“Blow out that candle and shut the door, Mary. I need a pair of trousers.”
We waited an hour before letting ourselves out the back door and into the courtyard, Henri in his shirtsleeves, jacket left behind, me in Mr. Babcock’s smallest pair of trousers, which were both too big and too short all at once. I’d felt ridiculous coming down the stairs, much worse than in the green velvet earlier, Mary shaking her head and giving her opinion freely all the way down. It felt absolutely wrong, like I’d nothing on but bloomers. But I forgot all that in the cool silence of the garden, where the shaking of the dying leaves in the night wind made it impossible to know if someone else might be out there with us. We scooted in the darkness along the edge of the buildings, finally crouching down at Mrs. Reynolds’s back door.
“Keep watch,” Henri whispered, quietly pulling what I took to be a ring of keys from his pocket. I had my hair braided, pinned up beneath Lane’s red cap, and I held it on my head with one hand while I watched the shadows move, wondering why Henri would have a set of keys to Mrs. Reynolds’s, then wondering why it was taking him so long to use them. I risked a glance behind me. Henri was not using keys; he was picking the lock.
The lock clicked, the door squealing lightly on its hinges, and I followed him inside. We flitted through the dark house to the foyer, trying not to bump, knock over, or be impaled by one of the myriad ornaments along the walls and in the corners. Henri put his hand on the front doorknob and whispered back to me, “We will walk quickly, and with purpose, like servants sent for the doctor, or … I don’t know what. Just walk … avec confiance, with confidence.”
I nodded. It did not matter in the least whom the men watching my house thought was coming out of Mrs. Reynolds’s, as long as they did not think it was us. Henri opened the front door, we stepped outside, and he closed it behind us with a bang, as if we were doing just as we ought, with no need of silence. We moved away down the sidewalk as a light came on in Mrs. Reynolds’s second floor.
“Where did you learn to pick locks, Mr. Marchand?” I asked as we turned the corner.
“I am a man of many talents and, mon Dieu, stop walking like a woman before you are arrested.”
A city at night, I discovered, was an uglier world, where things hidden by the nicety of sunshine dragged themselves out to revel in gaslit music halls and the light of the occasional streetlamp. It was a long way to Rue Tisserand. We avoided noise and crowds, keeping to the dark, but twice we were accosted by women, one painted and bedraggled, the other hardly more than a girl, and once we had to speak to a gendarme, or rather Henri did, loudly and with much laughter. I was fairly certain he informed the man that we were drunk. I stood half behind him, mute, thankful for the darkness that I suspected was the biggest component of my so-called disguise. Or maybe the policeman just didn’t care.
It was three o’clock in the morning before we arrived, having made several wrong turns after a consultation with a man sleeping on a door stoop. Rue Tisserand was small and narrow, rank with the odor of rubbish and cess. No lights shone other than a dim candle in an upper window, where a baby cried, and a house at the end, where the night-soil men were shoveling. Henri looked closely at a doorway and then knocked on it hard. He turned to me.
“And now … how do the English say it? It is your time to ‘call the shots,’ Miss Tulman.”
Footsteps came down the passage, and someone spoke on the other side of the door. “Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?” A girl’s voice, a little frightened.
“Joseph, please,” I replied, mouth close to the door.
“Qui êtes-vous?”
“She wants to know who you are,” whispered Mr. Marchand.
“I am here about Jean-Michel.”
The door flew open.
We sat in a clean kitchen, which smelled of cabbage, with scrubbed pots hanging from the ceiling. Joseph, face creased from his blankets, leaned on his elbows on the opposite side of the table, seated beside a younger, longer-haired version of himself, a man who introduced himself as Jean-Baptiste, one of Joseph’s brothers. The young woman that had opened the door — rather healthy in all her curves, I’d noticed — heated coffee at the stove while Joseph and Jean-Baptiste listened to everything I said, interpreted as necessary by Henri. Joseph rubbed his stubbled chin, pondering, as the young woman set down our coffee. I was grateful for it. I’d been too anxious to eat all day, and I was feeling the lack. After a long time, Joseph spoke rapidly in French, and I elbowed Henri’s attention away from the girl to tell me what he said.
“If the man is high in the imperial court,” Henri translated, “then there will be a heavy price to pay if we are caught.” The girl’s smile had vanished.
“Tell him that all they need to do is get the information and hold the man at my house. If they remain masked, then there is no need for the man to know who anyone is, and we only need to hold him long enough to free Jean-Michel and get a head start out of Paris. I have …” I glanced away from Henri. “I have a secure place to keep him. But also tell them that I believe this man will tell no one at the imperial court, that he will not risk admitting a failure. They can leave the door unlocked and slip back to their streets, and we will be out of Paris before he even knows he is free.”
After the translation, we waited, listening to the rasp of Joseph’s chin against his palm. Henri lit a cigarette. When Joseph spoke again it was soft, and Henri lowered his voice as well. “He says Jean-Michel was very good to Marie, his sister …” We all glanced at the curvy girl, who was flushing prettily. “… that he helped her out of a … a bad position.”
“Did he?” I replied, eyes narrowing. I’d hoped this Marie was Joseph’s wife.
Henri was still listening to Joseph, who was speaking with an occasional soft addition from Jean-Baptiste. Henri’s expression became surprised. “He wants to know if you know who trained Jean-Michel in silver, and the names of his parents.”
It was my turn to be surprised, both by the question and by the realization that I had no idea where Lane had learned his trade. I’d never thought to ask. The bodies around the table were still, waiting for my answer. “He must have learned it from someone in the village,” I said, “or perhaps from his father. But his father was a French soldier.”
“Moreau?” Jean-Baptiste asked after Henri’s translation.
“Yes, Jean Moreau. His mother was English, of the name Jefferies. Why …”
Henri didn’t bother to repeat this for Joseph and Jean-Baptiste, as they seemed to understand enough already. They consulted, their like heads close together. The pretty sister stood against the wall, chewing a nail.
“We will do it,” Joseph said in English, “for Jean-Michel.”
I only knew I’d been holding my breath when I let it out in relief. “And you can make him speak?” I said. “You can make this man tell you where Jean-Michel is?” This was essential, but I wanted no part of it.
“Yes,” Joseph said after Henri repeated my question, continuing the rest of his thought in French. When he was done, Henri’s dark eyes turned to me.
“He says that it will be a small blow to the emperor, but it will also be justice, for the old man.”
I nodded at Joseph and held out my hand. And though he was French and I was a woman, we shook like Englishmen. When we were done, I said to Henri, “Two more questions. Joseph said before that he had helped Jean-Michel find out about certain chemicals. Ask him if he can get me this.” I held out one of the little brown bottles Dr. Pruitt had given me, now nearly empty. “To make someone sleep.”
Joseph took the bottle while Henri spoke, sniffed the contents, and put one tiny drop on his tongue. He slipped the bottle into his pocket, muttering, and Henri said, “He says he will find out.”
“Also ask him what Jean-Michel wanted to know, what he has been waiting by the lamppost to tell him. Was it news of the man we’ve been speaking of?”
Henri asked, and then listened to the response. “He says no, it was not about th
e man, but a woman. Jean-Michel wanted the name of a woman in the hospital at Charenton.” Our eyes met briefly. It was the asylum we had visited. “He says he found the name.”
“And what was it?”
Joseph did not wait for a translation, but merely replied, “Thérèse Arceneaux.”
We made our way back in silence. The back alleys and boulevards had become sleepier in the hours before dawn. I followed at Henri’s heels, counting the repetitive motion of putting one foot in front of the other, a calming process that could be used as a background for sorting my thoughts. Lane had asked Joseph to find the name of a woman in Charenton, and the name had been Thérèse Arceneaux. I could not help but think of the woman who had stroked my hand, talking of her Charlie and Louis. The nun said she claimed the father of her child was the emperor of France, but she was a madwoman. Wasn’t she? There was certainly one man who believed it: Ben Aldridge, also known as Charles Arceneaux. And the emperor did not seem to be discounting the possibility either. I wondered what had led Lane to Charenton in the first place. He must have known that Ben was alive for some time.
I looked up and realized we were slipping through the street door of the courtyard, the sky the luminous sort of blue-black that comes just before the sun, the smell of earth and green a welcome change from the gutters and rubbish heaps of the city. We seemed to be alone but for a prowling cat, so we opened my back door, tiptoeing in like sneak thieves, and let it shut softly behind us.
Someone was in the kitchen, rattling the stove lids. “Go on through,” I told Henri, “I’ll see about getting us something to eat.” He nodded, rubbing his heavy eyelids, and moved down the corridor while I opened the kitchen door.
Marguerite stood at the stove, her head wrapped in a kerchief, her spoon dropping into the pot with a soft clatter when she turned to see who was behind her. The kitchen smelled of hot chocolate. Mr. DuPont, sprawling untidily in a chair at the table, seemed to wake up at the sight of me. “Ah,” he said cheerfully, “Napoléon est mort.”
“Good morning to you, too, Mr. DuPont,” I replied, coming fully into the kitchen. I ignored the fact that he was once again not wearing a shirt. “What are you doing up so early, Marguerite?”
Marguerite lowered her eyes, turning away from me to fish her spoon out of the pot. She really was a lovely little thing, extraordinarily so.
“Bonjour, Mademoiselle.”
Mrs. DuPont stood behind me in the doorway, a shawl around her nightgown, her hair hanging in a tight braid down her back, not a single strand out of place. “Marguerite,” she said in the calm, even way I found intensely irritating, “you have not spoken to Mademoiselle properly. Apologize at once, and then you will scrub the front sidewalk after breakfast.”
I glanced back at Marguerite, saw a slight twitch to her shoulders, and was stung to anger. No child deserved to be chastised for not responding properly to a lady dressed in Mr. Babcock’s pants. “Mrs. DuPont,” I said, “Marguerite is always polite, which frankly is more than I can say for you most of the time. And I’m quite sure my sidewalk is just as clean as it needs to be.”
Mrs. DuPont’s white face remained expressionless while Mr. DuPont shook his head. “Napoléon est —”
Mrs. DuPont cut off this statement with a sharp, “Tais-toi!” a phrase I assumed meant, “Be quiet!” since that is exactly what Mr. DuPont did. I shot another look at Marguerite’s twitching shoulders, and realized that the child was not crying; she was trying not to laugh. I raised a brow, decided I had no time to decipher the intricacies of this inexplicable family, and turned back to Mrs. DuPont.
“I’m glad you’re here. We need to speak about —”
“Can I offer Mademoiselle some chocolate? Or a bun?”
“No, thank you, Mrs. DuPont. And please refer to me as ‘Miss Tulman.’ Tonight I will —”
Mrs. DuPont drew herself up tall in the square frame of the doorway, the grim reaper in a nightgown. “Have we not served you well?”
“I —”
“Do we not keep our peace?”
“You —”
“Do you not eat the hearty, English breakfast?”
I sighed.
“And where will you find such clean windows? Such shining glass —”
“Tais-toi!” I said. “Please,” I added. Mrs. DuPont closed her mouth. “I am not asking you to leave. Or at least not yet. But I am asking you to leave the house for tonight. Do you have somewhere you can go? For one night?”
She looked at me for a moment, then her eyes slid toward the hallway, where Henri Marchand had gone, and back to my frankly bizarre choice of clothing. And she smiled. It was not a nice smile. “As I said, Mademoiselle, we can keep secrets. You will find no others that can keep secrets so well.”
“Napoléon est —”
“Tais-toi!” she hissed. “Perhaps Mademoiselle would like to give us some money,” she said, still smiling. “For the hotel?”
A small silence fell, and Mrs. DuPont’s black eyes stared back significantly into mine. I had no time for this. Or funds.
“Actually, Mrs. DuPont, perhaps you would like to tell me what you are selling at my back door? That is what you’re doing, is it not? I would think those profits might be plenty for one night at a hotel.”
All I could hear was the bubbling of the chocolate. One of Mrs. DuPont’s bone-white hands crept up to adjust the shawl around her shoulders.
“I think you’ll find that I can keep secrets, too, Mrs. DuPont. Do we have an understanding?”
The quiet in the kitchen stretched until there was one tiny nod from Mrs. DuPont’s chin.
“Good. Please be out of the house by the time the sun goes down, and you may come back in the morning. Maybe at that time we can continue the discussion about your future arrangements.” I wondered if it was too much to hope that we’d be gone from Paris by then. “Thank you very much, Mrs. DuPont. Good day, Mr. DuPont. Have a lovely morning, Marguerite.” I started to the leave the kitchen. “Oh, and I would happily accept your offer of chocolate and buns. If you could bring them into the dining room, as soon as is convenient? There is no hurry.”
I glanced at the clock in the corridor, feeling satisfied as I walked down the hall.
We had nineteen hours, forty-two minutes until Ben Aldridge came.
Five men came at intervals during the day, Jean-Baptiste and four of his cousins, all entering through the courtyard with milk or bread or some other supply to “deliver,” and then never actually leaving again. The day had turned gray and cool and there was a fine rain falling, darkening the house stones. If anyone was observing the courtyard, it was from the interior of one of the other houses. The last to come was Joseph, a bag of tools at his side and a hammer in his belt for a disguise. Mary spirited him up to Mr. Babcock’s room, where his male family members awaited, well provisioned with the remnants of the ridiculously vast breakfast Mrs. DuPont had prepared. I really should have known better when I asked for “chocolate and buns.”
Mary had been very somber as she packed our things. She’d said nothing of it, but I’d seen her in the garden again with the boy Robert, and I felt rather sorry about it. She scowled at the little bottle Joseph had supplied me, green instead of brown, sitting next to its fellow on the chimneypiece of my bedchamber.
“Are you thinking that will be enough, Miss?” she asked. “Last time it was taking ever so much more.”
“Yes, there will be enough,” I replied grimly. I had more stashed away for Uncle Tully. The ones over the fireplace were for someone else.
When I came through the shelf door, Uncle Tully was waiting for me in his favorite frock coat, rocking back and forth on his heels. He looked almost like his old self standing there, the white beard spreading wide when he saw me.
“Little niece!” he shouted at me. “You are two minutes not late for playtime!”
Which meant I was one minute early. I smiled absently, coming back to the reality of the coat that hung loose on his frame and the s
pace he had been confined to. So much had been taken from him. But tonight he would sleep, and when he woke we would be back at Stranwyne with Lane, and he would play and we would find a way to keep up the illusion that my uncle’s only home was now the cemetery on the hill. Heaven knew what I was going to say to Mrs. Cooper, though surely bringing Lane with me would help. I saw that Uncle Tully was now plucking at his coat.
“You are not ready,” he said. “You are not thinking of clocks.”
I snapped back to attention and smiled at him. “Of course I am, Uncle. I came especially to help you wind them.” Nothing could have induced me to miss my uncle’s clock-winding, not when I was about to spin his carefully constructed world out of balance yet again. The clocks chose that moment to strike four times. Eight more hours until Ben Aldridge came. “See, they have said it’s time. Which shall we do first?”
We began, alternating the privilege of turning the winding key, always clockwise, of course; my uncle would not have had a clock that wound otherwise, if such a thing existed. He knew precisely how many turns each one of them required. The last clock fell to me and, as it was on the floor, we sat there, too, my uncle cross-legged and me in a poof of skirt, both of us mentally calculating the turnings.
My uncle shook his head and said, “There are not enough, Simon’s baby.” I paused in my twisting of the key.
“Is this one not thirty-seven?”
“No, no! Not windings! Clocks!”
I turned the key again, the tick of the mechanism soft in the sound-deadened room. The clock room of Stranwyne had held hundreds of clocks, the ticking alone a noise one almost had to swim through. We had only brought ten of those clocks to Paris, all we’d had room for, small ones, chosen in haste. It would give me much joy to see my uncle back with his clocks. Uncle Tully was still shaking his head, muttering.
“Shall I? Shall I tell her a secret? Should I? Shall I?”
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