“Monsieur musketeer,” DuJournal shouted to be heard over the drumming rain.
Jean-Claude hobbled quickly to the mathematician’s side and carefully tipped the brim of his hat so that it did not drizzle on Isabelle’s remains. DuJournal knelt by Isabelle’s side. Jean-Claude still found it hard to look at her blackened husk, but the spirit of the hunt gave him strength. He would find her killer, even if it took him until the end of time.
“What have you found?”
DuJournal flexed his fingers, as if preparing to snatch a burning brand from a fire. “I think … the princess did not have foul breath.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Look at her mouth.”
Jean-Claude had to hold down his gorge, but he bent to look where DuJournal was pointing. Isabelle’s skull had shattered in the fire, and the flesh had been burned from her bones, but her teeth remained. They were yellowed and blackened. “I see nothing,” he admitted.
DuJournal pointed at a group of molars that were black and deeply pitted. “This isn’t burn damage. This is jaw rot. This woman, whoever she was, had rotten teeth and terrible breath. Princess Isabelle did not. I danced with her the night of the fire.”
The implication stunned the breath from Jean-Claude’s body. He hardly dared embrace the logical conclusion lest the reprieve be snatched away. At last he whispered, “She’s alive.”
“Or at the very least, this is not her,” DuJournal said.
“But someone wants us to think it is.” Jean-Claude’s mind raced, and understanding heaved up like a leviathan from a cloud bank, vast and frightful and unexpected. “It’s all misdirection. Breaker’s balls, I’m such a fool.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This is not a murder; it’s a kidnapping.” And if it was a kidnapping, that meant Isabelle was alive, bless the Savior. Without food or drink or sleep, Jean-Claude felt he could live a hundred years on that knowledge alone. “Someone meant to kidnap Isabelle, but they wanted everyone to think she was dead so no one would look for her.”
“But why? The dead give you no political leverage, and you can’t collect ransom on a corpse,” DuJournal said.
“Not for ransom, for something else, and I would give a lot to know what that ‘else’ is. But first they had to get rid of me, so they kidnapped me and tried to make it look like I’d been gutted in a tavern. Nothing mysterious about that, just a stupid foreign drunkard dying a drunkard’s death. No one would ever investigate such a death.”
“No one except Princess Isabelle; she had the whole city looking for you.”
“Yes, but while I was supposed to be dying in a tavern, Isabelle was abducted. The kidnapper wanted to avoid pursuit, but he knew he’d be hunted unless everyone thought Isabelle was dead, so he set the fire and left another corpse in her place. One burned corpse looks pretty much like another, except for Isabelle’s … oddity.”
DuJournal said, “Bones survive fires, so he took the only course open to him. He amputated her deformed hand and left it for searchers to find.”
An impotent fury swelled in Jean-Claude’s heart. Someone had maimed Isabelle, vandalized the most beautiful, precious girl in the world. And whoever had stolen her intended to keep her, else why the cover-up? He had to find her. Idiot! He had already wasted four whole days feeling sorry for himself. But there was no time for additional self-recrimination now.
DuJournal looked thoughtful. “But if we’d found her with just a missing arm, we might have been suspicious, so this mysterious kidnapper cut off the corpse’s leg for verisimilitude, because two missing limbs looks more accidental than just one. Ironic.”
“Yes, he counted on people accepting the obvious explanation. He didn’t count on you looking this poor woman in the mouth.”
“So you were kidnapped in order to be murdered, and Isabelle was murdered in order to be kidnapped. Very symmetrical. But that still doesn’t tell us who did it. Or why.”
“You are correct, but I do know who might know why.”
“Who?”
Jean-Claude frowned, wondering afresh who DuJournal worked for. He did not want to give his next quarry any warning; neither did he want to let DuJournal out of his sight. “Come with me and I will show you.”
CHAPTER
Sixteen
The coach Jean-Claude had borrowed from Don Angelo rattled and splashed its way along San Augustus’s winding, rain-slicked streets. Jean-Claude willed it to go faster. Every step taken slowly for the sake of care was another instant lost in his search for Isabelle. People didn’t become lost by distance but by time. Events did not hold still, and the courses of lives were buffeted and twisted by events no empirical philosopher could calculate. Where was Isabelle, and what was happening to her? She had to be absolutely terrified.
“Do you mind telling me where we are going?” DuJournal asked.
“To visit Duque Diego,” Jean-Claude said.
DuJournal’s eyebrows lifted. “You think he knows something about Isabelle’s disappearance?”
“I intend to find out.”
“What makes you think he will speak to you?”
“I will demonstrate to him that it is in his best interest to do so.” He flashed a sideways look at the imposter, still wondering who the man was working for and what he wanted. “You do not have to accompany me, of course.”
“Builder forbid I would miss an opportunity to introduce myself to a great nobleman.”
“On your head be it.”
The coach halted under the portico outside Duque Diego’s city residence, a stand-alone house in an expensive quarter. It was built to a tasteful scale but clad in ostentatious marble.
Jean-Claude marched up the broad steps to the main doors as if he had an army at his back instead of an imposter. He hoped persuasion would get him an audience with the duque, but if not, Jean-Claude had other means. One of the more specialized classes in the musketeer academy was penetration without detection, taught by a man with the title “master of the rooftops” whose final admonition with every mission was, “And don’t get caught.” Jean-Claude found himself wishing that the academy had not been such a long time ago, or that he had not spent so much of the intervening decades loitering in taverns. He was out of practice.
Just as Jean-Claude was about to rap on the door, it swung open and a steward liveried in black, red, and gold appeared. He bowed them in and said, “Se?or musketeer, be welcome. Duque Diego has instructed me to inform him whenever you should happen to arrive. Happily, he is in residence at the moment. May I ask who is your guest?”
DuJournal grinned at Jean-Claude. “Do you get the feeling you are expected?”
Jean-Claude said, “This is Lord Martin DuJournal, mathematician, swordsman, and gadfly.”