style="font-size:15px;"> I poured the dregs from the wine-bottle into a spare glass and handed it to Dupin. Madame Bihan appeared, as if by magic, carrying another bottle, already uncorked, and set it down. She it was, I think, who indicated to Dupin with her eyes that he would be welcome to slice some cheese from any of the fragments she had brought. I had assumed that he would not want any, and was mildly surprised to see him pick up the cheese-knife. I suppose that he wanted some task with which to be busy, other than drinking wine—and perhaps some reason for prevarication, in order to get his thoughts in order, even before answering a question as innocuous as the one she had asked.
I hastened to get up and move my chair in order to make room around the hearth for a fourth. Madame Bihan stirred up the fire and used the tongs to place two more small logs on it—but Dupin did not sit down immediately. He began murmuring as he cut himself a slice of cheese and picked it up, but suddenly seemed to realize that he was speaking too softly, and raised his voice lightly, in order to make himself heard without running overmuch risk of waking the child.
“Monsieur Groix is very well, considering,” he said, before taking a bite of the cheese—a Saint-Paulin, I think. Then he stopped in order to chew.
Neither I nor Madame Guérande had to ask “considering what?” Revolution was in the air, and the political division of the various police forces of which Lucian Groix was in nominal control—a division with which Dupin remained scrupulously uninvolved—was extremely busy detecting plots against the regime and filling the prisons with dissidents.
When Dupin has finally swallowed, he did not have to hurry in order to add: “Is this your daughter, Madame?”
“It is,” the lady confirmed. “Her name is Sophie. She’s twelve years old. I’d introduce you properly, but the journey has tired her out, as you can see.”
“My friend has introduced himself, I suppose?”
“Oh yes—Mr. Reynolds and I are the best of friends already.”
A slight shadow seemed to pass over Dupin’s face as she said that, but I could not believe that it was jealousy. It was more likely to be anxiety, caused by not knowing what Julie Guérande might have told me while we were waiting for him to return.
“And how is Monsieur Guérande?”
“Claude is not so well, I fear,” the lady countered. She seemed to have tired of the forced conventional manner of conversation, and wasted no further time. “That, as you will undoubtedly have deduced, is why I am here. I’m sorry that I did not write to warn you that I was coming, but I had left it too late. I kept hoping that the winter would cool the fever that overwork brought upon Claude last year, but instead, his impatience has become corrosive. I hoped too, that spring might bring an amelioration, but it has not. Now, on top of everything, vague threats are being made of legal action against him—entirely unnecessarily—and that seems to have brought his anxiety to boiling point. He needs a calming influence, Auguste, and I cannot provide it.”
Dupin feigned puzzlement. “I’m not a lawyer, Madame Guérande,” he said. “If and when I lend assistance to the Prefecture, it is in the capacity of a logician.”
The lady had barely restrained herself from cutting him off in mid-sentence. “The legal issues are a mere irritant,” she said. “The last straw, so to speak. What is crucially at stake, in Claude’s eyes, is the research that he has been carrying out in the caves close to the house he inherited from his father—with or without proper legal authority. It is in that respect, I believe, that he needs an understanding ear and some wise advice. I wish that he would trust me sufficiently to discuss the matter with me—but he does not consider that I was a true member of my father’s salon, and the older members of the clique are all dead. Lucien is not the only one to have put such matters behind him, but even if there were veterans of the salon still in the heart of the Sorbonne...you will understand well enough, Auguste, why I thought of you....”
“You want me to renew my friendship with your husband,” Dupin stated, in a tone so neutral as to seem quite dead.
“More than that, I fear,” the lady replied. “The matter is urgent. Now that the spring has come, the caves will become accessible again—and they will return in a matter of days....”
This time, her hesitation was very obviously planned for effect. She was being deliberately tantalizing. She might not have seen him for twenty years and more, but she knew her man. She knew how to manipulate Auguste Dupin, even—perhaps especially—when he was in an atypically refractory mood.
“They?” Dupin queried.
“The Thierachians,” she supplied, ready to follow up once he had taken the bait—but only so far.
Dupin condescended to arch an eyebrow. Then he moved around the armchair that I had positioned for him, between my own and the lady’s, and sat down.
He put his wine-glass down on the occasional table, and then looked up at me, as if to remind me that I was still standing. I sat down too. I understood the symbolism of the gesture; he was accepting his part in the drama that the lady had scripted, agreeing to take an interest in her problem—not because he had once been a close friend of her husband’s, and perhaps an admirer of hers, but because she had mentioned something odd, something intriguing, something strange.
“Given that you spoke of their returning,” Dupin said, “I take it that you mean Thierachian in the specialized sense, rather than the people resident in the vicinity of the city of Guise. You’re referring to the nomads who are sometimes known by that name?”
“Yes,” said Madame Guérande. “Bohemians, the locals also call them, or even Romani—but all the labels are incorrect, in a deeper sense than the one that merely attributes them a false geographical origin.”
Dupin nodded, approving of the pedantry—which had, indeed, caused her to sound, just for a moment, exactly like him. “And how has Monsieur Guérande contrived to irritate the so-called Thierachians?” he asked, mildly. “They normally keep very much to themselves, even more so than the Romani.”
“I can’t explain that here and now,” the lady replied, still deliberately tantalizing. “It would take too long, and it’s very late. As you can see, poor Sophie needs to be put to bed, and I’m very tired myself. I need a clear head in order to give you a full explanation. Will you come to my hotel tomorrow...alone?”
I did not take offence at the final word. I could think of any number of reasons why the lady might want to talk to Dupin without a third party being present—even one that she had already identified as a friend
Dupin glanced at the little girl as mention was made of her, but then his gaze was suddenly caught by the book on the lady’s lap, which a movement of her left arm—deliberate or accidental—had only just revealed. “I shall very pleased to make your daughter’s acquaintance when she wakes up,” he murmured, with deliberate irrelevance, before his tone sharpened. “That, if I’m not mistaken, is the copy of Telliamed you once gave me. You must have keen eyes, to have seen it on my friend’s shelves in this weak light. Has he explained to you how it comes to be there?”
“Your friend has explained that you count it among your less precious books, which you keep here because your apartment has become overcrowded with others dearer to your heart.”
I wanted to protest but did not dare.
Dupin did not even glance at me. “I can assure you that any diminution of the importance I
