City of Secrets (14 page)

“Well, I can hardly wait! Shall I become as famous as Mrs. Malcolm?”

“There are different kinds of fame,” Laurie answered diplomatically, “just as there are different styles of feminine beauty.”

He smiled at Elfreda when he said that, for which Maddie could have hugged him. Florence appeared not to notice.

“I tell you what,” she said, after she had rummaged about in her purse for some francs. “This calls for a celebration—a reunion party! And not only with tea, either. Oh, there you are again, Geoffrey, just in time.”

“I do my best,” he said and winked at Maddie. He must have known he would be sent on another errand, however, because he did not trouble to sit down.

“Geoffrey, you must go and find us some champagne and nice things to eat ... let me see, some caviar, I think, and some of that lovely smelly cheese we had at the inn last night, and ... oh, whatever would be nice for a friendly celebration.”

“Here?” Geoffrey asked, looking at Maddie who, knowing protest was useless, nodded. Geoffrey went obediently off again, and Elfreda attempted to excuse herself as well, but Laurie said, “Nonsense. You stay here, and I’ll go fetch your mother to join us.”

Elfreda smiled gratefully after him, and Florence made use of the intervening time to tell Maddie that she and Geoffrey had found the most charming little inn outside Boulogne when they arrived the day before and decided to stay there overnight.

“And then this morning, I had a premonition. ‘Maddie Malcolm will be on that train today,’ I told Geoffrey. ‘Mark my words.’ And see if I wasn’t right! I’m sure it’s a sign that we’ll have a lovely time in Paris. What are you plannin’ to do there, by the way? Geoffrey and I are goin’ to Versailles and Chantilly and Fontainebleau ... I adore castles, don’t you?”

Happily, since Maddie did not want to admit that she had no defined schedule lest Florence include her in her plans, Lady Jervis arrived just at that moment to announce that she lived in a castle, and it was cold and damp and impossible to keep clean. This made Elfreda giggle but effectively silenced Florence on the subject. Indeed, Lady Jervis’s presence served to dampen Florence’s spirits down to a level that allowed everyone else to enjoy the little party after all. Even Elfreda, although her mother allowed her only the occasional sip of champagne, confessed to having a jolly time and was, as Florence grudgingly remarked to Maddie later, the only girl she had ever seen whose looks improved as the champagne went to her head.

After an hour, the party moved to the bar car, which, Florence said, boasted piano entertainment and the most talented barman imaginable. Elfreda and Laurie, supervised by Lady Jervis, retired to a far corner of the car with one last glass of champagne between them, a plate of several kinds of caviar and foie gras to sustain them until they reached Paris, and a backgammon board to amuse them. Maddie sat back to listen to Florence’s highly colored description of her stay in Boulogne, where she had discovered not only an inn, but the most exquisite lace handmade by a sweet old lady who charged a ridiculously low price for a whole shawl of it, which Florence then sent a waiter to fetch from her maid to show off to Maddie.

In this way, they arrived at the Gare de L’Est before they even noticed that the sun had set behind them. When the train had come to a hissing stop inside the station, Maddie took Oliver’s hand to step down from it, grateful, now that they had arrived, that Florence’s unexpected appearance had distracted her from any further reflections along the way on things past and best forgotten.

They left the station to find Paris just turning on its lights for the evening ahead. There had been a rain recently, and the lamplight reflected off the paving stones, making the city twice as bright and twice as light, as if it floated on water.

“Oh, look!” Elfreda exclaimed. “It’s as if Paris is glad to see us.”

“And so it should be,” Florence agreed, as Geoffrey gave the porter an especially large
pourboire
for muscling Florence’s luggage off the train and to the taxi rank outside the station.

But for Maddie, the sense of excitement in the air and the hint of exciting things happening in the bustle of traffic and staccato footsteps on the pavement stones had, strangely, just the opposite effect. An unexplainable stab of dread went through her, and for a moment, she imagined she could see beyond the lights to the dark corners they did not illuminate and hear beneath the quick chatter of cabdrivers and newspaper vendors the whispered speech and muted cries of anguish of a more shadowy world.

Oh, Teddy, where are you? Are you alone here, somewhere in the dark? Help me find you.

There was no answer. She shivered a little as she stepped into the smart, well-sprung fiacre that would take her to her comfortable suite at the Ritz, where she would be out of sight and sound of that other world.

Paris and springtime impressed themselves finally and forever on Maddie the next morning as she sipped her coffee in the window seat overlooking the Place Vendôme, but not quite in the way she had anticipated. Inside, her suite was elegantly furnished and spacious and cozy, all at the same time. Outside the window, the sky was blue and cloudless, the air was warm, the square was filled with sunshine and people—but Maddie could not bring herself to feel part of it. She responded to Louise’s concerned questions with automatic, and doubtless unconvincing, assurances that she was only a little tired from the journey from London.

The truth was that now that she was here, she wanted to be somewhere else. In Paris, she would have to find Teddy or go home in failure.

She had to blame Paris. She had never felt like this before, had never been at all moody. It was not just that she was alone. She had learned long ago to enjoy her own company when it was all she had, and she had always been able to make new friends. She had done that at home and in London and would do it in Paris. So it was not just that she missed Teddy. She still worried about him, especially here in Paris, where she felt instinctively that he was in some danger. But she no longer missed his company, which she had never been certain of anyway. No, there was a new hollowness inside her. Something was missing that she hadn’t known was ever there, and it left a deeper hurt than anything else had.

She ought to have learned to deal with the hurt a long time ago, but the first time Teddy left her to her own devices, she hadn’t seen the implications. It had been at a party, a friend’s engagement party. All of the boys were friends of Teddy’s, and one night he had gone off with them for an hour down to the lake in back of the house. It was a small thing, but Maddie had felt deserted. They had been married only a month then, and she still believed he would always prefer her company to anyone else’s.

Of course he had laughed when he came back, his hair slicked back and a grin on his face.

“Sweetheart, we went swimming in the lake—naked. You couldn’t have come anyway,” he said to her frown. “And I’m back now, aren’t I?”

Teddy’s explanations were always so sensible that Maddie could only suppose she was being selfish. He had sat down on the sofa next to her and kissed her and given her all his attention; and when he asked her what she wanted him for, all she could say was that she was lonesome, which was nonsense. She had always assured him—bragged even— that as an only child, she had learned early on to amuse herself. But she had thought being married meant she wouldn’t have to do that anymore.

#

A sound registered on her consciousness—a knock. She brought her wandering mind back home.

“What is it?”

“May I come in, Mrs. Malcolm?” said Oliver Drummond from just behind the crack in the door. Maddie wondered how long he had been standing there, trying to catch her attention.

“I’m sorry, Ollie. Do come in.”

He had come in to report that he had reached the first of the names on Peter Kropotkin’s list, but Maddie could not bring herself to take an interest in who that might be. She picked up her cup and saw that the coffee in it had grown cold. Out of idle curiosity, she lifted the lid of the silver coffeepot and discovered that what was left was even colder. Only then did she remember that Oliver was still talking to her.

She apologized again, and for the first time in their association asked him to write out a report and give it to her later, when she would be able to concentrate on it. Then she dismissed him with sweeping permission to do next whatever he thought best. Nevertheless, something he said as he was leaving temporarily roused her from her abstraction.

“Oliver!”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“You haven’t heard from Mr. Grant yet?”

“Not yet.”

He waited for a moment for her to say something else, but when she fell silent again, he slipped out, closing the door softly behind him, as if on a sick room.

That registered on Maddie.
Damn Devin Grant
. Where was he? After all his assurances, he was still keeping her in the dark as much as before, and she was letting him get away with it!

Well, not quite, but righteous indignation made her feel better. On the channel crossing, she and Oliver had discussed possible courses of action when they got to Paris, and Oliver
was obviously doing his best for her, with or without Devin Grant’s help. Her own job was less easily defined, having promised both Ollie and Devin that she would not meddle in their investigation, and apart from continuing to make herself visible where Teddy might see her, she had to depend simply on recognizing and taking any opportunities that came her way.

The first of these she had recognized as not at all necessary, but she wanted to do it. On the train, somewhere around Rouen, it had occurred to Maddie that Devin Grant had very neatly
not
introduced her to the Prince of Wales at Newmarket, when he might easily have done so. It was not that Maddie was all that eager to exchange small talk with royalty, but she had convinced herself that the lack of an introduction was just another instance of Devin’s not trusting her. He had never introduced her to anyone, now she came to think of it, not even the clerk in his own office. So she had made up her mind to remedy that herself; and when Oliver had discovered, on registering, which suite the prince would occupy when he arrived the following week, she cajoled the hotel into letting her have it until then, when she would move into another set of rooms. Having stayed in his suite would make a perfect conversational opening when she succeeded in making herself known to the prince. And that she would do.

She poured the dregs of her coffee into a potted plant and rang for Louise to help her dress. She would
not
stay in and mope all day; she would go out and
do
something.

She rang the Jervises’ suite to invite Elfreda to go shopping—without her mama, if at all possible. Lady Jervis, however, had already made plans to go sightseeing that day, to introduce herself and her daughter to Paris, in much the same way, Maddie suspected, that the British under Wellington had once done—by occupying it entirely. But she accepted an invitation to join them, if only to shake herself out of her gloomy mood and prove to herself that the sun shone in Paris, too.

Delaying only long enough to consult her Baedeker, Lady Jervis instructed the hotel to hire her a
voiture de grande remise
—“Oh, yes, madam,” said the concierge when Lady Jervis underlined the phrase in her guidebook, “a fly”—and they set off on what the book called a “preliminary drive.”

They had scarcely swept through the Place de la Concorde and around the Madeleine Church before Maddie began to feel much more cheerful. They crossed the Seine by the Pont Neuf, and Notre Dame rose up like a proud flagship from the Cité, as if to greet them. Paris seemed to be smiling at her after all, so Maddie smiled back. Even Lady Jervis turned out not to be the ogre she had seemed, although she was opinionated about the most unexpected things.

“Oh, yes, I am decidedly a republican,” she said, turning her nose up at the suggestion of a stop to visit the Emperor Napoleon in his tomb at Les Invalides. “My husband is a great admirer of you Americans, particularly. He finds your way of doing business most enterprising and imaginative. We took our wedding trip in New York, you know.”

“Mama!” Elfreda exclaimed, while Maddie tried in vain to imagine the Jervises’ enterprising and imaginative honeymoon. “You never told me that.”

“I do not recall that you ever asked,” Lady Jervis said with, Maddie thought, more than a hint of impatience. But Elfreda did not seem to notice and pressed her mother for more, upon which Lady Jervis revealed that she had accompanied her husband on a number of his journeys to the United States, early in their marriage, of course, before Elfreda was born. Maddie seized on this as a way to ingratiate herself with Lady Jervis to the point where her ladyship might be willing to relax her rigid Baedeker timetable and entrust her only daughter to Mrs. Malcolm’s American hands and republican tastes.

Elfreda, apparently aware that her new friend had some ulterior motive for drawing out her mother’s views on everything from New York hat-makers to Chicago stockyards, kept her silence, so that by the time they were taking a rest from their sightseeing in the Café Anglais, the older ladies were in perfect harmony with each other and Elfreda ventured a suggestion.

“Mama, did you not say you looked forward to visiting Papa’s business acquaintances while we are here in Paris? If you would rather do that than drag about with me in the shops and dressmakers, perhaps Mrs. Malcolm would not be bored with doing so.”

Maddie looked admiringly at Elfreda when this bold stroke actually succeeded and Lady Jervis, after a great many polite protests and slightly more sincere apologies, handed her daughter over to Mrs. Malcolm, who was only “too kind” to offer to chaperone her.

Thus it was that the next morning, Maddie, Elfreda, and Louise set off for the Galeries Lafayette together. Maddie had at first suggested going to the more stylish shops on the rue de Richelieu, but Elfreda confessed that she was a little frightened of the snobbish proprietresses of such salons and, although not quite such a republican as her mother claimed to be, much preferred the democratic hurly-burly of the
grands magasins.
Maddie promised to protect her from any snubs on the part of upstart salespersons, and they compromised on first a visit to the Galeries, then a stop at Worth’s, where Maddie wanted to be fitted for a new evening dress, thus encompassing both ends of the fashion spectrum in one day. Elfreda could then decide where, between those extremes, she would be most comfortable, and they would have her measured and fitted the next day.