All Bedlam Courses Past (part sixty-four)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Three

An Object in Motion

(part sixty-four) 

There was indulgence, too. A box from a Mrs. Buckley, brought upstairs by Ebrach’s housekeeper. Bertrand could give only a jumble of boats, face-making dishes, a play his great-aunt would not let him speak of, but he had, to Mademoiselle, a fort with cannons, as to what he’d seen and done in Nashville.

A stranger’s alphabet blocks and jigsaw puzzles, slates and colored chalks for practice at letters, her set of unconscionably fine dictionaries (tucked into A-L: “These old books were Moult’s. Let them be a gift for later on. I’d be tickled to get a note from little Bertram, whenever he starts in on his English”), fell outside Honoré’s ordinary opinion, and like Mme Sartain, he reserved this.

Ebrach did not play uncle to his family. Walter and Fern Gremot, neither inclined to play godparent, seemed to feel Élucide’s company sufficed…

“…because Monsieur Lamarquier sat behind his coachman. The street was blocked by a handcart turned on its side. Monsieur Rose climbed in. I suppose…it was an open car…it was the springtime…”

Listening again, he broke across this. “You may suppose as you like, Clotilde. The thing happened, or it did not. Monsieur Rose said he could not have aimed a pistol because he had no pistol. He was not found with one.”

Clotilde, willing enough that this, or any topic, be closed, gave the story up.

“My love. You said it yourself, the pistol. You have lost your place. And if your aunt tells you it was an open car, and if your aunt tells you it was the springtime…”

“No, but. Because of the assassin…of the king.”

“They thought he had staged it, in that same fashion.” And because Honoré took pride in his editor’s mind, having the name at hand, he gave it. Not that she would know it. “The way Ravaillac had done his crime. That was very long ago, Clotilde.”

“But Monsieur Rose is dead since thirty years.”

That too, yes…long ago.

“He had left a purse of coins with Jacques. Jacques was only a boy of ten, but his father made him swear a promise. When the prisoners were to be moved to the ship for Belle-Ile, Monsieur Rose would find another to take his place. Jacques carried the purse to a certain house, where the man’s wife lived.”

“And so. Very many, then, had set eyes on Rose? Who was not after all transported, but…”

Had skulked about Paris, livid, as he ought to be, that his wife was now mistress to Robert Serrigny. Livid, but maintaining a prudent invisibility.

Honoré’s gesture said to this, canard.

If Madame had been filling her head with a romance of that Sartain idol, Serrigny, Clotilde would…perhaps it was harsh to say empty it…

He could only tell himself he had not known his wife’s stories to have a point.

69

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part sixty-five)

(2023, Stephanie Foster)