Page 28 of Who Will Remember (Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery #20)

S ebastian had to knock twice at the door of Madame Blanchette’s apartment before it was answered, not by Madame herself but by a thin, pale slip of a girl whose eyes widened at the sight of him.

“Pardon, monsieur, mais madame n’est pas ici,” she whispered in a rush, and would have closed the door on him if Sebastian hadn’t thrust out his hand, stopping her.

“I’ll wait for her return,” he said, then paused at the sound of the street door opening and closing below.

He heard a woman’s halting step as she limped across the entry hall and began to slowly mount the stairs. Madame Blanchette’s voice drifted up to them. “Do not manhandle my young maid, monsieur le vicomte. I shall be there directly.”

He waited until she came into view, her body swaying awkwardly back and forth as she maneuvered her shattered leg up the stairs one step at a time. He said, “I wasn’t manhandling her.”

A gleam of amusement showed in the cartomancer’s eyes, but she didn’t say anything until she reached her floor and handed her shopping basket to her maid. The girl took the basket and disappeared into the depths of the apartment.

“You didn’t tell me Lord Preston was going after the city’s fortune-tellers,” he said, following the Frenchwoman into her apartment. “Were you one of those he targeted?”

She shut the door behind him, her eyes widening as she turned to face him. “ Alors. Am I a suspect now? If so, I would be interested to hear how you think I managed to bash in the man’s skull and then hoist him up into the air.”

“You could have had help.”

She pursed her lips and tilted her head back and forth as if considering this, then wrinkled her nose. “Unlikely. I have many customers here in London, but few friends. And none of such a nature.”

“So why not return to France?” he surprised himself by asking. “You could now.”

A sad, faraway look crept into her eyes. “The friends and family I once had there are all dead now. And the France I once knew and loved no longer exists.” She shrugged. “So I am here.”

“But it is true that Lord Preston was prosecuting fortune-tellers?”

“He was, yes. But surely you don’t expect me to give you their names, do you? To save myself?”

“No.”

She sucked in a deep breath that flared her nostrils. “Farnsworth’s kind go after anyone in the ‘lower orders’ who doesn’t keep to what those worthies consider his ‘place’—or who even dares to try to have fun. The poor are supposed to work hard for their ‘betters,’ eat a meager and humble diet, pray, and die. Anything else isn’t simply an outrage; it’s a sin—and therefore must be punished.”

There was something about the vehemence of her words that told Sebastian she knew at least one person—and probably more— who’d been the victims of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. He said, “Did you know an ex-convict named Harry McGregor?”

She gave him such a blank look that he found it difficult to believe it was assumed. “ Non. Who is he?”

“He was found dead this morning in the same chapel where Farnsworth was murdered, except this time the killer hanged his victim by his neck instead of from an ankle. And he left this.” Sebastian drew the green, white, and red patterned tarot card from his pocket and held it up.

She reached to take the card and stared at it a moment before saying abruptly, “Follow me.”

She led him to a small room he’d seen before, her cabinet d’études . Yards and yards of deep red cloth draped the walls for a tentlike effect; there was no window, only an inlaid table in the center flanked by two stools and illuminated by a pierced brass Moroccan lantern that hung overhead and was already lit. The air was thick with the scents of frankincense and myrrh and something else he’d never been able to identify. An articulated skeleton leered at him from one corner; a large carved wooden chest stood against the far wall. But the owl that had once blinked at him from its perch here was gone.

“She had an injured wing,” said Madame Blanchette. “When she recovered, I let her go.”

Sebastian caught his breath. He’d been around the cartomancer enough that her perspicacity shouldn’t still have this effect on him. But it always did.

She set the card in the center of the table so that it faced him, then raised her gaze to his. “Are you familiar with this particular tarot deck?”

“No.”

“It comes from the printing press of a man named Ferdinando Gumppenberg. He is German by birth but moved to Milan some six or seven years ago, taking with him the German tradition of publishers commissioning tarot decks from well-known illustrators and engravers.”

“I didn’t know the Germans used the tarot.”

“Oh, yes.” Turning, she lifted the lid of the chest that stood behind her chair and withdrew from it two decks she set face down on the table before her. The green, white, and red pattern on the back of one deck matched the pattern of the card from the chapel; the other deck was unknown to him. Picking up the first deck again, she fanned it open, selected a card, and laid it face up beside the one he had brought.

They were identical.

“It’s a beautiful deck, oui ? The artist, Giorgio Bassano, uses copper plates to produce exquisite engravings that are then delicately colored.”

Setting aside the first deck, she picked up the second deck and withdrew from it a single card she set beside the other two cards on the table. She said, “This is the same card from a typical deck from Marseille. You see the ways in which the two cards are similar and the ways in which they differ?”

He nodded. The card from the Marseille deck was much cruder than that from Milan, a cheap wood-block print colored in roughly after it was printed. Rather than being smashed by a bolt of lightning, the top of the tower on the Marseille deck looked as if it were being sheared off by a thunderbolt so stylized it might have been a plume of red and yellow feathers billowing down from heaven. And rather than crumbling, the top of this tower was falling essentially intact, so that its crenellations made it look like a tumbling crown.

The figures falling from the tower were also markedly different. In the card from the Marseille deck, the most prominent man, falling with his arms outstretched before him, wore an oddly serene expression and was so close to the ground that he might have been an acrobat walking on his hands. Rather than lying dead on the ground, the second man on this card appeared to be reaching from inside the tower as if to pluck something from the ground outside. And whereas the Milanese deck showed bricks and pieces of stone from the crumbling tower filling the air around the falling man, the sky in the Marseille deck’s card was filled with an odd cascade of red, blue, and yellow balls that might have been colored hailstones but could just as easily have been dozens of jesters’ balls.

The card was even labeled differently: La Maison Dieu rather than La Torre : “The House of God” rather than “The Tower.”

“Why are they so different?” he asked, looking up at her.

She shrugged. “Many cards have such differences. I have seen a deck from sixteenth-century Florence in which this card shows two naked people fleeing a burning building, and there is one from Belgium that has a shepherd beneath a tree being struck by lightning. That one was labeled La Foudre , lightning. This deck from Marseille essentially merges the earlier traditions, while the Milanese one…shifts it.”

“Where does the imagery of the tower come from?”

“Ah, that surely originated in Italy. I’ve heard it said that in the Middle Ages such towers were a common status symbol amongst the wealthy of Italy’s city-states. The nobles competed with one another to see who could build the tallest tower. At one time Florence had some two or three hundred such towers, but they were so high they were constantly being struck by lightning and crumbling. It’s the perfect metaphor for the kind of pride that brings about one’s downfall, yes?”

“Is that what the card symbolizes?”

“Different people see it differently. But it’s all mostly about the same thing: pride, ruin, people bringing about their own destruction.”

Sebastian thought about Half-Hanged Harry McGregor, with his misshapen hat and ragged coat; he doubted anyone would call the ex-convict a prideful man. But if he had made the mistake of identifying himself to Lord Preston’s killer, one could say he had brought about his own destruction….

He was aware of the Frenchwoman watching him silently, as if she were once again somehow divining the direction of his thoughts. “When exactly was this deck printed?” he said, reaching out to retrieve the card left by Harry McGregor’s killer. “Do you know?”

“Two years ago, I believe.”

“So it’s relatively new.”

“Yes.”

He tucked the card back into his pocket. “Thank you.”

“Of course.”

She walked with him to the door. But before she opened it for him, she paused with her hand on the knob and looked back at him. “You are aware, of course, that your sister was close to Lord Preston?”

He wondered how she came to know he even had a sister, let alone that Amanda was close to the Farnsworths. He said, “Yes. Her house is on the same square, and she is friends with his sister, Lady Hester.”

“There’s more to it than that.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

She shrugged and opened the door.

This time he was the one who hesitated. “The Bourbons have sent a new assassin to London. Do you know anything about him?”

Rather than answer his question, she said, “I did warn you that you were…vulnerable.” Which he supposed was an answer, of a sort.

Sebastian said, “You know the reason for his interest in me?”

She met his gaze and said simply, “I know.”