He’d no doubt that Claire Bisette had honestly told him all she could remember of Alexi’s visit to her lodgings that night with Damion Pelletan. But a woman raw with grief over her child’s recent death was unlikely to make a reliable witness.
He found Cat’s Hole crowded with beggars and seamen and vendors selling everything from pickled eggs and salted herrings to cracked old shoes and mended tin pots. The air was thick with the smell of the river and overflowing bog houses and unwashed humanity. His knock on the door at the end of the corridor off Hangman’s Court went unanswered for so long he was beginning to think Claire Bisette had moved away. Then the door swung slowly inward to reveal the sad-eyed woman he remembered from the other night.
“I’m sorry to bother you again,” he said, removing his hat. “But I wonder if I might ask you a few more questions about the night Dr. Damion Pelletan was killed?”
He realized she was younger than he’d first taken her to be, probably closer to thirty than forty. She had her dark blond hair pulled back into a neat bun, and the wild look of unimaginable anguish he remembered had been replaced by a quiet kind of hopeless despair that was in its own way even more heartbreaking to witness.
She nodded and stepped back to allow him to enter. “Monsieur.”
The room was as cold and forlorn as it had been the first time Sebastian had seen it. And he knew without being told that she had spent the money he’d given her not on fuel or food for herself, but on securing a proper burial for her dead child.
As if aware of the drift of his thoughts, she squared her shoulders with a ghost of pride and said, “What was it you wished to know?”
“I realize this might be a difficult question to answer since you’d never met Damion Pelletan before that night, but . . . did he seem at all agitated in any way? Angry? Or perhaps even afraid for some reason?”
Her eyes narrowed. Instead of answering, she said, “How is Alexi Sauvage?” The question was not the non sequitur it might have seemed.
“She is much improved. Unfortunately, the blow to her head has affected her memory. She recalls little from that night. Which is why I was hoping you might be able to help us piece together what happened, and why.”
The Frenchwoman continued to stare at him for a moment longer. But the answer seemed to satisfy her. She went to stand at a small cracked window overlooking the dark, narrow courtyard below. “I found him a most gentle, generous man, and he could not have been kinder to me. But . . .”
“But?” prompted Sebastian.
“Since your last visit, I’ve been trying to recall everything that was said that night. He and the doctoresse were arguing—and I don’t mean about Cécile.”
“Do you remember what about?”
“The conversation was held in undertones, but I heard enough to understand that the disagreement was over a woman. Not a patient, but someone from Dr. Pelletan’s personal life.”
“A woman?”
She nodded. “I had the impression the woman was someone from his past who is now wed to another. I could be wrong—it was all said in whispers, and I was so very distracted—but I had the impression he wanted this woman to leave her husband.”
“And Alexandrie Sauvage thought that would be a mistake?”
“She did, yes.”
“Did she say why?”
“If she did, I did not hear it. When your child is ill . . .” Her voice trailed away.
Claire Bisette was a woman whose life had been crowded with unimaginable hardships and sorrows. For the sake of her child, she had kept going, struggling every day to find food, to survive. But now, with Cécile dead, it was as if something had died within her too. And Sebastian knew it was her will to live.
He said, “When was the last time you ate?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. It does not matter.”
“It does.” He removed one of his cards from his pocket and held it out to her. “My wife is due to be confined shortly and is in need of a nursemaid for our first child. She would prefer to engage someone older and better educated than those typically sent by the employment agencies. I realize that such a position is far below the station to which you were once accustomed, but it is a beginning.”
Rather than take the card, she shook her head, one hand running self-consciously down the side of her ragged, old-fashioned gown. “I could not possibly present myself to your wife looking like this.”
“A lack of proper clothing is easily remedied, unlike deficiencies in education, experience, and character.”
When she refused to take the card, he laid it on the wooden mantel of the cold hearth. “I’ll tell Lady Devlin to expect you,” he said, and then left before she could hand it back to him.