The next day, I took my early walk to the Presqu’île and Beaumont’s tavern to seek my breakfast. I was alone this morning—Gabriella had departed after the comtesse’s soiree, Major Auberge arriving in a carriage to escort her, as arranged. Brewster, who’d insisted on accompanying me into town, had paused to slurp coffee from a vendor as we’d made our way down the hill.
As I neared the middle of the Pont Tilsit, the bridge across the river Saône, I spied a man sprawled, face upward, on its paving stones. Bending over him was my old enemy, Colonel Moreau.
The body proved to be that of Signor Gallo, who lay in a pool of brownish blood. Moreau gripped a long knife in one fist, its blade covered with same drying blood. No one else was near, the middle of the bridge empty.
Moreau heard my step and snapped his head up. He froze, wide eyes burning, his face becoming a stark shade of gray.
“No,” he declared in halting English. “This, I did not do.”
Chapter 5
I planted my walking stick squarely in front of me, liking the sound of the blade rattling inside it.
“Why should I believe you?” I answered in French.
Moreau carefully laid the knife on the cobbles and rose once more. “You have no reason to.”
He did recognized me. I saw it in his eyes. We studied each other warily.
What did I say to a man who’d once let his soldiers torture me, and then walked away, leaving me for dead? I’d made it home by luck and sheer determination, and I saw him register shock that I now stood before him. He must have thought I was a ghost when he’d caught sight of me yesterday.
The pair of us might have stared at each other all day, had not Brewster lumbered up beside me.
“Bloody hell. What the devil have ye done now?”
“I didn’t kill the man,” I said at once.
“Nor did I.” Moreau said, continuing in English. “I swear on my life, I found him here.”
“Well, then ye should walk away.” Brewster directed the command at both of us. “’Twill be nothing to do with ye, will it?”
Neither Moreau nor I moved. “We should summon les gendarmes,” Moreau said reluctantly.
“I agree,” I said.
Brewster’s eyes widened. “You mean the police what go about in military uniforms? They’ll arrest us, guv, since we’re foreign. I can’t be taken to a French nick. I’ll never see me Em again.”
I could not say that Brewster was wrong. The three of us were conveniently standing over the body of a man who’d been murdered, and police of any country were happy with an easy solution. Moreau, a well-regarded colonel, might talk his way out of it, but Brewster and I would be fair game.
“What happened?” I asked Moreau sharply. “What did you see?”
He continued to respond in English, no matter that I questioned him in French. “I saw nothing. I was walking from the square to cross the river, and found him here on the bridge. I thought the man drunk, unconscious, and I leaned over him to discover if he was well. I saw the knife and picked it up …”
“A foolish thing to do, but it can’t be helped,” I said. “Where do we seek the gendarmes? We should summon them before anyone else comes.”
Moreau gave me a grim nod. “I will fetch them. Wait here.”
He jogged off across the bridge toward the Presqu’île, leaving us with the dead Signor Gallo.
“He’s legged it.” Brewster glared after Moreau’s retreating figure. “We should too, guv. He’s not coming back.”
“I think he will, somehow.”
Moreau had been stunned but not panicked, more concerned for procedure than distancing himself from the incident. He’d been this coolly efficient on the night he and his soldiers had altered my life forever.
It was too late for Brewster and me to retreat, in any case. The Pont Tilsit, named for the Treaty of Tilsit during which Napoleon and the Russian Czar had carved up Europe between them—a treaty that had not sustained, needless to say—was a major crossing of the Saône. It had been empty this soon after sunrise, but townspeople were now making for the bridge from either direction, pausing to see what was happening.
Fernand Devere was among them.
