Seven Stones to Stand or Fall Read online

  “Monsieur le Comte,” said an amused, gravelly voice. “I see the years have been kind to you.”

  Raymond stepped into the starlight, smiling. The sight of him was disconcerting; Rakoczy had imagined this meeting for so long that the reality seemed oddly anticlimactic. Short, broad-shouldered, with long, loose hair that swept back from a massive forehead. A broad, almost lipless mouth. Raymond the frog.

  “Why are you here?” Rakoczy blurted.

  Maître Raymond’s brows were black—surely they had been white thirty years ago? One of them lifted in puzzlement.

  “I was told that you were looking for me, monsieur.” He spread his hands, the gesture graceful. “I came!”

  “Thank you,” Rakoczy said dryly, beginning to regain some composure. “I meant—why are you in Paris?”

  “Everyone has to be somewhere, don’t they? They can’t be in the same place.” This should have sounded like badinage but didn’t. It sounded serious, like a statement of scientific principle, and Rakoczy found it unsettling.

  “Did you come looking for me?” he asked boldly. He moved a little, trying to get a better view of the man. He was nearly sure that the frog appeared younger than he had when last seen. Surely his flowing hair was darker, his step more elastic? A spurt of excitement bubbled in his chest.

  “For you?” The frog seemed amused for a moment, but then the look faded. “No. I’m searching for a lost daughter.”

  Rakoczy was surprised and disconcerted.

  “Yours?”

  “More or less.” Raymond seemed uninterested in explaining further. He moved a little to one side, eyes narrowing as he sought to make out Rakoczy’s face in the darkness. “You can hear stones, then, can you?”

  “I—what?”

  Raymond nodded at the façade of the cathedral. “They do speak. They move, too, but very slowly.”

  An icy chill shot up Rakoczy’s spine at the thought of the grinning gargoyles perched high above him and the implication that one might at any moment choose to spread its silent wings and hurtle down upon him, teeth still bared in carnivorous hilarity. Despite himself, he looked up, over his shoulder.

  “Not that fast.” The note of amusement was back in the frog’s voice. “You would never see them. It takes them millennia to move the slightest fraction of an inch—unless of course they are propelled or melted. But you don’t want to see them do that, of course. Much too dangerous.”

  This kind of talk struck him as frivolous, and Rakoczy was bothered by it but for some reason not irritated. Troubled, with a sense that there was something under it, something that he simultaneously wanted to know—and wanted very much to avoid knowing. The sensation was novel, and unpleasant.

  He cast caution to the wind and demanded boldly, “Why did you not kill me?”

  Raymond grinned at him; Rakoczy could see the flash of teeth and felt yet another shock: he was sure—almost sure—that the frog had had no teeth when last seen.

  “If I had wanted you dead, son, you wouldn’t be here talking to me,” he said. “I wanted you to be out of the way, that’s all; you obliged me by taking the hint.”

  “And just why did you want me ‘out of the way’?” Had he not needed to find out, Rakcozy would have taken offense at the man’s tone.

  The frog lifted one shoulder.

  “You were something of a threat to the lady.”

  Sheer astonishment brought Rakoczy to his full height.

  “The lady? You mean the woman—La Dame Blanche?”

  “They did call her that.” The frog seemed to find the notion amusing.

  It was on the tip of Rakoczy’s tongue to tell Raymond that La Dame Blanche still lived, but he hadn’t lived as long as he had by blurting out everything he knew—and he didn’t want Raymond thinking that he himself might be still a threat to her.

  “What is the ultimate goal of an alchemist?” the frog said very seriously.

  “To transform matter,” Rakoczy replied automatically.

  The frog’s face split in a broad amphibian grin.

  “Exactly!” he said. And vanished.

  He had vanished. No puffs of smoke, no illusionist’s tricks, no smell of sulfur—the frog was simply gone. The square stretched empty under the starlit sky; the only thing that moved was a cat that darted mewing out of the shadows and brushed past Rakoczy’s leg.

  WORN OUT WITH constant walking, Michael slept like the dead these days, without dreams or motion, and woke when the sun came up. His valet, Robert, heard him stir and came in at once, one of the femmes de chambre on his heels with a bowl of coffee and some pastry.

  He ate slowly, suffering himself to be brushed, shaved, and tenderly tidied into fresh linen. Robert kept up a soothing murmur of the sort of conversation that doesn’t require response and smiled encouragingly when presenting the mirror. Rather to Michael’s surprise, the image in the mirror looked quite normal. Hair neatly clubbed—he wore his own, without powder—suit modest in cut but of the highest quality. Robert hadn’t asked him what he required but had dressed him for an ordinary day of business. He supposed that was all right. What, after all, did clothes matter? It wasn’t as though there was a costume de rigueur for calling upon the sister of one’s deceased wife, who had come uninvited into one’s bed in the middle of the night.

  He had spent the last two days trying to think of some way never to see or speak to Léonie again, but, really, there was no help for it. He’d have to see her.

  But what was he to say to her, he wondered, as he made his way through the streets toward the house where Léonie lived with an aged aunt, Eugenie Galantine. He wished he could talk the situation over with Sister Joan, but that wouldn’t be appropriate, even were she available.

  He’d hoped that walking would give him time to come up at least with a point d’appui, if not an entire statement of principle, but instead he found himself obsessively counting the flagstones of the market as he crossed it, counting the bongs of the public horologe as it struck the hour of three, and—for lack of anything else—counting his own footsteps as he approached her door. Six hundred and thirty-seven, six hundred and thirty-eight…

  As he turned into the street, though, he abruptly stopped counting. He stopped walking, too, for an instant—then began to run. Something was wrong at the house of Madame Galantine.

  He pushed his way through the crowd of neighbors and vendors clustered near the steps and seized the butler, whom he knew, by a sleeve.

  “What?” he barked. “What’s happened?” The butler, a tall, cadaverous man named Hubert, was plainly agitated but settled a bit on seeing Michael.

  “I don’t know, sir,” he said, though a sideways slide of his eyes made it clear that he did. “Mademoiselle Léonie…she’s ill. The doctor…”

  He could smell the blood. Not waiting for more, he pushed Hubert aside and sprinted up the stairs, calling for Madame Eugenie, Léonie’s aunt.

  Madame Eugenie popped out of a bedroom, her cap and wrapper neat in spite of the uproar.

  “Monsieur Michel!” she said, blocking him from entering the room. “It’s all right, but you must not go in.”

  “Yes, I must.” His heart was thundering in his ears, and his hands felt cold.

  “You may not,” she said firmly. “She’s ill. It isn’t proper.”

  “Proper? A young woman tries to make away with herself and you tell me it isn’t proper?”

  A maid appeared in the doorway, a basket piled with bloodstained linen in her arms, but the look of shock on Madame Eugenie’s broad face was more striking.

  “Make away with herself?” The old lady’s mouth hung open for a moment, then snapped shut like a turtle’s. “Why would you think such a thing?” She was regarding him with considerable suspicion. “And what are you doing here, for that matter? Who told you she was ill?”

  A glimpse of a man in a dark robe, who must be the doctor, decided Michael that little was to be gained by engaging further with Madame Eugenie. He took her
gently but firmly by the elbows, picked her up—she uttered a small shriek of surprise—and set her aside.

  He went in and shut the bedroom door behind him.

  “Who are you?” The doctor looked up, surprised. He was wiping out a freshly used bleeding-bowl, and his case lay open on the boudoir’s settee. Léonie’s bedroom must lie beyond; the door was open, and Michael caught a glimpse of the foot of a bed but could not see the bed’s inhabitant.

  “It doesn’t matter. How is she?”

  The doctor eyed him narrowly, but after a moment nodded.

  “She will live. As for the child…” He made an equivocal motion of the hand. “I’ve done my best. She took a great deal of the—”

  “The child?” The floor shifted under his feet, and the dream of the night before flooded him, that queer sense of something half wrong, half familiar. It was the feeling of a small, hard swelling pressed against his bum; that’s what it was. Lillie had not been far gone with child when she died, but he remembered all too well the feeling of a woman’s body in early pregnancy.

  “It’s yours? I beg your pardon, I shouldn’t ask.” The doctor put away his bowl and fleam and shook out his black velvet turban.

  “I want—I need to talk to her. Now.”

  The doctor opened his mouth in automatic protest but then glanced thoughtfully over his shoulder.

  “Well…you must be careful not to—” But Michael was already inside the bedroom, standing by the bed.

  She was pale. They had always been pale, Lillie and Léonie, with the soft glow of cream and marble. This was the paleness of a frog’s belly, of a rotting fish, blanched on the shore.

  Her eyes were ringed with black, sunk in her head. They rested on his face, flat, expressionless, as still as the ringless hands that lay limp on the coverlet.

  “Who?” he said quietly. “Charles?”

  “Yes.” Her voice was as dull as her eyes, and he wondered whether the doctor had drugged her.

  “Was it his idea—to try to foist the child off on me? Or yours?”

  She did look away then, and her throat moved.

  “His.” The eyes came back to him. “I didn’t want to, Michel. Not—not that I find you disgusting, not that…”

  “Merci,” he muttered, but she went on, disregarding him.

  “You were Lillie’s husband. I didn’t envy her you,” she said frankly, “but I envied what you had together. It couldn’t be like that between you and me, and I didn’t like betraying her. But”—her lips, already pale, compressed to invisibility—“I didn’t have much choice.”

  He was obliged to admit that she hadn’t. Charles couldn’t marry her; he had a wife. Bearing an illegitimate child was not a fatal scandal in high court circles, but the Galantines were of the emerging bourgeoisie, where respectability counted for almost as much as money. Finding herself pregnant, she would have had two alternatives: find a complaisant husband quickly, or…He tried not to see that one of her hands rested lightly across the slight swell of her stomach.

  The child…He wondered what he would have done had she come to him and told him the truth, asked him to marry her for the sake of the child. But she hadn’t. And she wasn’t asking now.

  It would be best—or at least easiest—were she to lose the child. And she might yet.

  “I couldn’t wait, you see,” she said, as though continuing a conversation. “I would have tried to find someone else, but I thought she knew. She’d tell you as soon as she could manage to see you. So I had to, you see, before you found out.”

  “She? Who? Tell me what?”

  “The nun,” Léonie said, and sighed deeply, as though losing interest. “She saw me in the market and rushed up to me. She said she had to talk to you—that she had something important to tell you. I saw her look into my basket, though, and her face…thought she must realize…”

  Her eyelids were fluttering, whether from drugs or fatigue, he couldn’t tell. She smiled faintly, but not at him; she seemed to be looking at something a long way off.

  “So funny,” she murmured. “Charles said it would solve everything—that the comte would pay him such a lot for her, it would solve everything. But how can you solve a baby?”

  Michael jerked as though her words had stabbed him.

  “What? Pay for whom?”

  “The nun.”

  He grabbed her by the shoulders.

  “Sister Joan? What do you mean, pay for her? What did Charles tell you?”

  She made a whiny sound of protest. Michael wanted to shake her hard enough to break her neck but forced himself to withdraw his hand. She settled into the pillow like a bladder losing air, flattening under the bedclothes. Her eyes were closed, but he bent down, speaking directly into her ear.

  “The comte, Léonie. What is his name? Tell me his name.”

  A faint frown rippled the flesh of her brow, then passed.

  “St. Germain,” she murmured, scarcely loud enough to be heard. “The Comte St. Germain.”

  HE WENT INSTANTLY to Rosenwald and, by dint of badgering and the promise of extra payment, got him to finish the engraving on the chalice at once. Michael waited impatiently while it was done and, scarcely pausing for the cup and paten to be wrapped in brown paper, flung money to the goldsmith and made for les Couvent des Anges, almost running.

  With great difficulty, he restrained himself while making the presentation of the chalice, and with great humility, he inquired whether he might ask the great favor of seeing Sister Gregory, that he might convey a message to her from her family in the Highlands. Sister Eustacia looked surprised and somewhat disapproving—postulants were not normally permitted visits—but after all…in view of Monsieur Murray’s and Monsieur Fraser’s great generosity to the convent…perhaps just a few moments, in the visitor’s parlor, and in the presence of Sister herself…

  HE TURNED AND blinked once, his mouth opening a little. He looked shocked. Did she look so different in her robe and veil?

  “It’s me,” Joan said, and tried to smile reassuringly. “I mean…still me.”

  His eyes fixed on her face, and he let out a deep breath and smiled, as if she’d been lost and he’d found her again.

  “Aye, so it is,” he said softly. “I was afraid it was Sister Gregory. I mean, the…er…” He made a sketchy, awkward gesture indicating her gray robes and white postulant’s veil.

  “It’s only clothes,” she said, and put a hand to her chest, defensive.

  “Well, no,” he said, looking her over carefully, “I dinna think it is, quite. It’s more like a soldier’s uniform, no? Ye’re doing your job when ye wear it, and everybody as sees it kens what ye are and knows what ye do.”

  Kens what I am. I suppose I should be pleased it doesn’t show, she thought, a little wildly.

  “Well…aye, I suppose.” She fingered the rosary at her belt. She coughed. “In a way, at least.”

  Ye’ve got to tell him. It wasn’t one of the voices, just the voice of her own conscience, but that was demanding enough. She could feel her heart beating, so hard that she thought the bumping must show through the front of her habit.

  He smiled encouragingly at her.

  “Léonie told me ye wanted to see me.”

  “Michael…can I tell ye something?” she blurted.

  He seemed surprised. “Well, of course ye can,” he said. “Whyever not?”

  “Whyever not,” she said, half under her breath. She glanced over his shoulder, but Sister Eustacia was on the far side of the room, talking to a very young, frightened-looking French girl and her parents.

  “Well, it’s like this, see,” she said, in a determined voice. “I hear voices.”

  She stole a look at him, but he didn’t appear shocked. Not yet.

  “In my head, I mean.”

  “Aye?” He sounded cautious. “Um…what do they say, then?”

  She realized she was holding her breath, and let a little of it out.

  “Ah…different things. But they no
w and then tell me something’s going to happen. More often, they tell me I should say thus-and-so to someone.”

  “Thus-and-so,” he repeated attentively, watching her face. “What…sort of thus-and-so?”

  “I wasna expecting the Spanish Inquisition,” she said, a little testily. “Does it matter?”

  His mouth twitched.

  “Well, I dinna ken, now, do I?” he pointed out. “It might give a clue as to who’s talkin’ to ye, might it not? Or do ye already know that?”

  “No, I don’t,” she admitted, and felt a sudden lessening of tension. “I—I was worrit—a bit—that it might be demons. But it doesna really…well, they dinna tell me wicked sorts of things. Just…more like when something’s going to happen to a person. And sometimes it’s no a good thing—but sometimes it is. There was wee Annie MacLaren, her wi’ a big belly by the third month, and by six lookin’ as though she’d burst, and she was frightened she was goin’ to die come her time, like her ain mother did, wi’ a babe too big to be born—I mean, really frightened, not just like all women are. And I met her by St. Ninian’s Spring one day, and one of the voices said to me, ‘Tell her it will be as God wills and she will be delivered safely of a son.’ ”

  “And ye did tell her that?”

  “Yes. I didna say how I knew, but I must have sounded like I did know, because her poor face got bright all of a sudden, and she grabbed on to my hands and said, ‘Oh! From your lips to God’s ear!’ ”

  “And was she safely delivered of a son?”

  “Aye—and a daughter, too.” Joan smiled, remembering the glow on Annie’s face.

  Michael glanced aside at Sister Eustacia, who was bidding farewell to the new postulant’s family. The girl was white-faced and tears ran down her cheeks, but she clung to Sister Eustacia’s sleeve as though it were a lifeline.

  “I see,” he said slowly, and looked back at Joan. “Is that why—is it the voices told ye to be a nun, then?”

  She blinked, surprised by his apparent acceptance of what she’d told him but more so by the question.

  “Well…no. They never did. Ye’d think they would have, wouldn’t ye?”