The Left Hand of Justice (15 page)

Crouching in the shelter of the back stairs, she made quick work of the back-door lock and let herself inside. The stairs continued down a dark passage toward the kitchen. Voices echoed up from the depths of the servant areas below the stairs, accompanied by the aromas of roasting meats and fresh bread. Corbeau’s stomach growled. It had been a long time since her breakfast at Oubliette. She wished she trusted Sophie enough to go look for the housekeeper directly. She might well have been given a bite to eat at that point.

Off to the right, a narrower staircase led up to the main house. Floorboards creaked above her head, and the walls hummed with conversation and laughter. If only she had an easy way of mingling with the guests—what information she might have gleaned there! On the other hand, servants were the unseen eyes and ears of every house, and often prone to gossip. If she could pass herself off as help hired for the evening, she could learn what she might from the staff, then possibly find an excuse to poke about upstairs.

“Who are you? How did you get in here? Where do you think you’re going?”

Corbeau flinched at the voice suddenly at her shoulder and was just quick enough to stop herself from dislocating the hand that closed over her elbow. It was a woman’s hand, work-hardened but with thin bones. No threat there.

Corbeau turned slowly, deliberately, calling up her story. “I’m looking for Madame Pettit, the housekeeper. I’ve come to work.”

“You found her.” Madame Pettit was fiftyish, all angles and points, with a dark uniform and salt-and-pepper hair pulled up severely. She looked Corbeau up and down. “You’re Moreau
the Alchemist?”

What?
Corbeau’s heart raced.

The woman continued without waiting for an answer. “Mademoiselle Martin told us to expect you tonight. She didn’t say you were a woman, however. And she didn’t say you’d look like you’d been in a fight.”

Corbeau’s heart stopped altogether.

Sophie had set her up
.

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 would 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.