Free The Blood of Lorraine by Barbara Pope Page A

methodical, and relentless, gathering both useful and useless information about her life. He wanted to make her squirm with impatience and annoyance. At the same time, he hoped that the routine triviality of his questions would lull her into a state of compliance, so that when they got to what she had done and why, she would blurt out her answers without thinking.
    Once he got her started, she was quite forthcoming. As long as she could pour scorn on other people.
    Geneviève Philipon “had always been a stupid cow. Kept behind in school, she was. That’s how I met her,” Antoinette Thomas explained. “It was me that had to help her with her numbers.”
    When asked about her employer, she informed Martin that she worked at a factory owned by a “rich dirty old Jew. Working us to the bone to make his money.”
    She was hardly kinder to her husband, who was “the one who wanted a kid.” The one “who comes home smelling of drink and dead animals’ blood and shit.” Her nostrils flared out with distaste. “He promised to get me out of the factory, then got me pregnant. The pig.”
    “Then why did you marry him?” The question slipped out, unplanned. But, Martin thought, it might offer him an opening. If the husband felt the same contempt for his wife, Martin could turn them against each other. He shifted in his chair, eager to see what she would have to say.
    “I married him because they paid us. They said we should be ‘wed in the eyes of God’ because we were co-habiting ,” she sneered as she pronounced the fancy word, which evidently had been pressed into her limited vocabulary from some higher source. “What difference did it make to me?”
    “Who paid you?”
    “Them snooty ladies who like to stick their noses into everyone’s business.”
    “The Saint Regius Society,” Martin mumbled. A charity propagated by those having too much time on their hands. Rich women who believed that they could turn the Antoinette Thomases of the world into pious bourgeois housewives despite the poverty and brutality of their lives. What cruel foolishness.
    “Yeah, that one. And they would have paid me to nurse my kid too, but I couldn’t do it.”
    “Couldn’t?” Martin asked, thinking of the proud, full breasts, which she had managed to keep well within his view. If only she knew how much her spite and hardness repulsed him, then maybe she would just relax back into the seat and stop trying to be provocative.
    “How were we going to eat if I didn’t keep going to the factory, making that Jew rich?”
    Well said, thought Martin, only barely restraining himself from shouting at her. Blame your predicament on the Israelites. Yet who was to blame? Fauvet had reminded him that mill women often sent their children to the country in order to keep on working. Many, if not most of them, including the vixen who sat in front of him, had no choice. He sighed. “And you chose Geneviève Philipon because…?” he asked
    “Because,” she leaned forward and screwed her mouth into another sneer, “she still had her last one at her breast and I knew she was desperate after her husband kicked the bucket. Because,” she added as she sat back, “she’d take anything I gave her.”
    “Let’s talk about you and Mme Philipon,” Martin said, clasping his hands around his stomach. His gaze roved slowly over every facet of Antoinette Thomas’s face, stopping at exactly the point where his eyes bored into hers. They had finally come full circle. To the pitiful dead body of little Marc-Antoine. To Antoinette Thomas’s blatant lies and ridiculous accusations. Back to what the wet nurse had told Martin.
    After almost two hours of questioning, Antoinette Thomas was becoming restless, apprehensive. The bosom that she had so proudly thrust at him was taking in shorter and shorter breaths. The tense stillness of his own body made Martin’s chin prickle under his beard. He rubbed it with a slowness that he hoped would keep her on