Chapter 20 #2
The viguier clapped a hand on Oste’s shoulder and turned.
It was his right one, though, and he only just managed to conceal his flinch when hard, gemstone-encrusted rings and thick sausages for fingers handled him roughly enough to conjure the alacrity of his everyday small tendrils of pain.
He massaged the scars only after the viguier left with his constables trailing behind him.
Despite Oste hanging his head, he felt Jehan’s eyes on him from the corner of his vision.
“He’ll forget about this until there’s a trial, then take all the credit for justice,” Jehan quipped.
Oste looked up. “Don’t tell me he had anything to do with the arrest of Bouchier.”
“Don’t you know it?”
“Then I warrant the viguerie didn’t really think he did it, and didn’t really slow the investigation?”
“You’re a clever fellow.”
“I was furious the day you came into my office, Jehan, but I think I’m more furious now.”
“You’re doing a good job of hiding it.”
“If I didn’t,” said Oste with a forced smile, “then I would be smashing open that window and leaping out of it.”
“To bash his teeth in?”
“To throw up.”
“Oh, there’s time enough for that.” Jehan inclined his head and turned away from Alida’s body.
Oste did the same. For as much as he wanted to do right by her, he didn’t think he’d be able to stomach the additional task of her transportation, and everything the preparations would entail.
“I’ve scheduled that for myself this afternoon. ”
“I don’t imagine I’ll last that long.”
“Do you do so after most cases?”
“Not at all.”
Jehan shrugged and slowly walked out of the closet. “I saw Dorotèa with some of the bath attendants.”
“Is that a crime?” Oste exhaled tiredly and peered at the bloody footprints out of the corner of his vision.
“Not at all. I just wasn’t sure if you’d leave her at home.”
“She’s not a horse, Jehan. I can’t just stall her where I choose. Though, mind, she does share some qualities with the best of horses.”
“Great teeth?”
“A powerful kick.”
“I always knew you were a masochist, Petit-Lézin. At least she’s a pleasant sight to be trampled by.”
“That’s how I prefer it.”
Jehan looked at Oste at his side. “I was actually glad she did. Most of them were inconsolable. Next thing I know, they’re all together and enjoying some quiet. Do you suppose she said anything?”
Oste shrugged. “Well, she’d not have neighed enticingly, on account of not being a horse.”
“I do not think you have to make such a concentrated effort to prove to me that your wife is not of the equine variety.”
“If she was a horse,” said Oste thoughtfully, “she’d certainly be a nice one.”
“Don’t make me have to defend your sanity in the Palais,” Jehan sighed.
“I doubt you’d need to. I already know plenty of lawyers.
” Oste’s expression then grew more grave.
His intentioned indifference gave way to a serious frown as the weight of the present brutality trickled back in.
Every step he took away from the scene of the crime made reality set back in.
His skin itched. His feet hurt. “After my report—what will happen?”
Jehan’s response was as instantaneous as it was quiet. “Camsas frequented these baths.”
Oste continued to stare straight ahead. Cold slid down the expanse of his body again, even in the oppressive heat. “And you think he’s still a suspect?”
“There’s no reason why he’d stop being one. The timeline adds up. The necessary skill to carry out the crimes.”
“But no confession, and no evidence.”
“That’s your answer,” Jehan retorted. “We collect. We watch. We catch him.”
“With methods and escapes like these, you’d be trying to catch a phantom.”
“Not with unyielding observation."
“He’s an experienced military man. He’ll notice.”
“I agree, so I’ll have to give it a little thought. But even if he was to notice, and subsequently make a run for it, that’s some manner of guilt.”
Oste snorted. “If we’re measuring guilt by aerobic output…”
“Don’t you start.”
The men moved towards the front of the bathhouse.
Word of the crime had brought about a veritable flurry; nosey citizens clustered behind the perimeter established by the unlucky watchmen on duty.
People were, at least, loath to draw in closer to take a peek when the men in front of them wore thick gambesons and sharpened blades.
There were some women amongst the throng, and they begged the viguerie men to spare just a fraction of the effort the city spent on uprooting heresy on the dead girls.
There would be another, they pleaded. Here was another, so why hadn’t they caught the bastard yet?
Well. Oste heard them as much as he felt the blow slam into his heart.
“Will you go straight back to the hospital?” Jehan asked in the doorway.
Oste shook his head. “I’ll linger until Dorotèa has finished.”
The lieutenant frowned at this. He voiced his concern with low trepidation. “Red hair…”
He shot his friend a look. Oste hadn’t remotely wished to say it out loud, even though the common traits had grown more obvious with each girl, each one cut from the same cloth.
No, Dorotèa was no Cordeliers night woman.
And no, she wasn’t anywhere close to being vulnerable.
None of that logic had any bearing on his concern, first as a friend and now a husband.
Her safety was a necessity for both of their wellbeing.
“I’ll walk her home, then finish the inquiry.”
“Very good. I’ll have the rest of my report sent to you as well.”
“Would the viguier like that?”
“The viguier likes results.”
Both men stepped outside. Oste ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “I’m going to take a little air.”
“By all means,” said Jehan, who dipped his head in parting and left down the opposite side of the road.
Oste felt his sanity wane as the lieutenant moved further and further away.
The sensation began with an itch in his throat and a dwindling supply of air; it was as though a phantom hand had wrapped around his neck and squeezed.
One of his own lifted up to it and rubbed his skin so as to prove such was an imagination, a delusion, a quirk of a broken man who was haunted by shadows and too many fears to count.
His feet were too heavy. His vision, too bright, too blurred. This was too much. It was all too much.
He made it around the corner to the back alley of the bathhouse, then leaned his arm against the wall, pressed his forehead into it, and vomited.
His lurching brought out little but the water he’d forced down, but it subsequently forced him down too; Oste lowered himself on shaky legs and moved over enough distance to sit on clean cobblestone and hold his head in his hands.
One sob came out in a choke, then another, and his hands grew wet from the tears that accompanied his violent trembling.
Oste wasn’t shocked by such a crime; it was his lack of surprise at the depths of indecency that fueled his disgust. Monsters had walked the city for a long time, and sometimes he got to know them.
He didn’t entirely know why he wept. Despair didn’t lead to thinking.
All he knew was that it was too much blood, the crime was too unfair, the city was too wretched, and that it was entirely too painful.
He wanted the momentary bliss back from the days previous, and was willing to accept every accusation of selfishness that accompanied this desire.
With every tear he yearned to hold his lover close or feel the safe company of his parents in front of their fireplace like the old days, when the anxiety that pumped through him didn’t have a cause and they simply called him a sensitive soul.
If only he could go back to those years when people couldn’t name heavy weights in whispers that leadened his veins and made his heart pound fit to bursting day after day and night after night.
“Please,” Oste gasped out between shuddering cries, because after twenty-nine years, he still didn’t feel strong enough to manage everything alone.
He needed someone to hold him. Some presence.
His wife, his mother, his father. Oh, Papa.
He’d grown used to being held by a hunter’s worn hands.
That was safety. That was where he learned about faith.
His father’s arms had been the strangest place he’d found himself on a night where he expected to die.
Oste couldn’t have possibly perished in the one place where everything was always alright.
His present weeping found its mark with the old.
Every drop of blood he saw led back to his own in the snow.
Every moment of terror called upon that night when nothing had ever been worse.
Loss always frightened him more than anything that could happen to him.
Loss made Oste sneak over to the saddled grey in front of Saint-Sauveur and ride to cut off the approach of Flassans and his gang.
When the directive from the cardinal who sired Eflamm eventually came and confirmed his innocence, Oste almost laughed, because that was one thing he knew wasn’t true.
On paper, he was a concerned commissioner caught in crossfire.
In truth, if those men had made it one more block, they’d have stumbled upon the Huguenots and the former archbishop, Jean de Saint-Chamond, that Saint-Mitre was helping escape.
And if they found the Huguenots, they’d have found the people most precious to him, who believed in their cause enough to have followed Oste’s order to interfere, because otherwise there would be another bloodbath.
But if they were caught doing so, there was no question that they would all bleed, too.
Oste’s father wasn’t supposed to be there. He was only an old man who went looking for his son when the streets fell into disarray.
It was funny, the details he realized only now. Oste didn’t take off until two people had started to move. One had been his father, who couldn’t have stood to lose his child in a massacre. And the other, he recalled, had been Dorotèa.
Her backtracking had been odd to him then, as was how tightly she wrapped her cloak around herself.
At the time, he was certain she’d not have been able to take any of them on, nor had the influence to make a single man stop.
Her instinct was one of foolhardiness, he’d thought.
Heroic misadventure. But she hadn’t been going in blind, had she?
No, no, and he saw that now. She’d been willing to slow those men as the Duelist of Aix-en-Provence.
She’d been nursing him from the martyrdom he denied her when he decided he couldn’t stand to watch his beloved friends die.
Dorotèa might have dazzled before she fell, but she deserved better than to perish at the order of a lesser man who was only there to silence her song with a shot.
Life would have gone on without meaning.
He’d have lost the object of his reverence, and Aix its champion.
He’d have to have been the one to hold her and plead with her as his father did for him that night, and he might never have known the depths of his love for her.
Oste only knew that he couldn’t have endured losing her or his father. Not like that, not in a swell of violence only there because people craved having someone to hurt and blame. Loss was more frightening than a musket. Loss made his legs move faster than his head.
He was a nervous man full of love.
Bang.
The physician wrapped his arms around himself in the alley as he thought his father might.
It was pressure he’d grown used to, there when he wasn’t dead, but should have been.
He remembered recognizing the way to the hospital’s theater.
Feeling freezing cold, save for where he was touched by those warm, rough hands.
Questions from a distant voice that he wasn’t sure he actually gave answers out loud to.
Does he know where he is?
Yes.
Does he remember what happened?
It was loud. I was on a horse.
Does anything hurt?
Yes.
Does he want his father with him?
Yes. Is everyone else unharmed?
Yes.
“I’m sorry,” Oste shuddered, because he wept for the girls, wept for his father, wept for Dorotèa, wept for himself. He was sorry for all of them, because they lived in a city of justice, but that gift wasn’t ever so easily bestowed. “Make it stop, make it stop, please make it stop…”
The trigger of a musket, a heavy hand against his door. Every end sounded the same.
Bang.