The Coral Thief

by Rebecca Stott

  “Cats,” I said. “I can smell cats and damp.”

  “Yes, it belongs to the cats now, finally, and the pigeons. We are the trespassers.”

  At the top of an ornate cast-iron balustrade that swept upward around a staircase that spiraled to a skylight perhaps a hundred feet above me, I could see the flurried shapes of what looked like pigeons. We climbed the stairs to the second floor in the dusty half-light. If I had thought I had a plan only an hour before, I abandoned it now. I had decided only to trust her.

  I had no idea what that would mean.

  On the second floor she stopped to unlock a door. A small painted sign on the wall read SERRURIER. Locksmith. Jagot had said that Lucienne’s lover had been a lock breaker or a locksmith, called Duluc, or Duford. No, Dufour. Leon Dufour.

  We stepped into a dark room lined with shelves and all the paraphernalia of a locksmiths art—metal saws, metal presses and molds, boxes of screws and levers. The air was thick with the smell of metal and dust. Cobwebs hung heavy from the tables and walls. Some cupboards had been draped with grimy sheets, encrusted here and there with pigeon droppings. A fragment of song drifted up from a street seller below.

  “The locksmith, Dufour …,” I said, imagining him and his tall lover, here in the striped light of hot afternoons, and then I tried not to think about that. “Is he here?”

  “He died,” she said. “Dufour is dead.”

  “Who was he?”

  “A friend. Someone who lived here once. A locksmith and a poet. He left me all of this, so sometimes I am Dufour, the locksmith.” She gestured at her clothes. “Today I am Dufour the locksmith. Tomorrow I am a linen dealer or a botanical illustrator or a printer’s assistant. In Paris I am many people. Dressed like this, I can come and go as I please.”

  I felt a stirring, a heat spreading through my body. Yes, I thought. I would give you anything if you would just kiss me again.

  “I’m not used to having guests here in the atelier. Can I offer you some wine? I have a bottle of Burgundy here somewhere, I think. Come.”

  I was not prepared for what came next. Behind the room of locks and keys and dust, the locksmiths workshop, was another room.

  “My cabinet,” she said.

  It might have been a cave beneath the sea. The last of the evening light fell onto shelves covered with spiraled shells, the intricate branchings of red corals, and the fanned shapes of sponges. Shelves covered every wall and in the center stood cabinets, with drawers of different lengths and widths, among packing cases from which dried seaweed spilled out. A stuffed crocodile hung suspended from a rafter; giant conch shells lay on the floor. A long table covered with dusty books and papers ran almost the length of the window, scattered with small cream-colored labels threaded with red silk.

  “My specimens,” I muttered. “They’re here? You stole them. For this? A collection?”

  “Yes, they’re here somewhere. I’ll find them for you. But first you must have some wine.” She reached for a couple of glasses and a bottle of wine from a cupboard and blew the dust off them, uncorking the bottle a moment later.

  “I’ve never seen anything—”

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “You will see larger collections than this even a few streets away. The comtesse de Sévignon—”

  “May I, can I look?” I asked, opening a drawer of coiled and netted and tentacled white corals arranged against dark blue velvet. “How long have you had all of these? Are they all stolen? How long have you—”

  “Most of them are the remains of my grandmother’s collection. She left it to me when she died. Some are from the Red Sea. Others are new. All of them are rare and worth a great deal of money. Some, yes,” she said with a smile, “have been acquired. Stolen. It is more than a collection to me. It has a certain history, of course, which gives it importance, but I am also writing a book.”

  She opened a drawer and lifted out a black fan coral, running her fingertips along its delicate netted fibers. She passed it to me, telling me how it had been plucked from the bed of the Red Sea by a diver from Alexandria, who later sold it in the port of Al Qusayr to a Dutch sailor who was buying up corals for a ships captain who knew something about corals and collectors. In a London auction room leased by a Russian prince, the novelist Horace Walpole procured it for his friend the Duchess of Portland, who placed it in the museum shed built for her coral and shell collection at Bulstrode Park in Buckinghamshire. That’s where it stayed, until her death in 1786, when her entire collection—the birds’ nests, the corals, the snuffboxes, the paintings, the china, the birds’ eggs, the fossils—was sold to pay off the duchess’s debts.

  “My grandmother sent her agents to London to buy the duchess’s corals,” she said. “The trouble was, half of the other coral collectors in Europe were there and the prices were impossible. She had to sell three paintings to get the pieces she wanted, and this was one of them. This little piece of black coral from the Red Sea. She sold a Rembrandt drawing for this.”

  Lucienne Bernard was an aristocrat, then, or at least her family had been. How had someone from such a background ended up as a common thief hunted by Jagot?

  “Why, though?” I asked, handing her back the coral. “Why did she go to such trouble? Why do you?”

  “My grandmother collected corals because she loved rare and exotic things. It’s different for me. My interest is philosophical. The corals know things we do not know,” she said.

  “What do you mean know? They don’t have minds or eyes or souls. They can’t know anything.”

  She placed the piece of coral on the table and wrapped it in thin white paper; she marked the paper with some symbols and letters, tied it with red silk, and put it in the packing case deep in the dried seaweed. She took another coral specimen from a drawer and did the same.

  “They know how old the earth is,” she said. “They know how life on earth began. They know how animals have changed down there on the seabed, the way bodies have mutated and transformed from fishes to reptiles. They’ve seen it. They know it.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” She talked like a poet, I thought, not at all like any natural philosopher I had met.

  “Alors,” she said. “Perhaps they can’t tell us, but we can read them, like we read a book or a clock and find out. The corals are a clock to tell us how old the earth is.”

  “But we know how old the earth is,” I said, “or at least how long it is since the last great catastrophe that wiped everything out. Three thousand years. Cuvier has settled that.”

  “But Cuvier is wrong, and it’s easy to prove he is wrong. If a coral reef grows at the rate of an inch a year,” she said, making the distance between her forefinger and thumb, “and some reefs are a thousand feet thick, how many years would it have taken them to grow?”

  I did the calculations. “Around twelve thousand years,” I said. “That can’t be right.”

  I was supposed to be taking the corals back, I reminded myself, not listening to her criticism of Cuvier’s work. But, despite my intentions, I was rapt.

  “Oui, c’est vrai. C’est merveilleux, n’est-ce pas? Think about it. The reefs are even all the way through, which means they can’t have been disturbed. It means there have been no catastrophes, no boiling seas, no eruptions or tidal waves or angels of the apocalypse for at least twelve thousand years. Cuvier’s wrong—he just has to look at the corals properly to see that. But he won’t.”

  I nodded toward the packing cases, almost afraid to ask the question. “You really are going then? Leaving Paris?”

  “I came back to Paris to move my collection,” she said, “to take everything back to Italy. Nothing is safe here now that Paris is occupied. But it has taken much longer than I expected. I need to leave quickly—in a few days.” She passed me a glass of wine. “I wanted to give you your things before I left. To apologize. You had fallen asleep and I was curious to see what you were taking to Cuvier, and, well, once I had seen two coral fossils from the Ambras collecti
on in your box, they were more than I could resist. Did you know that they once belonged to Ferdinand II? Still, I shouldn’t have taken them, and now I can give them back.”

  “Italy?” I said, my voice shaking. “You’re going to Italy?”

  “Yes, that’s where I live.”

  “The child,” I said. “Delphine?”

  “She doesn’t want to leave Paris.”

  “Where is she?” I had looked for signs of a child in the atelier-toys, books, shoes—but saw none.

  “She is staying at a convent on the north side of the city. The nuns run it as a school. It’s not safe for her to be here with me in the atelier. Not anymore. I see her almost every day—she is not far away.”

  The heat in the room was stifling. I eased off my jacket, and when she stepped toward me and kissed me again, I felt an unbearable longing, softer and darker than the seabed.

  “It is too hot,” she said. “You know, you were lucky to see the paintings in the Louvre when you did. The walls are full of gaps now. The Prussians took their paintings two weeks ago, and Wellington sent a hundred and fifty riflemen in today to reclaim the Italian paintings. They took them down in less than two hours, except for the ones that Denon has hidden away, the ones he can’t bear to part with. Come through and let me light some candles. We can’t sit in here. Soon it will be too dark to see.”

  “The Louvre? You were there … today?”

  “Yes. I was looking for you,” she said. “When the soldiers came up the main staircase with guns, Denon simply stood and watched. He’s getting used to it. A few weeks ago, when the Prussian soldiers went to take back the marble columns that Napoleon had removed from Aachen Cathedral, Denon told them that if they took them, the Louvre roof would fall in.”

  I followed her through a low doorway into a room that was empty except for a mattress on a rugless floor, covered in crumpled sheets, a pale, blue silk nightdress lying like sloughed skin. She carried in a candleholder and placed it on the floor near the head of the mattress.

  “When … do you leave?” I asked, my words breaking up as she began to unbutton my shirt.

  “Soon. There’s so little time. I wanted to ask you about your notebooks. There are questions you are asking that … there are books you could read…”

  “I can stay in Paris now,” I said, “if you return my things. You could stay too, perhaps.” For a second I wondered whether I should warn her about my conversations with Jagot, tell her that there seemed to be a high price on her head, but when she pulled her shirt over her head and her hair came loose from its ribbon, catching the light from the candles, I forgot about that too. Underneath the shirt, her chest was bound with strips of white linen.

  “You will have to help me with this,” she said.

  As I reached to untie the white bands that bound her body, I tried to keep my mind on the soldiers in the Louvre. I imagined them climbing the ladders to reach the highest pictures, passing down paintings by Rubens, Caravaggio, and Titian, taking the canvases from their frames and rolling them up. If I kept my mind in the Louvre, I thought, my hands might stop shaking.

  Without thinking, I leaned forward to kiss her in that hollow where her shoulder curved toward her neck as she slipped off the rest of her clothes. “You can change your mind,” I said. “You could stay.”

  She was naked now except for her silk drawers, white against her dark skin.

  “You are flushed,” she said as she turned to face me, smiling. She reached for a sheet and draped it around herself. As I let the last strips of linen fall to the floor, she touched me, her fingers reaching for the skin beneath my unbuttoned shirt. “Wellington has told the Venetians they can have the horses back.”

  “He has?” I tried to keep my mind on the empty white spaces on the walls of the Louvre as she took off my shirt and slipped the belt from my waist. “The horses? What horses?”

  “The four bronze horses that Napoleon took from Saint Mark’s Square and put up on the top of the Arc de Triomphe.” She lowered herself onto the mattress, pulling me down beside her.

  “The horses coming down,” she whispered, “that will be something to see.” Lying on her side facing me, her head propped on her hand, she traced the lines of my thigh and hip with her fingers.

  “I can see purple now,” I said, my eyes closed. I pressed my mouth to hers, my hand on her breast, underneath the sheet.

  “Paris will never be like this again,” she said. “It’s all changing. You will be here to see it all, even when I am gone. You will see everything.”

  N THE NIGHT OF AUGUST 20, Napoleon, having walked eight or nine times the length of the deck of the HMS Northumberland, had taken his usual seat on the second gun from the gangway on the starboard side. He was dictating his memoirs to his secretary, Las Cases, recalling on this particular night his childhood in Corsica—the smell of the houses in Ajaccio, his first military uniform, the history of his family, who were émigrés to Corsica from Italy, and the fact that, as he had been born prematurely, his mother’s nurse had placed him on the bedroom floor, on a carpet woven with scenes from the Iliad, while she attended to his mother. Those scenes from Homer were the first pictures I saw, he told Las Cases: Menelaus and Achilles in battle and Hector’s body being dragged around the walls of Troy.

  For days the Emperor had stared out from the deck toward an unbroken horizon or watched the distant landmasses slip by: Cape Finisterre on the northwestern corner of Spain, the dazzling bird-nested cliffs of Cape Saint Vincent on the southern coast of Portugal, down past the Strait of Gibraltar where merchant ships gathered to pass from the Atlantic Ocean through to the Mediterranean Sea, the boundaries once known as the Pillars of Hercules. The HMS Northumberland and the warships that accompanied it continued to tack slowly down the coast of Africa toward Madeira and beyond Madeira to the equator. It would be at least another month before the Emperor would set foot on solid land, thousands of miles from Paris.

  The heat was so great that Napoleon could not sleep; he complained of swollen feet from lack of exercise. For hours every day he and Las Cases pored over maps in the volumes of the Historical Atlas Las Cases had published a few years before in England and had brought on board for the Emperor’s amusement. By night, after his walk on deck, the Emperor played vingt-et-un or chess with his generals, Las Cases, and his valet, then retired to his cabin. Only that day he had received word that Wellington had allowed the Louvre to be sacked by Prussian soldiers. Where would it all end, he wondered, now that vultures circled the imperial city? If you would only find me a musket, he whispered to Las Cases, then we might do something.

  9

  HE CATS WOKE US THAT DAWN with cries like human screams that echoed from the rooftops outside her window. We lay listening to the rain, the first we’d had in weeks.

  “Stay a few more days,” I said. “I want to see you again. I want—”

  “What does Daniel Connor want?” she asked, half-asleep. “It’s dangerous for me in Paris,” she said, her head heavy against my chest. “You keep forgetting.”

  “I have forgotten everything outside this room,” I said, running my fingers through her hair, reminding myself she was no apparition. “There is nothing outside.”

  “There is Henri Jagot,” she said. “He is always there. He doesn’t forget.”

  “What can Jagot possibly want with you? It must be a mistake.”

  I remembered Jagot’s suspicions about Silveira and what he had said about Dufour. Lucienne was not a woman who chose her friends wisely, I thought. For a moment I imagined what my father might say about such a woman—he would call her fallen—but then perhaps he would use the same word for me now. It was a hollow word. It meant nothing to me anymore.

  “It was a bad mistake,” she said. “There was a gunfight in an old warehouse in Montmartre six years ago. One of Jagot’s men died.”

  “Did you kill him? Jagot’s man?” The thought seemed ridiculous.

  “No, I didn’t. But Jagot arrested me
and some other people—it was mistaken identities, you understand.”

  “So he wants revenge. Saint-Vincent, the man in the Palais Royal. Was he arrested too?”

  “Yes. And Manon. Four of us escaped from the Bureau, but my friend Dufour, he did not escape and was sent to Toulon. Jagot never sleeps and he never stops looking. Eventually he will find me even in Italy. Wherever I am. You are a beautiful boy, Daniel Connor, but even for your beauty and your cleverness and your questions that never stop, I cannot stay in Paris.”

  “Just stay to see the Venetian horses come down,” I said. “It will only be a few more days. Stay for five days. At least five more days.”

  And so it began.

  I traded the coral fossils that morning for five of her days, taking only the mammoth bone, the manuscript, and the notebooks from the locksmith’s atelier. A few hours later, I stepped out into the rain, as if into a new time, a new air. I’d find a way of explaining the disappearance of the corals, I thought. I would tell Cuvier they had been delayed in London and would arrive later in the year. I had become reckless.

  I could hardly believe the reversal of my fortunes. Only the day before, utterly dejected, I had determined to resign my position and go home. Now that Lucienne had returned Cuvier’s manuscript and the mammoth bone, anything was possible. The doors were open, and not just the anticipated ones—the Jardin, the lectures, the job—but a new corridor of doors I never even imagined existed, and behind each of them was Lucienne Bernard, the beautiful savant, the thief, the woman who dressed as a man and who understood the language of corals. I felt as if I had been given the keys to the city.