She gives her head a slow shake. "It would have been a betrayal, I suppose. Or so it seemed to me. Now, of course-well, now I wonder if things might have been different if I had told him."

From the hallway, the clock is tolling the tenth hour. Around us, the candlelight is the color of cognac. Upstairs, everyone else is asleep: Charlotte and Father Time and the law students. And Charles, turned as usual on his left side, dead to the world.

"May the twenty-second," I say.

"Yes," she says, raising her eyes suddenly toward mine. "Eighteen days before that boy died. There's some wine, Hector. On the buffet."

A bottle of Beaune, still breathing. The act of setting it before her carries me back to my first encounter with Vidocq. He was seated in this very chair, sloshing down wine and raw potato and, for all his filthy manners, making the room seem shabbier than him.

"The night before that boy died," says Mother, "your father came to me. It was just after supper. He was very plain, very brief. He told me he had business to take care of that very evening. Very important business, he said, the nature of which he couldn't divulge except to say-how did he put it?-it was not without danger. Oh, and there was a good possibility he might not return, and if he didn't come back by morning, then I was to take you and leave at once for my uncle's in Grenoble. Don't even stay to pack, he said. Leave at once."

She raises the glass to her lip, rests it there a few seconds.

"He even gave me money for the trip: a bag of silver! And then he kissed me good-bye. And he left. I suspect he didn't want to draw things out any longer than he needed to. In case his resolve failed.

"Well, I ask you, how was I to sleep after that performance? And to make matters worse, that very night, you came down with a fever. Roasting with it, you didn't even have the strength to cry. So I held you and . . ." Her eyes widen at the memory. "I rocked you asleep. Yes, and I set you in your crib, and I didn't want to leave you, so I-I lay down on the f loor next to you. And I think I must have fallen asleep myself because I didn't hear him come back.

"He was standing in the doorway. It must have been around three in the morning. I saw him, I-I couldn't do anything. I couldn't even get off the f loor. And then he spoke, it was only three words. All is well, he said. He looked down at you, asleep in your crib. He touched you on the brow. And then he went to bed.

"As for me, well, I never even got off the f loor. I lay there till morning."

She runs her finger round the rim of her wineglass.

"Well," she says, "two days passed, and the papers were full of the dauphin's death. I read the news to your father over breakfast, and of course, the whole time I was watching him to see how he reacted. But he never f linched. Never said a word. And still-I don't know how, exactly-but I could feel it, the change in him. The change in everything.

"He'd staked so much, you see, on keeping that boy alive. And when he couldn't-oh, nothing seemed to matter to him anymore. He began by dropping his patients, one by one. The wealthiest first. Before the year was out, he'd resigned his hospital post. At which time he told me he desired to be a glass grinder."

She shakes her head, as if the news were a minute old.

"Unusual sort of career. Well, I knew then what my own career was to be. I was to become one of those helpless, sad women. I used to notice them when I was young. It seemed to me their lives had slipped away when they weren't looking, and the only thing they could do was"-she contemplates her silverware, strewn across the tabletop- "polish."

She picks up a pierced serving spoon. Watches her image dance in and out of the light.

"You should know something, Hector. When your father came to me-the night before that boy died-he left me a letter."

Well, here's how it is. The things people tell you are fragile in direct relation to their being vital. So it is now. As soon as I hear of this letter, I don't dare say another word. Anything but silence could kill it. For another minute, Mother is silent, too, swirling her wine.

"He said I was to open it only if he didn't return. Otherwise, I was to burn it unread."

"Did you?"

"Of course. I did exactly as he asked. Tossed it straight in the kitchen fire."

You have to be leaning toward the candle to catch the glimmer in her iris.

"The envelope I tossed," she says. "The letter . . ."

A nd w hat a wonde r is this. The thing that everything's been building to has been lying on the table the entire time, not two inches from a pile of teaspoons. A rectangle of grease-stained parchment: it might have been an old menu or a handbill.

"Take it, Hector. What do I want with it anymore?"

And still I can't touch it. Any more than I can look away from it. "He gave up everything," she says. "Everything we'd ever worked

for, and he never . . ."

Her hand f lies to her mouth. Stays there a good half minute before she trusts herself to speak again.

"So I gave up, too. I gave up trying to please him. Trying to know him."

Gazing at that paper one last time, she plucks it from the table surface and drops it in my hand. Closes my fingers round it.

"I'm hoping you'll have better luck than I did," she says.

The candle by her elbow has burned down to a stub. Neither of us moves to replace it, and gradually, the light contracts into a hard corona, and the air round it thrums like a heart.

"I never thought I would end up like this," says Mother. "No, I definitely had something else in mind. I just can't remember what it was."

Very slowly I rise from my chair. I stand there for some time, deciding whether or not to kiss her good night. This is the course I take: