The Counterfeit Heiress: A Lady Emily Mystery (Lady Emily Mysteries)

by Tasha Alexander

  But I had made a grievous error of my own. He had slowed down specifically because he did know I was following him. When I was very nearly upon him, without stopping, he flung over his head a sheaf of papers that scattered over me. They broke my pace and disoriented me—there must have been hundreds of them, each the size of the page of a novel—and when I regained my composure, he was gone.

  Furious that I had allowed myself to be so easily thrown off course, I stomped through the papers and out of the gardens. He had exited back into the rue de Rivoli, and would have had no difficulty disappearing into the throngs of tourists there. I felt a tug on my arm—a policeman—who, upon having assured himself that I was unharmed, began to scold me for having caused a scene, not to mention a grievous mess in le Jardin. I brushed past him, knowing he would follow me, and returned to Cécile, who was now back on her feet and being propped up by an extremely handsome gentleman. On my way to her, I stooped over to collect a handful of the papers the villain had thrown. They had already blown all over, littering the park in a most indecorous fashion. I could understand the displeasure of the policeman. Printed in thick block letters on each sheet were two short sentences:

  LAISSEZ ESTELLA SEUL. DÉSOBÉISSEZ À CET AVERTISSEMENT À VOS RISQUES ET PÉRILS.

  “Did he elude you, Kallista?” Cécile was doing her best to remove from her walking dress the fine layer of dust that had clung to it after her fall. Her efforts did not accomplish a great deal; the navy blue was all but covered with white.

  I thrust a bunch of the papers at my friend. “It was the auburn-haired man. I did not have to see his face to confirm as much.”

  The policeman was beginning to growl again. “Monsieur, you must not be so horrible. It is not my friend who caused this mess,” Cécile said. “It was a diabolical criminal.” The officer listened carefully to her story, nodding and making sympathetic noises when she reached the part in which she had been flung to the ground.

  “Are you injured, madame?” he asked.

  “Only my pride, but I am greatly concerned that you have let this man escape.”

  “Madame, I was not on hand—”

  “One ought to be able to take a turn in a public park without suffering at the hands of a maniac. I am not interested in any excuses as to where you or any of your colleagues were at the time of the incident. I merely want your assurance that it will not happen again.”

  “Madame, I—”

  Cécile raised a hand. “I am not interested. Are we quite finished here?” I had gathered up as many of the papers as I could, and told her I thought it best that we return home. The handsome gentleman who had leapt to Cécile’s side offered to escort us. His carriage, he said, was waiting near the Pont Royal, just outside the gardens.

  “Absolutely not.” I looped my arm through Cécile’s and pulled until she had no choice but to move. She hobbled along, fighting me all the way to the river. Although the Pont Royal was nearer to us than the Pont Solférino, I elected to walk the longer distance, as I had no intention of putting us near the gentleman’s carriage. A glance behind us told me he had not followed us, but I did not trust that his driver had not been instructed to intercept us.

  “You cannot think Monsieur Aguillon is in league with the auburn-haired man!”

  “Monsieur Aguillon? He had time to introduce himself in the midst of all the commotion, did he?”

  “Marcel, as I hope to soon be calling him,” Cécile said. We were on the bridge now, and she tugged hard on my arm to force me to stop walking. “Enough, Kallista!”

  “So I am to believe it was a happy coincidence that landed Monsieur Aguillon so conveniently at your side following the attack?”

  Cécile shrugged. “With a face so handsome as that, his criminal connections, whatever they may be, are of little interest to me.”

  “Don’t be absurd. What would have happened if I hadn’t returned with the police? He might have been deliberately lurking, waiting, so that he could spirit you away while I was distracted.”

  “It is a risk I am willing to take.” She put her arm through mine again, congenially, and patted me with her other hand as we started to walk again, crossing the bridge. “You are kind to worry about me, Kallista, but when a lady reaches a certain age, she finds that her standards become more fluid than they once were. Monsieur Aguillon is very nearly as handsome as your own Monsieur Hargreaves. Do you really expect me to fling him aside on the grounds that he may possibly have a connection to someone we may possibly believe to be engaged in what may possibly be a criminal activity?”

  “Yes. That is precisely what I expect.”

  “You are so very young, ma chère amie. When Monsieur Aguillon calls—and I assure you he will—I have every intention of receiving him.”

  “You are impossible, and I am not so very young. I was only recently lamenting the demise of my impetuous youth.”

  “No matter how rapidly you age, Kallista, you will always be younger than I.” We had crossed the river and continued along the rue de Solférino until we reached boulevard Saint-Germain, where we turned left toward Cécile’s house. Soon after, I noticed a printer’s shop, and an idea struck me. A bell tingled from the door as I pushed it open, and before long a wiry man with a fine example of an aquiline nose stepped from the back room to greet us as he wiped his hands on the long, ink-spattered apron tied around his waist.

  “Bonjour, mesdames.”

  We returned his greeting. “I was hoping you might be able to assist me.” I smoothed one of the pages I had collected from the ground in the park and pushed it across the counter to him. “Is there, so far as you know, any means of identifying who printed this?”

  He picked up the leaf, studied it, and then held it up to the light. “There is a watermark on the paper, but I am afraid it identifies it as one of the most commonly used brands in France. The typesetting, however, is more unique. It may look to you like any other serif font, but it is more special than that.” He flipped the paper around so that we could see the words right side up. “This typeface is designed to have only capital letters—you see that all the letters are capital, but the ones we would expect to see capitalized, such as the first in each sentence, are larger than those that follow. Other than that, what is most strange is that although the words are written in French, the spacing has followed English rules.”

  “Could you explain?” I asked.

  “In France, we leave a single space before and after most punctuation marks. In England, there are generally no spaces before punctuation, and one inserts a double space between sentences. You see here that there is no space before either period, but a double space after the first one. No Frenchman would set type in this manner unless specifically directed by his customer, and even then, would argue strongly against it.”

  “Bien sûr,” Cécile said.

  “Is the typeface itself common?” I asked.

  “Not so much. I have seen it before, but it is not one I use.”

  “Have you any suggestions as to how we might locate the printer?”

  “It would be very difficult,” he said. “There would be no way to know except by asking shop by shop.”

  “How many printers are there in Paris?”

  “Hundreds, madame.”

  We thanked him for his time and continued on our way. “This confirms what I already suspected—the auburn-haired man is English. He would have insisted that his flyer be punctuated correctly.”

  “Or incorrectly, given that he is in Paris and writing in French,” Cécile said.

  “Touché. This will make an excellent assignment for Jeremy to tackle once he has finished at the post office.”

  “You cannot expect the poor man to go to every printer in Paris! That would be too cruel.”

  “I am never cruel, Cécile. We believe Swiveller’s lair is in the neighborhood around the Catacombs. He can focus his search accordingly. It does him good to be of use.”

  “What are you going to do, Kallista,
when at last he does marry? I suspect you will miss his attentions more than you think.”

  “Ridiculous. Jeremy will marry, but not for ages, and I can assure you when the glorious day at last comes, I will be more delighted even than his own mother.”

  Cécile arched her eyebrows. “Skeptical does not begin to describe me.”

  * * *

  We called in at Café de Flore on our way home, on the chance that the auburn-haired man had returned there. He had not, but this did not detract from my enjoyment of a superb chocolat. When at last we returned to Cécile’s—I confess we lingered over our beverages for more than an hour—Colin and Jeremy were already there. Cécile made a dramatic entrance in her dusty dress, sending both gentlemen shooting to their feet the instant they saw her, alarm etched on their faces.

  She raised a weary hand to her forehead and begged them to forgive her—she was enjoying every second of this performance—she would tell them everything once she had bathed and changed into more suitable attire. I was not party to this anticipatory delay, and, once she had retired upstairs, I gave them the whole story, unabridged, presenting them each with one of the printed sheets.

  “A warning! How terribly exciting.” Jeremy dropped the paper next to him on the settee where he was sitting. “I do think, Hargreaves, this calls for whisky?” Colin agreed, and Jeremy poured for them both. “Port, Em?” I saw no reason to deny myself the comfort of a spot of my favorite libation.

  “What of your own travails?” I asked as he handed me a glass of the tawny liquid.

  “Nothing yet,” Colin said, “but we expected little else today. I suspect that all the excitement in the park may keep him from collecting his post tomorrow—that would be wise if he has any inkling that we are onto him—but we will watch all the same.”

  “I suppose you can’t spare Jeremy, then?” I asked, and described for them my strategy concerning the printers. “Neither Cécile nor I would make a good second should you require assistance in stopping the wretch if he manages to leave the post office. I proved that much by letting him get away this afternoon.”

  “I am glad you got no further than you did,” Colin said. “The effort was admirable, my dear. I am most impressed.”

  “I suppose Cécile and I could deal with the printers—”

  “But you thought it sounded tedious and that is why you wanted to put me on the case,” Jeremy interrupted.

  “Am I so obvious? Darling Jeremy, after seeing how well you did with the florists, I can hardly be blamed. I think, when we are in the neighborhood investigating printers, Cécile and I should inquire with Swiveller’s concierge as to the availability of apartments in her building.”

  “Absolutely not.” Colin set his empty whisky glass onto the side table next to him with such force I feared it would shatter. “If he were there, he would recognize either of you. We cannot take the risk.”

  “A fair point.” I sighed. “We shall limit ourselves to the printers.”

  Cécile returned, wearing a frothy tea gown, and crossed directly to the rafraîchissoir, where, with a deftness one would not expect from a lady undertaking the task, she opened a bottle of Moët et Chandon. “I had a revelation while I was in the bath. If Estella is indeed in Paris, and for only a short while, it is likely that she will visit the graves of her parents. She was always devoted to them and had a habit of bringing a fresh wreath to them every week. Tomorrow, Kallista and I will go to the cemetery and watch for her.”

  “Won’t she see us and run away?” I asked.

  “Parisian cemeteries are not like English ones. There will be plenty of places for us to hide.”

  As I was not particularly eager to trudge through a far-off neighborhood interviewing printers, I agreed to her plan. The truth was, I expected us to make little progress in the case until either the auburn-haired man collected his mail or until I, next week, was able to speak to Swiveller’s delivery boy. In the meantime, an outing to the cemetery sounded like an excellent diversion.

  Estella

  xiv

  A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

  Estella, now three chapters in, was thoroughly enjoying Monsieur Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. She paused at this passage, reading it over and over, delighting in the thought that she, hidden away here in her little room in the cellar of some house—it must be a cellar, she had decided, for where else would a person build walls of stone for a room accessible only by trapdoor?—she herself was a secret enclosed.

  She glanced at her clock. Six forty-five in the evening. She should think about dinner soon. The quiche might be too old now, and she did not want to risk any sort of digestive disturbance. She limited herself to bread and cheese and a small fruit tart. When she had finished eating, she returned to her book, and fell asleep with it still in her hands.

  The next morning, Sunday—nearly the last of her imprisonment!—she awoke and was pleased when she saw the time. It was only seven-thirty. As much as she was looking forward to going home, she wanted to take advantage of these last hours on her own. She had relished staying in her nightgown all day yesterday, but today, she was going to dress. She lathered her soap, wrapping it in a flannel and dipping it into the bucket she used for her toilette. Soon she was clean and dressed in her old skirt, but with new undergarments and a fresh shirtwaist. She couldn’t manage her corset well without assistance, but was able to button the blouse even in the absence of her constricting stays. Her skirt would not fasten all the way, but who would see her to notice? She even put on her boots, but after several days of not having worn them, they felt stiff and uncomfortable, and she wondered how she had ever been able to stand them. She flung them into the corner of the room where she had already heaped her dirty clothes.

  As the day progressed, Estella grew melancholy. She did not eat anything for luncheon, and did not even bother to open the wine her captor had left. Water kept her thirst at bay, but there was an ache building deep inside her that she could neither identify nor satisfy. She returned to her book, weeping when poor Lucie was reunited with the father she had believed to be dead, and soon found herself so caught up in the story that the ache had all but disappeared. She read, on and on, until hunger began to gnaw at her, and she reached for the last of her cheese and a piece of now stale baguette. The bread was so hard she could barely tear it, but she managed, and found it wasn’t so bad as she would have thought. At ten-eighteen her eyelids started to feel heavy. For the last time, she fluffed up her featherbed, changed into her nightgown, and settled down to sleep on her stone slab.

  15

  Paris’s Père-Lachaise bore almost no resemblance to any cemetery I had visited before, although I could see that it had originally been intended to conjure up visions of the ancient tombs lining Rome’s Appian Way. Far in the northeast of the city, the Cimetière de l’Est—its official name—had been constructed at the end of the previous century in an attempt to provide burial sites outside what were then the limits of the city. France, post-Revolution, was secular to its core—at least in theory—but the builders gave their grounds a Jesuitical nickname. The historical Père de la Chaise, confessor of King Louis XIV, had once acquired for his order the land on which the cemetery now stood to serve as a resort for the priests. When contemplating the luxurious holidays they must have enjoyed, one can hardly argue with the country’s desire for secularity.

  Secular though their government may be, the Parisians are a devout lot, largely followers of the Roman church, and once the Cimetière de l’Est had been dubbed Père-Lachaise, the citizens began to accept that it was a respectable, hallowed place. There
are few people more conscious than the Parisians of tradition and the importance of doing things in a manner suited to reflect their station, and the organizers initially had a great difficulty convincing members of the best families that they ought to choose this new cemetery as their final resting place. In an effort to manipulate attitudes, they began exhuming bodies of famous Frenchmen and reburying them in Père-Lachaise. Before long, high society was clamoring to rest in the same location as Abélard and Heloïse, Molière and La Fontaine, Louise de Lorraine—the widow of Henri III—and Caron de Beaumarchais, who had written The Marriage of Figaro.

  Cécile’s driver left us directly in front of a steep set of stairs that, from the street, appeared to lead to the top of a high wall. In fact, the cemetery’s ground, on a hill, began above street level. Once inside, I felt as if I had entered another world, a true city of the dead, with long, narrow avenues crossing long, narrow streets, lined on both sides by tombs that looked almost like narrow houses. Cécile’s late and unlamented husband was buried here, and although she had never been fond of the man, she did very much appreciate the fortune he had left her, and she always credited him with having taught her how to shoot. Thus, she had brought with her a simple wreath to lay on his grave—or so I had thought before I understood the nature of things at Père-Lachaise.

  We hiked what felt like a mile up a hill, then turned left and then right. There were some slab graves, but mostly tombs, and I assumed the bodies were buried, so to speak, inside the walls of these structures, but I quickly realized my mistake when, thirty yards down a narrow street, Cécile stopped and put her hand on the door of one of the tombs.

  “You’re not going to open it?” I gasped.