French Leave (9 page)

“
Alors
.” Madame Gabbot settled herself, and her own coffee cup. “The tenants, they are very difficult.  I have even had an artist on the top floor.”

“An artist?” Inspecteur Ollivant’s instincts leapt to attention like a setter on the point. “This is true?”

“It was against my better judgment, you understand.
Canaille
coming and going at all hours— I prefer a tenant with a more regular income.”

Yves understood that this reference was to himself. “He is behind in his rent, this artist?”

Madame Gabbot looked regretful. “He is dead. His daughter has the studio now.”

“Ah.” They progressed. “It is she who is behind in the rent?”

“But no.” Madame Gabbot set her coffee cup on the floor. The remaining liquid as immediately lapped up by the cat.

Scant wonder the beast was so ill-tempered. “I do not understand,” said the inspector. “You do not approve of this daughter, I can hear it in your voice.”

“She is a disreputable young woman living alone.” Madame remembered that she was speaking to not only a prospective tenant, but an officer of the law. “This is, of course, a respectable house.”

“I am assured it is.” With a flourish, Inspecteur Ollivant presented a calling card. “But one never knows when something out of the ordinary may transpire.”

Madame Gabbot clutched the card. Yves took his leave. He was relieved to return to the cluttered courtyard, which was blazing hot. He stepped through the gate, into the street, paused to wipe his brow. And then, through the gate, stepped Ma’mselle Foliot herself.

Deep in thought, she did not see him. Almost, the inspector spoke. Before he could do so, she set off briskly down the street. Inspecteur Ollivant allowed Ma’mselle Foliot a discreet head start, and then set out in pursuit.

Chapter Ten

Mab searched frantically for the laudanum. The Duc had come back to his senses far too soon. There’d been no time to concoct any explanation of his presence in the studio. So much for Barbary’s grand, helpful notions! Mab should have known better than to listen to her cousin, should have remembered that Barbary’s most practical suggestions turned out to be the most ill-advised. Where, oh, where was the laudanum? Mab pushed aside canvases and easels, weapons and costumes and various assorted accessories in her quest.

Tibble was bent over the divan. Mab hoped he would not harm the Duc in an effort to prevent him getting up. Then she thought she might herself harm Tibble, when he called, “Miss Mab! Miss Mab!”

She turned. Tibble was not looking at Mab, but at the still shape upon the bed. Had the Duc regained consciousness, then, merely to expire? Mab hurried across the studio.

The Duc was still among the living. His curious gaze fixed on Mab.

Mab looked at Tibble reproachfully. In the absence of the laudanum, she saw nothing for it but to strike the Duc again unconscious with the large oriental vase that stood on the floor beside the divan. What story they might concoct to explain that assault, Mab could not imagine. Barbary was the expert at tale-telling. Let her account for it. Mab picked up the vase.

“Tsk!” chided Tibble. Miss Mab had already half-cracked the poor Duc’s skull, now she apparently meant to finish off the job. Tibble might have already put himself beyond the pale by helping his mistress outrun her creditors, but he would be no party to murder. He snatched the vase out of Mab’s hand.

Mab did not take kindly to this interference. With impotent rage, she glared. Such was the intensity of Tibble’s own feelings that he returned her scowl.

The Duc stirred on his pillows, drawing the attention of both Tibble and Mab. “Where am I?” he asked weakly. “Who are you?”

Mab blinked. “Who am I?”

Tibble cleared his throat. “I was trying to tell you that his—er, that your friend here seems to have lost his memory. There, there!” he added as the Duc again stirred. “It’ll all come back to you, don’t fret! Think of it as just misplaced.”

Her friend? The Duc was no friend of Mab’s. She opened her mouth to say so, but Tibble was looking at her in a very speaking way. “But you know,” the Duc said weakly, “who I am?”

Why was Tibble making such bizarre faces? Mab was at a loss. “To be sure, we do!” said Tibble when she failed to speak. “Or Miss Mab does, because to say the truth, I never saw you before in my life before she brought you home. A proper sight you were, too, bleeding like a stuck pig.”

Barbary’s facility at tale-telling had apparently rubbed off on her servant. Mab crossed her arms beneath her bosom and waited to see what additional whoppers he would spin. “Miss Mab rescued you,” Tibble offered blandly, “when you were attacked.”

The Duc turned his head painfully. “You are this Miss Mab?” he whispered. “I appear to be in your debt.”

No, he was not. Mab felt guilty for Tibble’s lies. She also felt a kinship for Barbary in her confrontation with her husband. One could hardly tell these gentlemen the truth. “Yes,” she said. “I am Miss Foliot.”

“Foliot.” The Duc frowned. “If only I could remember! Your name seems familiar. As does your face.”

And so it might. The Duc had certainly inspected it at close enough range. Heaven forbid he should recall the circumstances. “You must not try so hard to remember!’’ Mab said hastily. “You will tire yourself. You have been very ill.”

He closed his eyes, opened them again. “Will you tell me my name?”

Tibble frowned. Mab did not need his warning; no good purpose would be served by acquainting the Duc with his rank, and most likely a great deal of harm. “I believe,” Mab said carefully, “that you are called Edouard.”

“Edouard.” The Duc seemed to test the name.

“There now!” interrupted Tibble. “You mustn’t talk so much. Miss Mab has the right of it; you’ll wear yourself out. Time enough later for questions, when you’re in better pin.”

“No.” The Duc’s voice, though weak, held all the command of his rank. “I assure you I will rest better for the more I know.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Tibble turned on Mab a frantically imploring eye. “Fit to murder you, they were. Nabbed you a rum ‘un. It’d have been bellows to mend with you if Miss Mab hadn’t took up the cudgels on your behalf.”

“So I gather.” The Duc’s voice was growing weaker. “But where, and why?”

For these excellent questions, Tibble had no answer. At all events, he’d done his part. “Miss Mab can tell you better, having been there!” he said, and withdrew to the far side of the room.

Miss Mab could, could she? Unlike the other members of the
ménage extraordinaire
in which she found herself currently residing, Mab had a respect for the truth. Now she must violate her principles even further by engaging in additional lies.

At least she might use some of the same ones. “It happened,” she said, “near the Palais Royale.”

“The Palais Royale?” The Duc’s voice was the merest whisper now.

Mab knelt so that she was nearer the man on the divan. Posed beneath the draperies, with the rakish bandage wound about his brow, he looked like some Oriental potentate. “You truly have misplaced your memory if you cannot recall the Palais Royale. It is the most wicked place in all of Paris, perhaps in all of France. Yes, we are in Paris, m’sieur—Edouard.”

He was watching Mab’s face. “What does one do in this Palais Royale?”

“Whatever strikes one’s fancy.” Tired of kneeling, Mab perched gingerly on the edge of the divan. “One may gamble, or visit the shops. Dine in one of the dozens of
traiteurs
there. Attend the Theatre Francais.”

“Ah.” With cold fingers the Duc touched Mab’s hand. “And what did I do there, mademoiselle?”

Mab supposed Barbary would have left her hand beneath the Duc’s. She moved her own away. Had Barbary been in Mab’s place now, what taradiddles she would have spun, what flirtatious glances she would have cast.

Mab felt singularly ill-equipped to do either. “I do not know what you did there,” she snapped. “I know only what happened afterward. I wish you would not ask so many questions. It is important that you rest.”

“I cannot rest.” The Duc sounded petulant. “My head aches fit to burst. Why will you not tell me? What is it you don’t wish me to know?”

“M’sieur, you are persistent!” But Mab already knew that. “You and I— That is—” What was she to tell him? In her agitation, Mab twisted away from the Duc. As she did so, the sharp edges of the packet pressed into her soft flesh. Reminded of its existence, she cried, “Jacobins!”

“Jacobins?” Now the Duc looked truly bewildered. “I don’t understand.”

Nor did Tibble, though he understood perfectly when Mab directed him to make a cup of hot chocolate for their guest. She meant the brew to be laced with laudanum. Tibble could not fault this suggestion, though he doubted his ability to carry it out. Tibble knew how to do a great many useful things, such as brewing beer and decanting wine and detecting alterations made by unscrupulous tradesmen. Alas, he had no notion of how to prepare a cup of chocolate. Cautiously, he approached the stove.

“Jacobins,” Mab said firmly, having collected her wits. “I didn’t wish to tell you, if you will remember. I suppose that you remember nothing at all.” She then launched into a reprise of recent French history. “The Bourbons are not popular. Louis
le Gros
has made no attempt to abolish unpopular taxes and conscription, despite his promises to do so, and his proposal to return unsold land to its former owners is resented. There is growing reluctance among the peasants to admit that France has even been conquered. They insist the Emperor was betrayed by his marshals and the Legislative Assembly. The army officers see their hopes of advancement fade as the restored nobility resumes its old monopoly of the higher posts. The Bourbon refusal to maintain the tricolor flag which has been carried in victory all over Europe, and the reinstatement of the old white and gold flag of their ancestors, is largely considered an insult to an army which already resents the promotion of the é
migrés,
and the curtailment of its own military careers. The exile on Elba grows increasingly popular.”

The Duc wore a glazed expression, caused whether by his injury or the dryness of her monologue, Mab could not tell. Behind her, she heard Tibble mutter as he tried to light the stove. “Jacobins,” the Duc said again. “I don’t understand.”

Mab leaned closer, spoke conspiratorially. “The Jacobins are severely repressed by the new regime. They dream that Napoleon may once again become the Son of the Revolution and uphold the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In the army they are making many converts. Oh, don’t you see?” she cried impatiently. But of course he did not; the Duc was a member of the restored nobility. “Napoleon, on Elba, remains a threat. He is far too close to France, too easily called back should war break out on the Continent. The Allied Sovereigns are converging on Vienna. It is expected that one result of the peace conference will be the Emperor’s removal from Elba. The Jacobins must act soon, or not at all.”

“Ah,” replied the Duc. “And I am one of these Jacobins.”

Poorly developed as was her sense of humor, this notion amused Mab ne little bit. “There you have it,” she said.

The Duc closed his eyes for a long moment. “And you. Are you also a Jacobin?”

“I?” Mab shrugged. “I am a mere female.”

“There is no such thing,” the Duc said with some feeling, “as a ‘mere female.’ Whatever else I may have forgotten, I remember that. How is it that we met, ma’mselle? That you came to my rescue?”

How indeed had they met? “There is a certain cafè in the Palais Royale,” said Mab. “Frequented by those who believe that after the
Marseillaise
there can be no going back to the
gavotte.
I had seen you there. That is how I knew your name. We are not formally acquainted.”

“We are now, I think.” The Duc managed a weak smile.

The man was an arrant flirt. Meanly, Mab said, “As to how I came to your rescue— I had seen you in the street. I was watching you flirting with a woman. You barely avoided being hit by a wagon. You are quite the gentleman of the world, m’sieur.”

The Duc moved his head and grimaced. “I do not think so. Except—”

“It is not important.” Mab had no desire to hear of the Duc’s conquests. “I was telling you how you came to be here. There were three armed men. They were no common footpads. The attack took place in broad daylight.”

“Comment?”
said the Duc.

“I think you must be more discreet, m’sieur.” Mab was discovering in herself a hitherto-unsuspected aptitude for the telling of untruths. “If I have heard rumor of a plot to return the Emperor from Elba, who else may have? It is not inconceivable that you have run afoul of the police. Were I you, I would not be too eager to leave this refuge.”

“Believe me, ma’mselle, I am not eager.” Mab looked at him sharply, but there was nothing flirtatious in the Duc’s attitude. He looked distressingly weak.

“I told you not to ask so many questions,” she said sternly. “Now, look what you have done. You are so exhausted you can barely speak. Tibble, where is that chocolate?”

Tibble had mastered the lighting of the stove. Now he was stirring ingredients into a saucepan. The same saucepan, in fact, with which Mab had assaulted the Duc. “It’ll be ready in the winking of an eye!” he promised recklessly. “Miss Mab.”

How
had
she rescued the Duc from three armed brigands, or alternately members of the secret police, and then transported him single-handed and unnoticed into her studio at the top of the house? Mab hoped he would not ask. Under the strain of invention, her briefly fertile imagination had suddenly grown barren. She wished that Barbary had not taken away the vinaigrette.

“Miss Mab,” the Duc repeated with a very faint smile. “I wish that I may call you that. And you will call me Edouard. You are familiar to me, though many of the things you tell me are not. I think perhaps you have understated the degree of our acquaintance.”

“I—” protested Mab, and then she fell silent, because the Duc had closed his eyes. Mab was grateful for it; she knew she must wear a guilty face.