I braced myself and ascended two steps. The legs above me became sharper to my vision. I could see the calves, dark where the hair was flat to the skin, and the thighs, slender yet solid. As I watched, the muscles tensed.

  I should have been more wary. I hadn’t expected violence. One of the feet swung at me and caught me in the chest, pitch­ing me backward. I might have been thrust on the tiled floor and seriously injured. However, my instinctive reaction to the attack was to grab the foot. I held on. I did fall backward, but slowly, tugging my assailant with me. We ended together in an ignominious heap at the bottom of the steps.

  We were soon back on our feet, both of us, because the heat of the tiles was searingly painful against delicate areas of flesh. Before I could get a look at him, the man mounted the steps again—on the principle, I suppose, that the high ground was tactically easier to defend, but this time I was close behind. He was slight in stature; I’d gleaned that much from our encounter. I’m no Eugene Sandow, but I reckoned with my superior weight I could subdue him.

  The problem was that the higher one went up the steps, the closer were the ventilators belching out the steam. I got almost to his level and grasped an elbow that he tried jabbing into my midriff. I held on as well as I could with the steam gusting into my face. He was a doughty antagonist, because he twisted one of his legs behind my own and forced me to relax my grip under the threat of losing my balance. Then, before I was steady again, he secured an armlock around my neck.

  My face was forced down brutally. Below the ventilators at the top of the steps was a large semicircular cistern half filled with steaming water and lined with sediments of gray clay. My head was being inched toward it and the searing sen­sation on my skin made me cry out. To come into contact with the enamel edge would result in terrible burns. I was so close and the heat so terrific that I could not tell whether I was already being scalded.

  The Marquis of Queensberry’s Rules weren’t written for people in the process of being casseroled. My only hope of escape was to go below the belt, so to speak. Groping like a blind man at a door, I found his most vulnerable point, squeezed with all my strength, and twisted. He emitted a roar of pain and relaxed the armlock. But you are right: I did not relax the hold I had on him. Holding tight, I braced and drew back from the wicked heat. My efforts toppled us both off the top step. We slithered down the steps together, staying upright only because we held on to each other. At ground level, I let go and pushed him away. I was practically expiring from the heat and the exertion. The only thing in the world I wanted was to get out of the steam room. I staggered to the door, pushed it open, and took a run­ning jump into the cold pool.

  Sinking thankfully under the surface, I thought, I shall never order a cooked lobster again.

  I came up for air in time to see a pink blur at the edge of the pool, followed by a mighty splash. My antagonist had taken the same escape route. I rubbed water from my eyes and waited for him to surface.

  I blinked. “You?”

  He groaned, gave me a long look across the rippling water, and said, “For pity’s sake, keep away from me, Bertie. I can’t take any more.”

  He was Jules d’Agincourt.

  You may imagine my confusion, I said, “I had no idea it was you.”

  “I won’t make a run for it, I give you my word,” said Jules. “I’m not even sure if I can walk after what you did to me. Just let me stay in this water.”

  When Goron, the far-famed chef de la Sûreté, came to the side of the pool and offered to help me out, I declined. I said in a dignified way, “You’ll be better employed attending to your confederate.”

  I won’t say Goron’s shamefaced look was worth the indig­nity I had suffered. But it was some consolation.

  Dressed again, the three of us met over mint tea in the tearoom of the hammam, a blessedly cool, se­cluded place with a fountain playing.

  Goron had taken time to marshal his defense. “Your Royal Highness, allow me to explain why I invited the comte to be present when I met you in the bath,” he said in an emollient tone.

  “To eavesdrop,” said I. “I understand now why you chose this place. It’s ideal for eavesdropping.”

  “That wasn’t the spirit in which it was done, sir. The comte was deeply troubled about the distress your, um, investigation was capable of inflicting on innocent people like the Letissiers and his own family.”

  “Distress?”

  “In all innocence, of course. But I shared his concern. We at the Sûreté had serious worries that your activities might inter­fere with the process of the law.”

  “This is really too absurd,” said I.

  He continued doggedly, “I agreed to arrange a meeting with you. And you’re correct in suggesting that this place seemed the ideal choice, because it enabled the comte to be pres­ent but unseen. He would be well placed to come forward, if necessary, and use his influence—”

  “You don’t have to go on,” I cut in. “It’s all transparently clear. Frankly, Monsieur Goron, I am more interested to know why my old friend the comte crept away like a thief in the night—or tried to.”

  “Because you impugned his family, sir,” said Goron. “No sooner had I convinced you that Claudine Jaume could not have committed the crime than you pointed your finger at the Agincourts.”

  “Are you suggesting that he beat a retreat rather than defend his family’s good name?”

  “He avoided an unpleasant scene.”

  “I think you are mistaken.” I glanced in the direction of Jules, who had stayed conspicuously silent. “That isn’t the con­duct of a gentleman and Jules is a gentleman through and through, regardless of the dustup we had this evening. Isn’t that so, Jules?”

  My old friend looked at me bleakly and, to my astonish­ment, said nothing. Now, I’m as prone to error as anyone else (some would say more prone), but I know the ways of the aris­tocracy of Europe. Jules would defend his family like a tiger, whatever their failings.

  “Jules?”

  His silence was a revelation. In that moment of scintillat­ing clarity, I understood.

  Reader, I rumbled him.

  “You killed Letissier.”

  After a moment’s stunned silence, Jules said, “Yes, I admit it.”

  “What?” said Goron, jerking upright as if his name had been called by Saint Peter.

  Jules said in a tone drained of all emotion, “Bertie is right. I shot Maurice Letissier. I have behaved abominably. You must release that poor man Morgan. He is innocent.”

  “When did you discover this?” Goron demanded of me as if I was the guilty man.

  I ignored him. Addressing Jules, I said, “You were the sender of that anonymous letter—the one insisting that Morgan was innocent.”

  “Yes—and the others to the Sûreté. I did everything I could, short of confessing, but this man took no notice.”

  Goron reddened. “The information you gave us was flawed. Morgan wasn’t in the garden when the shots were fired. He was in the hall.”

  “Jules didn’t know that,” said I. “All he knew was that Morgan didn’t fire the shots. As a man of honor, he couldn’t allow an innocent man to be accused, so he invented what he thought was a watertight alibi for him. He didn’t know that Morgan’s own statement contradicted it.”

  Goron’s hands were clasped in front of him and his knuck­les were white. “If this is true, it’s astonishing.”

  “You dismissed those letters as unimportant,” said I. “A more alert investigator recognized them as clues.” (The atten­tive reader may recall that this was Bernhardt. I would have given her the credit if she had been present, but the distinction would have been lost on Goron.) “Jules, you had better explain what made you into a murderer.”

  The word unsettled him. He shuddered and ran his hand through his hair. “The immediate cause, I suppose, was meeting Claudine Jaume.”

  “By chance?”

  “No, she came to me. I knew nothing of her existence until the Wednesday before. She wrote a letter asking to meet me in front of the Madeleine at noon the following day. It was a sim­ple letter in an educated hand and I decided to act on it. I took her to a quiet café and she told me the story that you know, of her affaire de coeur with Maurice, about the love child and her attempts to persuade Maurice to acknowledge the child and come to some arrangement for its upkeep. Over the last days, the child had become sick to the point of death. In desperation, Claudine went to Maurice’s apartment to make one more appeal for money, to pay for a doctor’s attention. He sent her off with­out a sou and now she was appealing to me. Of course I did what I could to help. Tragically, the help came too late.”

  “Did you confront Letissier?” Goron asked.

  “Maurice? Of course. I did it discreetly, on the Friday. I told him frankly that I thought he should have the decency to help the girl. One might forgive his peccadillo with Claudine, if that was all it had been, but as a gentleman he was honor bound to make provision for the child. His reaction was to tell me that Claudine was lying, that he had never been intimate with her. I didn’t believe him. The girl had been convincing—utterly convincing—and Maurice was not. And if he was pre­pared to lie to me over this matter, I didn’t want him marrying my daughter.”

  “What was his answer?”

  “He challenged me to break off the engagement. He said if I muddied his reputation, he would be justified in muddying Rosine’s and he went on to allege deplorable things about her.”

  “With Morgan?”

  “Yes—and I am sure they were untrue, but you know how scandal is spread in society. He fully intended to ruin her life if I intervened. What could I do as a father? Throw my daughter to a jackal like that—or risk her being slandered as a slut? I couldn’t allow it, Bertie. I had to remove the threat. I decided to kill him.”

  I nodded. “The rest we know. You don’t need to tell us how it was done, except one thing. After shooting him, what­ever possessed you to put the gun into Valentin’s overcoat pocket?”

  He gave a shrug. “Incompetence. I didn’t think ahead. After I shot him and he was carried to the dressing room, I real­ized that the police would be called and that any of us might be searched for a weapon. The coat pocket was the only hiding place I could find. It didn’t occur to me that the owner of the coat would collect it while we were still in the room. I was in no state to think clearly.”

  We became silent. Each of us, I suppose, was imagining the devastation this would wreak in the Agincourt family and in the larger family of Parisian society. I almost wished I had left the Sûreté floundering in its own incompetence. But then an inno­cent man would have been executed.

  CHAPTER 19

  There is a postscript to this case.

  More than a year later, Sarah Bernhardt arrived in London to fulfill the latest engagements of her world tour, and naturally I attended a performance and visited her dressing room. Capricious as ever, she declined my offer of supper at the Savoy and instead proposed tea the following afternoon. She said tea would be more discreet. I suggested breakfast as a compromise and got a ticking off. She was most anxious not to cause offense to Alix while in London, and I am sure on reflection that she was right. Those two formidable ladies have always respected each other.

  A world tour can be tedious in the telling, and I was resigned to hearing how the Bernhardt troupe had been received at every stop from Amsterdam to Zanzibar, but to my relief, Sarah had called at Paris enroute to London, so she had more intriguing news to impart when we met at a quiet corner table toward the back of Elphinstone’s, the tea shop in Regent Street.

  “That dreadful Rosine d’Agincourt, Bertie!”

  “Rosine? What has she done?”

  “Married an American millionaire.”

  “Good Lord! I thought she’d sworn undying love to the painter—what was his name?—Morgan, the fellow I saved from the guillotine.”

  “I told you she was not to be trusted. It appears that she was wrong about the undying love. It was puppy love.”

  “Well, I don’t suppose Morgan is brokenhearted. All that passion was too much for him to handle. He’ll have to find someone more his own age.”

  “He has,” said she. “The gossip is that he’s living at Montroger now.”

  “On the estate?”

  “In the house, as Juliette’s lover.”

  I choked on a cucumber sandwich. “Did you say Juliette?”

  “She is more his age.”

  “Yes, but she hated him. She called him a parasite.”

  “A lady can change her mind, Bertie.”

  “He’s not her type.”

  “Who can tell? With Jules gone, she needs someone else to talk to. I’m sure he’ll earn his keep.”

  When I’d adjusted to the shock, I nodded. “It still seems insensitive, not to say callous. Poor old Jules. He deserved better from his family after the dignity he showed, and right to the end. I read about his execution in The Times. I gather he went bravely.”

  “Nobly.”

  “I think about him often,” I added. “That a decent man like that should feel driven to murder—quite appalling. It occurred to me that there could have been a much more satis­factory outcome to this wretched business.”

  She leaned forward eagerly. “What is that?”

  “Well, we know that Claudine Jaume did her best to poi­son Letissier with arsenic.”

  “Do we?” said she archly.

  “My dear Sarah, I thought your memory was better than that. She possessed a jar of the stuff. I took it to the chemist for analysis, remember? And Letissier displayed the classic symp­toms of slow poisoning—gastric problems, headaches, loss of hair, and jaundice. Now, this is the point: if only the poisoning had succeeded, Jules need not have shot him. Claudine would have taken her own life, anyway, after the baby died. And Jules would still be alive to this day!”

  The corners of her mouth twitched. I thought for a moment she was deeply moved, but she scolded me instead. “Bertie, that’s the silliest nonsense. After all these months, I can’t believe you still don’t know the truth of it. The arsenic wasn’t for poisoning. It was medicinal.”

  I shook my head. “Sarah, this is no joking matter.”

  “I mean it. I’m serious. Claudine was taking it for her con­dition.”

  “Taking arsenic?” I was utterly skeptical.

  “Yes.”

  “For her condition? You do mean when she was, um”—I cleared my throat—”expecting the child?”

  “No, Bertie. She had the pox.”

  “Good Lord!” I looked about me. “Keep your voice down. Do you mean . . . syphilis?”

  She gave a nod. “I am not conversant with the condition, but the treatment is well-known. You take arsenic or mercury in tiny amounts.”

  “Sarah, how can you possibly advance such an unedifying theory?”

  “Bertie, she caught it from Letissier. He was a roue. He went to whores.”

  I winced, certain that the entire tea shop was listening. “I don’t dispute that, but it was never suggested that he contracted a disease.”

  “He did,” she insisted. “And I’ll tell you how I know. Do you remember the medicines you found in his lodgings at the rue Tronchet? Among them was a bottle of Van Swieten’s liquor. I made inquiries. It is a preparation made from subli­mate of mercury dissolved in alcohol and water and it is the standard remedy for chronic syphilis.”

  “Oh.”

  “She favored arsenic—I suppose because she found it easy to acquire—and he used Van Swieten’s.”

  “Really?”

  “And what is more,” she said, “all those symptoms you described for arsenic poisoning are characteristic of the pox in its secondary stage. The stomach upsets, the sore throats, the headaches—what else?”

  “Loss of hair.”

  “Alopecia.”

  “Jaundice.”

  “Hepatitis.”

  “And they are . . .”

  “Characteristic of the second stage. It lasts up to three years.”

  I took a sip of tea. I’d lost my appetite for the sandwiches. The cakes would not be eaten, either. “If this is true—and I admit you make a strong case—why didn’t Jules speak of it when he confessed? Wasn’t he aware of the truth?”

  “I’m sure he knew,” said she. “What happened is this. When Claudine met him in the last days of her life, she was in despair. She showed him her dying baby, another victim of the disease.”

  “He didn’t mention it to me.”

  “Bertie, he wouldn’t,” said Bernhardt with such an out­pouring of feeling that I was quite subdued. “Jules was a gen­tleman to the last. He regarded what that poor girl told him as confidential. But he was appalled that Letissier—having in­fected Claudine and her child and ruined their lives—should still insist on marrying his daughter. When he saw Letissier and heard his lies, his absolute denials, he felt he had no choice but to shoot him. That was the real motive. But he went to the guil­lotine without mentioning it once.”

  I needed no more convincing.

  She said, “Do you believe me now?”

 

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