第42章 ALMOST A LADY(7)

The Prince very likely was asleep in his bed.The murderers must have been given entrance to his bedroom--I have no wish to ask how or by whom.They then threw themselves on the Prince, gripped him firmly, and could easily pin him down on his bed; then the most desperate and dexterous of the murderers suffocated him as he was thus held firmly down; finally, in order to make it appear that he had committed suicide and to hinder any judicial investigations which might have discovered the identity of the assassins, they fastened a handkerchief about their victim's neck, and hung him up by the espagnolette of the window.

And that, at all hazards, is about the truth of the death of the Duc de Bourbon and Prince de Conde.There was some official display of rigour in investigation by the Procureur; there was much play with some mysterious papers found a good time after the first discovery half-burned in the fireplace of the Prince's bedroom; there was a lot put forward to support the idea of suicide; but the blunt truth of the affair is that the Prince de Conde was murdered, and that the murder was hushed up as much as possible.Not, however, with complete success.There were few in France who gave any countenance to the theory of suicide.

The Prince, it will be remembered, had a practically disabled left arm.It is said that he could not even remove his hat with his left hand.The knots in the handkerchiefs used to tie him to the espagnolette were both complicated and tightly made.Impossible for a one-handed man.His bed, which at the time of his retiring to it stood close to the alcove wall, was a good foot and a half away from that wall in the morning.Impossible feat also for this one-handed man.It was the Prince's habit to lie so much to one side of the bed that his servants had to prop the outside edge up with folded blankets.On the morning when his death was discovered it was seen that the edges still were high, while the centre was very much pressed down.There was, in fact, a hollow in the bed's middle such as might have been made by some one standing on it with shoes on.It is significant that the bedclothes were neatly turned down.If the Prince had got up on a sudden impulse to commit suicide he ishardly likely, being a prince, to have attempted remaking his bed.He must, moreover, since he could normally get from bed only by rolling on his side, have pressed out that heightened edge.Manoury, the valet who loved him, said that the bed in the morning looked more as if it had been SMOOTHED OUT than remade.This would tend to support the theory of Dr Dubois.The murderers, having suffocated the Prince, would be likely to try effacing the effects of his struggling by the former method rather than the latter.

But the important point of the affair, as far as this chapter on it is concerned, is the relation of Sophie Dawes with it on the conclusion of murder.How deeply was she implicated? Let us see how she acted on hearing that there was no reply to Lecomte's knocking, and let us examine her conduct from that moment on.

Note that the Baronne de Feucheres was the first person whom Lecomte and the Prince's surgeon apprised of the Prince's silence.She rushed out of her room and made for the Prince's, not by the secret staircase, but by the main one.She knew, however, that the door to the secret staircase from the Prince's room was not bolted that night.This knowledge was admitted for her later by the Prince's surgeon, M.Bonnie.She had gone up to the Prince's room by the main staircase in order to hide the fact, an action which gives a touch of theatricality to her exhibited concern about the Prince's silence.

The search for documents spoken of by M.Pasquier in his letter to the King had been carried out by Sophie in person, with the aid of her nephew de Flassans and the Abbe Briant.It was a thorough search, and a piece of indecorousness which she excused on the ground of being afraid the Prince's executors might find a will which made her the sole heir, to the exclusion of the Duc d'Aumale.

Regarding the `accident' which had happened to the Prince on the 11th of August, she said it was explained by an earlier attempt on his part to do away with himself.She tried to deny that she had been at Saint-Leu at the time of the actual happening, when the fact was that she only left for Paris some hours later.

When, some time later, the Prince's faithful valet Manoury mademention of the fact that the Prince had wanted to put the width of the country between himself and his mistress, Sophie first tried to put the fear of Louis-Philippe into the man, then, finding he was not to be silenced that way, tried to buy him with a promise of employment.

It is beyond question that the Prince de Conde was murdered.He was murdered in a wing of the chateau in which he was hemmed in on all sides by Sophie's creatures.It is impossible that Sophie was not privy, at the least, to the deed.It is not beyond the bounds of probability that she was an actual participator in the murder.

She was a violent woman, as violent and passionate as she was determined.Not once but many times is it on record that she physically ill-used her elderly lover.There was one occasion, it is said, when the Prince suddenly came upon her in a very compromising position with a younger man in the park of one of his chateaux.Sophie, before the Prince could utter a protest, cut him across the face with her riding-whip, and finished up by thrashing him with his own cane.