The Adventuress by Carole Nelson Douglas Page A

while she spoke.
    “I wonder that you discern so much of the situation from such slight acquaintance with it—and us.”
    “Obviously,” Irene put in, “Louise was kept under strict supervision by her uncle. Few Paris demoiselles require the unattractive likes of Pierre to shepherd them through the city. One would think your husband feared kidnapping by pirates. But we are not prescient, merely observant. Louise told us of the mysterious letters that came to your husband. And of another matter that we are sworn to keep secret—”
    “You know even of that?” Madame Montpensier had leaned forward in something like horror; now she drew back in dismay. “You have told my husband?”
    “Nothing. He did not seem interested. Besides, he is a suspect. Unlike the Paris police, we do not find it wise to settle too soon upon a candidate for suspicion.”
    “He is suspected of what?” I asked, shocked.
    Irene’s answers came readily. “Of ill will, at the most; indifference to his family, at the least. Am I not right, Madame Montpensier, in saying that this was a house of distress; that your husband ruled home and hearth with an iron poker; that he became even more vile-tempered after the letters began arriving three years ago?”
    “True, Édouard was always high-tempered. It is understandable; he was the eldest of a family that was falling into ruin. He objected fiercely to his younger brother’s marriage to a milliner, although Marianne was kind and pretty. I fear that the contempt of his brother drove Claude to seek his fortune at the tables of Monte Carlo. Of course, Claude found only further ruin there.”
    “And death,” Irene said. “He took his own life.” Madame Montpensier did not deny it. “Marianne had died in childbirth; the infant had succumbed also. Louise was only five. I was surprised when Édouard took the child, but by then it was obvious that I myself could have none.” A smile smoothed her haggard features as she rested her chin on the dog’s blond head. “I welcomed Louise’s presence. She was never any trouble, nothing but a joy. That is why it worried me when Édouard grew jealous of her movements as she grew older. A young girl should not be penned into an empty old house, dogged everywhere by a crude servant!”
    “How old was Louise?”
    “Just twenty when she.... Twenty last April.”
    “So when she matured, your husband’s attitude toward her changed.”
    “He had been indifferent; then he became angry, suspicious, stifling. He became like a melodrama father, afraid that someone would steal away his daughter, save that Édouard had never regarded Louise as anything but an encumbrance... and a distraction for me, like Chou- chou.”
    “His manner changed exactly three years ago, when the letters began coming?”
    Madame Montpensier blinked, then considered the question. “Why, yes, about then.”
    “I must see one of those letters!”
    Godfrey, who had been observing Irene’s interrogation with an expression of amused admiration, lifted his eyebrows at that point. I was more blunt; I rolled my eyes.
    “That is impossible, Madame Norton!” For the first time, the woman showed spirit, even if in a cowardly cause. “My husband has responded with nothing but unimaginable ire to the appearance of the letters. They vanish immediately. No one in the household would dare refer to them.”
    “You are his wife. You must know where he keeps them.”
    “No. I have glimpsed them only as they arrived; that is enough for me to know that the entire household will suffer for it for many days. That is all.”
    “Think!” Irene knelt beside the woman’s chair. With the veils of her mourning bonnet spilling around her pale face like a black rose’s wilting petals, her russet hair and entreating expression, she reminded me of Mary, Queen of Scots, pleading for her life with Queen Elizabeth. “Did he burn them? Surely no woman—wife or servant—could resist checking the grates the day