Anatole, the chef, had a face swollen with bruises from where he was beaten near senseless by the invaders. But he was far more concerned that the Madame had seen him clad only in his nightshirt. Inès and Corrine were reduced to tears and shivers and only recovered somewhat after several draughts of cognac.
Mme. Villeneuve took to her room where she remained in bed succumbing, Caroline suspected, to draughts of wine mixed with laudanum to dispel her pain and shock.
In addition to the wreckage caused by the home invaders, the house was a slaughterhouse of bloody corpses. Including the four men shot dead by Caroline, three hired villains and the man who hired them, there were four more victims of Claude and Claude himself to be disposed of. Anatole left the house when the sun came up and brought back some rough and silent men.
Corrine assured Caroline that these men would be discreet. They were frequently hired to do work about the house and garden and could be trusted to keep their secrets, especially when paid with the gold coins found in the pockets of the slain intruders.
All would be taken to the mass gravesites set about the city for those unnamed dead who were found in the rubble or who fell on the day of the forlorn counterattack against the Prussian lines. The winter ground was frozen too hard for burial. The corpses would wait until the thaw before being tipped into trenches and covered.
Only Claude remained behind. Anatole, with the help of Corrine, the less squeamish of the maids, sewed the big man in sacking and placed him in a shed in the alley where the cold air would freeze him solid until a proper funeral could be had.
A few young men came to visit Jeannot. They were fellow students from his university. They were appalled that Jeannot himself answered the door. Where was that dour footman who usually greeted them? Jeannot told them that Claude was dead. They shrugged at this. So many dead in Paris these days. They made a few remarks about the state of the house, and their host mumbled a few remarks that did little to assuage their curiosity.
Caroline gave them their privacy by withdrawing to the small library room with Stephen. Through the closed doors to the adjoining room, she could hear them talking as young men will in dramatic and lofty terms. She assumed from their bluster and Jeannot’s relative silence that none of them had participated in le sortie torrentiale. Not one of them had seen or experienced what had turned Jeannot from fervent firebrand to sullen automaton in a single morning. There seemed to be more life in the young man after the previous night’s events. It was as if they served as a tonic to restore some of his resolution. The lost look was gone from his eyes despite occasional vertigo brought on by the head injury. The repulsion of the intruders, though it was mostly Claude and Caroline’s actions that routed them, gave him a renewed strength, a restoration of his manhood.
Despite this, Caroline overheard only brief contributions from him in response to the heated discussion of his friends. They spoke of capitulation and surrender. They would probably have spat on the floor were they not in a house as well regarded as that of the Villeneuves. Rumors were rife that Prussian troops would soon occupy the city, and that the upstart Wilhelm had been proclaimed Emperor of the Germans at Versailles. It was a deep insult to all Frenchmen. A halfwit puppet of the Krupp family, and this Bismarck crowned him at the winter residence of the kings of France. A bloody Prussian dressed up as a Napoleon from a comic opera. What were Prussians, after all? Only damned Poles who spoke German. It would be absurd were it not so profoundly loathsome.
Inès brought a tray with a bottle of wine and the few mismatched glasses that had not been broken in the previous night’s siege. Jeannot apologized both for the glassware and the vintage, as the Villeneuve cellar was rather depleted. This set the students off on politics again, damning the mayor and the generals and the enemy. There would be no vintage this year. The Germans had seen to that.
Caroline lost interest in the conversation. Translating the words in her head was tiring and the speakers were bores, like the young anywhere and at any time who see the world only through the passions of their own personal politics. She dozed, the comforting warmth of the baby radiating in her arms. She could feel Stephen’s gentle breath on her breast.
A muted clanging noise awoke her, sounding once, twice. The dinner gong, rung by Inès. The library was dense in shadow, the early evening of winter was on the city. The young men were still talking in the next room, and their voices rose excitedly at the prospect of dining. Caroline suspected that this was the purpose of their visit all along, to mooch a meal from a friend’s kitchen. There would not be much left in the Villeneuve larder, but she doubted this would matter to the uninvited guests.
She waited until she heard them depart from the drawing room before emerging from the library. Stephen was stirring and would want to nurse again soon. Caroline was surprised at the bottom of the stairs to see Mme. Villeneuve descending. The widow’s eyes were glassy, and she required a hand to the banister rail to keep her steady. Despite that, there was a hard look to her eyes and the set of her mouth.
“My dear, whoever you may be,” she began. Her voice was thin but resolute. “I must ask you to leave my house. At once.”
“I understand, Madame,” Caroline said.
“I do not understand all that was said last night. I understand that they came for you, and they came for the child. Claude was murdered,
