She was right, as it happened. Her own mother didn't care a lick about the fact that Éponine had nearly been raped. She only cared that, since Éponine was in protective custody, she had one fewer mouth to feed. And Monsieur Jondrette, the consummate criminal, had refused to even see Javert, afraid he was there to arrest him.
Javert had gone next door to where Monsieur Marius Pontmercy was said to live, and he knocked on the young man's door. When the door opened, a surprisingly well-dressed student type opened the door, and Marius frowned as he asked,
"May I help you, Inspector?"
"I come with a message from a mademoiselle called Éponine," said Javert carefully, and Marius looked mildly interested. He'd been in the middle of tying a cravat when Javert had arrived, and he continued at it as he asked,
"Is 'Ponine all right? Got herself into some fresh trouble, did she?"
"She wants you to know…" Javert hesitated and then glanced next door to the hovel where Éponine's parents lived. He sighed and said to Marius, "She wanted you to know that she was in trouble, but she is being kept safe. She is not in jail."
"Oh. All right. Well, tell her I said hullo, if you should see her." Marius flashed a little smile to Javert and said, "I hope she's warm and fed, wherever she is."
"She is," Javert confirmed. "She is safe. She wanted you to know that she is safe. She thought you might care."
"Well, of course I care, Inspector," said Marius, almost cheekily. "I'm glad to hear 'Ponine is doing better wherever she is than she does here. Will you see her to tell her hullo for me?"
"I…" Javert did not wish to divulge enough about Éponine's location to reveal whether or not he'd see her. He gulped and just shook his head a little, not wanting to lie, and he just told Marius, "I shall try to see that your greeting is passed along."
At the end of his shift, Javert went back to the station to write up a one-page report noting that he had gone to see the family of his charge. He sat at a desk writing when another inspector, Lemieux, walked up and loomed over him.
"Javert," said the mustachioed Lemieux playfully, "I hear you've got a pretty young thing in your house."
"I've got a crime victim in protective custody," Javert sniffed, writing a few more words.
"My wife would lose her mind if I brought a seventeen-year-old girl home and called it work," Lemieux laughed.
"Yes, well, I haven't got any wife," Javert reminded Lemieux, "and, anyway, this particular crime victim was in need of sincere and honest shelter."
"You are a good man of the law, Javert," said Lemieux, grinning like a fool. "Far better than the rest of us."
"I only serve what is right," Javert insisted, "and I will do my duty."
"I'm sure she sleeps soundly." Lemieux was more serious now, and he said carefully, "I did not mean to goad or tease. I know well that you are a decent man."
"Thank you, Lemieux. Go get some sleep," said Javert, and Lemieux laughed.
"You go get some sleep," he said. "I'm just coming in for a morning shift."
Then he walked away from Javert's desk.
"Olives? Real olives?" Éponine seemed utterly shocked by the food that Javert had brought home, including marinated olives. Javert smirked a little as she ate one and set the pit down, but then he had to pause, for she made a rather beautiful face and an even more beautiful noise when she chewed the olive and swallowed it.
"I saw your mother," Javert informed Éponine, "and Monsieur Pontmercy. I informed them of your safety. This morning, just an hour or so ago."
Éponine gave him an expectant look as she took another olive, and she asked carefully, "Did they… what did they say, Inspector?"
"Not very much," he conceded, and though Éponine looked mildly wounded, she did not seem surprised one bit. She ate the second olive and insisted,
"You must get to bed at once, Inspector Javert. You must be terribly tired."
"Are you my maid, or my nanny?" he laughed, and she smiled a little as her earlier sadness dissipated a bit. She pulled out a chair for him and said,
"Eat, Inspector, and let me take off and clean your boots."
"Éponine," he protested, but he sank into the chair just the same. He took a few bites of ham and bread and a few olives, and then Éponine sank down onto the ground before him. She pulled off his boots one at a time, which felt so wondrously freeing that Javert actually groaned a little. When she walked away and went at them by the door with a brush, Javert watched her as he kept eating. He drank some red wine and chewed at an olive as she stood, and he decided that her dark green dress was his favourite. She had a mustard yellow one and a coral-coloured one, too, but he liked the dark green on her best.
Why, he wondered, was he thinking about what dresses he preferred upon her?
"Let me go warm your bed, Inspector," she said. "I can do it now without setting the house afire."
He curled up half his mouth at that and let her go, shutting his eyes for a moment at the thought of her warming up his sheets with the pan. He cleared his food and swigged down the rest of his wine, and then he went into his bedroom as Éponine moved the warmer constantly and slowly around the bed to avoid scorching his sheets.
He began to unbutton his uniform jacket where he stood, and he saw Éponine glance up from her work as if to marvel at him doing it. She finished warming the bed as he hung up his uniform jacket, and then he set to work on his cravat and his shirt sleeves. She went into his wardrobe and fetched his nightshirt for him, and when she brought it over, he took it from her hand, both of them hesitating for a moment as she handed it over. He stared down at her, thinking she was awfully pretty, and he whispered,
"Thank you."
"May I eat a few more olives, Inspector?" she asked quietly, and he quirked a little smile at her as he nodded and said,
"You may have all the rest of the olives, Éponine. Every last one."
She just stared then, her chestnut eyes boring into his. She wore her dark hair braided over one shoulder, not at all anything resembling the styles of fashionable ladies. She was not a fashionable lady. Javert did not find beauty, though, in the primped-up women walking the streets of Paris. He did find it before him in the fresh-faced girl with the wide brown eyes and the full lips and the…
Stop it, Javert! He took the night shirt and gulped hard, averting his eyes, and he murmured,
"Why don't you go eat them now?"
"They didn't care, then?" Éponine asked, and he knew she meant her mother and Marius Pontmercy.
"Monsieur Pontmercy insisted that he did care," Javert confessed, "and he said to tell you, 'hullo.'"
"Hullo. That is rather like he says it," Éponine smiled, and her eyes went a little misty. "D'you know, Inspector, I think sometimes that I'm in love with him."
"Are you?" he asked blandly, and he tried to understand why. The boy seemed distant, distracted. He was a student, or some moneyed sort, living in what appeared to be deliberate poverty. What was there to love? And, most bizarrely, the thought of Éponine being in love with that boy made Javert's stomach twist strangely, unpleasantly. He gulped and said,
"He was aloof, that boy."
"Aloof. Yes." Éponine nodded and looked away. "He never looked at me when he didn't have to."
"Your mother was less charitable, I must say," Javert said, and Éponine shrugged.
"One less mouth to feed for her."
"That's precisely what she said," Javert mumbled, staring at his nightshirt in his hands. He raised his eyes to Éponine and insisted, not even remotely for the first time, "Take this opportunity to make a new life for yourself, Éponine. Even when the threat of the Tappapieds has passed, your future is not in Gorbeau House. Surely you can see that. Your future is something greater than Gorbeau House, isn't it?"
"Could it be? I'm not certain." She looked sorrowful then, and she said, "I once had pretty dresses and pretty dolls, Inspector. Now look at me."
"Yes. Look at you. Standing before me in real clothes, in a real house, with olives waiting for you in the kitchen," said Javert almost harshly. Éponine seemed to have a little revelation then, and she smiled rather broadly as she nodded.
"Real clothes," she agreed, "with olives waiting in the kitchen. And for all that, I must give you my thanks, Inspector Javert. Please, forgive me…"
He was about to ask her what he was forgiving her for, but she stretched up onto her tip toes and reached for Javert's face, and she pulled him down just a little bit. She kissed the skin just beside his mouth, the part of his cheek near his lips, and she rubbed her fingers at his jaw. When she pulled back, he wanted more, which frightened him, but he just nodded at her.
Then she scurried away, red-faced, off to eat her olives, leaving Javert standing there breathless and shaking.