City of Light (City of Mystery) (20 page)

Rayley struggled to
sit, but could not find the strength.  Even this slight exertion had sent his
head swimming and he sank back onto the small cot, an involuntary cry slipping
from his lips.  And then, as if the church bells had been the cue, the door to
his cell began to slide open.

10:10  PM

“They need help?” 
the thin young man asked.  His voice had gone high with hope.  He had spent a
miserable night on the river bank, for although the April days were pleasant,
the evenings grew cold.  There were some francs in his sack but he had been
bringing them to light slowly, for the future was uncertain if a man was a
foreigner here in this grand city, alone without a single friend.  Even the
cost of this pitiful glass of wine, which scraped its way down his throat like
a rasp, was an extravagance for anyone in his precarious position. 

But he had known he
must go somewhere, must do something, must talk to someone.  A person cannot
exist forever on the banks of a river, skulking his way around the little slums
which spring up around the sewer openings.  Those shameful ghettos where the
people gnawed bread crusts and the rats gnawed the people.  So he had ventured
into this disreputable bar and seated himself in the center of the action. 
And, just as he’d hoped, within minutes he had been pulled into the swirl of
conversation.

The men around him
were batting about a piece of news.  The tower not yet finished and the clock was
steadily ticking down to May 9, the official opening date for the Exposition. Nothing
fresh to report there.  But apparently Eiffel’s desperation had grown so severe
that his company was prepared to hire the sewer rats.  Unskilled labor, boys
and men of all strengths and experience level - in general anyone who could
stand on two legs.  Hired to cart and carry and polish and scrape and thus free
the better trained laborers for the final touches.  A full franc a day.   All
one had to do was show up at sunrise and present himself as sober and
able-bodied, or at least reasonably close. 

Ian chewed his lip. 
A franc a day meant merely nine days until he could earn passage back to London. 

The men were joking
among themselves, something about the sewer rats becoming known as the sewer
monkeys and they were laying bets on which among them would be the first to
tumble from the tower.  They seemed to be under the impression that their jobs
would require them to scale the outside of the structure like an army of drunken
apes, wherein Ian suspected the actual work would be far more mundane.  All
those restaurants and shops, he thought.  They will have to be stocked.  Boxes
of glassware and hats going up and down the elevator.  And staircases to the
second level and the third.  They would have to be finished and this was
tedious, backbreaking labor.  The tile, the high lights, the doors and windows
and counters. Holding the railings in place for the welders…now, that might be a
tricky business.  Might require a fellow to show a bit of nerve.

But never matter.  It
was a stroke of luck that there was work to be had of any sort and the
beginning of a plan was forming in his mind.   In nine days he could set sail
back to London.  For the chance to go home, he would do anything, even if the
job was a bit dicey.  Ian Newlove had many fears, but a fear of heights was not
among them.  

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Paris

April 26

11:20 AM

The word was celadon. 
She’d never heard it before, but she loved this silver-green silk which swirled
around her legs.  Emma could not help but smile at her reflection as she stood
in front of the mirror in the dress shop on the Rue de Monge.

“I adore it,” she
whispered to Gerry who was sitting behind her with a huge smile on her face.

“You look marvelous,”
Gerry said.  “Try another.”

“But I don’t think I
could ever love another half as much as I love this one,” Emma said, glancing
at the shopgirl, who stood in attendance like a severe little soldier. 

“Not another in
place of, dear.  Another in addition to.”

“Geraldine, no. 
Really.  It’s too much.”

Gerry’s eyes also
flickered to the salesgirl, but there was no sign that she understood even a
word of English or had the slightest desire to.  She was staring fixedly down
at the twirled design of the rug beneath her, as if her boredom was so profound
that it had driven her into a trance.

“You’ll need more
than one dress,” Geraldine said pointedly, raising her pale eyebrows. “So ask
this girl to show you another.  Perhaps two.”

Emma supposed she
was right.  There was no way to know how long they would be in Paris and she
could scarcely appear at more than one social event clothed in the same celadon
dress.  She was, after all, masquerading as the fiancée of a young man with family
money.

“Puis-je voir une
autre robe?” she ventured and the salesgirl shook herself to attention and
disappeared into a back room, leaving Emma to contemplate herself once again in
the mirror.  She felt disloyal even thinking the thought, but this had been the
best morning of her life.   She could scarcely forget that Rayley was in danger
and thus the seriousness of their mission, but still…walking the streets of Paris
on a brilliantly sunny April morning, coming to this fashionable shop, perching
on a padded chair beside Geraldine while the shopgirl solemnly brought out one
dress after another for her inspection.  For a young woman who had spent most
of her life sewing her clothes, quite often revising the cast-offs of others,
it was almost too much to absorb.

The shopgirl was soon
back, bearing a pale pink gown with a draped bodice.  Grecian style, as the
magazines called it, and it looked so soft that Emma’s hand involuntarily shot
forward to brush the cloth.  But the color, with her hair, would simply not
do.  Pink was not a shade her mother would have ever allowed Emma to select
growing up.  Girls with ginger hair, her mother had always said, look best in
blue and green.  Now Mary, who was blonde, would have been lovely in pale pink…But
she mustn’t stop to think of that.  Mary was a door Emma’s mind rarely opened,
and when she did allow herself to consider the fate of her older sister, she
would lose hours or even a day in tears. She could not afford the luxury of
collapsing now. 

“No,” Emma said,
regretfully. “Merci.”

“Are you sure,
dear?”  Gerry said.  “I think it’s quite pretty.”

“It is,” Emma
admitted, “but not for a girl with ginger hair.”  She shook her head toward the
shopgirl and said “Mes cheveaux est…rouge.”

She girl nodded
briskly, as if she could see well enough for herself what color Emma’s hair was
and continued to stand at attention holding the gown.

“May as well try it,
dear,” Geraldine said.  “She seems quite insistent and her judgment in these
matters is undoubtedly sound.  We’re in Paris, after all, so let’s allow
ourselves to be surprised.”

“No doubt we’ll all
be very surprised before this affair is over,” Emma murmured, but she nodded to
the girl and let herself be escorted back to the small changing room. 

It was a strange
thing indeed to stand so still and wait for another person to work their way
down the sequence of buttons at the back of one’s dress.  Strange to raise your
arms and have another person pull a rustle of celadon cloth from your body. 
Strange to stand undressed before a complete stranger and to wait so passively,
like a toy doll, for another rustle of pink cloth to descend.  Emma had often
played the opposite role in this little drama, easing Geraldine in and out of
her grandiose ensembles, but she had not had anyone dress and undress her since
she was a child.  It’s tedious, she thought with surprise. A lot of waiting
around for someone else to do something I could better manage myself.

“The white is nice. 
I want you to see you in it.”

The sound, coming
from outside the dressing room, startled her.  A man’s voice.  Speaking
English.

“But I like the blue.”

The second voice was
that of a child or a very young girl.  High and a little breathless, but still
demanding.  Just the suggestion of a whine.

The man laughed.  A
deep sound, a little gruff. “Then perhaps we should try them both.”

The nimble fingers
of the salesgirl were working their way up the back of Emma’s spine, fastening
the innumerable hooks of the pale pink dress.  Emma stood stiffly, holding her
breath, waiting to hear the sound of Gerry’s voice chiming into the
conversation.  For these were precisely the sort of expatriates she had
predicted they would meet, were they not?  An English father escorting his
spoiled young daughter around Paris for a day of shopping.  They would
doubtless leave the store with both the blue and the white dress, perhaps a
buttercup one as well.  But there was no further conversation.  Gerry was
keeping her own council for once, and Emma wasn’t sure why.

The shopgirl stepped
back, indicating she was finally finished, and Emma pushed aside the curtain
and emerged again into the sunny showroom. 

Things were much as
she had left them and yet somehow strange.  Gerry was still sitting on her
padded velvet chair, but more stiffly now and her eyes met Emma’s with a sharp
snap that seemed to say it all.  Something about the man and his daughter must
have struck Gerry as noteworthy and Geraldine Bainbridge, as so many thoroughly
unorthodox people seem to be, had always been an astute judge of the behavior
of others.  In opting not to speak herself, Geraldine was signaling Emma to
follow suit, and thus not to give them away as being English.  Emma gave a
small nod to indicate the message had been received, and made a great fuss of
picking up the draped skirt and advancing toward the mirror. 

The man was tall and
handsome, with closely cropped hair and obviously expensive clothes, including
a blue silk cravat that billowed around his throat.  The girl with him appeared
to be about thirteen.  Too young for the clothing in this fine shop and much better
suited for a schoolgirl’s plaids, at least in Emma’s option.  But a blue dress
and a white dress, held by separate shopgirls, were being displayed before them
and the boutique owner herself, a woman who had not been at all effusive when
Emma and Gerry had entered an hour before, was chattering nervously in the
background.  They were important, these two people, or at the very least they had
spent significant sums in this shop before.

Standing in front of
the mirror and pretending to study her dress allowed Emma to truly study the
man and girl.  He seemed vaguely familiar to her, especially when he tilted his
chin to address his daughter, whose name was revealed to be Marianne.  She was
holding the blue dress in front of her now, and swaying back and forth coyly in
front of him, saying that she must have it, she simply must.  Something in the
scene made Emma suddenly uneasy.

One of the shopgirls
gathered up the blue and the white dresses and, just as Emma had predicted, the
other sprang forward with two more.  In a flurry of words, spoken so quickly that
Emma did not catch the full of the conversation, the shopgirls, the boutique
owner, and the girl all marched off in the direction of the dressing room. 
Emma looked at Gerry’s reflection in the mirror and their eyes locked.  Not all
the words uttered in the rush of conversation had been clear, but two of them
had stood out well enough.  The boutique owner had addressed the handsome man
as Monsieur Delacroix.

Apparently, they
were in the presence of none other than Armand Delacroix, lover to Isabel Blout
and benefactor to the Exposition Universelle.  The girl now in the dressing
room was most certainly not his daughter, but rather an employee, a child on
the cusp of womanhood, whose need for expensive dresses, be they white or blue,
was a function of her job. 

With the girl gone,
Delacroix lowered his long limbs gracefully into one of the chairs, and, with a
polite nod toward Emma and Gerry, proceeded to wait.  Gerry was so excited by this
unexpected turn of events that it seemed, at least to Emma who knew her so
well, she could barely contain herself.  She obviously couldn’t wait to tell
Trevor that she and Emma had been the ones to find Armand Delacroix and that
they had managed to accomplish the feat before noon on their first day in Paris.  

Emma turned back to
the mirror.  The dress she was wearing looked different than it had in the shopgirl’s
arms.  It was not so much pink or peach or blush or any of the other colors one
might use to describe a woman’s gown.  No, when stretched taut across her body
it proved to be the color of human flesh and it had clearly been designed to
give the subtle but distinct impression that the woman wearing it – in this
case, Emma Kelly – was naked.  It was audacious and quite glorious.  Emma
stared at her reflection and the reflection of the man lounging behind her.

In a world where so
few things turned out as one expected, Armand Delacroix was precisely as Emma
had imagined him to be.  Elegant, yes, but ostentatious as well.  Not at all
afraid to draw attention to himself or his money.  Obviously a regular customer
of this shop and obviously this young woman was not the first of her kind he
had brought here.  The dresses she was trying on now were more sophisticated than
a girl her age would wear in London but yet, like the pink dress Emma herself
was now wearing, they were not vulgar.  Suggestive and yet not inappropriate in
any glaring way, and Emma suspected this veneer of respectability was part of what
the boutique was selling.  Perhaps part of what all of Paris was selling.  Sex,
most certainly, but the sort of sex that seems accidental, the sort that scolds
the observer more than the observed.  For who is more to blame that one who
gazes upon an innocent white dress and sees nothing but the movements of the
body that lies beneath it?  Who is guiltier than he who cannot behold a simple beauty
without also seeing the vulgar possibilities it brings?