Beauty, Beast, and Belladonna

by Maia Chance

  She pushed into a cramped shop whose walls were built, floor to ceiling, with carved shelves full of bottles and jars.

  The shopkeeper, an elderly woman in a black gown and dyed curls, helped the lone customer. Ophelia loitered until the customer bunked off. When Ophelia had the shopkeeper’s ear, her pitiful French could not express her question well. She left the shop, cheeks hot, with the distinct impression that the shopkeeper thought she wished to purchase a large quantity of belladonna berries.

  After more wandering, she found a second apothecary’s shop, the dingier, dustier sort.

  “Oui, mademoiselle?” the portly man behind the counter said.

  Ophelia managed to make her question understood: Did Château Vézère’s gardener sell belladonna berries to him?

  “Non.” The shopkeeper frowned and said in French, “Only the grand lady of château comes here, for her sleeping tablets.”

  “Mademoiselle Gavage?”

  “Oui.”

  “Merci, monsieur.” Ophelia went out.

  Sleeping tablets! Maybe Ivy hadn’t been fibbing about Bernadette putting tablets in bits of cheese, after all. But then, did that make Bernadette the murderer? If she was, Ophelia realized she ought to be back at the château, not tailing Forthwith in Sarlat.

  Actually, it was nearly time to meet Forthwith back at the carriage, anyway. Ophelia went in that direction. Half a block later, she spotted Forthwith up ahead, leaving a shop with a small parcel tucked under his arm. He hadn’t seen her, and he walked with a jaunty step in the direction of the carriage.

  Grand.

  Ophelia waited until he was out of sight before hurrying to the shop from which he’d emerged. IMPRIMEUR, the hanging wooden sign read. She peered into the display window. Stacks of fancy stationery. A printer’s shop.

  Inside, it smelled of flat ink and sweet, pulpy paper. Printing presses of gleaming wood and brass occupied half the shop, and two men in shirtsleeves bent over their work. A shop counter and shelves with stationery filled the other side.

  Had Forthwith simply been purchasing stationery? He wasn’t exactly the letter-penning sort. Ophelia approached the young woman at the counter.

  “Pardonnez-moi, l’homme avec le chapeau, um, beaver,” she said, tongue scrambling.

  “I speak English,” the woman said with a smile. “If you prefer.”

  Thank Theophilis. “I do prefer. The gentleman who left a few moments ago—wearing a beaver hat—”

  “The American gentleman?”

  “My brother. He forgot part of his purchase, and asked that I collect it for him.”

  The woman furrowed her brows. “Why did he not come back himself?”

  “Oh. Too hungry. He is going directly to the café.”

  The woman gave Ophelia a funny look, but turned and checked one of the cubby holes in the shelf behind her. “He left behind nothing from his order.”

  “His order of stationery,” Ophelia said, trying to sound sure of herself.

  “Stationery? Why, no. The American gentleman collected his order of the strange little labels with the beast upon them.”

  Ophelia’s jaw fell. “I beg your pardon—beast?”

  The woman’s expression closed. “You are his sister, you say?”

  One of the men at the printing presses called something to the woman that Ophelia couldn’t understand, but she reckoned it was something to the effect of is there any trouble?

  “Well, I must be going.” Ophelia left before anyone could stop her.

  22

  Now it was certainly time to meet Forthwith back at the carriage; Ophelia saw a clock tower. What could Forthwith be doing, having labels printed with beasts on them? He was surely at the bottom of this mystery. And Larsen was mixed up in it somehow, too. To top all, Bernadette bought sleeping tablets at the apothecary’s shop. Was there no one in the château who wasn’t a scheming scab? Besides Abel and the professor, of course.

  As Ophelia passed through a crowded square, she saw Professor Penrose step out of a storefront. Speak of the devil.

  He saw her. There is a moment, Ophelia reckoned, when you could see the truth in people’s faces. Most of the time, people were actors, going about performing the person they hoped to be. But when someone caught sight of you unexpectedly (or when you saw your own face by accident in a mirror), you saw through the mask.

  When Ophelia saw Professor Penrose see her, she read surprise on his face, followed by vulnerability, hopefulness, friendship, and . . . love? But when he’d said he loved her last month, he hadn’t really meant it.

  Her heart stuttered and her feet stopped. Walkers flowed around her.

  In a flash, Penrose’s face arranged itself into the genial, composed expression he customarily wore. He smiled as he walked towards her.

  “Miss Flax. Good morning.”

  “What’s happened to your face? Things keep happening to it. Oh. And good morning.”

  Penrose touched the pink welt on his cheekbone. “I’m not certain I ought to tell you.”

  “Professor.”

  “Tolbert.”

  “What!”

  “Smacked me with a revolver.”

  Ophelia’s hands went cold. “Why?”

  “He is unbalanced, and rather angry that I am—or so he believes—searching for the fossilized jawbone, which he considers his.”

  “You were searching for it. Where? In his chamber?”

  “I’d already checked there.”

  “You’re very busy.”

  “Then that makes two of us.” Penrose’s mouth quirked. “I went to look through the cook’s chamber, in the hopes that she had hidden the jawbone there—and your ring, actually—after withholding those items from the secondhand shop. Although why a woman of that sort would keep a fossil, I’ve no notion. I keep worrying that someone has given it to their dog to chew.”

  “Then you didn’t find it?”

  “No. I merely succeeded in further agitating Tolbert. I’m firmly convinced now, however, that it was he who set up that shrine in the cave. He may be, vocationally speaking, a man of science, but he has the heart and soul of a fanatic. Oh—I spoke with the stagecoach driver, Gerard. He’s here in town, and you were correct. He was bribed by an anonymous person to cause the stagecoach to break down, just before Château Vézère’s gates. He received a packet of money for his trouble—and to keep his mouth shut.”

  “I knew it. He didn’t say who?”

  “I don’t believe he knows, truthfully.”

  “A packet of money, then? Yes, the murderer is someone rich.”

  “Speaking of which, I’ve just come from the telegraph office. I sent messages to both the Avignon and Lyon ticket offices of the Compagnie des chemins de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée.”

  “What in tarnation is that?”

  “A railway company with an excessively convoluted name. I’ll check back first thing tomorrow for a reply.”

  “Thank you. And I mean to pay you back.”

  “I know that you will.”

  “I must go. I’ve come into town with Forthwith, and I fancy he won’t wait more than a minute for me if I’m late. Tolbert isn’t the only one brandishing a gun, you know. Forthwith has one.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ride with me back to the château—we could hire another horse. Better yet, do not return to the château at all. People are behaving oddly, and whoever the murderer is, well, they’ll become desperate—they already are desperate, actually— and they must know that you’re snooping about in this business.”

  “Not go back? No! I’m getting closer to the murderer, I feel it. Besides, I can’t run off without returning the count’s ring, and I certainly can’t allow Henrietta to go to the guillotine.”

  “I do understan
d. But—”

  “And I wish to ride back with Forthwith to—to ask him about something.” Ophelia didn’t wish to tell Penrose about the printer’s shop and what the shopgirl had said about beast labels. Nor did she have any inclination to share her suspicions about Forthwith and Larsen being in cahoots. Penrose’s knee-jerk response was to treat her like a demure, delicate lady. Which she wasn’t.

  “Please don’t ride with Forthwith,” Penrose said.

  “I must.”

  “There must be a better way. A safer way. Would you take my revolver?”

  “You’re carrying a gun, too?” Ophelia rolled her eyes. “It’s like the Oregon Territory hereabouts.”

  “Take it.”

  “No. I could never use it, and letting others see that you’ve got a weapon only makes their blood boil. In the circus, the ringmaster always fired a gun—only a blank—up into the air to mark the beginning of the show, and let me tell you, some of the sauced fellows in the audience got the wrong idea more than a few times, and whipped out their own guns. Caused a stampede in the audience, once, and then one of the elephants got into the mix—don’t look at me like that, Professor. No, I’m going to ride back with Forthwith. I’ll see you soon.”

  Penrose grabbed her arm. “Miss Flax, I beg you not to—”

  She shook him off and turned tail. The professor was so confounded bossy.

  * * *

  Forthwith was waiting inside the carriage. His legs were crossed, and he bobbled his foot impatiently. The paper-wrapped parcel sat on the seat beside him. “I haven’t got all day, Ophelia. Lord. Where have you been?” He rapped on the ceiling, and the carriage rumbled forward.

  Ophelia stuffed down her unease. What of it if she was trapped in a carriage with a possible murderer?

  “Where have I been?” she said. “Oh, wandering around. Quaint little town, isn’t it? My Baedeker says the town center dates to the middle ages.” Ophelia inched to the edge of her seat, eyes on Forthwith’s parcel. “Funny, isn’t it? Back in America, I reckoned the buildings from the colonial days were ancient, but that’s nothing, is it?” She snatched up the parcel and tore off the brown paper. Dozens of little paper rectangles cascaded out.

  “What in hell are you doing?” Forthwith yelled. He fell to his knees and began frantically to gather up the papers.

  Ophelia held one up—they were all the same. There was a beast on the label as the woman in the printer’s shop had said, sure. But not the half-man, half-boar variety. No, Forthwith’s little papers were printed with the image of an American buffalo. Words curved over and under the buffalo:

  Stonewall’s Magic Buffalo Soap

  “Patented and Pure”

  Est. 1867

  Forthwith grabbed Ophelia’s wrist, hard. She cried out, and he nipped the paper away. “You may be an accomplished trickster, darling, but it is I who specialize in sleight of hand,” he snarled.

  “What is all this?” Ophelia said. “Did you kill Mr. Knight? Did you kill Madame Dieudonné?”

  Forthwith gathered up the last fallen papers and stuffed them into the torn wrapping. “Damn it, you dirtied them, Ophelia.”

  “Tell me!”

  Forthwith got back on the seat. “You suppose I killed those two? Why would I?”

  Ophelia pointed at the torn parcel. “To protect whatever scheme you’ve got cooking. The sneaky talks with Mr. Larsen. The gun in your jacket—yes, I saw it.”

  “Knight and Madame Dieudonné were both strangers to me. I didn’t kill them. God, what a waste of tuck that would be. Why murder people when you might simply outfox them?”

  “Stonewall’s Magic Buffalo Soap? What is that? And if it’s so magical, why didn’t you launder that belladonna-stained hankie of yours?”

  Forthwith slitted his eyes. “How do you know about that?”

  “Oh. I may have borrowed your trousers to, um, climb a cliff.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. The point is, I saw the hankie.”

  “That wasn’t mine. It was planted, just like that bottle of heart tablets this morning.”

  “By Miss Banks?”

  “Maybe. Whoever planted the hankie probably hoped a servant would find it. Don’t you see? The murderer is creating distractions. Smoke screens. Magician’s bread and butter, you understand. Make everyone look the other way while you do your business.”

  “All right, then what about Stonewall’s Magic Buffalo Soap?”

  Forthwith lounged back in his seat and folded his arms. “It’s quite simple. I hatched a scheme, during that wretched journey here during which Henrietta did nothing but gush like a girl in pigtails about that cadaver Larsen. He sounded ripe for the picking, and when Henrietta mentioned his fascination with the American West—the plains and tepees and antelopes bounding into the sunset and all that rubbish—well, I had a brilliant notion. Since I’d already been recruited to play your brother, Mr. Stonewall the soap heir, I decided to get Larsen to invest in my soap company.”

  “What soap company?”

  “My false soap company, which employs a secret, patented ingredient derived from the gopher claw bush, one that has been used for eons by the natives of North America.”

  “It has?”

  Forthwith snorted. “Of course not. There is no such thing as a gopher claw bush. But Larsen liked the cut of my jib, and that was the important thing. I spun him a tale of woe, about how I yearned to break away from Father’s tyrannical clutches—old man Stonewall, don’t you know—and build a company of my own. He utterly sympathizes and, provided I produce a solid business strategy that could convince other investors, he is prepared to invest a small fortune in my company.”

  “But you haven’t got a company.” Ophelia rubbed her temples. “What do you—you mean to accept a small fortune from Mr. Larsen and then—what?”

  Forthwith made a lazy, abracadabra wave. “Vanish.”

  “You’re a thief. A confidence man.”

  “Well, you would know, Ophelia dear. And if you so much as breathe a word of this, I’ll expose you as an actress faster than you can say guillotine.” Forthwith smiled.

  Ophelia scowled out the carriage window. Given that Forthwith had the morals of a brick, he could be lying about all of this. He still could be the murderer. Yet for some reason she was inclined to believe him. The soap, the investment—it all rang plausible to her ear. But with Forthwith off the list, who was left? Only Griffe, Bernadette—mustn’t forget the sleeping tablets and the cheese—and Banks, who was, if nothing else, very rich.

  With Henrietta wilting in jail, and with only a day until Ophelia was supposed to walk down the aisle—only a day left, that is, to find the missing ring—it seemed like an impossibly long list.

  * * *

  Gabriel located the blacksmith’s shop from a long way off, by the dirty ribbon of smoke rising from its forge. As he drew closer, walking along the muddy track into the village, he heard the prismatic clang of hammer on iron.

  The blacksmith—Gabriel had been told he was called Marcel—was at work, then. But the stable boy had said all the women would be elsewhere, making garlands for some village celebration.

  Gabriel slowed, formulating a plan. The shop stood to the side of a cottage. No smoke rose from the cottage chimney. Gnarled fruit trees clumped behind the cottage, and beyond that spread a field dotted with sheep. Cottages stood on either side of the blacksmith’s cottage, but at a distance of several yards and screened by more trees.

  Gabriel could simply sneak around and enter through the back—provided no one was home. And the clanging of Marcel at his forge would be a constant indication of his whereabouts.

  If anyone asked Gabriel what he was about, he could say he wished to hear firsthand the woman’s account of seeing the beast.

  A pause in the clanging made Gabriel stop. But a moment later, the
hammering started up again. He picked his way to the rear, crouched behind a fence, and watched the cottage windows. No motion behind the dark, leaded panes. After several minutes, Gabriel crossed the weedy garden.

  How odd that a village woman did not tend her garden. Surely her family would benefit from the crop of greens or onions or herbs that this little plot could yield. Perhaps the villagers gardened in a communal plot.

  Gabriel knocked gently on the door, and waited. Nothing—and no barking dogs, thank God. Come to think of it, dogs were oddly absent in this village.

  He slipped through the door—unbolted—and found himself in a one-room living space half lit by small windows. Low-beamed ceiling. Unlit hearth, ashy and smoking. A pile of frilly, wild-looking mushrooms on the table.

  He listened for creaking floorboards, but if anyone was upstairs, they were still. Outside, the clanging went on and on.

  Gabriel sprang to action. All he desired was the jawbone, and there weren’t many places it could be hidden in this humble place. He checked the mantelpiece and the crude chest beside it. Nothing but a half-made gown of pale gold, homespun flax. He found a small cupboard under the stairs, but that was filled with broom, mop, bucket, and rags.

  He turned to the table, covered with food preparation in progress: the mushrooms on the cutting board, a bowl of shelled acorns, a pile of swampy-smelling greens, a wild game hen, dried berries. This explained why the woman of the house did not bother with her back garden: All of this food had been foraged or hunted from the forest.

  In the china hutch, stacks of mud-colored stoneware. Gabriel opened the hutch’s lower doors. The odor of decaying wood puffed out, and he cringed as his hand plunged through sticky cobwebs. But—there was something. Not a jawbone, but . . . a piece of paper.

  Gabriel studied it, and his breath frayed.

  It was a pencil drawing, black-and-white and scientific, of a skeleton. Tidy little labels—a. b. c. and so on. Tolbert’s hand, Gabriel was convinced. The skeleton was of a creature that appeared to be, in some respects, human—the rib cage, pelvic bones, limbs, and spine were certainly human, if with a rather hunched and sturdy appearance. But the skull and the feet? Like a boar’s, tusks and hooves and all.