Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [388]
“Well,” said Maillart. “None but I could have known its provenance. And no one missed it when I took it from the rest, there were so many . . .”
“Really so many?” Isabelle stared at him.
“Yes, with locks of hair and all of that, and some women had even been foolish enough to write letters.”
“The foolishness of some women knows no bounds.” She paused. “You’re telling me Elise was not so foolish.”
“No. She was not.” Maillart swallowed. “And General Boudet is a gentleman. He burned everything that would take a flame and threw the rest into the canal—yet I thought I ought to preserve this for you.”
“It is kind of you,” Isabelle said abstractedly. She gathered the pendant and chain in her palm. “I suppose Elise might still be denounced.” She caught Maillart’s reluctant eye. “As I might be.”
“Oh, surely not.” But Maillart could not hold her gaze. He was memorizing a pattern of the tapestry: some European bird with its throat open, vomiting an inaudible song. “That wretched Paltre,” he blurted out. “He goes around muttering, and who knows who listens. He saw too much in this house, I fear, when he was here with Hédouville in ninety-eight.”
“If only Doctor Hébert had done away with him.” Isabelle’s hand clenched on the pendant.
“He can’t be killed if he won’t fight,” Maillart said. “We are not murderers.”
“Of course not,” Isabelle said, but it seemed she had scarcely heard him. From the rear of the house, the voice of a cock was repeating its dawn cry. Isabelle’s fingers curled and uncurled over the pendant like the legs of a starfish.
“Let Paltre say one word openly against you and I’ll stop his mouth forever,” Maillart said. Then, in another burst of irritation: “I don’t see why you let that Captain Daspir hang about, mooning like a lovesick calf.”
Isabelle’s laugh was bright, but harsh. “You’ve no call to be jealous of him,” she said. “He is only a very young calf, as you say.”
“Yes.” In spite of himself, Maillart grinned into a fist. “But someone seems to have given him the notion he’s a bull.”
This time Isabelle laughed wholeheartedly, and a little too loudly for discretion. “Oh . . .” She caught his hands in both of hers. “How good it is to laugh.” Her voice lowered. “But now you really had better go.”
The hidden stair curled down to release Maillart into the garden. Nanon and Zabeth were giving the smaller children their breakfast at a small table under the portico, but no one appeared to notice the major, as he glided quietly toward the side gate. Only Gabriel, walking among fresh planted sprigs of aloe, looking for snails, glanced up and caught his eye. A handsome boy, black as he was, and stout for his small size. Maillart smiled and winked at him, and on further thought gave him an English penny from his pocket before he let himself out onto the street.
There were the hollow eyes of Captain Daspir, bearing down on Maillart from across the way. Maybe he had been standing there sleepless all night, shifting from one leg to the other, like a stork. Maillart sent him an easy smile, stretched luxuriously in the gathering sunshine, and touched his hat to the young captain before turning his back and walking away in the direction of the Place d’Armes. As a younger man he too had skulked on the borders of Isabelle’s other assignations, and known all the torments Daspir’s haggard face now expressed.
But Isabelle had told the truth; he had no reason to be jealous of Daspir. The one man who had earned his jealousy had been dead since last November. Joseph Flaville. Maillart had really quite liked Flaville, respected and even admired him a little, though it had shocked him to the bone when he learned that it was he who’d presented Isabelle with the ever-so-unusual stone pendant she still wore. But where had he seen that face so recently that it now came before his eyes? Flaville was dead since last year’s fall—executed for his part in the Moyse rebellion. But— Maillart stopped dead in the center of the Place d’Armes, half aware of the crows that had started up squawking into the trees