It
was past noon when I put down the books about Jeanne de la Motte and faced my
math homework. I was anxious to
get out. I half did the problems
and half guessed by adding up the numbers Aunt Mill gave for the answers. As long as I had two of them right I
could just drag the dial and listen for the click of the third tumbler. Easy. Inside the safe were more Metro tickets and five more Euros. Not wanting to alert Sief, I eased the
apartment door closed, padded down the steps on my toes, snuck across the
courtyard, and slipped out the carriage door. I looked over my shoulder a few times on the way to the
metro to make sure Sief wasn’t following me.
I
made a mess of the Metro. From
Filles du Calvaire I went to the Bastille stop and got totally confused, taking
the number five line to Richard Lenoir before I realized I was going the wrong
way. I got off, took the tunnel
over the tracks and headed back the other way. At Place d’Italie I transferred to the number six line and
took it to Denfert Rochereau.
I
didn’t mind taking in the extra stops.
I love looking at all the people in the metro, and all the big posters
and the roar and tick and hiss and squeal of the trains. I love the whir of color as your train
slips in and out of each station and even the weird metro smell, slightly
different at each stop. I wonder
if blind Parisians navigate the metro by smell? Oh, and sure enough, I saw a few rats creeping about under
the steel rails.
When
I came up it was raining again.
Denfert Rochereau is a huge station under a big, multi-avenue
intersection, so of course I was on the wrong side of the catacombs and had to
cross five or six million avenues and rues, dodging buses and taxis and old
ladies with umbrellas and shopping carts.
The catacombs were not marked by any huge sign or anything, so it took
me awhile to find the entrance house, and when I did, it was locked up. A sign said, in four languages, that
the catacombs were closed for repair.
So that was that. I guess
the bones and skulls needed dusting.
I
decided to make my way to the Saltpêtriere, where Comtesse de la Motte had been
locked up. Back into the metro,
back to Place D’Italie, back onto a number five train to the Saint Marcel
station.
When
I came out of the Metro, the rain had paused. Even rain gets tired sometimes. Low clouds were turning purple-orange overhead. It was easy to spot the Saltpêtriere, a
magnificent building with a black dome and clock tower. It didn’t look like a prison exactly,
more like a chateau, but it was plenty intimidating anyway. Modern buildings had sprung up around
it. Occasionally a man or woman in
a lab coat, or some college-student type, would stroll by. When I tried to walk in the main
archway a guy in a blue uniform came from a side office and waved his finger at
me. I asked him where Comtesse de
la Motte had stayed but he had no idea what I was saying and I had no idea what
he was saying, thought it was clear form his tone that he thought I was a
nuisance.
I
walked out to the wide drive in front and stood there imagining the Comtesse
opening a third story window, dropping down a long braid of bed sheets, and
shimmying down in the dark. I
wondered if anyone helped her? Did
she have to walk across the lawn and avoid the guard in the blue uniform? Was there a coach waiting for her? Or maybe, since she was disguised as a
boy, they just let her walk right out the door.
“Who
goes there?” demanded the guard.
“It’s
me, Pierre, the stable boy,” said Jeanne.
“See you tomorrow.”
“Right,
bonsoir mon garçon.”
I
hate to say it, but the Comtesse seemed like my kind of girl. Oh, I don’t mean like with all her
boyfriends and stuff. Plus, I’m
not so stupid that I don’t know what they mean in the book when they wrote that
the Saltpêtriere was for mad women and women of tainted virtue. But still, virtue or not, dressing up
as a boy and escaping to England was pretty cool.
So
who pushed her from the window?
Secret agents working for the king and queen? Somebody working for Cardinal Rohan? Mr. Boehmer or Mr. Bassange? And even more important, what happened
to the diamonds? The books
said the necklace was broken up and that some of the diamonds were sold in
France and others in London. But
it made it sound like most of the fortune tied up in that necklace just
vanished. Poof.
I
got the feeling Aunt Mill knew more than she was telling. Plus, it seemed to me, if you were
going to hire someone like Aunt Mill and pay them good money to decode old
messages, then there had to be something valuable at the end of it. Say, diamonds?
☠
