Chapter 38
Venturing into the Faubourg Saint-Antoine was like stepping back in time to medieval Paris. The crooked, fetid streets were narrow and dark, the houses mean and crumbling, the wretched, ragged figures on the streets gaunt and hollow eyed. Hero took the carriage as far as she could, then continued on foot with two stout footmen at her side. The day was cloudy and cold, and she had dressed simply in a gray pelisse and a round hat. But she was aware of hostile stares following her, and as she passed a chandler’s shop, a man leaned against the rotting doorway, his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his canvas trousers as he began to sing “Ça ira!”
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
les aristocrates à la lanterne!
The words of the old revolutionary song followed her up the street.
If we don’t hang them
We’ll break them.
If we don’t break them
We’ll burn them.
Ah! It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine, it’ll be fine. . . .
Hero felt a chill run up her spine. It had been less than thirty years since revolutionary mobs had literally torn gentlewomen apart in the streets of Paris. And it occurred to her as she turned into the woodworkers’ passage that it wasn’t simply Napoléon and his tiny advancing army they needed to worry about.
The real threat might well come from the pent-up popular anger and lingering animosity his return could unleash.
She found Francine’s father, Marcel Danjou, out making a delivery. But the towheaded little girl who answered Hero’s knock whispered shyly that her maman and sister were washing clothes “out the back.”
“Can you take me to them, sweetheart?” asked Hero, hunkering down to the little girl’s level.
The child stuck her thumb in her mouth and nodded.
Francine’s mother was using a big stick to stir the clothes boiling in a massive kettle set up over a charcoal fire in the tiny flagged court behind the shop. She looked up at Hero’s approach, eyes narrowing against the steam. Claudine Danjou was a large woman, broad of face, with wide shoulders and heavily muscled arms. She looked to be somewhere in her late fifties or early sixties, her once-fair hair now mostly gray, her face lined and coarsened by work, deprivation, and sorrow. But judging by the age of the babe that slept in a basket by the hearth, the six-year-old assigned to watch it, and the four- or five-year-old who’d answered Hero’s knock, Hero suspected the woman was probably closer to forty or forty-five.
Wiping her red work-chapped hands on her tattered apron, Claudine took the basket of fruits and cheeses Hero had brought, eyes widening at the unmistakable chink made by the coin purse tucked within. “Take over here, Julia,” she said to the thin, lanky-haired young girl helping her.
The girl nodded, her face an indecipherable mask as Claudine drew Hero back inside.
They sat on wooden stools drawn up before the hearth, where a thin stew simmered in a heavy iron pot slung over the fire, its aroma filling the small, meanly furnished room. Hero admired the babe in her basket, nibbled one of the biscuits she herself had brought, and slowly worked the conversation around to the woman’s dead daughter, the girl’s service to Dama Cappello, and who Claudine thought might have killed them both.
“If I knew, I’d say, madame,” whispered the heartbroken mother, a handkerchief wrapped around one fist as she stared into the fire. “Truly I would. But I don’t. I just don’t.”
“Did Francine tell you they’d been to Italy?” Hero was careful not to say to Elba.
Claudine looked up, her lips parting as she drew a quick, startled breath. “Is that where they went? We knew she’d been on a ship because she talked about being so dreadfully seasick and about how kind and gentle Madame Cappello was with her. But she never said where they’d been. She wasn’t supposed to tell, you see.”
“She sounds like a good, honest, faithful girl.”
“Oh, she was,” said the dead girl’s mother, her voice breaking. “Truly she was. I think that’s why whoever killed her hurt her like that—to make her talk and say where they’d been.”
Hero suspected it was more likely the girl’s killers had been after the missing talisman. But all she said was “Did Francine ever talk to you about an ancient amulet called the Charlemagne Talisman?”
The Frenchwoman looked at her blankly. “Non. Jamais.” Never.
“Did she mention anyone Dama Cappello might have had reason to fear?”
“Fear? I don’t know that Dama Cappello was afraid of anyone. She was a strong woman, that one.”
“What about someone with whom she’d quarreled?”
The baby began to fuss, and Claudine went to pick her up. She stood for a moment beside the basket, her hips swaying back and forth as she patted the infant’s back. “Well, I don’t know if you could say they ‘quarreled,’ exactly, but I do know she had issues with Marie-Thérèse. The Duchesse d’Angoulême treats the wives of Napoléon’s marshals and generals like cockroaches, and she was even worse with Madame Cappello because of . . . well, you know. But it wasn’t just that. Madame was furious because of what Marie-Thérèse was doing to France—how she was bringing back the power of the Church and trying to make it so the nobles won’t have to pay taxes again. Everything the Revolution fought for, Marie-Thérèse wants to destroy.”
“Did Madame Cappello have a recent confrontation with the Duchess?”
Claudine came to sit down again and put the babe to her breast. “Recent? No. How could she have? She was gone.”
“True,” said Hero.
She was silent for a moment, searching for a delicate way to phrase her next question. But then Claudine herself said, “I know madame has long been troubled by her falling-out with her former ward, Angélique.” The word the Frenchwoman used was éloignement—estrangement. “She blamed Angélique’s husband, Antoine de Longchamps-Montendre.”
“I’ve heard he’s an Orléanist,” said Hero. “Is that true?”
“Bien sûr. It’s not as if he makes a secret of it. He’s quite open about it, you know.”
“What about Hortense Bonaparte?”
Claudine fell silent, her gaze on the suckling babe. “You’ve heard they’re saying he’s landed near Antibes? Napoléon, I mean.”
“Yes,” said Hero.
Claudine looked up, her eyes surprisingly shrewd. The woman might be poor and ground down by childbearing and despair, but she was not stupid. “You think that’s what this might all be about? The death of madame and my Francine, I mean. You think it has something to do with Napoléon’s return?”
Hero met her gaze squarely. “I honestly don’t know. It’s possible.”
Claudine nodded and turned her head to stare into the fire. “Hortense is a Bonapartist, of course. But then, how could she not be? They say her new lover is a Corsican—a relative of Napoléon’s mother. But that’s all I know.”
“Can you think of anything—anything at all—that might help us find Francine’s killer?”
Claudine’s face grew pinched, as if she were holding back tears. “She was my firstborn, you know. I’ve birthed ten children and I’d buried three before I lost Francine. But I never thought I’d be burying her. She was always so healthy—healthy and strong. I still can’t believe she’s gone. I keep expecting her to walk back in that door, laughing and chattering in that way she had and bringing us presents from Dama Cappello.”
“She did that? Dama Cappello, I mean. She sent you gifts?”
“Oh, yes. All the time. She was a good mistress to my Francine. Believe me, if I knew anything that could help you and the vicomte find who killed them, I’d tell you. But I can’t think of anything.”
“I’m sorry I’ve had to ask you to talk about something I know is so painful for you,” said Hero quietly.
“No, no. In truth, I am glad to know someone is looking into what happened. Someone . . . independent,” she said in a way that told Hero that Sebastian was right to suspect the family of not entirely trusting Vidocq.
It was later, when Hero was leaving, that Claudine suddenly said, “There is one other person I know Dama Cappello quarreled with.” Her brows drew together in thought. “I don’t know his name, but he’s mad about roses. He was originally from Corsica, and Napoléon made him a count.”
Hero turned on the stoop to look back at her. “You mean the Count of Cargèse?”
“Yes, that’s it. Francine told me he was mixed up with Fouché and the spies Bonaparte had in Britain—that they used to send their reports with his shipments of roses. Plants were allowed to pass freely during the war, you know. It was all in the interest of science, they said. But it wasn’t only plants going back and forth across the Channel.”
Hero stared at her. She was only too familiar with Joseph Fouché, the ruthless, bloodthirsty former Jacobin who’d risen to become Napoléon’s feared Minister of Police. For years he’d controlled a network of spies and informants that was said to rival Jarvis’s own.
“Is that why Napoléon made Cargèse a count?” she said.
A ghost of a smile touched the woman’s lips. “Why do you think, hmm? You think it was because the Emperor likes roses?”