by Maia Chance
A heavy silence. Penrose scratched his temple.
“I shall not even attempt to understand the meaning of your various and absurd disguises, Madame or Mademoiselle Whoever-you-are,” Madame Fayette said.
“How did you know?” Ophelia asked.
“I measured you. Every inch of you. I recognize the turn of your wrist and the set of your shoulders. And you, Lord Harrington. I cannot begin to fathom why a gentleman of your standing would consort with this—this actress thing—”
“Now see here,” Penrose said.
“—but I am somewhat intrigued as to why the two of you have undertaken to play at officers of the police.” Madame Fayette picked up a little silver handbell and jingled it.
With her left hand.
Madame Fayette was a southpaw!
“If, that is,” Madame Fayette said, “you are able to explain your charade before my maid arrives to show you out.”
“You’re a lefty, Madame Fayette,” Ophelia said.
“Pardon?”
“You rang the bell with your left hand.”
“Ah,” Penrose said.
“I cannot think why that is of any interest to you, but, oui, I do use my—”
“I’m interested,” Ophelia said, “because Caleb Grant—and maybe Sybille Pinet, too—were shot with a lefty’s gun. A lady lefty’s gun.”
“Are you accusing me of murder? Good heavens, you are an audacious creature. Where are your manners? But wait—I do not suppose they teach those on the musical stage or wherever it is you have come fr—”
“I’ll save you some puff and cut this short,” Ophelia said. “Did you do it?”
Madame Fayette’s face flushed. “If I had murdered anyone, why would I confess it to you?”
Good point. “To get it off your chest?”
“If you must know, I owned a small pistol specially made for me once for a journey through the mountains. There were tales of bandits at the time, and I wished to protect myself. But that pistol was stolen.”
“Stolen!” Ophelia said, glancing at Penrose. But he was staring at that watercolor painting again. “When was it stolen?” Ophelia asked. “Was it stolen from this apartment?”
“That is quite enough, you impudent little morsel. I did not intend to mention it, but . . . how could anyone be fooled by that wig you have on?” Madame Fayette rang the bell again, furiously this time. “It appears to have contracted mange.”
Ophelia scowled. She’d paid a pretty penny for this wig.
“I allow, your application of cosmetics is remarkably cunning,” Madame Fayette said. “But that bust? Those padded hips? Laughable!”
“I reckon if it’s your calling in life to measure busts and hips, then you might discern a—”
“My calling, you vicious little impostor, is to create works of art that may be worn—”
“Sure. On ladies’ busts and hips.”
Madame Fayette’s face turned a shade of puce.
Ophelia felt Penrose’s eyes on her. She wouldn’t look at him. Surely the ladylike, retiring Miss Ivy Banks would never, ever say busts and hips.
But it turned out that Penrose had his mind on something else.
“Madame Fayette, this watercolor”—he gestured to the painting he’d been staring at—“it is a stage scenery design, no? With rather a distinctive style to the trees.”
“That dingy little thing? I mean to be rid of it. It doesn’t go at all with the rest of the décor.”
“I saw many quite like it at the apartment of the late Caleb Grant. These are at times quite valuable, I understand—”
“No, no, that is only a cheap reproduction. And I must protest that this interrogation, in my own home no less, is quite impermissible!” Madame Fayette stood. “If that will be all, I really must ask that you leave—ah, Odile! There you are. Where have you been?” She scolded the maid in French and kept at it even when Ophelia and Penrose were walking out the front door.
23
“You’re certain that bracelet belonged to Henrietta?” Penrose asked Ophelia as they trotted down the stairs.
“If not, then one just like it.”
“If Madame Fayette received Henrietta’s bracelet in exchange for keeping a secret . . .”
“I’d reckon it had to do with a fellow. With Henrietta, it always has to do with a fellow. And you’re certain that watercolor painting was like those in Mr. Grant’s apartment?”
“Yes. Which in itself would not be strange, because surely they both could own paintings by the same artist, particularly by a scenery designer from the opera house where they were both employed at one time.”
“Except Madame Fayette said it’s only a cheap reproduction. Which sounded like a tall tale to me, because nothing in her apartment looked cheap.”
Penrose nodded.
“Do you suppose Madame Fayette is a blackmailer?” Ophelia asked. “Finds out her customers’ secrets and then squeezes them for jewelry and paintings and things?”
“It certainly seems a plausible conjecture.”
“Maybe she knew why Mr. Grant had that gown made for Sybille, and took a painting or two to stay mum.”
They reached the bottom of the stairs and hurried through the black-and-white marble vestibule and out into the street. They paused on the sidewalk. Pedestrians streamed around them.
Ophelia raised her voice over the clamor of traffic. “All right, then, let’s make a list. Madame Fayette blackmails her customers—maybe. She knows plenty about the stomacher since she designed the ballet costume and the gown, and the stomacher was even in her shop yesterday morning, before Mr. Grant took it away. Madame Fayette is a lefty, and she even admitted to having owned a lefty’s pistol. Does that mean she’s the murderer?”
“What of a motive? And opportunity?”
“Motive? The stomacher.”
“She voluntarily handed the stomacher over to Grant, remember—”
“But then he was shot that very night, maybe for the stomacher.”
“Why would Madame Fayette devise such a maneuver? Giving the stomacher to Grant only to kill him for it the same day?”
“It’s peculiar, I allow. As for opportunity, well, Madame Fayette must know her way around the opera house if she was once the costume mistress. She could’ve gotten into Hôtel Malbert’s garden because she knows the stepsisters. She is their dressmaker. Remember, too, that Austorga was backstage—”
“Which brings us right back round to Caleb Grant and Madame Babin.” Penrose pushed his hands into his pockets and gazed thoughtfully at Ophelia. “By the by, that was a tremendous performance up there, Miss Flax.”
Ophelia sighed. Here he went with the stick-in-the-mud act again. “I beg your forgiveness if I made you uncomfortable, Professor—”
“No, no. I meant to say only that, well, your disguises—your quite frankly absurd disguises—and your, ah, loquacity, shall we say—”
“If you’re saying I’m mouthy, you aren’t the first one.”
“Yes, well, no, I mean . . .” Penrose adjusted his spectacles. “Your methods are effective. Remarkably effective. Impressive, to be perfectly honest.” He smiled.
Confusion knocked over Ophelia’s thoughts and sent them scattering. “I guess there are a few advantages to not being ladylike and retiring, then.” Drat. Why had she said that?
Penrose looked at her curiously. “Whatever do you mean?”
“Oh. Well. Only that your betrothed, Miss Ivy Banks, possesses a retiring and ladylike nature—you said so—and I was only pointing out that the likes of me have strong points, too.”
“The likes of you, Miss Flax?” Penrose’s eyebrows knitted and his eyes shone with warmth. “There is only one of you, but I do agree, you possess strong points. Multitudes, in fact, and I daresay there is a turtle waiting in that carriage
who would heartily concur.”
Ophelia wasn’t sure what the professor was getting at. She glanced away. Just when she thought she was done with that nervy, human cannonball feeling when she was with the professor, he had to go and stir it up again.
* * *
Well, this was an unexpected turn of events.
Miss Flax seemed to be, oddly enough, envious of Miss Ivy Banks. Or, rather, envious of the idea of Miss Ivy Banks. And that might mean that Miss Flax, well, cared about him, Gabriel.
She’d turned her face away so he could see nothing but her homely taffeta bonnet and a curve of crepey cheek. And, by God, that cheek suddenly seemed a beautiful sight.
He was further gone than he’d thought.
Suddenly, a large-wheeled velocipede jerked up the curb and onto the crowded sidewalk several paces off. A slim figure in a dark suit pedaled the velocipede furiously, jacket flapping wide. The figure wore a black highwayman’s mask and a shoved-down bowler hat.
Ladies screamed. Gentlemen shouted. A dog reared up on its hind legs and yapped.
Miss Flax hadn’t noticed the velocipede. She frowned out into the teeming traffic, apparently lost in thought.
The velocipede careened towards her. The cyclist hunkered forward to heave more weight into the pedals. Three yards off, close enough for Gabriel to see the glint of a pistol tucked inside the cyclist’s jacket. Then two yards, one—
Gabriel grabbed Miss Flax’s arm and pulled her back. The velocipede whizzed by. Miss Flax sagged into Gabriel’s arms with a cry. The velocipede bumped down the curb and zigzagged out of sight behind an omnibus.
Gabriel considered himself quite the opposite of what one termed a romantic. Yet he’d somehow managed to sweep Miss Flax into his arms quite like a pose from one of those perishingly self-serious Wagner operas.
Her eyes stared up at him with their melting darkness (never mind the faux crow’s feet). Her chest, beneath all that padding, rose and fell. Gabriel’s chest rose and fell, too. Her lips, too wide to be considered truly beautiful and yet, suddenly fiercely beautiful to him, parted—
“My toe,” Miss Flax whispered. “Oh golly, he crunched my toe.”
“Oh. Yes. Rather. Your toe?” Gabriel returned her to a perpendicular position. “Are you quite all right?”
“Not exactly.” She tried to put her weight on her right foot and winced. “He did it on purpose!” She glared up the street in the direction the velocipede had gone. Nothing but a steady stream of traffic and the hissing clatter of dozens of wheels and hooves against wet stones. “Did you get a good look at him?”
“He wore a mask and a bowler, and—well, on that velocipede, his entire appearance was really quite farcical.” Not as farcical, of course, as Gabriel himself felt at that juncture. He ran a finger under his collar.
“Might it have been a lady?” Miss Flax asked.
“A lady? On a velocipede? In a bowler hat?” The cyclist had had a slight build.
“Miss Smythe—you remember, the friend of the Misses Malbert—is supposedly mad for velocipedes. I was told she owns two of them.”
Gabriel handed Miss Flax up into the carriage. “But why, for pity’s sake, would Miss Smythe attempt to mow you down in that fashion? And how might she have known where to find you?” He glanced at the driver, and then said to Miss Flax, “Where are we going next?”
“To see Madame Babin about Mr. Grant’s watercolor paintings.” Miss Flax checked on the turtle, still hiding in its shell. She bent to touch her foot and winced again.
Gabriel directed the driver and climbed up into the carriage. They wedged into the stream of traffic.
“I’m awfully sorry, Professor, but I’ve got to take a look at my foot.” Miss Flax began to unlace her boot.
Gabriel looked away. If the sight of a lady in a padded matron’s disguise unlacing a boot that appeared to have gone through the wars seemed fetching to a chap, well, what precisely did that say about him?
He feared that he knew the answer.
* * *
Although it felt distressingly intimate to do so in front of the professor, Ophelia shimmied off her boot. The little toe of her right foot had already swollen to the size of a grape. She had no doubt that beneath the black woolen stocking it was also the purplish hue of a grape, too. And it hurt like the dickens, with that noisy, throbby kind of pain.
“That looks frightful, Miss Flax. We ought to go directly to see a doctor. I am certain they will send for one at my hotel if—”
“No, no, it’s nothing.” Ophelia was acutely aware of the large hole in her stocking. She tried to stuff her foot back into the boot. No go. Too swollen. She loosened the laces, and tried again. This time she got it in—barely. Splendiferous. Now her feet—or at least one of them—were even bigger. “I didn’t mention it before, because it didn’t seem too important, but this morning I saw Miss Smythe out in the garden, speaking with the coachman, Henri. I couldn’t hear, because I saw them from my window and they were outside by the carriage house, but they seemed . . . familiar.”
“Arguing?”
“Not exactly.”
Penrose ahemed. “Embracing?”
“No. But it seemed sort of secretive and urgent. Miss Smythe said they were merely conversing about a lost glove and I put it out of my mind but now I wonder . . . what if it was Miss Smythe on that velocipede? She could have followed us to Madame Fayette’s if she’d set her mind to it. She could be following us still.”
“On a velocipede?”
“The traffic is certainly moving slowly enough.”
“I don’t wish to alarm you, Miss Flax, but whoever the cyclist was, he—or she—was carrying a gun.”
* * *
The funny thing about a nunnery was, it didn’t matter if you were pretty or plain, bony or plump, or even if you had a burn scar across your cheek as big as a hand. Which, as a matter of fact, someone in the Pensionnat Sainte Estelle did have, and it was a pity, too, because that dark-haired novice would’ve been a right looker without that scar.
Except.
Prue dropped her gaze down to the damp dirt of the garden plot and hurried up ripping out more dead plants. Except being a looker didn’t matter. Shouldn’t matter. She had figured that out already, and she’d only been hunkered down in the nunnery for—what was it?—three hours? It felt like longer. The nunnery was so quiet and cool, and everything smelled like beeswax and clean laundry. Time seemed gentler.
When Prue had finally found the Pensionnat Sainte Estelle, across the river from Malbert’s mansion, and, hopefully, miles away from that crone and her revolver, she’d been wheezing for breath and sweaty. She’d rattled the nunnery gates. When a nun came and opened up, it was as though they’d been expecting her. The nun had led her to Sister Alphonsine.
Prue had gulped water, taken a hot bath, dressed up in clean, nunnish togs, and devoured a big meal. Then Sister Alphonsine had set her to work in the herb garden out back.
The nunnery felt safe. No mice in sight, either, although Prue missed the fat ginger cat.
The only snag was, Prue didn’t know what she was going to do next. Ophelia would be worried sick about her. But how could she tell Ophelia where she was without risking telling the wrong people, too?
24
When Ophelia and Penrose alighted from the carriage in the Latin Quarter, Ophelia indulged in a quick glance about the street. A peddler wheeled a handcart piled with onions. Ladies in kerchiefs chattered out second-story windows. A violinist screeched away on the corner, hat at his feet. Two students, already drunk—or still drunk—stumbled into an inn. Nothing seemed unusual.
It was silly to think a person might’ve followed them all this way through the city on a velocipede.
Madame Babin was at home. Her mahogany hair clung to her slack cheeks. A wrinkled, saffron silk dressing gown drooped to her ankles
. “Oui?”
“Madame Babin, we would be most obliged if we could have a brief word with you,” Penrose said in English.
Surely she understood English; she had been living with the American Caleb Grant.
A Siamese cat curved around the doorjamb. Clara scooped it up. “Who are you?” she asked in throaty English. Her eyes flicked to Ophelia. “Who is this old river barge?”
Ophelia drew herself up. “I am his aunt, Madame Brand.”
“His aunt? You might buy a nicer bonnet, then. You resemble a charwoman.”
“How rude! Did—”
“Madame Babin,” Penrose said quickly, “it is urgent that we speak with you regarding Monsieur Grant’s death.”
“What does it matter? He is gone and the murderer was arrested. And why do you care one way or the other?” Clara stroked the cat. Hard.
Ophelia said, “We care because two ladies, the Marquise de la Roque-Fabliau and her daughter, are missing. We believe their disappearances are related to Monsieur Grant’s demise.”
“Go away.” Clara, still holding the cat, nudged the door shut with her shoulder.
“Our questions also concern the Cinderella stomacher and a certain letter you could describe as a death threat,” Ophelia said.
The door stopped.
“We had supposed the wisest course was to go to the police with the matter,” Ophelia went on, “but I suspected that you would not especially enjoy being questioned.”
Clara’s voice fell to a hiss. “How do you know about the letter?”
“You must have dropped it in the opera house lobby.”
“Bah!” Clara threw a hand up. “Very well, then, very well. What do I care?” She left the door open and stalked into the apartment. Her dressing gown wafted. The cat glared over Clara’s shoulder at Ophelia.
“Well done,” Penrose murmured in Ophelia’s ear, and Ophelia smiled in spite of herself.
They followed Clara into the sitting room. It was cluttered, as before, with the addition of half-filled wine bottles, goblets, brimming ashtrays, and tasseled pillows on the carpet. Acrid smoke drifted in the air.