Judith Rock - The Rhetoric of Death

“I saw you leave the postern,” Fabre said. “You had on a veil, but I still knew you.” He smiled a little. “I saw your red underskirt.” His eyes pleaded with her to be the sister he’d always known. “The porter gave me the package to deliver and-it was terrible, Agnes. Antoine’s tutor ate some of the gaufres. I saw him die.”

She tossed her head and pushed him away. “Other women have red petticoats. And what does it have to do with me? Even if I brought the child some cakes, as my mistress told me to, it’s hardly my fault if some old man is ill and dies!”

“Antoine?” Mme Montfort’s face was rigid with horror. “The poisoned cakes were for Antoine?”

“What poison?” Agnes stamped her foot, as though they were all thickheaded. “The baker must have poisoned them!”

“Where did you get them? When?”

“Yesterday. From a shop on the Place Maubert.”

“But you bought poison, Mademoiselle La Salle,” Charles said quietly. “You bought aconite from the dwarf on the Petit Pont. You bought it more than once.”

“You lie! Everyone knows Jesuits lie, what you say means nothing!”

“I saw you go into his shop. M. Riviere, the apothecary, has your name and your purchases in his register.” If there was a register. But that was another matter.

She shrugged indifferently. “My mistress sends me to buy it.” Her calculating gaze flicked from face to face. “Talk to her.”

“Oh, we will, mademoiselle,” Servier said. “We will talk further with both of you. At the Chatelet, I think, since the commissaire is so busy.” He grinned evilly. The Chatelet was notorious for its torture facilities.

Agnes screamed and slammed her hand into his face, catching him in the eye, and plunged toward the door. Charles caught her and swung her around. Blinking furiously, Servier grabbed her and pinned her arms against her sides.

“It was her, it was my mistress!” Agnes screamed, writhing against his hold. “She set me to it, I won’t die for her and her brat!”

“That’s good enough.” Servier gave Charles a satisfied nod. “You hear that?” he said to Mme Montfort, who seemed to have turned to stone. “Your sister’s accused of murder. You say she’s expecting and ill. Keep her here. I’ll be back shortly and if I find her gone, madame, I’ll take you instead.”

Agnes threw back her head. “You’ll burn, Lisette,” she screamed at the dispassionate divinities on the ceiling. “Tell them, you bitch, it was you, not me!”

Stumbling on her skirts, Mme Montfort fled up the stairs. The manservant, who had been listening from the upper floor, rushed down with a cloak and Charles draped it around the now-sobbing Agnes. Fabre stood frozen, his face wet with tears.

“Judas,” Agnes spat at him, as Servier pushed her over the threshold. “You had your chance to get away from the godforsaken tannery. This was mine! Damn you to hell, you stinking Judas!”

The cold stone and stooping shadows of the Chatelet did nothing to quell Agnes La Salle’s fury. She stood at bay in a small chamber lit only by a lantern that the watch officer, M. Servier, had set on a scarred table. Servier stood at the table’s end and Lieutenant-General La Reynie, Pere Le Picart, Frere Fabre, and Charles all sat behind it on a bench, watching her. Like judges, Charles thought uncomfortably. La Reynie had sent a carriage for the rector, and ordered Servier to stay for Agnes’s questioning. When it was over, La Reynie and Servier would take what they’d learned back to the Place Royale to question Mme Doute.

“It’s not my fault,” Agnes insisted sullenly. “Mme Doute told me to deliver the package.” She looked at them from under her lashes. “Because of what M. Louis told her.”

“Who is M. Louis?” La Reynie asked sternly.

“Her astrologer. He told her the first wife’s brats would kill hers to get all of old Doute’s money.”

The three Jesuits crossed themselves. La Reynie’s face was rigid with anger. In the anteroom, the rector had told Charles that La Reynie was still haunted by the notorious poison trials ten years ago, when it seemed that half Versailles and Paris had poisoned someone or had been some poisoner’s target. And that now he was merciless toward mountebanks who preyed on the ignorant.

“Where did she go to meet with this man?” La Reynie demanded.

Agnes smiled slyly at the Jesuits. “He calls himself Louis in honor of your St. Louis church. He lives by the old city wall that runs behind it.”

“Describe him,” La Reynie said.

“I’ll tell you if you let me go.”

“Oh, you’ll tell me, mademoiselle.” La Reynie sighed. “One way or another. For your own good, I suggest you tell me here rather than in the chamber beyond that door.”

The whites of her eyes showed as she glanced at the heavy planked door. “Young,” Agnes said sullenly. “Not tall.” Slowly, her lips curved and her eyes took on a faraway look. “Blue eyes and a voice you could listen to forever. He always wore his hood up, I never saw his hair. He wore a beautiful blue robe-I always wondered what he had on underneath.” Her dreaming tone grew venomous. “He’s the one should be here, not me! It was his idea, his and Mme Doute’s, never mine!”

“When did she first consult him?”

Agnes thrust her lower lip out and turned her head away. Servier started toward her. “The end of June,” she spat, before he could touch her. “And twice after that.”

“But why, Agnes?” Fabre burst out. “Why would you help her poison a child?”

She held out a fistful of her plain skirt and shook it at him. “I am a servant. Like you. I do what I am told, I didn’t know what was in the package, how could I?”

“You knew,” Charles said. “You knew what the astrologer had said. You bought the poison. And you disguised yourself in the veil. Your mistress’s mourning veil, wasn’t it?” His voice hammered at her. “You left the gaufres at the college and said they were for Antoine. What did your mistress promise you that was worth his life, and your own damnation?”

“Nothing you would understand, you bloodless Jesuit!”

“You said it was your way out of the tannery, Agnes,” Fabre said, begging her to show them they were wrong. “But you’ve been gone from it four years, you’re in good service, what could you need so badly?”

“You always were an idiot, Denis. Do you think I am content to be a mealymouthed servant all my life, like you? Do you think I am content to be talked at, ordered around from morning to night, hit if anyone feels like it? I won’t be beaten, ever again! And don’t tell me you don’t remember the beatings, I know you do!”

“I remember,” Fabre whispered. “When he tried to make you marry Jules. But-”

“Yes, damn your father’s ugly soul! He beat me till I couldn’t stand and when you tried to make him stop, he beat you, too.”

Fabre looked at Charles. “There was an old tanner-my father tried to make Agnes marry him, to get control of the tannery when the old man died.”

“I was fifteen, even still a virgin, if you’ll believe that.” Agnes rushed to the table and leaned across it, staring into her brother’s eyes. “What do I need, Denis? I need a rich husband, I want a soft living, just like you do. And that’s what she promised me! Don’t look at me like that, you’re no better than me, you damned little hypocrite!” She grabbed up the lantern and swung it at his head. Fire spilled onto the table and kindled the papers in front of La Reynie. The men jumped to their feet, and Charles smothered the flames with his cassock skirt, as Servier wrenched the lantern away from Agnes.

The rest of them fled the cell. Fabre’s cheek was livid where the hot edge of the lantern had caught it, but he seemed to feel nothing. Charles sat him on a bench and asked a guard for water while La Reynie and the rector talked hurriedly. Servier came out of the cell and La Reynie spoke quietly to him.