Knowing her past, Roger felt no compassion for her, and replied tersely: "Your future means nought to me. I am now an official of the French Government, and have been sent to enquire into your doings. You have been endeavouring to blackmail Madame de Beauharnais, have you not?"
Seeing her hesitate, he added: "Come! I have no time to waste; and I have men outside awaiting my orders. If you refuse to answer my questions I will have them take you off to prison."
"You put a hard interpretation on it," she muttered sullenly. "Marie-Rose Josephine is my foster sister. She owes me much: for it was through being of service to her that I was thrown out of her father's house, and became what I am."
Roger gave a cynical little laugh. "You seem to have forgotten that you told me the whole story yourself, and that there is another side to it. Had it not been for your example in taking a lover she might not have been incited to go to such lengths with William de Kay. But, that apart, it was you who planned and induced her to go through this form of marriage which has since proved the curse of .her life; so she can owe you nothing but the bitterest reproaches."
"I intended it only for her happiness. She should remember that, and that in girlhood we were devoted friends. She is rich, and could well afford to give me the small pension which is all I meant to ask."
"She might have, had that been all, and you had gone to ask it of her yourself. But it was not You meant to bleed her white. For that, to conceal your identity in case she went to the police, you had to have an intermediary, and for the purpose have been using Citizen Fouché"
Fear showed in Lucette's eyes, as she said in a low voice: "So you know about that?"
"There are now only a few minor details that I do not know about this matter; such as why you choose him for your agent."
"It was owing to a man I met soon after landing at Nantes. He told me that Citizen Fouché was a skilful homme d'affaires, and not above sharing any profit to be obtained from a valuable piece of information. My friend gave me a letter of introduction to him."
"I see. Let us proceed to business, then. Be good enough to hand over Madame de Beauharnais's diary."
"I... I have not got it."
"That is a lie. You are much too clever to have passed it on to Fouché. Had you done so, you know well enough he would have had no further truck with you."
"I tell you I have not got it."
"Then that is most unfortunate for you." Roger drew from his pocket the Order of Transportation, opened it held it to the light and told her to read it. Then he said:
"When I came here I had no idea that you were Madame Remy. But I was prepared to make a bargain with her, and I will do so with you. Give me the diary, and agree to leave Paris for good tomorrow morning, and I will have this order suspended. It will be marked 'to be executed only in the event of the person named being found to have returned to the Capital'. Should you refuse, I will call in my men to arrest you, and I snail see to it myself that you start on your journey to Cayenne tomorrow."
"No!" she exclaimed with a violent shake of the head. "I'll not give it up. Send me to Cayenne if you will. I am no flabby European to take a fever and die of it. For once I'd have something for which to thank my black blood. I'll be little worse off there than I am here, and I'm not yet so ill-favoured that I could not seduce one of the guards into aiding my escape."
At her outburst Roger's confidence in his prospects of success suddenly slumped to near zero. It had not occurred to him that for a mulatto prostitute transportation threatened few of the terrors it would have held for an ordinary French woman. All he could do now was to play his subsidiary card; so he said:
"I think you underrate the horrors that you will have to face. I am told that conditions in the convict ships are appalling, and that many people die upon the voyage. Be advised by me and take the easier way. Your refusal, too, may have been influenced by lack of money. If so, I will give you a hundred louis; and that will see you back to the West Indies in comfort."
Again she stubbornly shook her head. "No. I know enough of Voodoo to survive the voyage, and within a month of reaching Cayenne I will have escaped. Then I will join another fraternity of sea-rovers. The diary is safe enough where it is. Later I will return and collect it Having kept it so long, I'll not give it up. It is my life-line to a secure old age.
Roger had already thought of threatening her with prison, but whatever charge was trumped up against her she could not be kept there indefinitely. Then, as he sought desperately in his mind for a way to get the better of her, the expression 'life-line' that she had used gave him a sudden inspiration. Since she was who she was, he still had a forgotten ace up his sleeve.
Refolding the transportation order, he said quietly: "You seem to have overlooked one thing. Piracy is just as much a crime punishable by death in France as it is in England. Unless you produce that diary, I will charge you with it; then the thing you count your life-line will become the rope that works the blade of the guillotine."
At that her jaw fell; then she screamed: "You fiend! You devil!" and came at him with hands rigid like claws in an attempt to tear his eyes out. Thrusting her off, he gave her a swift jab in the stomach, which sent her reeling and gasping for breath back again on to the couch.
Standing over her Roger said firmly: "Now! Do I send you to your death or will you give me the diary?"
Still whimpering, the fight at last gone out of her, she pulled herself to her feet, and slouched across to a door at the far end of the studio under the steep stairway. Roger followed her and, as she opened it could just make out by the faint light that beyond it there lay a kitchen. Going inside she fished about for a moment in its near darkness, and emerged holding a heavy meat chopper.
Alert to the possibility that she meant to attack him with it, Roger watched her warily. But without a glance at him she went up the twenty or more narrow stairs to the small landing; then, using the blunt back of the heavy chopper, she began to hammer with it at the end of one of the many short cross beams that supported the roof of the studio. After half a dozen blows the nails that held the end of the beam to a larger rafter were loosened enough for her to pull it down. It was hollow, and thrusting her hand into the cavity she drew out a small leather-bound book. Then she came down the stairs and handed it to him.
"Thank you," he said. "Allow me to congratulate you on having thought of such a good hiding-place. We might have hunted the house for a month without coming upon it Indeed, I doubt if we would have found it short of pulling the whole building to pieces."
With a shrug, she walked past him, threw the chopper on to the table, and sat down again on the couch. Meanwhile, he flicked over the leaves of the little book to make quite certain that it was the thing that he had gone to so much trouble to obtain. It was a thick book and all but the last dozen of its pages were covered with a round childish scrawl. Soon he came upon the name William repeated three times on the same page, then on a passage that made nun raise his eyebrows. It was, he thought, remarkable how indiscreet young girls could be during the first upsurge of physical passion, in confiding their feelings and experiences to paper. Little wonder Madame de Beauharnais could not face the thought of her diary falling into the hands of an unscrupulous publisher. There was no law to prevent the printing of such material, however personal; and there were still innumerable books on sale describing, without the least truth, obscenities of the most revolting kind said to have been practised by Marie Antoinette, which had been published while she was a Queen living in splendour at Versailles.