Free The Blood of Lorraine by Barbara Pope Page B

edge, while he considered the next step. If he began the most critical part of the interrogation by accusing her of mutilating her own son, he might set her off, either in a stream of denials or, if she cared anything about the little boy, a sudden flood of remorse and grief. Because he needed answers, not hysteria, he decided to save any talk of that gruesome scene by the stream in Tomblaine for last.
    “Mme Philipon told me that it was your idea to accuse a Jewish tinker of killing your son.”
    Antoinette Thomas shook her head in denial, jangling her curls, before thrusting out her chin and proclaiming, “She’s lying.” Antoinette Thomas stared straight into Martin’s eyes without so much as a flinch.
    Martin persisted. “She even suggested that you might have gotten the idea that a Jew would do this to your son from a priest.”
    “A priest!” Antoinette Thomas arched her eyebrows in surprise. The idea seemed to amuse her. “I haven’t been in a church since my first communion. Why should I bother? They’re for the rich too.”
    “You just told me you got married—”
    “Oh, yes, that. And you see what good it did me. Married.” She turned her head in disgust as she spat out the word. “No, no. Geneviève’s the one who listens to them and goes to confession and does what they say. A priest. The cow,” she scoffed.
    “Then where did you get such a preposterous idea? From a political speech? Or your husband?” Antoinette Thomas’s assertion that the Church supported the rich had not escaped him. It suggested some acquaintance with anti-clerical politics.
    She fell back in mock surprise. “Why do I need someone to tell me what everybody knows?”
    Everybody ! A pulsating tension streamed down the side of Martin’s head from his temples to his jaw. Everybody! Did she mean all the tanners and factory workers and shopgirls living in the hovels that lined the river? The drunks trading insults and fisticuffs in working-class cafés, who would never dream of setting foot inside a church, as well as the pious and sober, like Geneviève Philipon, who, for all Martin knew, might hang on every word uttered by an ignorant country priest. Everybody! And she did not even know the half of it, the upper crust, the writers, the politicians, even those entrusted with dispensing justice, like the court’s own Alphonse Rocher.
    “And what exactly is it,” Martin asked as his own breath became short and labored, “that everybody knows about the Israelites?”
    Her eyes got wider than ever, as if she thought him quite daft. “What is it?”
    “Yes, what is it that everybody knows? Tell me please.”
    She hesitated. He nodded encouragement. She shrugged. And then she spewed it all out. They ran everything. From the Rothschilds and their banks in the big cities to the local shopkeeper who cheats poor people like her. They’re money-hungry. They stick together. Except they also want to be like us. If it weren’t for their noses, and their smell, Antoinette Thomas averred with the air of a schoolgirl concluding a successful recitation, we’d never be able to tell them apart. And, of course, she added hastily, suddenly mindful of her own circumstances, their religion encourages them to kill Christian babies and use the blood in their ceremonies.
    It was quite a list. Things he would have never dreamed of saying about anyone, or reading, or hearing without objection. The kinds of things that undoubtedly drove Singer up the wall, Singer for whom dignity and decorum were so important. What was it that he had told Martin last Friday? “You are fortunate that you do not have to care about these things.” Not any more. Not if Martin was going to be a real friend to Singer or, for that matter, a principled republican judge. It was a distasteful business, one he had never thought he would have to confront. And here he was in the middle of it. He looked up to see Antoinette Thomas staring at him, waiting. Charpentier cleared