‘I guessed.’
‘You suspected,’ she corrected him. ‘Suspicions in our world are as pervasive as air. We may feed on them, but they’re proof of nothing.’
He changed the subject. ‘Have you learned any more about the Salpêtrière files. From your intern friend. He isn’t you as well, is he?’
‘No, he isn’t. Though the idea did cross my mind. Then flitted away. That’s a serious matter. I should hear from him tomorrow. I’ve upset you, James. That wasn’t my intention. Almost more with my masquerading than with the blackmail, a far more serious offence in my estimation.’
He couldn’t meet her eyes. ‘I need to phone Touquet’s office. Do you have the number?’
She gave it to him with the expression of a penitent and left without a nod.
Watching her go, James felt breathless, as if he had penetrated into some protean region beneath the waves where shapes shifted with fugitive speed, too quick for the senses to settle on. Or as if he had been swallowed up in the inner recesses of some oriental harem, a labyrinth where the dance of veils was perpetual, beckoning him onwards towards the core of some feminine mystery which metamorphosed into billowing gossamer as he approached, hiding rather than revealing. Door after door in an endless corridor, veil after veil, so that he lost his bearings, was dizzy with the pursuit of an ever changing object for which neither his eyes nor his values could provide a solid measure.
He picked up the telephone and put it down as quickly. He wasn’t ready for Raf. What was it the Chief Inspector had said to him one day? Yes, he had complained of this world of his where women were no longer women and men not men. Perhaps he had more in common with the Chief Inspector than he had suspected.
With a sudden longing for home, he wished for clear demarcation lines, for things to be as they seemed. He wondered if that might ever be possible again.
*
Harriet opened the door to him. It was a relief to see her scrubbed face, unencumbered by wiles or mystery.
She put a finger to her lips. ‘Elinor’s asleep.’ She ushered him into the dining room.
‘How has she been?’
She lowered her eyes, smoothed a wrinkle in the tablecloth, then looked up at him again, shaking her head. ‘Not well. She slept through part of the night, then woke to scribble in her journal. She didn’t acknowledge me, hasn’t acknowledged me all day. And she won’t eat.’
‘What did Dr Ponsard say?’
She shrugged. ‘Well, he did examine her thoroughly. She was quite calm. You remember that. You were still here. He prohibited the wearing of corsets.’ She flushed slightly, then raced on. ‘And he gave her some sleeping powders. Something for the temperature, too.’
‘No prognosis?’
‘He came back around noon to check on her. She didn’t recognise him. Or at least she pretended not to … I don’t know James, I really don’t know.’
‘And …?’
She smoothed her dress with something of an injured expression. ‘He had a box with him, coils. He told me to bring a large bowl of water. Her bare feet were put into it. When he caught me staring, he told me to leave them. I think he applied current to her body.’ She shivered, then looked round and lowered her voice. ‘I think he may also have hypnotised her.’
‘Oh?’ James imagined Ellie walking around the room with those sleepwalker’s eyes.
‘Yes. Because when he finally called me back, he told me that she had taken a little cold broth and brioche and that I was to monitor her and report to him when he came in tomorrow. While he was talking, Elinor started to retch, to vomit everything up on the floor. Ponsard reprimanded her sternly. Elinor gave him a smile. It wasn’t a nice smile, more like a challenge, as if she was going to show him.’ She shuddered again. ‘I cleaned up and then he ordered me out once more.’
‘Poor Harriet. I’m sorry. Where was Violette?’
‘She was running some errands.’
‘Did Ponsard say anything more?’
‘Before he left, he said he was a little worried that there might be some blockage in her oesophagus. He had wheeled her out on the terrace. He thought a little air and change of scenery might do her good. When I went in to her, she was scribbling in her journal again. She’s slept or scribbled all day since. She won’t eat or take her medicine, not even the digestive powders he prescribed. She doesn’t know me.’
Harriet’s eyes had filled with tears and she turned away to wipe them.
‘Why don’t you go home and rest, Harriet. I’ll keep an eye on her. You must be exhausted.’
‘No, no. It’s not that. I’m comfortable enough here.’ She gave him one of her direct looks. ‘My own quarters are nothing to write home about. Though I would like a walk. I have a few things to see to. But I’ll be back in an hour or two. I’m sure Elinor wouldn’t like you to … to see her like this.’
‘She’s been poorly before, Harriet. And she’s come through. She always comes through.’ He said it with more certainty than he felt.
After Harriet had left, he tiptoed into the salon. Ellie was asleep in her chair beside the divan. Her head drooped down on her chest. She was wearing a belted burgundy robe. The ruffle of a white nightgown peeked from her sleeve. Her notebook was perched on a table by her side, which also contained an assortment of powders and pitchers. There was a stale smell in the air.
He picked up a book, chose a far chair and settled into it. He didn’t look at the book. His spirit was heavy, his head full of too many riddles. He used the quiet moments to try and sift through all the things he had learned in the last twenty-four hours. He had no sense of how long he sat there, but the next thing he knew, Ellie’s voice roused him from his reverie.
‘Jim, you’re home. I’m so glad, but there’s no good news for you I fear.’
Ellie was swaying in her chair, one hand clasped round her stomach as if she were in pain, the other playing erratically with her hairpins.
‘No, no.’ Tears flooded her eyes. ‘Maisie’s no better.’
‘Maisie? Maisie?’
Ellie sobbed, clapped her hands to her ears. Her back was arched in agitation. ‘She’s fading, Jim. Fading. It’s all my fault.’
‘Your fault?’
‘Yes. I never told you. I was afraid.’ She grasped the arms of her chair as if to lever herself up, but her hands stayed there, clenched into white fists. Her eyes were preternaturally large. She spoke in fits and starts. ‘My embroidery. I dropped it. Dropped it on the stairs. I didn’t realise. Didn’t know. Maisie tripped. Tripped on it. The babe too.’ She slumped backwards, limp as a sack.
‘Tripped on it,’ James repeated, his mind in turmoil.
‘Yes. There. I’ve told you. You should go up to her. She’ll want to see you.’ She tilted her head. Her smile had a milky sweetness. ‘She loves her, Jim.’
For a fleeting moment, as if Ellie’s conviction were contagious, James had the impression that were he only to locate the stairs of the Boston house and ascend them, he would find Maisie resting amidst lace and linen. Maisie with her gentle faraway gaze, her frail pallor.
He took a deep breath. But there was no air in the room. With a brutal clatter, he threw open the windows and turned on his sister. ‘Maisie’s dead, Ellie. We’re in Paris. Paris. Do you hear me. And you know that perfectly well. You know that.’
Her hands clasped her stomach, she swayed. ‘You’re angry with me, Jim. You have a right to be angry. But pity me too. There’s a worm in my stomach. It’s eating away at me. Eating.’ Her eyes pleaded with him, then grew opaque. ‘You rest. You must be tired after a day at the office. I’ll go to Maisie. Yes.’ He could barely make out her words.
With a sudden movement, she propped herself up from the chair. For a lightning second, James thought she was going to walk. Instead, she lunged to the floor in a heap of blankets.
He rushed towards her. She had collapsed into a faint. He dampened a cloth in water, applied it to her temples, her wrists, whispered her name, carried he
r to the divan and laid her gently on it. Covering her lightly, he sat to watch over her in a mounting panic.
He couldn’t follow the wanderings of her delirious mind, as fluid and capricious as a wraith which knew no boundaries of time or place. Could it be that in an attempt to come to terms with her own condition, Ellie had transported herself back to an invalid Maisie – a Maisie who had lain abed for months with near-perfect equanimity?
When her eyes fluttered open, he breathed a sigh of relief. But she didn’t focus on him now. As he brought a glass to her lips, he felt he had become transparent.
She drank in short thirsty gulps, then lay back, her gaze fixed on the ceiling.
‘That’s right, Ellie, you rest now. Sleep a little if you can.’
She offered no response.
‘If you need anything, I’m here. Just call me.’
Her silence was as disturbing as her speech. He went back to his chair and watched her out of the corner of his eye. A pale glint of late sunlight fell on her and streaked her with a vertical gash so that it seemed to cut her in half. She didn’t move. Not even when tears cascaded down her face. He hesitated, then went to wipe them.
‘You’re kind,’ she whispered.
He waited for her to say something more, but she receded into her silent place. Her breathing grew even and he realised that she must have fallen asleep.
Fetching a piece of paper, he settled at the table. He was determined to make use of his time, to put some order into the disparate strands of their inquiry. Everything seemed to have taken on a fraying centrifugal force and his mind ached for cohesion. He was about to write down the names of the key players about whom he harboured any degree of suspicion, when instead he found himself printing Rachel Arnhem-Olympe Fabre at the top of the page, and beneath this what amounted to a chronology of her life and its points of intersection with the people he had encountered at such a fast and furious rate in these last days.
Before he had finished, he heard the click of the door. He tiptoed out and saw Violette, a basket filled with groceries in her arms. He greeted her, said he would be dining with Mlle Harriet and returned to his musing.
He was just thinking about the fire which had obliterated Madame Arnhem’s life and set the two sisters on such a treacherous path, when a sound from Ellie pierced his concentration.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked in a neutral voice.
‘I’m just writing something, Ellie dear.’
‘About what.’
He swallowed. He still didn’t know if she was focused in the here and now or not. ‘About a case.’
‘A case?’
‘Olympe. Can I get you something to eat, Ellie. Or a drink. Violette’s back.’
Her brow furrowed with the effort of attention. ‘Will you pass me my notebook?’ she surprised him by asking. ‘I want to write, too.’
‘You mustn’t tire yourself, Ellie.’
She said nothing, not even when he handed her the book and the stubby pencils which lay beside it. She propped herself on an elbow and gesturing him away, opened the journal and began to write. A noise in the corridor made her stop. She was all alertness. ‘Who’s that?’
‘I imagine it’s Harriet.’
She slammed the cover of the book down. ‘I don’t want to see her. Don’t let her in here.’ Her nostrils quivered. There was fear in her eyes, like a rabbit trapped in light.
‘All right. But she only means you well.’
‘I want you with me. No one else. Please stay. You do me good.’
‘Of course, I’ll stay.’
‘Thank you, Raf. Thank you.’
James froze in position. The Ellie who wanted him by her side was the Ellie who thought he was Raf.
‘And you’re the only one I’ll ever allow to read this,’ she whispered looking up at him with a tender expression. ‘You’re the only one who understands me. You understand about the worm. The worm who comes in the night.’
James murmured helpless assent.
PART THREE
TWENTY-ONE
For the next days, he was taken up with Ellie. He ministered to her, sat or slumbered by her side in a state of semi-somnolent vigilance, fed her the potions and broth Ponsard had prescribed and which she took from James and no one else, even though she still addressed him as Raf. Whoever he was, it seemed that his presence had a calming effect. Ponsard testified to as much on both his visits, which brought with them the whiff of an emissary from some promised, some imminently rational land. Since Ellie was peaceful Ponsard decided that she was best left to rest and mend in her own way, before he undertook any further treatment.
‘The mind is still a mysterious entity to our science,’ he told James. ‘We tiptoe, we blunder and do what we can. But who knows whether your sister may not be her own best physician, with a little help from time. When the mists of delusion have cleared, we will see what else we can do.’
Ellie paid no attention to the doctor. She only hummed a little during his visits, some childhood tune, which had the ring of a skipping rhyme.
‘The wind blows low, the wind blows high, little Jessie says she’ll die …’
She hummed across Harriet, too. James – or rather the Raf he was meant to be – was the only person she addressed with any degree of alertness, and that only to ask for her notebook or a cooling drink.
As he sat by her side, he wandered back over her past episodes and had a vision of his mother sitting just like this, the house darkened in enforced slumber, the knitting growing in her hands with the speed of a magic beanstalk.
Once, too, when he had come home to visit from Philadelphia and finding no one else about, had rushed into Ellie’s room, he had surprised his father in a similar posture, newspaper still in hand, eyes half closed. Ellie, her features askance, was mumbling something incomprehensible, and his father, instantly alert, had rushed him away as if from some secret scene of perfidy. He had offered no explanation, except that Ellie wasn’t herself.
It astonished James that throughout those years, he had never penetrated quite so deeply as now into the terrifying reality that simple expression obscured.
Some time during his bedside vigil, James slipped away to phone both Touquet’s office and the Grand. He left a message for his brother, simply to tell him where he was. He also wrote a note to Chief Inspector Durand explaining that Madame de Landois had indeed penned the blackmailing letter, but it dated from some six years back and was part of an elaborate hoax which bore no relation to the present situation. He wondered at his own formulation and at quite what induced him to preserve the woman’s honour. Perhaps it was simply that if the worst had to be discovered about Marguerite, he wanted to be the one to discover it. The shadowy nature of this wish didn’t fail to strike him. He concluded, not without an aching irony, that since he couldn’t hope to compete with Raf in the winning of women’s favours, maybe he was trying at least to equal him when it came to knowledge.
As for the ever-present puzzle of Olympe’s tragic death, it had come to him during the musings of these long days and gruelling nights, that a hidden key to her relations with Marguerite and indeed with Raf, let alone the prostitutes she had visited, probably lay buried with her sister Judith. Or indeed with her childhood friend Louise Boussel. He could imagine the Olympe he now thought he had some grip on confessing to these old confidantes, telling them things she couldn’t mention to her new friends. Or simply thinking matters through in their uncritical presence. He didn’t quite know why he had come to this conclusion, except that he knew Olympe was a loyal soul. He determined to see both women as soon as he could leave Ellie.
But something intervened. In Saturday’s five o’clock post, there was a letter from Raf asking him to meet him at the Grand by eight. ‘Tonight is the big night,’ Raf proclaimed in the cryptic tone of someone who suspected his letter would be intercepted by alien eyes. ‘I know you wouldn’t want to miss it.’
James fingered the bracelet the boatman had giv
en him and which still lay in his pocket. He took it out to examine it in the light. Could Raf have given it to Olympe? And should he now, in all conscience, return it to his brother and convey everything he had learned?
Like some ultra-sensitive instrument that could read his inclinations even before he was aware of them, Ellie was suddenly not only awake, but aware of who he was.
‘Jim,’ she beckoned him to her side. ‘Jim, where are you going? What’s that you’ve got? And where’s Raf? Where has he gone?’
‘I don’t quite know, Ellie. But I’m going to meet him at the hotel later.’
She surveyed him, her eyes darkening with her appraisal. ‘You never did like spending much time with me, Jim. Always running. Leaving me to Father or to Raf.’
‘That’s not quite fair, Ellie.’ He was taken aback by her accusation, but also relieved that she now recognised him.
‘Isn’t it?’ She turned her attention to the bracelet and snatched it from his hand. ‘Where did you get that, Jim? That’s my bracelet. Raf gave it to me for my birthday. I thought I’d lost it.’
‘Yours?’ He prevaricated. ‘I found it lying about. It’s pretty. Very pretty.’
‘Help me put it on, Jim.’
The trapped fire of the emeralds danced in the light. He fumbled with the catch.
‘Never mind, Jim. You won’t have to put up with me much longer. Everything will be fine now. Now that the bracelet’s come back.’ She started her humming, then stopped abruptly. ‘Tell Raf there’s something I need to say to him. Say to him alone. It’s urgent.’
‘All right. I’ll see you later then, Ellie.’ He planted a light kiss on her brow. ‘I’m so glad you’re feeling a little better. Harriet will take care of your needs.’
‘Ah Harriet. Dear Harriet. So utterly dependable.’ She sighed, her eyes playing over the bracelet once more.
The bustling Saturday evening streets dispersed the cloistered air of the sickroom with a tingling rapidity. Women’s hats looked brighter and more elaborate than an array of exotic birds. The frothy confections of the neighbouring patisserie enticed. Near the Madeleine, a harlequin of a juggler threw striped pins in the air with such speed that their colours metamorphosed and dazzled. When a flower girl thrust a bouquet of fluttering sweetpeas towards him, he purchased them for their sheer evanescent beauty.
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