by Kim Wright
In short, James Whistler had given Isabel Blout the one thing no other man had ever attempted to give her: respect.
And it turned out, unlikely of unlikelies, that this is what she had truly wanted all her life.
For after only a few weeks under the artist’s tutelage she had announced to both her husband and Armand that, in her words, “This charade is over. I am simply no longer prepared to sustain it.”
Blout had panicked. There was no telling how far she would push this, how many subsequent revelations would come from the first. For Isabel was no longer herself. She had taken to roaming the parks of London dressed as a man. Drawing people, sometimes with Whistler at her side and sometimes alone. Her fingertips were perpetually stained, colors driven beneath the nails and crusted around her cuticles. She envisioned herself to be a budding artist, whose talent would dazzle the masses and allow her entrance into the sort of bohemian circle that would accept and celebrate her unorthodox past.
All she wanted, as she repeatedly said to any man who asked her and to quite a few who did not, was to be herself.
But that, of course, was the one thing she could not be.
Whistler panicked too. It was a fine thing to play at being professor and pupil two mornings a week, and he had come to care for the girl. But his livelihood came not from a bohemian circle of artists but rather from the British upper class. He did not wish to abdicate his profitable role as a society portraitist for the dubious distinction of being the man who had discovered the hidden talents of Isabel Blout.
It fell to Armand to reason with her, as indeed it always had. She would not always have to play the game, he told her, but she simply must play it a bit longer. The official story would be that Isabel ran off to Paris with Armand, a tale most people would readily believe. He was, after all, a handsome man close to her own age and London had been expecting Isabel to abandon George Blout for years. Wifely desertion may be scandalous, but it is scandal of a tolerable sort. George’s social circle would tsk about it over the soup course at their next dinner party, and then, with the arrival of the fish, they would move on to tsk about something else.
Granted, the portrait itself was a bit of a hot potato. The truth was built right into it, visible to anyone who had the eyes to look. The artist did not wish to see it destroyed – and nor would any sensitive person who had ever gazed upon its rather remarkable brand of beauty. But Whistler understood, as did George Blout, that a portrait like this was best shepherded into a private collection where it would never be widely viewed. It was not to be a pearl before swine but rather a pearl displayed in a very precise sort of setting.
And so it was mutually decided that Isabel would go to Paris with Armand. She would pose as his lover and use her beauty and charm to help him establish a Parisian branch of his business. Even before the disaster at Cleveland Street, the opportunities in London had been paling, and Armand had vowed not to make the same mistakes in Paris. He would not throw the net so wide. Not a brothel this time with dozens of men coming and going, but rather just a few very specialized procurements for the wealthy. All Isabel would have to do is help him through the Exposition, when there was so much money to be made and then, then…
Then she could go where she pleased and do whatever she wished. Vienna. San Francisco. Calcutta. Pretoria. Milan. It was all the same to Armand. He would give her money and he would give her freedom. She could take Henry with her if she wished.
Armand had most sincerely meant this promise. He and Isabel had been together in this quest from the beginning and he could have done none of it without her. It was not his intent to keep her in eternal thralldom and he would release her from any obligation once the Exhibition had passed. From there she could call herself whatever name she chose, paint whatever she wished, speak whatever truth moved her, travel to any city that beckoned.
As long as it wasn’t London or Paris.
Armand sipped his brandy. It had been a good plan, but now it had all somehow fallen apart. The table had been tipped and any bets which had been placed on it had slid to the floor, cancelled forever.
For Paris was a changed place from just a year ago. Too many reporters and far too many lawmen. He could not fault himself for failing to predict Isabel’s transformation at the hands of Whistler, for that had been a true stroke of fate, but Armand knew he should have seen this part coming. He should have anticipated that as the Exposition neared it would bring not only money, but scrutiny. Newspapers from all over the world had sent writers hungry for stories, determined to find some angle on the fair that had not yet been explored. Nations sent not only their jewels, their art, their scientific advancements, but also men to guard these assets – defenders of every sort, from police captains in uniform to Mafia thugs. No movement in Paris went unmonitored, no aberration escaped analysis.
All the fuss made it rather difficult for a man to conduct his business.
Armand Delacroix had spies of his own, so he had known of Rayley’s arrival within days of the man setting foot in France. On a rational basis, he knew it was unlikely that Scotland Yard had sent a detective to net a small fish such as himself, a man whose only crime was transporting young whores across the channel to meet the burgeoning needs of Paris. Isabel had told him he was being foolish. There was no reason to believe that Scotland Yard either knew or cared that Armand Delacroix and Charles Hammond were the same person or that the pretty boy from Manchester had grown into a man of international business.
Which was all most likely true, at least last autumn, when Rayley Abrams had blown into Paris on a cool wind. Armand’s informants had reported that Rayley was merely working in the forenics lab, studying methodology with the French police. Autumn had turned to winter, and winter to spring, with the tower ever rising and Armand’s coffers growing fatter. For if procuring sexual entertainment for gentlemen was a profitable business, it could not compare to the profit potential of blackmail.
No one knew of this. No one. There was a time when he would have told Isabel, for there was a time in which they had shared everything. But that had changed. She saw him more as a jailer than a friend now, as evidenced by the fact she refused to live under the same roof. As evidenced by the fact that they frequently argued, the one thing that in their long and storied history together, they had never done.
So all Isabel really knew were the things that everyone knew: The Exhibition was running low on funds. Private investors were being sought and Armand, a man with moneyed friends on both sides of the channel, was in a uniquely favorable position to forge the right sort of deals. Had she not been so distracted with what she described as her “slavery,” Isabel was certainly clever enough to have determined the rest. That the patrons Armand had assembled did not expect to profit from their investments, nor to be paid back for their loans. All they expected was that their activities at the white brick house tucked away in a small side street off the Boulevard Saint-Michel would never be discovered. They wanted their secrets to remain secret.
They paid significant sums for this assurance, half of which Armand obligingly turned over to the Exhibition committee and half of which he pocketed. There was talk of a small plaque somewhere at the base of the tower, in tribute to these selfless and visionary men who, be they of French or British birth, were willing to put aside nationalist squabbles and pledge their personal monies to assure that the Exposition Universelle would be a rousing success. It amused Armand no end to consider this, that the world’s largest phallus should be embellished with a list of the wealthiest pedophiles in Europe.
So it had all worked well for a while. Funding for the Exhibition, steady employment for the poor, sexual novelty for the rich, and unlimited profit for Armand Delacroix. He had recovered from his first blow and despite the troubles with Isabel, despite the damned reporters and the damned coppers everywhere babbling each in their own foreign tongues, it might have continued to work.
But April had brought both the crisis in London and the subsequen
t arrival of Henry Newlove. And for the second time in a year, Armand’s whole world had fallen straight to hell.
He had been in London when the word came that the bobbies had raided Cleveland Street. He had not bothered going by the premises – there was certainly nothing there to salvage – and fortunately Tommy had been with him when he heard the news. The two of them had instead walked straight to the docks, strolling their way up the gangplank into steerage on the next transit boat scheduled to leave. The paperwork was not a problem. Even if the channel officers had been looking for a man named Charles Hammond – and they probably weren’t, at least not yet - he had his French passport in the name of Armand Delacroix, bestowed upon him by a grateful civil servant, a man who also happened to be a member of the Exposition committee. A minor in his company, a child declared to be his niece, would need no papers at all.
Armand could only assume that the other boys had scattered after the raid. Gone back to wherever they’d come from, which would have meant Henry had returned home to Manchester. The boy had no papers, after all, so his chances of following Armand to Paris seemed remote – so remote that Armand had ceased to worry about it by the time the boat struck the dock in Calais. It was a pang to lose his London brothel, but Paris was proving far more profitable and Armand was already considering making it his primary home.
So it had been a shock indeed to see Henry standing in the street outside his home a few days later, a shock to see him stepping from the shadow of an obliging tree to confront Armand with a single word: “Why?”
“Why?” was the question Henry Newlove had been asking all his life. He was a sullen lad, prone to fits of self-pity and rage. It was as much his temper that had driven him from the ranks of the boy-girls as the faint velvety fuzz of hair on his chin. There were ways around the physical changes. Certainly ways around the facial hair and deepening voices, even methods to conceal the protrusion at the base of a boy’s throat, the width of his wrists and the gracelessness of his hands. Physical femininity was far easier to feign than psychological, and Henry had never developed the sweet pliability of the other boy-girls. He had been constitutionally incapable of flirtation or charm.
In fact, save for the fact he was Isabel’s younger brother, Armand would have sent Henry Newlove packing years ago. He was certainly handsome enough to draw a steady stream of business, blessed by the same genetic gods which had smiled so radiantly down on Isabel. He had wide blue-grey eyes and full lips, the kind favored by many clients. But none of this would have been enough to counteract his outrageous demands had Isabel not been there to constantly intervene on his behalf. Armand had let him remain in the ranks of the boy-girls longer than any prudent man should and, when the velvet fuzz on Henry’s face finally turned to wool, even had created a position for the boy as the procurer and trainer of new talent.
Isabel had been the one to suggest they put him at the postal and telegraph office. The delivery of messages around the city required the services of innumerable adolescent boys, so the pickings were lush, and Henry, who had a good mind when it wasn’t mired in petulance, had proven a reasonably effective tutor. He should have been gratified, but it had never been enough. Henry was always asking Armand why he couldn’t have this room or that new suit of clothes. Why he couldn’t go to a certain dance or operetta, why he shouldn’t come to Paris to live with Isabel.
Armand had pretended to mull this last idea, as much to content Isabel as Henry, but he had never seriously considered inviting Henry to Paris. The boy’s frequent explosions of anger were problematic enough in the controlled atmosphere of Cleveland Street and would be the undoing of them all in the more politically precarious world of the Exposition Universelle. So it had been with the most abject horror that Armand Delacroix had perceived Henry Newlove stepping out from under a tree on a lovely April morning and saying “Why?”
Armand’s only salvation, ironically, was the fact Isabel had refused to live with him. Henry had managed to find his way to Armand’s house easily enough; in light of the soirees which were regularly held there, the place was well known among men of a certain persuasion. Isabel’s home was smaller and more discreetly located. The longer Henry went without being able to find his sister, the more likely he was to give up and return to London.
Armand had taken him to luncheon. It seemed safer than allowing him inside the house, where Marianne would shortly be awakening and coming down to breakfast. Henry’s resentment of her, and the place she clearly held in Armand’s future plans, was so intense that Armand feared he might actually attack the child. If Isabel had been mercurial, Henry was plutonian. Just as impulsive and unpredictable, but darker, wilder, meaner. Heaven help them all if he found his sister, and thus the means to stay in Paris.
But over luncheon Armand was to get his second nasty shock of the morning. For Henry had come to Paris not in hopes of securing employment, but set on blackmail. Not just the blackmail of clients. Oh no, not at all. Henry had sat behind the crisp white tablecloth, swirling his wine with great affectation and little skill, sloshing a bit over the rim. And he had cheerfully announced to Armand that if the two of them couldn’t come to some sort of agreement, he was prepared to tell the authorities that the civic-minded Armand Delacroix and the whore-mongering Charles Hammond were one and the same.
“Turnabout’s fair play, yes?” he had said, while Armand had sat frozen in horror, a bite of trout almandine growing enormous in his mouth.
So there it was. The wily Henry had managed to ascertain what the distracted Isabel had not: that Armand’s true money was coming not from prostitution, but from blackmail. And he had traveled to Paris with one intent, to blackmail the blackmailer. A thousand pounds, he said. A thousand pounds or Scotland Yard shall know it bloody all.
“Scotland Yard?” Armand had repeated stupidly. The figure of a thousand pounds had been too ludicrous for comment, but he was surprised the boy would attempt to threaten him with a weapon so far from hand.
“There’s a Yard detective right here in France,” Henry had said with a smug little smile. “Name of Rayley Abrams. Maybe he’d like to know where the master of Cleveland Street has flown.”
Rayley Abrams. That name again. For someone whom Armand had never met, the man was turning out to be the most enormous pain in the ass.
“How do you know of Rayley Abrams?” he asked, dreading the answer even as he posed the question.
“I work at the telegraph office, don’t I? At your insistence, don’t I, Sir?”
It was in that final syllable that Armand knew he was caught. That final sarcastic “Sir,” the word twisting in the boy’s mouth like a rag. A lad with the morals of Henry Newgate wouldn’t hesitate to read a telegram before he delivered it, especially a telegram that was sent to or from Scotland Yard. In fact, now that one paused to consider it, running telegrams was the perfect side-job for a fledgling blackmailer. Henry undoubtedly knew as much about where the Cleveland Street case stood as any man on either side of the channel. And, just as he said, it was Armand himself who had gotten him the job, the one who had placed the very weapon in his hand.
Armand sipped his brandy, looked up at the transient moon. Even now, the memory of that luncheon made his stomach churn. He was an ethical man, was he not? He had tried for years to keep matters well in check, to ensure that no one was seriously hurt, that no one lost anything he could not afford to lose. But that day at luncheon with Henry had been the point of no return. For once the threat of blackmail has been loosened, it spills over everything. It is a splash of Bordeaux on a white table cloth – irretractable, the stain everlasting. The boy had sat before him, his fingertips pressing together in the church steeple of children’s rhymes, smiling, quite proud of himself.
But still, even then, Armand had not intended to kill him.
Henry had to be gotten rid of, but he was Isabel’s brother and Armand had known the boy almost since birth. He felt responsible for him too. Henry had to be gotten rid of only in the sense tha
t he needed to be taught a lesson, spanked like the child he still was, and transported back to England. Within an hour of leaving their luncheon Armand had devised a plan of his own. He had several muscular and persuasive men already in his circle of contacts - such was the nature of the industry in which he toiled. It would be a simple matter to send instructions to one of them while Henry bathed upstairs.
For Armand had pretended to capitulate. He invited Henry to stay with him and apologized for not sending for him earlier. He persuaded the boy that to blackmail Armand was to fish in a very small pond when there was an ocean of possibility all around them. He said he knew the perfect client – old, and that’s always best, is it not? They demand so little and pay so handsomely in return. Had he brought his uniform with him? Henry had nodded eagerly. His first Parisian conquest would be a simple one.