The Left Hand of Justice Page 12

  As Corbeau had suspected, the phial on Sophie’s mantel had indeed been a message. The Church of the Divine Spark had acquired an alchemist—only everyone seemed to know it except the alchemist herself. She remembered the reverent way in which Sophie had described Madame Boucher and her organization earlier that morning in Oubliette. She’d been testing the waters, testing Corbeau’s potential interest. When she realized Corbeau was only interested in the organization as it related to the investigation, Sophie had used this as bait.

  And now Corbeau was exactly where Sophie had wanted her.

  But she was also in a unique, and arguably better, position.

  Corbeau mumbled an apology for her appearance. She had forgotten the bruises and lacerations. Her coat was dripping brown water onto the floorboards, and the dress underneath it, quite frankly, would need to be burned.

  “I’ve seen worse,” the housekeeper responded after a moment. “And though I can’t countenance wasting money on perfume and baths, it at least makes up for that dress. Now follow me. Your lab is set up, and you’ve a lot of work to do.”

  Corbeau’s heart sank as the housekeeper took her own coat from a row of hooks near the door, but she followed her back outside. As they sloshed through the mire of wet grass toward the carriage house, her hopes rose again. She might have to work harder to find an excuse to get back in the house, but Madame Pettit was giving her an engraved invitation to a building she would have had to break into. The housekeeper led her around the back of the structure and took a ring of keys from her belt. “In here. It’s not much, but it’s out of the rain, and you won’t disturb anyone.”

  They stepped into a four-horse stable, walked past a matched pair of bays, and stopped at the last stall: a large double box, secured with a padlock. Corbeau glanced at the back wall, where a sliding double door in the center connected the stable with the carriage area. Madame Pettit unlocked the stall and gestured Corbeau inside.

  Tables sat against three of the walls. The tables were neatly arrayed with tubes, pipettes, flasks, phials, and clamps. There were two burners and a hot plate, all with new wicks and full of oil. Shelves lined the walls above the tables with an impressive assortment of bottles stopped with corks or sealed with wax. An apron hung on the back of the door. A man’s shirt and trousers, clean and folded, had been placed on the corner of one of the tables for her to change in to while she worked. There was also a cap, which would serve to keep noxious and flammable fumes from her hair. Corbeau’s pulse quickened. It felt good to be back in a laboratory again. While Madame Pettit spoke, Corbeau began to mentally assemble the tubes and clamps into a still and to organize the bottles according to their properties.

  “Mademoiselle Martin told us more or less what kind of equipment you’d need, but none of us was sure how to set it up. She said you’d know how.”

  “Thank you.”

  The larger vessels contained the alcohol and oils essential for distillation. She also noted a number of more esoteric ingredients—plants and tinctures not easily accessible to the everyday tinkerer. The layout resembled the basement lab Corbeau had once maintained. Sophie had remembered well.

  Madame Pettit cleared her throat. “I assume you’ve already been briefed on your task. Is there anything else you need before you get started?”

  Corbeau tore her thoughts from the equipment and forced her gaze back to the housekeeper. “Only to express my condolences on the recent loss of your mistress. Such a charismatic leader. It’s amazing that everyone seems to go on so well, even in her absence. I do hope it won’t take long for her to be found, safe and sound.”

  Madame Pettit pierced her with a long, unwavering look. If she felt anything about the situation, she hid it well. “That’s none of your concern. Now get started. I don’t need to tell you that time is of the essence.” Corbeau watched her walk away. When she reached the door, Madame Pettit turned. “I’ll have someone bring you something to eat in a little while. You’ll find an apron on the wall and clothing to wear while you’re here. The Great Prophet was very clear that no traces of your work should leave with you.” And with that, she shut the door.

  The Great Prophet? Wasn’t that how Sophie had referred to Madame Boucher? How quickly the group had found a new leader! Had Sophie been aware of the change before she sent Corbeau to the house? Her heart thrummed. It felt like she had less information than when she’d left the Rue St. Dominique, and less reason to trust the information that remained. She had to think. Quickly, automatically, her hands found the familiar clamps and pipettes. As her mind raced, she began to build a still from memory.

  The Divine Spark must have intended for her to create a formula for subduing untrained supernatural talents on a mass scale. Sophie hadn’t mentioned any such thing, but it wasn’t difficult to figure out.

  Sophie had put her at the center of the operation, and possibly mere steps from the carriage from which Madame Boucher had disappeared. Corbeau couldn’t have engineered a better situation. Yet the thought that Sophie had manipulated her into it set her on edge. Sophie had known she wouldn’t have willingly gone back to the business that had sent her to prison, yet she’d wanted Corbeau to join the organization so badly she’d put her in that exact position. Sophie had probably hoped that once Corbeau arrived, she would forget the suffering she’d caused all those years ago and fall back in love with the work itself. Perhaps even be grateful. Perhaps Sophie had thought, if Madame Boucher didn’t want her, then she and Corbeau could return to some semblance of what they’d had before Corbeau’s arrest and transformation.

  But was Sophie working for Madame Boucher or for the new Prophet?

  Either way, what a feather in Sophie’s cap, to have produced Moreau the Alchemist, back from the dead, or prison, or from wherever people had thought she’d disappeared—especially considering the sloppy work their current alchemist was turning out. The more Corbeau thought about it, the more she wondered if the outbursts in the Montagne Ste. Geneviève weren’t due simply to impurities in the formulae the victims had been using—or even to solutions badly formulated in the first place. A cold dread settled in her bowels. Sophie had mentioned she’d tried her hand at putting together the occasional brew to help Madame Boucher suppress her overactive spiritual forces. It wasn’t difficult to do—much of the time a mild sedative would do the trick. But Sophie hadn’t been up to anything more complex than that, and she’d known it. Corbeau shuddered at the thought of Sophie trying to reconstruct the work they’d done together all those years ago.

  Corbeau shucked off her coat and dress and gratefully slipped into the clean, albeit well-worn trousers and shirt. If the stable had contained a heat source larger than a brazier, she would have happily tossed the ruined dress onto it. Soiled as it was with her blood and sweat, it surely wouldn’t be wise to leave it lying around in a place crawling with occult practitioners. She wadded it up and kicked it under the table. The shirt and trousers fit well. Vidocq had insisted his female agents wear trousers when not working undercover, for the freedom of movement they afforded. It hadn’t taken Corbeau long to get used to it. The new chief inspector hadn’t been able to fire her, but he did force her back into a dress—a fact that Corbeau resented almost as bitterly as all the man’s other insults combined.

  Comfortable once more, she examined her supplies. Paper and pencils for taking down notes. Boxes of plant matter: flowers, grasses, roots, and herbs. Oil and alcohol in abundance. A good supply of empty bottles with corks for holding the mixtures she was to create. And the still she’d assembled, so quickly and almost without thinking about it. Sophie had done a good job.

  Corbeau shook her head. Whatever was happening with the Church of the Divine Spark, Sophie was in it to her neck. How had she known Lambert would have an attack? And how had she known to find Corbeau there? The Montagne Ste. Geneviève was not at all close to Rue St. Dominique. Nothing else of interest to a gossipmonger happened there. Had Bertrand and Fournier been tests to see whether Corbeau w
ould respond? Had they been lures? Corbeau pushed away her darker thoughts. It was time to see what was in those bottles.

  Her fingers shook as she removed the two phials from her shoulder bag. The names and faces of the people she’d harmed so long ago rose up in her mind’s eye, accusing. She heard Joseph’s cry as he fell under the carriage wheels just out of her reach. The list of names Vidocq had read to her that first night beneath the Conciergerie—names of people she’d sent to the madhouse, to prison, to their graves—scrolled through her mind, permanently etched there. Corbeau hadn’t allowed herself a laboratory after that, outside of the Bureau’s compounding room. As much as standing before a burner again excited her, it terrified her twice over.

  Pushing the dark thoughts aside, she popped the cork on Lambert’s bottle. She sniffed it and wrote down the ingredients she could smell. She put a bit on her tongue to divine a few more. It was basically a sedative, not much different from the ones in her mother’s pillbox. An inelegant concoction, but one that would take the edge off an outburst. Something a student might have made. Or an apprentice who had watched over the shoulder of a master for many years, then tried to duplicate what he had seen.

  What she had seen.

  “What have you done, girl?” she asked, as if Sophie could have heard and answered. Her dread increasing, she took the bottle she’d found on Sophie’s mantel and performed the same tests. The liquid inside was likewise colorless, but the smell was distinctly different. The taste was astringent. Grassy. Perhaps a bit of wormwood, but she couldn’t be certain. Corbeau lit the wick of the oil burner and wiped clean the metal plate that rested on a stand above it. After it had heated, she used a pipette to drop a small amount of the solution onto the plate. Seconds later, the liquid burnt down to nothing, leaving no telltale residues, save for a sweet-smelling smoke that disappeared almost as quickly as it had formed. “Damn it, Sophie, what the hell was it?”

  If only she had more time. But at least the tests had confirmed what Madame Boucher’s group was up to. And she was fairly certain why Lambert, Bertrand, and Fournier had suffered their outbursts. She didn’t know what had become of Madame Boucher, though she was certain that whatever it was, Dr. Kalderash had something to do with it. Whether or not Lambert, Bertrand, and Fournier had been Kalderash’s co-conspirators—that remained to be seen. And if Madame Boucher’s carriage lay behind those double doors, Corbeau suspected she would find answers to at least some of these questions inside.

  She pinched out the flame under the burner, replaced the stoppers in the bottles, and placed the bottles carefully back into her bag. She glanced at the dress by her feet, then picked it up and draped it over her shoulder, turned off the lamp, and exited the makeshift lab, locking the door behind her. There was another lock on the double doors between the stable and the carriage room, but the tumblers gave way easily beneath her picks. She pushed the doors aside.

  In the muted light the moon cast through clouds and window, she recognized Madame Boucher’s carriage. The well-kept two-seater sat in the middle of the carriage room, its new black paint gleaming dully. Taking a lantern from its hook, Corbeau pulled the doors shut behind her. Slowly, she began to circle the carriage. The vehicle was new. The wheels showed little wear, and the paint—it hadn’t been painted more than once—was intact. As she passed around the back and around the other side, she stopped. The frame of the window wasn’t sitting quite flush with the body of the vehicle. Holding up the lantern, she peered inside.

  The interior of the carriage looked as pristine as the outside. The bench on the far side was well and expensively padded in shiny black leather, though her position was inadequate for examining the rest of the vehicle. She circled around to the doors, running her fingers over the smooth metal handle before opening the door. As she did, something flew out, bounced off the step, and disappeared into the loose dirt near her boot. Corbeau knelt down and retrieved a brass button. Angling it into the lamplight, she smiled. She’d been right about Madame Boucher’s family emblem: a distorted shield—wider than it was tall—with a bear rampant on either side and crossed swords at the center. Designed to recall the feudal nobility diluted by time and social change, the emblem probably didn’t date back more than fifty years.

  But that wasn’t important.

  The button had come from a man’s garment—likely from livery. But who would have lost a button inside the carriage? Drivers and footmen wore livery but had no business inside a carriage. Those who did, like Claudine Fournier, would not wear livery. Perhaps Madame Boucher had been having an affair with Lambert or Bertrand. Perhaps the button had come off during some late-night assignation.

  She set the lantern on the floor of the carriage and sat down beside it. From that position, the window frame looked even more warped than it had from the outside. Her gaze traveled over the new upholstery, across the overstuffed seat, and stopped. The seat cushion opposite the window looked normal, but the one beneath the window looked lumpy and odd. In a new carriage such as this, where the leather upholstery was still stiff, the stuffing should have been evenly distributed. But it wasn’t. One side was visibly higher than the other.

  Tucking the button into her trouser pocket, Corbeau slid onto the floor of the carriage and felt around the underside of the seat where it hung over the base. A few of the tacks that held the leather to the seat stuck out unevenly. They rocked in their holes under gentle pressure from her fingers. Someone had removed them, Corbeau realized, and replaced them none too carefully. Closer inspection revealed visible holes in the leather where the tacks held the leather to the wood. The leather had stretched to accommodate the greater bulk of whatever was beneath the leather. Someone had indeed removed the tacks.

  Corbeau worked the tacks out one by one and placed them on the floor beside her. Then she plunged her hand under the leather.

  “Good God.”

  She had reached inside, expecting the horsehair that generally filled carriage cushions. But her fingers met silk instead. Carefully, she enticed the gown out from beneath the leather. She shook it out and held it up, squinting at it in the dim light of the lantern.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  Glinting crystal beads formed an intricate design over champagne-colored silk. It was the same dress Hermine Boucher had been wearing in the newspaper sketch that appeared the day after she vanished. Corbeau glanced again at the window, whose frame sat so unevenly in its place. She felt the livery button pressing against her thigh. Immediately, she knew exactly what had happened.

  Hermine Boucher’s preference for simple, straight gowns uncomplicated by whalebone hoops, extra petticoats, or bustles—dresses her mother might have worn in her youth—had been a boon to newspaper satirists. Her dislike of skirts a carriage could hide beneath had been described as old-fashioned, eccentric, and unfortunate.

  But had Hermine Boucher subscribed to the fashions of the day, she never would have been able to make herself disappear in such a spectacular manner.

  The scene came together in Corbeau’s mind, as clearly as if she were watching it happen. Hermine Boucher had entered the carriage in her gown, accompanied by her companion, Claudine Fournier. Michel Bertrand had been driving. Footman Lambert had helped the ladies inside, and then he had run along beside the carriage once it started, as was the fashion. Inside, Mademoiselle Fournier had helped Madame out of her gown and into the livery they had placed there earlier. At some point, the carriage passed under a bridge or through a sparsely populated area. Dressed in livery, Madame had exited the carriage through the window—witnesses at the party had reported the footman had locked the door behind her as she entered. Anyone watching when the carriage emerged would have seen Hermine Boucher—by all accounts a tall woman with a mannish, athletic build—in livery, and assumed it was the footman. Lambert left the carriage long enough for Madame Boucher to duck into the shadows, then rejoined it before it reached the house.

  Which proved Lambert and Fournier, and probably Michel Ber
trand as well, had been accomplices.

  And Maria Kalderash was innocent. There had been no kidnapping at all.

  Prefect Javert was trying to frame Dr. Kalderash for a crime that never happened. For surely if he had been serious about investigating Madame’s supposed disappearance, he and his men would have gone over the carriage in great detail and come to the same conclusions she had.

  But why would Madame Boucher want to disappear? And why did everyone else want Dr. Kalderash to hang for it?

  It was clear why Sophie would benefit from having Dr. Kalderash out of the picture. Kalderash had been a rival for Madame Boucher’s affections, and even if Madame didn’t return to Sophie’s embrace, Sophie was just vindictive enough to rejoice in her rival’s ruin. Obviously, Sophie had known about the entire operation. As much as her heart was breaking over Hermine Boucher’s rejection, she hadn’t seemed a bit worried about her disappearance. She had known, and she hadn’t said anything. In fact, like Javert, she had gone out of her way to implicate Dr. Kalderash.

  But what was Javert’s excuse?

  Damn it.

  Was Madame Boucher hoping her disappearance would draw more attention to her group’s good works? Or was she hoping to escape the wrath of the Church and the King, who were busily prosecuting people who stepped out of line with their moral teachings?

  Or was there another explanation?

  Corbeau crammed her hated, police-issue dress into the cavity beneath the upholstery. Then, finding a weak spot in the stitching beneath the arm of Madame Boucher’s dress, she pulled and worked at the stitching until the arm came apart from the bodice. She folded the arm and stuffed it into her shoulder bag, then shoved Madame Boucher’s dress back into the cushion with her own. Finally she replaced the tacks.

  She would take the evidence of Dr. Kalderash’s innocence to Javert at his home and rub his nose in it until he told her why.

  Relief washed over her. Paris had not treated Dr. Kalderash well. Between Javert’s single-minded pursuit of her, the troubles with Madame Boucher, and the fact that Kalderash’s nationality would make her a natural target for anyone looking for someone to kick, Corbeau couldn’t understand why she hadn’t pulled up stakes already. Part of her couldn’t help but admire the woman’s determination, as brave, or arguably stupid, as it was. And she was relieved that she herself wouldn’t add unjust persecution to the woman’s troubles.