The Coral Thief

by Rebecca Stott

  20

  UCIENNE AND SILVEIRA arrived together a few minutes later, stooping through the low doorway with wet umbrellas. She looked tired. She wore Silveira’s robe, the long robe I had seen him wear in the room in the rue du Pet-au-Diable, fleece-lined with the silver embroidery, the robe that smelled of ginger and garlic, the desert, and the sea. I didn’t like seeing her in his clothes.

  Both were quiet and serious. Silveira nodded to Saint-Vincent and Manon, his bow slightly mannered, his hand on his heart in, I supposed, an Arab greeting. “Citoyens,” he said, nodding to each of us in turn.

  “Silveira,” Saint-Vincent answered, shaking his hand.

  “Sabalair is not with you?” Manon said.

  “But of course. He is downstairs, watching the street.”

  “You weren’t followed?”

  “No,” Lucienne said. “We came by boat and then through the underpass.”

  “Half of Paris is looking for you, Silveira,” Saint-Vincent said. “You have put us all at risk coming here.”

  “The other half of Paris is looking for you, M. Saint-Vincent,” he said. “All of Paris is looking for all of us, I believe. We could offer ourselves up for ransom. We would be rich.”

  “You are already rich, citoyen. Do you need more?”

  “That, my friend, is not your business.”

  “Enough, now,” Lucienne said, glancing at me with a look of burdened weariness. “Stop. We have work to do. Daniel, do you have the map?”

  I nodded. I could not speak.

  Silveira’s clothes were dusty. He wore large gold rings on his fingers. Byron might have looked like this, I thought, after a night on the road. He wore no waistcoat, only a crumpled white cotton shirt. His face was deeply lined; it was the face not of a diamond trader but of a man who had spent most of his waking hours on board ship, where wind and rain had weathered him. He smelled of leather and brandy. He had shaved his neck and trimmed his beard since I had seen him in the rue du Pet-au-Diable, and I noticed a small cut on his neck.

  In Lucienne, dressed today in a simple brown-and-gray-striped silk waistcoat under Silveira’s coat, I looked to see where the man became the woman, the woman the man, and failed to find the border.

  “Daniel, I have the books and papers I promised you,” she said, passing me a parcel wrapped in brown paper. “I found them in an old trunk, when I was packing yesterday. There’s a copy of Lamarck’s Philosophie zoologique. You can keep it. I have two. And Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia. It’s heavy. And there’s a copy of Peysonnel’s paper on corals too.”

  “Lucienne Bernard is a savant still,” Silveira said. “She thinks she will find the key to everything with her books and her microscopes. Soon she will tell us the reason for everything and why this bone fits into this socket and why ducks’ feet are webbed, and why corals have found three different ways to reproduce themselves, and why animals have no roots, and why plants don’t feel. Apparently there is an answer, you see, M. Connor, and Lucienne is going to find it. Nothing else matters, eh, Lucienne?”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not,” she said, meeting my eye. “There are other things that matter to me.”

  Silveira interrupted. “Now she looks casual, even, how do you say, nonchalant? Perhaps, she says. Peut-être. And then she shrugs her shoulders. In truth, M. Connor, she thinks no one will find the answers to the fossils or to the origin of the earth until all the priests have gone. I say to her these beginnings of time will never be known, so why try. Let the philosophers argue. I tell her the priests will never go. I tell her we need the priests. I tell her she should give up her obsession with beginnings and think about the present and the future.”

  “Tais-toi, Silveira,” Manon said. “You are being quarrelsome. Enough.”

  How might a man feel to learn that he is the father of a daughter he has never met? Angry, it seemed. This interminable duel of theirs, fought in deserts and on mountains, on the shore of the Dead Sea and in the marketplaces of Egypt and now in a warehouse overlooking the Jardin des Plantes—I wondered how it might have begun. Perhaps they no longer remembered.

  Lucienne stood at the window peeling off pieces of paper to make a larger square in the glass. The rain had stopped during the night, but the trees had taken a battering from the storm so the chestnut tree outside looked as if it was holding on to its last leaves only by an act of absolute concentration; now and again four or five large yellow and brown leaves slipped away into midair, hovering for a moment before a gust caught them up.

  “It took me a long time to glue up that paper,” Manon said. “Don’t take it off again.”

  “It makes me feel hemmed in,” Lucienne said. “There’s no light in here.”

  “Now, Citizen Connor,” Silveira went on, “Lucienne Bernard will tell you, of course, that it is important to be free. She will tell you that freedom is important above all things. To be free to think, to ask questions, free from the kings and the priests and men like Cuvier. She is a fighter for freedom, M. Connor.”

  Lucienne turned back to face him, her black eyes flashing.

  “Freedom to think, yes, that matters. Freedom to ask questions, that matters too. Clever students like Daniel come to Paris believing every thought is possible here. It isn’t. It was, but it isn’t anymore. The priests, kings, aristocrats, they are coming back, and what freedom we had—it will go. And yes, I do believe that freedom matters. Because for a short time we had it.”

  They both seemed entirely oblivious to the rest of us.

  “Freedom to think?” Silveira said. “That is nothing. What about rights? They gave us Jews equal rights during the Revolution. They made us equal to everyone else in France—in law. Already, in just five years, those rights have gone. Already it is hard to be a Jew in this city. My people are leaving again. Yes, we can think, but now Davide Silveira must hide in rooms above a curiosity shop in the rue du Pet-au-Diable.”

  “At least you had rights, even if they took them away again,” Lucienne hissed. “For all the noble rhetoric of the Revolution, did anyone suggest giving women rights? What did the Revolution do for us? Égalité? It is all empty rhetoric. We are still slaves to the laws and petty tyrannies of men. If we have the right to go to the guillotine, to fight alongside our brothers at the barricades, why do women not have the right to mount the platform of government? That matters. I care about that.”

  “The price of bread is rising again. That matters. Five thousand babies are left at the Foundling Hospital every year. That matters.”

  “You are not hiding because you are a Jew, Silveira,” Manon interrupted. “You are hiding because Jagot has you on his list, because of crimes.”

  “That is a family matter,” he said. “Jagot has a long memory.”

  “Everything is a family matter for you, Silveira,” Lucienne said. “L’honneur de la famille. Sacristi. You will get us all killed for your family honor. The map?” she said, turning abruptly to me. “Daniel?”

  I unfolded my copy of Deleuze’s map of the Jardin and spread it across the table, securing its edges with pots and books, grateful to have something to do to escape the cross fire of accusation and counteraccusation. The others took seats around the table. Saint-Vincent lit the lamp and poured coffee from the pot on the fire.

  The map was a long, vertical oblong. To the north the wide ribbon of the river ran horizontally across the thick grainy paper, crisscrossed by quais and bridges. Inside the oblong of the walled garden there were two distinct halves. To the right, a series of boxes marked out in right angles the various borders and buildings around the edges. To the left, the menagerie grounds were all curves and twists, a series of winding paths and circles. And down in the bottom left-hand corner were the spiraling paths of the labyrinth where I had sat with Lucienne. Each section on the map was marked with a number.

  “There’s a key,” I said. “Deleuze has numbered everything. I’ve copied it out in English and French.”

  Over the top of the map I placed anothe
r piece of paper—a list. It had forty-seven numbers corresponding to locations on the map: the beehives, the labyrinth, the cedar of Lebanon, a dairy, the park and hut for the zebra, the garden for experiments, borders for aquatic plants, flowers for ornament, greenhouses, hot frames, seed gardens. It was like a poem, I thought.

  “It’s good,” she said. “Very good. I hope M. Deleuze is getting some sleep now. Show me, Daniel,” she said softly. “Show me everything that is important, everything new. We must make a plan. We must make the very best plan.”

  As I described what they had in front of them—the four entrances to the Jardin, heavily guarded, the number of guards, the locking systems, the gates checked night and day, the keys checked in and out, the windows locked, grated, barred, checked, and double-checked—the impossibility of the task became increasingly evident.

  I put another map on top of the first, the rectangular floor plan of a two-story building with four sides built around a courtyard: Cuvier’s museum. I had devised the map from a prose description written by Joseph Deleuze. Each new map took us farther in, farther down, farther into the heart of things, and closer to the diamond.

  “The Comparative Anatomy Museum,” I said, smoothing out the folds in the paper. “It used to have an entrance directly onto the rue de Seine on the east side of the gardens, but that door was bricked up last year. The main entrance to the museum is therefore from the Jardin, through this door here.”

  I ran my finger around the perimeter, showed them the long side of the building that housed the museum. I told them that Cuvier had fitted iron grilles to all of the windows at street level and had designated the rest of the building, the other three sides, as lodgings for his assistants. It was never empty.

  “Impressive,” Lucienne said. “Cuvier has made the museum into a fortress. It’s impenetrable. And the vault? How do we get in?”

  I described the entrance to the cellars through Room 2 of the museum, an entrance that had once been a trapdoor in a flour warehouse, and before that in a coach house. It was two doors, opening onto a staircase, that were now hidden by a plinth on a sliding mechanism that carried a full-sized rhino skeleton from Java. Room 2, I told them, was now the centerpiece of Cuvier’s museum, and was almost impossible to get into. Cuvier had ordered a refurbishment of the entire room and there was always someone in there, assembling or dismantling the bones for cleaning, rehanging them, repainting the signs, dusting the shelves, or polishing the floor.

  “We will go in on the night of Brugmans’s visit,” she said. “The night that Cuvier gives a party in his honor. Those are our orders. The twenty-ninth of October. That’s fifteen days.”

  “We break in during a party? You are joking,” Saint-Vincent said. “That’s suicide. So, we’re supposed to get into the Jardin past the armed guards here, who will be checking the papers of everyone who goes in and out, into the museum to the private party, where we will be stopped again at the door here. During this party we get down into the cellars by moving a plinth with a skeleton of a rhino on it, find the cabinet, wherever it is, and the diamond, and get it and ourselves out again, all of this while there’s a party going on and the place is full of royalty, princes, and diplomats? Does Jagot think we’re magicians? Or just fools? It would be easier to rescue the Emperor from Saint Helena than to get that diamond from Cuvier’s museum.”

  “The Emperor arrives on the prison island today, the papers say,” Manon said. “No one will rescue him now. No one can. He must know that. It is a bad end for him.”

  “We’ve done more difficult jobs than this,” Lucienne said, sensing our spirits falling. “But we have to know what is what. One of us must watch the Jardin day and night from this room for at least a week. We will take turns watching and making notes. I want to know when the guards change, when the feeding times happen. We have to know every single routine and schedule.”

  Silveira grinned broadly. “Lucienne is a magician,” he said. “She would rescue the Emperor from his prison island, if they asked her, if they gave her a ship and a map.”

  “Manon is right,” Lucienne said. “You would need an army to rescue him now. There is no way back to Paris for him.”

  “Or for us,” Saint-Vincent said gloomily. “There will be no way back for us either.”

  N THE EVENING OF OCTOBER 14, under cover of darkness, a small crew of red-coated British soldiers rowed the Emperor Napoleon ashore from the fleet of man-of-war ships anchored off the coast of Saint Helena. Jamestown itself was nothing but a cluster of houses in a wide ravine at the south end of the island, a valley in a vast expanse of gray rock. To the Emperor’s eyes it was just a series of flickering lights clustered around the shore.

  Despite the darkness, the entire population of the island had turned out, pushing and jostling for position, disappointed to be able to catch only the occasional flash of a diamond star pinned onto the Emperor’s dark overcoat as he moved among his entourage, straining their eyes for a glimpse of that small cockaded hat. The sentries in their red coats had to use their bayonets to clear a route through the crowd. They stare as if I am a circus animal, the Emperor muttered to his generals, une bête feroce.

  Napoleon had arrived. No one, his jailors told him with pride, had ever escaped from Saint Helena.

  21

  UCIENNE CAME TO THE EMPTY WAREHOUSE that night and found me struggling to stay awake in the leather chair placed at the window in the dark of the room, drinking brandy, watching the lights from the watchman’s lamps moving about in the Jardin, taking notes. Her mouth close to my ear: Are you awake? The smell of perfume, wood smoke, and brandy. I remember the heat of the brandy on my tongue; the mattress we found in the attic and pulled down in front of the fire. Naked amid dust and insects in the firelight, we watched the goings-on of the street through the moonlit night: the lights, the prostitutes, the watchmen checking doors and windows.

  “What do you see?” Lucienne asked, her fingers on my back, sometime between two and three o’clock in the morning, as I leaned up against the window, peering out between the sheets of paper.

  “You and your life,” I said. “And all the people in it.”

  Draped in the gold-and-green brocaded curtains we had found in a box in a downstairs room, she began to describe how she and Manon and Delphine had lived for almost six years in an Italian village she wouldn’t name, a house by the sea, buried in long grass, with no road, a house that was falling to dust, that had grass growing through some of the floorboards in the pantry, a house where you had to check your shoes and your sheets for the tiny scorpions that climbed in there, a house on the top of a hill with a path winding down to the cove, and a porch that looked out toward the sea.

  The books were the biggest problem, she said. They swelled in the rain. They were the only valuable things in the house, the only things they worried about, but it always cost a little more than they had to move them into town for the winter. They always moved back into town for the winter. Things were easier. There are women who come and work for us, in the town, she said. They sweep and polish, cook and clean, make the fires and blacken the hearth. In town they had parties, dinners, conversations, and guests. “There are always guests, savants and philosophers passing through the house. Some stay all winter,” she said. “And then sometimes, when the mood takes me, when I get restless, I go, sometimes with Delphine, sometimes not, to Florence or Pisa.”

  But even in town, she said, she missed Paris. Manon complained that she was always talking about Paris: the Jardin, the latest microscopes, the museums, the arguments you could have only there. There were things she wanted in Paris, she said; they weren’t the normal things that women want, like hats or gloves or lace; she missed the curiosity shops and the collectors, the museums and the people.

  “I always knew we would have to come back,” Lucienne said. “Once Delphine was old enough. And I think I always knew something like this would happen. You can’t keep running away.”

  La marche. Lucienne’s life
, her marche. It made me think of Ramon’s arm—stretched out among the wine bottles in our salon, his finger sweeping down from his shoulder and stopping at the fingernail—that night when he had told me about all the time there was on earth before man arrived. Here is where human history begins, he had said, here at the fingernail. See how small we are and how late we have come.

  Hearing about Lucienne’s life, putting it together piece by piece, made me feel small—and late. For there were others behind me, others who had lain with her. Lucienne’s story stretched back into a history before I was born, a past that, like wind, snow, rain, and ice, had carved out the landscape she had come to be. This was a past that kept her on the run, not just from the consequences of her crimes, but from the cuts and blows of her memory.

  “I wish I could erase all your histories,” I said. “I wish there was nothing before me. That the world and all the planets turned around this bed, that everything began and ended here, with just you and me. I wish you were entirely mine. And I know that’s selfish and stupid. And I know, before you say it, that Lucienne Bernard doesn’t belong to anyone.”

  “Silveira? You speak of him?”

  “Did you love him?” I needed to know, even if I didn’t like the answer, I thought.

  “Yes. With a kind of madness—for years. I would have done anything for him. It was the same for him. But it is always a fight. We might have killed each other, I think, if we’d been left alone. It all came to an end in Montmartre when Silveira killed Jagot’s man. If he hadn’t killed Jagot’s man, Jagot’s man would have killed me. So you see, I owe him many things. He taught me many things. I was pregnant then, when Silveira killed Jagot’s man, but I didn’t know it. By the time I knew, we were hundreds of miles away from each other.”

  “You must sleep,” I said, alarmed by the pallor of her skin and unable to bear any more talk of Silveira. “You will make yourself ill. Let me do this watch. You can take over in the morning.”