All Bedlam Courses Past (part sixty-five)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Three

An Object in Motion

(part sixty-five) 

They were all, in this swamp of newness, to be educated, made more polished. He could well suspect Clotilde’s aunt, laying her concrete plans for the children’s futures, troweling all smooth (if one forced the metaphor), of looking so far ahead…

To insuring a reputation for the late head-of-household, an improved parent for Bertrand and his sister to mourn.

Young Rose, wizened in the criminal arts, would not have let a purse of coins go unplumbed, when a hundred lies might excuse its shortcomings. No doubt the ghostly enforcer, the prison-hardened father, had served Jacques for guardian angel.

Dead, Jacques had served Anne this way…so there was irony, if nothing other of interest.

“Clotilde, the chance that Anne will…” He turned his hand over and back. His wife’s eye read in no way he could pigeonhole.

“Honoré.”

“Ebrach won’t have her. Your aunt, you know it very well, won’t have her. My cousin Gremot won’t have her.” Unversaght, the jaundiced liver of the body Crownhaven, would not have such a spectacle as Anne Lugard disturbing his peace. Honoré understood Clotilde wished him to say, “I will not have her.”

“Honoré, Monsieur Serrigny spent money of his own, he hired a detective to learn what Monsieur Rose did, and where he went. He might have had him imprisoned, my aunt says, on surer charges than…than pointing a gun at a minister.”

“As he had thrown it in the Seine. No, why say it? Handed the gun to a friend…to keep safe, and sell back to him one day.”

Rose, afoot, had given strong chase, going to earth by rabbit hole, a tunnelway of connected cellars…to emerge sooty through a trick door inside the prison yard (where he’d meant, too cleverly, to lie low). But 1850 was before Haussmann, the warrens of Paris most intimate, in all their seedy utility, to those who lived in them.

In love with Marie Rose, Serrigny, nobleman, had entered these warrens in shabby dress, to interview the associates his detective named. He had walked barefoot to Compostela, paid his martyr’s price to feel that he, besotted and tempted, did not allow himself a poor defense of Rose.

His eloquence spawned a brief riot, soldiers firing into the crowd. Irony again. But Rose had not escaped a second time. He had died; the prison hulks of the day had been horrors.

Yes, a lovely story. Mme Sartain found it apt that elderly Serrigny must busy himself, nowadays, with the affairs of Honoré Gremot.

A man who had abandoned his spouse for his love.

A stranger might guess Mme Serrigny cold, status-minded…vengeful? While Mme Rose had been open-armed, a gatherer and giver, born to the class of the people, not the rulers.

And Anne…?

And Clotilde. A small lion in heart, the gentlest of souls otherwise, a treasure to him, he would not deny it. Also, she meant to say, or her aunt did, that this story held for Honoré its particular lesson.

70

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part sixty-six)

(2023, Stephanie Foster)