The next week Marie had a group of new workers sent into the factory to replace the ones who had been fired. There were police and guards to protect them when violence broke out. And there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that violence would break out.
Later, all the papers would describe how it had been the female workers who had put up the most frightening and bizarre acts of rebellion. It was almost impossible to convey the level of mass mania if one hadn’t been there. The whole scene was surreal and disturbing. One girl swung a cat by its tail and let it fall on the heads of the scab workers. There was a naked woman with a mask who launched a can of red paint in the face of a police officer.
A girl was throwing snowballs from the roof of the factory. How she had got up there, no one could say. But no one seemed quite ready to dispense with the possibility that she had flown.
The jeering, because it came from women, was high-pitched and shrill. The reporters were forced to resort to mythological analogies to describe it. They were harpies and banshees. Because they had never heard this sound before, they could not describe it as simply as a group of angry women who wanted their rights.
* * *
One evening Sadie took a break from her new manuscript and stood up to stretch her limbs. She walked over to the window to gaze out. Whereupon she discovered something very peculiar. She could not quite comprehend what she was seeing. Because she had been writing for hours, she felt she might be hallucinating. She opened the window and the cold rushed in, as though it had been waiting outside for hours to be let in. Sadie leaned her head out and yelled, “Marie! What in the world are you doing in that tree?”
“What do you mean?” Marie’s voice said from behind her.
Sadie jumped and almost toppled over. She turned and Marie was coming up to the window next to her. Sadie pointed to the tree. They both looked at Mary Robespierre, who was standing on one of the bare branches.
“Murderers!” Mary yelled at the top of her lungs. “There must be justice for murderers!”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Marie said. She closed the window and the blinds.
Marie and Sadie stood looking at the blinds for a good ten minutes. As though Mary might come through the curtains at any moment, as though they were in some terrible play. Finally, they both approached the window again and peeked around opposite sides of the curtain. The tree branches were empty, as though Mary had fallen off like the last autumn leaf.
“Thank God,” Marie said.
“Has this happened before?” Sadie asked, still startled.
“She pops up once in a while. The last time she was in the labyrinth pretending to be shot. It used to trouble me so much. But now I’m rather used to it. She’ll get bored eventually.”
“Bored! We killed her mother. Were you aware of that?”
“She’s mentioned it.”
“Well, she’s capable of anything. Clearly. She was sitting in a tree a minute ago.”
“People get so hung up on their mother’s death. I mean that’s what mothers do, don’t they? They die all the time.”
Marie walked away from the window and out of the room, leaving Sadie utterly confused.
* * *
Marie felt she understood Mary Robespierre in a manner Sadie didn’t. She knew they were similar in many ways. For this reason, she felt there was a commercial solution to this problem. With enough money, this tiny entrepreneur would be silenced. She had no illusion the leader of a revolution might want a better world blessed by equality. Mary Robespierre was ambitious. She wanted the power and wealth that eluded her because of her lowly birth. Once she was at the top of the hierarchy, she would come to love inequality as much as the next wealthy person.
Marie decided she would draw up the paperwork to offer Mary ownership of the bakery. She would also offer to purchase whichever local bakeries she considered competition and would hand over the properties to her.
Marie went through her father’s papers. She found the rescinded lease that had been transferred over to Mary with her father’s signature on it. She could only conclude that her father had made this exchange in an attempt to placate the girl for her mother’s death. This arrangement had temporarily been satisfactory, but now she had become greedy and wanted more. So what? thought Marie. She would give the psychopath what she wanted.
But then something else caught Marie’s eye: a dark black envelope. She opened it up and the first thing she pulled out was a death certificate for a girl. The parents were Mr. and Mrs. Louis Antoine. She had died when she was four months old.
Marie discovered another birth certificate. It was for twin daughters. The mother was Agatha Robespierre and the father was Louis Antoine. There was a legal adoption paper by which Louis Antoine had adopted one of the twins from Agatha.
Her heart was fluttering like a butterfly that had finally emerged from a cocoon. She felt all the blood drain out of her as though she had been shot in the chest. She fell onto the floor on her ass. A maid stuck her head in the door to see if she was all right. And Marie screamed to be left alone. The enormity of what she held in her hands was too much for her to bear. Mary had rights on everything she owned. Her house was not hers. Her factory was not hers. Marie’s shadow could take everything away from her. Her reflection in the mirror had betrayed her.
She had shot her own mother. But it was too late for her to ever think that way. It was too late for her to consider Agatha her mother. Your mother is who you grow up thinking is your mother. She had grown up thinking her mother was a sadness. A sadness she had escaped.
She understood the revulsion she had always felt toward Agatha when she was young. Every time the woman had shown her any affection, she was overtaken by an urge to push the woman down the stairs. She had been entirely justified. Agatha could have ended her fortunate life at any moment. And now she understood the terrible feeling of ill ease Mary had given her—the feeling there was something more dangerous about Mary than anyone else.
She was thankful she and Sadie had shot Agatha. She did not have to worry about her speaking this abominable truth anymore. She was certain Mary did not even know this truth. She knew Louis was her father, but nothing else. But she would do away with Mary before she ever learned the truth. She needed to act immediately. She had learned the best way to deal with any situation was not to ruminate about it, but to act. She had also learned that people should not just be punished for the crimes they committed but for the ones they were going to commit.
CHAPTER 46
A Fable of Sadness