Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (80 page)

They parted immediately, the violin arcing over the drum now, their hands describing individual arabesques upon the air. It was a dance of the dark, of fire that only lit to the edge of shadow, of original sin and man’s need of woman. Touching, parting, eyes meeting, the air around them crackling with heat. Advance, retreat, allure, seduce, all the push-pull of the physical courtship.

In his arms again she leaned back, rejecting his advances, arcing over until her hair spilled onto the ground, her back a supple bow of demure regret. And then he pulled her back insistently, one beat at a time, and she raised her arms above her head so that the man could slide his hands along them in a caress that was as old as time. She brought her hands down and touched his face, bending his forehead to her own, then whirled away. The man followed and the dance moved faster and faster until they were a whirl of flesh and fire and flashes of gold and long white leg, hip to hip, cheek to cheek, and Casey saw why they had been such a draw. Half the country would have gathered to see such a passionate display. She was like a mirage rising sinuously from a hot plain, seen from a distance, drawing a man through a desert to find her.

Watching Pamela dance in such a way made him feel odd, as though there was something of her that was foreign to him, a place he had never traveled and did not know the customs nor rituals that would bring him inside her enchanted borders.

Near the end of the dance, the man handed Pamela into Casey’s arms in a fluid movement and then danced back to the fire, stamping and tossing his head like a stallion. Though Casey could not imagine trying to match the steps, still he knew how to hold a woman, how to hold this one in particular. When a man knew a woman in this way it was natural to slide into a dance—a soft, slow dance beyond the boundary of the firelight.

He looked down into her eyes, which were dark, the pupils dilated so it felt he could fall into them. She was a stranger entirely, as if she was neither his wife nor the mother of his son but a vessel through which something ancient was being channelled with the aids of fire and drink and the wild, wild music that seemed to go on forever.

She coiled like smoke around his senses until he felt drunk on her, intoxicated by her strangeness, by the night, the music and the madness that seemed to have infected the very molecules of the air. And so he followed when she took his hand and cast a look over her shoulder, hair coiled there, framing the kohled eyes and cherry-bitten lips.

He heard someone call after them, a few sentences in a strange tongue, and the bawdy laughter that followed.

He had not noticed the caravan before, painted a deep blue and standing off by itself beyond the circle of the encampment. Gilded under the full moon and traced with the shadows of the trees that it sheltered under, it sat empty, waiting for them, he understood, following his wife as though in a dream, drifting soft over the landscape and hardly feeling his own movements. The night was held still in the moon’s embrace, each blade of grass frosted with a lambent silver glow.

There were lanterns flickering, lighting the stairs into the caravan. He followed her up them and into the snug interior.

A small stove pulsed with heat and the caravan was warm, though he wasn’t sure he would have noticed had it been frigid as an ice floe, for his blood was that hot.

“What did she say?” he asked, for the words had been Romany, and though he could not understand the exact meaning, the gist would have been clear in any language.

“She said,” she fixed him with the kohl-lined eyes, “that it is a good night for making a baby, for the moon is full and the tides higher than they have been in a hundred years.”

Her dress dropped to the floor and he lifted her onto the bed, quirking an eyebrow at her as he climbed up beside her into a nest of quilts and pillows. “Well then, ye gypsy temptress, I suppose we’d best do as we’re bid.”

Chapter Fifty-nine
Paris Ghosts

Paris was a city of myth. Celtic myth and Roman myth
, ancient gods and goddesses and traces here and there, caught in the periphery of one’s vision, of old Roman walls and underfoot, buried in the sediment of human history, entire cities, crypts of bones where lay poets and generals, lovers and liars, saints and thieves. It was a city of sacred geometry and a long tradition of the occult, still evidenced by bookshops devoted to that one subject. It was a city of rebellion, of street fighters, of a population of both kings and
parigots
.

It was a city of ghosts, for one could well imagine Victor Hugo sitting down in that grey shawl, ink pot to hand, and writing the first lines of
Notre-Dame de Paris
, or Balzac fueled by litres of caffeine writing against time and ruin, Baudelaire penning verse that would scandalize a nation, and Colette with her suits and pearls, writing of the flesh in a way no woman had dared before.

If one could crack open the city’s layers, one would find history leaved layer upon layer, both golden with promise and fortune and crimson with blood and rebellion. One would find a city forever haunted by its own past.

It seemed inevitable to Pamela, once there in the environs of the greatest
grande dame
of cities, that Jamie, whose past was as much a labyrinth of twisting lanes, dark in the shadows of a tilting architecture, would keep his deepest secrets here. For Paris, like the best of courtesans, knew how to keep a secret safe.

The house was in the 3
rd
arrondissemont
, in the old and once venerable Marais quarter of the city. Marais translated literally as ‘swamp’, and a swamp it had indeed been, but the
quartier
had been occupied in one way or another since the Romans were in residence. It had reached its peak in the Golden Age of the 17
th
and 18
th
centuries, when it had been home to members of the
Ancien Regime
as well as a royal stomping ground for Henri IV. After the Revolution the area had gone into serious decline, with many of its old homes razed to the ground. More recently it had become home to a flock of artisans whose skilled hands produced some of the world’s most highly prized gold and silver work, enamels, leathers, hats, violins, lutes, jewels, saddles, dyed silks and painted feathers. The artisan workshops that had been plunked down into the courtyards of ancient
hotels
, were called, in a most poetically French manner, ‘pustules’ while those wedged between the
hotels particuliers
were called ‘parasites’.

Jamie’s house was tucked into a leafy corner at the end of a curving street. Built in the 17
th
century, it had only been in Jamie’s family since his grandfather had purchased it from an impoverished widow, shortly after WWII. It had been shabbily genteel at that point, but its exquisite bones had been restored with love, good taste and money. It retained the soul of a house built during the Golden Age, however, with organic flowing curves and gilded surfaces. If one was very quiet, one could hear the ghostly echo of gold-encrusted coaches rattling past on the cobbled streets, sense the flutter of ancient love affairs conducted in walled gardens, hear the rustle of pale satins and breezy muslins, smell a waft of
poudre de mille fleurs
borne aloft on a drift of coquettish laughter, and sense the terrible fear that must have gripped the entire city when the Revolution came to tear down the structures of society that had held the aristocracy immutably in place for hundreds of years.

The house itself was pure magic. It was just that sort of house where it was hard to say if the enchantment had been hanging there in the air waiting for the right pair of hands to build it, or if the hands themselves were enchanted that pulled this house out of the airy realm and into that of blueprints, stone and wood, angles and load-bearing walls and trusses, of glass and wrought iron twisted into the shapes of fantastical and grotesque beasts, of steps that went up and then down, that twisted round corners and into nooks, of broad stone sills where a grown person might sit cosily with a book or press a palm to a frosted window pane, hidden behind heavy draperies. Here one could picture a woman waiting for a lover, gazing down at the avenue of lime trees from the octagonal window in the upstairs bedroom. Bare vines rattled against the windows in the November wind, but in the summer their greenery would press against the windows, bringing the outdoors in, making the house seem even more a part of its landscape.

Pamela sat at the desk in the study and watched the sunset lay its water paints over the canvas of bare lime branches and snow, softening the rough trunks and spilling down the twisting drive. It was very peaceful here, so beautifully tucked away that it was hard to believe all Paris was out there, only a brisk walk in the snow and falling light. The twilight stole in softly, pooling on the floor, curling upon the carpets like feline spirals of heavy smoke, slipping over the delicate lip of her teacup and turning its amber contents garnet. It solidified as though smoke took form and sat upon the chairs in ancient costume; waistcoat and brass buttons, silk stockings and embroidered satin. A tendril of twilight slipped off, trailing its finger along her spine, a shiver spreading out in its wake as though a ghost stood behind her and touched her through the veil of two hundred years.

Madame Felicie, the housekeeper in residence, called her for dinner, and she was swiftly returned to the solid world with a dose of hearty Provençal cooking, a beef stew flavored with thyme, garlic, peppercorns and red wine, the latter also in a bottle upon the table, scenting the air with earthy notes. She asked Madame Felicie to eat with her and the woman, after a shrewdly assessing look, acquiesced.

“Have you lived here for long?” Pamela asked, after consuming two full bowls of stew and drinking a glass of the exquisite red wine. No one could ever fault Jamie on the quality of his wine cellars.

“Yes, for a very long time now, Madame. I hardly remember living anywhere else.” The woman laid her work-roughened hands on the table, her lined face troubled.

“I think there are things you have come to search out, Madame, and there are things here that Monsieur left in my care, should you come. I would like you to be comfortable, for the story is not a short one nor entirely easy.”

Pamela poured them each another glass of wine, feeling the fortification was going to be necessary. Around them, the house seemed to sigh as if it had been waiting for this tale as well. The delft tiles gleamed from behind the stone sink and the wavy thickset glass in the windows reflected back the pleasant surroundings.

“I have to go back a bit. You will understand that stories are complicated beasts with many tentacles and when they are true stories, it is only more complicated.”

Pamela nodded to encourage the woman.

“This house originally belonged to Jamie’s
grand-père
. He bought it for the woman he loved. It was their time out of the world,
vous comprenez
?”

“Yes, I understand.” It was, of course, Yevgena of whom Madame Felicie spoke.

“To begin with, Jamie’s
grand-père
was my employer. He hired me for several reasons but the most important one is that I was a nurse. Perhaps just as important was my ability to keep secrets.”

Pamela had a sudden foreboding that this story was one of those kind that changed the constructs of the universe, that once heard it could not be unheard, and one could not go back to the former innocence of the world one had lived in before. She bit back the urge to tell the woman to stop, not to tell this tale, to leave her in her innocence concerning things she could not change. But it was too late for that.

“When Jamie was born, it was not, as you believe, a single birth. The other details of his birth are true, that he was born at home to two parents who loved him, but were not perhaps best fitted for such a gifted boy. But there was also a twin sister, born three minutes after him. She too was lovely physically, but she was not gifted in the ways that her brother was and still is. It was as if the universe, feeling that it had endowed the brother with such gifts, was seeking to balance things by giving the sister none. She was like a beautiful vase without flowers, if you understand my meaning.”

“I understand,” Pamela said through lips that were numb with shock. “Please continue.”

“This, of course, is where my part in the story begins. They spirited her away to Paris after the birth. They were an old family, and it was how such things were often managed in such families. Certainly they were not the first to hide a child away. I think Jamie’s
grand-père
knew that his son and wife were hardly fit to raise the whole child they had, never mind one that had nothing of wholeness about her. So I was hired and I came here to live in this house with Adele. She was not a difficult child, though now and again we would have some very hard days.” She sighed, hands brushing over the worn table, as though she could clear away the long usage and turn it to a glass that would show Pamela the past.

“They did not tell Jamie of his twin, but he was a curious and very determined young man, and one way or another, when he was sixteen he found out, and so he came here to see her on his own. He was so angry—oh, the fight he had with his
grand-père
, I thought the roof would come down around our ears before they ceased—it was, what is the saying, ‘anvil and tongs’?”

“’Hammer and tongs’,” Pamela supplied. She had rarely seen Jamie angry but on the occasions that he had been, it was a very unpleasant experience.

“Just so, ‘hammer and tongs’. For Adele, he was never anything but loving and gentle. You will know his
grand-mère
—his mother’s mother?”

“Yes, I know her.”

“She would come over for a few months each year, and take care of Adele while I went home to Provençe or on holiday and sorted out the affairs of my own life. When Monsieur Jamie visited here he would look after her with such love. I swear there was a light inside her when he was around that did not turn on when he was absent. I think she knew he was the other half, the whole of their particular equation.”