GAME OF PATIENCE (Aristide Ravel French Revolution Mysteries) Read online

  GAME OF PATIENCE

  by

  Susanne Alleyn

  An Aristide Ravel Mystery

  GAME OF PATIENCE © 2006 by Susanne Alleyn. All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, please contact Don Congdon Associates, Inc., 156 Fifth Avenue, Suite 625, New York, NY 10010, USA

  email: [email protected]

  Also by Susanne Alleyn

  A FAR BETTER REST

  A TREASURY OF REGRETS

  THE CAVALIER OF THE APOCALYPSE

  PALACE OF JUSTICE

  Acknowledgments

  For their unflagging friendship, affection, interest, encouragement, and most of all, endurance, as this novel slowly evolved, a gigantic thank you, as always, to Johanna and also to Erika Vause, Kristi Corlett, Benjamin Cooper, and the Hudson Writers’ Roundtable, particularly Dan Region, Sean Springer, Ned Depew, and Carol Lavender. Equal thanks must go to Peter Wolverton and Don Congdon, my two sternest and best critics.

  I also owe a debt of gratitude to Professors Laura Mason, Michael Sibalis, and Clive Emsley for their kind and invaluable assistance with details of 18th-century French law and policing. Merci à tous.

  To Berenice and Walt McDayter, with love and thanks always

  Foreword

  I have followed general European practice in the naming of floors in buildings; the first floor is one flight up from the ground floor, and so on.

  Much of the tangle of medieval streets in the heart of Paris disappeared during Haussmann’s extensive rebuilding of the city in the 1860s. Many other streets have had their names, or the spelling of their names, changed over the course of the past two centuries. To make matters even more confusing, many street names still in use today were temporarily changed or altered during the most radical phase of the Revolution to eliminate references to royalty, aristocracy, or Christianity. All streets and street names mentioned in this novel, however, existed in the 1790s.

  TERMS

  Bourreau (plural bourreaux): A hangman or professional torturer. Used as a derogatory term for any executioner, including the master executioner, who held a largely ceremonial and supervisory office; he was a title-holder and officer of the court, and rarely performed the dirty work of executions himself, beyond sometimes releasing the lever of the guillotine.

  Commissaire: After 1790, a local police official, in charge of a section (administrative district) of Paris; the commissaire combined the approximate functions of precinct commander and chief investigator.

  Commissariat: Police headquarters for a Parisian section.

  Faubourg: A suburb or, less precisely, a neighborhood at the edge of the medieval center of a city; areas of Paris such as the faubourg St. Germain, the faubourg St. Marcel, and so on, were so named in the Middle Ages, when they were parishes lying outside the twelfth-century walls, but by the eighteenth century they were well within the city limits.

  Hôtel: Can mean a hostelry, a large public building (hôtel de ville, city hall; hôtel-Dieu, charity hospital), or a large private town house or mansion (hôtel particulier). I have used the French form, with the circumflex over the o, whenever referring to a mansion or municipal hall, and the unaccented English word when referring to public accommodations.

  Inspector: After 1790, a low-level police officer roughly corresponding to a uniformed sergeant or senior “beat cop” in a modern police force.

  Jacobin: A member of the longstanding, left-wing political club which, from 1792, called itself “Society of Jacobins, friends of Liberty and Equality.” In Paris, it met in the former monastery of the Dominican Brothers (nicknamed Jacobins, from their mother house on Rue St. Jacques). The term grew to include any radical republican. The Jacobin Club was closed down in 1794 after the fall of the Robespierrists.

  Maître d’hôtel: A high-ranking house servant, equivalent to butler or steward.

  Money: The most common standard unit of eighteenth-century French currency was the livre, although there was no one-livre coin. Twenty sous (which were further divided into the small change of copper deniers and liards) made up a livre; six livres a silver écu; twenty-four livres a gold louis d’or. In 1790, the National Assembly introduced paper currency, the assignats, which promptly plummeted in value and incited people to hoard coinage. The franc, roughly equivalent to a livre, was introduced in 1795.

  Palais-Égalité: In the 1780s the Duc d’Orléans built the Palais-Royal, an enclosure of elegant buildings with ground-floor shopping arcades, to surround the extensive gardens of his family’s Paris mansion, and opened it to the public. It was temporarily renamed during the Revolution to “Palais-Égalité” (Equality Palace, after the ex-duke, who had renounced his title and renamed himself Philippe Égalité), to follow republican fashion during the Terror. Though quiet today, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Palais-Royal was the center of racy, fashionable social life, chic shopping and dining, and expensive debauchery.

  Police: The duties of the police of eighteenth-century Paris extended far beyond the prevention and investigation of crime and the maintenance of public order. Essentially city administrators, they supervised all kinds of public affairs which today, in a large European or American city, would be managed by various departments of health, sanitation, public welfare, housing, trade, the fire department, and even public morals.

  President (of a court): The chief or presiding judge at a trial, during both the ancien régime and the Revolution.

  Republican calendar or French Revolutionary calendar: Used officially in France from 1793 to 1809. It consisted of twelve months with three ten-day weeks in each, and five additional festival days (six in leap years) completing the calendar. The republican year began on September 22 of the Gregorian calendar and was dated from September 22, 1792 (the day the French Republic was established), though it was not put into official use until October of 1793, a month into “Year II.”

  Section: One of forty-eight administrative areas of Paris, replacing the numbered districts of the prerevolutionary regime, consisting of a few square blocks in the heart of the city, and a wider area in the more sparsely populated outer quarters. Their names frequently changed during the Revolution, as personages or political movements grew popular or were disgraced; the Section du Palais-Royal, for example, became Section du Palais-Égalité in 1792, after the fall of the monarchy; then Section de la Butte-des-Moulins in 1793; then Section de la Montagne, within the year; and then once again Section de la Butte-des-Moulins in late 1794, after the decline of the “Montagnard” faction. Neither the sections nor the numbered prerevolutionary districts bore any relation to the modern arrondissements.

  CHAPTER 1

  9 Brumaire, Year V of the Republic

  (October 30, 1796)

  Aristide Ravel did not often set foot in the Place de Grève. It was an ill-omened place, the Golgotha of Paris, the site of uncounted butcheries across five centuries, and he loathed public executions.

  He shivered and cast a fleeting glance toward the guillotine, waiting high above the heads of the crowd, as the sharp breeze of a Parisian October whipped lank dark hair into his eyes. Perhaps, he brooded, not for the first time, he was over-sensitive for a man who worked for the police. Police officials, his friend and employer Brasseur among them, did their duty and washed their hands of the affair, leaving the rest to the Criminal Tribunal and the public prosecutor. But the police and the law courts, he though
t, in their determined efforts to maintain order in a city still unsettled after seven years of revolutionary upheaval, sometimes could be wrong.

  He elbowed his way onward, through the clamorous crowd of errand boys in smocks, domestics in shabby cast-off finery, and craftsmen in work aprons who slouched about, playing truant from their trades for half an hour’s free entertainment. The muddy square between the City Hall and the Seine swarmed with spectators, pushing, joking. Here and there a spruce bourgeois or stylish incroyable, flaunting the exaggerated fashions of the season, blossomed like a hothouse flower amid the weeds. Though Aristide wore no tricolor sash, the mark of a police inspector or commissaire, they made way for him, reluctantly parting ranks before the austere black suit that instantly placed him among such traditional dignitaries as police, civil servants, or magistrates.

  He shouldered his way through the spectators until he could push no farther against the eager, humming barricade of bodies. He could see well enough; he stood half a head taller than most of his neighbors. The guillotine loomed above him against the leaden sky like a doorway to nowhere. Two men, silently overseen by a third in a fashionable black frock coat and tall hat, hovered about it, brisk and impassive, tightening ropes, testing moving parts, greasing grooves and hinges. Aristide offered a silent prayer of thanks that at least the guillotine was far swifter and gentler than the punishment meted out to murderers and bandits in the decades before the Revolution.

  The crowd stirred and muttered, growing bored with idling. A few fights broke out. Rough-voiced street-peddlers sold rolls, oranges, vinegar-water, hot chocolate, and cheap brandy.

  A pair of mounted gendarmes appeared at the edge of the square. Behind them creaked the executioner’s cart and the murmur grew into an uproar. Those who often attended such free public entertainment self-importantly pointed out the approaching actors: there the attending priest in civilian costume; there the old executioner, come out of retirement for the day, Old Sanson who had topped the king, and Danton, and Robespierre, and so many others, in those disagreeable years 1793 and 1794; there his assistants. Young Sanson, the new master executioner, they told one another, was already waiting on the scaffold: a good-looking, well-made young fellow, wasn’t he?

  In the cart a splash of crimson, a smock the color of blood. The central performers of the show stood between executioner and priest. One of the three condemned men had fainted and was lying nearly out of sight in the bottom of the cart.

  A shout pierced the crowd’s babble.

  “I am guilty!”

  The man in the crimson smock leaned forward across the cart’s rail, straining at his guard’s tight grip on his bound arms.

  “I am guilty, citizens! But Lesurques is innocent!”

  “That’s Courriol,” said someone in the crowd, “one of the bandits. . . .”

  Aristide swallowed and squeezed his hands together behind his back as a chill crept from the pit of his stomach to the center of his chest. When even a confessed killer insisted upon his comrade’s innocence . . .

  The second man stood erect in the cart, his pale, youthful face betraying neither fear nor hope. His fair hair was cropped short for the blade, but unlike his companion, he wore no red shirt, the emblem of a condemned murderer; waistcoat, culotte, shirt cut open at the neck--all were spotless white.

  Absence of the usual formalities betrayed some belated sympathy on the public prosecutor’s part. What must it be like, Aristide wondered, to live in doubt, to have to ask yourself for the rest of your life whether, in the performance of your duty, you had condemned an innocent man?

  “Lesurques is innocent!” Courriol repeated. His crimson smock fluttered in the wind. “I am guilty!”

  The cart creaked to a stop before the scaffold. Above, Young Sanson waited silently, hands at his sides, ignoring the wind’s bite.

  A raindrop stung Aristide’s cheek. Mathieu had died on just such a day as this, he recalled, a bleak autumn morning with a cold, leaden sky and spattering rain. Three years ago . . . the last day of October 1793. Perhaps under the same steel blade. He closed his eyes for an instant at the touch of another cold drop.

  The assistant executioners lowered the cart’s tailboard and lugged the unconscious man up the narrow steps. Carefully impassive, they strapped him to the plank and slid it forward beneath the blade. The wooden collar clapped down over his neck. Young Sanson stepped to the machine’s right-hand upright and tugged at a lever.

  Aristide blinked. Did anyone ever see the blade in the midst of its fall? Yet there it hung, at rest at the bottom of the uprights, smeared with glistening red, and blood was weeping between the boards of the scaffold onto the sawdust below.

  “I am guilty! Lesurques is innocent!” shouted Courriol as hands reached for him and swung him down from the cart. He struggled a moment, twisting about to shout once again to the crowd as the executioners marched him toward the waiting plank. “Lesurques is innocent!”

  Aristide watched, motionless. Here, at least, simple justice had taken its course. But God help us all, he thought, if the criminal court has condemned a blameless man.

  “Lesurques is--”

  The crowd grew silent as Lesurques climbed the steps. Upon reaching the platform he paused.

  “I am innocent of this crime. May God forgive my judges as I have forgiven them.”

  For the third time, the great blade scraped and thudded home.

  Aristide thrust his way past the gawkers and at the edge of the square paused, gasping for breath. At last he found an upturned skiff on the riverside and dropped down on it, elbows on knees, staring into the murky shallows of the Seine. Had the police he worked for, so determined to keep the peace, instead been so horribly wrong?

  He clasped cold hands before him, shivering suddenly, not from the chill river breeze alone. Men made mistakes; it was the natural way of things. Impossible that you would never make a mistake, accuse wrongly, perhaps unwittingly destroy a life . . .

  He sat brooding a while longer, watching the stray raindrops ripple across the river as it slid silently past. Forget this, he told himself at last. You can do nothing about it. Even if you could somehow learn the truth, and clear his name, he will still be beyond help. There is nothing you can do. He sighed, pushed himself to his feet, and turned his steps westward along the quay, letting the walk and the chill breeze calm him.

  Like a great ship, the Île de la Cité parted the river, the cathedral at one end of the island and the Law Courts at the other. As Aristide passed along the shore of the Right Bank, the brooding medieval towers of the Conciergerie, the ancient prison attached to the Law Courts, caught and held his gaze. All his misgivings returned in a rush.

  What if I, too, in my time, have sent innocent men to that place, and even to the executioner?

  CHAPTER 2

  11 Brumaire (November 1)

  Aristide dreamed of the execution for a second night, heard the shouts, the thud of the blade, and woke sweating and trembling at dawn, as his small mantel clock chimed seven. Grateful for the common, raucous noise of morning, carts and peddlers in the street below, he stared at the fine web of cracks in the plaster ceiling above his bed alcove as the twilight slowly brightened. Swiftly he thought back through the murders he and Brasseur had solved during the ten years past--or had thought they had solved. Could anyone ever be so completely sure he was right? The evidence had borne them out--but still . . .

  Someone pounded on the door, jerking him back to the present. He struggled out of bed and pulled on his culotte and stockings as the pounding continued.

  “Ravel, for heaven’s sake, wake up!”

  It was Brasseur’s voice. Aristide unbolted the door to the landing to find his friend’s fist poised for another hammer-blow as his landlady hovered behind him with a breakfast tray.

  “I didn’t want to let him upstairs, citizen,” she protested, “not at this hour.”

  Brasseur scowled at her and she hastily pushed aside a few books and broken quills
on Aristide’s writing-desk, set down the tray, and scuttled away. Brasseur’s broad shoulders and bayonet-scarred face had led more than one timid witness into wondering if he were being questioned by a brigand rather than a district police chief.

  “Ravel, I need you. I have a double murder on my hands.”

  “Double murder?”

  “And this on top of the hotel murder a month ago,” Brasseur added, stepping inside and shutting the door. Aristide poured cold water into the basin on the washstand and splashed it on his face as Brasseur continued. “This one looks like a crime of passion, Didier said. No robbery evident.”

  “Didier’s there, is he?” Aristide said.

  “Well, I had to send somebody.” Brasseur glanced about the crowded room, at the litter of books and dirty coffee cups left on top of shelves, a wrinkled cravat hanging about a candlestick on the desk, coat tossed carelessly over a chair. “Doesn’t your landlady keep things tidy for you?”

  Aristide shrugged. “She’d love to.” He wolfed down a few mouthfuls of breakfast, sour, gritty bread with a spoonful of lard scraped across it. So again there was no butter to be had. “If Clotilde had her way, she’d tidy this place up so well I’d never find what I need.”

  “Are you ready, then? I’ve a cab waiting. It’s not far.” Brasseur headed for the stairs as Aristide gulped down a cup of milky coffee--at least half of it roasted chicory, he thought with a grimace--and struggled into his coat.