“Perhaps you are not yet aware that I am in mourning, Mrs. Hardcastle. That — and the newness of my arrival — make it impossible for me to accept invitations at this time.”
“Mourning?” she repeated, the pince-nez now taking in the significance of my clothing colors.
“Yes. My uncle, Mr. Frederick Tulman, he is … gone.” And, as luck would have it, this is exactly what I hoped was true. I could hear low voices and movement in the foyer.
“… had no idea, my child. Is Alice Tulman aware of the circumstance?”
“I am not certain, actually. My aunt and I … are not on speaking terms.”
“No, I daresay you are not.” Mrs. Hardcastle’s breath whooshed through her nose. “Well, that is all the more reason to come, dearest child. No one stays inside the house in Paris. You must let our little party help you forget your troubles.” She smiled at me. “We dine at eight.”
The presumption jumped right beneath my skin, where it prickled. “The idea is out of the question, Mrs. Hardcastle. Another carriage ride today would be most unpleasant. Come to tea tomorrow, if you like, but for now I will stay in my own house and tend to my own affairs.” I took a breath. “And I would be most gratified if you would address me as ‘Miss Tulman.’”
Mrs. Hardcastle’s face wore an expression I remembered from Aunt Alice’s morning room. A smile, but one that hid something ugly, like the prettily embroidered cloth that covers a casket.
“Why, of course, Miss Tulman. I hope I did not offend. I was merely eager to hear more of you and your intended stay in Paris.”
I inclined my head, thinking I would not mind knowing the same of her. I had been too busy dealing with the fact of her presence to even question why it should be here.
“But please,” she continued, “do not think me so rude as to wish you to traipse about the city on the very day of your arrival. I assume you know the Reynolds family? They are set up just next door. Mrs. Reynolds is my husband’s second cousin and I am with her for a several months’ stay. I had the good fortune to witness your arrival from the drawing-room window.”
I stared back at her, trying to process this information, the knot that had become a permanent feature of my insides pulling agonizingly tight.
“Good day to you, Miss Tulman. I do hope we will be favored with your company soon.”
I returned her curtsy, and then, waking slightly from my shock, ran to the pocket door, getting there just in time to block her exit. I cracked the door, saw that the foyer was devoid of trunks, and only then allowed her out. She chose not to comment on my bizarre behavior, but swept from the salon in an elegant rustle, stepping over the fallen bonnets. The front door closed, and less than a half minute later, still standing in the salon, I also heard the faint close of another door, outside and down the sidewalk, just beyond the shuttered window I had tried to open.
I closed my eyes. No one but I, Katharine Tulman, could run across land and sea to hide a supposed-dead uncle from not one but two governments, only to move next door to one of the most blatant gossips on the continent. I really wasn’t sure why I was surprised. And then I remembered my uncle. I picked up my skirts, hurried through the empty foyer, and ran up the stairs.
On the second landing, I passed our two drivers, going down with a heavy tread, one of them rubbing his arms. They tipped their caps, otherwise ignoring me. I assumed this meant they had been paid and continued my dash for five more steps before I met Mrs. DuPont coming down with a smooth, almost unnatural glide. I stopped.
“Have you not gone home yet, Mrs. DuPont?”
“The house, it is full of English,” she hissed.
I squeezed past her on the stairs, in too much of a hurry to consider the sense of this comment, the question of what she might have been doing on the upper floors all that time more prominent in my mind. Light footsteps clacked down the steps and the girl Marguerite blew past me in a streak, another book, larger this time, tucked beneath her arm. She maneuvered around her mother and across the landing, her clamor sinking lower into the house.
I had twisted my head to watch her go, sure I’d already seen her descend once before, and when I turned back again I was facing yet another figure, this time a man I’d never seen. He was short and gray-headed, lines and wrinkles on his cheeks, though the muscles in his chest were still hard, wiry with strength. I could see all this very clearly, as he was wearing no shirt. I stopped dead on the stairs.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
Mrs. DuPont said something in French that I thought might be angry, but the man did not answer either one of us, just kept the pace of his downward tread.
“Excuse me,” I said, “but why are you not … clothed?”
“Ah,” he sighed as if the world were a sad place indeed, “Napoléon est mort.” He shook his head. “Napoléon est mort.”
I found myself pressing against the wall to let him pass. He joined Mrs. DuPont, who was sputtering rapidly in French, and then I remembered my business and ran to the fourth floor, where I found Mr. Babcock. He immediately took my arm, steering me toward the little storeroom.
“Are they gone?” he asked.
“Mrs. Hardcastle is,” I replied, panting from the climb, “but I met a man on the stairs without … well … when I inquired about his clothing, I believe he told me that Napoléon was dead.”
“Ah, yes,” said Mr. Babcock. “That would be Mr. DuPont. He informed me of Napoléon’s demise as well. The first Napoléon, I assume, not the current one.” He pulled a ribbon from beneath his shirt, a key hanging on its end. “A helpful man, quite correct in his assertions, though his information appears to be limited.”
I shrugged a shoulder in agreement with this as Mr. Babcock shut the storeroom door and locked it behind us. The trunk was now in the middle of the floor, its contents quiet, and Mary was running her hands over a section of shelves on the far wall.
“You gave him a dose?” I asked Mary, joining her to examine the shelves.
“Had to, Miss. Is the old bat gone?”
“Yes.” I chose a section of the dirty wood and felt carefully, looking for a latch or anything that might be out of place. Mr. Babcock got with difficulty onto his hands and knees at the corner of the room, where the shelf wall began, and peered upward. “We have to get Uncle Tully out of that trunk soon,” I said. The worry was returning, eating at my stomach like an ulcer. “Dr. Pruitt said much longer than this would be unwise, and he’s already been several hours without water.”
“I know it, Miss. And I’m not looking forward to the cleaning of that trunk, if you don’t mind me saying. It weren’t so nice when I opened the lid, though I suppose he can’t be helping it, and them old dresses is only fit for the fire. …”
“Here!” cried Mr. Babcock.
We both turned. He was reaching below a shelf, a shade lower than the height of my waist. A latch clicked, and the shelf swung out and into the storeroom, creaking a bit on its hinges. It was just a door, I saw, half my height, a thin layer of plaster spread over its wood and with shelves built across it, matching the other sections in the room. The whole thing was so simple it made me nervous, though I supposed there would be no reason to think that what lay beyond the wall of shelves did not belong to the next house. Still, I was glad I’d told Mrs. DuPont this room would be mine. The storeroom door would have to stay locked.
Mr. Babcock stuck his head through the resulting doorway, and then crawled through. Mary went next and I bent down and followed, surprised when I needed to step upward once; the wall between the rooms was much thicker than I would have anticipated. I got through the door and straightened, straining to fill my eyes with everything at once.
It was a very comfortable room, not large, but airy in its sense of space. The ceiling was high, with the same slope as the storeroom’s, but instead of one small window and the resulting corner shadows, here the roof was cut by a row of five of them, tilted to the sky, sending a bright swath of light through the air to the
carpeted floor. A long roll of pink cloth was set along the top of the windows, a system of crank, pulleys, and thin rope ready to let the cloth down or roll it back up again, to block the sun as wanted.
I left Mary and Mr. Babcock to explore and went to the back wall, past a little stove tapped into a chimney of bricks, and through another door. Behind it was a tiny bedroom, windowless, with a cot and a door on either end. The first door was locked, bolted, and painted shut, but the second opened easily. I shook my head, surprised, and yet not surprised. It was a bathing room. The convenience was not as modern as the one my grandmother had put beside her bedchamber in Stranwyne, but there were pipes connected, a copper tub, and a faucet hanging over a large shallow bowl. I turned a tap, and watched the water run.
“Look, Miss!” I heard Mary calling. I came out of the little bedchamber to see her standing beside a workbench — though I’d hardly recognized it as such, it being so clean — searching noisily through a box of tools. There was a box of metal parts, I saw, and a few dingy tin toys. Other trunks and boxes lined the walls, which instead of being painted or papered were covered in a pale pink cloth.
“There’s most everything Mr. Tully would be needing in here,” Mary was saying excitedly, “though I’m not seeing his hot pen, Miss, what he uses for making them bits of metal stick together. Did we bring this with us? I’m thinking we did but everything was done in such a tearing hurry, I can’t be sure. …”
“Mr. Babcock,” I said, “is all well?” He was standing perfectly still in the middle of the room, hands clasped behind his back, staring up at nothing, his belly when left in that position looking amazingly close to the shape of his head. He smiled.
“Oh, yes, my dear. It’s just your grandmother … she did a rather good job of it, didn’t she?”
I knew what he meant. I’d felt it, too, the same presence as in my bedchamber at Stranwyne, one that I suspected my uncle also sensed in places like his clock room. My grandmother’s stamp was indelible, and the thought made me long for home. But I only replied, “And she’s managed to get water and pipes up here, too, though I can’t imagine how.”
Mr. Babcock smiled again, and then we both jumped violently at a sudden crash, as if every pane of glass above us had burst into a thousand shards. I spun on my heel to see Mary, wide-eyed at the workbench, holding the ripped lace of her sleeve, the full box of tools now a scattered mess on the floor. “I’m sorry, Miss, I —”
“Shhh!” said Mr. Babcock, holding up a hand.
We waited in silence, listening to three sets of breath. I hadn’t had time to think of it yet, but I realized that what had to be below us was the house next door. The house, it came to me suddenly, where Mrs. Hardcastle was living. I held my breath and heard nothing, not even the noises from the street, and then I understood the raised, carpeted floor, and the thick, cloth-covered walls. The sound in this room had been deliberately deadened. But how much so? If my uncle woke frightened, unable to find the familiar, could this room possibly conceal one of his tantrums from whomever might be directly below?
When the silence continued, Mr. Babcock slowly lowered his hand, closing his eyes for a moment in relief. But I could not be certain that relief had a foundation. How quickly would rumors of strange noises in the house next door get from Mrs. Reynolds to Mr. Wickersham? Or even to the French? We could not allow my uncle to stay here without knowing. I would not. I ran a hand along the side of my head, smoothing the curls that were springing their way out in the warm attic air. I felt infinitely weary.
“What time is it, Mary?”
She snatched up the pocket watch hanging on its chain, and then paused, nose wrinkled. “But I said I’ve already been giving Mr. Tully his —”
“What time?”
“Not quite a quarter past one, Miss. Why?”
“Because I think we must hurry. We need to unload Uncle Tully’s things, have this room ready as quickly as possible, and get him out of his trunk before I have to go.”
“Go? But where do you have to be going, Miss?”
“Dinner,” I said. “With Mrs. Hardcastle.”
If I had exchanged the words dinner and firing squad, I think my expression might have been the same.
By a quarter past eight I was ready, or as ready as I was going to be. The three of us had worked feverishly, dragging the cases and trunks up the stairs and into the storeroom, handing through the hidden door my uncle’s floor pillows, his teacups, a smattering of clocks, and the tools, pieces, parts, and half-finished automatons from the workshop at Stranwyne, all his comfortable familiarities I’d told Mr. Wickersham had been melted. I pronounced the mattress on the cot in the bedroom unusable, so Mr. Babcock ransacked the house to find another while Mary warmed water, scrubbed, swept away mice droppings, and brought out the linens.
Then carefully, and with a struggle, we brought my sleeping uncle out of the trunk and got him through the little door. We laid Uncle Tully out on the floor and cleaned him — no time for modesty — dressing him in his usual nightshirt before putting him on the bed with a new mattress and fresh coverings. He was thrashing some now, groaning and speaking the nonsense of dreams, not asleep but never truly awake either. Dr. Pruitt had told us to expect this, a certain time of grogginess and weakness after the prolonged anesthetic, and that my uncle would become himself again given time. But it hurt me to see it. Uncle Tully drank half a glass of water, eyes closed, before I laid him back on his pillow.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” I’d asked Mary in a whisper, helping her tighten the blankets around his kicking legs. Lane had discovered this, cocooning Uncle Tully in a blanket when he was upset, a trick that had always seemed to give my uncle security. It was doing nothing for him now, and the guilt of leaving him was nearly intolerable. But for his own safety this task had to be done, the quicker the better. And short of burglary, I could not see how it was a task that could be performed by anyone but myself.
“We’ll be just fine, Miss,” Mary said softly. “I’ll be taking care of Mr. Tully; he’s used to finding me with him. It’s Mr. Babcock that’ll have to be staying away, but I’ve sent him off to be getting us a bit of bread and honey for toast, as I’ve already got Mr. Tully’s tea. I’ll be keeping Mr. Tully wrapped up tight, but if he’s waking up proper while you’re gone, then I’m thinking I should be giving him a time for your coming, Miss, so he can look at my watch. And I’ll explain how we’ve all been doing just as Miss Marianna said, and let him wind up the clocks.”
I considered. “No, I think perhaps have the clocks wound already, if you can possibly manage it, Mary. Seeing them stopped will make him upset. Though I daresay he’s going to throw a tantrum once he understands his surroundings, no matter what we do.”
“But, Miss, if Mr. Tully does shout his head off, and if you can be hearing it from next door, and the others can be hearing him, too, what are you going to do, then, Miss?”
What we would do, I thought, was pack our things again and take my uncle out of this place. I had not the first notion of where we could go. The knot inside me twinged with familiar pain as I glanced guiltily at Mary; there was nothing about my life lately that did not involve guilt. “I had thought to tell them that my maid was … prone to nightmares. Do you mind?”
“Lord, what would I care, Miss?” she replied, tucking in the last corner of blanket. “’Tis no skin off my nose, as they say.”
I wondered what I had ever done in life to be blessed with the likes of Mary Brown. “Then let’s try to keep him calm,” I said, “but if he shouts, he shouts. And be sure and move about normally. I need to understand what can be heard from the other house. But you’re perfectly right about giving him a time. Let’s say eleven … no, we’d do better to say half past. Mrs. Hardcastle mentioned four courses, and I’ll need time to look about the house.” Only heaven knew how I was going to manage that.
Mary shook her head, a dark smudge beneath each eye. “Well, don’t be a minute after, that’s what I�
�m saying, Miss. There’ll be the devil to pay if you are. Is there anything fit after being stuffed in your trunk — your dresses, I’m meaning, Miss, not your uncle, and I’m meaning your real trunk, of course, the other one — and are you needing any help with your hair?”
I’d told her that I could find something to put on and do my own hair. And I did, my appearance scarcely being a priority. But the deep brown silk rustling at my toes suited me well, and under artificial light should be dark enough to be taken for proper mourning. It was a far cry from a gray worsted dress, I reminded myself. I touched the small, healing cut on my neck, pulled some wisping curls around my face, hoping to lessen the effects of fatigue I could plainly see there, turned from the gilded mirror of the foyer, and shut the red doors quietly behind me.
It was nearing full dark and the streetlamps were lit. I pulled a patterned shawl tighter around my shoulders, more against the strangeness than the slight chill. Rue Trudon was mostly residential, it seemed, with only a boy, whistling, moving leisurely to what was likely his last destination of the day. I could smell cooking that was not like London, could hear the clop of horse hooves from the cross street, oddly muffled on the smooth, black pavement and, from an open window, a conversation I could not understand. Seven days and eight nights had passed since the Frenchman had died in my uncle’s workshop, and since then I had buried a stranger in my own family plot, told more lies than I could count, bribed a sea captain and a bevy of French officials, committed what I suspected might be treason against the British government, and left behind the only place in the world I had ever known as home. It seemed blatantly unfair that dinner with the likes of Mrs. Hardcastle had to follow. I sighed, walked thirty-two steps to Mrs. Reynolds’s door, and knocked.
A servant answered, very formally attired in a black frock coat with silver buttons. He stared at me without the slightest hint of welcome, brows raised in inquiry.
“Miss Katharine Tulman,” I said to him, “acquaintance of Mrs. Richard Hardcastle. I believe I … am expected to dinner.” I only just kept the question mark from my sentence. I’d sent Mary flying next door with a note accepting Mrs. Hardcastle’s invitation several hours earlier. Surely it had been received? The door opened a bit wider.
A Spark Unseen Page 7