Chapter Ten

‘So she broke the hand off her doll?’

‘Sometimes I don’t know what to do with her.’

‘She believes in the story.’

‘There was a tale my nurse used to tell me when I was small. In it, the heroine is courted by her brother. When he asks for her hand, she orders her servant to cut both of them off and send them to him in a silver casket. It frightened me so much, I used to be afraid to have my hands outside the quilt when I was sleeping. I was very young. It made all talk of asking for someone’s hand seem ghastly.’

‘Are you saying it isn’t ghastly?’

Victoire was sitting on a stool watching as Madame de Cardonnoy’s seamstress, dressed in plain grisette, put pins into the bodice of a new mourning gown. The dress was made of heavy brocade, dull black – a lustrous fabric would have been inappropriately gay – with white at the throat and the sleeves. It was both sombre enough for her state as a recent widow and rich enough to wear to Versailles. Victoire had convinced her that she must go to the palace. Her husband had spent many of his days there, was recognised at court, had been the recipient of a handful of offices. It would be right for her to pay her respects to the king upon the baron’s death and, while she was there, she might speak with some of the courtiers he had been close to.

Victoire’s offhand remark about the ghastliness of marriage made Marie Catherine’s elbow twitch a little, so that the grisette’s pin stuck her. She had no idea what the seamstress might think about Victoire’s opinions on marriage, directed as they were to a recent widow. She made her face severe, and Victoire tilted her head back against the edge of her chair and fell silent.

Marie Catherine had, for the most part, avoided the court since her marriage and her early pregnancies. She could remember the enchantment of her first visits to Versailles: the old grounds of the last king’s hunting lodge, the immensity of the building that seemed to have been dredged up out of the forest and the farmland, as if one had discovered an ancient and terrible temple in the wilderness. The last time she had attended the court had been to celebrate the wedding of the king’s natural daughter and the Prince de Conti, Victoire’s brother. It had been January, but the paths of the gardens were lined with orange trees bearing fruit, and between the banquet dishes every table was heaped with fresh flowers – tulips, hyacinths, jasmine, a thousand blooms out of season. They might have been taken for silk, if their heady fragrance hadn’t risen into the air and combined with the scent of butter pastry, nutmeg, roast partridge and sweetbreads. Workmen had built two curved golden staircases up to the enormous windows of the ballroom, to make sure that the guests could enter easily, and the women climbing in and out of the windows were blue-lipped in their glimmering silk, the skin of their décolletage milk-white and puckering up into gooseflesh from the biting cold. Marie Catherine had worn a silk dress the colour of an unripe orange, embroidered from sleeve to skirt with little golden knights and ladies, each swain kneeling to take his beloved’s hand.

But the dress was too airy and light for the weather. She had felt as if she’d been cast into the hell of Tantalus – here were the orange trees, the sweet flowers of spring, the head of lamb roasted in green sauce and garnished with its own feet, the blancmange in the shape of a dancing woman, her dress striped pink and white, the nightingales stewed with cardoons. But nowhere, as she climbed the enchanted stairway up to the ballroom windows on her husband the baron’s arm, was there any warmth. They might all have been dancing corpses. The groom’s family considered a marriage with one of the king’s bastards to be a misalliance and were glum, except for Victoire, who thought marriage was a farce, and hid with the bride among the flowers when she bolted in terror from her husband’s bed later that night.

Madame de Conti, Victoire’s mother, herself rebellious in her youth, was in no hurry to marry off her youngest daughter and provide her with a fitting dowry. Everyone else could accept Victoire’s eccentricities as the rightful inheritance of her house. So Victoire dressed scandalously, kidnapped her brother’s bride and pretended to be an Amazon. Her father, before his death, had been known to practise alchemy and beat himself with a spoon.

Perhaps this was why Victoire never quite understood the things Marie Catherine hated about the court. Yes, the courtiers were snobs, they were two-faced, they ruined themselves at cards to win the momentary favour of their patrons, they lived in a warren of windowless rooms like an underground maze, but all this excited her. Victoire observed, flirted and saw no risk of her own ruin. Marie Catherine was a peasant wandering in a giant’s castle.

‘Will you raise your arms so that I can pin your waist, Madame?’ said the grisette in the shop, and Marie Catherine complied. She’d taken off her widow’s veil for the fitting. In the course of a few days she’d grown so used to wearing it that her naked head felt weightless and cold.

‘How soon will it be ready?’ asked Victoire.

‘In two days, I think,’ said the seamstress. ‘It only needs some final adjustments. I’ll need to fix the trim on the bodice, here, where I’m taking it in.’

‘Good. We should make the trip to court soon.’

Jeanne came in, carrying a pair of cups from the itinerant coffee-seller who had set up his stand on the corner. The bittersweet smell of the coffee followed her. She gave Victoire her cup with a curtsey. Marie Catherine’s glass she placed on a step-stool, for the moment when she could drop her arms again. Then Jeanne retreated and stood by the door, reaching out occasionally, absent-mindedly, to touch the trailing ends of the bolts of cloth heaped on the shelves to her left.

She had been very meek in the days since her magic trick with Monsieur Lavoie’s drawing. Madame de Cardonnoy could not tell what Jeanne was thinking, although her fingers, as she helped the seamstress unlace the black court dress without disturbing the lie of the pins, were as quick and gentle as ever. Marie Catherine raised her arms, let Jeanne lift her hair off her neck and the dress over her head, watched Victoire watching her from her seat in the corner, as Marie Catherine stood in her shift and let the two women dress her, like a doll.

When they were back in the carriage, Marie Catherine once more enveloped in her old black dress and veil, Jeanne cleared her throat delicately.

‘Madame, if you don’t mind …’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I have some bad news from my sister, outside Paris. Her little son is very sick. My uncle sent me a message yesterday, and I wondered if I could take the afternoon off and go and see him.’

‘Of course, Jeanne.’ Madame de Cardonnoy felt a ripple of relief at the request. It would be an easy way to have the girl out of the house, and would buy her some privacy with Victoire. She was too distracted to feel much genuine sympathy for the sick boy. Most children fell sick at some time. Many lived. ‘You can leave as soon as you like.’

Jeanne, however, did not look up from her lap, where her hands were twisted around a handkerchief.

‘Thank you, Madame. Only … my family are country people. They don’t have the money to treat the boy, or to feed him well. Since I am in service in a great house they’ve asked me for help, and if I could have my wages in advance, I could send something back with my uncle, to pay for the doctor.’

Marie Catherine paused and her eyes darted to Victoire, who sat next to her on the carriage bench. Jeanne’s wages were paid yearly, like all the Cardonnoy servants’, and the baron was dilatory enough about payment that the servants were sometimes owed several years of back wages and collected them only when they left Hôtel Cardonnoy permanently. Marie Catherine paid Jeanne’s wages herself, kept her well dressed in clothes fit for a lady’s maid and occasionally gave her a gift of ribbon or lace trim or a little money, for diligent service, but Jeanne rarely asked for anything above this sort of token, and the timing was deeply suspicious. Jeanne had been steady in her loyalty so far – she had carried the letter to Victoire, she had produced Lavoie’s drawing for Monsieur de la Reynie. But the early payment of her wages would give her the freedom to run, and she might run to the police.

Jeanne had been loyal. She could have asked for much more money, knowing what she did. Marie Catherine needed her loyalty too much to deny her. When she reached for her purse, Victoire put a hand on her wrist.

Marie Catherine watched Jeanne’s face change at Victoire’s gesture. It was a quiet transformation – a slight hardening of the line of her mouth, a downward tilt of her head. But her disappointment was plain. Madame de Cardonnoy had never been stingy with her before.

She shook Victoire’s hand off and took an écu from her pocket.

‘Of course, Jeanne. Tell your family I will ask our priest to pray for the boy’s health.’ Although she didn’t quite believe in the sick child, after all.

‘Thank you, Madame.’

But Jeanne was quiet and pensive for the rest of the ride back to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and Marie Catherine could see the way she held her hands balled up in her skirt.

‘Why did you do that?’ she asked Victoire, once they were safely in her cabinet in Hôtel Cardonnoy and Jeanne had been sent with the Swiss guard to find a rented fiacre that would take her to her uncle’s lodging. ‘Do you want her to think she’s being punished for her loyalty?’

‘I gave her a silver coin when she came with your letter.’ Victoire crossed her arms over her chest. ‘Has she spent it already? How could she have? Whatever she wants that money for, it’s not a sick nephew.’

‘She’s been trustworthy so far. Henri might have ruined me, without her help.’

‘We’ll have to hope you continue to be lucky then. I wish I’d brought my girl to send after her and find out where on earth she’s going.’

Victoire turned away from her then, sorting papers with brisk, choppy movements. Marie Catherine tried to catch her eye and failed. All day the air between them had been tense. Victoire had kissed her cheek when they first were alone in the study, but it was a quick kiss, more of custom than of passion, and she had pulled away afterwards as if disappointed. Marie Catherine was afraid that the murder had brought out something hard in Victoire. She seemed jealous of Marie Catherine’s attention, in a way that she had never been. When the baronne turned away from her – towards the baron’s papers, towards Jeanne – when she rebuffed her quips at the seamstress’s shop, Victoire’s posture tightened with disappointment. Or was it guilt? If so, it came to her differently than to Marie Catherine.

‘She’s more likely to betray us if you mistreat her,’ Marie Catherine said, touching Victoire’s sleeve.

‘You don’t know that,’ Victoire snapped. ‘Your husband used to beat his valet, and the man’s still defending him after his death.’

Marie Catherine took her hand away. ‘I suppose my husband must not have treated me poorly enough then.’ She had tried to say the words lightly. It wasn’t a success.

‘All right,’ said Victoire. She smoothed her hands over her face. ‘You’re right. I shouldn’t have done that. I’m ashamed.’

Marie Catherine stepped close behind her and, bending down, put her forehead in the curve of Victoire’s shoulder. She smelled like powder and irises, and like the perfume she wore in the city. It was comforting to stand there, with her chest pressed against Victoire’s back, but Victoire remained tense in her arms.

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing.’ Like a child without the words to describe what’s gone wrong. ‘We should get to work.’

She peeled Marie Catherine’s hands off her waist and sat down at the desk, taking deep, unsteady breaths. Marie Catherine watched her, but Victoire didn’t glance up.

The écu might have bought a piece of fringe off the sleeve of the elaborate brocaded mourning dress that her seamstress was now sewing. It was nothing. But in the servant girl’s hands it acquired the power to unsettle her. She kept seeing the passage of the silver into Jeanne’s hands, her fingers closing over it.

Jeanne stopped the fiacre near Les Halles, half a mile away from the address Laure had given her. She had a superstitious fear that the driver might return to Hôtel Cardonnoy and give Madame her destination, so she ducked down a little alley and hid in a doorway to try and catch her bearings. The street was overhung by a sign for a cobbler’s shop and a windowbox, out of which some wife was selling winter potatoes and shrunken cabbages from her garden. When Jeanne pulled her skirts up, she saw that in her haste she’d put one of her pretty embroidered shoes into mud or horse shit. She tried to scrape her sole clean on the doorstep.

The vegetable woman hissed at her. ‘Get on your way! We’re decent people, we don’t want you here!’

‘I’m sure your husband likes to see your face every night, cow!’ Jeanne called back, trembling. But the insult gave her the courage she needed to brush down her skirts and step back out into the street instead of lingering.

Her own outburst embarrassed her a little. Would it have been better to have held up her head and pretended she couldn’t hear the insult, as a lady might have? She could certainly have thought of a wittier reply. It wasn’t until she had gone three blocks and passed a couple standing on a corner – she powder-pale and dressed in ragged silk, he in servants’ braid with his arm around her waist – that she realised the vegetable-seller must have seen Jeanne’s own cast-off lady’s dress, with its lavender ruffles and faint, indelible stains of wear along the hem, and assumed she was one of the prostitutes who frequented the gardens at the nearby Tuileries, trawling for noblemen or at least their servants. The man looked up from his temporary lover and whistled at her. Jeanne hurried past, watching, from the corner of her eye, as the man’s partner put her hand on his cheek to turn his eyes back towards her.

Jeanne pulled her winter mantle tighter over her chest. She was used to running errands for Madame, but it made her uneasy to be away from the streets she knew well. Part of it was the way that men like that whistled or followed her, even when they knew she was just someone’s servant girl, but there was something else in it, too. Sometimes she felt as if she was uneasily sharing her eyes with the country girl she’d once been. She could go into a fashionable coffee house with its crystal chandeliers and the waiters would see her dress and serve her as if she were a lady – as if anyone could become anything in Paris. But it was an illusion. Her dress was only half as fine as a lady’s. The waiters condescended to the house in which she served, not to her, and the men who whistled at her served as a reminder that, even if she could transform herself into a princess in the eyes of the crowd, she could also be transformed into other things, many of which she wouldn’t like. Even those like La Chapelle, who understood the magic by which people remade themselves better than anyone else Jeanne knew – even she could be cast down.

Jeanne didn’t know which building was Madame Camille’s, and so she stopped on the street that Laure had indicated and looked for someone to ask. It was the kind of street where one could rent a furnished room, dirty but cheap enough – although Jeanne had heard that the landlords charged single women double. The gutters were clogged with household filth. Jeanne didn’t like to approach any of the men waiting on the street or going in and out of houses, and the women were just as frightening. As she watched, a fraying bureaucratic creature with stains on his white cuffs tumbled out of a doorway, buttoning his coat, and after him came a woman dressed only in her shift and stays, her hair tumbling down her back in a cloud of powder, screaming insults into the cold air.

‘And take your blistered cock to someone who’s more of a fool! Foutu! I wasn’t born yesterday!’ She wrapped her arms around herself, then shivered. She was barefoot. She paused for only a moment on the doorstep before slamming the door.

No one else on the street seemed to find this exchange particularly noteworthy. An old woman hissed at the man as he hurried away.

After La Chapelle had found her a place at Hôtel Cardonnoy, Jeanne had often looked out of the window of Madame’s coach and begun the sentence, If La Chapelle hadn’t helped me, I would have been condemned … But the thought usually remained unfinished.

Finally she screwed up her courage and walked over to an older woman who held the hand of a small child dressed in a sexless long wool shirt. ‘Can you tell me which of these buildings is the one run by Madame Camille?’

‘Ah, you’re new here.’ She pointed at a door. ‘The rents are high, and the room is bad. I have a friend a few streets away who might give you a better offer.’

‘No, I’m – visiting a friend.’ Jeanne stumbled over the sentence. She’d almost said, I’m not one of those women, I’m not staying, but then she’d thought that this woman might well be one of those women, changed out of her working clothes.

‘As you like.’ The woman nodded, curtly, and took her child away.

Jeanne approached the door of the house where Laure was staying, found it unlocked and went upstairs.

‘I should visit the painter.’

‘You can’t! That’s incredibly foolish. Think how it will look.’

‘A widow can’t want to know how her husband spent his last night?’

‘I thought you had enough trouble making La Reynie believe he wasn’t your lover the first time. That man’s a wolf – he’ll take the faintest trace of impropriety for blood.’

Marie Catherine sighed. ‘I wish Henri hadn’t had that outburst. He was my husband’s confidant. He knew more about his doings than I ever did.’

She and Victoire were sitting together in her husband’s office, going through his papers. She’d filed documents according to their type – personal letters, documents asking for favours or loans or court appointments, letters asking for the repayment of debts. Separate from the rest of the papers were the ledger books containing her husband’s finances. These detailed the income from the estates at Cardonnoy, from his royal offices, from the sale or rental of lands and goods. When the baron’s father had died, the estate had been in decay, but between Marie Catherine’s money and his own keen financial instincts he had reversed the slow seepage of the Cardonnoy fortune.

The ledgers, however, were a disaster. Marie Catherine had been taught to manage a household’s income, both in the convent and by her mother’ s example. But high ladies didn’t do such work, whatever the nuns taught. Marie Catherine’s father had bitterly mocked her mother whenever she revealed her knowledge of money – the proof that she was only a shopkeeper’s daughter. After her own marriage, Marie Catherine had been shut out of the management of the estate. Her husband kept the details of his finances to himself.

He had not kept clear accounts. Some of the entries were written in the baron’s hand, and others in the hand of the intendant who managed the baron’s estates at Cardonnoy. Sometimes he had slipped letters promising or requesting money into the books, perhaps in lieu of entering expenditures, or perhaps simply as a reminder to himself to decide what to do about them.

‘Can you read this? I can’t make sense of the handwriting.’ Marie Catherine passed a letter to Victoire. ‘As for Monsieur Lavoie, surely going to see him will give us a better sense of whether the Lieutenant General of Police considers him a serious suspect. And if he doesn’t, I owe him some kind of recompense for my husband’s behaviour.’

Victoire dropped the letter on her lap. ‘Do you like this painter?’

Marie Catherine shrugged. ‘He was charming. And I’m sorry that any harm came to him because of his interest in my fairy tale.’

Victoire, surely, heard the undertone of guilt in her voice. It was Victoire’s custom to be frank when she found another lady beautiful, but Marie Catherine was private about her own inclinations, and she felt sick knowing that her encouragement of the painter, however gentle, had made him fall foul of her husband.

‘You haven’t told me that tale yet.’

‘I didn’t tell him the ending, either,’ she said. ‘I upset the children with it instead. I lost my head when I thought my husband might send me away, and I frightened them.’

‘A little adversity makes the ending happier,’ Victoire said with a smile, as if she had forgotten their earlier disagreement. Marie Catherine felt herself flushing.

‘Will you take a look at that letter?’

‘Don’t be angry with me, Marie.’ She bent her head as if she were reading the paper Marie Catherine had handed her, but her eyes remained fixed on the salutation. ‘The children will be all right. It’s just a story.’

‘I’m not angry.’ If she were honest with herself, Marie Catherine knew that she was trying to pick a fight. But Victoire’s light- heartedness frightened her. She didn’t know what lay underneath it.

It was the worst possible time to argue. How many days like this could they have, alone in the privacy of the baron’s study? And yet she didn’t seem to be in control of herself, although she could see that Victoire was trying to soothe her, with her jokes and the sad way she bent her head over her sheaf of papers.

‘“To Monseigneur the Baron de Cardonnoy,”’ Victoire read, softly, ‘“best wishes, et cetera” – this is chicken scratch, it’s illegible – “enclosed is the talisman you requested, which, being wrapped in a piece of cloth worn by Monsieur so-and-so, and buried in consecrated ground, will have a salutary influence on the proceedings that concern you.”’ Victoire looked up from the paper. ‘This is a magic charm! Did Monsieur de Cardonnoy see fortune-tellers?’

Marie Catherine shook her head. ‘Not since the time when every one at court was obsessed with that man who could tell a man’s fortune by looking at his writing.’

‘The queen herself patronised him, so that’s hardly damning.’ Victoire fanned herself with the letter.

‘This letter still might be, though,’ said Marie Catherine. ‘Who is the man whose clothes he was supposed to get?’

‘The name’s left out.’

‘And the name of the letter writer?’

Victoire paused. ‘He’s a priest. Père Roblin.’

Marie Catherine reached for the letter. Her eyes met Victoire’s for a moment, and then they both looked away at the same time. A priest selling spells was explosive – it would mean black magic, devil worship, the profanation of his holy calling. It would mean that her husband had had dealings with men who might very easily commit murder.

That morning she had had a letter from Monsieur de la Reynie. A man on the rue du Four had seen a swift rider, who he thought wore bloodstains on his coat, about the time of her husband’s murder. The horseman had been well dressed, he said, the horse a colour he couldn’t identify in the rain. Monsieur de la Reynie asked her to look, particularly, for men of some means with whom her husband might have quarrelled.

Marie Catherine’s hands trembled.

‘It’s not dated. But if he put the priest’s letter in the account book around the time it was received, and not later, it was sent about two years ago, before any of these rumours about poison became public. It’s too old.’

It might be nothing, after all.

‘It might not be,’ said Victoire. ‘What would he have wanted a sorcerer for?’

‘It wasn’t a love charm. That would have mentioned a lady’s name.’ She was afraid to look too closely at the letter. She imagined it might grow legs and try to run away.

‘Unless it was intended to harm the lady’s husband,’ said Victoire.

‘Is that something you know much about?’ she snapped. She was ashamed the moment she’d said it. It was something she might have said to the baron, in anger, and she was sure she’d finally said the thing that would ignite Victoire’s own temper. Instead Victoire took a deep, unsteady breath and looked back at the letter.

‘Be serious. It’s a rumour they toss around at court. The Princesse de Tingry wants to remove her sister so that she can enjoy her sister’s husband.’

‘I’ve always doubted that. I’ve met the Marquis de Luxembourg. The man’s hideous.’ Her hands were shaking a little in her lap. Surely now they’d fight.

‘I know that, but so is Mademoiselle de Tingry,’ Victoire said. ‘I think people believe that rumour just because there’s an awful fascination in imagining them in bed together. It’s not true, anyway. They say she cried when Monsieur de la Reynie questioned her about it. She’s taken a vow of celibacy.’

At court, Victoire had learned to disguise her feelings, but Marie Catherine could see that she was upset. Her voice sounded almost carefree, but her eyes were focused intently on some point in the room to the left of Marie Catherine’s shoulder.

Marie Catherine held the letter up again.

‘So it’s more court gossip then.’

‘I thought we were looking for a scandalous story?’

‘I know. It’s just ugly.’

‘So it is.’

Marie Catherine could see the muscles of Victoire’s throat working as she tried to master herself. She swallowed, twisted her hands in her lap and finally leaned forward until her knee was pressed against Marie Catherine’s through the many layers of her skirts, and looked into her eyes. Marie Catherine found it hard to hold her gaze. She wondered, if she crumbled and put her head in the girl’s lap, whether Victoire would find some way to rescue her on her own, while Marie Catherine herself was busy being paralysed by fear.

‘Are you all right?’ Victoire asked.

‘I’m well enough,’ she said, fidgeting with the pile of letters on her lap.

‘You aren’t.’ Victoire put a hand on her wrist. ‘I’m sorry I interfered with your maid earlier.’

‘That’s not it.’ Her skin was uncomfortably sensitised where Victoire was touching her, as if pins and needles were travelling up her arm. But she’d hurt Victoire’s feelings when she’d sniped about love spells. It would hurt her again if she drew her hand away.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Victoire again.

‘I’m frightened. That’s all it is.’

The truth was that once she would have turned to Victoire instinctively with her fear, and now she didn’t know what she should do. It was as if some eruption from the earth had shifted the landscape between them, so that she no longer knew where the old boundary lines lay. She had lain awake, some nights, imagining what might have happened if she had not refused Victoire’s offer to take the blame – how safe she might have felt then, in her household, surrounded by her children and her servants and the protection of her good name. And then she had frozen over with the horror of imagining that dear body enclosed in a lightless cell, or led to the axemen at the place de Grève. Would she really risk not only herself, but her children, for Victoire’s sake?

It appeared she would.

‘Marie, I’m so sorry,’ Victoire said, after they’d sat in silence for a while, Marie Catherine idly flipping the letter over in her hands. Now she looked up and saw that Victoire was biting her lower lip as if to ward off tears. ‘I’ve made myself a burden to you,’ she said and swiped a hand over her eyes. She had always been proud. She hated anyone to see her embarrassed, or weeping, or weak. When something touched her too deeply she made a joke of it, or she disappeared inside herself and returned only when she had transformed her sadness into some feeling that was more acceptable to her. The first time Marie Catherine had seen her cry, she had been enchanted. With Victoire there was no greater mark of trust.

Marie Catherine caught her hand and kissed her fingers.

‘You aren’t a burden to me.’

Victoire shook her head, as if she were shooing away a bee.

‘I will take the blame if you need me to. I meant that when I promised it.’

‘Why are you despairing now? This is the best thing we’ve found so far.’ She held Victoire’s hand against her cheek, and the girl let out a breath and put her head on Marie Catherine’s shoulder. When Marie Catherine put her arms around her, she could feel her shoulders shaking. But she cried almost silently.

After a little while Victoire straightened up and wiped her face with her handkerchief.

‘I’m sorry I said that thing, earlier,’ Marie Catherine said.

But Victoire wouldn’t speak about her feelings. She put on a smile, only a little shaky, and reached out for the letter again. ‘What could Monsieur de Cardonnoy have wanted that spell for, do you think?’

Marie Catherine looked at the ledger, still open on her lap. Expenditures. She recognised the name of the baron’s lawyer. ‘Two years ago Monsieur de Cardonnoy was involved in a law suit that went badly for him,’ she said. ‘He was so angry that he sent away his old intendant, who’d managed his affairs for years, and whose father had managed his father’s affairs.’

The old baron had, before his death, been a sieve of debts and unwise expenditures. He had sided against the king in the Fronde, the rebellion that had blighted Louis’s early years as a monarch and turned Paris itself against its ruler, and while many men had successfully regained their status at court and proved their loyalty, old Monsieur de Cardonnoy never quite recovered either his fortune or his reputation. The old baron had dragged along in noble near-poverty, but the new one, once his father had died, had successfully gambled with his inheritance, selling off some part of his ancestral lands to finance his life at court, leasing away the rights to the monopolies that his father had held in Paris and, finally, sweeping up Marie Catherine, the financier’s only daughter, who came to his house carrying ten times her weight in gold, in exchange for the noble history of his name. With his capital assured, he had set about regaining the old Cardonnoy rights and privileges, ensuring with as much assiduousness as any bourgeois tax-farmer that his money would, like spring seeds planted in fertile ground, continue to grow.

The baron had, for the most part, been successful. His chief regret had been a piece of good farmland that he had sold in a hurry, early in his career, in order to make good on a gambling debt to no less a person than the king’s brother. The best one might have said for the debt was that the baron had perhaps been overwhelmed by his proximity to royalty, for at the time he had been new at court and had wagered far more than he was capable of paying. The land, therefore, had been sold in a hurry, at a loss, and his intendant’s management of the sale had seen some fault in the paperwork, for in the years that followed he and the buyer would bitterly dispute whether the surveyed land included in the sale encompassed the farmland only or also an adjacent woodland, rich in timber, and worth far more, the baron felt, than the money he had received.

The case went against the baron. He blamed first the dishonesty of the financier he had sold to, and then the servant who had managed the affair, and finally Marie Catherine, whose dowry had come too late, and who, despite the long seasons spent at her father’s country house, did not understand what it was to know that the land was your birthright, the soil your bones, to walk on the land that your fathers had walked on for far more than four generations, only to have it snatched away by lawyers.

She had conceded that she did not understand. Privately she had thought that if a contract made carelessly and under duress were not legally binding, then she ought also to be released from her marriage and regain what she had brought as a dowry. But she had kept that opinion to herself.

Now she laughed. ‘I supposed he asked the devil to intervene in his lawsuit.’

Victoire, too, was smiling now. Her fingers found a curl escaping from under the widow’s veil and tugged it until it hung loose across Marie Catherine’s face, which made Marie Catherine laugh more, with a strength that felt like a prelude to hysteria. She leaned forward and kissed Victoire, quickly, on the corner of her smiling mouth, and Victoire caught her by her veil and held her there when she would have pulled away.

Behind them, the door to the baron’s study creaked. Marie Catherine jumped away from Victoire’s hand on her neck. At first it appeared that no one was there and the door had swung open of its own accord. After a moment she saw Sophie’s face peering around the doorframe. She’d got down on her knees, as if she hoped to creep in unnoticed.

‘You ought to be in the nursery,’ Marie Catherine told her, breathlessly.

Sophie rolled her eyes up to the ceiling, as if she was supplicating the angels. ‘It’s not fair.’

The sound of footsteps echoed in the hallway, and Anne appeared at the door.

‘I’m sorry, Madame. She slipped away when she should have been doing her lessons.’

The nursemaid tried to take Sophie by the hand, but she ran forward and wrapped her arms around Madame de Cardonnoy’s waist. Victoire reached out and ruffled Sophie’s hair, so that her shiny curls were mussed, and Sophie looked up at her in surprise.

‘Let her stay,’ Marie Catherine said. ‘Bring down her books, she can do her lesson here. As long as she’s quiet and well behaved.’

The last line she delivered with a little press of her hand on Sophie’s shoulder. Sophie nodded. Victoire raised her eyebrows at her.

‘Will you tell us a new story?’ Sophie asked.

‘Tonight. If you’re good.’

‘I’d like to hear it too,’ Victoire said, and she looked towards Sophie with a tentative smile, as if they were playing a game and she were waiting for the girl’s approval.

Marie Catherine took Victoire’s hand in one of hers and Sophie’s in the other and squeezed.

‘Wait. Both of you. There’s work to do.’

She picked up the papers.

There was a little window in Laure’s room that overlooked the alley, casting a thin stripe of light across the grimy floor. Jeanne found herself staring at the light instead of Laure’s face. Laure held the coin Jeanne had given her and flipped it back and forth between her fingers. Jeanne had kept half her money for herself, the écu Mademoiselle de Conti had given her burning a shameful hole in the pocket of her dress.

‘They say La Voisin’s execution will be today,’ Laure said. ‘I don’t dare go.’

She touched the red birthmark on her face, a silent explanation. The mark was too distinctive – she’d be recognised.

‘Would you want to see it?’ Jeanne asked.

‘I would. It would be good if there was someone there at her death who bore her no ill will.’

‘I thought she and your mother didn’t get along?’ Jeanne felt herself trapped in a parody of a social visit. Her voice sounded high and artificial to her own ears. It was her accent – the words that Laure herself had trained her to pronounce like a lady. She remembered holding hands with Laure in La Chapelle’s garden, walking back and forth among the cabbages, reading aloud from Le Mercure galant, about poetry, the theatre, the styles of the season, and how the reading had felt like a process of enchantment, from the girl who took away the soiled bedclothes to a fine lady. Now she felt like a block of wood. Laure’s eyes were red-rimmed and her face was drawn. She seemed infinitely far away.

‘They didn’t like each other, it’s true. But I forgive her. It was a small quarrel.’

There was a long pause. Jeanne looked out the window. There were pigeons roosting on the roof and they cooed and rustled. The sheets on the bed were dirty. Jeanne thought she saw a stain the colour of menstrual blood, indelible even after long scrubbing.

‘There’s no hope for Mother, you know. I don’t dare visit her. Even La Voisin’s daughter is imprisoned. I heard she turned herself in.’ Laure was looking at her hands, picking at the skin around her nails.

‘Did she really sell poisons?’ Jeanne blurted out.

‘I don’t know. She said that she didn’t and La Voisin did. I think La Voisin probably says that she didn’t and Maman did.’ Laure sounded so uncertain that Jeanne decided she didn’t want to hear any more.

‘Will you leave Paris?’

Laure sighed. ‘I don’t know how to start again without her. And I don’t know how far my money will take me.’

She looked up at Jeanne, shaking her head as if she were shaking her thoughts away.

‘I’m sorry. I must sound so ungrateful.’

‘Don’t,’ Jeanne said. ‘I’m the one who owes you.’

But Mademoiselle de Conti’s money was a cold bruise on her leg. She wanted it, in case she had to run herself. She felt as if Laure had asked her to give away her dress and go out onto the street naked.

‘She’s so close, La Voisin. The execution will be at the place de Grève. Some of the women who stay here have gone to watch.’ Laure’s eyes were focused on the windowsill.

The silence settled back on the room.

‘Did you know, my mistress’s husband was murdered,’ Jeanne said.

‘What? How?’ Laure looked up at her. ‘Are you saying he was poisoned?’

‘He was shot.’

Jeanne tugged at the trim on her bodice, trying to readjust her dress so that the boning in her underclothes didn’t pinch. The bloodstains on Laure’s sheets, the general air of squalor, the sounds of creaking stairs, slamming doors and fucking emanating from furnished rooms above and below, all were making her squirm with second-hand humiliation for Laure.

‘I think Madame planned it.’ The words fell out of her mouth like a pebble, surprisingly light and small. ‘I think she had me carry a letter, explaining how it was to be done.’ As soon as she’d spoken, she was horrified at herself. If the police ever caught Laure, how could Jeanne expect her to keep her secrets, when she couldn’t keep them herself?

Laure sat on her bed perfectly quietly, waiting for Jeanne to go on. It was a look Jeanne remembered well from her fortune-telling: the strange calm of her marked face, the way her eyes seemed to film over and regard some invisible presence. If one sat in silence long enough, one could watch Laure’s eyes dart upwards and then follow her gaze around the room, as it observed something that left no visible impression on the air.

Jeanne believed in what Laure saw. And yet that power hadn’t stopped the police from finding La Chapelle.

‘So you see,’ Jeanne said, ‘I may need to find some way to flee Paris, too, if Madame is arrested. Because the police will believe that I assisted her.’ She twisted her hands uneasily behind her back. Jeanne didn’t believe that Laure kept her own record of the debt between them. Perhaps she thought that Jeanne had already repaid her. But what Laure and her mother had given Jeanne was a new life, and what Jeanne had returned was less than that.

‘What was in the letter?’ Laure had been watching the dust move in the dark corner beneath the window, but now she looked up and met Jeanne’s eyes.

‘I’m an idiot. I didn’t read it. I was afraid to break the seal.’ She glanced at the corner where Laure had been staring, then swallowed. ‘What did you see?’

Laure shook her head. ‘I don’t like to describe them,’ she’d said, long ago, when Jeanne first asked, shivering, what she saw when she spoke to the spirits. ‘They’re strange.’ Her darting gaze had made Jeanne feel intimately acquainted with the beings of the other world, how they moved, how they tiptoed and glided on the ceiling, or hung in the drying linen and watched her while she washed her face in the morning. Now, again, she had the feeling of a supernatural watcher. Did it look into her heart and see what Laure couldn’t?

Why didn’t you warn me that I ought to have read that letter before I delivered it? she wondered silently, and then felt blasphemous. Why shouldn’t it choose Laure instead of her? Laure was kind, and holy in the way that Jeanne imagined the virgin saints.

‘You’re not an idiot,’ said Laure.

Jeanne put her hands over her face.

‘I didn’t give you all of my money,’ she said. She fumbled in her skirt until she found Mademoiselle de Conti’s écu at the bottom of the pocket. ‘Here’s the rest. Take it.’

She held the coin out flat in the palm of her hand. At first she felt embarrassed, as she had when she stepped forward in front of Henri and lied to the police. But there was something else underneath the embarrassment, a kind of elation – not because she’d stopped being afraid, but because she’d decided her fear didn’t matter. Laure was the kind of person who gave what she had when it was needed, without reckoning what it cost her. Jeanne knew she wasn’t like Laure. But she would be, today.

‘Oh, Jeanne.’ Laure shook her head. ‘You’ll need it as much as I do, if you’re right about your mistress.’

‘No.’ Jeanne could feel her resolve hardening as she spoke. ‘I’ll manage. I can get more money. I can steal it if I have to.’

What she did not say was, You once took on a great risk in order to help me. Allow me to do so in return. La Chapelle had never spoken of the danger or the expenses she had incurred by taking in Jeanne. She had simply asked, kindly, whether Jeanne would remember her, at her new post in the baron’s house. Noble words were for those who couldn’t communicate through the invisible signs written in the outer world, in a gesture, in a friend’s face.

Jeanne smiled. ‘Take it. After all, you promised me once I’ll yet live to be old.’

Laure frowned at her. She didn’t stretch out her hand. Jeanne put the coin down on the blanket beside her. Her face was burning.

‘Take it, please. And write to let me know where you’ve gone, if you can.’

Impulsively she got down on her knees and embraced Laure’s skirts, pressing her forehead into the other girl’s knees. The silk hem of her skirt swept up a ratted tangle of dust from under the bed, which gusted along in her wake as she scrambled up and bolted from the room. She heard Laure’s footsteps follow her to the door, Laure calling, ‘Jeanne! Your mistress …’ But she was as light as a seedpod blown on the wind. She had to leave, or else she would end up regretting the money, which she had only risked her life to get. She turned for a last look at Laure’s face and waved gaily, then smiled as her feet in their delicate heeled slippers tap-tapped down the squalid stairwell. Tap-tap, she spun out on the last step as if she were dancing at a ball, then opened the door to the outside world and floated into the street. She felt as if, along with that piece of silver, she’d thrown away her past one more time and had become Jeanne-of-no- particular-name, nineteen years old, who lived by her wits and owned a silk dress and one true portrait of herself in black charcoal, drawn by a man who did not love her, but wanted her favour.

The cold air hit her face and shocked her back to herself. She was a fool who’d given away the money for her own escape. She pulled her mantle tight around herself and laughed. She barely had the pocket change to take her back to the hôtel. When she’d run out of laughter, she left the alley on light steps, looking at none of the men, and flagged down a rented carriage.

What had possessed her? At least Laure would be all right.

The coachman shook his head at Jeanne sadly.

‘Oh no, Mademoiselle, it will be difficult to cross the river now. All the crowds have gathered to watch the execution of that poisoner, La Voisin. The streets are crowded with traffic. It will be a long drive for me indeed.’

Jeanne bit her tongue over a sharp reply.

‘Just take me to the edge of the crowd then, and I’ll get out and walk.’

The driver grinned at her. ‘Going to watch with the others as she burns then?’

‘Maybe so.’ She opened the door and sat down on the musty upholstery, which breathed out a sigh of dust as she settled in. The air inside the carriage was cold and close.

The crowd was indeed thick on the rue Saint-Antoine, whatever the coachman might have said to drive up his fare. When he pulled in behind a line of coaches, Jeanne got out and paid him, and pushed her way into the street. She looked at the gold braid the waiting drivers were wearing, at the crests on the carriage doors, and counted the members of the nobility, customers of La Voisin’s or strangers, who’d come to watch the spectacle of her death.

There was one more thing that she could do, while she was pretending to be fearless. There would be one soul at La Voisin’s death who didn’t wish her ill, as Laure had wanted.

She shoved her way between two tall men, one of whom slapped at her and nearly caught her on the ear, and then she pushed farther into the crowd, the press of bodies turning the winter day warm. There was a woman on the corner selling roasted chestnuts. Their smoke hung in the air, over the smell of horse sweat and cabbage, like a lady’s perfume.

‘Chestnuts!’ the woman was calling over the noise of the crowd. ‘Hot chestnuts!’

La Voisin’s cart must have passed already. The crowd was moving towards the place de Grève like a snail, never seeming to consciously step forward, but slowly, undulatingly changing place. Men and women called the poisoner’s name and jeered. Jeanne ducked low to slide under a man’s waving arm, sidled a woman out of her way, felt some unseen person grab at her skirt and try to squeeze – shoved off the bulk of an immense man in lawyerly dress – and finally washed up under a shop window facing the place de Grève, with its gallows and its single stone cross, mounted high on a column. She climbed up on an empty crate to look over the crowd and tried to shake off the feeling that all those bodies were trying to seize her and push her up towards the executioners.

There was a clear space in the centre of the square, and by it stood the convict’s wagon. Little figures were heaping straw around the stake, which was blowing away in the cold wind as they piled it up. Jeanne held her hand up to shade her eyes against the winter sun. Two ragged children climbed up on the crate beside her, jostling each other for a better view.

Far away, two guards dragged a struggling figure out of the cart. She was wearing white. Her legs were bound with fetters – she kicked them together, like a fish. She lay limp on the ground and made them drag her. Through it all, her mouth was open, a black hole in her pink face, chafed with cold. It was impossible to hear what she was shouting, over the low rumbling of the crowd assembled to watch her death. It looked, more than anything, like a ghastly and inexpert puppet show. Her confessor ran forward, a black mouse in a white collar, offering her the cross, and the little poisoner-puppet shoved it away and turned her face to the ground.

Jeanne felt as if the crate on which she was standing had risen into the air and was hovering somewhere far above the crowd, so that she had the same view as a passing crow, and felt as far removed from the proceedings. She thought she ought to have flinched when they lit the straw, and the smoke began to curl up around La Voisin’s feet, but instead she felt as if she was a kite flying away from herself on a long string. La Voisin kicked at the burning straw, in defiance of the chains binding her to the stake. A heap of smouldering straw tumbled off the platform, and the executioner piled it back up with a long pitchfork. La Voisin kicked the pitchfork. She kicked, again, the straw. The smoke rose so thickly that it became hard to see the movements of the little imprisoned figure at the foot of the stake. The flames were very bright.

What Jeanne hadn’t been prepared for was how long it took. She’d half expected La Voisin to go up like a slip of paper held to a candle flame, her soul escaping into the air as soon as the fire touched her. But of course the pyre didn’t burn that way, and it wasn’t possible to pretend that she was only a marionette woman while she was in the flames. When she first screamed, in real pain and not the helpless fury at her impending death, there was a moment when the audience went silent and listened to the high, wavering sound. Then they called out again, heckling her, promising hell.

Jeanne made the sign of the cross over her chest. Her lips seemed to have frozen together with cold. When she opened her mouth to whisper, there was a sort of gummy film clinging to them, cold as the air and tasting of smoke. She murmured, Our Father, but stopped herself, the words of the prayer ringing inside her head, sounding less merciful than she had hoped. She pictured La Chapelle, in her dark cell, waiting to be sentenced to death, and then she imagined the smoke parting so that the tiny burning woman could fly away into the night on the wings of – what, the holy ghost? Her demon familiar? Her guardian fairy’s chariot? The smoke did not open, but it drifted out over the crowd and stung Jeanne’s eyes.

Maybe they would burn Jeanne too, if they knew her.

‘Hail Mary,’ she whispered. ‘Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.’

And on her breast, where she’d first made the sign of the cross, she traced the letters AGLA, which La Chapelle, who had not been able to save herself, had sworn were magic, and which she had given to Jeanne to eat when she woke up from her long sickness.

She closed her eyes against the sun and the smoke. Maybe the prayer had some power even in her mouth. Maybe the burned woman’s soul would ascend to heaven, and stand outside the golden gates and cry, Open the door, for I, too, am going to come in.