by Morgan Rice
“What’s happening?” Kaia asked. Her legs didn’t seem to want to keep their footing, like she was drunk or ill, somehow.
“It’s normal,” Pinsley said with a smile. “Your legs have gotten used to the movement of the waves, and now they’re having to adjust to dry land again.”
Kaia noted that he wasn’t having any problems with it. Maybe it was just that the rigid military posture of the inspector made giving in to any kind of unsteadiness impossible. Maybe he’d just been on far more boats than she had. Either way, Kaia envied Pinsley his composure for the minute or two it took her legs to remember how they were meant to work.
“What now?” Kaia asked.
The inspector took out a pocket watch. After a moment’s thought, he started to wind it.
“Your watch isn’t working?” Kaia asked.
“I’m just remembering to wind the time forward an hour to account for the difference here,” Pinsley said.
That threw Kaia a little. In theory, she knew about different places in the world having different times, about it being night in Australia when it was day in London, but knowing it and experiencing the sudden, arbitrary shift was a different thing. It felt almost like an hour lost, never to be recovered.
“In any case,” the inspector said. “It is getting a little late. The crossing has eaten up most of the day, and I doubt that we would be able to get to Paris today, even if we tried. It may be better to find a hotel.”
A part of Kaia wanted to press on, but she could also feel the tiredness starting to seep into her from the long trip. Maybe it was better to do as the inspector had suggested.
They started off along the dock. Around them, people were working, or just out walking. They chattered as they did so, and while Kaia was used to filtering out the noise of London, this was different, because she couldn’t even understand what was being said. Suddenly, this place that had seemed almost normal when they’d alighted at the dock seemed utterly alien to Kaia. She felt as unsteady as she had when she’d first stepped off the boat, but this strangeness wouldn’t go away. It was reinforced with every word said around her.
Then the inspector stopped someone and spoke to them in rapid French, rattling it off with ease. The man he stopped said something back, and the only word Kaia thought she recognized was “Hotel.”
“This way,” Pinsley said, leading the way through the town to a tall, brightly painted building that was apparently a guesthouse, run by an older woman who gave them both a sour look before negotiating for rooms with Pinsley in more of that rapid, impossible to follow French.
The inspector showed Kaia up to a room, passing her a key.
“Apparently, dinner will be bouillabaisse, essentially a kind of fish stew,” Pinsley said. “I will need to go out before then.”
“What for?” Kaia asked.
“To change some money into francs at the local bank. You are welcome to come with me, but it might be better if you got some rest after the journey.”
“And also you don’t want the landlady rooting through our things?” Kaia guessed.
“Also that,” Pinsley admitted. “She seems the type to be nosey about these things. I won’t be long.”
He left, leaving Kaia alone in the room. She sat there, on the edge of a small bed so neatly made that it seemed as though the covers had been ironed in place. Almost immediately, Kaia found herself wishing that she’d gone with the inspector.
The landlady came up, giving her an intrigued look.
“Que fais tui ici?” the woman asked. “Pourquoi es-tu en France?”
“I’m sorry,” Kaia said. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
The older woman huffed and walked away, leaving Kaia by herself.
Kaia had never felt quite as alone as she did in the minutes that followed. She had never had a family, but there had always been other girls around her in the orphanage. Even when she’d run away, it had been within a familiar city. Now, she was in a place where she knew nothing about how things worked, and she didn’t even speak the language.
The enormity of what Kaia was trying to do hit her then. She’d felt so confident about going to Paris, finding her sister, finding out what the shadows were planning to do and stopping it; yet here she was, not able to even answer a simple question from some guesthouse keeper.
Kaia felt tears starting to form at the corners of her eyes. She’d left so much behind coming out here. Back at the vicarage, she’d had the first home she’d ever known, the first room that had ever been truly her own. She could have stayed there, and lived her life. Instead, she’d come all the way to France.
It would be worth it, though, if she managed to stop the shadows, and if she managed to find her sister… Kaia couldn’t even imagine what that would be like.
Even so, it was hard to sit there and not rush out into the town, trying to seek anywhere else to be rather than sitting there by herself. Only what had happened in London just last night stopped her, and kept her there.
Had it really been so recently? Had it really been only half a day since she’d fought against Xander and the shadow within him? Maybe this moment was what Kaia needed: a moment to just relax and recover, in the wake of everything that had happened.
Without really thinking about it, she lay back on the bed and fell asleep.
There were shadows in her dreams. They darted ahead of her while she chased them through a crowd, moving from person to person. They were flying ahead of her openly now, like tendrils of darkness that fled from the light blazing from her. Then, without warning, the shadows turned, and whirled in front of her, lashing out towards her…
Kaia woke to the inspector shaking her arm.
“Kaia, you need to wake up. Our train will be leaving in less than an hour.”
Kaia got ready as quickly as she could, washing and dressing, then heading downstairs. There was some kind of flaky, buttery pastry for breakfast, which seemed to be called a croissant, along with some cheese that was sharper and softer than any of the hard, crumbly stuff Kaia had been given back at the orphanage.
Where Lottie had given her tea back at the vicarage, here they had coffee, which was far stronger and more bitter. Kaia made a face.
“How do people drink this stuff?” she asked.
“It is an acquired taste, but many people swear by it,” Pinsley said.
“Including you?” Kaia asked.
Pinsley shrugged. “Traditionally, the British Empire runs on tea, but since we are not in it, I find coffee… acceptable.”
Acceptable seemed to be high praise coming from the inspector, so Kaia did her best to finish her coffee in spite of the bitterness. Ready to go, she collected her things and came down to find the inspector waiting with his.
“It’s only a short way to the station,” the inspector said, leading the way out of the guesthouse. The two of them walked through the streets of the town, and now, Kaia felt better prepared to deal with the strangeness of it.
“Will you teach me some French?” she asked Pinsley as they walked.
“I do not know how much I will be able to teach you on a train ride of a few hours,” Pinsley pointed out.
“Even something is better than nothing,” Kaia replied. It wasn’t about understanding everything then so much as simply feeling a tiny fraction less out of place.
“Very well,” the inspector said. “Bonjour is the word for hello.”
“Bonjour,” Kaia said.
“If you wanted to ask someone how they were, you would say ‘ca va?’”
“Ca va?” Kaia repeated.
“Bien, merci. Et vouz?” Pinsley said.
Kaia tried to work out what that might mean. She took a guess. “You’re saying that you’re good?”
“And asking how you are,” Pinsley said. “Bien is good. Merci is thank you. Et is and. Vouz is one of the two ways of saying you.”
“They have two ways of saying you?” Kaia said, surprised that any language could be so com
plex.
They reached the station. This was similar in some ways to those in London, still dominated by the platforms, the smoke and the bulk of the steam engines. There were differences too, with columns everywhere, and marble busts of a figure Kaia assumed had to be the Emperor.
“Following the Roman style,” Pinsley said. “After his uncle, the first Napoleon.”
They bought tickets, and Pinsley handed Kaia hers.
“We will be going via Lille, Amiens, Creil, and Pontoise,” he said. “From there, we will take a carriage into Paris, and try to work out what we are to do next.”
It sounded like a good plan to Kaia, and she repeated the names of the places they were to pass through in her head, wanting to make sure that she had them right in case she and the inspector should become separated by some chance.
“How long will it take?” Kaia asked. She remembered the inspector saying before that it was almost two hundred miles.
“A few hours, perhaps,” Pinsley replied. “We will be there later today.”
“So soon?” Kaia said. She had grown up with only a few streets in London as her entire world. Just the city had seemed huge, and her one trip beyond it with Pinsley had seemed like a world away even though it had only been into the Home Counties. Now, she was going to cover two hundred miles in a day? It seemed impossible.
The train set off through the French countryside, and it looked to Kaia a lot like the English countryside they had passed through on the way from London to Dover, although possibly with fewer signs of large towns in the distance. It seemed as if everything was more spread out here, and with slightly less in the way of large factories belching smoke into the sky.
Fields went past, and several of them seemed to have vines growing in them rather than corn or wheat. Kaia had no idea if that was a normal thing in the countryside, or something specific to France.
She and Pinsley had a compartment to themselves this time, and for a long time, the inspector was silent. He even looked a little uncomfortable.
“What is it?” Kaia asked him.
“I have been trying to think of the right way to say something,” Pinsley said. “I wanted to explain why I reacted poorly the other day when that sailor asked if you were my daughter.”
That caught Kaia’s interest. She’d known that there had been something about it that had hurt the inspector, but she didn’t know what.
“I had a family,” the inspector said. “A wife and a daughter.”
“Had?” Kaia said, catching that word.
“My wife was killed by a dangerous madman,” Pinsley said. “I was not able to save her. Our daughter… I do not know if she never forgave me for that, or if she simply could not stand my inability to forgive myself. Either way, I came home one day to find her gone, disappeared beyond even my ability to find her.”
In that moment, Kaia felt as if she understood so much more about the inspector than she had before. His reluctance to lie and call her his daughter seemed obvious after those few words, but it was far more than that. She felt as though she understood some of his prickliness, his need to make things right, and his unwillingness to allow harm to happen to anyone weaker than he. Even his need for logic, and to steer away from anything linked to madness, made more sense.
“Where do you think your daughter is?” Kaia asked.
Pinsley shook his head. “I do not know. I have scoured London, but England is a big place. Olivia could be anywhere. The fact that you are coming here after your family is part of what brought me.”
“Do you think I’ll find my sister?” Kaia asked.
“It is possible,” Pinsley said. “But you must not raise your hopes too high. As I said, finding one person can be difficult.”
And that was in London, which Pinsley knew like the back of his hand. Kaia didn’t want to think about how much more difficult it would be in Paris. Her only hope was that the business of trying to stop the shadows would somehow be connected to her family. Even then, though, how were they meant to go about finding the shadows once they reached Paris?
That was a problem for when they got there, though. For now, there was only the journey through France, the miles, or kilometers, or whatever they had here disappearing under the wheels of the train.
Without thinking about it, Kaia reached out her hand for Pinsley’s. He looked surprised as she took his hand, but he didn’t pull away.
Paris waited, and Kaia hoped that answers waited with it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Heloise had never expected to standing on stage as applause rained down on her, but now that she was, it felt right; it felt like it was meant to be. She had been born for the role of Juliet, and now it seemed that the audience were getting their chance to agree, clapping until the sound of it made the Theatre Rue St Germain seem to shake with it.
Flowers pelted the stage. Heloise didn’t collect them, because bringing flowers backstage was supposed to be bad luck, but she smiled out at the people who threw them, making a note of the potential admirers who sat there. In Paris, moments like these were so fleeting that it was important to make the most of them.
Heloise took her bow, and it was hers, despite the presence of the rest of the cast there on the stage. Instinctively, she knew that the people there were clapping for her, not just for the chorus or even for Jean-Charles, her Romeo in the play. The difference in applause between the performances without her and the ones with her now was night and day.
Heloise lingered there, drinking it all in before sweeping off with all the elegance she could muster. M. Lascelles was waiting in the wings, among the ropes and the sandbags, the director looking as enraptured by it all as the audience had been. He was a portly man of middle years, with thinning hair and usually a furious scowl at the antics of actors. Now, though, he was smiling broadly.
“My dear,” he said, hugging her tightly and kissing each of her cheeks. “A day ago, I despaired, and now you have brought me hope. And you don’t even need a wig for the part. I should have cast you as Juliet in the first place!”
Heloise almost asked him why he hadn’t, but she wasn’t quite secure enough in her new role to risk that. Besides, the important point was that she was the one who was on stage now, getting the applause from the audience. That could make up for almost anything.
All because Amelie had walked out of the play in the most spectacular way possible. Heloise had heard of actors walking away from productions at all kinds of inconvenient times, before opening night, in the middle of a run, even once ten minutes before the start of a performance before the Emperor, but all of those allowed for an understudy to walk on easily. All of those left the play whole. Amelie had walked out in the middle of it all. Heloise couldn’t even imagine someone doing that.
She’d benefitted by it, though, moving from simple chorus member and understudy to star of the performance in the space of a day. It was the kind of story that she might have dreamed of as a girl.
“Your name will be in all the newspapers,” M. Lascelles said. “Censors permitting. Your name will be known across Paris. I hope you won’t forget us all now that you’re going to be famous.”
“Oh, in an instant,” Heloise joked. “The first time Emperor Louis-Napoleon invites me to his residence, I shall completely forget to mention any of you.”
“Ah, actors,” the director said, with a theatrically exasperated shrug. “Now, you must tell us when you’re ready to leave, so that we can find a way to get you past any waiting hordes of admirers.”
Heloise couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. Maybe, or maybe not. This was Paris, after all, and a beautiful, successful actress tended to attract admirers.
Everyone was assuming that was what had happened to Amelie, because it seemed like the only thing that could trump the need to perform. Rumor among the stage crew had it that she had a wealthy admirer and had walked off because he didn’t want her performing in front of other men a moment longer, that she had been jilted and could not stand
to be there, that a pair of admirers had found out about one another and she had been forced to go to try to prevent them from dueling with one another. All of it was the kind of thing that sounded utterly romantic and just as improbable to Heloise.
Still, whatever the reason, it meant that Heloise had the spot she’d always been waiting for. She even got Amelie’s dressing room, only having to share it with a couple of other cast members. Heloise went there now, making her way down among the tangled corridors beneath the theatre. They said that Paris was mostly built on older versions of itself, the layers forming a tangled network beneath people’s feet. Here, in the bowels of the theatre, Heloise could believe it.
There was no one in her dressing room at the moment. It seemed that the others were either still busy talking with the chorus or they had gone already. Either seemed possible, although there were a few fragments of clothing left behind that were not hers, from a stocking draped over one chair to a dress set out on a stand ready for tomorrow.
Heloise briefly considered asking M. Lascelles if the dressing room could be hers alone, but possibly it was still a little early to ask for that sort of thing. That could come later, when Heloise had had more performances like tonight’s.
To a combination of her delight and slight discomfort, there were flowers waiting back there, too. Not everyone knew the traditions, and gentlemen could sometimes be quite forceful in insisting that their roses be delivered, whatever the usual etiquette was. These ones were rich, and red, with a scent that made Heloise feel as though she could drift away in it.
There was no card, but Heloise had heard that some men preferred that. They wanted to be mysterious, and romantic, and if it also meant that their wives were less likely to find out and cause a scandal, then so much the better.
For the time being, Heloise focused on removing her makeup, feeling the buzz of being out on stage slowly ebb. In her way, she suspected that she made a better Juliet than Amelie ever had. She didn’t have to wear a wig to be the director’s vision of a blonde haired ingenue. She could pass for younger than she was on stage and convey a kind of sweet-voiced innocence that fit the part. They’d had to find a new dress to fit Heloise after Amelie had walked off wearing the old one, but that was no bad thing either.