Chapter six

To the right of the columned entrance to the Church of Saint-Sulpice stood a statue of Moses, the holy tablets balanced in his right hand, a long sword held before him in his left, its shadow falling over his alcove like the shape of a cross. Sometimes when she had recently done something that provoked her to guilt, Marie Catherine would feel the eyes of the image of Christ on the cross hung high in the arches overlooking the nave, but as she knelt beneath her veil of black crepe and listened to her husband’s funeral oration, her conscience drifted outwards, towards the image of Moses, and she felt the shadow of the sword on her neck.

In the Lady Chapel, off the nave, there was a third statue, depicting the Virgin, her mantle wrapped around the child on her hip. She had been cast from old silverware donated by parishioners, and her look was sweet and sad and forgiving, as if she knew that she had been made of cast-offs. She was humble and ready to embrace high and low alike. Our Lady of the Old Tableware, the parishioners called her, laughingly.

Together, the three statues formed the vertices of a kind of triangular net that seemed to be wrapped around Marie Catherine as she knelt and prayed. Christ offered repentance, Moses the sword, and Mary some kind regard that she could not name. Each tugged at her. She prayed, and tried to weep. She had wept the night of the baron’s death. That morning, after Jeanne had dressed her in her mourning clothes, she’d climbed back into bed and cried again, dreading the funeral and the moment when she would have to face the other mourners. It would have been good, in the eyes of the public, for her to weep now, but she couldn’t. She dropped her eyes from the silhouette of the priest in the pulpit and focused on her hands, clasped before her.

The north end of the cathedral was under construction, a project of expansion that had been under way for some years already, as the funds from parishioners ebbed and flowed. The night outside stole its fingers into the chapel, despite the candles lit in honour of her husband. A cold draught picked at the edges of Madame de Cardonnoy’s veil and sneaked up her sleeves and down her collar. Her skin was all gooseflesh, a kind of shiver that was half from cold and half from the feeling of being a profane creature impinging on the sacred. Her mourning dress was the one she had worn to her father’s funeral, hastily refashioned by her seamstress, and the many yards of black wool pinched at her bust and rasped at her throat. Beside her, Sophie and Nicolas knelt in their own black clothes, fidgeting and poking each other occasionally.

Repent, said the image of Christ and, as if she were a child again, she answered, I do.

Atone, said Moses and, again, she wrung her fingers together, insistently. I will.

And Mary, away in the chapel, looked on in silence.

The nuns of her girlhood had been quite descriptive about the torments of hell, so that sometimes, when she lay in bed at night, Marie Catherine had kept herself awake with the image of the convent building and the ground beneath it, the earth only the thinnest rind over an infinite sphere of fire, like the skin of a lemon – a layer that, at the end of the world, would be peeled away by the hand of God to expose the bitter fruit. If she had to get up at night to use the chamberpot she’d lie frozen in bed for a long time, then find herself tiptoeing softly from one bare board in the dormitory to the next, as if the sound of her steps might wake the vast burning thing that she knew slept under her feet, inattentive for now.

The image came back to her as she knelt, mixed up with the regards of the saints and the memory of her husband’s bloody body as they dressed and prepared it for the coffin. When the funeral was over and the burial procession had begun, she stepped softly, pushing the children in front of her, her shoes descending on the steps of Saint-Sulpice with only the softest whisper, and she felt, again, the depths of the earth beneath her, as if she was balancing over a long fall. Her crepe mourning veil cast the receding silhouette of the church into shadow.

It had been Victoire.

She knew it, although she wished not to know. I take risks, Victoire had said, about that foolish letter. She had no fear of discovery. But even a Princess of the Blood must resign herself to living by the laws that governed the world. She had paid a servant, perhaps, to stand out in that rainy night. There were men who would do such things.

And Madame de Cardonnoy had sent the letter.

If only she had known.

But even now she barely believed that Victoire would be capable of it. For all her rebelliousness, she was still so young. She lived in her mother’s house. It was she, Marie Catherine, who had imagined, with an attention that was almost like love, the day she would stand by her husband’s grave and see him in the ground. She felt that the baron’s death was a spectre that she had coughed up from her own body, that she had infected Victoire with it, by dreaming of it.

The walk to the graveyard was not long, but the moving circle of candles about her seemed to make the time stretch and shiver like a guttering flame. She felt Nicolas press against the sweeping circle of her skirts, cold and afraid of the ring of darkness that pressed around the mourning party. It had been Victoire. The ground’s chill seeped up through her shoes and numbed her toes. She should never have sent the letter. She should have known that Victoire would try to save her. Her husband’s cousin, the Marquis de Favrier, walked behind her, dressed in his own mantle of mourning, its hood drawn over his face so that she couldn’t see his expression. It was her crime, too, although she had neither paid the murderer nor held the gun. She reached for the children’s hands and clasped them in her gloves.

They put him in the ground, with songs.

She was still cold long after the burial, when the coachmen had brought the mourners’ carriages around in the street, and each relative and friend who had walked behind the baron’s body had climbed once more into a coach, their lackeys running before them through the night or clinging behind the carriage, casting long shadows in the street lights. It was late. The children, up long past their bedtime, were tired and crying. She made Nicolas a nest in her thicket of black skirts, drew the mantle over him and said, ‘Go to sleep, the guard will carry you up to bed.’

Sophie, too, was pale and yawning, but she wouldn’t lie down next to her brother. She kept touching her little gloved hands to her face, sniffling into the soft leather. Jeanne, next to her, pushed her hands with the tear-stained gloves gently back into her lap and put her handkerchief between her fingers, and Sophie sat still and looked at the white linen square without using it.

Madame de Cardonnoy leaned her own head back against the carriage seat and closed her eyes. The ride back to Hôtel Cardonnoy was short. When they arrived, she was nearly asleep herself.

The next morning she was exhausted by the time she’d finished dressing. Jeanne laced up her stays, unwrapped the cloth that covered her hair while she slept, rearranged the curls that had fallen into disarray. She left the mantle until last. Soon the visitors would begin arriving, offering condolences. Marie Catherine was glad there was no breach in etiquette in receiving them in bed. She lay back once her sleeves were fastened, drew the long veil over her face, closed her eyes and watched the morning light make shadows on her eyelids.

Two workmen had been summoned on the day of the funeral to set the broken door to her bedroom back in its frame. Now all appeared normal, except that there was a pale edge of new wood showing in the doorframe, where the hinges had given way.

Earlier than she had thought possible there was a knock on the door, and the lackey announced that Madame de Cardonnoy had a guest waiting downstairs.

‘Who is it?’ said Jeanne. Marie Catherine opened her eyes. A guest who had not been admitted to her bedroom must be unknown in the house. Or else unwelcome.

‘Monsieur de la Reynie, Madame.’ Henri’s gaze, as he spoke, looked through Jeanne to Madame de Cardonnoy.

Marie Catherine brushed off her skirts and sat up. The Lieutenant General of Police would have been a laughing stock if he were not so dangerous. He was a man who had come from nothing and had made his career on his wife’s fortune. Now he had the ear of the king himself. In Paris he had made himself reviled for the ferocity with which he had pursued allegations of poison among the court, which everyone agreed must have been born of jealousy. Madame de Fontet said that he was out for blood, like a hound that sniffs out the slightest lingering trace of sin and then worries it with his teeth. Another woman, the Duchesse de Bouillon, had admitted to the Chambre Ardente that she had dealt with the devil and that he had worn the face of Monsieur de la Reynie.

‘Tell him I’ll see him,’ she said. She leaned on Jeanne’s arm to get up.

In the flesh, La Reynie was a tall man whose height was accentuated by the bramble-bush of curls that framed his head and fell as far as his shoulders. He was about fifty, his fleshy jaw had thickened with age, he wore a close-trimmed moustache that adhered to his lip like a stripe of paint. He looked something like a bear that had just stood up on its hind legs and turned into a man. He wore a sombre look that seemed almost theatrical, as if his frown had worn grooves in the slack skin of his cheeks.

He did not look like the devil. This made Marie Catherine no happier.

He bowed deeply when she entered the salon. The bow cast his hair over his forehead.

‘Forgive me for interrupting you on this day, Madame,’ he said.

The winter light was coming through the shrouded window like an army of silver arrows. The draperies in the salon and her own bedroom had been replaced with black cloth, cut hastily before the funeral, like the white-ribboned mantle that Marie Catherine herself wore, whose skirts looped back into a long train that dragged on the ground. Under her widow’s veil, she wore a tight white cap held in place on her forehead with a band of Cyprus crepe, which trapped her hair against her forehead and made her sweat. She had already put in the order for the servants’ new uniforms, for every member of the household must be dressed in black while they mourned. The baron’s portrait, which overlooked the room, was festooned in black garlands.

‘Surely you don’t need to apologise,’ she said to La Reynie. ‘Have you caught my husband’s murderer?’ Her voice sounded clipped to her own ears.

‘You saw your husband’s body brought in, did you not, Madame? I’d like to ask you some questions about the night he died.’ His tone, in response to her rudeness, had become almost obsequious, which frightened her.

‘You haven’t found his killer yet, have you?’

Marie Catherine pressed her hands into her black skirts, then released them. She tried to breathe and let her consciousness float up and out of the crown of her skull, the way she did when she was telling a story, when the words came without her having to think about them. She must not alienate this man.

She was disgusted with herself, with the way that terror, in this slow, quiet, light-filled room of her house, made her want to lie down on the floor and surrender and say, Forgive me, Monsieur, I am the wickedest of women. As if he were God himself and commanded the fires of hell, not merely the torturers at the Châtelet. How quickly he made her fear for her own life.

‘Can you tell me what happened?’ La Reynie had stepped a little towards her where she stood at the window, and when she summoned the courage to look at him, she found that he had looked away from her, towards the portrait of the baron that hung on the wall. The consciousness of her need to impress him made it almost impossible to read his expression. It was like trying to read whether a soul had been damned or saved from a death mask.

What did she know of him? He was said to be envious and vindictive, but those he struck were almost always those who had fallen into disfavour with the king: the general who had lost one battle too many, the comtesse who had gossiped about the king’s love affairs, the little fortune-tellers who advised women about their lovers and men about their wealth.

She pressed her gloved hand against the windowpane. A scrim of fog formed around her palm. La Reynie was still looking at the baron’s portrait while he waited for Marie Catherine to tell him her tale. Perhaps she could make herself into someone who needed to be saved. A good wife, who had given all her father’s wealth to advance her husband. A jewel innocent of the court, who loved God and the king. They said that La Reynie had written that play, The Fortune-Teller. Perhaps he’d appreciate a little drama.

‘I was with my children that night,’ she said. ‘My husband’s valet came to fetch me. He said that the lanterns on the corner had been broken, or had gone out, and so it was fully dark when my husband’s carriage was returning. The murderer threw down a torch in the road that caused the horses to take fright, then opened the carriage door and shot my husband.’

She took a breath, took her hand away from the window and held it to her throat. The fabric of her glove had grown cold. The veil obscured her peripheral vision just enough that she couldn’t tell whether La Reynie had moved, without turning her head to look at him.

‘There were three men with him – with my husband, that is. The coachman, his valet Henri, and the Swiss who guards our door. Usually he did not take the Swiss when he went out.’

She had sat down with each of them, the morning after the death. Caspar had been sombre and terse in his replies, the coachman bewildered. It was Henri who had sobbed his way through his story, looking at her with eyes that said quite clearly that he believed his master’s death was her doing. He had loved the baron.

Partway through the conversation she had realised that a little of her husband’s blood was still clotted in her hair and she had recoiled.

‘Both the Swiss and the valet were riding clinging to the back of the carriage,’ she told La Reynie. ‘When the coachman lost control of the horses, they jumped down to help him. My husband’s valet told me that he did not see the man come out of the shadows or open the carriage door until he heard the sound of the gun. My husband must have supposed that it was one of his own servants opening the door to help him out.’

Her voice didn’t tremble, which might count for her or against her. Perhaps La Reynie was the sort of man who considered obvious displays of grief to be a kind of detestable play-acting.

‘Could the valet describe him?’

‘Not well,’ Marie Catherine said. A meeting between Henri and this man was something she needed to avoid at all costs. ‘He wore a hat and a cloth over his face, and his clothes were so wet with rain that my husband’s man couldn’t tell their colour. He’d half pulled the body out of the carriage, and Henri thought he was looking for a purse or for his jewels, but when he saw there were three men coming for him, he took fright and ran away. He’d hidden his horse in the alley, where the servants throw the household refuse. He escaped.’

Henri, she knew, had not actually believed that the man was a thief. He had spat out his description of the murderer pawing through the baron’s clothes as if it were spoilt milk.

La Reynie paced back and forth at the edge of her chaise longue, reaching one end, tapping the scrollwork, and then brushing his hair out of his face and turning and pacing back again. It was a strange habit that made it seem as if he had forgotten that Marie Catherine could see him, despite her veil. She wondered if he fidgeted like that when he had to appear before the parliament, or when he was in conference with the king. Did it mean anything that he felt no need to dissemble before her? Despite the flightiness of his gestures, he had the expression of a man who was thinking furiously, who would have liked to summon a clerk to his side to write down her testimony. She turned her back on the window and watched him, pressing her shoulders slightly against the cold glass.

‘And was anything missing from the body? His purse? Or rings?’

Marie Catherine shook her head. ‘No. I don’t know. Perhaps a ring. I don’t remember what he was wearing when he went out.’ She hoped her distraction seemed like grief. She saw that La Reynie’s eyes had flicked again to the portrait of the baron that hung on the wall, as if checking his painted hands for baubles.

‘If he was merely a brigand, we might catch him by finding where he sold the jewels he took. If he took any.’

‘And what could he be, except a brigand?’ If only Victoire’s hired man had had the presence of mind to steal from him, she might have let the police spend the rest of her life searching pawn shops for his missing jewels.

La Reynie’s head twitched, almost imperceptibly. Madame de Cardonnoy felt that he might have heard her thoughts.

‘One cannot be too careful in the pursuit of justice, Madame. Do you know of anyone who might have held a grudge against the baron?’

‘I do not.’

‘I’d like to question the servants, if you will give me permission.’

‘They will tell you what I have already told you.’ She didn’t think he would have asked her that if her husband were alive. His word would have been trustworthy. His eyes kept meeting the painted eyes of the baron’s portrait.

‘I’m sure. But sometimes servants …’ He trailed off, spread his hands gently. ‘It helps to be certain.’

‘If I were you,’ said Marie Catherine icily, feeling the cold of her voice in her hands, ‘I would not be at the house of a new widow asking to question her domestics. I would be sending my men to search for news of who had seen the murderer loitering under a broken lantern, waiting to waylay some nobleman’s carriage.’

She feared this was not an argument that she could win. But if La Reynie did question the servants, he could not avoid hearing the story of the argument that she and the baron had had on the day of his death. Perhaps he would also hear that her maid had been absent, and that she had carried a message that Madame de Car donnoy had not entrusted to the men who usually ran such errands. Perhaps Henri would tell him what she knew he suspected.

‘Of course, Madame,’ said La Reynie, with another of his deep bows, as if she had said something reasonable. ‘And if I were in your place, I am certain I would answer to the best of my ability the questions put to me to find my husband’s murderer.’ He turned his back on her and began to walk towards the door.

She couldn’t let him leave thinking she was untrustworthy. She had a moment of inspiration.

‘My husband’s servants were loyal. They did not conspire to kill him.’

La Reynie paused by the door. ‘Of course. I should not have suggested it. I will only disturb you when I have more news.’

‘Wait,’ Marie Catherine called, stretching out her arm. Gratitude – that he believed, or pretended to believe, her poor excuse – made her feel faint. La Reynie turned back to her, and she crossed the arm over her chest and took a breath. He tapped his foot. A heavy cloth seemed to have settled over the room. Whatever she said next might lose his trust, or win it. She edged along the wall until she was standing below the baron’s portrait, touching the frame with her hand as if to draw strength from it.

‘I don’t want you to talk about this with your men,’ she said. ‘It is embarrassing to me.’

La Reynie was silent. She picked at a loose thread in the hem of her sleeve.

‘My husband considered it wise not to share too much of his affairs with his wife. I could not blame him for it. I was very young when I married him, you understand, and at court men often approach other men’s wives in order to win favour or influence over them.’

‘Go on, Madame,’ said La Reynie, when she paused.

‘As far as I know, my husband had no enemies. But he spent a great deal of his time at Versailles, in the Marquis de Favrier’s apartment. And when he was in Paris he did not always sleep at Hôtel Cardonnoy. I don’t know what kept him away. His father loved to gamble, and lost a fortune that way, and while my husband condemned it, I know he played cards at Versailles to win him friends.’

La Reynie nodded. His frown had softened a little. It was obvious that he liked hearing this kind of thing, in the same way the gossips liked it. And perhaps he also liked that she had been sharp with him and was now throwing herself on his mercy.

‘He had debts?’

‘I would believe more readily that other men owed him,’ she said.

‘And was he loving, apart from his absences?’

‘He was distant.’ Marie Catherine looked away, so that her forehead almost touched the baron’s painted foot in its frame. ‘I tried to consider that my cross to bear, but I was not always as forgiving as a good wife should be.’

She let the sentence hang in the air for a long time, afraid to look up into La Reynie’s eyes, in case she saw in them the beginning of suspicion.

She did not know who had killed her husband, she told herself now. She must believe it so. Questions crowded around her, speaking in La Reynie’s own soft, polite voice. Did you kill your husband, Madame, or did you do it with help? And what was the subject of the argument you had on the day of his death? Are you sure? Where did you hide the pistol? What was your lover’s name?

Finally she looked up. He was looking at her now. It must make a pretty picture. She inclined her head towards the portrait’s frame, again, as if she were going to kiss it.

‘I want justice for my husband, Monsieur. But not at the expense of his good name and his family’s honour. I will go through his papers myself, and anything that might help I will bring to you. But I believe that he was a good man, and if, God forbid, he was involved in anything disreputable, I would not want to see his children humiliated by what came to light.’

La Reynie nodded.

‘And you think that the man who killed him might also have the power to ruin his good name?’

Marie Catherine met his eyes. The lieutenant general seemed discomfited by this. As she spoke, he looked away.

‘I think that, because of your diligence, the Maréchal de Luxembourg is imprisoned in Vincennes for black magic – when only a month ago the entire court would have called him a great general and a hero – along with those ladies whose reputations will be forever smeared by charges of poison and adultery. I know little of such things, except what other women say, and so I could not tell you whether I think that all of this wickedness is true. But I know that two years ago such things were not even whispered of, and now I am afraid of what I might discover about my own husband if I look at him too closely. Can you forgive me for that?’

The Lieutenant General of Police bowed to her.

‘Of course, Madame. On hearing these charges of poison in such high places, one feels as if the ground has opened up. But you understand that I have to do my duty.’

Marie Catherine risked a small smile. He spoke so courteously that she could almost forget how his demeanour had changed when she let him know that she understood he had power over her.

‘It has not made you well liked at court, I’m afraid, if my husband’s words are anything to go by.’ If only he would believe that the baron had been one of those wits who likened him to the devil, fearing to have their own faults uncovered.

La Reynie frowned at her.

‘I hope I haven’t offended you,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I was not expecting a gentleman.’

The frown softened, just slightly. She held her breath. La Reynie bowed.

‘Then I am sorry that my reputation preceded me,’ he said. ‘You are right. Though you are gracious enough to call me diligent, there are those who see in my work not duty, but envy and cruelty. I will send my men to ask if anyone saw your murderer that night. Perhaps after that I will ask again whether I may question your servants.’

‘Thank you,’ Marie Catherine said.

When he had gone, she sank down onto the chaise and felt the floor rock beneath her as she lay there, her veil twisted uncomfortably over her arm. Her neck was running with sweat under the widow’s cap, and her legs had gone strangely numb.

How safe, she wondered, had the Comtesse de Soissons felt, the night before the king issued the order for her arrest as a poisoner? Falling out of her life would be as easy as stepping into the shadow of a passing cloud. La Reynie only had to see the darkness touch her and she would become expendable again. The knowledge kept her limp on the chaise like a discarded dress, as if her bones and nerves had melted out of her mourning clothes and left her awareness of the cloth. For a long time she watched the panel of light cast by the window as it crept backwards across the floor. Finally she closed her eyes and fell into a wingless rushing half dream. She woke when Jeanne and Anne brought the children down in their black clothes and white stockings to see her, and their sticky, warm, living hands touched her face and pressed her own chilly hands, encased in their gloves. She looked up into Jeanne’s eyes, and the maid sighed and turned her face away towards the black-draped window.

‘You have visitors bringing condolences, Madame,’ Jeanne said. ‘Will you receive them?’

*

She was allowed to lie on the bed while they milled around her, propped up on a pillow that Jeanne rearranged and plumped up underneath her when she shifted. The black crepe veil trailed limply across the coverlet to the floor. Madame de Fontet, sitting by her, held her hand for a while, and then the Comtesse de Combois took her place, and she could hear the hum of voices in the hallway, Jeanne deciding who should come through the doorway to her room, depending on her own whims. Everything was arranged so that Marie Catherine had only to lie back like a doll, listlessly, raising a hand to acknowledge the men and women who came and sat beside her or peered in at the door. The lackeys came in and out, bringing sweets for the guests to eat.

The enforced stillness, however, quickly became oppressive and exhausting. It felt as if she too had been buried and the mourning dress and veil were growing into her skin. Alone, she had wanted to lie down on the floor itself, and now that her well-wishers had arrived, she wanted nothing but to jump up, hike up her skirts and run out into the cold, bright streets.

It was a long time before Victoire arrived. She was dressed as a woman today, with twilight-blue ribbons in her hair and in the trim of her dress. She came to the bedside and, instead of sitting on the tufted stool pulled up close by Marie Catherine’s right hand, she knelt on the floor in a froth of skirts and pressed her forehead into the trailing edge of the black veil. Her eyes were very red from crying. In the doorway, a marquise whispered to her companion that Mademoiselle de Conti’s flair for the dramatic was truly too much. No one shed tears like that for the husband of a friend.

Marie Catherine could see the blue veins through the skin of her eyelids and gloss of a tear on one cheek. Her bedside was crowded with well-wishers, so she could say nothing to Victoire. She said nothing. She turned her face away and closed her eyes and allowed the Comtesse de Combois to dab a little oil of jasmine on her temples with her handkerchief.

‘Are you feeling faint, darling?’ said the comtesse.

The air was contracting around her like a vice. Soon she would cry. She could feel the pressure of it behind her eyes, but it was a very cold, angry kind of sorrow. How many hours before they left? Victoire went out and then came in again, pressed a glass of brandy into her limp hand. Every time the girl moved, Marie Catherine felt her presence as if they were connected by a noose that tightened, the more they struggled with it. She had become a block of weeping ice. She heard the women in the room talking, but couldn’t follow their conversation. The light was starting to fade.

‘Can we bring you your supper, Madame?’ The servant Arnaud was in the doorway.

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘We’ll leave you to your prayers, my dear,’ said Madame de Fontet. This, Marie Catherine knew, was a polite excuse, designed to allow her to eat if she wished. To dine in front of her guests would look heartless.

‘Thank you.’

Victoire did not leave. That the room was now empty made it no easier to look at her.

‘Jeanne, you may go downstairs for your own dinner. There’s no reason you should fast as well.’

Jeanne curtseyed and left. Marie Catherine and Victoire sat for a few moments in silence. Jeanne had gone away without lighting the lamps. So Victoire’s hair blended into the growing shadows, and only her face was a pale smear in the grey twilight. She put her head in her hands and her face disappeared.

‘Marie,’ she said, her face still buried, ‘I have such a confession for you …’

‘Spare me the fucking play-acting, please. And close the door.’ The curse turned to ash in her mouth, although she had not spoken above a whisper. It was her mother who had spoken that way, when she was angry. Marie Catherine had learned young that she must never talk like a servant.

Victoire was looking at her with her eyes full of tears, her mouth pressed into a thin line. Her head had snapped up when Marie Catherine spoke, as if Marie Catherine had struck her. She rose and went to the door, and closed it very slowly.

‘This isn’t play-acting, Madame,’ she said when she had turned round. ‘I know I should never have done what I did. But I acted to save you. After discovering us, he would have killed us both, and no one in Paris would have blamed him.’

‘So you ran out and found an assassin to kill my husband?’ Madame de Cardonnoy asked. ‘Who did you hire? The police are already looking for him, and Monsieur de la Reynie does not believe he was only after my husband’s jewels. Do you trust this man not to betray you?’

‘I hired no one,’ Victoire said. ‘I held the gun myself.’

‘The servants saw a man.’ She realised how stupid she sounded as soon as she’d closed her mouth. So, too, the servants had seen a man when Victoire had come to Hôtel Cardonnoy in her red coat.

Victoire laughed, quietly. Then she covered her mouth as if she were horrified at the sound that had escaped from it. ‘So did you. I had only to dress as one.’

‘Oh God.’

Every time she had re-created her husband’s death she had managed to avoid thinking that Victoire might have opened the carriage door herself. It was impossible to imagine that bloody body and the girl she loved together – a curtain must separate them, hiding one from the other. When Victoire had first sat down next to her bed, Marie Catherine had blamed her: for her eyes that were red with tears, the paleness of her face, the stunned attitude of grief for a thing she could not have seen, a man whose death she had only imagined, although she must, without doubt, have ordered it. Now something terrible was moving over her face. She doubled up in her blue dress, she clasped her hands over her mouth as if to contain the noise that came out of her mouth, a dog’s howl. Marie Catherine leaped up and crossed the room and took the girl’s face between her hands.

‘Quiet,’ she whispered, ‘quiet, the servants will hear.’ She was shaking.

‘Any gentleman with any honour would have done the same,’ Victoire choked out. Then she clasped her hands over her mouth as she was trying to force the words back in.

‘Quiet,’ whispered Marie Catherine, and Victoire shook her head and whimpered. She didn’t seem to be breathing or, rather, she was drawing in short, choking breaths and with each exhale she seemed to be about to scream. It felt as if her panic was contagious. Marie Catherine pushed her away, and then she drew her hand back and slapped her.

There was a strange intimacy in the slap, as if it were one more secret they shared, or as if, in the moment Victoire jumped back from her, her mouth open, Marie Catherine could glimpse some secret self that the girl had never shown her.

Victoire raised her hand as if she was going to hit her back, and Marie Catherine embraced her. Despite the pressure of Victoire’s silk skirts against her own, she felt that she was holding the straight body of a young man.

Victoire must have felt herself a hero, and then, the moment she pulled the trigger, she must have realised that this time she had made a mistake she couldn’t undo. Marie Catherine could see her, riding through the night in her gallant coat, to save them both from her husband. And if she had been a man, the law would still have condemned her, but the world would have regarded her with a grudging admiration, because who hadn’t dreamed of rescuing a lover from catastrophe, even at the cost of his own life?

Victoire’s hands, braced against Marie Catherine’s shoulders, were cold, and the rest of her body was tense and breathing warmth through her dress, so that Marie Catherine remembered fucking her in the carriage, every kiss they had stolen in her box at the theatre, every time she had sent the servants away and recklessly pulled her down onto the bed that she’d thrown her husband out of. How could she have believed it possible they wouldn’t be caught?

As she breathed in Victoire’s scent, part of her wanted to surrender and let herself be swept away by the gallantry of it, as if she were the princess in a tale, rescued at the last minute from a monster. If she was damned, then let her be damned.

But there were Nicolas and Sophie, who she had to protect. Perhaps it was too late for her to die for love.

‘I’m going to confess,’ said Victoire. ‘I just wanted to speak with you first.’

‘What are you talking about?’ said Marie Catherine. ‘The Lieutenant General of Police was just in my house, and you’re going to confess to him?’

‘I have a plan.’ She was speaking quickly, as if she hoped to get the words out before she had to weep again. She kept stopping to take enormous gulps of air. ‘I acted hastily before, because I was in a panic when your maid brought me the letter. But I promise you, I will be the only one to bear the consequences of this. I swear to you. And you’ll be free to live in peace without him.’

‘If you confess and are condemned, they’ll want to make certain the confession is a full one,’ said Marie Catherine. ‘And what are you going to say when Monsieur de la Reynie asks you why you killed him?’

‘I’m going to tell him that the baron was my lover, and I was furious when he tossed me aside.’

‘The whole of Paris society knows that you’re my friend, they’ll hardly believe that you were in love with my husband.’

Victoire shook her head. Her silhouette moved like a shadow across the window, away from the door where Marie Catherine still stood. ‘They will. They already say that any of the ladies at court would kill each other to sleep with the king. That Madame de Montespan poisoned Mademoiselle de Fontanges when his attention turned her way. And Madame de Montespan may wish the queen were dead every day of her life, but she still pretends to be friends when they ride in a carriage together. If I tell the chamber that I begged the baron to poison you and marry me, and he refused, so I killed him, they’ll wail over the falseness of women, but they won’t doubt my word, because it’s only what they already believe.’

It was true that people whispered that Madame de Montespan, the king’s mistress, had murdered her rivals. But they said it, most often, with a laugh, not quite believing. Victoire turned away and lit the lamp by Marie Catherine’s bedside, bringing her face and her shining eyes out of the dimness.

Marie Catherine snorted. ‘I doubt they’ll consider my husband as great a prize as the king.’

‘They’ll consider him enough of one, as long as the story is scandalous.’

‘Oh yes.’ Marie Catherine’s voice had risen without her noticing it. ‘Here is this grey-haired baron, they’ll say, with his famous stinking breath, and of course he’s managed to seduce Mademoiselle de Conti, who is so far above his station, and who, so recently, would accept no man for her own!’

‘God damn you, Marie, what do you want me to do? I’ll die before I let the blame fall on you.’ Victoire, also, was no longer whispering. She tossed her head back as if she were on a stage, and the gesture made her look very young. Just the girl who’d rested her head on Marie Catherine’s knee and listened to stories about wicked fairies and the land of the Amazons.

‘I didn’t ask you to save me,’ Marie Catherine said.

‘What else could I have done?’ Victoire asked. ‘Should I have sat by while he imprisoned you in some workhouse for disobedient wives?’

‘Wait. Hush.’ There’d been a sound from outside the room. Marie Catherine opened the door a crack. Henri was coming up the stairs with a candle. She closed the door as quietly as she could. Henri’s footsteps travelled down the hallway.

‘I wanted to give you your freedom,’ Victoire whispered.

‘I had grown used to being without it.’ Every nerve in her body was still listening for movement in the house. She was so tightly wound that when Victoire flinched, she flinched with her.

‘I know,’ said Victoire. ‘I hated him for that. You bore it so silently, but you could barely bring yourself to say his name.’

And that was true, although it hardly mattered now.

‘It’s not too late. I’ll take the blame.’ Victoire was taking deep, slow breaths, visibly trying to master herself.

The house was quiet. Victoire’s hands were fisted in her skirt. Finally she turned away, towards the window.

‘I don’t regret his death,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I would see him at court, and all I could think about was how much I hated him, for the power he had over you. I wished him dead. But now that I’ve done it—’

She looked at her hands, as if she were trying to trace the shape of something she couldn’t see.

‘I waited so long, it was as if I were in a kind of dream,’ she said. ‘The rain began after I broke the glass on the street lamp, and the night was so dark that I could barely see the crests on the carriages as they passed. It was only afterwards – he was so close when I shot him, he was wearing fine gloves and they were all soaked through with blood, where he’d clutched his chest, I was holding him with my hand on his shoulder – he started forward as if he thought I was there to help him. I only wanted to save you. Do you understand?’

Marie Catherine bit the inside of her lip, picturing the bloody gloves laid over the face of her husband’s corpse, like an evil death mask. She wanted to shove the image away and, for a moment, Victoire with it.

‘Did you think I would agree to a plan in which you also died?’ she said instead.

Her voice was tight. She looked past Victoire to her reflection, which hovered in the windowpane, distorted by the faint ripples in the glass, so that it looked as if she was moving through a world of dark water that pressed in and threatened to extinguish her flame.

‘I murdered him. That burden’s on my soul.’

‘I forgive you.’

She said it as if she were a priest who had the power to offer absolution. And, for a moment, she felt that she did, as if the words had lit a candle flame inside her mouth that burned with the light of her love. She did not, would never, believe that flame was the flame of hell. Not if every confessor in France lined up to tell her that she was damned.

‘We could flee together, like the Comtesse de Soissons and Madame d’Alluye did when she was accused of poison,’ Victoire said quietly.

‘The Comtesse de Soissons’s children are grown.’

‘Then what do you intend to do?’

‘I don’t know.’

It was true that when the comtesse had received the news that she was to be arrested, and made up her mind to flee, her closest friend had climbed into the carriage with her and ridden out of France by her side. Marie Catherine had never heard any whisper that there was anything more than friendship between them – two ladies in their middle age, the comtesse, who everyone called The Snipe for her long nose and sharp-edged looks, and Madame d’Alluye, who had been famous for her beauty in her youth and was still – and yet she let herself imagine it for a moment. Riding out into the unknown night.

How could she not have seen it? It was clear that Victoire thought it must be obvious. But even when she had heard that Madame d’Alluye had fled with the comtesse, Marie Catherine had thought only of friendship, or that Madame d’Alluye feared herself implicated in the same crimes.

When Marie Catherine told stories, Nicolas wanted tales of princes, but the ones that Sophie loved best were always the ones where the heroine, the princess or the peasant girl, or the fairy in disguise or the girl who was only as tall as a mouse had to leave home, fleeing an ugly marriage, a wicked stepmother, a hungry monster. Always they were forced out, the girls, and returned home only through their own cleverness and bravery, to the shock of their old parents, who had long ago called off the search parties and given them up for dead. There was something in the story of Madame de Soissons’s flight that recalled these tales, except that she had set off not as a girl but as a woman, abandoning her grown children, her husband, her house and her land, at a point in her life when the tale might usually have ended, as if the force of her desire to save herself could turn back time and flip the world upside down.

The magic carriage hung in the air before her, so close that Marie Catherine thought she could touch it, if only she stretched out her hand. Victoire left the window and tiptoed to her on quiet feet, touched her cheek with her fingertips.

‘No,’ Marie Catherine said. ‘I won’t leave the children.’ The Image dissolved in the air. She wondered if Victoire had felt it, too.

‘Then what will we do?’ Victoire asked. She had slipped a hand under the widow’s veil, and her fingers were laced through Marie Catherine’s hair at the base of her neck.

Marie Catherine leaned in and kissed her again. She felt Victoire’s breath in her ribs and on her lips, and her touch still felt like a haven from the world. Her imagination had shaken her: the carriage, the night, Madame de Soissons with her unbeautiful face and Madame d’Alluye sitting side by side, sharing, maybe – only maybe – the same bond that she and Victoire shared. The power of the story that no one had ever told. There was sweat running down her back.

‘We’ll keep them at bay,’ she said.

Victoire looked at her. ‘And how?’

‘We’re going to tell Monsieur de la Reynie a story,’ Marie Catherine said. ‘A story he can believe. He wants witches and murder and poisoning, doesn’t he? We will give him that, and then we’ll give him a helpless widow, so that he can be a hero, for once.’

She would believe it if she said it aloud. Didn’t they say she told such stories, the kind that could be believed?

‘How, Marie?’ Victoire’s hand tightened on the back of her neck, and Marie Catherine put her own hand in the girl’s hair, so they were mirrors of each other, as if in a soldiers’ pact.

‘We’re going to find another murderer,’ Marie Catherine whispered, close to her lips. ‘Someone else to take the blame.’

‘An innocent?’ Victoire shook her head, a tiny movement that filled Marie Catherine’s whole field of vision. She’d never lose her gallantry.

‘I don’t know yet.’ But she wanted to live. She felt as if she could move any mountain with her wish. ‘If any cloud falls over us, it will mean death. Can you do it, Victoire?’

‘Can you?’ Victoire drew back from her a little, and Marie Catherine wanted to follow her, to lean forehead to forehead until it felt as if they were inhabiting the same flesh. ‘I don’t know if I can.’

‘I will find a way,’ she said. ‘I will.’