Abigail (40 page)

“Did you know her?” Abigail asked.

“I thought I did, but of course it can’t be. She’d be over a hundred if she were alive still. But—the resemblance! Have we just seen a ghost, I wonder?”

“Whose?”

“An actress. Mademoiselle George.” He laughed at a memory. “During her last benefit, her absolutely final farewell benefit, she wasn’t content to sit in her box. She went behind the scenes and begged Arsène to let her go on and sing. But he told her to be content. ‘Ah,’ she said, knowingly, ‘if I were only ten years younger, you wouldn’t give me such an answer. If I were ten years younger I could give you the sort of night no man would ever forget!’ And d’you know how old she was? She was
eighty
!”

Abigail laughed and clasped his arm, marching with vigour now toward the gate. “Oh, Victor, you’re invincible, aren’t you? Nothing can quench your fire.”

“I am an old man,” he began. “And already…”

“No!” She shouted him down and would not let him continue.

But before that day was out, her question—are you safe in Paris?—was to be answered.

After a light lunch they went to the Gare du Nord to arrange theirjourney home. Abigail, wanting to show off a little, sent in her card, which still read
Lady Abigail Stevenson
,
to the stationmaster. He came out to greet her as if she were royalty—as, indeed, was any son or daughter of John Stevenson in the railway world. John had built many of the lines in Normandy and most of the line between this terminus and Le Havre; indeed, in the early 1840s he could not walk through the streets of Rouen without being pointed out a dozen times. Of course, the stationmaster assured them, he would supervise all the arrangements for their journey and there would be a special coach—the royalty coach—for them. And he would see that the best berth on the cross-channel steamer was made available. They settled their departure for a week that day.

Victor was suitably impressed; she felt highly pleased with herself as they walked over to the cab rank.

Before they were halfway across the concourse they heard a woman’s scream and turned to see a gang of men attacking a young girl and dragging her toward the exit. She was now calling, in English, “Help! Stop them! Please…someone help!”

Several people nearby began to intervene, until a policeman in uniform, apparently one of the gang, though Abigail had not noticed him, stepped forward and prevented them.

“That’s the morals police, you may be sure,” Victor said.

The girl, seeing that no one would now come to her aid, stopped struggling; but the men grew even more violent, pushing and kicking her forward while others held her back.

“I’m going to stop that,” Abigail said.

“D’you want me to take a hand?” Victor asked. “I will if you wish.”

She saw the fear in his eyes. “No,” she said. “Go back to César. Tell him what’s happened here. His father has lots of friends in the government. It could be very useful.”

“I’ll stay if you wish. I mean it.”

“No, darling. Don’t risk it. I’ll be all right. I’ll go straight to the prefecture.”

The men had passed through the swing doors at the head of the short stairway to the street. Moments later Abigail burst through the same doors in time to see the girl fall headlong down the stairs. One of the men, probably in the act of pushing her, fell too—but fell upon her. She screamed again, but this time in agony, not fear. The man who fell on her stood again and kicked her. “Get up, filth!” he shouted.

The girl lay whimpering.

“Stop that at once!” Abigail called out as she ran down to where the girl lay.

“If you want trouble, we’re the ones to give it you,” one of the men told her. He grabbed Abigail’s arm and held it in a vicious grip—a grip that could have compelled any girl to follow him to the police station.

“Careful!” a more prudent colleague warned, looking at Abigail. No one could mistake her for anything but an upper-class lady of considerable wealth.

“This garbage is a common whore, madame,” the observant man explained to Abigail. “She’s been infecting soldiers of the army of the Republic. We are only doing our duty.”

“Not true. Not true,” the girl moaned in English.

“You’ve broken one of her legs,” Abigail said.

The man lost patience with her. “She’ll get treatment,” he barked, and turning, signalled the others to continue. Between them they lifted the girl roughly, leaving the broken leg dangling, to crash on each step. The girl was beyond screaming; with a strangled whimper she passed out. They paid no further heed to Abigail’s commands or entreaties.

They bundled the unconscious girl over the street and threw her in on the floor of the police wagon. Then, with the satisfied air of men who had already done half a good day’s work, they climbed over her and lounged on the benches on each side. Abigail looked well at the face of each, horrified at the laughter in their eyes; she wanted to be sure of identifying them again. They were like hounds, grinning and panting at the fringe of a kill.

“To the prefecture,” she said to the first cabman in the rank.

The prefect received her at once, the moment she sent in her card.

“I know your father, my lady. I am from Rouen. The Earl has great respect in those parts.” He spoke in English.

She answered in French. “He is an old friend of Monsieur Rodet.”

He nodded. He understood. She told him what she had seen at the Gare du Nord and what she expected him to do. His thin smile vanished. His voice was grim as he said, “I shall investigate. If Lady Abigail will have the goodness to return in an hour?”

She spent the hour in a parlour in his apartments. She asked for paper and pencil and passed the time drawing likenesses of the men of the morals police. Then, in ink, she wrote a statement of what she had seen, thinking that if she had spent the last twenty-five years of her life developing both talents, drawing and writing, and their only use was in this hour, it was time well spent.

The prefect returned. “There has been an error, my lady,” he said. “A most unfortunate and regrettable error.” He buried her statement and drawings in a pile of papers as if they would not be needed now. “The girl is not a prostitute.”

“Even I could see that.”

“Then perhaps I should offer you a position among our morals police?” There was a new truculence in him. She became uneasy.

“The girl,” he went on, “was denounced by a jealous lover—a man she jilted here in Paris. He has just confessed.”

“You’ve arrested him? He’ll be punished?”

“No, my lady. We view it as a domestic fracas, soon forgotten. In France we’ve developed a
tolérance
for violence in crimes of passion, as you may know.”

“I know that the violence I saw, Monsieur le Prefect, had nothing of the colour of passion. But it assuredly was a crime. A cold and calculated crime. A rabid dog would have deserved less vicious handling—and this was an uncomplaining girl held by six large men.”

“An understandable error, my lady. Regrettable, as I say, but understandable. The women they usually handle are worse than rabid dogs. A full apology will be made, of course.”

“It will not be accepted. There must be an inquiry and discipline must be exerted.”

He smiled: trump card coming. “You are travelling, I believe, with a certain…” He pretended to consult a paper, half opening the pile at random. “Ah, yes—Monsieur Bouvier. Monsieur Victor Bouvier?”

So that was it. They knew something, but not everything—not his new title, for instance. She did not want to add to their knowledge, especially as she herself knew nothing. It was pointless, and perhaps dangerous, to insist further.

“I see.” She rose to leave. “I shall be staying at the Pension Boisanfray in the Rue Michel-Ange at Auteuil. You will kindly arrange for the girl to be delivered there by ambulance without delay.”

She named the pension she had always used in her days as a journalist. If she was to nurse this poor English girl, she didn’t wish to impose on Celia and César, nor to link them with Victor in the minds of the police.

The prefect, courteous to the last, escorted her all the way to the chief entrance. “Lady Abigail understands our language very well,” he said. “It gives me immense confidence there will be no further…unfortunate occurrences during her brief stay in Paris. We must think above all of this poor young woman’s reputation, mustn’t we?”

***

The girl was still in pain, but a great deal less distressed in mind, when the ambulance attendants brought her into the pension. Her name was Frances Law and her father owned three butcher’s shops in the Deal area of Kent. She was more worried about him than about herself. She was supposed to meet him at the train from Calais. “I was an hour early,” she said. “But he must have arrived some time ago. He’ll be frantic with anxiety.”

Abigail sent messages by the
pneumatique
to the station and to the school where the girl had been a pupil, giving her new address. She also sent word to Victor.

The doctor, who came within minutes of her arrival, gave his opinion that the leg was fractured rather than broken. For the rest, she was badly bruised, but no internal organs seemed to be injured. He set her leg in plaster and said she might travel on a stretcher and on a calm sea within a week. He gave her opium to help her sleep. “You English ladies are tough,” he said admiringly.

So, in a way, Abigail thought, were French ladies who poked at corpses with parasols. Yet there was something almost unnerving at this girl’s lack of shock; still, it was preferable to hysterics or tears.

A
pneumatique
came from Victor to say that he was seeing Vauchet, a powerful minister and a long-standing enemy of the morals police. To occupy the time, Abigail rewrote her statement and repeated the drawings the prefect had casually confiscated; no doubt he’d hand the originals out for each man to frame and hang at home—all part of the well-known French
tolérance
for violence in crimes of passion.

The girl’s father arrived before Victor. At first he was angry and wanted to kill the entire morals police force, from the prefect down; but when he read Abigail’s sober, unembroidered account, a wiser (or, at least, a more calculating) counsel insinuated itself.

“I don’t know, your ladyship,” he said, making implosive sucking noises at his upper front teeth. “It’s a bad business. Take this charge, now…what she was charged with. That’s a bad business.”

“But she wasn’t charged, Mr. Law. And, in any case, it was groundless.”

He shook his head and went on sucking his teeth. “Mud sticks though, don’t it, your ladyship. It’s different for a lady of class and breeding, I daresay. No one’s going to suspect…well, the likes of you, if I may make so bold. But…” He nodded at the sleeping girl. “A girl of our class don’t start out with three farthings’ worth of reputation anyway. There’s no lean to spare, see.”

Sadly, Abigail saw. She rose to go.

He handed her back the drawings and statement. “Not but what I’m not grateful, your ladyship. Mrs. Law and me, we’ll never be able to repay your kindness.”

“Oh, please don’t think of it in that light, Mr. Law. To have done less would be despicable. I’ll come back and sit with Miss Law for two or three hours tomorrow afternoon. It would be a shame for you to stay a week in Paris and see nothing of the city.”

He protested. She insisted. It was arranged.

As they reached the front door, she saw Victor alighting from a fiacre. “Don’t pay him off,” she called. “We’ll go home now.”

She introduced Law to Victor.

“Vauchet’s all set for a fight,” Victor said in English.

She told him of Law’s decision. Victor pulled a face. “That’s what Vauchet said would happen. It always does. Neither the guilty nor the innocent want to stir up trouble; that’s what puts these swine above the law.”

“To coin a phrase!” she said, nodding at Law.

He laughed. “Above retribution, then.” His English was good but not as flawless as her French. It was the first time she was more than intellectually aware of their difference in nationality. Until now she had thought of them as sharing some common but undefined citizenship.

“The main thing is,” Law said as they left him, “we got our little lamb back, eh?”

On their way home Victor said, still in English, “He seems a tolerably decent sort of fellow.”

His English vocabulary, unlike his French, was noticeably upper class. “Let’s talk French between ourselves,” she said.

He nodded. “Yet I wonder what sort of man can use as a term of endearment for his daughter the name of an animal he must slaughter and sell every day.”

***

Frances was delighted to see her again. Between the lines Abigail gathered that Mr. Law was a great man for homilies.

The girl had been in Paris as part of a bargain with her father. He had wanted her to marry from school—specifically, from the finishing school, or lycée, at Gentilly where, until yesterday, she had been lodged (and where Law had now gone to collect her things and settle accounts). She agreed only if he first let her train to be a typewriter and to do simple bookkeeping, for her aim was not to marry until she had tasted something of freedom in an office. Law, seeing his best hope was to let the two ambitions, hers and his, fight it out, had reluctantly agreed. The “fiancé” who had denounced her turned out to be one of the women teachers at the school, who had made improper advances to her and other pupils and had been dismissed.

“So,” Abigail said, “it’s your father’s half of the bargain that came unstuck.”

“Yes, my lady,” she answered glumly. “And he’s not the man to take the loss of face lightly.” Her speech was more refined than her father’s; she was as middle class as Celia.

“And can you typewrite, and bookkeep?” Abigail asked.

“I came second in my class—and the girl who was top had done the course twice. I can typewrite fifty-eight words a minute on a good typer. And bookkeeping doesn’t fluster me the way it does some girls.”

“And shorthand?”

“I’ll do some now if you want to try me.”

Next afternoon Abigail asked, “Would Mr. Law consider that a position as secretary to Baroness de Bouvier, formerly Lady Abigail Stevenson, might be a better finishing school than his first choice?”

“Never mind him, my lady! If the salary is anything like fifty pounds a year, you’ve no need to consult wider than these four walls.”

Their eyes dwelled in each other’s. Abigail laughed. “You knew!”

“After your questions yesterday, my lady? After my father saw you this morning going into the lycée?”

“Ah!” Abigail became more businesslike. “Very well, young lady. Now to lesson one. You no doubt think it very much the New Woman sort of thing to leap in and talk about money like that.”

“I believe a man would, my lady. New or Old.”

“Not a wise man. A wise man would at least find out about the job first, don’t you think?”

The girl bit her lip, worried now.

“This job, for instance, may involve a lot more than being a typewriter and keeping simple books. I may want someone who can do researches for me, meet people for me, go ahead of me in travels and make arrangements, take minutes, meet tradesmen, hire servants, deal tactfully with important nincompoops—right up to really responsible commissions, like going out and choosing me a pair of gloves of exactly the right shade. Now!” She sat back and entwined her fingers with a flourish. “Tell me, Miss Law—tell me the going rate for such a person.