, and of course, the whole time I was
watching
him to see how he reacted. But he never flinched. Never said a word. And still—I don’t know how, exactly—but I could
feel
it, the change in him. The change in
everything
.

“He’d staked so much, you see, on keeping that boy alive. And when he couldn’t—oh, nothing seemed to matter to him anymore. He began by dropping his patients, one by one. The wealthiest first. Before the year was out, he’d resigned his hospital post. At which time he told me he desired to be a
glass grinder
.”

She shakes her head, as if the news were a minute old.

“
Unusual
sort of career. Well, I knew then what my own career was to be. I was to become one of those helpless,
sad
women. I used to notice them when I was young. It seemed to me their lives had slipped away when they weren’t looking, and the only thing they could do was”—she contemplates her silverware, strewn across the tabletop—
“polish.”

She picks up a pierced serving spoon. Watches her image dance in and out of the light.

“You should know something, Hector. When your father came to me—the night before that boy died—he left me a letter.”

Well, here’s how it is. The things people tell you are fragile in direct relation to their being vital. So it is now. As soon as I hear of this letter, I don’t dare say another word. Anything but silence could kill it.

For another minute, Mother is silent, too, swirling her wine.

“He said I was to open it only if he didn’t return. Otherwise, I was to burn it unread.”

“Did you?”

“Of course. I did exactly as he asked. Tossed it straight in the kitchen fire.”

You have to be leaning toward the candle to catch the glimmer in her iris.

“The
envelope
I tossed,” she says. “The letter…”

A
ND WHAT A WONDER
is this. The thing that everything’s been building to has been lying on the table the entire time, not two inches from a pile of teaspoons. A rectangle of grease-stained parchment: it might have been an old menu or a handbill.

“Take it, Hector. What do I want with it anymore?”

And still I can’t touch it. Any more than I can look away from it.

“He gave up everything,” she says. “Everything we’d ever worked for, and he never…”

Her hand flies to her mouth. Stays there a good half minute before she trusts herself to speak again.

“So I gave up, too. I gave up trying to please him. Trying to
know
him.”

Gazing at that paper one last time, she plucks it from the table surface and drops it in my hand. Closes my fingers round it.

“I’m hoping you’ll have better luck than I did,” she says.

The candle by her elbow has burned down to a stub. Neither of us moves to replace it, and gradually, the light contracts into a hard corona, and the air round it thrums like a heart.

“I never thought I would end up like this,” says Mother. “No, I definitely had something else in mind. I just can’t remember what it was.”

Very slowly I rise from my chair. I stand there for some time, deciding whether or not to kiss her good night. This is the course I take: resting my hand on her shoulder for the barest second before retracting it again.

Her voice follows me out of the room. The
old
voice, briefly reasserting itself.

“Hector, I’ve been after you for weeks about that newel post. It’s not going to fix itself. I don’t know why you can’t…”

And then, as I walk back up the stairs, I hear:

“Never mind.”

I
DON’T READ
it right away. I settle myself in bed first, I place the candle just so on my nightstand. For several long minutes, I hold the letter in my hands, unopened. At last, a little shy of midnight, I unfold the paper and find…

My dear Béatrice,

 

If you are reading this, I have failed in my task.

The precise nature of that task I will not divulge, for fear of incriminating you further. I will say only this. There was a creature who needed my help.

If it were our own dear son in peril, I could only hope that someone else’s father would do as I am doing. And when Hector is himself a man, I trust and believe he will stand ready to do the same.

Much will be imputed to me, Béatrice. I will be called a devil, a royalist agent, an enemy to the people, etc. I am none of these things. I am a physician, whose highest calling (or so I have always believed) is to heal—to comfort—not to sit by and watch a Life be extinguished.

The thought of placing you and little Hector in danger on my account pains me beyond measure. How I wish I could have spared you! Please know—please believe—if I could have found another course, I should have taken it.

Know this, too, my dear wife.
I love you,
more than is healthy for anyone. You will be a good mother to our son, and if he should ever ask about me, tell him that until the very last second of my life, I was thinking of him.

Farewell,
Hector

 

 

I read it a good dozen times—maybe more—struggling to reconcile the man I knew with the largeness of this letter, the rashness of this act. To smuggle a young boy out of a fortress guarded by two hundred men! What combination of principle and courage and sheer insanity would that require?

And did he succeed?

All is well,
he told my mother. Did that mean he had carried off his improbable feat? That even now the dauphin was being spirited to Switzerland? And what of the death notices? Were the Temple commissaries simply trying to cover up the boy’s disappearance? Was anyone
really
buried that night in the Madeleine churchyard?

Questions, a blizzard of questions. And gathering beneath them a mission. I can see now there’s a reason Charles was dropped into my world. There’s a reason this letter was spared from the fire. For the first time in my life, my father is speaking directly to me.

And when Hector is himself a man, I trust and believe he will stand ready to do the same….

Again and again I read that line. And in my heart, I say:
I am ready.
To finish the work you began.

 

N
O SURPRISE
: I
DREAM
of my father that night. Except that Charles Rapskeller’s voice is coming out of him. He’s playing quoits with Chrétien Leblanc, and no one can agree about what to call the King, and as they argue, they begin to melt round the edges—until a voice from the waking world breaks through.

“Doctor!”

I peel my eyes apart.

“You must wake up!”

The image of Jeanne-Victoire. Panting and purposeful. Shaking me by the collar.

“What are you—”

“Watching over you,” she snaps. “As usual. Come, we haven’t a moment to lose!”

She grabs my arm and guides me down the steps like a nurse leading a convalescent.

“Charles,” I mutter.

“The old man’s got him. Come along!”

But why?
I want to ask.
Why do I have to come along?

And then I reach the ground floor and I know why.

Fire.

I feel it first as a blast of heat emanating from the rear courtyard, transforming the air into something both solid and liquid. Timbers crackle and shriek above our heads. The remains of the kitchen ceiling gust toward us in a shower of confetti, and the air is choked with a strange and savory aroma.

Chickens,
I realize as Jeanne-Victoire drags me out the door. The chickens that Charlotte keeps in the rear courtyard. Roasting alive.

Charlotte herself is the first to greet me. Her face even more chaffed than usual, her eyes black and fathomless.

“Monsieur Hector,” she exclaims in broken accents.

Quickly, I make a mental inventory of our party. There’s Father Time, wrapped in his own coverlet. The law students, all three of them, and in their enclosure, a young woman in a blanket, with bare shoulders and beautiful auburn hair. Tonight’s conquest, although it’s not clear which student has conquered her.

From that loosely knit crowd, a small disheveled figure emerges. Mother: her tulle cap discarded, her curls lopsided.

“Oh,” she says.

Her bird bones quiver as she folds herself round me.

“You’re alive,” she says.

“Of course.”

“Well, then.” She releases me with a nod. “That’s fine.”

Over her shoulder, I catch a sudden glimpse of Charles. So lost in rapture that he doesn’t see me approach. I have to wave my hand in front of him.

“You’re all right?” I ask.

“Oh, yes. But what a grand fire it is!”

The flames are no longer contenting themselves with the rear of the building. Tongues of yellow and orange snarl the curtains. The floor joists crackle and heave. Smoke churns through the cracks in the walls and doors—as if the building’s deepest rages were being released. Yes, it’s a grand fire.

“Oh!” cries Charles. “You forgot your book.”

Father’s journal slides once more into my hand. I stare down at the green calf’s leather.

“Did you—”

Did you read it?
That’s what I want to ask him. But all I can manage is…

“Thank you.”

Night after night, the occupants of Maison Carpentier have waged war across the dinner table. In extremis we find a fraternity. Neighbors swirl round us—Monsieur Sénard the moneylender, Madame Fleuriais and her elderly aunt and their Pomeranian—full of questions and commiserations. We turn our backs to them. This is
our
calamity.

And when the front window cracks open and a jet of white flame shoots out, bisecting the air around us, we shout in unison. Another window splinters. The building’s bass rumble rises to a baritone, and just then I hear Charlotte say:

“Where’s Madame?”

It’s in the firelight that I find her: a swaddled figure stealing toward the house like a burglar.

“Mother!”

Charlotte and Father Time both try to restrain me, but I’m too fast for them. I’m too fast for all of Paris, I’m racing the entire populace toward that front door, but the fire wants only me, for the heat that greets me as I step over the threshold seems cut to my exact form. I sink into it, and everything goes black for a second, and then I find myself crawling across the remains of our dining room, I feel the crunch of glass, I smell the contents of Charlotte’s pantry: burnt flour, caramelizing sugar. My throat seizes up, my lungs squeeze down. And my brain turns to fog, which is why it takes me several seconds to recognize the obstruction in front of me as my mother.

I wrap my arms round her, and I try to lift, but the sheer mass of her defeats me. Rolling her over, I find, pressed against her bosom, her box of silver.

In vain do I try to pry it from her. I have to hoist her
and
the box and carry them both to the door, the fire roaring after us. Within seconds, the rectangular fruitwood table and the convict-made china and the ivory landshape have been submerged in flame. And as I race out the front door, I can feel the fire skipping after me, stinging my heels, pulling my hair.

It’s only when I reach the street that I realize my nightshirt is on fire. Jeanne-Victoire is the one who pulls it off me, stamps the flames into silence. I almost laugh, finding myself half-naked again in her presence, but there’s no air to laugh with, and I drop to my knees and bend over Mother’s half-conscious form.

Her skin has turned a faint blue, and her mouth is smeared black, and the spasms in her vocal cords make a strange music, high and thin, like a recorder.

“Don’t worry,” I whisper. “You’re safe.”

The sound stops. The tarred fingers of her right hand reach for mine, and the heat of the house seems to weld us together. By degrees, though, the heat evaporates, and her fingers grow cold, from the tips down to the root. Then the palm turns cold. Then the arm.

I reach for the other arm, still folded round that box of silver. It’s every bit as cold. Every bit as still.

No one says a word to me at first. Then Charles steps forward. His arms form a kind of fidgeting square around me. Later I will realize he is trying to touch me.

“I know how it is, Hector. I lost my mother, too.”