by Maia Chance
“I may have other things to do, but they are not necessarily better.”
Well. A translator would make snooping easier.
“Fine,” Ophelia said. “But I’m in charge.”
He smiled.
Ophelia peeked through an open door. A rehearsal room: high ceiling, tall windows, wooden floors, mirrors. Rows of lady dancers clung to wooden barres, kicking their legs like wind-up tin soldiers. They wore tulle skirts over tight linen chemises, white woolen stockings, and ballet slippers. In the corner, a gentleman in a waistcoat banged away at a piano, a cigar dangling between a moustache and beard. All the yelling was coming from a gentleman in a black suit. He was long and snake-narrow, with a pointy black beard. He paced between the rows of dancers, poking and prodding them.
“Who is that man?” Penrose asked Ophelia.
“A dancing master, I think. Dancing masters oversee the daily classes for the company, and the rehearsals and such.” The dancing master in Howard DeLuxe’s Varieties had also been a juggler of flaming sticks and a teller of bawdy jokes. Never mind that.
“Would he know every dancer in the company?”
“Yes.”
Ophelia and Penrose waited for several minutes. The class ended. Sweaty dancers streamed through the doors, pulling knitted wraps around their shoulders and chattering.
Ophelia and Penrose went in.
The man with the pointy beard hovered beside the piano, going over something with the pianist.
“Would you show him the picture?” Ophelia whispered to Penrose. “Ask him straight out if she was a dancer here?”
Pointy Beard and the pianist glanced up in surprise as Ophelia and Penrose drew close.
“Oui?” Pointy Beard said, looking down his nose.
Penrose said something in French.
“Ah, you are an Englishman,” Pointy Beard said. He had an American accent—Philadelphian, Ophelia would bet.
Peculiar.
“I do apologize for the intrusion,” Penrose said, “Mister—?”
“Grant. Caleb Grant. And you are—”
“Lord Harrington.”
“Ah.” Grant dismissed the pianist with a shooing motion.
“I, and my”—Penrose glanced at Ophelia—“aunt, wish to confirm the identity of a young girl who was, most regrettably, found dead three days ago in Le Marais.” He showed Grant the picture.
Grant barely glanced at it. “Sybille Pinet.”
Ophelia’s heart leapt. “She was a dancer in this company?”
“In the corps de ballet. Beautiful, graceful, if not particularly virtuosic or—”
“I knew it! Her feet, see—well, the police have not—the police don’t know who she is. Why didn’t you—”
“The police never asked, madam. If they had, I would most certainly have answered their questions.”
“But,” Ophelia said, “surely a murder—”
“L’Opéra de Paris, as you are doubtless aware, is an institution that must maintain a certain degree of, shall we say, discretion. The newspapermen would feast like carrion eaters if Sybille’s death were linked to us. We cannot pack the seats with the dregs of a public that wishes to associate itself with sordid crimes when we count, particularly due to the current International Exhibition, great scientists, diplomats, important novelists, duchesses, even a prince of Persia, among our audience.”
What a windbag.
“I beg your pardon,” Penrose said, “but do you have any idea who killed the girl?”
Grant turned away and rifled through the stack of sheet music on the piano. “No.”
“Have you ever happened to meet the Marquise de la Roque-Fabliau?” Ophelia asked, just in case.
“I cannot say that I have.”
“She was—is—American, too. And she used to be on the stage.”
Grant’s nostrils pinched.
“Where did Sybille Pinet live?” Ophelia asked.
“I’ve no idea. Now”—Grant looked at his pocket watch—“I really must . . .”
“Of course,” Penrose said.
“But—” Ophelia said.
Penrose drew her away. “Thank you, Mr. Grant,” he said over his shoulder.
“What a slinky dog!” Ophelia whispered, once she and Penrose were in the corridor. “Not breathing a word to the police?”
“He was immediately forthcoming to us about the girl’s name.”
“Well, certainly. Because anyone else in this building could tell us the very same thing.”
“True. Should we attempt to learn where Miss Pinet lived? I believe I noticed some sort of clerical office downstairs.”
* * *
A cluttered room with wooden cabinets and shelves led off the downstairs corridor. Its frosted glass door was ajar. Inside, a sparrow-shouldered woman with faded blond hair and sagging, powdered cheeks sat at a desk. She wore a plain gown and, surprisingly, carmine paint on her lips.
Theater folk, Gabriel believed the term was. He glanced at Miss Flax in her preposterous disguise.
“Go ahead,” Miss Flax said to him softly. “Ask her about Sybille.”
“Excuse me, madame,” Gabriel said to the clerical lady in French. “Did you by chance know Sybille Pinet, a young dancer in this company?”
“I keep the books. I know everyone. And I know, too”—the lady’s eyes suddenly filled with tears—“of Sybille’s death. Are you her uncle?”
“No. We are both her friends.” Gabriel paused. “I beg your pardon, but why did you not suppose I am Mademoiselle Pinet’s father?”
“You are too young, for one thing. And she said her father died five years ago.”
“She knew Sybille,” Miss Flax said in an excited whisper.
“Yes,” Gabriel said. “And Miss Pinet’s father died five years ago—or so she said.”
“Ask her why the police haven’t figured out who Sybille was, why nobody said anything to the police.”
Gabriel translated.
“Sybille was a quiet girl,” the lady said.
“But surely everyone knew her, still, and her picture was in half the newspapers in Europe, and surely every newspaper in Paris,” Gabriel said.
The lady hesitated. “We, well, we decided to keep the connection between her death and the opera ballet . . . concealed.”
“What’s she saying?” Miss Flax whispered, impatient now.
“Who decided to conceal it?” Gabriel asked the clerical lady in French.
Miss Flax’s umbrella poked Gabriel in the ribs. He winced.
The clerical lady glanced out into the corridor. She lowered her voice. “Monsieur Grant. The dancing master. He made an announcement to the company, and all the musicians and stage hands, too, that we should avoid speaking with the police.”
“Whatever for?” Gabriel discreetly pushed Miss Flax’s umbrella away.
“He said that the murderer had already been identified, that justice would prevail, and that, therefore, there was no need to drag our company’s name through the mire through association with a—a sordid crime. Because Sybille—oh!—I believed her to be a good girl, but why, then, was she in that costly gown that she had no business wearing, out in the night, alone? Shot?”
“Tell me what you’re talking about,” Miss Flax whispered. “This is my investigation, Professor.”
“I haven’t forgotten, Miss Flax, and neither have my ribs.” Gabriel told her what the lady had said.
“Everyone in the company agreed to silence?” Ophelia said. “That’s peculiar.”
Gabriel said as much in French to the clerical lady.
“Yes, well, Monsieur Grant’s word carries much weight. He is not the impresario, but he is the head choreographer as well as the dancing master. He is much feared. He alone casts the roles and hires and dismisses
dancers.”
Gabriel passed this on to Miss Flax, who nodded. “Does she have any notion why Sybille might have been in Le Marais that evening?”
Gabriel translated.
“Oh dear me, no,” the lady said. “Although . . . well, we do try to protect the girls, but . . . now and again, one slips through the cracks.” Her eyes were distant. “I wonder . . .”
“She was extraordinarily beautiful,” Gabriel said. “That is sometimes dangerous.”
“She was briefly employed as an artist’s model, I was told, a year or so ago, which will mix a girl up with the wrong sort. And she had no protector. No family. She was a bit mysterious, yet with something quite prim and proper about her. She had grown up in an orphanage of some kind, where she had taken dancing lessons, and she had demonstrated ability. She danced for Monsieur Grant in one of our annual auditions. That was, let me think . . . nearly two years ago.”
Gabriel translated for Miss Flax.
“Ask her where Sybille lived,” Miss Flax said.
Gabriel asked.
“In a boardinghouse in the Quartier Pigalle—”
“Pigalle!” Gabriel said. “Good heavens.”
“Yes, well, that is where many of our girls live. It is fairly close by, and inexpensive.” The lady rose, and found a card in one of the filing cabinets. “Sixteen Rue Frochot.”
* * *
Outside, the rain had let up. Sunlight bounced off the wet square in front of the opera house. Carriages, delivery wagons, and omnibuses slopped by in the street.
“We ought to go to Sybille’s boardinghouse,” Ophelia said. “Surely someone there will know something about the night she died.”
“Should you perhaps return to Hôtel Malbert? Won’t you be missed?”
Ophelia rummaged around in her reticule. “You aren’t going to do that old routine, are you? Nudging me in the direction of propriety?” She pulled out her Baedeker.
“Would it make a difference if I did?”
“No.” Ophelia checked the index and flipped to a map captioned Place Pigalle & Environs. She scoured the map for Rue Frochot. “There. Ought to be an easy walk.”
“It’s well over a mile, surely.”
Ophelia bookmarked the map with a red ribbon. “I used to walk three miles to the schoolhouse every morning as a girl.”
“We’ll hire a cabriolet.”
“I won’t have you paying for things.” Ophelia turned in what she hoped was the direction of Place Pigalle.
She stopped. Once again, the fanciful placard decorated with mice, rats, and lizards caught her eye. She pointed it out to Penrose. “What does that placard say?”
“Good heavens. Cendrillon.”
“Sendry-what?”
He paused. “Cinderella.”
Ophelia’s jaw dropped. She swung on Penrose. “Cinderella? Cinderella? Why, you low-down, deceitful, double-crossing, two-faced scallywag! I knew it. I knew it!”
“I fail to grasp your meaning.”
“Fail to—humbug! I knew you were fibbing about why you’re here in Paris. And now”—she jabbed her umbrella at the placard—“I’ve got proof.”
“That I’ve traveled hundreds of miles to take in a ballet?”
“That you’re here on account of your everlasting, crumbly—and, might I add, downright nutty fairy tale obsession.” Ophelia thought of Sybille in that dress, missing a shoe. In a pumpkin patch. “To think I swallowed that line about you coming here to help me. You’re only in Paris on account of this ballet, and the way Sybille died.” She barged off across the square. Pigeons scattered.
Ophelia hadn’t believed for a second that the professor was in Paris because of her. But she’d wished to believe it. Ugh.
Penrose caught up and stopped her with a firm grip around her upper arm.
She wouldn’t look at him.
“Miss Flax,” Penrose said in a rough, low voice. “Please. Look at me.”
Ophelia breathed in and out three times. She lifted her gaze. The professor’s eyes, a clear, bright hazel behind his spectacles, looked like . . . they looked like home.
Madness. Home was four walls and a roof. Home couldn’t be a man. And what was wrong with her to think for even a second that home could be a man?
She wriggled her arm from his grasp. “What was it you wished to say?”
“You have made rather a large leap of logic, assuming that this ballet has anything to do with the murder.”
“But don’t you see? Sybille’s death must have had something to do with the ballet.”
“Because she was a dancer within the institution in which a Cinderella ballet is being performed? That hardly seems—”
“Don’t you know? Sybille, when we found her in the garden . . . she wore a fancy ball gown. Like Cinderella in the story. And there were squashes there, too—pumpkins, don’t you see? I hadn’t realized it until now, but . . . And her foot—well, she was missing her shoe.”
“Good God.”
“Quit pretending you didn’t know. Like I said, your acting isn’t exactly top rail.” Why did everything she said come out so ornery? Ophelia found herself fidgeting with the umbrella handle.
“How could I have known? I saw but one report in the newspaper. It made no mention of what the girl wore. My interest in the murder stemmed solely from a concern for your safety. Pray, listen. Allow me to assist you, Miss Flax. I shall stay in Paris as long as it takes to locate the marquise.”
“What of the university? Your students?”
“They’ll barely notice I am gone. If the police are not searching for Henrietta, as you said, then finding her might be quite a simple task. We will check all the hotels in the city, check the steamship passenger lists for all of this week’s sailings to New York—and elsewhere. She sounds like the sort who’d sail off to Bolivia.”
“If she met the King of Bolivia, then yes. Why do you wish to help me?”
Penrose paused. He adjusted his spectacles and gazed past her into the street. “To be honest, I am not quite certain.”
“Well, at least you’re finally being aboveboard with me.”
6
Gabriel could not convince Miss Flax to allow him to hire a carriage, so they walked all the way to Place Pigalle. Miss Flax kept her eyes on her Baedeker and the sights and left Gabriel alone with his guilt.
Why hadn’t he told her the truth about the book and the house? She would have laughed, but that was surely no reason to lie. Gabriel was well accustomed to his research being scoffed at. And dash it all, what had possessed him to say he’d stay in Paris until Henrietta was found? It had been false, saying that he wouldn’t be missed in Oxford. The dean would have his neck.
In the mile and a half between Salle le Peletier and the Quartier Pigalle, the buildings grew shabbier, the sidewalks thicker with pedestrians and alley cats and rubbish, and the street chatter grew more coarse. Quartier Pigalle, at the foot of Montmartre hill, brimmed with literary cafes and, up in the garrets, painters’ studios. A disreputable class of women infested the quarter, although at this time of day such creatures were still sleeping off last night’s wine.
Gabriel longed to whisk Miss Flax in and out of this neighborhood, posthaste. Despite her colorful past, Miss Flax somehow retained an air of innocence.
“Here it is.” She stopped at two large doors on Rue Frochot, painted a dingy yellow with the number 16 hanging on nails. She tried the rusty ring that served as a door handle. The door swung inward.
The boardinghouse’s courtyard was tight, weedy, and reeking of sour waters. Rainwater mottled the plaster walls. A rawboned woman bent with a bucket over a rain barrel at the bottom of a gutter pipe.
“Bonjour, madame,” Gabriel said.
The woman straightened. She inspected Gabriel’s gentlemanlike attire with approval, but she did not seem to
be as impressed by Miss Flax’s matronly appearance. “Oui?”
“Are you the landlady of this establishment?” Gabriel asked in French.
She nodded, wiping raw knuckles on her apron.
“She is the landlady,” Gabriel said softly to Miss Flax.
“Good. Tell her we are here for Sybille’s belongings—oh, and find out how long Sybille lived here.”
“I am the uncle of Sybille Pinet,” Gabriel said to the landlady. “I am here to collect her things.”
“High time you did! I have already let her room, but she left me a box of trash. I was meaning to haul it to the rag and bone shop later today.”
“I did not know my niece well,” Gabriel said. “I had quite lost sight of her when I received a telegram from her place of employment at the opera house, informing me that she had been murdered.”
“Yes, murdered.” The landlady almost smiled.
“For how long did she let a room here?”
“Near two years—no, a year and a half. Would have been two years in the spring.”
“Almost two years,” Gabriel murmured to Miss Flax.
The landlady led them across the courtyard, through a low doorway, and into a murky room that was half office and half refuse heap.
“I remember Sybille as a meek young girl,” Gabriel said.
“They always turn out that way from those convent orphanages. She grew up in one of those since the age of four, she told me. Mild as a little lamb she was, and always paid her rent on time and kept her room clean. Scarcely made friends with the other girls. Never a peep out of that one. No trouble at all. Well, until lately.”
“Oh?” Gabriel said, ignoring Miss Flax’s glare. She did not like being left out of things, but he sensed the landlady was in a hurry to be rid of them. He wished to learn all that he could from her while he had the chance.
The landlady dug through boxes and buckets on the floor. “In this month or so past, she stayed out past curfew several times. I insist upon a strict curfew. Even these ballet girls who work late can be in by midnight, and I will not have my establishment going to the dogs like some. Mademoiselle Pinet claimed to have lost track of time, but that was not like her, you see, and she also seemed, as of late . . . haunted.”