Chapter Fourteen

Madame de Cardonnoy had woken up all at once in the bright sunlight, hearing the noise of the day filtering in from the courtyard. The cook was back from the butcher’s and was unloading baskets of meat with the help of the kitchen boys. Somewhere on the street a dog was yelping. The man who sharpened the knives was walking down the boulevard, calling for customers. She felt as if she had taken off her fever like an old, dirty dress.

She left Jeanne sleeping, sweaty and feverish on her pallet, and took her breakfast upstairs, with the children. Anne waited inexpertly at the table, pouring bittersweet coffee into Marie Catherine’s patterned cup and cutting Nicolas’s omelette into small pieces. Even the children seemed softer and better-behaved today, Nicolas looking up from his lap to ask, ‘Are you better, Maman?’ with an expression of sweet and childish worry. She’d left off her veil and wore only the black mourning dress, with a piece of lilac ribbon tied in bows around her wrists. She felt only the smallest traces of illness in her body. That she was thirsty. That the breeze from the open window in the children’s room touched her face like cool relief. That everything in her vision seemed soft-edged and vaporous, as if she were looking at the world through a veil of steam.

‘I’m much better, thank you. I feel entirely well.’

She led the children in their morning prayers, kneeling down on the nursery floor before the cross on the wall. Nicolas bent his head and mumbled fervently through the words he knew by rote, his eyes focused on some piece of the carpet in front of him, as if he was looking through it and into an invisible world. Sophie closed her eyes when she prayed, and her face became fiercely concentrated on some vision inside herself. Marie Catherine got up when she was finished and touched her children’s hair.

‘Be good today, please,’ she said. ‘I have some things to do.’

‘Where are you going?’ Sophie asked.

‘I’ll be back soon, sweetheart.’

She left the children and climbed into the carriage and wished that she could turn her desperation into something outside her. She must have a tale for Monsieur de la Reynie, and she believed she knew now how the pieces would come together. The renegade priest who had fled the city. The years-old letter. The thread that she would use to stitch them to her husband’s murder. Once she had finished, it would look more real than the truth.

In the carriage she stroked the fur fringe on her cloak and imagined the weight of a marble figure beside her, as if the fairy of her creation was a friend, or a mother of whom she could ask advice. Help me, she thought. Give me some help outside myself.

Lavoie was in his studio when someone knocked on the door. For a while he ignored the sound. He was in his shirt sleeves, and his fingers were daubed with paint where he’d touched his palette carelessly. His boots were standing by the door. He’d have to clean his hands if he didn’t want to get paint on his shoes, and he was absorbed in the painting that he’d finally begun – in the line of colour and light where the sea’s waves met the edge of the sky. It was dawn over the burning city and smelled like the acrid, clean scent of oil and pigment.

He left his caller standing on the doorstep for some time, and for a while he thought the man must have left, but then after a few minutes of silence there was a renewed knocking. The pounding sent an unpleasant memory running up his spine. It was not, at least, night. In the street someone shouted his name, and he heard it dimly through the windowpane.

‘Monsieur Lavoie! Your neighbour says that you are at home!’

Finally he washed off his hands and pulled the boots on, in no particular hurry. He chose the plain coat. The brocade one he wore to call on clients needed to have the cuffs washed. He thought his hair was probably mussed, but he didn’t look at himself in the distorting mirror of polished metal that hung over his shaving basin.

The man at the door wore the Cardonnoy livery. Not one of the men who had beaten him. Or was he? It was as if Lavoie’s vision shimmered when he looked at him, and he didn’t know if he had seen him before. He had nearly slammed the door in the man’s face, but the lackey stuck his foot in the gap and wrestled with him, panting, ‘Excuse me, Monsieur Painter, Madame desires to speak with you, if you would kindly forgive this intrusion.’

Lavoie looked up across the street and saw the carriage waiting, the Cardonnoy seal on its door, a dark curtain drawn across the window, like a sealed coffin in which the lady was folded up for safe keeping.

The little police spy who Lavoie was fairly certain had been assigned to watch him was lounging across the street, his arms crossed, doing nothing to disguise his expression of interest. Lavoie met the boy’s eyes, and the spy shrugged and pursed his lips to begin whistling.

‘Madame sends her deepest regrets for your trials at the hands of her former servants and desires to do what she can to atone for their errors. If you would consent to let her in.’ The lackey drawled out the words slightly mockingly, in a voice that made it clear he did not think Lavoie had the right to deny a baronne entrance to his house, and he was merely reciting a polite message that his mistress had impressed on him.

Lavoie stepped aside, making his face match the other man’s mocking expression. This wasn’t one of the men who had forced his way into Lavoie’s house and beaten him. He was certain now, or nearly certain.

‘Tell Madame she may make herself welcome,’ he said.

The lackey went to the carriage and conferred with its occupant through the window while Lavoie watched from his doorstep. Then the man held the door open and a black-gloved hand emerged from the recesses of the carriage and braced itself on his arm, and a dress and veil and dainty black satin shoes climbed down from the running board and stepped across the muddy gutter. Madame de Cardonnoy released the servant’s hand, and he followed at her heels as far as the painter’s door. Lavoie wondered where her lady’s maid was. Then Madame de Cardonnoy and the servant had reached him and she held out her gloved hand and said, ‘Monsieur Lavoie, good morning,’ and he had no choice but to take her hand and bow, which he did stiffly, his eyes on the police informer. When he looked accidentally at Madame de Cardonnoy’s face, he saw that her blue eyes were a little hollow, feverishly bright, and a bronze-coloured curl had worked its way out from under her veil.

He was alarmed to realise that he still found her lovely. She was his own age, but she seemed older, like a kind of wicked fairy godmother. He had spent so much time rehearsing the words they had exchanged at their last meeting, trying to decide whether he forgave her for giving her husband the letter he’d written to her, that the woman before him now seemed like an allegory of herself, a figure in which he’d invested all his desire and anger. Had she read his thoughts from across the city and appeared on the morning breeze? He could almost have believed it.

‘How can I help you, Madame?’ Lavoie held the door open. She passed through it, stood in his hallway, brushed down her voluminous black skirts as if checking for mud, then looked up at him. Her lackey was hovering by the doorway.

‘I want first of all to apologise for my husband’s behaviour towards you. It was unconscionable and base of him, and although I could say that such behaviour does not reflect the kind of man he was, I know that saying so would do nothing to soothe your injury. If you will let me, I am here to make what amends I can.’ She half turned towards the door, while Lavoie was still struggling to formulate a reply, and spoke to the lackey. ‘Arnaud, will you go out and see that the coach isn’t blocking traffic? The coachman may need to take it out to the boulevard.’

The servant bowed and left. Lavoie gaped at her.

‘Get him back in here, Madame,’ he said, once he’d recovered his faculties. ‘There’s a police informant on my front doorstep. It’s bad enough that you came to my home with your servant. Do you have any idea of the kind of questions the police have asked me about you?’

It did not help his sense of irreality that he had been privately imagining this kind of meeting with her, and she wasn’t reading her lines quite as he would have written them.

‘He’ll be gone for ten minutes moving the carriage,’ the baronne replied, as if she hadn’t heard his question. ‘Even if I were here for an amorous meeting, that’s not nearly enough time to get all this off and then on again, and I don’t have my lady’s maid to help me.’

At all this, she made an impish gesture that moved from the veiled crown of her head to the black hem of her dress, her black-gloved hands skimming past and dismissing the whole paraphernalia of mourning. Her expression and that quick movement of her hand had as much effect on Lavoie as if she’d stripped off all her clothes in his hall. Not because it made him picture her naked skin, although it did, but because she seemed so delicately confident that no one would touch her, that she wouldn’t be harmed, and Lavoie himself was so afraid.

‘You’re mad,’ he said. ‘Did you kill your husband?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘How can you ask that? I was in the nursery with my children the entire night. Every servant in the house can vouch for me.’

She didn’t seem taken aback by the question. Perhaps the police had been at her already and she was expecting it. Or perhaps she assumed that she did not have to answer for herself in front of Lavoie, that it didn’t matter what he asked or whether he believed her answer.

‘Madame, no one’s accusing you of holding the gun. They seem to have picked me for that role, and I assure you I was quite as incapable that night as you were.’

‘I didn’t kill him, nor did I conspire to kill him,’ she said. Very seriously, as though they were equals.

‘And I’m sure it was a coincidence that he was out in Paris trying to find and murder your lover on the night of his death.’ Lavoie planted himself by the door, watching the tiny movements of her face as she heard him out. Her glassy eyes might have expressed surprise or pity. His hands were unsteady, so he balled them into fists and crossed his arms over his chest. ‘Your girl may have lied to the police, but I know I never set foot in your bedroom or had her there.’

‘Don’t be vulgar, please. You tried to visit me, my husband took it the wrong way. That’s all. Servants start rumours sometimes.’ She’d turned her back on Lavoie and walked to the edge of the staircase. Her husband had tried that trick also, of not looking at him when he spoke. The memory was, for a moment, uncanny.

‘Yes, I’m sure that’s all,’ Lavoie spat. He was no longer trying to adhere to the rules of politeness. A police informer listening at the door would have been delighted. ‘And what do you need now? A little vial of orpiment to poison rats at Hôtel Cardonnoy? Don’t act like I’m a fool – I’m not one.’

He would have liked to imagine that she had come to his house because she thought of him as he had been thinking of her. But he wasn’t going to permit himself to imagine that.

‘Truly, Monsieur, I’ve never thought you were a fool.’

It would have been pleasant to be able to break the baronne’s calm, but she was still speaking as if they had met, by chance, in Madame de Fontet’s salon, and Lavoie’s outburst was too minor to be acknowledged.

‘I came to apologise, for myself and for my husband, and to pay you the money he owed you. For the portrait, which I will understand if you do not wish to complete. I don’t expect to restore your goodwill, but I owe you a debt.’

She took a purse out of her pocket and held it out to him. Lavoie could see that it was heavy, but he felt a repugnance towards the money. He waved her off.

‘Don’t try to buy me off, it’s insulting. I’ll keep your secret. I don’t know enough about you to betray you.’

‘Take it,’ she said. ‘It’s only what’s owed to you – and something for the harm my husband caused you.’

‘Why don’t you answer a question instead, Madame? It’s one I’ve been longing to know the answer to. Did you give Monsieur de Cardonnoy my letter of your own free will? Did you know that he would come here?’ Lavoie’s voice, he was ashamed to realise, was shaking. He couldn’t meet the baronne’s eyes, so he turned and looked at the wall, feeling again the humiliation of her husband’s visit, the knowledge that he would only ever be, to their kind, a small man, as expendable as a loyal horse or hound.

The baronne’s power had been her attraction. She had smiled at him, and he had felt as if he could take her hand and let her draw him through a door and into another world. Now she was standing in his own bare whitewashed hallway, and he was like any other creature who couldn’t refuse her money.

He was already regretting how quickly he’d waved away her purse. There was less satisfaction in the knowledge that he couldn’t be bought than there would have been in paying off his bill at the apothecary.

‘I didn’t give him your letter,’ Madame de Cardonnoy said. She spoke hesitantly. He still couldn’t bring himself to look at her. He was shocked when her voice cracked. ‘He was in a rage and he broke down the door to my room and took my writing case. I thought he might kill me in front of my children.’

‘Is that what happened?’ Lavoie looked back at her. Her face was pink. She wiped her eyes with her thumb, as if she was alone. He might have tried to comfort her, but it felt indecent to acknowledge her distress, after the way he’d spoken.

‘No,’ she said. Already she looked almost recovered. The tears had dried up as quickly as they had appeared. ‘I don’t believe he would have killed me. But I did think he’d beat me. Perhaps if he had, he might have left you alone.’

‘Why did you come here?’ Lavoie asked her. He was realising that he really didn’t know. He had the ideas presented by his inclination and by his resentment, which described to him two different versions of the same woman. Neither of whom was the baronne as she stood before him.

‘What do you want, Monsieur Lavoie?’

She said it so archly, and with the same solicitous tone of courtesy, that Lavoie found himself wanting to play along, as if the game of polite compliments and subterranean meaning was a dance whose steps she was offering to teach him. She wasn’t weeping. He wasn’t injured. They were merely playing a game together, in which the distance between them was its own uneasy form of intimacy.

‘Perhaps you could dig up your husband and kick him for me,’ he said.

As an attempt to shock her out of her salon mannerisms, it was not quite successful, but it did momentarily wipe the sorrow off her face. Madame de Cardonnoy put a hand over her mouth to disguise her laugh.

‘Sometimes I wish I could do that, too,’ she admitted.

‘What a strange coincidence.’ Lavoie felt his anger loosening, almost against his will, as if he were a knot that the baronne had untied by laughing. This, also, was why he’d liked her, at first.

‘I’m sorry for the part I had in what happened to you,’ she said, and her words seemed very genuine.

‘I’ll recover.’

They stood in silence for moment, during which Madame de Cardonnoy tugged her gloves off, used them to fan her face limply and then put them back on. She seemed to be casting about for something to say.

‘I wanted to ask,’ she said finally, ‘a moment ago – orpiment?’

‘I spoke without thinking,’ Lavoie said. ‘It’s used as a pigment, in painting.’

‘I thought I’d heard it was used that way. I know you may think I am a kind of Madame de Poullaillon for asking.’

Lavoie smiled at her, although she had not been wrong to suggest that he thought her very like one of the ladies who had been brought to trial by La Reynie for trying to poison their husbands.

‘It makes a yellow that doesn’t fade with the passage of time. The clearest yellows – for a bird’s wing, or a bolt of silk, or a tulip in bloom – all come from orpiment. And if you burn it, it turns into a kind of earthy red, such as you might use to enliven a lady’s blush, or her lips, if mixed properly.’ His hand, as he spoke, described a shape with an imaginary brush, which might have been a loose curl of hair or the bow of a woman’s mouth. ‘The brightest yellows are all painted with poison. Other yellows – saffron, Avignon berries, Dutch earth – they’re duller, or they don’t mix well with oil, or they fade after they’re applied to the canvas.’

‘How strange.’

The door creaked open and the lackey Arnaud reappeared.

‘The carriage is moved, Madame. I’ll go and fetch it when you’re ready to leave.’

‘Thank you, Arnaud,’ she said briskly and then, without pausing, she continued a conversation that she and Lavoie had not been having. ‘Monsieur Lavoie, if you are so hesitant to take payment for a portrait that can’t be completed while my children and I are in mourning, perhaps you’d be willing to show me around your workshop? I’ll look for a landscape, or some small piece there, and leave the portrait for another time.’

‘Of course, Madame.’ Lavoie bowed his way up the stairs. The lackey’s presence had an effect on him such that he felt the continual need to bow, so as to avoid the impression of impropriety. Just as certainly, however, his excessive deference seemed to him flirtatious, the kind of deliberate and exaggerated courtesy that a man paid only to a woman he admired.

The baronne, as far as he could tell, suffered from no such embarrassment. Lavoie suspected this was because she was a much more accomplished liar than he was. Which ought to have put him back on guard, but instead he was drawn in her wake like a piece of wood eddying on a current. Perhaps the light of her charm would hide his defects.

‘Arnaud, you may wait in the hall,’ Madame de Cardonnoy said, before following Lavoie up the stairs.

In the workshop she paused at the door, drew in a deep breath and then pulled out her handkerchief to shield herself from the smell of sizing and paint that hung in the air. It was a smell that Lavoie rarely noticed any more, being so used to the tools of his trade: the rancid smell of oil, the tinny scent of cooking verdigris prepared for green pigment, smells of earth, distemper, the smoke of Roman vitriol or of blue ash, for the preparation of which one melted salt, ammonia, nitre and copper together in a crucible. He should have aired the room out more recently, but he hated the cold more than the smell. Madame de Cardonnoy herself trailed a faint breeze of orange flower and bergamot.

‘Why are we continuing this charade, Madame?’ he asked quietly, stepping close enough to her elbow that he could speak into her ear.

‘What did you tell the police when they questioned you?’ Madame de Cardonnoy whispered back to him.

‘You do know how to get the servants out of a room, don’t you?’ His words came out biting, and somewhat louder than he’d intended. He hoped his tone didn’t carry down the stairs.

‘Please, Monsieur Lavoie. I don’t know what happened after my husband left the hôtel and I’ve had a great deal of anxiety, wondering what the police may think.’

‘They asked me why your husband came to my house. How he left me. What he said. Whether I had had an affair with his wife, which I’m sure the police are going to wonder about again, after today.’ He looked over his shoulder involuntarily. He’d left the door to the workshop open, to avoid any appearance of secrecy – if the servant heard voices, if he wondered, if he came up the stairs. There was something perversely thrilling in the danger, which clipped his voice and made the skin on the back of his neck prickle.

Lavoie had no sooner noticed the thrill of bravery creeping up his shoulders than he cursed himself for it. He’d been a coward with the baron, when bravery might have saved him some pain, and now he’d suddenly discovered a taste for adventure, when it could only ruin him. Any idiot would have had the sense to throw Madame de Cardonnoy out on her ear.

‘And when they asked you about your visit to my maid?’ She was still speaking quite close to his ear, which gave the whole encounter an air of demented flirtation.

Lavoie sighed. ‘Forgive me, Madame, if I had been let in on that story I might have been a better liar.’

‘Jeanne never informed me that you had paid her a call,’ the baronne said coolly.

‘And she didn’t tell me that I’d made love to her while she was dressed up in your clothes, so I suppose we were all surprised in our own way by that news.’ His consciousness of her breath, close enough almost to stir his hair, was discomfiting, so he went to the table where some of his brushes were soaking and rattled them around in the jar.

‘Was there anything else you had to lie about?’ She reached out a hand towards him, admonishingly, the tiniest gesture, and with the heavy folds of her veil she looked once more like a statue that had come to life and was turning from stone into flesh. Again it was impossible to offend her.

‘My neighbours found me that night. I was in no state to have killed a man.’

‘Of course not.’

The truth was that that night had become a kind of closed room inside his head. He wasn’t entirely sure what he would find if he opened the door, and he had the feeling that things inside it might have moved and slid into disturbing shapes. He didn’t want to look.

‘Did you come here to buy me off?’ he asked. He might not be above being paid for his silence, in the end, but he wasn’t sure that his cooperation would do her much good.

‘I came here to buy a painting,’ she said sweetly. ‘By way of apology for my husband.’

The baronne began to walk along the edge of the room, past the portrait of a rich textile merchant on which Lavoie was finishing the design of a fabulous brocade jacket, to the painting that he’d been working on when her servant knocked on his door.

‘What’s this?’ Madame de Cardonnoy raised her gloved hand, reaching towards the foaming edge of a wave, and Lavoie caught her by the wrist.

‘Don’t. It’s still wet.’

She smiled at him. ‘Monsieur Lavoie, I know better than to touch such a work.’

He let go of her hand very quickly.

‘Forgive me, it is a new painting. I would not normally show it to visitors so early. Here, on the horizon’ – and he gestured towards the shape of a rising cliff and a city wall – ‘is Troy, and these figures are Aeneas and Anchises, escaping to their ships.’

‘The water runs red, under the cliffs.’

‘It isn’t finished. It will look more natural, once I’ve worked it more. What you’re seeing now is only the ground of the painting, and the beginning of the shadows of figures. Helen will stand here, on the clifftop. I thought to paint her covering her eyes with her veil.’

She leaned in close to look at the place he’d indicated, as if she could already see Helen’s figure.

‘Hmm. Do you think a woman like Helen would be afraid to look at her own handiwork?’

Lavoie shrugged. ‘I am afraid. Would you like to be the painter who tried to capture the most beautiful woman in the world?’

If she had looked at his sketches, she might have left with the impression that there was a specific woman he was thinking of, to stand in for Helen’s beauty and her duplicity. He was glad he hadn’t painted her figure yet.

‘Oh, but beauty fades. If the Trojan War lasted for ten years, she’d no longer be a girl by its end.’ She looked sidelong at him and then back to the painting. It was an eerily comfortable moment. For a moment he could have forgotten both her dead husband and the police informant on his doorstep.

‘I’d like to think, though, that even if she aged, the power that she had to move the world might be preserved,’ he said. ‘So that even if her hair turned white with sorrow, one might look at her and catch a glimmer of why the war was fought.’

The baronne frowned but held her tongue, bending forward in silence to look at the brushstrokes with which he’d delineated the walls of Troy, the red and gold rays of the rising sun. Lavoie stepped back and watched her look at his work.

‘How much would you sell it for?’ she asked, as if it were the simplest question in the world.

‘It’s not finished,’ said Lavoie. Silently he was calculating what price he might put on it if any other patron had asked, and how much more he could reasonably charge the baronne for the danger she was putting him in. ‘It’s going to take me months, at the very least. I don’t have an assistant.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You could consider it a commission. I could give you five hundred livres now, and we’d call that, say, one-third of the final payment?’

That might have been merely a generous fee, if Lavoie had previously won the Prix de Rome and painted King Louis’s own portrait. As it was, he’d never been paid so much for anything. He could buy a dozen coats with lace cuffs. He wondered, with a stupid pang, whether she even liked the painting.

‘You’re generous, Madame.’ Lavoie swallowed. ‘But … you realise that my silence won’t save you? I doubt the police put much stock in my word, even before you paid me this visit.’

Madame de Cardonnoy sighed. She raised a hand and tucked the curl that had escaped from her veil back into place.

‘There’s one other favour I want to ask of you, but I’m afraid that in doing so I will compromise us both.’

Lavoie, who had already started back towards the door of the workshop, froze near the window. His stomach lurched unpleasantly with the realisation that she was about to tell him something he didn’t want to hear. Of course she wasn’t going to pay him just to mind his own business.

‘What are you hoping for, Madame?’

‘There’s something I’d like to know, but I’m afraid it’s a very foolish question.’ She was speaking to the painting of Troy, not to him. ‘If it came about that you found a vial of orpiment, without any label signifying what it was, would it be easy to identify?’

‘If it were pure orpiment, its colour would betray it.’ He was trying to keep his voice steady, but he could feel himself being drawn into a place he didn’t want to visit. As if the door to the night he didn’t want to think about had opened and he was frozen, again, in front of his powerful visitor, hoping that this time he could make the conversation play out differently. ‘If it were mixed with some other preparation, the colour might be dimmed and then it would be difficult to know, unless one tested its effect somehow. Then, of course, there are other yellow substances, so a vial of yellow might not be a vial of poison.’

He was trying to treat her question as a theoretical one, as if she had asked him about pigments or what each figure represented in an allegorical scene. Don’t tell me this, he wanted to say to her. When I asked, it wasn’t because I wanted the truth. Once again she was slipping out from behind the image he’d made of her, no longer the foolish, over-generous rich woman, but something else.

‘And do you know how it’s mixed when it’s mixed as a poison?’ The baronne was twisting her handkerchief in her fingers, and Lavoie could see that her hands were shaking.

‘Madame, do you mean to poison someone?’

‘No, of course not.’ She shook her head, twice, sharply.

‘Then what?’

Don’t tell me. No, tell me. She paused for a very long time, and Lavoie wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. I know I’m not the man your servants saw you kiss, so why pretend with me that you had no lover, that he had nothing to do with your husband’s death? Why pretend you came here for some reason other than to buy me off? But still he wanted not to know the thing that he knew.

Madame de Cardonnoy cleared her throat.

‘There is … someone I know, who saw my husband on the night of his death, but cannot come forward without causing a scandal. If it happened, however, that I could discover a vial of poison in among my husband’s things, I might be able to point the police in the right direction. Without implicating my friend.’

He didn’t believe her. The disbelief was so immediate that he struggled even to hear the details of the story she was offering him. A friend, of course. Why didn’t she ask her lover to get her the poison?

‘Forgive me, Madame, you are very convincing when you swear you didn’t kill your husband, but not for one moment do I believe that story is true. Send your servant to the chemist’s and say you need it to kill rats, I will not get involved in this.’ His voice was clipped and precise, but he could feel his heartbeat pounding in his ears. He wasn’t brave, after all.

‘I see.’ Lavoie could see the movement of her throat as she swallowed. ‘Then I will leave you.’

Possibly what was wrong with him was not the visit that her husband had paid him in the night, or the cracked rib that still hurt him when he breathed too deep, but the possibility that he was in love with her – a stupid inclination for a woman he didn’t know and had every reason to distrust. Would a hopeless love be better than knowing that it was the charm worked by her money? He didn’t really believe it, even as he was formulating the thought, but something drew him towards her, whether it was his useless hatred of her husband or the desire he’d first felt when he painted her portrait, the scent of her perfume, the feeling he still had that she might, like the enchantress of her stories, take his hand and work some transformation whose substance he couldn’t predict.

He wanted to help her. But he didn’t want to risk his life.

‘Wait.’ She was halfway to the door when Lavoie grabbed awkwardly at her veil, then her arm. ‘Tell me why. The real reason.’

She brushed him off. ‘Surely you see why that would be impossible, Monsieur.’

‘I’m not inclined to betray your trust. Unless …’ He gestured at the ceiling, helplessly. He would be entirely capable of betraying her, if she told him too much. He could be mercenary. He was afraid of prison, and of death.

‘Unless it’s something truly damning? What kind of matter do you think this is, Monsieur Lavoie?’ She was staring at him very intently as he blocked her way to the door with his outstretched arm, his other hand still clenched in the fabric of her sleeve. He could feel the tension in her arm as she shifted weight; and she, likewise, could feel his grip slacken on her clothes, as if he’d thought better of grabbing her, and then tighten again as he regained his resolve.

‘Did you kill him?’

It would have been possible then for her to scream, calling her servant Arnaud from the hall downstairs, saying (it was true) that the painter had grabbed at her, pulled her arm, almost torn her veil, blocked her exit, that she was frightened for her life. Instead she held Lavoie’s gaze as he looked at her.

He was not a bad man, Madame de Cardonnoy thought. But she should not have trusted him.

‘I did not kill him,’ she said. ‘Now I’d like to leave.’

‘Did you know he would be killed?’

‘I did not,’ she said. ‘And that is the truth.’

‘If you want me to involve myself in this,’ Lavoie said, ‘then I must know what is it I am agreeing to.’

‘And if I said I conspired in his murder – which I did not, but it seems to be the only answer you will accept – what would you do, Monsieur?’

‘I don’t know.’ He didn’t drop the arm that was barring her way. His face was creased so that he might have been one of the figures in his own painting, looking back towards Troy. Madame de Cardonnoy touched his wrist with her glove and, at the pressure of her hand, he took his away from the door jamb and let it fall to his side.

‘I’ll leave this purse for you,’ she said. ‘If you don’t want to associate with me any more, you may pick another painting to send me. If you send me a message, I will have a servant pick it up, so that you need not trouble yourself to arrange its transportation to my hôtel. Or keep the money as a gift.’

‘And that’s to be all then?’

‘I think so. And, truly, I regret the extent to which I have involved you in a matter that has nothing to do with you.’ She nodded to him, gave a small, slight curtsey that was still deeper than politeness required, began to turn away.

Again Lavoie caught her sleeve at the door.

‘If I were to buy the thing that you’ve asked of me,’ he began, rushing the words so that they tripped over each other on the way past his lips, ‘it would take me a few days. But if I bought it, along with some other tools of my trade, I would draw far less notice than you would, if you tried to obtain it directly.’

Marie Catherine drew her spine up a little straighter, shook her head. There was a kind of fear that existed in the possibility of success, hand in hand with it, the shock one might feel on jumping off a high cliff and finding oneself suspended in an invisible net, instead of broken on the rocks below. She had paid Lavoie a visit on such a tenuous thread because she could not stop thinking about whether he had upheld Jeanne’s story. Because what she had to give La Reynie was too vague and uncertain. Because she had remembered hearing that a painter must use poison to mix his colours.

‘That is why I asked you,’ she said. ‘But it was an unreasonable request, and we won’t speak of it further.’

For a moment she hoped that Lavoie would nod, and the moment where he might have helped her in defiance of reason would pass in silence. Instead he looked into her eyes as intently as if he were trying to read her thoughts. As he looked, Marie Catherine saw that he had very thick, feminine eyelashes, and a greyish spot in the green of his left eye, and the frivolity of this observation comforted her. Perhaps if the judges found her guilty, she would go to the place de Grève and have a last moment to admire the white of the executioner’s teeth, or the charming curls of her confessor’s hair.

‘Tell me this, Madame. Who do you want it for? It is to keep someone silent?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘My husband wrote – there are letters, in his office, written to a man, a rogue priest, that talk about spells. I persuaded one of this man’s servants to speak to me, a young boy, but he’s afraid to go to the police. He’s only a child. The priest himself has already fled Paris – if the police want to bring him in for questioning, they will have to hunt him down. And without the servant boy’s testimony, I doubt there is enough in the letters to persuade them to seek out this man. But if I could give them the letters, and a vial of poison that I found enclosed with them in my husband’s study, and the news that he fled Paris in the days since my husband’s death, I think that would be enough to make them credit even the theories of a woman.’

That was as much of the truth as she could tell him. He already knew enough to condemn her, if he wanted to.

‘And suspicion would be directed away from you,’ Lavoie said.

‘And from you,’ Marie Catherine replied.

The painter gave her a brisk nod.

‘What else do you know about this priest?’ he asked.

‘Only a little. He sold spells, perhaps other things. The servant boy – the one I spoke to – is the man’s natural son. His mother was keeping him hidden in a cupboard, or nearly. And he loathes the priest and wishes him dead. Whatever the man is, he isn’t a good priest or a kind father.’

Lavoie looked at her face as if he believed he could read the truth in her eyes. She wasn’t sure what he found there, or what he might want to find. Perhaps it had been a mistake to offer him the money so blatantly. But she didn’t think she could have carried off a seduction.

‘I’ll think on it,’ he said finally. ‘You’ll have an answer soon.’

‘Don’t put it in writing,’ Marie Catherine said quickly.

‘Of course not. I’ll have to send you a painting. Something smaller than the historical one, that I can finish quickly. If you still want that one …’ He let the sentence trail off, and she could see how much he hoped that she had liked it, genuinely, and his fear that she had only complimented it to flatter him.

‘I haven’t seen anything like it,’ she said. ‘It’s beautiful.’

‘Perhaps you’ll still think that when it’s finished.’ He gestured to lead her out of the door, then paused. ‘One other thing.’

‘Oh?’

‘Your friend. The one who you are protecting.’

‘I thought we agreed that was an invention,’ Marie Catherine said. ‘I must apologise for imposing on your trust.’

Lavoie sighed, and for a moment she thought he would press her further, but instead he brushed off his shabby coat and stepped through the door.

‘And we’ve truly talked too long,’ he said. Then, raising his voice, he bowed her down the stairs, saying, ‘I hope you’ve enjoyed the tour of my workshop, Madame, and I am glad you have found a piece you like. Please do not worry about sending payment immediately – a week or two after you’ve received the finished piece will do, and until then you still have credit with me.’

Marie Catherine laughed. ‘You do not drive a hard enough bargain, Monsieur Lavoie. But I look forward to the painting.’

Arnaud was still waiting in the hall, looking bored.

‘I’m sorry, Arnaud, I forgot to tell you to bring the carriage back round. Can you run and tell the coachman to hurry?’

The servant bowed, and left.

‘Thank you,’ she said to Lavoie.

‘I haven’t agreed yet,’ the painter said. ‘I can imagine this is how your rogue priest began his career, and I certainly don’t want to end up like him.’

‘Escaped, you mean?’ she asked, as lightly as she could. ‘It would be sad indeed to leave Paris.’

‘You are a very disturbing person.’ Lavoie shook his head at her, which made her laugh. She would have liked to be this man’s friend, she thought, in another world. She could have introduced him to Madame de Fontet, and hung one of his paintings in her own salon and watched his star rise.

‘Thank you for your help. Really.’

They stood in silence for a minute or two, during which Madame de Cardonnoy felt the painter watching her, an expression of slight sadness on his face.

‘You did much better with business conversation coming down the stairs than going up them,’ she said, finally. ‘I was surprised. I thought you were going to be tongue-tied again.’

‘Well, your footman had scared me half to death when he appeared on my doorstep,’ Lavoie said. ‘I haven’t learned to love the men who wear the Cardonnoy uniform.’

The sound of carriage wheels filtered in from the street.

‘Goodbye,’ Lavoie said. ‘Good luck. I suppose we won’t see each other again. It will be better if I manage the delivery without coming to your hôtel.’

‘Would you want to see me again?’ She turned towards him. ‘I thought you found me disturbing.’

Lavoie frowned at her. ‘Do you think I agreed to this just because I hate your husband?’

But the door creaked open and he cut himself off, arranged his face back into an expression approaching neutrality, bowed to her.

‘Good day, Madame. Travel safely.’

‘Good day, Monsieur Lavoie.’

Arnaud handed her up into the carriage. When the door had closed on her and left her alone, she had a sudden feeling of vertigo, which rushed from her toes up to her ribcage and left her nauseous. Perhaps she couldn’t trust the painter. Perhaps she could, and what she and Victoire had done would be wiped clean. She could feel her chest tightening, and she gasped and gasped but couldn’t catch her breath. She pressed her forehead against the carriage window. The streets rolled by as if she were dreaming them, shabby fiacres and sedan chairs and men and women on foot, hurrying through the mud in clothes that might once have been fine. A crier on the street called, ‘Oranges, oranges, ladies, take your pleasure!’ If Victoire had been with her, Marie Catherine might have put her head in the girl’s lap and been comforted, but Victoire was at Versailles and might as well have been on the moon. Nothing seemed solid. She couldn’t breathe.

Gradually the cool glass against her skin calmed her, and she left fear behind and went to a place without past or future or punishment, but only the shadow and noise of the city, through which she passed like a kind of ghost.

When she dismounted from the carriage at Hôtel Cardonnoy the courtyard was nearly empty, unusual at this hour of the afternoon. The stable boy alone peeked out of the carriage house at the sound of her arrival, slinging the piece of tack he’d been polishing over his shoulder and running to help the coachman. Besides him, only the kitchen boys Philippe and Albert hovered in a knot by the kitchen entrance and, on seeing Arnaud hand her down from the carriage, Philippe ran into the house, leaving Albert to shake the potato peelings out of his bowl and follow. A battle-Scarred white cat sat alone on the steps to the house cleaning itself, and when it saw the carriage it directed a blue-eyed glare at Marie Catherine through the window and leaped away into the bushes.

Still no one had appeared in the courtyard, until Anne burst out of the front door, running. She was wringing a sodden cloth in her hands, too distressed to curtsey.

‘Madame, I’ve called the doctor,’ she said in a rush, stopping short just in front of Madame de Cardonnoy, her hands seeking her mistress’s, a familiarity she had never before taken. ‘It’s the children. They both took ill after you left.’