Chapter Text
The next day, Javert was sent east on horseback with dust in his eyes and his orders in his uniform coat. Somehow, parts of Paris still stank of blood and ash, and the Prefecture was desperate to stamp out the last glowing embers of rebellion. All the way to Nogent-sur-Marne, Javert followed rumours of fugitives and hidden arms with the silent urgency of a man who did not believe in ghosts but had begun to see them all the same.
When he returned to rue Plumet, exhausted and hungry, he found that Cosette’s calm was entirely gone.
Toussaint pulled the door open before he even raised his hand to knock, and the look upon her dark, solemn face alone told him something had gone awfully wrong. Her brow was pinched and her mouth was drawn into a line of such taut composure it might have been sewn shut.
“M’sieur l’Inspecteur,” she said quickly, and stepped aside. “Ma’mselle Cosette is unwell.”
Javert stepped into the foyer of Valjean’s house and plucked off his leather gloves with slow, smooth motion, as if doing so might somehow steady the uneasy flicker already beginning in his chest. Toussaint’s voice dropped and was almost conspiratorial.
“She collapsed into her nerves, M’sieur — around the Angelus, I think. At first, I blamed the heat, or perhaps fatigue. But no.”
Javert pulled off his hat and handed it over, tilting his head slightly, waiting.
“Mam’selle Cosette knelt in prayer just before the Angelus.” Toussaint continued her report in a low rush, moving to attend to Javert’s gloves and hat, then twining her own fingers fretfully. “She had her rosary in hand, M’sieur, very quiet, very still. But then something seemed to… break within her. She went quite silent, not from peace, but from —” she paused, searching for the word, her eyes glistening a bit, “—from a sort of absence, M’sieur. She would not answer me; only stared at the floor. She has taken no broth and no water. No tea. Not even the barley infusion I offered her just now.”
Javert’s jaw tensed. He clicked his teeth and let out a low breath. Toussaint tossed up her hands in frustration before her apron.
“She shakes this evening,” she said. “In her hands, her mouth. No fever, M’sieur. I felt her brow, but she trembles still. She has said no word to me in three hours, save for a prayer mumbled now and then, like she’s talking in her sleep, though she is awake.”
“Thank you, Toussaint.” Javert nodded curtly, then moved toward the stairs. Upon the landing, he paused a moment, his fingers resting lightly on the slightly worn banister, before continuing upward at a deliberate pace.
The claustrophobic, warm air of the upper floor was hushed and thick with the scent of beeswax and lavender. The door of Cosette’s bedchamber had been left ajar, perhaps deliberately so, and he approached it quietly. Through the small opening, he could just glimpse her little figure upon the bed, turned sideways, the line of her crêpe-clad shoulder rising above the clean sheets like a ridge against the faintest golden spill of late-afternoon light. Javert froze in the threshold, feeling just as much a monstrous interloper now as when he had spied upon her earnest prayers the night of Valjean’s death.
Cosette lay motionless on her side with her knees slightly drawn up, but she was not sleeping. Her hands were clasped beneath her chin in too childlike a posture, the knuckles pressed together until they whitened at the joints. She was not clad in a nightgown; her black mourning dress was still fastened at the collar. The black ribbon at the back of her hair had come loose, and her long blonde hair draped almost oddly like a halo around the pillowcase.
Her lips moved faintly. Javert leaned in, straining to hear as the brittle rasp of thirsty breath emerged and she whispered,
“No, Madame, I beg you… I am sorry… Papa, Papa… Papa… away…”
Her wide eyes were open, fixed not on the door or the window, but on some distant point in the wallpaper’s pattern, as if she were counting the flowers there like rosary beads for penance. Her dilated pupils did not waver. Her already pale complexion was utterly drained of colour except for twin pink flushes on her cheekbones. One slipper had fallen from her foot and lay discarded on the rug beside the bed, toe pointed sideways like the limp paw of an animal, leaving her stockinged foot dangling.
Cosette did not turn her head; she did not seem to register him at all.
He remained there in the doorway for longer than he knew he ought to do, longer than was proper, watching the barely perceptible movement of her chest and the near-inaudible repetition of her prayer. This moment was not holy, he knew. Javert was not at all a holy man, but he could tell well enough that this was mechanical, that the words passed her lips like the whirring teeth of a clock whose hands no longer moved. He drew a breath but did not speak, for it would do no good to say anything to her just now. Anyway, what would he have said? He stepped back soundlessly and pulled the door shut behind him with a little click.
At the bottom of the staircase, Toussaint looked up from where she stood in the shadow of the grandfather clock, her hands clenching furiously in her apron. Javert nodded to her and spoke without raising his voice.
“I can see plainly, Toussaint, that Mademoiselle Cosette is overstimulated in her grief. Exhausted. Do not try to wake her to conversation, nor make her see reason now. Leave her broth, or warm milk, or tea. Put it beside the bed, and speak gently when you must, but do not press her.”
“Of course, Monsieur,” Toussaint murmured formally, dipping into a deep curtsey. “But… shouldn’t she be seen?”
“Yes.” Javert agreed, and he was already reaching for his hat from the hook. “She must be attended at once.”
“Will you send for someone, then, M’sieur?” Toussaint hesitated just a bit. “There is a doctor for ladies in the rue de l’Homme Armé. At Number Eleven there. A messenger…?"
“I will fetch him myself, immediately.”
Toussaint opened her mouth to protest, likely with some sort of polite reminder to the policeman in staying in the house that he had only just returned from work, was clearly fatigued, and hadn’t yet eaten dinner, but she quickly seemed to think the better of it. Javert had already set his hat firmly upon his head and was shrugging into his greatcoat, for a very slight chill was coming with the night. He gave Toussaint a stout nod.
“If she does stir, or asks after me, tell her I have been away at police work and will return before dark with a doctor, and that there is no cause to be afraid.”
Toussaint gave him a bit of a strange look at that, and Javert knew why at once. Why would Cosette ask after him? She scarcely knew him. He was surely no source of comfort for her. But Toussaint nodded quickly, and Javert did not meet her gaze, choosing instead to quickly stride out of Valjean’s house and into the street.
When he did, he found that the air was still heavy with humidity and that the lamps were not yet lit, and that the gutters were still streaked with faint soot from rebellious fires long since extinguished and ordinary muck of the city. His uniform boots struck the cobblestones with brisk determination. He did not yet allow himself to think any semblance of coherent thought just now, for he was set to a task of necessity. A girl was ill, and he would summon care for her.
He passed four houses and the remains of a charred lamppost before the lie began to splinter.
This was not police duty, his thoughts spat at him. Not really, entirely. And what he had seen in that upstairs bedroom was not ordinary grief, nor mere female nervousness, nor even religious melancholy. It was the collapse of something far more profound, something held up by threadbare hope and too many years of denial. He had seen it once in the face of a prisoner the morning before execution, in the face of Fantine herself, and this morning in the mirror.
The sky had dimmed into a bruised cerulean by the time Javert reached the rue de l’Homme Armé. The narrow street, twisted as an old man’s spine, lay tucked between crooked buildings and glowed dimly beneath the flicker of lamps now lit, and a grimy dust clung to the air in slowly unspooling ribbons.
Javert reached Number Eleven, the address to which Toussaint had sent him. The brass placard beside the turquoise door was polished to a lurid shine and read, in ostentatious lettering: Dr Gustave Chavigny — Médecin des Dames — Maladies Nerveuses & Constitutionnelles. Javert exhaled once through his nose, his brow furrowing. Physician to the Ladies. Nervous and constitutional ailments. The wording was just vague enough to be dignified, and just vulgar enough to be entirely understood. He rapped the brass knocker twice, and the door was opened expeditiously. A bright-faced young maid blinked up at him with confusion that bordered on alarm. His uniform still bore the soot and sweat of the day, and the sun was already down. His presence surely alarmed her, so he said in a gruff and matter of fact tone,
“The doctor is needed. Urgently.”
The maid stepped aside to admit him, taking his hat and coat at once, and he was shown into a too-warm salon with overstuffed armchairs and drapes the color of crushed berries. The aromas assaulted Javert’s nostrils first — too-sweet almond oil from furniture polish and clove from potpourri, undercut faintly by an odour of old medicine and scented pomade. Upon the walls, portraits of pale, scowling men in frock coats looked down, and a yellow canary in a gilded cage let out a trill.
Dr Gustave Chavigny entered as if onto a stage.
“Ah! A policeman in my parlour!” he cried, spreading his arms wide. He was much shorter than Javert, and far rounder. The bottle green of his velvet tailcoat strained across his gut, and his waistcoat of brilliant blue brocade was visibly one button too tight. He smelled overpoweringly of violet water. His beige trousers, quite tight round his fat legs, disappeared into high-polished black shoes that clicked with every self-important step.
“Might I presume, Monsieur l’Inspecteur, this summons is not for a professional infraction - for of course, I am doctor of impeccable distinction - but for a matter of the flesh?” Chavigny gave a pleased laugh and pointed toward the sideboard. “A drink, perhaps? Cognac?”
Javert shook his head once. Chavigny sighed.
“No? What a pity. I am always in the mood and searching for an excuse.”
“Monsieur le Docteur, there is a young woman in need of medical care,” Javert said flatly.
Chavigny paused in mock astonishment, as though being informed for the first time of his trained purpose, but then raised a brow and clucked his tongue.
“A young woman, you say? Yes, Paris is absolutely riddled with them, Inspector… Javert, isn’t it? Well. Let us away.” He waddled to a cabinet and began gathering instruments into a black bag. “Now. What might be the trouble with this young woman?”
Javert hesitated, and Chavigny peered over his shoulder as he placed a glass vial and a silver spoon into his bag. He flashed Javert a strange smirk.
“Ah. I presume she has grown pale, delicate, and inclined to religious ecstasy or sudden fits of silence? This is France, after all; the bloody aftermath of a revolution - or an attempted one - does tend to make the dear creatures collapse like broken lace, does it not?”
Javert said nothing at all to that. He straightened his spine and squared his jaw and allowed Chavigny to misread his silence as agreement. He watched as the doctor plucked some smelling salts from a cupboard and dropped them into his bag and blathered on,
“Yes, yes. Poor little lambs, crumbling at the first sign of disobedient men or divine wrath. But we must not blame them, my dear Inspector. No. It is the uterus! That ancient, wandering, cursed little malefactor.”
He chuckled again, this time at his own perceived wit, and cinched his medical bag with a theatrical snap. He whirled on a foot, though he was rotund enough to nearly toppled, and he leaned upon his shelf a bit ungracefully to steady himself before he insisted,
“Come along, then, Monsieur l’Inspecteur. Lead me to your invalid.”
Javert turned and strode out of the man’s office without a word. He did not hold the door. They walked rather than taking a cab or whatever carriage Chavigny might have possessed, for the city was cramped and it was not too far, so Javert working on foot as escort was much quicker. His long strides made the distance between them unnatural, but Chavigny chattered on, undeterred by Javert’s very obvious disinterest.
“Now, Inspector,” he huffed as he waddled along with exertion, “are you quite certain this is not a case of spiritual possession? I have been beaten more than once this week alone by the clergy, you see! Would you believe it… just yesterday, a Carmelite girl began speaking in tongues and wouldn’t stop until the priest threw holy water at her. But then? Silence! Holy silence.”
Javert did not look back, choosing instead to fix his eyes forward in a glare and to rather snarl, “There are no demons, Monsieur le Docteur. This is a medical case. She is the daughter of a man who died two days ago. Her name is Cosette.”
“Hmm. Cosette,” Chavigny repeated, as though mouthing a bonbon. “Pretty name. Pretty girl? So often, Inspector, girls like that often simply require a firm voice and a tonic. Or it can be that they require… a gentler hand… when warranted. You understand what I mean, I’m sure.”
Javert slowed his steps, not enough to make a scene, just enough to rein in the tightening fury clawing its way up his spine and making his cheeks flush hot, his throat tighten.
Chavigny did not notice, it seemed. “The awful trouble with grief, of course, is how indulgent it becomes to the fairer sex, especially to girls and women raised in softness. I treat half the widows of the Marais, you know. It is exhausting! Every week, a new episode of collapsed nerves. A direct but delicate approach is used, very respectable. And afterward, I tell them all: take tea, a warm bath, a touch of valerian, and remember you are blessed to be still alive.”
Javert struggled to keep his steps and breath steady as they turned onto rue Plumet. He said nothing as they reached Valjean’s gate. He did not knock at the door; he used the key he had been given by Toussaint that morning and opened it himself.
Toussaint stood just inside, her dark eyes darting between the two men. Her face stiffened at the sight of Chavigny. He was not, perhaps, the vision of a healer she might have been expecting for her mistress.
“Doctor Chavigny,” Javert introduced plainly. “He will attend Mademoiselle Cosette. Show him up.”
“Yes, Monsieur,” Toussaint murmured, giving an obedient, if slightly hesitant and stiff, curtsey.
Chavigny beamed just a bit too broadly, swept off his beaver skin top hat, and gave a short bow. “Ah, what a charming home. You have the look of order here achieved, Madame. Yes, I quite approve. Well, this certainly is not the cause of the Mademoiselle’s distress. So. Where shall I find the little dove?”
“Upstairs, Monsieur. First door on the left. I shall take you. Come with me, please.” Toussaint glanced back at Javert with a look of horror and muttered under her breath, “ M pa fè konfyans nan zoli a… ”
Javert, for his part, stood stock-still as Chavigny waddled toward the stairs, his polished shoes tapping an irregular beat.
The dining room was much too quiet, the air much too still, and the small, precise ticking of the damned mantle clock struck Javert’s nerves like a metronome out of rhythm.
He had fetched Dr Gustave Chavigny himself. He had escorted the man back through narrow streets as dusk had cloaked itself upon Paris, had opened the gate and unlocked the door and watched that fat little leech greet Toussaint with the self-satisfaction of a man who fancied himself indispensable. And then Javert had watched him mount the stairs with greedy, lurching steps, all the while breathing through clenched teeth to avoid retching at the lingering cloud of violet perfume the doctor left in his wake.
He ought not to have left him alone with her. He had promised to protect her. Even now, sitting here in the dining room, jacket off, in his own sweat-damp shirt sleeves, with his boots dirty from a day on horseback, collar loosened like some peasant drunkard, he knew it. He had handed Cosette, who lay upstairs like a broken porcelain doll, trembling with the echo of a grief so profound it had stripped her of appetite, of proper prayer, of focused gaze, into the care of a mean creature who treated female nerves as some excuse for medical debauchery.
Chavigny had confirmed it, Javert growled at himself. Not outright, of course, but Javert was not a fool. He was a grown man. He knew what twisted exploits doctors ennobled themselves to in the name of extracting women from their peculiar dangers.
And on the walk here, he had heard quite enough, between the doctor’s smirking quips and veiled euphemisms, to know exactly what sort of treatment men like Chavigny performed upon girls like Cosette at times such as these. Paroxysms. That was the term used, Javert knew well. A conjured convulsion of the womb to realign the humours, soothe the mind, purge the grief. A cure, Chavigny had implied, for too much softness. A restoration of good sense by way of a skilled doctor’s hands.
Ministrations, doctors carefully called it. With delicate touches smoothed by oils and with pompous invocations of Hippocrates as defence, a man who reeked of violet and clove had taken his bag of instruments and gone upstairs to touch her. To finger her in the name of God and medicine.
Javert swallowed hard. The gleaming amber cognac still filled his glass and reflected the faint flicker of the candelabra, but he could not bring himself to raise it to his lips. He set it aside, leaned forward, and rested his elbows rudely upon the table, feeling the heat of his own breath in his collar and the dull pulse at the base of his skull like a hammer. This room, this space in Valjean’s house, smelled strangely of ash and lavender and a trace of someone else’s tea long gone cold. His jaw tensed until it ached. This was not police work. This was not procedural duty.
Cosette was a girl who had been beaten in an inn until her bone marrow learned to flinch. She was a girl who had learned to hide over and again with the skilful precision of a holy automaton, an angel in constant fitful flight. She had been buried away from Javert himself for years in a convent, kept in this house with its jasmine-filled garden as though she herself were the illegal secret. She had not been prepared at all for the world, and now, she had no father and no map for where to turn her fear, and she was in all manner of danger.
And upstairs, just now, right this very moment, there was a man who called himself a physician and considered it his moral and medical responsibility to violate her living body in the guise of medical treatment. There was a man twining his fingers against her to exorcise her grief.
Javert stood up so quickly that the cognac sloshed, the glass almost toppling over. He righted it upon the table with a little thud. His shoulders, always taut when properly dressed in his uniform, were locked like stone now as he turned toward the stairs. But he did not move as a man returning to check on a patient. He ran, sprinting like a man desperate to salvage life from a fire.
He only hesitated at the door for the briefest of moments, because he heard two voices making equally horrific noises: Chavigny’s was grunting like a beast, and Cosette’s was squealing softly in what could only be described as confused terror. That was enough for Javert to fling himself over the threshold and into Cosette’s bedchamber with no regard whatsoever for propriety, though he did turn away at once to fix his eyes upon the wallpaper and hissed furiously,
“Cease your ministrations at once, Monsieur le Docteur. I assure you, they are not curative in this case. You may go; the maid will remunerate you downstairs.”
“Oh, indeed? How… disappointing. I had just begun to properly attend the Mademoiselle.” Chavigny sounded oddly breathless for a practitioner whose treatments were meant, in Javert’s understanding, to exhaust the patient alone. Javert’s neck tightened strangely and his fingers flexed at his sides; it took every bit of control he had to remain facing Cosette’s wall, knowing well that she was exposed just now. He blinked and mumbled quickly,
“As I said, Dr Chavigny, you are dismissed, if you pleased.”
“M-Monsieur l’Inspecteur?”
Her voice struck him through like an arrow. There was a tremor in it, to be certain, and yet she sounded quite sure in summoning him, and so Javert slowly turned, and when he did, he was utterly horrified to see the Good Doctor hurrying to stuff himself back into his too-tight trousers and button the placket back up whilst Cosette gripped her boutis quilt tightly round herself like a shroud. Her wide eyes found Javert’s and she shook her head just a little, pleading with him silently. She did not scream, though how she managed not to do so, Javert had no idea.
“Ministrations,” he hissed, the word sour and sharp on his tongue now, and he found himself crossing the bedchamber in three long strides until he had reached Chavigny. His body - aging, perhaps, but still very strong - acted entirely of its own accord then. Before he knew what he was doing, he had seized Chavigny’s silly roundness in his fists and tossed him harshly toward the wall, and the other man crumpled a bit before steadying himself, a look of shock registering upon his face before he insisted,
“Inspector! I assure you, I was only doing my professional -”
“Lies,” Javert snarled, looming over the shorter man and jabbing a finger against his starched collar. “I am an officer of the law. I have known many doctors; I have never known one who has found it necessary to disrobe in order to perform his profession, nor to groan like a bear whilst alleviating a woman’s nerves. You have precisely ten seconds to explain yourself, Monsieur.”
He took a half step back, his heart hammering a tattoo behind his ribs, and for some reason, a back corner of his mind registered how sweaty and tired and hungry he was. It didn’t really matter just now, but he didn’t look or sound professional himself, he knew, standing here hovering over Chavigny. Or perhaps he did. The terror in the man’s eyes told him that perhaps he did. Chavigny touched at his brow and whispered in a desperate rush,
“I did not violate the girl, I swear it! There was no carnal entry. None!”
Javert narrowed his eyes and glanced over his shoulder to where Cosette sat upon the bed, rocking slowly with her eyes squeezed shut and ignoring them entirely.
“Mademoiselle Cosette?” Javert prompted quietly, but she ignored him. He roughly shoved at Chavigny then, so hard that the other man stumbled once more. He crossed the room, much more slowly this time, walking heel to toe so that his boots were quiet on the floorboards, and when he reached the bedside, he realised Cosette was whispering to herself.
“I did not… no… Papa will come and…”
“Mademoiselle Cosette?” he said again, and suddenly her eyes sprang wide open and she gasped a short, sharp breath, turning her face to him as though he had awakened her by dropping her into cold water.
“Yes, Monsieur?”
He held up his hands carefully and curled up his lips just a little out of instinct before resettling his body and face, then stepped back from the bed and glanced to where Chavigny stood at the wall looking far too indignant. Javert gestured to him and asked Cosette,
“That man. That… erm. That doctor. What did he do to you?”
Cosette just shook her head minutely and murmured, “Please just send him away.”
Javert blinked and shifted where he stood. “I must know, Mademoiselle, whether or not he has simply undertaken unpleasantries permitted by his profession or whether he has committed a crime, you understand.”
“Oh.” She looked, suddenly, as though she had gone somewhere else entirely, and when she spoke, her voice had lowered significantly. “I had never seen one. It is very ugly, as it happens. I had not thought to see one until my wedding day. He put it upon my thigh. He said it would help to steady my nerves, Monsieur l’Inspecteur. I confess I was indeed quite frightened. But then you came into the room. I am not familiar with medicine or the law. I do not know…”
She trailed off then and lowered herself to her bed, curling beneath her blankets, and she mumbled a bit desperately, in a crackling, higher tone,
“I want my Papa, you see, and I only feel it now, but I am very hungry.”
“I shall have Toussaint bring you buttered bread at once, Mademoiselle,” Javert said numbly, and he glared across the room at Chavigny.
Suddenly he could see it all, everything that would transpire if he pursued charges against this man on behalf of Cosette. In so many cases, this would go absolutely nowhere, of course. Countless women had undoubtedly suffered identical indignity under Chavigny himself and men just like him. But Javert could easily bring Chavigny to the attention of the parquet. Despite her age and condition, and despite the witnesses of Toussaint and Javert against Chavigny, Cosette would be expected to give testimony before a juge d’instruction, which seemed a profoundly unfair way to compound the many miseries she had already been made to suffer. Beyond the embarrassment and discomfort of her doing so, it was a socially wretched and potentially damaging thing to do for a young woman. Of course, the punishment to Chavigny for an offense such as this would be grave - years in prison, hard labour, or even exile. And though the thought of that made Javert’s lip curl into a little sneer, he knew very well that he could do nothing now to further punish Cosette.
So he rushed back across the room with Chavigny’s black leather bag in his hand and snatched so hard at the round man’s waistcoat that the doctor yelped in alarm. Javert dragged him angrily toward the doorway of the bedchamber and out through the upstairs corridor, hurrying down the staircase and paying no heed at all to the way Chavigny stumbled more than once upon the steps. In the foyer, he did not allow the man to retrieve his hat. He gripped him close and growled down at him through clenched teeth,
“Leave Paris. Do you understand me, man? There are many cities in France. Many cities outside of France. But you must leave Paris at once, and you ought to become… a cobbler, or a baker, because if I ever lay eyes upon you again, or hear word of you laying hands upon women again…” He shut his eyes and was swamped cruelly, suddenly, by thoughts of Jean Valjean breaking his parole, by thoughts of Fantine, and, bizarrely, by the glint of a ring in the mud. He opened his eyes once more and nodded.
“Leave. Now. And never return.” He wrenched the door open with one hand then and shoved Gustave Chavigny so roughly outside that the man fell down several steps at once, dropping his bag and spilling its contents. Javert did not allow his gaze to linger; he simply shut the door and locked it, and when he turned to see Toussaint standing and holding Chavigny’s beaver-skin top hat, he murmured, “Burn that, Toussaint.”
She gave a stout nod. “Yes, Monsieur.”
Javert climbed the staircase again, this time with steady, controlled steps.