Free The Black Tower by Louis Bayard

their—kroomp—blue stockings and their dirty vests. Always mooning, aren’t they? The old days. Pwiff. I say what’s done is done, bring on the next. I’ve always been that way. Ploonf.”
    She stops at last before a door of besmirched oak. A knock and then a bearlike roar.
    “Madame la Baronne! Your visitor is here!”
    Then, by some prearranged ritual, she turns the handle, opens the door three hairs wide, and backs slowly away, her gasping chest bent parallel to the floor.
    I see worn red tiles under a threadbare carpet. An old round table, a low sideboard topped by a hanging mirror. A bench, unanchored. And a short-backed armchair, the type of grim, cured artifact that might have been lifted from a Breton widow’s cottage.
    A magnificent woman is sitting there.
    No, let me be clearer. A magnificent woman was sitting there. She was wearing peach blossoms in her hair and a gown of loose lawn to accentuate her glorious bosom, and she had doeskin gloves of a paradisiacal whiteness.
    But that was thirty years ago. Today, the white has sickened into yellow; the lawn has given way to a black damask dress, no longer fashionable; the fichu has been mended so many times there is almost nothing left to mend.
    And that once-handsome, that still-handsome face has hardened into something unyielding and curatorial, like the tablet of a lost civilization.
    “Dr. Carpentier.” A lightly tickled contralto. “How good of you to come.”
    She rises from her peasant’s chair and offers me her gloved hand. Not knowing what to do, I close it round. With a hint of charity, she draws herself free.
    “You must excuse me,” she says. “You are not quite the man I was expecting.”
    I am going to ask what she was expecting, but I’m stopped by the thing I missed on my first canvassing: the spectacle of her eyes. One brown, one blue— borrowed, I would almost conceive, from two different women.
    “Would you care for some tea, Doctor?”
    She serves it herself in porcelain that, I am relieved to see, was not made by convicts. She tells me…well, I’m not conscious of much more than the music of her voice. I’m dimly aware of the concussion of spoons…a settee, a sisal rug…and finally a natural history cabinet, empty except for a few seashells and a line of red morocco bindings.
    “Ah, you are coveting my library,” she says in an ironical tone. “Those are the memoirs of my late husband, the Baron. He was ambassador to Berlin under Louis the Sixteenth.”
    Not knowing how to answer this, I say nothing, and this proves to be the very signal she was waiting for. Setting her teacup down, she folds her hands in her lap and, with a conscientious and abiding air, as if she were showing visitors round a house, begins to speak. And all the facts that should have been elicited after days, even weeks of small talk and trust building come tumbling out now in a helpless profusion.
    “We lost everything, of course, during the Revolution. The Jacobins nationalized our lands, that much we were expecting, but then most of my jewels were lost on the way to Warsaw, and the Baron made rather a hash of the money we had left. He made a rather poor émigré, given how accustomed he was to travel. Voluntary exile was one thing, he used to say, involuntary quite another. He chafed, poor thing. Always intriguing to come back here, where he was least wanted.”
    She picks up her cup, rests it briefly on her underlip.
    “Intrigues, I am sad to say, cost money. At least his always did.”
    With a rush of undercoats, she rises. Opens the cabinet with a scant pressure of hand, strokes the morocco bindings.
    “This is what’s left of his estate. A life in ten volumes. To the end, he was persuaded that someone would publish it.” She takes the leftmost volume in her hand, holds it out to me. “ This one might be to your taste, Doctor. It follows the Baron from his nativity in Toulon to his brief and, if I may say, unexceptional term as intendant of