Glass Houses (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #13)(65)

“Pardon. Pardon. Désolé,” he whispered, leaving winces and grunts in his wake.

Once in the aisle, he headed to the large double doors of the courtroom. They were closed and seemed to recede into the distance, even as he moved toward them.

“Chief Superintendent, I asked you a question.”

Behind Beauvoir there was silence.

He wanted to stop. To turn around. To stand there in full view, in the middle of the aisle. In the middle of the cauldron that was the courtroom. So that the Chief Superintendent, so that Armand Gamache, could see him. And know he was not alone. Know he was supported.

Whatever he chose to do. However he chose to answer.

They all knew this question would be asked. None of the other members of the inner core at the S?reté had dared ask what Chief Superintendent Gamache intended to do when it was.

They preferred not to know and Chief Superintendent Gamache had preferred not to tell them. And certainly not to consult any of them. So that, when the inevitable investigation was held, this decision could be proven to be his, and his alone.

But Jean-Guy had asked.

It was a sunny summer afternoon just before the trial began, and the two men were working in the back garden of the Gamaches’ home in Three Pines.

The roses were in full bloom and their scent hung in the air, as did a hint of lavender, though Jean-Guy could not have named it. But it smelled nice. Familiar without being cloying. It conjured lazy days when he was very young. Weeks spent at his grandparents’ home in the country. Away from bickering parents and bullying brothers and moody sisters, and teachers and tests and homework.

If safety had a smell, this would be it.

Jean-Guy was kneeling on the grass, trying to twist a thick rope through a hole in a piece of wood. He and his father-in-law were making a swing, to be hung from the branch of the oak tree at the far end of the garden.

Honoré was with them, beside his father on the grass. Every now and then, his grandfather would pick him up and bob him slightly, up and down, whispering to him.

“Really,” said Jean-Guy, “don’t feel you need to help.”

“I am helping,” said Armand. “Aren’t I?” he asked Honoré, who really didn’t care.

Gamache strolled around, whispering to his grandson.

“What’re you saying?” asked Jean-Guy. “Dear God, tell me it’s not Ruth’s poetry.”

“Non. A. A. Milne.”

“Winnie the Pooh?”

Reine-Marie, grand-maman, read Honoré to sleep with the stories of Christopher Robin, and Pooh, and Piglet, and the Hundred Acre Wood.

“Sort of. It’s a poem by A. A. Milne,” said Armand. He turned once again to the infant in his arms and whispered, “When We Were Very Young.”

Jean-Guy paused in his task of cramming the large rope through the too-small hole on one side of the seat, and watched.

“What’re you going to say on the witness stand?”

“About?”

“You know what about.”

The lavender had made him ask. Excessive calm. Contentment. It had made him either brave or foolhardy.

Beauvoir stood up, wiped his sleeve across his forehead and picked up his lemonade from the table. When Gamache didn’t answer, Beauvoir shot a quick glance back toward the house. His wife, Annie, and her mother, Reine-Marie, were sitting on the back porch with their own lemonades, talking.

Even though he knew they couldn’t hear them, he lowered his voice.

“The root cellar. The bat. What we discovered.”

Armand thought for a moment, then handed Honoré back to his father.

“I’ll tell them the truth,” he said.

“But you can’t. That’ll blow the whole thing. Not just the chance of a conviction in the murder of Katie Evans, but the entire operation of the past eight months. We’ve put everything into it. Everything.”

He saw Annie glance his way and realized he’d raised his voice slightly.

Modulating it again, he rasped, “If you tell the truth, they’ll know we know, and it’ll be over. We’re so close. It all hinges on that. All our work will be for nothing, if you tell the truth.”

Jean-Guy knew he didn’t have to tell Gamache that. He was the architect of the plan, after all.

Beauvoir felt Honoré’s tiny hand grasp his T-shirt, and make a fist. And he smelled the baby powder. And felt the soft, soft skin of his son. It was even more intoxicating than lavender.

And Jean-Guy knew why Armand had handed the child back to his father. So that the infant, his grandson, wouldn’t be tainted by the lie he’d just been forced to tell.

“It’ll be all right, Jean-Guy,” said Armand, holding his son-in-law’s gaze before his eyes shifted and softened, as they rested on Honoré. He leaned toward the child. “It isn’t really Anywhere! It’s somewhere else / Instead! Isn’t that right?”

“And now it is now,” came a voice over the garden fence just ahead of the head. Gray and lined, though the eyes were bright. “And the dark thing is here.”

“You’re not kidding,” said Beauvoir, then said to Honoré, “It’s a Heffalump.”

The two men and a baby looked at the old poet.

“More like Eeyore, don’t you think?” said Gamache. “With just a hint of Pooh.”