Page 30 of Souvenir Heart

“Or, that someone else drew this?” Fouquier-Tinville demanded, keeping the book open to the offending page.

“No, citizen. You are saying that. I’m just asking if I might examine it.”

There were chuckles in the gallery.

“After all,” Andre gestured at the quill and bottle of ink beside the papers piled in front of the prosecutor. “I notice you’ve been doodling throughout this procedure.”

“Doodling?” The prosecutor’s brows rose. He opened his mouth to speak, but Andre had already turned to the spectators.

“But who among us hasn’t doodled on a page not of his or her own creation, in a moment of inattention?”

“Or wall,” someone shouted from the gallery.

“Inattention?” the prosecutor sputtered. “Are you accusing me of inattention to the people’s business?”

“Inattention to the people’s business? No one would ever accuse Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville of less than zealous attention to the people’s business. I’m merely suggesting that anyone might have doodled in that sketchbook you’re holding…”

He had a point, Marcus mused.

“Are you suggesting that I drew Marat as a fish?” Fouquier-Tinville’s face was turning an alarming shade of red. Marcus almost felt a flicker of sympathy for the man. Andre frequently had that effect on him, too.

Shrugging, Andre held out his hand, “I’m simply suggesting that the sketchbook requires further investigation…”

The justice slammed the book closed and clutched it to his chest, as if Andre might attempt to snatch it from him. “This book most definitely belongs to the citizeness. Her neighbor, Citizeness Victorine Seurrier, gave it to us, and will testify to that fact. There is no question of Citizeness de Rouvroy’s guilt.”

A sudden movement to Andre’s right caught Marcus’s eye. Marguerite, who had been standing like a caryatid, went ashen and swayed sideways.

Stuffing his sketchbook into his pocket, Marcus stepped forward.

Twenty-Two

“Chief.” L’Helias saluted as he entered the Rouen brigade chief’s office, disturbing a trio of flies on the desk.

The chief returned his salute. While he had nothing personal against his subordinate, he was rapidly coming to view his reports with the same sense of foreboding he reserved for knocking over the salt or putting the bread upside down on the table. He sat back in his chair, waiting for the latest round of bad news.

“As you ordered, we sent out patrols to all the hostelries within 20 kilometers—anywhere really, where a vehicle might have changed horses…”

“And what did you discover?”

“It’s been challenging,” L’Helias said. “There’s a lot of traffic on those roads. Lots of carts and carriages. So, we focused on the larger ones. The ones that were big enough to carry six bodies without attracting attention, with teams of four to six horses.” His narrative trailed off.

“And.” The brigade chief motioned for him to continue.

“There were a lot of them.”

“So you said.”

L’Helias nodded, acknowledging the prompt. “And when you ask the locals about suspicious behavior…well…there are a lot of reports about that, too.”

Of that the chief had no doubt. His hand drifted to the piles of papers in front of him. Demands from Paris to know about the activities of counterrevolutionaries in the area, to assist in the search for escaped Girondists, to provide information on the movements of provincial forces, to report on any shifts in loyalty among his own forces.

He’d considered delaying his report to Paris about the deaths of the six soldiers. Sending a report without any mention of suspects would be bad. But if anyone else reported it, that delay would make him look suspicious and that would be worse. And if he failed to solve the murders…well, that could prove fatal.

“There was one report of a large blue Berlin. The hostlers said that two of the passengers, a man and a woman, looked foreign.”

The chief regarded L’Helias with cautious optimism.

“The hostler’s description of the two jibed with those earlier reports of a pair of English spies operating in the area—a tall blond man with a scar on his cheek and a young woman with brown hair.”