Headline

by Imogen Robertson

  ‘Of course we should!’ Tanya said. ‘They can be returned to the Countess and he will have lost what he has worked for so hard. Then Maud, you can be free again. You will have beaten him.’

  Yvette watched the Englishwoman’s face. There was a moment of light there, like a shifting of the clouds against a stormy sky, as if she had perhaps caught some scent of a future free of this, but then she shook her head. ‘I don’t care about the diamonds. What is their theft, taking jewels from a woman who has too many already, compared to what he did to me?’

  Yvette put out her hand and rested it on Maud’s knee. ‘It is not what is important that counts, but what is important to him, isn’t it, Maud?’ For herself she thought collecting the diamonds would be by far the best idea. Tanya was right, and for the first time since they had left Henri in the cellar she thought there might be a chance of an ending which Maud might survive. Maud hesitated, then nodded.

  ‘We should go at once,’ Tanya said, standing up. ‘The waters are reaching higher and higher through the cellars and sewers. If we don’t go now it might be weeks before we get another chance, and he might be well enough by then to stop us.’

  They hurried Maud up and into her long coat and into the street, but she could not resist looking back towards the apartment. He was there again, looking out of the window towards them, his face grey and his mouth a gape of despair. She turned away and let her friends sweep her along the street.

  Still Sylvie would not go. He begged her to but she would not. She tried to dose him with laudanum but he tasted it in the wine and spat it out. He could stand today, and in those moments she left him to himself, he went to the window and strained to see how near the waters were approaching. What if she came in the night? If the waters reached to the road under the window, would she be able to leap up to the first floor and throttle him? Would he wake up to find her squatting on his chest, dripping with the foul waters of the Seine? He thought of her face, livid with rot like those of the drowning victims he had seen at the morgue. She would bare her yellow teeth and wring out her sodden clothes so the poisonous damp would trickle into his throat.

  His heart thudding, he leaned out again. And he saw her looking up at him from the street below, her eyes a-glimmer with hatred. She was going to take the diamonds, his beautiful diamonds, the emerald-cut great stone five times the size of all the rest that would make him a king in America. She would take it and then force it down his throat with the riverwater and cut it out of his belly again. He saw it in her eyes. He whimpered. Sylvie could come back any moment and she would tell him he was ill, that his imagination was disturbed and his fever high, but she had not seen it, had not felt the hatred of the ghost as he had.

  Morel dressed as quickly as he could. The buttons were difficult to fasten with his shaking hands and the sweat on his forehead stung his eyes. He took his coat and waited behind his door for a moment till he was sure the corridor outside was empty then made a dash for the front door, scooping up the large key to the apartment door as he passed the hall-table. His hand caught the flower vase and it went crashing to the floor but he didn’t pause until he was outside and had turned the key in the lock. He heard Sylvie call his name and hesitated on the landing; her footsteps came close and then the door handle rattled. He could hear her breathing and put his fingers lightly onto the wood, knowing she was just the other side.

  ‘Christian?’ she said softly. ‘Christian, my love, I know you are there. Come back and come to bed. Let me look after you, my darling, you know you are not well.’

  He felt tears in his eyes; her voice was so soft but she could not protect him from the dead. ‘She is coming for the diamonds, Sylvie,’ he whispered, pressing his cheek to the wood. ‘For our diamonds – and we shall not be tricked. No, I will fetch them and then I will come home and you will care for me.’ His mind would not work as he wanted it to, his forehead was damp. ‘I know I am not well.’

  ‘Christian, unlock the door. We shall go together.’

  He smiled, a wave of love for his pretty clever wife lifting his heart as it had lifted the first time he laid eyes on her. ‘No, Sylvie. You will stop me. Be patient. I will fetch them and then we will be happy for all times, best beloved.’ He let his cheek rest against the wood one moment more then turned and stumbled down the stairs. He could hear her calling his name and the rattle of the door handle as he went.

  CHAPTER 21

  ‘Wait here for me,’ Maud said as they turned into Cour de Rohan.

  Yvette frowned. ‘No, we go together. I don’t think he will have put them in a big barrel marked Diamonds. You’ll need help to look, Maud.’

  ‘And if someone comes?’

  ‘Everyone is helping their neighbours nearer to the waters,’ Yvette said, then looked at Tanya. ‘But you stay here anyway, Tanya. Just in case.’

  Tanya was busy preparing the lanterns they had brought from the ironmongers. ‘Why?’ she said indignantly.

  ‘Because! And anyway, Maud and I have spare clothes at Rue de Seine and you do not. It might already be flooding down there, and even if it isn’t it will smell and there will be rats.’

  ‘Rats?’ Tanya said, taking a slight step backwards.

  ‘Yes,’ Yvette said with a certain glee creeping into her voice. ‘They panic as the water rises and come swarming out through the tunnels. They will probably try and climb up your dress to escape the flood.’

  ‘Oh, all right! I’ll wait.’ She sat down on the edge of the water-trough and put her chin in her hand.

  The entrance to the cellar was in the corner of the courtyard: a wooden cover set in a stone surround with two large iron rings to lift it, sunk into the wood. Yvette and Maud lifted it off together, the rust flaking off on Maud’s pale brown leather gloves like dried blood. Yvette swung herself nimbly down onto the ladder in front of her and when she had reached the bottom, she lit her lantern. From where she watched above, Maud could see nothing but shadows – ghosts of barrels and wooden struts in the ashy Indian Yellow glow.

  ‘Come on down.’

  The ground at the bottom of the ladder was dry, but the tunnels smelled of riverwater, and it was clear even in the half-light that the cellar tunnel led quite steeply downwards. The floor was earth, the walls brick. After three or four yards the tunnel ended in a T-junction. In front of them were half-a-dozen arched doorways.

  ‘You start there,’ Yvette said, pointing to her left, and with a determined step went right. None of the doors were locked and it seemed that whatever was usually stored in them had already been cleared away. There were wine racks on the walls of the first two rooms that Maud went into, simple shelving in the third.

  Yvette suddenly appeared beside her in a blur of diffused light that made her look ghostly, her voice breathy with excitement. ‘I’ve found something.’

  ‘Can you hear water?’ Maud said. It was a whispering sound like rain in the trees.

  ‘The sewers will run just underneath here. The ground is still dry. But come on – there’s another room leading off this one.’

  Maud followed her out through to the T-junction and back into the next store room. At first it looked just like the others, but at the back there was a space of deeper darkness. Yvette lifted her lamp, to reveal a low opening leading back into some older, deeper vault.

  Yvette was pushing aside a barrel that blocked the path. Whatever dread Maud felt settling on her shoulders, it seemed as if Yvette felt none of it. Without speaking to Maud she ducked through the opening, and a moment or two later reappeared, grinning. ‘It opens out again, Maud. Come through.’

  She did. The sound of running water had faded here, but the air seemed heavier; even the flames in their lamps seemed to shrink from it. She straightened up and looked around her. She was in a vault perhaps seven foot at its highest point and all lined with thin and crumbling bricks. It was divided in two by a wall of larger stone blocks that looked as if they could have been pulled from the medieval walls of the city. They did
not quite reach the roof. Around the walls, strange shapes gathered – broken furniture and split barrels. It was a dead space, a forgotten dumping ground.

  ‘You go left of the wall,’ Yvette said cheerfully. ‘Look for something that has been disturbed.’

  Morel remembered his gun only when he was out on the street. He could not go back now but the thought of seizing the diamonds back from Maud’s ghost frightened him. He felt in the pockets of his coat and found a five-franc piece then half-stumbled across the threshold of the ironmonger’s shop on the corner of Saint-Germain and Rue Grégoire de Tours. The old man behind the counter looked up at him in some alarm.

  ‘Are the waters coming?’ he said. ‘We’ve emptied the cellars and my son is searching for sandbags. Is it coming up the street yet?’

  Christian ignored him, trying to focus on the display of knives hanging on the wall opposite the counter. The reflections of the oil lamps lit about the place confused him and the air was smoky. He made a grab at one almost at random – a hunting knife, its blade four-inches long and curved. Then he put the coin down on the counter and went to leave.

  ‘Sir, are you well, sir?’

  He waved his hand as if the man was merely some insect and stumbled out again, shoving the knife into his belt. The crowd seemed to work against him. The street furniture set out to trip him, the men buffeted at him with their shoulders. The crowd became a mass of hostile glances. He leaned against the flaking bark of a plane tree and drew his breath in and out until the world steadied a little and his vision cleared. He thought of her again, the ghost searching for his diamonds. He pushed on and turned onto the cobblestones of Cour du Commerce. It was narrow and ancient here, the old walls of the city cramping towards each other, then the open air of Cour de Rohan. There was the lean-to where he had watched old Henri sweating day after day. He spat on the ground. Then, feeling a hand on his sleeve, he recoiled. A dark young woman was speaking to him. The Russian girl! What was she doing here? Could a ghost have human companions? Her voice buzzed into his brain; she was chattering about the floods, asking him for some assistance. He tried to form some reply and free himself from her, but she continued pulling at his arm. His rage, his desperation suddenly broke free and he struck her across the face with all his force. She fell to the ground and did not move. The cover to the cellar steps had been lifted away and he clambered down into the darkness, his hands and feet clumsy on the ladder. There was his candle on the barrel. He took it, lit it and lurched onwards.

  The rear cellar extended back a long way. The texture of the ground changed. It felt slippery under Maud’s feet. The dividing medieval-looking blocks didn’t sit flush with this back wall either. The end wall was made of thin, old-looking bricks; the mortar was crumbling. Lowering her lantern, she saw the earth floor was black and muddy. She heard a dry whisper in the walls and lifted her light again; the mortar between the bricks was trickling out in a thin stream as she watched. She put her hand on the stone and it felt cold. She pressed herself against the wall, listening. It was not the rush of water, but something else. A sense of mass and weight, of pressure. She felt, horribly, the stones shift under her palms and took a step backwards. Her heel caught on the curl of an old piece of railing and she tripped and dropped her lamp. The flame died. Above the wall that almost divided the chamber in two she could see the glimmer of Yvette’s light. She pulled herself upright, fighting free of the railings as if she had fallen in a briar patch.

  ‘Yvette, I’ve lost my light!’

  ‘One moment, I’ll come for you. Maud, I think I’ve found them.’ There was the sound of something shifting then a rattle. ‘Oh my God. They are beautiful.’ Her voice was soft, reverential. ‘I am coming now.’

  The light shifted and Maud felt her way cautiously along the central wall. In the darkness the pressure of the caged water nearby was palpable in the air. The trickling of mortar seemed louder and there was another noise, a slow scraping of brick. She reached the edge of the dividing wall and saw Yvette stepping towards her over the wreckage, the light in her left hand and a box in her right. Maud recognised it, the phoenix rising on its edge, and she felt her rage lift into her throat.

  On Yvette’s face was an expression of bliss. She showed Maud the open box. The grand stone cushioned by its smaller fellows. ‘We have him now, don’t we?’ Without waiting for Maud to answer she set it down for a moment to relight Maud’s lamp then picked it up again. She was about to speak but before she could, there was a sound in the darkness in the outer cellar and a curse. Someone had missed their footing and knocked into the barrel Yvette had moved.

  ‘Get back, and cover your light,’ Yvette said in a harsh whisper and Maud crept back again along the wall, sheltering the reluctant glow of her lantern under her coat. She could hear a heavy laboured breathing. Maud’s fingers brushed one of the tangle of short railings again and her hand closed round the free end.

  ‘Mademoiselle?’ It was Morel’s voice, a little slurred but him, without a doubt. He was on the other side of the partition with Yvette. Maud set down her lamp and pulled the railing free. It was very heavy.

  Yvette gave a little shriek. ‘Oh! Monsieur, you startled me.’

  ‘What? Why are you here?’

  Maud shifted her grip on the iron bar. The water was so close. Even if Morel was ill he might still be strong enough to kill them both, but he was not as strong as the water was, whispering to her on the other side of the thin bricks. It had eaten Paris, it should eat him too. It became her ally. He would not think to harm them if he felt it coming for him – he would run. She moved her palm along the bricks looking for the place where the cold pressure was greatest.

  ‘What are you holding?’

  Yvette stood frozen in front of him, the box half-concealed in her right hand, in her left the lantern held high. She put her weight onto one hip and made her eyes wide.

  ‘My aunty swears she left a picture here among the rubbish. A landscape, I think, though she can’t like it much, otherwise why would she have left it to rot here for years? But today she must save it from the flood. Will you help me, sir? You’ve a kind face! Let’s have a look around, eh?’

  His face was grey and sweating; his eyes darted around the room. He saw the empty place where the little round box had been sitting, its cover clearly lit by her lamp. He dropped the candle into the mud and pulled the knife from his belt. ‘Give it to me.’ He shuffled forward a step.

  Maud closed her eyes and with all her strength swung at the wall. The bricks crumbled under the blow and the water leaped out of its confinement in a joyous blast, taking more of the rotten masonry with it.

  The noise made him step back, and at once water gushed in behind Yvette; she could feel its frozen force pushing against her legs. She screamed, and while he was still looking at the sudden rush in horror and confusion, she threw the box towards him. The diamonds cascaded out, striking him in the face, and the great stone fell over his shoulder. He half-turned and dropped to his knees, scrabbling in the rushing filth. Yvette ran past him, but his left arm shot out and caught her round her thigh, tripping her into the roaring waters. The lantern flew from her hands, landing and bouncing against the broken barrels. She fell hard on her hands then twisted round to pull her face from the deepening water. ‘Bitch!’ he screamed and as the lantern began to splutter and fail she watched, fascinated, as he raised his right arm, the knife hovering in the darkness above her.

  ‘Morel,’ Maud said, her voice clear above the sound of the water. She uncovered the lantern so he could see her face. He went absolutely still.

  Yvette pulled her own knife from her pocket, struggling to get it free under the water. It rushed up her body, splashing into her mouth and eyes, gushing around Morel’s thighs as if he were a stone in a stream. She scrabbled the knife free of her soaked skirts and opened the blade under the flow of dirty water.

  ‘Maud,’ Morel said in a whisper. Then Yvette thrust up, her thumb on the blade. She felt a terrible res
istance then a release as the knife went deep into his chest. He gasped and toppled forwards. She dropped the knife and scrabbled away from him. Maud pulled her upright. He was floating face down in the water.

  ‘My God!’ Yvette screamed and reached towards him as if she thought she might be allowed to change her mind. Maud moved her aside and went to him, pushing his floating body into the wreckage and turning him by his shoulder until she could see his face. The eyes were open and sightless.

  ‘He’s dead,’ Maud said. The water was nearly at their waist. ‘We have to go.’

  ‘Oh Jesus, my knife!’ Yvette said, dropping into a crouch, feeling around on the floor and spitting the water out of her mouth as it reached her lips and eyes.

  ‘Now, Yvette. Now or we’re dead too.’ Maud grabbed her and began to drag her towards the opening into the main cellar. Yvette reached out one more time and felt something in the water; she managed to get her fingers around it. Maud pulled harder at her shoulder, helping her to her feet against the force of the river racing ever faster to fill its new space. Together they struggled through towards the storage room, and both had to duck under the slapping water to get through the low opening. Maud let the waters tear the lamp from her hand. There followed moments of death, thunder and darkness with their heads underwater and all the lights gone. Air. They stumbled onwards – and ahead of them they heard their names being called – then screamed.

  Yvette got her arm under Maud’s and they moved forward, their hands pushed against the walls to keep their footing. Rats were swimming alongside them, scrabbling up the walls and along the roof over their heads, falling over themselves in their panic. The track of the cellar began to rise.

  ‘Here!’ Maud managed to shout. Tanya came splashing to meet them, her lantern held high, the rats swimming past her and up to her knees in water. She reached for her friends, and pulled them over to the ladder.

  ‘Yvette first,’ Maud gasped. Tanya nodded and guided Yvette’s shivering hands onto the ladder and went up behind her, pushing her onwards and out, shoving her lantern after her. Then she turned back.