What he had was lots of scrawl in black ink. He couldn’t read it. He couldn’t read print all that well and sure as hell couldn’t read twisty French handwriting. But the signature said Victor.
Take it with him, or close it up and put it back so they wouldn’t know he’d been here?
Lazarus used to set him problems like this. He’d lay out the problem and give him the time it took to breathe in and out to think what to do. The next breath, Lazarus cuffed him halfway across the room if he hadn’t decided.
A big, square box to the side of the hearth had sheets of fine writing paper in it, screwed up long and tight. That was to light candles with or carry fire from one room to the other. The paper had writing on it.
Not just the one letter. Lots of letters.
Just made you wonder what kind of a careless household they ran. A powerful man lived here. What were the chances those papers had something interesting on them?
He stuffed papers down his shirt. All the paper spills. The letter from Victor de Fleurignac. Then he went out the window he’d come in through.
He was out of the courtyard, out into the streets. He left the Rue Honoré as soon as he could and found the smaller ways where they didn’t bother to light them, holding to the middle of the road where no one could jump him, not hurrying, walking through the dog-chewed edges of the night toward the Marais and the house with blue shutters.
Twenty-eight
MARGUERITE KNEW WHERE TO FIND PAPA. DEEP in the park, at the end of a lane of poplars, a statue of Diana stood naked to every weather, endlessly drawing an arrow from her quiver. Here was an oval rose garden. They had come here when she was very young. He had explained the theory of numerical sequences while she sat on the grass and collected fallen rose petals. She told him about the fairies who lived in the rosebushes. He explained how to calculate the orbit of the moons of Jupiter.
He was there, among the rosebushes, waiting for her.
She said, “I will tell you the bad news first. They have burned the chateau.”
But one of Papa’s servants—he would not tell her which—had already come to him with this news. The first shock of it was over. She need only relate the whole round tale, which did not take long. It was necessary to admit that she had not saved his library. I did not save my own writing. I was concerned with saving myself. She again admitted she had not saved the library. She admitted it several times. She agreed that, certainly, Papa would have prevented the destruction if he had been there. She heard the speech he would have made from the steps of the chateau to stop the mob. It was moving.
“They would have listened to me,” he said. “You are certain you did not save any of the library?”
He was dressed oddly, even for Papa who always dressed oddly. He wore a tricorne hat and a military coat, much too large for him, dark blue. Its brass buttons glinted even in this light. The scarlet of his waistcoat was forceful enough to be seen by the light of the lanterns in the cafés across the street. His hair hung untidily around his face. Everything about him was at once shabby and flamboyant.
Papa looked up at the sky above Paris and sighed. He would have liked to ask yet again if she did not possibly save any of his books.
After a long and melancholy moment, he said, “We lay our possessions on the alter of history. It was inevitable the chateau should be destroyed. It has outlived its time. The Republic will take all the grand mansions, in the end, and put them to rational use. Schools. Prisons. Manufacturies. Perhaps orphanages and hospitals.”
“They did not take the chateau and put it to good use. They destroyed it to a heap of rubble.”
He did not answer. He had a vast ability to hear only what he wanted to hear.
“Everyone is wondering where you have gone, Papa. Some of us are worried.” She ran her fingers into her hair. “What are you doing with Nico? He should be at the Peltiers’s house.”
“I took him. Sylvie left him with servants, after all, and I needed him.”
“You wanted a monkey?”
“I am an organ grinder. I need a monkey. It is not easy to find a monkey in Paris these days.”
With Papa, one never knew how much of what he said was slyness and how much was his small madnesses and how much was rational thought expressed in his own particular dialect. A box leaned against the tree at his feet. She recognized it now by the bright colors and the hand crank. It was the box of an organ grinder. A hurdy-gurdy. “You are a street musician?”
“One must do something. If I stay in my rooms and write, they become suspicious of me. No one stays in their rooms. With Nico, I am above suspicion.”
“You collect money in a hat?”
“Do not be ridiculous. The monkey does that. I play music.”
“I should have seen that.” She leaned against the low wall of marble that separated a walkway of raked gravel from the flowerbeds of the rose garden. Nico snuggled in the crook of her arm. He liked being scratched behind his ears and over the top of his head, so she did that. “Do you feed him properly? He looks thin.”
“Of course I feed him. I feed him my own dinner. Marguerite, will you stick to the point? Did you bring money?”
She had brought all the coin she had in her room, which was a goodly amount. She never knew when La Flèche would call upon her resources. “I will give it to you when I understand what is going on.”
“I am Italian. I play music upon the streets. I speak only Italian. I live among Italians of the city. I am from Padua.” He brooded over that for a moment. “Padua was a mistake. It is a city I abominate. But once I had said it at random I could not take it back. I have told them my father was from Sospel, however, so I am French and have French papers.”
Sometimes when she was with her father—this was one of those times—she wanted to howl like an animal and beat her fists upon the ground.
She reached into her pocket—the left pocket that held several small, useful things, not the right one that held money—and fed Nico another of the comfits he should not be eating. He had, she hoped, a digestion of iron.
Her own stomach was much disordered. She had been ill upon the cobblestones, suddenly and unexpectedly, on the way to the Tuileries. She still felt sick. It was from something she had eaten, doubtless. “You are pretending to be Italian.”
“Have I not just said that? Pay better attention. Did you know, I bought papers for myself in the Rue Manon for twenty-seven livres. It is very inexpensive. I was surprised.”
“There is a vigorous industry in false identity papers, Papa. We are all shocked by it. Why have you suddenly chosen to become Italian?”
“I am in hiding.” He brooded. Her father brooded often and with great thoroughness. “To escape my enemies. Perhaps I should have become German. The Germans are a more serious people.”
“You have no enemies, Papa. The burning of the chateau was not sanctioned by Paris. There is no arrest order for you. I asked Victor.”
“They do not want to arrest me. They want to kill me. That is an entirely different matter. Even in a time of revolution, there is still murder. They tried to stab me.”
“Who?”
“Two men, in an alley. I do not know them.” On top of the hurdy-gurdy was a thin, braided strap. Nico’s leash. He took it now and ran it through his fingers to get to the end. “They may be Martinists. Or Fouché has sent them. But it is probably the English. The English are almost certainly enraged. They might even burn the chateau.” He mulled it over. “To smoke me out. Yes. It is the English.” He nodded. “I hope you’ve brought enough money. There’s a copy of Rahn’s Teutsche Algebra for sale in the Rue Percée that I must buy. They will not give it to me unless I bring hard cash. There are several other texts of interest.”
Papa had been to England. Not once, but several times in the last year. “What did you do in England, Papa?”
“Nothing of importance. And I do not intend to go back. The food is barbarous. You should give me the money you brought and return home. It’s not safe for you to be out this late at night. People watch you, and there are criminal types abroad.”
There were many people abroad. Twenty yards away, bright crowds of men and women laughed and strolled in groups on the promenade, enjoying the cool of the evening. None of them came into this quiet corner.
What could Papa possibly have done?
Papa rounded the leash into his hand and whistled softly. Nico went willingly from her arms to the ground. He clambered to hang on Papa’s lapels, the long tail curled up, the little paws patting and patting at the waistcoat pocket.
“What did you do in England?” She pulled out the pouch of coins and held it in her hand.
He looked away, toward the lights of the street. “My researches. My study of genius. I worked in England upon this.”
His geniuses. It was another of Papa’s strange intellectual exercises, like calculating the orbit of Jupiter or keeping records of rainfall. Only Papa would ask if one could select the young, the potential geniuses. Chemists, experts in physics, mathematicians, engineers, inventors of all kinds, military men, political philosophers. It was harmless, surely. He gathered information. He made lists. Papa was a great one for making lists. He would see if these Englishmen, these Germans, these Italians became famous in ten years or in twenty. He might even be right about some of them. Papa was truly brilliant.
She said, “You will not offend England by saying there are geniuses there.”
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