Read Online Game of Patience by Susanne Alleyn - Free Book Online Page A

would never—I would have sworn an oath that she would never have gone alone and called on a young man, even a distant relative. She would never have risked her reputation in such a fashion. Dear God—what secret would she have feared to reveal to me?”
    Brasseur set his cup and saucer aside on a pearl-inlaid table and began to scribble his own notes in addition to the transcript Dautry was meticulously recording. “No chance there might have been a … a clandestine affair of the heart—maybe with somebody unsuitable?”
    “Citizen! My daughter was not that sort of woman!” Montereau exclaimed. “If I’d ever supposed otherwise, I’d—I’d—” He stopped abruptly and clamped his lips shut. “I was about to say,” he continued, more calmly, after a pause to collect himself, “that I would have killed the man who dared to take advantage of her. But those would seem to be injudicious words at such an occasion …” His voice trailed off and he blew his nose loudly.
    “Who lives here with you, citizen, besides the domestics?” Brasseur inquired, glancing up from his notebook.
    “Only my children—” Montereau checked himself and drew a deep breath. “Only my son and I, now… .”
    An image flashed across Aristide’s mind, that of an aristocratic, quick-tempered youth disposing of an enemy as he might shoot a marauding wolf, and then killing his own sister for the sake of outraged family honor. “We shall have to question your son.”
    “Théodore?” said Montereau, bewildered. “My son is barely six years old.”
    Relieved, Aristide raised an inquisitive eyebrow. Many years lay between a daughter of twenty-two and a son of six.
    “It might be useful to talk to him,” Brasseur said. “Children notice things, you know.”
    Yes, Aristide thought, children often had a way of noticing things that should better have remained hidden. He swiftly fixed his gaze on a tall, royal blue porcelain vase with gilt handles, which probably had cost more than Brasseur earned in a year.
    “Dear me,” Montereau added, “sometimes I don’t see her for days at a time: my late wife’s old great-aunt, Madame de—pardon me, Citizeness Laroque, lives here. She’s nearly a cripple and rarely leaves her rooms.”
    Brasseur scribbled another note. “And the old lady, too, then, if she’s, er, got her wits about her. Did she know Saint-Ange?”
    “No, I’m sure she never did; Saint-Ange was related to my first wife, and madame to my second.”
    “Were she and Célie at all close?” said Aristide.
    “Close?” echoed Montereau. “Well, she’s ninety-four; I doubt they shared a great deal in common. But Célie was fond of her, to be sure. She often visited her.”
    “Then perhaps the citizeness can help us,” Aristide said, “if only by allowing us to understand your daughter better. Women, of whatever age, share secrets with each other more readily than they share them with men, especially fathers.”
    “Very well, if you wish.” Montereau rang the bell again.
    “You go,” Brasseur muttered to Aristide. “I’ll see to the servants. I’m sure you can manage an old dowager better than I can.”
    A lackey led Aristide through corridors and up stairways to a distant wing of the house. A curtsying maidservant gestured him inside to a cozy, shabby parlor that smelled of lavender and, more perceptibly, of cats, and shyly announced him as “Monsieur Ravel.” A tiny, wrinkled, black-clad woman, wisps of white hair escaping from beneath her old-fashioned frilled bonnet, peered up at him from the white cat in her lap as he approached her wheeled chair and bowed.
    “And who might you be?”
    Despite her age, her voice was strong, and the eyes she turned to him were bright and lively. Calling this aristocratic old lady “citizeness” would only vex her, Aristide decided, or at best confuse her.
    “I am an agent of the police, madame.”
    “The police!” she exclaimed, clutching reflexively at the cat’s