Chapter 53
Sebastian made the drive out to the Count of Cargèse’s château through a cold, wind-swirled mist. The afternoon was dark, the clouds still hanging low, the road a wet ribbon that wound through sodden fields.
No matter which way he looked at it, Sebastian decided, it seemed unlikely that any of the three people who had known the talisman’s location in the summer of 1814 would have shared that secret with Cargèse. Two—Joséphine and Sophie—had disliked the man intensely, and Sebastian likewise found it difficult to believe that the abigail Bernadette could have been the source of Cargèse’s knowledge. So how had the Count known where to try looking?
Sebastian considered the housekeeper Madame Sorel. He supposed she might have come upon the information in some way, but he doubted it. Anyone as shrewd and calculating as Joséphine would never have trusted the woman with such a secret.
So what about Napoléon?
The more Sebastian thought about it, the more that struck him as a real possibility. The Emperor could easily have known of the existence of Joséphine’s secret compartment without knowing its exact location. And whom else would he send to search for it besides his loyal comrade and childhood friend? One of his sisters or brothers, perhaps; but they were a half-mad and untrustworthy lot. Hortense? That seemed more likely, except had she even been in Paris last summer? He didn’t think so, although she had surely searched the house without success many times since.
Joséphine’s secret compartment must have been very well disguised indeed.
By the time Sebastian arrived at the Château de Marigny, the cloud-shrouded sun was slipping low on the darkening horizon, leaving a cold wind that burned Sebastian’s cheeks and cut to the bone.
“Think ’e’s ’ere?” said Tom, staring up at the dirty, darkened windows as Sebastian drew up before the neglected château.
Sebastian handed the boy the reins and hopped down to the gravel sweep. “Hopefully. It’s a bit chilly to spend the evening combing the guinguettes of Montmartre and Belleville.”
He turned at the sound of the front door creaking open behind him. A scruffy-looking retainer in a rusty black coat and yellowing linen stood in the partially opened doorway, peering out at them. In age he could have been anywhere between sixty-five and eighty, his cheeks pale and gaunt, his pate bald except for a few wisps of white hair. He held a candle in one hand and had the other palm cupped around the flame to protect it from the wind.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
Sebastian walked toward him, the gravel crunching beneath his boots. “The name is Devlin. I’m here to see the Count.”
The elderly maître d’hôtel gave a slow, ponderous nod. “Ah, yes. He said I was to let you in if you were to come.” He nudged the door open wider with his foot. “This way.”
Sebastian stepped into a soaring, cobweb-draped entrance hall tiled in dirty white marble littered with scattered clumps of dried mud such as might have fallen from a gardener’s boots. A graceful staircase with several missing spindles curled away into darkness, its carved banister dull from a lack of polish. The air inside the house was dank and musty and felt even colder than the outside; what rooms Sebastian could see opening off the hall lay in shadow and appeared virtually empty except for a disparate collection of overflowing bookcases.
Dozens of bookcases.
Here was a side of Niccolò Aravena that Sebastian would never have guessed. And as he crossed the filthy, cracked floor in the butler’s wake, he found himself having to slightly readjust every assumption, every theory, he’d formed about the Corsican.
Clothed in a splendid silk dressing gown thrown casually over shiny leather breeches and a worn open-necked shirt, the Count sat in a tapestry-covered chair drawn up before a log fire roaring on the massive hearth of what had once been an elegant drawing room. Now the space contained only the tattered old chair, a gilded octagonal marble-topped table that stood at the Count’s elbow, and an untidy sea of stacked books. A liver-colored hound lay at the man’s feet, and he had a ginger cat in his lap; a second cat—this one white—sprawled on the back of his chair. The only light in the room came from the fire and a branch of candles perched precariously atop the pile of books on the table at his side; the rest of the room lay in shadow.
“You’ll pardon me for not rising,” said the Count, the fingers of one hand rhythmically stroking the cat in his lap. “But I can’t disturb Rouille here. If you care for refreshment, do feel free to ring for it yourself. The bell does work, although to be honest, Jean might not answer it.”
“Thank you, but that won’t be necessary,” said Sebastian, going to hold his cold hands out to the fire.
Cargèse watched him through narrowed eyes. “Do I take it you’ve discovered something you think redounds to my discredit?”
Sebastian turned to face him. “You didn’t tell me you’d been caught ransacking Malmaison in search of the Charlemagne Talisman.”
“I don’t think I’d use the word ‘ransacking,’ exactly.”
“Oh? What would you prefer? Thoroughly searching?”
Cargèse snorted. “Not thoroughly enough, unfortunately. I never did find the thing.”
“What made you think it was still there?”
“Well, I knew Hortense didn’t have it.”
“How could you be so certain of that?”
“Because I knew how desperately she was still searching for it.”
“Interesting that the housekeeper neglected to tell me of your visit.”
“One assumes she . . . forgot.”
“One might also assume that you paid her to . . . forget.”
A faint smile tightened the skin beside the Corsican’s dark eyes. “One could assume all sorts of things, I suppose.” He shifted his hand to scratch behind the ginger cat’s ears. “And now you think Madame Sorel notified me of Sophia Cappello’s visit to Malmaison, do you?”
“It does seem a likely scenario.”
“Does it? What a murderous fellow you must think me. So you’re assuming . . . what? That having failed in my search of dear Joséphine’s chambers, I then paid her decidedly greedy old housekeeper to notify me if Sophia Cappello should ever show up to retrieve the talisman? Has it occurred to you that if Madame Sorel was supplementing her income by keeping me apprised of interesting visits to the château, then she very likely had a similar arrangement with others?”
“Such as?”
“Hortense, for one. But”—the Count waved his unoccupied hand through the air in a vague gesture—“perhaps you should ask the housekeeper herself. Or get that nasty little ex-gallerian to do it for you. I understand his methods are most effective. When he wants them to be.”
Sebastian thought about the housekeeper lying strangled in her bed and said simply, “Meaning?”
Cargèse tilted his head back against his chair. “Meaning that we are a divided nation of constantly shifting loyalties. A man—or a woman—considered a hero and patriot one day can easily find themselves dubbed a traitor the next . . . and be punished accordingly.”
Sebastian let his gaze drift around the shadowy, once-beautiful room, with its seventeenth-century carved paneling and peeling frescoed ceiling. The contrast between the château’s meticulously maintained gardens and the ruin of a house was stark.
As if following Sebastian’s thoughts, Cargèse said, “My wife fell in love with this château; it was because of her that I acquired it. But while the fields and greenhouses are of use to me, the house itself . . .” The features of his face twitched, and he shrugged. “It is full of ghosts.”
“And books,” said Sebastian.
“And books,” agreed the Corsican. “They keep me company in ways the ghosts cannot.” He dropped his gaze to the purring cat in his lap. “You know, Napoléon always loved Joséphine. But she drove him mad with her spendthrift ways, and after she was unfaithful to him while he was in Egypt, he never again respected her.”
“I wasn’t aware that he ever had much respect for women in general.”
Again that faint tightening of the eyes that suggested amusement. “Not overly much, no, although he is genuinely fond of his second wife, Marie-Louise. Not only did she quickly present him with a legitimate son whom he adores, but as a woman she was young, pretty, and quite taken with him as a man. And of course as the daughter of the Emperor of Austria, she promised to cement the acceptance of his line into the ranks of the royal houses of Europe.”
“An unfulfilled promise,” said Sebastian.
The Corsican sighed. “As it turned out, yes. She and her son were supposed to join him in Elba, you know, but her father stopped her. Just think: If the Austrians had allowed her to go to Napoléon—and if the Bourbons had paid the two million livres’ pension as promised—he might still be on Elba, filling his days with the supervision of a never-ending program of ambitious public works and teaching his young son to ride and shoot.”
“He might,” said Sebastian. The last he’d heard, Marie-Louise was indulging in a torrid love affair with a handsome equerry sent by her father specifically to seduce her and wean her away from Napoléon. It had worked extraordinarily well; the Austrian emperor obviously knew his daughter. “How old is the boy now?”
“The King of Rome? Nearly four. They say Marie-Louise has no use for him anymore and has abandoned him to her Austrian servants, who use him abominably. Ironic, is it not, that his fate should so closely parallel that of the boy king, Louis XVII?”
“Last I heard, no one has locked Napoléon’s son in a dark tower, sodomized and beaten him senseless, and left his wounds to fester.”
“Not yet,” said Cargèse. “I suppose his fate will rest upon the success of his father’s last, desperate gamble.”
“As will the fates of so many others.”
The Corsican inclined his head. “How true.”
“And for what?” said Sebastian. “To satisfy one man’s exaggerated amour propre?”
“Amour propre? Or sense of destiny?”
“Is there a difference?”
“Perhaps not.” Cargèse watched the ginger cat stand up, arch its back in a stretch, then hop down to trot across the dusty floor toward the door. “Telling, is it not, that no one ever attributed Louis XVIII’s decades-long quest to regain his family’s throne to amour propre, or blamed Marie-Thérèse’s even greater dynastic drive on her own overweening pride and lust for revenge?”
“If you’re looking for an argument from me,” said Sebastian, “you won’t get one on that score.”
Cargèse opened his eyes wide. “No? Interesting.” He pushed to his feet. “You’ve heard the King will be addressing the Chambre Législatif tomorrow? They say he intends to swear to maintain the Constitutional Charter and warn of the dangers of civil war. It will be interesting to see how he is received by the crowds in the streets. He’s been hiding lately.”
“I hear his gout has been acting up.”
“So it has.”
Sebastian was aware of the Corsican studying him with an intensity he found oddly disconcerting.
“Why are you doing this?” said Cargèse. “I can understand how you might have felt compelled at first to look into Sophia Cappello’s murder when you practically stumbled over her body. But it’s been nearly two weeks. Seems a bit above and beyond and all that.”
“Not for me.”
“And not in this case, hmm?” He paused, then said, “I have met Marshal McClellan, you know.”
Sebastian kept his features composed in an expression of polite boredom. “Indeed?”
A slow smile spread across the Corsican’s beard-stubbled face. “Oh, yes.” The smile lingered, but shifted subtly. “I did tell you once that the roses whisper to me, did I not?”
“Yes,” said Sebastian, wondering where the man was going with this.
“As you are no doubt aware, there were during the war various individuals in Paris who used to pass information to Whitehall. Some were genuinely secret loyal royalists, but . . .”
“But not all?” said Sebastian.
“Thus it is always, yes? Predictably, one or two were actually working with Fouché, deliberately feeding false information to the British.”
Sebastian didn’t need to ask how Cargèse had come to know this. After all, the Count himself had once worked with Napoléon’s extensive and highly effective intelligence service, helping smuggle French spies’ reports out of England with his rose shipments.
“It seems,” Cargèse was saying, “that one of these individuals was mentioned in conversation between Napoléon and Dama Cappello when she was in Elba.” The Corsican paused, then added, “A conversation overheard by one of the spies the Bourbons have on the island. Interestingly, however, the spy was unable to catch the individual’s name.”
Sebastian studied the Corsican’s dark, still faintly smiling face. “You’re suggesting this individual would thus have had reason to kill Sophia Cappello? To prevent the true nature of his activities during the war from becoming known to the Bourbons?”
“It strikes you as a possibility as well, does it?”
“And do you know the name of this individual?”
“Unfortunately, no.” The smile had faded from the Frenchman’s eyes. “You do believe me, don’t you?”
“Is there a reason I should?”
He shrugged. “Perhaps not. But you should, nevertheless. Fouché knows the individual’s name, obviously, but Fouché is playing both sides now. They say the King is about to offer him the Ministry of Police.”
“Will he accept?”
“If the King triumphs, then yes. Otherwise, I’ve no doubt Napoléon will offer him the same position.”
Sebastian was silent for a moment, watching the fire crackle on the hearth and listening to the cold wind buffet the walls of the old château. He was remembering the sinister, pale former Minister of Police, who’d approached him in the Place Dauphine for reasons he’d never quite understood; the sandy-haired man lying dead on the blood-drenched banks of the Seine; and the bland smile of an ambitious artillery officer whose English wife had somehow managed, against all odds, to be accepted at Marie-Thérèse’s court despite the Duchess’s avowed hatred of anyone who’d ever served under Napoléon.
“Tell me this,” said Sebastian. “How common in Paris were copies of the London newspapers during the war?”
“Common? Not common at all.”
“Even amongst officers in the military?”
“Hardly. Amongst Fouché’s men, perhaps. But the military? No. Why do you ask?”