The Coral Thief

by Rebecca Stott

  “I don’t want to sleep,” she said, her eyes brimming. “I have bad dreams. Everything ends in bad things. You know, yes? You know about Jagot? Manon told you, didn’t she? When I saw you today, when you looked at me like that, I said to myself, someone has told Daniel. He looks at me like that because he knows that Jagot has Delphine…”

  “Yes,” I said, relieved not to have to keep her secret. “It’s terrible. You must be … What will you do? There must be something we can do … the convent… Silveira must have men. There’s Sabalair, there must be others.”

  “Silveira knows too. He wants to take men into the convent. I made him promise not to. I tell him Jagot’s men have guns. If there are guns in the convent, think what might happen.”

  “But you must do something. Jagot’s not going to let you go back to Italy once he has the diamond. It’s a trap. He won’t honor whatever promises he made you. He is hard and unscrupulous.”

  “I’m going to do everything that Jagot tells me. I’m not risking anything—not this time.”

  She was broken that night, and I knew I was part of that brokenness, responsible at least in part. And I knew that if Lucienne did not rally, if someone didn’t do something, they were already in Toulon-all of them, and they would die there. Jagot would see to that. Je suis un homme mort, Alain had said.

  “Now that I have the map, Daniel,” she said, “you must not come back here or to the atelier. You must pretend you don’t know us. You must behave as if we have thrown you off.”

  “It’s too late,” I said, thinking of the expedition to Sumatra that Cuvier had planned for me that would no longer be possible. “You can’t rescue me. Jagot knows I’m caught up in this. But it doesn’t matter. You have to find a way out of Jagot’s trap, for your own sake and Delphine’s and the others. Unless you take a risk, Lucienne, unless you can think of another way, you will all be in Toulon by the end of the month and Delphine will be in a Paris orphanage. Have you thought about that? There’s no going back to Italy unless you stop doing exactly what Jagot tells you. Unless you make another plan.”

  “Will none of you leave me alone?” she said, pulling on her clothes and her boots. “You, Silveira, Manon. You’re like flies in my head. I can’t think. I can’t sleep. All the time, you say, Lucienne, you must do something. Lucienne, you must think of something. She’s my child and I can do nothing. There is no way out. There is no other plan. I am not a magician.”

  And then she was gone, disappearing behind a series of slammed doors into the night. When I awoke the next morning, stiff and hunched over the windowsill from watching, I found her on the mattress beside the fire, curled up like a child inside the covers, her hands bruised and bleeding, with Deleuze’s map laid out on the floor next to her.

  There’s a certain kind of hunger that can’t be sated. You can never get enough. The more you have, the more you want. In Paris in 1815 I never had enough of her, of the thief, the coral collector, the card player, the woman who knew, or thought she knew, how time began. I could never have had enough. I would have risked everything to save her.

  Moving between the museum library and the warehouse on the rue de Seine, between Cuvier and the thieves, between order and disorder, taxonomies and mutability, I knew nothing for certain anymore. I was lost in clouds and dark waters among questions I couldn’t shape and didn’t understand. I still hoped I might come to know how time began. I thought about what it was that makes the birds nest and corals spawn and birds migrate and eels head for the sea. Until then, until Lucienne and the heretics, until Paris and the quarries and the mammoths and the corals, there had always been a god behind the scenes, pulling the levers, pressing the buttons, marking time, keeping order. You don’t stop believing in God just like that. It’s a way of seeing, a voice inside, a structure. But the picture of the beginning of time was getting crowded with different stories and explanations. I was still certain that it was about to be discovered in one of the rooms of the Jardin des Plantes.

  Silveira was climbing the stairs as I left the warehouse that morning for the Jardin, leaving Lucienne sleeping on the mattress by the fire. He took the steps two at a time, his umbrella leaving a trail of raindrops behind him. He carried a basket of food. I could hear the sound of china jangling against glass; I could smell garlic and spices.

  “Il pleut dehors,” he said as he reached me on the staircase. “There is so much rain that soon we will grow fins.” He gestured at his basket. “There is a new traiteur in the Marais run by a Jew from Santiago de Compostela. The food is magnificent. I brought some for her, for breakfast. She is too thin. Peppers marinated in oil. Lamb in quince. And some late peaches from the Loire I found at the market. She must eat.”

  “Don’t wake her yet,” I said. “She’s finally asleep.”

  He paused, then tipped his head to one side so the thick curls of his hair fell in ringlets that made me think of ropes. Silveira was all sea-carved wood, the figure head of some great ship washed up on an empty beach. Out of water, never at home.

  “Are you lovers?” he said, putting the basket down on a stair so that I could not pass.

  I did not have time to compose myself.

  “You can’t ask me that,” I said.

  “Why not? You have blushed, monsieur. You think I will be angry with you? You think Silveira will be jealous, is that it? You are afraid of me.”

  “No,” I said, pulling myself up to my full height, which was still short of his. “I am not afraid of you.”

  “I have offended you, monsieur. I am not used to city manners and sensibilities. I say what I think. I will not say sorry for that.” He took a step to me and reached for my chin, turning my head toward the light. “You have a good profile,” he said.

  “I have to go,” I muttered. “I am already very late.”

  He leaned back against the flaking plaster of the wall and lifted his polished boot onto the balustrade. He was not going to let me pass.

  “Monsieur, I have one more question for you, before you go. Do you think, have you ever thought, for a moment at least, that she might be a little mad? Aliénée?”

  “No,” I said. “I think she is the cleverest woman—person—I have ever met.”

  “Yes, she says something like that about you, M. Connor. She thinks you are very clever. You must use your cleverness to make her let me go into the convent with my men, M. Connor. You must try. This other way is impossible. We will walk straight into Jagot’s net. I tell her the child will not come back that way.”

  “I know,” I said. “I think she is beginning to see that too.”

  “You’ve seen her—the child? No one will talk to me about her. Lucienne has no likeness, nothing to show me. What does she look like?”

  “You,” I said, remembering. “She looks just like you. She is clever and spirited.”

  “Of course.”

  “She is like no child I have ever met. Her mother called her a dragon slayer when I first met her. She said she had seen Delphine lift an elephant and its rider with one hand.”

  “Good. I like that. An elephant you say … Does she like sailing boats? She must be taught to sail and to fence.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Delphine would be good with a sword, I think, perhaps when she’s a little older. She is only five, monsieur.” I motioned to indicate Delphine’s height. He laughed and stood to one side to let me pass.

  “Yes, perhaps she is a little young yet. Merci, monsieur. Vous étes gentil. We are all relying on your cleverness, M. Connor,” he called down as I reached the front door. “Talk to her.”

  N OCTOBER 18, 1815, in the garden of a house on Saint Helena called the Briars because of its profusion of white roses, the Emperor Napoleon, newly arrived on the island, sat in the shade talking to the thirteen-year-old daughter of the house, Betsy Balcombe, who, unlike her brothers, spoke good French. Admiral Cockburn had given permission for the Emperor to stay with the English family who lived here until his prison house was completed.


  Having always imagined him to be the man of English myth, half-human, half-animal, a Gorgon with a single eye in the middle of his forehead, Betsy Balcombe was charmed by the Emperor’s conversation and by the set of Sèvres china he unpacked to show her—a set that had been presented to him by the people of Paris, each piece hand-painted with scenes from his great battles and victories. He showed Betsy the painted ibis on the plate that memorialized his Egyptian campaign and warned her never to go to Egypt, for she might catch ophthalmia and ruin her pretty eyes. And, yes, it is true that I practiced Mohammedanism there, he said. Fighting is a soldier’s religion. And what is wrong with that? he said when she raised one eyebrow a little. Religion is an affair for women and priests. Quant à moi, I always adopt the religion of the country I am in. It is much simpler that way.

  The garden they sat in had myrtle groves and orange trees; it was a paradise. Locals gossiped that Betsy’s father, William Balcombe, a disgraced naval officer who had been pensioned off as the naval agent and purveyor to the East India Company, was the illegitimate son of royalty. He was certainly a man in exile. His wife felt this especially keenly, and she promised her children that sooner or later they would find a way back to the mainland and civilization.

  This was an island populated by exiles. Napoleon sometimes talked with the Balcombes’ slave, Toby, a gardener, originally Malay but abducted and sold to Saint Helena by the crew of an English ship. “It was an infamous act,” Napoleon declared to Las Cases, “bringing him here to die in slavery.” But when Las Cases made a comparison with the Emperor’s situation, Napoleon was enraged. “My dear man” he declared, “there can be no comparison here … We are the martyrs of an immortal cause.”

  22

  UCIENNE BERNARD SLEPT FOR TWO DAYS. Manon sent me a note late on the first day to say she was ill, that she wouldn’t wake up, that I was to come immediately and bring my medicine bag. In the warehouse, Silveira, Manon, and Saint-Vincent waited in an adjoining room.

  The scene I found when I arrived moved me. Silveira had lit candles in every corner of the room where she slept and had brought flowers from the market—late sunflowers and roses—that spilled out of vases on every surface. There were bowls of figs and grapes and the air was sweet with the smell of scented oils warmed over lanterns. Where two days before there had been not only dissent but open conflict between Manon, Saint-Vincent, Lucienne, and Silveira, now there was silence, the silence of a darkened room that smelled of oil of myrrh.

  An empty blue-glass bottle stood by her bed—Manon had found it among Lucienne’s discarded clothes. Silveira identified the bottle as one he had given her only days before, a bottle that had contained a strong opiate tincture given to him by an apothecary in a village on the coast near Goa. He had given it to her to help her sleep. It contained perhaps eight or ten doses, he said. In a moment of desperation, sometime after she had left the warehouse that night, she had drunk the entire bottle. She had not woken or stirred since, Manon said—and her pulse was weak. I said what there was to be said, that there was nothing that would wake her until the effects of the sleeping draft had worn off.

  “She’s done it before,” Silveira said. “Three times. Damned woman. I should have known. Once, in the desert, when we were camped in the remains of a Roman city, she stole a sleeping draft from me and slept for a week—just to spite me, I swear. When she woke she didn’t know that any time at all had passed. She had been dreaming of the sea, she said, while I worried and paced about day and night. The Bedouin women gave me myrrh oil to burn. They say it is good for sleepers.”

  I sat with Alain and Manon through the first night. Silveira would not stay—he and Sabalair had work to do, he said. For the first hour, I sat at the window and they talked, as only Saint-Vincent and Manon could talk, one story opening up inside another, shared memories and disagreements about dates and the order and origins of things.

  “There are many things I don’t know about her,” Saint-Vincent said, turning to me and taking a knife to slice the top off one of the eggs he had boiled in the pan over the fire. “She comes and goes. She’s in Paris; but then she’s gone. She’s running and then she’s not.” He paused. “We are all running, I think. She was sixteen when I first saw her—she was living with her grandmother and Manon in Marseilles.”

  “My mother was the housekeeper there,” Manon said, glancing in my direction. “The old marquise adopted me when she died. You know, Alain, Lucienne fell in love with you when you first came to dinner, that very first night when you talked to her about the structure of algae.”

  “Algae? Hardly the stuff of romance,” he said.

  “It was to her. She was in your bed by the end of the summer.”

  “She seduced me…”

  “She was sixteen. You were her tutor.”

  “And I was eighteen,” he said, looking at me with a glint in his eye, “and I was hardly in a position to refuse or know better. It was a fine summer. But that was before the Revolution.”

  “In the old times,” she said. “Before Daniel was born.”

  “Don’t start on that,” I said.

  “It was 1793 before I saw her again. The same year that the revolutionary commission renamed all the months and years and started the new calendar from year one,” Saint-Vincent said. “It took me an eternity to remember that Thermidor was half of July and half of June and Brumaire was half of September and half of October. I’d been to university and on an expedition to Africa by then. I was working in the Jardin, in the glasshouses, attending the botany lectures when I could. It was October—Brumaire—a thunderous, wild day, just three weeks after they had taken the queen to the guillotine in the place de la Révolution, the beginning of the fifteen months of the Terror, and only a short while after they had renamed the Jardin du Roi the Jardin des Plantes and appointed all the professors. No one knew quite what they were supposed to do or who was in charge of what but there was a great sense of expectation. Lucienne turned up the same week Marchini brought the leopard to the Jardin.”

  “Your memory fails you, Saint-Vincent,” Manon said. “It was November. I remember very clearly. It was just after she left the prison. I had given her up for dead until the letter came. And by the time I found her she might as well have been dead. She looked like a walking corpse.”

  I thought of the red-haired woman Lucienne had described, the woman who had stood up in the prison, who had taken Lucienne’s name, the woman who disappeared into another prison and would take Lucienne’s place on the guillotine the following summer. I remembered Lucienne’s guilt at having sat down again. Lucienne de Luc had become Lucienne Bernard, and the red-haired woman’s bones and skull were thrown into the trench in the convent garden.

  “The leopard,” I said. “You said it was the day they brought the leopard to the Jardin.”

  “Oui. C’est vrai. The revolutionary committee had just issued a decree,” Saint-Vincent said, “outlawing the exhibition of wild animals on the streets of Paris because they were a threat to public safety. That’s funny, eh? A threat to public safety. The guillotine was released onto the streets just as the wild animals were cleared off them.”

  “Where did it come from?” I said, imagining a leopard stalking through the streets of Paris, its reflection caught in the glint of shop fronts and coffeehouses.

  “A man called Marchini,” Saint-Vincent said, “owned an exotic-animal shop near the place de la Révolution. The police arrested him and brought the last four animals in his shop to the Jardin: a polar bear, a leopard, a civet, and a monkey. Once word got out that we’d taken Marchini’s animals, everyone began bringing their animals to the Jardin—you could see them all coming over the bridge, or sailing down the Seine in barges. There was a queue along the quai, and chaos—monkeys, bears, even an alligator. Dubenton was in a panic. There was nowhere to put them, and people were asking ridiculous prices. They closed the gates of the Jardin and put some of the botany students at the front gate to try to stop people f
rom pushing and shouting. That’s when I saw Manon in the crowd with Lucienne, who was holding a parrot. Lucienne was dressed as a laborer; you’d never have known she was a woman. She was thin and hollowed-out, as if her clothes were holding her together.”

  “They were,” Manon said. “There was nothing left of her, and she wouldn’t let go of the damned parrot. She’d found him in the street. He was crawling with lice and so was she. None of the doctors I found would even look at her. They said there were too many mad people in Paris, it wasn’t worth the time or the trouble. They were past mending, unless I had thousands of francs, of course, which I didn’t. Mon Dieu, I was pleased to see you that day, Saint-Vincent. I had no idea what I was going to do with her.”

  “She terrified me,” he said. “I’d never seen anyone like that before. I couldn’t look at her, poor thing. I took the parrot and gave it to the people in the Jardin. Then I took her and Manon to the convent in the rue de Picpus, where a doctor I knew was looking after a few of the aliénés.”

  “The mad people,” Manon added. “It was the only thing we could do to help her. I left Paris. I had to. It wasn’t safe in the streets that winter. I went back to Marseilles, where I had family.”

  “And I went to my house in Bordeaux,” Saint-Vincent said. “I should have taken Lucienne with me, but what would I have said to my wife? When I returned the following autumn, I went to find her. The convent was closed and the windows had all been boarded up. There was no one there. It took me weeks to find her—she was begging on the streets outside the Palais Royal. I wrote to Manon and moved Lucienne into a room in a house in the rue Royale. Charlotte Holbach, who was my mistress at the time, gave them lodgings for the winter.”

  “We were in good company in that house,” Manon said. “There were scores of heretics and migrants living there—people who had escaped the guillotine, atheists, libertines, philosophers, artists, and writers. Everyone in that house was either mad or sleepwalking.”