by Maia Chance
Ophelia soon discovered that all of the doors at the front of the opera house were locked. Well, they would be. It wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. Even a matinee performance wouldn’t start for hours.
She paused to look at a big, colorful placard behind glass. The placard said Cendrillon—not that she could read French—decorated with ornate scrolls and spirals, interlaced with rats, mice, and lizards. Pretty.
She set off again. Perhaps the stage door was unlocked. She hustled around the corner.
* * *
Blubbering over Hansel had worked up a hunger and thirst in Prue. She stuffed the letter down her bodice, tied on her boots, and repaired her hair. Downstairs, the breakfast salon was empty.
Crackers.
She poked around until she found the kitchen stairs. She tiptoed down.
The housekeeper, Beatrice, was bent at the waist, ramming a broom—bang-bang-bang!—under a china cupboard and muttering in a scalding whisper.
Prue coughed.
Beatrice spun around. Her jowls were flushed and wisps of gray hair sprouted from her bun. She was shaped like a church bell and she wore a soot-colored gown. A hefty ring of keys hung where her waist would’ve been. The mansion had only four servants: Beatrice, Baldewyn, the coachman, and the stepsisters’ plump, spotty maid, Lulu. It turned out that Ma had fired all the other servants on account of they didn’t speak English and they cost too much.
“Oh! Mademoiselle Prudence. You frighten me.” Beatrice’s accent was juicy. “These mice make me jump! How I hate them.”
“Me, too.” Prue scratched her suddenly itchy arms. “Is there mice under that cupboard?”
Beatrice curled her lip. “Oui.”
A mouse sprinted out from under the cupboard and across the flagstones, and disappeared into a hole in the chimney corner. A portly cat, balancing on a stool at the hearth, watched the mouse’s progress with idle interest.
“What is the matter with these cats?” Beatrice said. “I cannot think how it happens that the mice are never caught! I lay traps with the nicest, most fragrant fromage every day, and every day the fromage is gone, but the mice are not caught. I bring home cats said to be the fiercest hunters, from the fish market, from alleyways, and what do the cats do? Why, they grow fatter and fatter. C’est répugnant.” Beatrice glared at the cat. Then she glared at Prue. “Ladies must not be in kitchen! Go—go!” She shook the broom. Dust and cat hairs billowed up.
“I ain’t a lady, ma’am. Look at me.”
Beatrice looked at Prue’s calico dress that was losing its dye at the elbows, the shiny-worn toes of her boots. “I have housework to do.”
That was a snicker. By the looks of the kitchen, Beatrice didn’t bother herself much with housework. A dead chicken, still in its spotted feathers, was draped over a chair back. Dirty dishes and pots filled a stone sink on the far wall. The floor didn’t bear close scrutiny, what with all the cat fuzz, curls of potato peel, and tiny brown dots that Prue didn’t fancy thinking too hard on.
“I wished to ask for a morsel to eat,” Prue said.
“You did not eat breakfast?”
“Slept late.” Prue’s eyes fell on an apron, dangling from one of the wall hooks at the bottom of the stairs.
Hold it. Instead of idling away the days waiting for Ma to turn up, well, maybe Prue could learn how to keep a gracious and meticulous household, just like Hansel wished for. She could amaze Hansel—supposing she ever saw him again—with lavender-scented linens or a crispy-brown roast duck with those fancy fruits ringed around.
Beatrice had gone back to mashing her broom under the china cupboard.
“Would you teach me housekeeping, ma’am?” Prue asked. “How to cook up a nice roast fowl, say, or one of them soo-flay things? How to press linens?”
Beatrice screwed her neck around. Her mouth pooched. Skeptical. Yet her eyes gleamed, for some reason, with cunning. “Do you know how to cook?”
“No—but I might learn, and real fast, too. Matter of fact, ma’am, I was, up till just a couple days ago, a scullery maid.”
“We are understaffed here, malheureusement.” Beatrice twiddled her broom handle. “If I teach you to keep house, to cook . . . you will not tell Monsieur le Marquis?”
“Never. Only thing I won’t do, I ought to mention, is work in that vegetable garden out there.”
“Bon. The garden is nothing, the silly fancy of the mademoiselles, who thought it would be a lark to plant pumpkins.”
“What’s so funny about pumpkins?”
“Because this house . . . ah, no matter. You will start by cleaning the china cupboard”—Beatrice swept a hand— “from top to bottom.”
“Really? Oh, thanks something fierce, ma’am!” Prue pulled the apron from its hook.
* * *
Gabriel stalked the ample-hipped auntie around the corner of the Salle le Peletier. The old dame plowed along like an ox.
After Gabriel had been barred from speaking with the Marquis de la Roque-Fabliau, he had directed his driver to wait one block from Hôtel Malbert. He had intended to follow the first member of the household who emerged, insinuate himself into his or her confidence, learn more about Miss Bright’s death and, perhaps, gain access to the Marquise Henrietta. The marquise, of all people in Paris, might know of Miss Flax’s whereabouts.
Gabriel did not like to admit to himself that his interest in Hôtel Malbert was not entirely restricted to Miss Flax and her whereabouts. Nothing in life was quite that simple, was it?
And it had been no easy feat following this auntie—Gabriel assumed that was what she was—from Hôtel Malbert, particularly after he had been forced to instruct his driver to deliver his luggage to his hotel, overpay him, leap onto the rear rail of an omnibus and ride, clinging to a handrail, for a mud-splattered half hour alongside a flock of smirking shop boys.
Auntie barged down Rue Pinon, which ran along the opera house’s western side.
Ah. Perhaps she wasn’t going to the theater after all; perhaps this was only a shortcut. To a tatting shop, perhaps, or a pâtisserie specializing in enormous chocolate éclairs.
Hold on a tick. Auntie was disappearing through a side door.
Gabriel followed and found himself in a simple, almost monastic passage. It smelled of damp plaster. The floorboards sighed.
Tallyho. There was Auntie. Trundling down the corridor, folded umbrella tucked beneath her arm.
What could the old game hen be doing?
Gabriel hurried after her, passing a gaggle of ballet girls with their hair scraped up in the tight buns only governesses and ballerinas wore.
Auntie launched up a flight of stairs. Piano music floated down the stairwell. A gentleman’s voice bellowed rhythmically: “Un! Deux! Trois!”
Up went Auntie. Gabriel was four paces behind.
Tracked-in rainwater slicked the steps. Consequently, Gabriel was watching his feet, not the stair above him. Another herd of ballet girls stampeded down the steps—he heard their prattling—but he didn’t realize that Auntie had paused on the stair to allow them to pass.
He crashed into her. She lost her balance. The ballet girls squealed. Auntie teetered, and then heaved forward onto a landing, breaking her fall with her hands. Her folded umbrella whipped upwards and caught Gabriel right in the wishbone.
“Oof” was all he could say. His mind wiped blank. He toppled onto Auntie.
The ballet girls slipped by, giggling, and hurried down the stairs.
“I beg your pardon!” Auntie squirmed beneath Gabriel.
He struggled to right himself. Auntie’s enormous, wet, woolen cloak was tangled about his arms.
But—Gabriel froze. What was it about . . . that voice? “You are an American?” he asked.
Auntie went still. Slowly, she twisted her neck to see him.
Beneath that matronly bonnet, her gray hair
was oddly askew. Gabriel found himself gazing into a pair of rather beautiful dark eyes.
“Professor Penrose?” she said. Her wig slipped another inch.
“Miss Flax.” Gabriel grabbed the bannister and pulled himself to his feet. His wishbone still throbbed, but his astonishment overrode the pain. He helped Miss Flax to her feet, and though he wished to hold, perhaps, for a moment longer her cold, fine-boned hand in its damp glove, she tugged it free.
“What in Godfrey’s green earth are you doing following me, Professor? I believed you were back in England.”
“I was. Forgive me for saying so, Miss Flax, but you appear to be upholstered in not one, but two divans’-worth of cushions.” The absurd disguise hid her regal form. Which was perhaps just as well. Gabriel had spent more minutes than he cared to count attempting to recall the precise arrangement of this young lady’s limbs.
“Keeps the rain off,” she said.
“Would it be terribly bothersome if I inquired what, precisely, you are doing backstage at the Paris Opera?”
She compressed her lips.
Miss Bright. Dead. Something to do with that.
“I beg your pardon,” Gabriel said. “I quite—”
“Tell me what you’re doing here, Professor. I thought I’d seen the last of you back in Germany. I was glad of it.”
“Oh? I thought I spied a tear or two when we parted.”
“Wishful thinking.”
“Mm. Perhaps a trick of the light.”
“Precisely.”
“I must admit, I felt a pang when we parted.”
“Did you?”
“Well, I thought I did. But perhaps it was only a touch of dyspepsia.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re meddling in my affairs. Again.”
“And you’re spitting fire, Miss Flax. I’d have expected to find you in a more”—Gabriel scratched his temple—“well, in a state of mourning, I suppose.”
“Mourning! Why, the cheek! To think I’d be mourning you? Like some schoolgirl who’d lost her—her pet kitten?”
“I fail to grasp your meaning.”
Miss Flax deflated. “Not . . . you didn’t mean mourning . . . you?”
“Not at all. Though I must admit the notion is intriguing.”
She shook raindrops off her umbrella with unwarranted vigor. “Oh, you believe Prue’s bit it. Read it in the papers, came scurrying down from your ivory tower to see what all the fuss was about?”
“Miss Bright has not perished?”
“She’s perishing from boredom in her mother’s moldy old mansion, but other than that, alive and kicking.”
“I seem to have quite missed the boat on this one.”
“Sounds more like you missed the entire fleet.”
* * *
They stood on the stair landing. Miss Flax told Gabriel how she and Prue had come to Paris looking for Henrietta and had stumbled upon the corpse of, evidently, Prue’s long-lost sister. How Henrietta was missing, and how no one in the marquis’s household seemed to mind. Miss Flax railed against the laziness of the Marais commissaire’s office and fretted over the weird coincidence of a daughter dead in her own estranged mother’s garden. She wondered aloud why the carriageway gate’s lock had been changed and described the dead girl’s mangled foot.
“So you see,” Miss Flax said, “something’s fishy. And I’m here because Prue’s sister wasn’t a fallen woman. I suspect that she was a ballerina, and I mean to confirm it.”
“Mightn’t she have been both a ballerina and”—Gabriel cleared his throat—“a fallen woman?”
“You needn’t look so grimacey, Professor. I’m an actress.”
He studied her crepey face. “How could I forget?”
“Certainly I know that ballerinas—and lots of actresses, too—supplement their incomes with”—she glanced away—“the attentions of admirers. But the police made Prue’s sister out to be some kind of common strumpet. They simply left it at that.”
“So you came to the opera house in an attempt to learn her true identity.”
“The police didn’t even care about her name. Like she was just a—a nothing. Something chucked onto the rubbish heap. It’s not right. Maybe they’re even searching for the wrong murderer.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“Just as high-handed as ever, aren’t you?” Miss Flax started up the stairs.
Gabriel scratched his head. In the past month or so, he had indulged in picturing what it might be like to meet Miss Flax again. But he had never pictured her so annoyed at him. Women were confounding. He gained her side. “I shall assist you. That is why I am here.”
“You expect me to swallow that horse pill?” At the top of the stairs, Miss Flax looked left, then right. The piano music and rhythmic yelling was coming from somewhere to the left. She went left.
Gabriel went, too.
“You reckon I’ll believe that you journeyed all the way from England only to assist me?” she asked. “And for no other reason?”
“I believed Miss Bright was murdered. I was concerned for your safety.”
“And you followed me here from Hôtel Malbert.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me why you’re truly here.”
“The sightseeing here tends towards the vulgar.”
“Not that.”
“Everyone knows French cuisine is far too heavy on the butter.”
She scowled.
“Although I must confess to a weakness for Bordeaux.”
She stopped walking. “You, Professor, are as transparent as a windowpane. You’ve got a hidden motive.”
“What have I done to be worthy of such prodigious distrust?”
“You didn’t know it was really me when you followed me here!”
“The steward turned me away.”
“Sounds like him. Baldewyn, he’s called. Prue calls him Mister Lizard.”
“I decided to follow the first member of the household who emerged and strike up a conversation. In order, you see, to discover your whereabouts, Miss Flax.”
A half-truth. At this juncture, with Miss Flax careening so dangerously close to his secret, it must suffice.
Miss Flax fumed away down the corridor.
Gabriel touched the left side of his chest, felt the rectangle of the Charles Perrault volume nestled beneath layers of greatcoat, jacket, waistcoat, shirt. He shoved his hands in his greatcoat pockets and sauntered after Miss Flax.
5
Prue wiped her sweaty brow on her arm.
What had she signed on to, anyway?
The inside of the china cupboard, which Beatrice had commanded her to clean, turned her stomach: sticky cobwebs, mildew-blotted cookery books, chunks of something-or-other that was maybe bread but possibly cheese, judging by the reek of it. And an avalanche of mouse plops, both antique and fresh.
Beatrice had tied on her bonnet and cloak and taken a basket off to market, leaving Prue alone. Well, if the company of two tubby, dozing cats and mice playing peekaboo counted as alone.
Prue stacked the cookery books on the flagstones, swept rodent plops into a copper dustpan, and dumped the moldy whatsits in the rubbish bin outside the kitchen door.
Outside, she could just see the edge of that rotted vegetable patch. She still felt the coldness of her sister’s body and she had to keep swiping the picture of her staring eyes away. Where was her sister now? Still laid out at some morgue? All of a sudden, Prue longed to attend her sister’s funeral. To sew things up, maybe. But no one had said anything about a funeral.
On the sunny side, Prue was finally learning to be a housewife. For Hansel.
Prue’s eyes fell on the topmost cookery book on the stack she’d made. The words, stamped in flaking-off gold on the loose cover, weren’t in any langua
ge she knew.
She set aside her broom and dustpan and hefted the book. It was awfully thick, and it looked so, well, serious, as though the cookery or housewifing knowledge it held wasn’t womanly twaddle, but honest-to-goodness Important Work.
Prue cracked it open. Dust puffed up, and she sneezed.
Page after page of thick, hand-lettered black script, in more of that mystery language. But there were plenty of pictures. Little, intricate, inky-black pictures of soup pots and turtles, bedsteads, stones, bees, carrots, flowers, boxes, pies, and brooms. Fascinating. Befuddling.
But it seemed that if one were to study the pictures with mighty care, all the magic of housewifery might be squeezed from this single, magnificent volume.
The china cupboard was forgotten. Prue, for the first time in her life, set to studying.
* * *
The opera house corridor was a buzzing hive of rehearsal and practice rooms. A trombone honked out scales, a violin spiraled through arpeggios, a soprano warbled and, mingled through it all, more of that man yelling: “Un, deux, trois! Un, deux, trois!” Then, “Mon Dieu, Marie! T’es un éléphant! Encore!”
All as familiar to Ophelia as the back of her own hand. Of course, the violinists in Howard DeLuxe’s Varieties sounded much more screechy.
“Why are you still following me, Professor?” Ophelia asked. Encountering Professor Penrose, after months of scrubbing him out of her mind, made her heart flutter like a hatchling chick. And that was simply irksome. She felt angry at him, too, and embarrassed in his presence, and she was unsure how to behave. She figured she was missing a piece of her mind, a piece that other people had. The piece that allowed a person to do things like fall in love or believe in fairy tales.
Penrose drew something from his pocket and unfolded it. The morgue drawing of the dead girl that had appeared in all the newspapers. “You did not think to bring one of these along, did you?”
Drat.
“And I speak French,” Penrose said. “I might be your translator.”
“What’s in it for you?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re a terrible actor. I know you’ve got better things to do.”