Whether the hospital would want Signora Ruggeri’s ostentatious clothing was debatable, but I supposed they could sell the gowns for the money places that tended the sick always needed.
This villa was not a large one, but I saw as we followed the housekeeper’s directions to Signora Ruggeri’s private rooms, it was luxurious. If the bishop who’d lived here had seen to its decor, he had fine taste. The paintings we passed were of secular themes—landscapes and still lifes, not a religious scene in sight. Either the bishop didn’t care to be reminded of his profession while at home, or Signora Ruggeri had asked for any religious art to be removed.
Signora Ruggeri’s chambers on the light-filled first floor consisted of a large sitting room opening to an equally large dressing room, with a bedroom behind that. A wealth of windows gave a view to the well-tended garden whose flowers bloomed red, gold, and blue in the June sunshine.
Moreau and I, without speaking, began our hunt. I’d come to search for the woman, not whatever she’d hid for Gallo, but I had the feeling that if we found the papers, they would point the way to Signora Ruggeri.
We worked through every table, every cupboard, every niche. We pulled out the drawers from the bureau and writing table and turned them over to see whether anything was hidden on the underside. As I had in Gallo’s rooms in La Guillotière, I slid beneath the bed to discover whether anything had been tucked under the mattress.
Moreau, having learned well from Brewster, began to tap the paneling and then to examine the bricks in the fireplace. We took our time to go over every inch of the room, but turned up nothing.
Plenty of Signora Ruggeri’s own belongings were still here—gowns, shoes, gloves, hats, ribbons, nightgowns, and slippers—but no papers or books of any kind. The writing table had a few sheets of unused foolscap and a bottle of ink that looked as though it never been opened. Signora Ruggeri wrote to no one, it seemed, but perhaps she’d learned that this was safer.
The fact that her clothes were still here did not make me easy about her fate. Confidence tricksters did sometimes flee in the night with what little they could carry, but still I felt more than a little concern.
“She might have hidden the papers elsewhere in the house,” Moreau suggested when we met in the middle of the sitting room, both of us dusty. “As she did when she lived in the Presqu’île.”
“I think it unlikely in this one,” I answered. “I imagine the housekeeper here kept a sharp eye on Signora Ruggeri whenever she wasn’t in her own chamber.” I guessed that the housekeeper had worked for the bishop—her resentment of Signora Ruggeri was sharp. “Housekeepers are aware of everything. If Signora Ruggeri had hidden the things in other rooms, she’d be certain to find them. My wife employs a butler rather than a housekeeper at our London abode, but the man can put his finger on anything in the house whenever he wishes, even when I don’t realize I need the item in question.” Indeed, I was often amazed at Barnstable’s percipience.
“True, my own housekeeper knows when I’ve not eaten or when I’ve stayed all night with Madame Paillard. Her servants don’t look after me as well, she claims.”
I smiled with him, but my amusement was short-lived. “Coachmen, too, are aware of their employer’s comings and goings,” I said, as ideas began to churn in my head. “Signora Ruggeri’s seems loyal to her. Perhaps she gave him the papers to protect.”
“We must ask him,” Moreau said with animation.
I agreed, and we went in search of the housekeeper.
“He’s gone off,” she told us when I inquired if we could speak to the coachman. “He commandeered the bishop’s coach when the signora moved in, and now he’s left in it to search for her.”
“Is he an Englishman?” I asked, wondering if he’d served Signora Ruggeri when she was Imogene Cooke.
“No,” the housekeeper answered in puzzlement. “Why should he be? He’s from Calais.” Her voice held a sneer for those from the far north.
Perhaps hired when Signora Ruggeri first landed in France, which meant he’d have taken her all the way to Padua and then here to Lyon. I recalled him applying the whip without remorse to those who tried to hinder her carriage in the plaza. I could imagine him murdering Gallo to protect her, though he looked a strong enough brute to then heave Gallo’s body from the bridge.
How far had Signor Ruggeri trusted him?
“May we see his chamber?” I asked the housekeeper.
She eyed me dubiously. “Why? What’s he done?”
“Possibly nothing, Madame,” I said. “But again, we might find some sign of where the signora has gone.”
“There was nothing untoward between them,” the housekeeper said, as though disapproving of my conjectures. “She employed him, and that it all. I’d have known if there were goings-on in the coach house.”
About which she’d have quickly told the comte, I had no doubt. Anything to have Signora Ruggeri dismissed.
“Even so, he might have kept her letters or some such.”
“Not without my knowing,” the housekeeper assured me. “But search if you must.”
She called a footman to take us from the villa to the coach house across the yard, which he did with quick deference.
The bishop’s own coachman had departed with him, one of the grooms told us when we reached the coach house. He hadn’t wanted to stay and drive a tart about.
No carriage occupied the space behind the wide doors, and only one horse remained in the stable, pulling at hay in a desultory way.
The grooms and coachman had quarters above, one open room for the grooms and a small, cramped chamber for the coachman.
