He wouldn’t put it past the boy to go off swiving whores, but he wasn’t going to express himself in Old English. That might be his attempt at some part of the verb suivre—to follow—and mean that Hawker was tracking somebody.
He’d brought stew meat, wrapped up in bread, for the boy. Since Hawker wasn’t in sight, he didn’t mind eating it himself.
It looked like he had the night watch. That was the great joy of the Service. You never got too senior to pull the short straw. He sat in one chair and put his feet up on the other, watching Maggie’s house.
Her room was at the back of the house, second floor. He couldn’t see the window from here. Her bedroom would be dark, this time of night. She’d be in her bed, lying on top of the covers, letting the wind run over her. She’d have a proper bed tonight and a proper linen night shift on her, but she wouldn’t be lying prim and stiff and proper. She’d be sprawled out, hugging her pillow, tucking it between her legs. She slept like a man had just finished with her. Like she was soft and satisfied and grabbing a few minutes of sleep before they started again. That was the way she always slept. He’d watched her doing it every night on the road.
That scrawny, blond man she met in the baths would be Jean-Paul Béclard, her partner in La Flèche. An old lover, obviously. A former lover, unless he missed his guess. That meant he didn’t have to track the man down and beat him up in an instructive manner.
THE noise in the city leaked away. It got quiet. It was the hour for what Lazarus would call nefarious deeds.
Hawker slipped from hiding. The courtyard was full of moon and that damned lantern light from the street out front. He kept to the edges of the yard where the shadows were. He could smell dog. There was a whuffling snore from upstairs that might be a dog sleeping. Which went to show that some dogs weren’t worth spit when it came to guarding a house.
The front door opened out of the work yard. It was ready to stand off battering rams. The window next to it was guarding the house with a pair of flimsy wood shutters closed with a latch. God, you’d think there weren’t any thieves in this city.
Take the knife out. Slip it in between the shutters. Lift the latch. He held his breath till the shutters folded back without squeaking. He swung his feet in.
For a man who was chopping off a couple hundred heads a week, Robespierre was damn unconcerned about his own safety. Upstairs, five or six snores said they slept heavy, the way honest folks do. Seemed they had an honest dog, too.
Light came in through the shutter he’d opened. Enough to see around the room. A letter lay in the middle of the dark wood table. That’d be the one the footman brought from Maggie’s house.
He nipped it up as he walked by. The door to the right let him into the kitchen, with a fire glowing on the hearth. He didn’t like to put a good knife into a fire. It played hell with keeping an edge on the blade. But sometimes you do what you don’t want to on a job. When the blade heated up he lifted the seal off the letter.
What he had was lots of scrawl in black ink. He couldn’t read it. He couldn’t read print all that well and sure as hell couldn’t read twisty French handwriting. But the signature said Victor.
Take it with him, or close it up and put it back so they wouldn’t know he’d been here?
Lazarus used to set him problems like this. He’d lay out the problem and give him the time it took to breathe in and out to think what to do. The next breath, Lazarus cuffed him halfway across the room if he hadn’t decided.
A big, square box to the side of the hearth had sheets of fine writing paper in it, screwed up long and tight. That was to light candles with or carry fire from one room to the other. The paper had writing on it.
Not just the one letter. Lots of letters.
Just made you wonder what kind of a careless household they ran. A powerful man lived here. What were the chances those papers had something interesting on them?
He stuffed papers down his shirt. All the paper spills. The letter from Victor de Fleurignac. Then he went out the window he’d come in through.
He was out of the courtyard, out into the streets. He left the Rue Honoré as soon as he could and found the smaller ways where they didn’t bother to light them, holding to the middle of the road where no one could jump him, not hurrying, walking through the dog-chewed edges of the night toward the Marais and the house with blue shutters.
Twenty-eight
MARGUERITE KNEW WHERE TO FIND PAPA. DEEP in the park, at the end of a lane of poplars, a statue of Diana stood naked to every weather, endlessly drawing an arrow from her quiver. Here was an oval rose garden. They had come here when she was very young. He had explained the theory of numerical sequences while she sat on the grass and collected fallen rose petals. She told him about the fairies who lived in the rosebushes. He explained how to calculate the orbit of the moons of Jupiter.
He was there, among the rosebushes, waiting for her.
She said, “I will tell you the bad news first. They have burned the chateau.”
But one of Papa’s servants—he would not tell her which—had already come to him with this news. The first shock of it was over. She need only relate the whole round tale, which did not take long. It was necessary to admit that she had not saved his library. I did not save my own writing. I was concerned with saving myself. She again admitted she had not saved the library. She admitted it several times. She agreed that, certainly, Papa would have prevented the destruction if he had been there. She heard the speech he would have made from the steps of the chateau to stop the mob. It was moving.
“They would have listened to me,” he said. “You are certain you did not save any of the library?”
He was dressed oddly, even for Papa who always dressed oddly. He wore a tricorne hat and a military coat, much too large for him, dark blue. Its brass buttons glinted even in this light. The scarlet of his waistcoat was forceful enough to be seen by the light of the lanterns in the cafés across the street. His hair hung untidily around his face. Everything about him was at once shabby and flamboyant.
Papa looked up at the sky above Paris and sighed. He would have liked to ask yet again if she did not possibly save any of his books.
After a long and melancholy moment, he said, “We lay our possessions on the alter of history. It was inevitable the chateau should be destroyed. It has outlived its time. The Republic will take all the grand mansions, in the end, and put them to rational use. Schools. Prisons. Manufacturies. Perhaps orphanages and hospitals.”
“They did not take the chateau and put it to good use. They destroyed it to a heap of rubble.”
He did not answer. He had a vast ability to hear only what he wanted to hear.
“Everyone is wondering where you have gone, Papa. Some of us are worried.” She ran her fingers into her hair. “What are you doing with Nico? He should be at the Peltiers’s house.”
“I took him. Sylvie left him with servants, after all, and I needed him.”
“You wanted a monkey?”
“I am an organ grinder. I need a monkey. It is not easy to find a monkey in Paris these days.”
With Papa, one never knew how much of what he said was slyness and how much was his small madnesses and how much was rational thought expressed in his own particular dialect. A box leaned against the tree at his feet. She recognized it now by the bright colors and the hand crank. It was the box of an organ grinder. A hurdy-gurdy. “You are a street musician?”
“One must do something. If I stay in my rooms and write, they become suspicious of me. No one stays in their rooms. With Nico, I am above suspicion.”