Free The Black Tower by Louis Bayard Page A

the Limousin.” She rubs the spine with her knuckles. “I find it is the only volume I can bear to read myself. The others fall a little too near to home. Why, good morning, puss-puss!”
    I feel it before I see it: a friction against my trouser leg. Then an unstable spectrum of black and white and orange, bounding into the Baroness’s open arms.
    “Is puss-puss just waking up? What a sleepy puss it is! It’s the fog, isn’t it? Yes, puss-puss loves the fog, doesn’t he? Come see, can you see ?”
    In the shadows of the sconce light, they become, briefly, a unitary organism: limbs coiled toward a common purpose, murmurs twining with mewls.
    “I’m afraid I must pose an indelicate question,” she says.
    It’s some time before I realize she is talking to me. Her voice hasn’t quite come back to its human register.
    “If you like,” I stammer.
    “Were you followed?”
    “No.”
    Such a ring of conviction in my voice, and the truth is I have no clue. I’m still getting used to the idea that I’m worth following.
    “It is my turn to be indelicate, Madame la Baronne.”
    “By all means.”
    “What possible connection could you have to Monsieur Leblanc?”
    With manifest regret, she sets down the cat, and in that moment, I have—for the first time—the full dint of her attention. I fairly blanch before it. The smile alone, whetted against a million drawing rooms and antechambers.
    “Doctor, I find myself longing uncharacteristically for exercise. Would you do me the honor of escorting me?”
     
    T HE FOG HAS begun to lift from the Luxembourg Gardens, but everything above our heads is still shrouded. The statuary. The fountains. The palace itself, where the Chamber of Peers—dried-up remnants of old monarchies and empires—make the rattling sounds of coffined men. Even the canopies of the plane trees have been sheared away, leaving only the trunks, damp and scarred, lining our path like battle trophies.
    For someone who takes little exercise, the Baroness has a rapid step. I have to quicken my own to keep pace with her. Before long, though, our feet are moving together in a companionable rhythm—I could almost believe we’ve been meeting like this for generations, wearing out a trough in the gravel.
    “You’re still a young man,” she says at last. “Twenty-five, perhaps?”
    “Twenty-six.”
    She nods, abstractedly.
    “It was nearly that many years ago I met Chrétien Leblanc. A summer afternoon in the Stare Miosto in Warsaw. I was dining out of doors—a bowl of krupnik, I remember—and I looked up, and there he was, in his blue stockings and this rather faded frock coat. He was watching my soup, the way a cat watches a rabbit. In spite of myself, I was touched.”
    Her gloved hand exerts a barely perceptible pressure on my left arm.
    “Leblanc was an émigré, too, in his own way. Lacking the curse of a title, he had weathered it out longer than most of us, but he, too, was obliged to leave Paris before long. In a hurry. He was wearing that look we all had at first, as though someone had dragged us into one of Montgolfier’s balloons and tumbled us out before we’d quite landed. He was still finding his balance when I met him.” She steps carefully round a puddle. “We fell into conversation. I liked his manners, and by the time he had finished my krupnik for me, I had formally engaged him.”
    Even through the fog, I can see where we are walking: along the parapet of the Pépinière, near the Rue de l’Ouest. I can hear the uproar of sparrows and woodpeckers and linnets.
    “My husband left behind a great financial ruin,” says the Baroness. “I was correspondingly obliged to dismiss our servants. Leblanc was good enough to stay on for some time, and when he could no longer afford to, he continued to visit me at regular intervals, simply to see how I was faring. I rather think he kept me alive.”
    A tiny grunt as she slackens her pace.
    “It was Leblanc who persuaded me to come back to