Tussaud

by Belinda, Lyons-Lee

  Philidor’s face heated.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Philidor asked, and roughly brushed Pinetti’s hand from his shoulder.

  ‘How dare you speak to me in such a manner?’ With a flourish, Pinetti retrieved a handkerchief from his breast pocket and made a show of wiping his afflicted hand.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Philidor repeated, feeling the stares of more bystanders who gathered around them.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I be here? I certainly don’t have to answer to you, a filthy thief.’

  ‘I’m your brother,’ ground out Philidor.

  Pinetti laughed and looked around at his audience, catching an eye or two and winking. ‘Good gracious, you are!’ he cried. ‘And next thing you’ll be claiming that I’m responsible for your being on the street in the first place!’

  ‘You bastard,’ said Philidor softly, and leaned in close, his own fist tight. Just one punch to the stomach, and this dandy would double over like a girl.

  ‘You miscreant,’ replied Pinetti in a low voice. ‘You are nothing.’

  The pride Philidor had felt a moment earlier at his free and independent life now evaporated. ‘If I’m nothing, it’s because of you. Where have you got the money for all this? Who did you have to kill for it?’

  Pinetti smiled. ‘Not murder, my dear boy. Just played the game well. Got rid of the competition, you see? And wouldn’t you know it, the poor woman had been saving up quite the store for her golden child all those years. Such a witless creature, yet —’

  ‘And the old man?’

  Pinetti’s smile hardened; he leant in closer and whispered. ‘Dead.’ He raised his voice again, ‘This is all most amusing, but I have no time for it. You’re a thief who would have made off with my whole wardrobe and probably knifed me in the back had I not stopped you!’ He looked around as if searching for someone. ‘Your assistance here, please! This man was stealing from my trunk.

  He’s stolen my – look, he holds my trousers, boots and a shirt, for goodness sake.’

  The crowd parted to let the puffing driver of the carriage through. ‘We need all hands to right the carriage, sir, so if you don’t mind … The horses are settled now and we —’

  ‘Yes, yes, but still, here is a thief, a filthy vagabond. Caught by myself, now claiming he’s related to me! Most likely drink-addled as well.’

  ‘I’ll see to it that he doesn’t get away, sir. You, and you,’ the driver said, singling out two men who judging by their attire were apprentices. ‘You look after him while the rest of us right the carriage. They’ll be another accident if we don’t get this lot out of the way.’

  ‘Quite right. I understand the next carriage leaves in half an hour, and I intend to be on it otherwise I will never get to Paris. Now, if someone will collect my baggage, I can finally leave this hellish place.’ Pinetti snatched the garments and silver watch from Philidor. ‘And make sure this savage gets the punishment he deserves.’

  Pinetti turned his back as Philidor’s arms were grabbed from either side and he was escorted from the scene. He didn’t resist then, nor did he resist the brutal beating that ensued in the cellar of the local public house where he was held prisoner overnight.

  The grey sheen of the screw caught his eye and brought him back to the present. He dropped it into its pile and picked up a short, thin plank of wood that could easily become the shinbone. Instead, he snapped it in two and held each end in his hands, savouring the warm smell as the fibres whirled through the air, and the tendrils and splinters, like fine wooden veins, stood out straight. His brother’s body should be broken like this, in repayment for what Philidor had endured, in that cellar and in everything that had gone before it. His nose had been broken again that night, but it didn’t matter: he still had his voice. But he’d decided then that shooting his brother would never be enough. He would have to be humiliated first.

  Philidor never returned to travelling the road with the vagabonds – that part of his life was over. He needed money, new clothes, a tutor to teach him how to speak, and then he would begin to fashion a new identity, one that would grant him access to the life his brother had somehow managed to style for himself. In order to do that, he would use his voice and his intellect. And the help of a little bit of magic. And that’s exactly what he’d done.

  He’d made sure, at one of his first magic performances in Germany, that a certain Baroness von Rassler was in the audience. He’d changed his name by then, reinvented himself – but even if he hadn’t, she would not have condescended to remember such a triviality as the name of the butcher’s son whom she had ordered thrashed. A personal invitation had been sent, and she came, still fiercely aristocratic, and was singled out to participate on the stage. In the half-light with the audience already in a swoon, it was natural for her to surrender a diamond ring in the name of entertainment, and be astonished when he pulled it from the mouth of a pigeon that was flying through the room. He’d seen her and the ring on the many occasions when he’d been invited to private parties to entertain where she’d been a guest.

  Exchanging the ring for a paste replica had not been difficult. But stealing was not a habit he chose to cultivate unless unduly pressed; he preferred to use his wits and attributes in ways more entertaining and lucrative, and for which he alone received the public acclaim – and didn’t come with the complication of relying on others to receive the goods, and therefore increase the risk of being betrayed.

  In this instance, he’d carefully acquired inside knowledge of the baroness from a servant whose hand was softened with an extra coin, and he’d bribed his jeweller to make two pastes indiscernible from the real one. They were so accurate that not only the baroness but also the Bank of London had been taken in, helped along by the documents of certification from the jeweller, for an additional sum. Taking the paste ring as collateral, the bank had granted him the loan to finance this whole venture; clearly their jeweller hadn’t had the time or opportunity to do more than a preliminary examination. It was pleasing how much appearances counted for – with references to ancestral wealth, an educated façade, an expensive suit and confidence, most people bought the deception. More the pity for them.

  And the real ring? He kept it in a hidden compartment at the base of his gold tobacco box. In case he ever really needed money.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Marie

  THE CONVERSATION WITH Philidor three days earlier had gone exactly as she’d hoped. Following much clanking, grinding and hammering over the ensuing days, he’d then supplied her with the mechanical limbs and, soon after, the torso. She measured each part, setting down the details in her notebook and clearing the space to work with the clay. Philidor had not let her in his workshop, claiming it was not fitting for her to view the mechanical designs. It furthered her irritation that he didn’t trust her with the information. Not that she would extend an invitation for him to come and watch her work either.

  Naturally, she had her own secrets – those that pertained to her own methods of construction, as well as more intimate secrets about herself. As she gently unfolded the wet cloth that bound the block of terracotta clay, she thought about the secret she’d kept the longest. It was simply that she was the daughter of an executioner. As a child she had known her father was an official with an important job in town. She saw how the people nodded in respect and hushed their children when they walked passed. But as she aged she was made to understand, first by the well-aimed remarks of her friends, then by her mother, that her father was respected but for the wrong reasons.

  She took up a wood-handled blade and began to slice off sections of clay in readiness to begin the models of each limb. The blade glided smoothly through the block and brought with it the smell of rich, damp earth. Yes, the people were afraid of her father and what his hands, always so large and clean with rounded nails, were capable of. She picked up a sizeable piece with her small white fingers, squeezed it hard against her palm and checked again the measurements of Antoinet
te’s mechanical arm. She threw the clay down, picked it up and threw it down again, bringing the tiny air bubbles to the surface in order to ensure the texture remained smooth. Then she began to knead the clay into the shape of an arm that could encase the mechanical skeleton. Push, fold, push against the table again, and the fleshy base of where her thumb joint met her wrist always carried the weight of the kneading. It wasn’t just her father’s hands that she remembered, it was his eyes that were arresting: light blue, large and almost translucent.

  But the day her mother explained exactly what her father did for a livelihood was the day she stopped meeting those eyes and turned away from the hands she’d once sought to capture in her own. Now she wiped her hands down upon her apron and reached over to her box, which held the more delicate accessories for her creations. She picked out one of Antoinette’s blue glass eyes, so cold in her warm clay-sodden hand. It stared back at her, unblinking. Her father’s eyes had once stared at her in the same way. She returned the eye to its spot amongst the row of others, various shades of green, brown and blue, then began smoothing and shaping the shoulder joint, the biceps and triceps, the elbow and down to the forearm before starting the second limb. Once completed she laid them both out on the long wooden table to dry.

  As she opened another slab of clay to begin the legs, she glanced again at the blue eyes waiting to be inserted. Her father. He had seemingly understood her withdrawal and didn’t ask her to voice or give reason for it, but instead added her to the list of deaths he’d witnessed – his way of staying sane, sealing each memory up so it brought no pain. But she was alive. He couldn’t not see her. So he detached.

  The second secret, she thought, as she stoked the fire to hasten the drying of the clay, was that of her maiden name. Being the daughter of an executioner, she was only permitted to marry the son of an executioner. Had she been male, she would have had to become an executioner. Instead, as her youth bloomed, she became aware that however coquettish she contrived to be, the young men ignored her. Her friends conducted dalliances that they shared with her in blushes, while Marie wondered if she would ever experience this. Soon enough, she clamped down on the hollow daydreams of a future that would never be hers and concentrated instead on improving her mind. Executioners’ sons were scarce, and she knew she would have to accept any offer of marriage bestowed on her from one of them eventually, if she was lucky to have an offer at all.

  But she couldn’t see herself being touched by a man with blood on his hands. She looked down at her own hands thrust into the clay and stained orange with its pigment, her knuckles clenched white in peaks of contrast. She held them up in front of her and turned them around, slivers of clay congealing in the shallow base between her fingers. Certainly her hands had been covered with blood in the Revolution. Death had always followed her, indifferent to how fast she’d tried to run. So it was no surprise, really, that she had been brought to the brink of it and nearly executed by a man whose job had been tied to her fortune since birth. She plunged her hands back into the lump. Prior to the Revolution she had never seen an execution; the moment she’d done so, she had realised with a sickening lurch the terrible burden those blue eyes had carried, and how much it must have hurt to have your own child withhold their love because of it.

  She was surprised by the drop of moisture that slid down her nose and into the clay as she repeatedly threw each handful onto the table with a satisfying thud until the tears stopped. Then she worked the piles together to form long thick slabs; at least six clay blocks were required for the legs. Next came the sculpting and defining of the quadriceps, the hamstrings, the abductors for the thighs, followed by the knee joints and the tibialis anteriors to make the shin muscles. Finally the calves, with some slight definition of the gastrocnemius and soleus muscles as the female form was more fleshy than muscly. She laid each leg out beside the arms and began work on the torso, which incorporated the hips that the legs would eventually lock into. Again this required a number of slabs worked together, so she moved further down the table, closer to the fire; this part of Antoinette’s body would take the longest to dry.

  She remembered helping her mother lay out her father’s body and wash and prepare it for burial. And as her strong hands flexed and pushed the clay together to sculpt Antoinette’s chest, she recalled her guilt as she’d looked down upon his corpse. In his death she had been freed. They could move away, and her surname would mean nothing.

  Curtius, her father’s brother, became their benefactor. He who would save her from poverty and the chains of marriage to an executioner’s son would later save her from the guillotine. He lived far from their village and offered her mother a housekeeping position. He took them both into his home with no further expectation or motive. He was one if not the only gentleman, apart from her father, whom Marie had trusted in her life.

  To both Marie’s and Curtius’s surprise, she took an interest in his business, which was the study of anatomy. And as she finished Antoinette’s breasts and moved to build up her ribs and rounded stomach, she imagined the internal organs that would lie underneath if this body were real. Official supplies of cadavers were short, and Curtius was reluctant to engage the services of undesirable men who promised to deliver a body according to specifications, but only at night for an inordinate sum. Curtius fell to constructing wax models in order to better understand the body, and as a consequence he taught Marie all he knew about this practice. Her active mind absorbed all the anatomical and biological information, and she possessed a deft touch with the instruments. She also demonstrated the artistic ability to imagine and then create what she saw in her inner eye, whether on paper or with clay.

  And so a new life opened up for her and her mother in a new town, where her surname’s connotations melted like wax and her future was no longer set in a predetermined mould. Curtius encouraged her to continue her studies by giving her liberty to use his extensive library, not seeing her as merely a girl but valuing her mind and ability, free from prejudice against her sex. He even introduced her to his colleagues and permitted her to sit in his study when they called on him.

  She gradually forgot the shame of her father’s name and occupation, and took on something of Curtius’s respectable house- hold. But still, while she had no wish to leave, she could not escape the attention of a certain young man who saw in her qualities that he had not: hard work, determination, a commitment to craft. Given her circumstances – no father and a mother in service – Marie was not in a position to choose or be contrary. And although she had found lovers in young medical students whom she had met through Curtius, when the civil engineer asked for her hand, she accepted. His hands, it must be said, were white; they were also big, like her father’s. Her jaw tightened when she thought of his fingers skating over her skin. But he was a way out of an uncertain future; she had known she could not rely on the generosity of Curtius forever. Though she was certain he felt towards her as a father would have, to strain his favour into womanhood was selfish.

  Marie’s thoughts returned to the present, her forehead damp with sweat from the fire and the exertion of working the clay. The torso was finished, including Antoinette’s small breasts with a suggestion of a nipple, her shapely buttocks and quim, just a smooth mound with no further details necessary.

  Now to the hands. Marie dragged a stool over to the table and sat down. Antoinette’s hands were delicate, so she needed to slow down and take care. She separated out two more little squares of clay, kneaded them then began to pinch out each elegant finger. Antoinette’s fingers used to be crowded with rings, while her own stayed bare. She had not worn her wedding ring at all, soon realising she had to remove it when she worked anyway; as this was an everyday occurrence, she fell out of the habit. It was of no concern. Her acceptance of the engineer’s proposal had been on one condition: her new husband was to permit her to continue to study, learn and create the wax models of anatomy that she produced for Curtius, as well as to accept commissions for busts, su
ch as the one she created of esteemed citizen Voltaire. Her husband had acquiesced, the money it brought in being the main reason he’d offered to marry her. They both understood it was not a match of love. Her passion would enable him to continue his own – which, it soon became apparent, was not engineering but drinking, gambling and philandering.

  From their union at least came her two sons. They lived for a time all together in the village of her husband’s family, until Curtius died and left her his premises, workshop, library and collection. She persuaded her husband that to move would benefit her ability to earn, so he readily agreed, and they shifted into Curtius’s former lodgings in Paris. From there she continued to create. Now she understood the inner functions of anatomy, she could construct life- sized models and put them on display – not for medical purposes, trapped in glass cabinets to be pored over by the scientific eyes of old men, but for the entertainment and pleasure of the public who could see the royal family portrayed as they dined. She experienced modest success of income and of recognition. But there was to be more. She had bigger, grander plans.

  Then the Revolution came.

  She finished each of Antoinette’s hands. The time spent in her workshop had hurried past in a blur. From beginning to end the whole process had taken three days. Three days caught in the web of memories, how they stuck in the corners of her mind. Nothing to do now but wait for the clay to dry. In the meantime, in the quiet wandering space her mind inhabited when her hands were rhythmically occupied, she had an idea for an invention. She had begun sketching a breathing contrivance that could be used in her wax creations, adding another dimension to their realism. When out replenishing supplies, she had also bought some metal bits and pieces needed to construct this small but intricate contraption. She had used the time waiting for the clay to dry to assemble the parts, ensuring that when she finished she packed away all evidence of her project in a box and hid it beneath the pile of dirty rags.