Kitty Peck and the Child of Ill-Fortune (6 page)

I told him about the straps on the evening dress and what I needed to do to make them sit straight, but he said that when you are staying in an establishment as grand as Le Meurice, there are people to take care of that sort of thing. It made me wonder again about his way of living in the days before the fire took his looks, but I didn’t say anything. That was the past, and I didn’t want it to cast a shadow now I’d found Joey again.

‘How do I walk in this rig without taking a tumble?’ I moved away from the mirror and felt the waterfall of lace at the back of the dress twist with me. It was heavy and made of many layers, some of them sewn with tiny glittering beads. I couldn’t work out how to keep it from winding round my ankles.

Lucca knelt beside me. ‘There is a loop here in the underskirt. May I?’

He burrowed around at my feet. ‘Here – take this in your left hand, hook it around your ring finger. When you walk along a hallway let it drop so that the dress flows behind you. If you go upstairs or if you dance—’

I snorted. ‘We’ve been invited to dinner, not a bleedin’ ball, Lucca.’

He glanced up at me. ‘Perhaps not tonight, but you will wear this dress again, Kitty, trust me, I know you will. You look like a Botticelli.’

He must have dialled the look on my face because he sighed and followed up on that immediately. ‘Sandro Botticelli – a painter of the Renaissance, famous for his beautiful women – angels, goddesses. That’s how you look in this dress. Joseph chose well.’

It was our last evening in Paris. We’d spoken about meeting in the early afternoon and later going out to dine, the three of us, so I was surprised when I read the note that arrived with the clothes. I’d got the distinctive impression – mostly by omission – that Joey wanted to keep us away from rue des Carmélites and his life there, but the invitation was clear.

I’d read that note a hundred times.
We gather at nine
. I wondered what that meant, exactly. And there was the other line too,
I want you to shine for my friends.
I looked at my blue frock folded neatly at the top of the open trunk. I would have worn it this evening if Joey hadn’t sent the dress I was wearing now.

Lucca fussed around my ankles again, smoothing out the train so that it pooled in a shimmering semi-circle behind me. He cleared his throat. ‘You understand about tonight, what you will see?’ He didn’t look up. Instead he busied himself with his cuffs, pulling them down so that just the right amount of white showed at the wrist.

Then he stood, brushed lint from his knees and stared at himself in the long dressing mirror, adjusting the starched collar of his shirt so that it rose higher on his scarred neck. He swept his dark hair forward and nodded at the half-handsome young man reflected back at him.

After a moment he caught my eye in the glass. ‘You do know what I mean, Fannella?’

I nodded. ‘
It is time for honesty
? That’s what his note said.’

‘But are you ready for it?’

Tell truth, I did wonder about that – when the images came I chased them out of my head. I pulled myself up straight and shifted my shoulders to bring the gauzy straps higher.

‘I’ve seen a lot in the halls, Lucca – and on the streets. I’m not a country parson’s chavy, am I? I know right enough what you’re on about.’

‘To know is one thing, but . . .’ He stared hard at me and I couldn’t read his expression, not exactly. It might have been concern, but it could just as easily have been a challenge.

The little gilt clock on the mantle struck three notes, it was quarter to nine already.

I tried to smile. ‘I’ll deal with it.’

The conversation and laughter died the moment the Monseigneur ushered us into the vaulted candlelit dining room. At the far end of the table someone rose to greet us, but I didn’t, immediately, realise who it was.

I knew what I was expecting to see. I knew what that house was, and I knew what my brother was, even though I hadn’t put it into words, but the reality of it, perhaps I should say the
unreality
of it, was almost impossible to take in.

The air was heavy with scent and wine. Little points of light sparked off the crystal ware set along the table. They flickered on the walls giving the oddest impression that everything was moving, like we were on water.

A score of blurred faces turned to me and a trickle of sweat ran down my back under the stiff grey satin as Joey walked towards me. His face was artfully and perfectly painted – just enough to emphasise the delicate curve of his lips, the tilt of his heavily lashed eyes and the slant of his cheekbones.

Joseph Peck was a beautiful woman.

Just as Lucca had told me that night when it all came tumbling out, ‘
He could pass. You might take him for a girl – for a woman.
’ I tightened my hold on the feather fan that had arrived with the dress.

Then from nowhere the old cow’s voice went off. ‘
I will return your brother to you . . . in due course. But whether you will accept him, now, that is another matter. You will find him much altered.
’ I was back in that churchyard by Ma’s grave staring at Lady Ginger’s white-painted face – her lips cracking into a sticky black smile.

She knew.

She knew how I’d feel at this moment and she enjoyed the power of knowing it. I heard a snap and something clattered to the floor. I’d gripped the carved ivory handle of the fan so hard I’d cracked it in two.

I wasn’t aware of anyone in the room, now, just Joey in his elegant sea-green gown. A thick golden rope of hair was coiled and set high on his head, soft ringlets framed his pointed face, green tear-cut gems trembled from his ears and a treble row of glittering jewels wound about the pale skin of his throat. He was like some mythical creature, a mermaid or a siren – something alien, not my brother.

‘You are most welcome.’ He said the words softly and smiled. As he came close I could see a vein moving in his neck and a muscle twitching at the corner of his eye. He held his hands out to me – they were trembling. To cover, he clasped them firmly together and repeated my name, but when he spoke his blue eyes slid down away from mine.

I felt my belly boil with anger and something sharp stabbed at my temples. I felt the skin on my neck and face flush up.

You mare, I thought. You monstrous, unnatural, wicked creature, Kitty Peck.

I hated myself.

Of a sudden I realised how difficult this was for
him
, not me. I was so wrapped up in my own concerns I couldn’t see what was happening. This wasn’t about me, at all.

‘Kitty?’ The whisper sounded like a plea.

For a second I couldn’t answer. I looked down at Joey’s tight locked hands and I truly grasped how much this moment meant. He was trusting me with his secret, with his soul. He was honouring me with the truth. In front of his friends, Joseph Peck was making himself utterly vulnerable because I was his sister and because he loved me.

God knows what he thought I might do or how I might react. I thought then, and still think now, that it was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do. At that moment my heart nearly burst with pride and love for my brittle, brilliant, beautiful brother.

I didn’t say anything, I couldn’t, there was something balling in my throat. The tip of my nose prickled and my eyes glassed up. I reached to take Joey’s clenched hands in mine and raised them to my mouth. I kissed them gently and then I looked direct at him. There were tears slipping down his cheeks too. They left a silvery train in the fine pearly powder that made his face gleam in the candlelight. I shook my head and reached across to wipe them away.

‘No need for these, eh?’ I smiled and suddenly caught him up in a fierce hug, burying my face in the scented lace of his neckline.

‘You are beautiful, Joseph,’ I whispered. ‘You always have been and you always will be.’

I felt a huge shudder go through my brother’s body. He kissed my right cheek and then my left and then took a step back and held me away from him a little way.

‘Thank you.’ He couldn’t quite say the words aloud, so he mouthed them and blinked hard as more tears threatened to ruin his makeup. Then he pulled me tight against him and murmured into my ear.

‘Josette, that’s what my friends call me here.’

I nodded. ‘I already know that. It’s a pretty name.’

As we stood there locked together I was dimly aware of a great sound crashing around us. It wasn’t the end of the world or anything biblically judgemental, it was the sound of whoops and cheers and applause.

I liked Joey’s – rather, Josette’s – friends.

Upwards of twenty of them were gathered round the table that night, mostly French, but I was introduced to a couple of English lads who were nearly as pretty as my brother, a striking Spaniard who sang for us with such sweet sadness that she (he) would have been an asset to any of my theatrical establishments (the punters always liked a bit of misery, ’specially if it was foreign and came with a good pair of ankles), and a little party from the East.

Two of them were dressed as girls and two of them were dressed as men, but according to Joey, they were all male and all Russian, and they were nearly all dancers from The Moika.

It was the second winter The Ballet Moika had come to Paris. The performers – the male and properly female ones – were, according to Joey, the toast of the city. Half the Imperial court had followed them and the locals had gone wild for ‘
le style russe
’, wrapping their heads in jewelled turbans and paying over the odds for cobble-dusting furs. Apparently there was a particular fashion for emeralds among the noble Russian ladies and now the women of Paris were draping themselves with rivers of stones to keep up with them.

Joey reckoned the hock shops over on rue des Rosiers had never done such trade seeing as every woman of taste was prepared to pawn her grandmother’s jewels – and quite possible the old girl along with them – in order to wrap a string of emeralds round her neck.

‘They are striking, don’t you think?’ Joey reached for his glass.

I laughed. ‘Emeralds? I’ve never given it much thought. You don’t see many in Limehouse, that’s for certain. Do you remember Ma’s pearls? She used to let me wear them in Church Row, but they went missing—’

I stopped myself. Ma’s pearls had gone missing around the same time as Joey. I likely knew what had happened to them now, but if my brother picked anything up from that it didn’t show.

‘I didn’t mean emeralds, Kitty, I meant my guests – the Russians. They have a certain look to them, don’t you think?’

As if he sensed us watching, one of the dancers dressed in men’s gear – breeches and a loose white shirt open at the neck – turned to look back down the table towards us. Joey raised his glass.

The lean handsome face was familiar. I was sure I knew him.

Of course! He was one of the cheekbones who’d been chatting to Lucca at the dance hall the night previous. Now I looked proper, I realised that they all – all the Russians that is – had luminous pale hair and slanting pale eyes set into wide angular faces. They were striking, I couldn’t deny it, that was surely the right word for them all, but there was something fierce about them too.

The man stood and raised his own glass in reply to Joey. Then he raised it to me, smiled and winked. He was tall and muscular – his gesture had a sweeping grace.

‘Ilya. He is one of The Moika’s principal dancers.’ Joey nodded his head in reply and took a sip from his glass. ‘On stage he jumps so high that sometimes you hold your breath watching, wondering when or even if he will come down again. I met him last winter during their first season in Paris and he introduced me to his friends. Akady is to his left, in the blue gown, Stefan to his right, in red, and directly opposite Akady, our friend Lucca is talking to Misha, who is the leader of the orchestra, not a dancer. He is a very clever man, a linguist – Misha is also The Moika’s fixer in chief.’

‘I wondered who that was. He doesn’t look like a dancer.’ I smiled. ‘Lucca’s hardly said a word to me all night.’

Joey looked down the table to the midpoint where Lucca was engaged in deep conversation with a broad-shouldered man whose hair was so fair it was almost white in the candlelight. Lucca was sitting with his back to me, elbow on the table, resting the scarred half of his face in his hand. I knew he was trying to cover the worst of it, but it didn’t seem to matter to the intense young man with him. I remembered that Giacomo, Lucca’s great love, had been a musician too.

‘I . . . introduced them on the second day you were here, when you had a headache – or said you did.’ Joey adjusted one of his dangling earrings which had got twisted up in a ringlet. ‘You were right. There were things Lucca and I needed to say. It was clever of you.’ He paused. ‘You know, he told me a lot more about you, that afternoon – what you’d done, how you really saved those girls.’

He smoothed a wrinkle in the starched white tablecloth, the gemstone bracelet at his wrist glittered in the candlelight. ‘She chose well.’ The words were almost a whisper.

I covered his hand with mine. ‘From what I heard, I don’t think she had much choice.’

He shook his head. ‘Our grandmother knew exactly what she was doing. She always does.’

There was a shriek as a log burning in the depths of a huge marble fireplace halfway down the room spat out a shower of golden sparks. A man who was sitting with his back to the hearth erupted from the table and made a great show of flapping out the trailing skirts of his lacy dress. When he was satisfied he wasn’t incendiary, he stood to one side and fanned himself most energetically as the Monseigneur moved his chair to a safer place.

I wondered if the old boy had come with the house, and if so I wondered what I was paying him. I watched as he ushered flustered Fanny back to a seat and discreetly arranged her skirts so they were folded away from any possibility of ignition. He was almost like part of the furniture. Perhaps he’d been in Lady Ginger’s employ here long before Joey came? The thought came to me then that he still might be. Perhaps the old cow had set a spy on my brother? I wouldn’t put it past her.

‘Do you know where she’s gone?’ It was the question I asked the Beetle every time he scratched up another legal piece for me to sign.

Joey shook his head. ‘I didn’t even know she had gone until you came. I do know this – she had another place. My guess is that it was somewhere far away from Limehouse and Salmon Lane. She went there once when she was taken with the winter sickness and didn’t want people to know how frail she was. If the Barons . . .’ He paused and his fingers tightened round the stem of his glass. ‘She came through and she came back, but she never told me where she’d been. Lady Ginger doesn’t like to show weakness and she never makes mistakes.’

He turned to look at me directly. His blue eyes darkened and his mouth twitched into a sort of smile. ‘And I don’t think you will either, Kitty.’

Mistakes?

For a moment another face swam into my head. James Verdin looked at me in just the way he’d done when he sat at the end of my bed after that first time, after that only time. Of a sudden I felt my cheeks burn up.

‘So, you’re running an establishment here?’ The question tumbled out of my mouth before I’d had time to phrase it more elegantly. Fact was, I didn’t want James in my thoughts and I said the first thing that came into my mind to replace him.

Joey was silent. He frowned and turned the glass about in his hand so that the cuts in the crystal caught the light. I cursed myself.

‘I like to think of it as a refuge.’

He looked down the table. Someone was playing a piano now in the next room and a couple of Joey’s friends rose from their places, wrapped their arms around each other’s tightly corseted waists and drifted off in the direction of the sound. The Monseigneur appeared with another bottle of champagne and began to fill glasses lined up on a tray set to the side of the door. The room was filled with the murmur of conversation punctuated by laughter. You’d have taken it for a society feast – if you didn’t look too close at some of the ladies present.

Joey took a sip and placed the glass carefully back on the table, moving it a little to cover a stain on the cloth. ‘The world isn’t kind to people like us, Kitty. My friends come here because they know they will be safe and for a short time they will feel . . . ordinary. Do you . . .
can
you understand that?’

I looked down at my hands in my lap as he continued. ‘I was blinded by her, you know – our grandmother. When she told me about Paradise and all the doors that were going to be opened it was as if a kind of madness descended on me. It was the same at first with—’ He broke off and filled my glass to the brim.

‘I . . . I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, Kitty, but I am proud of this.’ He gestured at the room and the easy, comfortable people settled around us. ‘It’s one thing I am not ashamed of.’

I knew then that I would never tell him who really owned 17 rue des Carmélites. Better that he thought The Lady had allowed him,
trusted
him, to prove himself here without any strings attached.

‘It’s a fine place, Joey. You should be proud.’ I raised my glass as a toast, and champagne fizzled over my fingers. Tell truth, I didn’t like the stuff much. It didn’t taste clean like gin and it gave me a roaring head.

‘To you and to your friends, J . . . Josette. I’m glad you’ve introduced me to them.’

‘Are you?’ He sounded oddly eager and there was something else there.

I nodded. ‘This is your home now. They’re your family too, aren’t they?’

He reached for my hand and squeezed it. ‘Yes . . . yes, I suppose they are.’ He looked down the table at the people still lingering in the room. His perfectly arched brows knitted together for a moment as he ran a thumbnail over his full lower lip. I recognised the gesture – when we were kids and played at cards together I always knew if he was about to take a risk. He was turning a question in his mind.