A Spark Unseen (22 page)

I didn’t answer. I was watching Joseph, who was still speaking, his eyes on mine. “He says after Jean-Michel left the silver shop, they were to meet regularly at Rue Trudon, but now Jean-Michel is not here. And he says there are men watching the house.”

I drew a quick breath. “English or French?”

“French,” Joseph replied directly. “They are …
discrets
.”

“The men are discreet,” Henri translated.
“Combien?”

“Trois,”
the man answered.

Three Frenchman watching the house. The emperor, then, not Mr. Wickersham. I retrieved the slip of paper I’d found beneath Lane’s bed, sliding it across the dining-room table until it lay beside the fish. “Does this mean anything to you?” I asked.

Joseph glanced at it and shook his head, pushing it back toward Henri, who told him what it said. The man frowned.
“Soyez prudent, Mademoiselle.”

“He says you should be careful, Miss Tulman,” said Henri.

“Ask him if he saw Mr. Babcock,” I said. “The small man who arrived in the carriage with me.”

When he had finished asking, Joseph spoke quickly. “Yes,” Henri replied for him. “He left with two of the men who had been watching. Early in the morning, the day before yesterday.”

I let out my breath. Mr. Babcock left with two Frenchman. So that crime was at the hands of the emperor, too. The fury that had accompanied my grief stretched out for the idea of Napoléon III like Uncle Tully’s snaking blue electricity was drawn to the next pole. Obviously the emperor must believe the weapon my uncle could produce was powerful indeed, much more valuable than one lawyer’s life. But how could he know that my uncle was not dead? Unless it was French agents that had opened Uncle Tully’s grave, and not Mr. Wickersham’s men?

Joseph was still talking. Henri interrupted with a quick question, listened, and then said, “He says it did not look like an unfriendly meeting. But he did not see the little man come back. I do not think he knows your friend is dead.”

Joseph’s face blanched at the word.
“Mort?”
he asked, looking back and forth between us. Henri spoke, evidently explaining while Joseph shook his head. When Henri had finished, the man spewed forth French at such a speed that I could not catch a word.

“He says your business is dangerous, that he worries for his family and Jean-Michel, and that he and his brothers will watch no more.” When Henri stopped talking, Joseph gave me one more long look and held out a calloused palm.

“He wishes you to give him the key, Miss Tulman,” said Henri.

“Wait. Ask him where we can find him, and will he come to us if he hears of Jean-Michel?”

This was done and Joseph said, “Rue Tisserand,” as he nodded. I put the key to the dining-room door in his hand. He said something quickly to Henri, unlocked the door, left the key in the lock, and after another moment I heard the front door slam. The slouching man was gone.

I turned to Henri. “What did he say? At the end?”

“He said that I should watch out for you, for Jean-Michel’s sake. That Jean-Michel used to talk of your beautiful hair.”

I got up and went to the sideboard, to see if the tea might still be hot, but mostly to keep Henri’s teasing eyes away from my face. I touched the red cap that sat there.

“Such amusing times I spend with you, Miss Tulman. Truly, it is never dull.”

I did not find it amusing in the slightest. Henri lit a cigarette. I let go of the hat, but did not turn around when I said, “Mr. Marchand, would you take me to the Tuileries? Are there public rooms?”

He blew out smoke. “I might take you, perhaps. If you are truthful with me.”

I turned around. “You think I am dishonest?”

“Maybe you do not lie, and yet you do not always tell the truth.”

“I can go to the Tuileries on my own.”

“No, Miss Tulman,” he said, teasing set aside. “No, I think you cannot.”

I thought of Mr. Babcock, canny and shrewd in his horrible waistcoat, and felt a sharp ache in my chest.

Henri asked, “Who are these Frenchmen that watch your house?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yet you thought they were perhaps English.”

“It seemed a logical question.”

“And who is this man Jean-Michel was looking for?”

I saw Ben Aldridge as I’d last seen him, his look of curiosity as I aimed the rifle scant seconds before his boat became a fireball. “He is no one. A dead man.”

Henri smiled as he blew a puff of smoke. “And you were also looking for a dead man, Miss Tulman. And now you seem to have found him.”

I had found nothing. Nothing that had brought him to me. I grabbed a handful of the red cap. Ten days since Lane had not returned to Mrs. Reynolds’s house, seven weeks he had lived there before that, and Mr. Wickersham had informed me of his death nearly two months ago. What had happened? He had left British employ and become the protégé of Mrs. Reynolds at about that time, that much was certain. But to what purpose? Certainly not to “pursue his art.” I knew Lane better than that. Could he have been arrested quietly, as a spy? Is that why Mr. Wickersham could or would not claim him? And yet Joseph had said he was to meet Lane six days ago at Rue Trudon, and Lane had been gone from Mrs. Reynolds’s for ten. Had he left on purpose? And if so, what had happened since? Joseph had not seemed aware of Lane’s ties to Britain or Mr. Wickersham, or anything concerning my uncle at all, but perhaps this was calculated as well. All Joseph had admitted was Lane’s dislike of the emperor, the man who had killed Mr. Babcock.

My thoughts swirled in confusion, and I felt the tears once again threatening my eyes.
“I do my utmost for the house of Tulman,”
Mr. Babcock had once said. And as Uncle Tully was at this moment sitting safe in his attic, that must have been exactly what Mr. Babcock had done. To the very end.

I looked up to find Henri watching me closely. All this time I had been still, squeezing the knitted yarn of the red cap. “Will you take me to the Tuileries?” I asked again. A flimsy clue at best, but it was all I had.

But before he could answer, Mrs. DuPont flung open the dining-room door. She was animated, flushed, actually suffused with a pale pink color that made her look distinctly … alive. I felt my eyes grow wide as she hurried to the table and handed me an envelope. Large, made of thick, pale ivory paper, and with a very official-looking seal pressed into red wax. I cracked the seal, looked over the contents without comprehension, and silently handed the letter to Henri.

He ran his eyes over the words and said, “I think there will be no need to escort you to the Tuileries today, Miss Tulman. You are invited there tomorrow. To the emperor’s ball. And you are invited by Napoléon himself.”

Mrs. DuPont erupted into excited speech that seemed to be for no one but herself while I looked again at the invitation. I saw my name now, formally inked in the midst of the print, and I felt the challenge, just as clearly as if I had been slapped on the cheek by my enemy’s glove. I had been called out. And then Mrs. Hardcastle was in the dining room, breathless, barely able to utter her words.

“Saw the royal messenger from the window, my dear. Is it so?”

I handed her the invitation. Henri stubbed out his cigarette and immediately pulled out another.

“It is so!” cried Mrs. Hardcastle. “Oh my, but won’t the Miss Mortimers be jealous! But what shall you wear, my dear? I’m certain you don’t have a thing. We’ll have to call in a seamstress, immediately, this very morning, or …”

I sat down at the table, trying to sift what I knew, to order, to sort, to calculate. What could I gain by facing the emperor? And yet, now that the enemy was clearly defined, what else was there? Despite all my best efforts, despite all that had happened, Uncle Tully was not safe, none of us were, and Lane was as lost to me as the day he left Stranwyne. And what of Uncle Tully? What if I left this house and did not return, like Mr. Babcock? Like Lane?

“Shall you go?” asked Henri, his voice low beneath the chatter. Mrs. Hardcastle was now discussing my clothing possibilities with Mrs. DuPont, of all people. I glanced at the invitation still in her hand, fluttering about as she talked, at the over-fancy, overconfident script that said my name. Nothing would be resolved by sitting at home. And I had been challenged. I turned to Henri.

“Will you escort me?”

He sighed, exhaling smoke. “I think I had better, Miss Tulman.”

And then the bell in the dining room rang, shrill and insistent.

I leapt to my feet. “I wonder what Mary could want,” I said over the ringing, snatching up Lane’s things and my skirts to go.

“Do you always run when your maid rings a bell, Miss Tulman?” Henri asked. I straightened my back.

“Almost always, Mr. Marchand. She’s a very good maid.”

I left him to chuckle in his self-imposed cloud.

F
or the next hours, my activities were polar extremes. I received a reply by telegram from Mr. Babcock’s offices, arranging for the transport of his body to the family burial plot in Westminster. And I was fitted for a dress, my perceived social standing high enough to gain me credit for the cloth. Mrs. Hardcastle, Mary, and a tiny French seamstress became an unlikely team, united in the common purpose of making me fit for an emperor I heartily despised. I could only hope the dress wouldn’t be the cause of my new life in a French debtor’s prison.

“Would you like to trade places with me, Marguerite?” I asked the child. She was sitting in the corner, one of the French fairy-tale books I’d found in my room propped open in her lap. I’d realized that these must be her books, that my grandmother’s room was a place she came often, but she was not reading this time. She was watching, wide-eyed, as I stood, arms over head in my underclothes, having swaths of cloth pinned all over me, listening to a frank discussion on certain aspects of my figure as if I were an interesting piece of horseflesh. “They’d never notice,” I whispered to her. I was rewarded with a giggle.

I’d never asked Mrs. DuPont about the comings and goings at the courtyard door — too many other worries had intervened — and she had never asked me about the bells that rang all over the house about once every hour when I was not above stairs. Curiosity seemed to be sadly lacking for the both of us, until on my way to the attic room after my fitting, I happened to glance out the round window on the upper floor. Far below, I saw a young man talking with Mrs. DuPont at the courtyard door. I watched as he put something slyly in her hand, perhaps a letter or something folded in paper.

I hurried down the stairs and around the landings, through the foyer, and into the back corridor. But Mrs. DuPont was no longer there, and there was no one at the door. She wasn’t in the kitchen either, only Mr. DuPont, staring dreamily at the wall, eating a bowl of porridge. I ducked away before he could see me and start one of our bizarre one-sided conversations, and found myself staring at the closed door to the servants’ quarters.

I was not actually lacking curiosity, far from it; the door to Mrs. DuPont’s room was a terrible temptation, even more so than the time I had succumbed and opened Lane’s. And this time I knew the house belonged to me. I reached out a hand for the door latch. For all of our posturing and squabbling over names, for all of her glorious dinners, hoping I would choose ease of service over actual authority in my own house, I was frightened of Mrs. DuPont. I did not understand her, could not make out where her allegiances lay except with the Bonapartes. Was her enthusiasm that of a loyal subject, or a more personal devotion? If she knew enough to lead the emperor’s agents to my uncle, surely she would have already done so? I put my hand on the latch.

Of course, she also might be choosing an income over the emperor, and there was the nexus of my fear. I was afraid of what Mrs. DuPont might do if she thought I couldn’t pay. And despite having searched through many of Mr. Babcock’s papers, the location of my money in Paris was still an enigma. I dropped my hand from her latch, and instead stepped out the back door and into the courtyard.

The sun was lowering, sinking down behind the steeply pitched roofs, and I could hear children in some other part of the garden, behind a screen of hedges, but that was not what captured my attention. I had come to see if there was any sign of the young man, and there he was, just a little way down the path, a large, strapping sort of lad with his pants tucked into his boots. But he was not with Mrs. DuPont. He was with Mary, and Mary was giggling in a way that showed perhaps one-third of the sense I knew her to possess.

The young man took one of Mary’s hands and kissed it before leaning forward to whisper in her ear. I felt my eyebrows rise. Mary Brown had always held strong opinions about her proper duties as my maid, but the role she’d felt most keenly was that of chaperone, a rather prudish, overprotective one, in my opinion. Mary would snap like a disgruntled goose if Lane’s skin ever brushed anything other than my hand. Not that we hadn’t outwitted her. Often. But we’d certainly never done so in public.

Mary caught sight of me and yanked her hand away, pushing the young man from her ear. The boy looked over his shoulder, grinned, made a motion as if he was tipping an invisible cap, whispered one last thing in Mary’s ear, making her giggle, and then trotted away down the path. I walked out to meet her, and Mary tossed up her chin, despite the fact that her freckles were disappearing beneath blotches of pink.

“Robert is a right nice young man,” she said with no preamble. “And you don’t say ‘Robert’ when you’re French, you say ‘Ro-bear’ like there’s a big, furry animal on the end of it. He brings the groceries to Mrs. DuPont, and he’s good to that Mr. DuPont, even though the man ain’t much of talker, if you take my meaning.”

“I thought you said there weren’t any groceries, Mary.”

“I said there weren’t any groceries that time, Miss. He’s a nice boy,” she said.