The foreman pointed. Jean-Claude’s gaze followed his direction to a pile of charred timbers, and there, sticking out of the wreckage like one more torched fagot, was a dismembered limb, a lady’s scorched and blackened arm, with one wormlike finger.
Jean-Claude’s whole world went black. How he remained standing, he could not say, for all his strength had fled, and time went very queer. The next thing he knew, the searchers had found the rest of Isabelle’s body. She’d lost a leg and an arm, and her face had been completely scorched away. Jean-Claude shuffled along after them as they loaded her onto a makeshift catafalque and carried her to temporary shelter under a tarp. One of Don Angelo’s aides said something about the possibility that Isabelle had accidentally knocked over a candle. “A tragic accident.”
Jean-Claude gave the aide such a glare as made the man retreat a full step. “She had alchemical lanterns, not candles, and this was no accident.”
Jean-Claude’s hand clenched the head of his cane, but braining the liveried staff would do him no good. He stuffed grief and despair and rage and every other emotion down into the pit from whence nightmares came. What use had he for feelings? What right had he to grieve, he who had failed so completely? Nothing could undo the crime. Nothing remained of his service but to hunt down its perpetrator.
Jean-Claude stalked into the remains of the building and stared around, looking for he knew not what. Isabelle would have been able to survey the room and tell him a dozen unusual things about the fire, about the way it burned and what that meant about whoever started it, but Jean-Claude was not so gifted. Yet perhaps others with more talent than he could be brought into service. DuJournal was already in the room, examining bits of charred wood, sniffing them.
“What are you doing?” Jean-Claude asked.
“Trying to figure out how the fire got started,” he said. “The princess was found near her desk, which means she wasn’t in bed when she died, but if she was awake, she could have escaped before the smoke overwhelmed her.”
“She might have been asleep at her desk,” Jean-Claude said, playing the Breaker’s advocate.
“Hmmm—possibly,” said Martin. “But no mere candle started this fire. Smell this.” He tossed Jean-Claude a piece of burned wood.
Jean-Claude sniffed it dubiously and his nose wrinkled at a sharp stench, oily but stinging even more than vinegar. “What is it?”
“Unless I miss my guess, it’s some sort of oil spirits, spilled all over the place. It would be perfect for getting a fire started.”
“I thought a bomb caused the fire.”
“I haven’t found any bomb bits. Things look to have been burned rather than blasted.”
“Then what caused the explosion?”
“Sometimes that can happen when a fire burns in a closed room. Fire needs air to mix with its phlogiston. I read a monograph by Gregor VonOrn that hypothesizes that once a fire has used up all the air in a confined space, it lies dormant until, say, a door is opened, then it flares up explosively. Isabelle would have been at her desk. Then a fire started and burned and she succumbed to the smoke and fell to the floor. And then Olivia opened the door, and that caused the blast and spread the fire. I can’t say for sure, but the furniture inside the room seems in place, if not intact, which means the blast was mostly outside the room.”
Jean-Claude grunted—it all sounded like hocus-pocus to him—but followed along with the story. “If the blast was outside, how did Isabelle lose her arm?”
“That is a very good question. With your leave, I would like to examine her body.”
Jean-Claude’s gut knotted at the thought of this stranger pawing over Isabelle’s corpse. It was indecent, but Isabelle … it was exactly the sort of thing she would have thought to try. Jean-Claude said, “You will treat her with respect.”
“The utmost.” DuJournal bowed low and took himself out, leaving Jean-Claude alone in the drizzle. He poked around through the ashes. He didn’t understand empirical philosophy. Fire didn’t have motives or reasons. It just was what it was. The natural world didn’t make mistakes. People did. Except whoever had murdered his princess hadn’t made enough mistakes, or Jean-Claude hadn’t been clever enough to spot them.
His walking stick jammed and twisted against something in a puddle that was deeper than it looked. He jerked the stick in consternation and popped an oblong object from the murk. He blinked, and saw a cavalry officer’s pistol half-submerged in a hole in the floor. He knelt and picked it up. If it was not the same pistol he had given Isabelle on the day of the cavalcade, then it was an identical twin. The barrel was cracked at the base, a sure sign of a backfire—like what might happen if a loaded pistol were left in a burning room.
He frowned and imagined the room as it had been. There was the wreckage of Isabelle’s bed, and the pistol had been in the trunk at its foot. The trunk that was no longer there. There was no remainder of it, no debris. Could the workers have taken it out already? Could the murderer? Why?
Jean-Claude went back to basics. Catching the killer was his duty, as empty as it seemed. How did the murderer get in and out? There was only one door. The walls had been burned down to mere stubs. Jean-Claude walked the perimeter, looking for what would have been empty spaces indicating secret passages. Alas, if such existed, their defining boundaries had been obliterated in the building’s collapse.
So assume just one door, and the chamber beyond had been filled with handmaids and guards. Could one or more of them have been complicit? Half of them were dead and therefore difficult to question. So further assume that a guilty handmaid, being forewarned about the fire, was one of the escapees. Were they all accounted for? He seemed to recall talking to each of them in the last few days. So, had all the dead ones been positively identified, or … wait.
Realization struck Jean-Claude like a crossbow bolt. He stood in the center of the room and turned a complete circle, peering through veils of rain, probing every cranny for something that was not there.
There was one handmaid unaccounted for. Marie. She wasn’t here. There was no corpse. So where was she? Most people wouldn’t even think to account for a bloodhollow. Bloodhollows weren’t people. They were part of the background, a piece of functional furniture. They didn’t count, except to people like Isabelle and therefore Jean-Claude. So where had Marie gone? Was she the instrument of the murder, controlled by the Comte des Zephyrs? But no … he stood to gain nothing from Isabelle’s death, and even if he did use Marie as a murder weapon, why not just let her burn along with everything else? Marie had left this room or been taken, but why and by whom? Whoever it was, it was a mistake, a loose thread, if only Jean-Claude could find some way to tug on it.