City of Secrets (20 page)

“Well, of course. She knew she could not hope to compete with
you,”
Daisy offered. Maddie smiled at Daisy, grateful for her loyalty but unconvinced that Florence had a hidden jealous streak in her nature.

“Or she simply did not care for the way the pictures turned out,” Laurie said. “You know that I would not be insulted to be told that—people see themselves in different ways, after all—but Mrs. Wingate may have thought she was sparing my feelings.”

They finally agreed that this was the most logical explanation, but Maddie was left with the suspicion that logic had nothing to do with it.

It was another mystery, but not one that occupied her mind for very long.  She was more interested in the partially satisfactory image Laurie’s plate turned up of the skittish young man, his facial features blurred, but the rest of his head and clothing quite clear. Oliver Drummond had once told her that it was sometimes easier to identify someone by the shape of his ears than anything else, so Maddie hopefully presented Ollie with both that photograph and the better likeness of Viktor Kemeny.

She had little real hope of connecting the young men to Teddy, however. The more she thought about it, the more difficult it was to imagine Teddy succumbing to the kind of desperation Geoffrey Wingate at least considered a common trait among those whose allegiance to anarchism took the form of reckless acts of violence.

Teddy had never been reckless—careless, perhaps, but too fond of his comforts to toss them away because some spellbinder talked him into joining a cause.

Unless he hadn’t stayed with it. What if he’d gone to France on his own, rather than to meet someone? Suppose he’d never even come to Paris but had gone on to Rome or Vienna or goodness knew where? Maddie’s heart sank at the
prospect of spending years in a search that might ultimately be fruitless.

And yet...

She had not been able to shake that feeling that came to her when she first arrived—that Paris was somehow going to be the end of her search. Here she would find out what had really happened to Teddy.

#

Now she would have to make Devin Grant show himself.

She searched her mind for a bait that would lure him out of wherever he was hiding, but it came to her only when she glanced into her mirror on the way to breakfast one morning. She stopped to look at herself, wondering how he really saw her. As the American Beauty Rose? She doubted that; he was not taken in by the kind of artifice Laurie had applied to get that look from her. But there were other kinds, and she considered them for a moment, formulating a plan in her mind. Devin Grant had never shown himself to be a knight errant, but he was at least a gentleman and ought to respond automatically to certain situations. It might work. If not ... well, it was a lovely day and she would still get a pleasant walk out of it.

In any case, it was not too soon to throw Laurie and Daisy together without the dampening presence of Maddie or Lady Jervis playing nursemaid, so when the two young people came to collect her to go and climb the Eiffel Tower, she pretended that she had completely forgotten an appointment at the milliner’s for that day and encouraged them to go by themselves. They insisted, however, in dropping her off at her destination, so that Maddie had to quickly invent one, and she found herself, when their cab had departed and she stepped out of the doorway she had hidden in, in the middle of the rue du Faubourg-Saint Honoré, by herself.

“You should have told them it was Worth’s,” she scolded herself. “At least that’s close to the hotel.”

But if the direction was wrong, the possibilities remained, so instead of taking another cab, she turned and began walking in the direction of the Seine, conscious of the curious glances of passersby and the raised hat of one gentleman whom she pretended not to see. After a few minutes, however, as she crossed the rue Royale, she forgot to be self-conscious and began to look around her, breathing the air of Paris deep into her lungs and its beauties into her imagination as well as her eyes.

She had been aware of something different about this city since she arrived, something that had not been due solely to her own morbid fancies. Whatever it was seemed to make every feeling more intense, whether happy or unhappy. Parisians probably took it for granted, breathing it in with the sharp, fragrant air. It couldn’t be isolated, so for now Maddie too just took deep gulps of it as she walked. By the time she entered the Garden of the Tuileries, where lovers strolled and starched nursemaids played ball with their small charges and where chestnut trees rustled in the light breeze, her mind had cleared and she was thinking quite contentedly about nothing at all. She smiled at the organ grinder playing next to the statue of Atalanta and gave him a coin.

She and Daisy has already taken an orienting tour of the museums, but Daisy had not been eager to spend much time in them, moving quickly from one painting to the next, admiring the bright colors or the way a fold of cloth looked so real she could touch it (and did). Maddie’s education in the arts had probably been no more extensive than Daisy’s, but the art mistress of the private school Maddie had attended had been so enthusiastic about her subject that Maddie had caught a little of her passion and was interested in seeing the originals of the works Miss Milsom had described.

So she had memorized from Lady Jervis’s Baedeker the plan of the Louvre, and now she went directly up the Grand Staircase to the Long Gallery. For a few minutes, she walked slowly past the Titians, content simply to let her eyes fill with them, reserving her guidebook to study later. She had just passed hi front of the
Holy Family
when she became aware of someone standing just behind her.

She knew who it was. She had been expecting him. “You’re following me again, Mr. Grant,” she said, without turning around. The lingering narcotic effect of the Parisian air made her smile, and she did not want him to see that. Not just yet.

“It’s easier when you’re on foot.”

There was silence for a few minutes as Maddie walked to the next painting. But she was more aware of him, even without looking at him, than of the painting in front of her. She was certain that if she turned around, the sight of him would be no less pleasing than the masterpiece before her. They did not touch, but there was something between them, like static electricity, that bound them. She sensed that he was embarrassed, but this seemed so unlikely that she began to doubt her perceptions.

“I’m relieved that you do sometimes remember that you are a gentleman,” she said, deliberately provoking him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, sounding as if he meant it, “about the other night.”

She had been right; it made her feel better—and bolder—to know that she was. She wondered which way she would have to move to brush lightly against him, as if by accident. But no, he was apologizing. She would have to say something. It came out more kindly this time. “What
were
you doing there, Devin?”

“Those were supposed to be the prince’s rooms.”

Of course!
she realized. How could she have forgotten that? At least the first mystery was easily solved.

“I was experimenting, to see if he would be safe there from ... break-ins, and so on.”

“Has he never stayed at the Ritz before?”

“It’s different this time.”

She sensed that she was treading on delicate ground now, and she no longer had any desire to punish him by prying into areas he did not want probed and that she did not need to know about anyway. “I’m sorry, too,” she said.

He made no reply, and she moved on to the next painting, waiting until she felt more capable of ordinary, everyday conversation, until she was able to force her attention back to the paintings.

“They say Titian’s women are so beautiful,” she said then, “but I can’t see it.”

“It’s the hair,” he said, after a moment. “You can see it better in his nonreligious work.”

She turned around abruptly then and, as she’d suspected, he wasn’t looking at the painting at all, but at her.

“Mine isn’t red,” she said.

“It is in the sunlight.” There was a hint of a smile in his voice, as if he were testing her receptiveness. But what did he mean by that? He hadn’t ever seen her in the sunlight that she could recall, at least not without her hat and veil.

“Have you seen the impressionists’ exhibition at the Luxembourg Museum?” he asked.

“I’ve seen prints of some of their work.”

“And were not impressed, I see. It’s different with the originals. Shall I show you?”

She looked up at him. This was absurd. He was asking to escort her to the museum as if he were eighteen years old and they’d just been introduced by their aunts. But she felt just as awkward and didn’t know why.

“Thank you,” she said, resisting the impulse to curtsey, “I think I’d like that.”

They went out the river entrance of the museum and crossed to the Left Bank on foot. Maddie had never ventured to that side of the river before, and she looked around curiously. It was an older part of Paris, with narrow streets leading off the main boulevards and lined by small, sometimes crazily leaning houses. There were shops on the ground level of many of them, selling everything from fresh fish and vegetables to used shoes and clothing.

Devin pointed out landmarks, not the usual ones, but the house where Victor Hugo had once lived and a square that still showed scars from the barricades thrown up by the Communards in 1871. He had an anecdote to go with every café they passed, and soon the constraint eased between them, so that when they entered the Musée de Luxembourg they were actually laughing.

But then they walked into the exhibition room, and Maddie drew a sharp breath.

He had been right. Miss Milsom’s prints and book reproductions were only a pale imitation of the real thing, as if Laurie had tried to capture them on film. The essence was different.

She looked up to see if there were a skylight in the roof, but there was not. The light came almost entirely from the paintings, large and small, hung closely together around the room. They were all landscapes, and they all seemed at first to be of the sky. Maddie walked up to one, but unlike the Titians, a closer examination told her nothing. She had to back up several steps before the splashes of white and color re-composed themselves into a recognizable image. Falling silent again, she walked around the room and found that many of the paintings were of the same subject: a country garden, taken at different times of day and from slightly different angles of vision. In that way they were like Laurie’s photographs, in imitating the human eye and the way it moved from one object to the next, but otherwise they were nothing like those static, black-and-white images. They were like nothing else she had ever seen.

“I’ve never known a woman who could be silent as long as you can,” he said, startling her back to earth.

“What can I say?”

“I take it that means you like them.”

“Like them—!” She stopped, at a loss again. “Yes,” she said finally, almost reverently. After another moment, though, she added, motioning toward a brilliant yellow field with a farmhouse in the distance. “But where were they done? No place in the world can really look like this.”

“It depends on how you look at the world, of course, but yes, there are places like this.”

She had turned back to the painting before he said again, “I’ll show you.”

And again, he was saying something else that she did not understand but that reached deep into her for something she did not know was there.
What is it?
she asked herself.
Tell me and I’ll give it to you.

For a moment, a vision of spending the day in the country, alone with Devin Grant, forgetting the past and living only in the present, rose to her imagination’s eye. That was madness, of course. They couldn’t do it, even if they could get away with no one knowing they had done it. No, it wasn’t possible.

“I have a car,” he said.

She looked up at him, and he was laughing again behind those hard eyes.

“An automobile?”

“Not just any automobile—a Daimler.”

She wondered for a moment how to make it possible. Then she remembered his offer at Maxim’s, to be at her service if she needed an escort. Perhaps that was all he had meant to say earlier. But she did not think so.

“Laurie will be thrilled,” she said.

It broke the spell between them, and he laughed aloud. “Bring Laurie, then, and your little protégée, Daisy. But for God’s sake, leave Lady Jervis behind!”

“How am I going to do that?” she asked, as they left the building and began walking back to the river along the boulevard Saint-Michel.

“I’m sure you can be very inventive,” he said, steering her around a crowd of people fighting for space on a streetcar. He pulled her inside a doorway for a moment to keep her from being jostled, and when he made a move to go on, she put her hand on his sleeve to stop him.

“Devin—” He smiled, and she realized that she had begun to use his Christian name without being aware of it. “Thank you for showing me those paintings.”

“My pleasure.”

They went on then, their progress slowed somewhat by all the other people in the street. The Latin Quarter was busier and more congested than the Paris Maddie was getting used to, but it was more exciting, too. All kinds of people thronged the streets, from thin, serious-looking students with satchels full of books to off-duty taxi drivers to the fat, observant concierges of small hotels, who sat in their doorways observing everything that went on in the street. Devin knew this Paris very well, she realized, and she was grateful to him for bringing her here, even though she had no doubt Louise would have palpitations when—if—she heard where Maddie had been.

They passed another café, and he asked if she wanted something to drink. More than that, she wanted to rest her feet, so she agreed, and they went through the front part of the café, which was open to the street and spilled out into it, into a glass-enclosed room that led in turn to a garden and a view of the Sorbonne to the rear. Most of the round, marble-topped tables were already taken, but a waiter appeared, made a little bow, and led them to a table in a corner of the room, where they would not be quite so much on public display. Devin ordered a
cafe au lait
for Maddie and a calvados for himself, and the waiter scurried away again.