A Spark Unseen

23

We made our way back in silence. The back alleys and boulevards had become sleepier in the hours before dawn. I followed at Henri’s heels, counting the repetitive motion of putting one foot in front of the other, a calming process that could be used as a background for sorting my thoughts. Lane had asked Joseph to find the name of a woman in Charenton, and the name had been Thérèse Arceneaux. I could not help but think of the woman who had stroked my hand, talking of her Charlie and Louis. The nun said she claimed the father of her child was the emperor of France, but she was a madwoman. Wasn’t she? There was certainly one man who believed it: Ben Aldridge, also known as Charles Arceneaux. And the emperor did not seem to be discounting the possibility either. I wondered what had led Lane to Charenton in the first place. He must have known that Ben was alive for some time.

I looked up and realized we were slipping through the street door of the courtyard, the sky the luminous sort of blue-black that comes just before the sun, the smell of earth and green a welcome change from the gutters and rubbish heaps of the city. We seemed to be alone but for a prowling cat, so we opened my back door, tiptoeing in like sneak thieves, and let it shut softly behind us.

Someone was in the kitchen, rattling the stove lids. “Go on through,” I told Henri, “I’ll see about getting us something to eat.” He nodded, rubbing his heavy eyelids, and moved down the corridor while I opened the kitchen door.

Marguerite stood at the stove, her head wrapped in a kerchief, her spoon dropping into the pot with a soft clatter when she turned to see who was behind her. The kitchen smelled of hot chocolate. Mr. DuPont, sprawling untidily in a chair at the table, seemed to wake up at the sight of me. “Ah,” he said cheerfully, “Napoléon est mort.”

“Good morning to you, too, Mr. DuPont,” I replied, coming fully into the kitchen. I ignored the fact that he was once again not wearing a shirt. “What are you doing up so early, Marguerite?”

Marguerite lowered her eyes, turning away from me to fish her spoon out of the pot. She really was a lovely little thing, extraordinarily so.

“Bonjour, Mademoiselle.”

Mrs. DuPont stood behind me in the doorway, a shawl around her nightgown, her hair hanging in a tight braid down her back, not a single strand out of place. “Marguerite,” she said in the calm, even way I found intensely irritating, “you have not spoken to Mademoiselle properly. Apologize at once, and then you will scrub the front sidewalk after breakfast.”

I glanced back at Marguerite, saw a slight twitch to her shoulders, and was stung to anger. No child deserved to be chastised for not responding properly to a lady dressed in Mr. Babcock’s pants. “Mrs. DuPont,” I said, “Marguerite is always polite, which frankly is more than I can say for you most of the time. And I’m quite sure my sidewalk is just as clean as it needs to be.”

Mrs. DuPont’s white face remained expressionless while Mr. DuPont shook his head. “Napoléon est —”

Mrs. DuPont cut off this statement with a sharp, “Tais-toi!” a phrase I assumed meant, “Be quiet!” since that is exactly what Mr. DuPont did. I shot another look at Marguerite’s twitching shoulders, and realized that the child was not crying; she was trying not to laugh. I raised a brow, decided I had no time to decipher the intricacies of this inexplicable family, and turned back to Mrs. DuPont.

“I’m glad you’re here. We need to speak about —”

“Can I offer Mademoiselle some chocolate? Or a bun?”

“No, thank you, Mrs. DuPont. And please refer to me as ‘Miss Tulman.’ Tonight I will —”

Mrs. DuPont drew herself up tall in the square frame of the doorway, the grim reaper in a nightgown. “Have we not served you well?”

“I —”

“Do we not keep our peace?”

“You —”

“Do you not eat the hearty, English breakfast?”

I sighed.

“And where will you find such clean windows? Such shining glass —”

“Tais-toi!” I said. “Please,” I added. Mrs. DuPont closed her mouth. “I am not asking you to leave. Or at least not yet. But I am asking you to leave the house for tonight. Do you have somewhere you can go? For one night?”

She looked at me for a moment, then her eyes slid toward the hallway, where Henri Marchand had gone, and back to my frankly bizarre choice of clothing. And she smiled. It was not a nice smile. “As I said, Mademoiselle, we can keep secrets. You will find no others that can keep secrets so well.”

“Napoléon est —”

“Tais-toi!” she hissed. “Perhaps Mademoiselle would like to give us some money,” she said, still smiling. “For the hotel?”

A small silence fell, and Mrs. DuPont’s black eyes stared back significantly into mine. I had no time for this. Or funds.

“Actually, Mrs. DuPont, perhaps you would like to tell me what you are selling at my back door? That is what you’re doing, is it not? I would think those profits might be plenty for one night at a hotel.”

All I could hear was the bubbling of the chocolate. One of Mrs. DuPont’s bone-white hands crept up to adjust the shawl around her shoulders.

“I think you’ll find that I can keep secrets, too, Mrs. DuPont. Do we have an understanding?”

The quiet in the kitchen stretched until there was one tiny nod from Mrs. DuPont’s chin.

“Good. Please be out of the house by the time the sun goes down, and you may come back in the morning. Maybe at that time we can continue the discussion about your future arrangements.” I wondered if it was too much to hope that we’d be gone from Paris by then. “Thank you very much, Mrs. DuPont. Good day, Mr. DuPont. Have a lovely morning, Marguerite.” I started to the leave the kitchen. “Oh, and I would happily accept your offer of chocolate and buns. If you could bring them into the dining room, as soon as is convenient? There is no hurry.”

I glanced at the clock in the corridor, feeling satisfied as I walked down the hall.

We had nineteen hours, forty-two minutes until Ben Aldridge came.

Five men came at intervals during the day, Jean-Baptiste and four of his cousins, all entering through the courtyard with milk or bread or some other supply to “deliver,” and then never actually leaving again. The day had turned gray and cool and there was a fine rain falling, darkening the house stones. If anyone was observing the courtyard, it was from the interior of one of the other houses. The last to come was Joseph, a bag of tools at his side and a hammer in his belt for a disguise. Mary spirited him up to Mr. Babcock’s room, where his male family members awaited, well provisioned with the remnants of the ridiculously vast breakfast Mrs. DuPont had prepared. I really should have known better when I asked for “chocolate and buns.”

Mary had been very somber as she packed our things. She’d said nothing of it, but I’d seen her in the garden again with the boy Robert, and I felt rather sorry about it. She scowled at the little bottle Joseph had supplied me, green instead of brown, sitting next to its fellow on the chimneypiece of my bedchamber.

“Are you thinking that will be enough, Miss?” she asked. “Last time it was taking ever so much more.”

“Yes, there will be enough,” I replied grimly. I had more stashed away for Uncle Tully. The ones over the fireplace were for someone else.

When I came through the shelf door, Uncle Tully was waiting for me in his favorite frock coat, rocking back and forth on his heels. He looked almost like his old self standing there, the white beard spreading wide when he saw me.

“Little niece!” he shouted at me. “You are two minutes not late for playtime!”

Which meant I was one minute early. I smiled absently, coming back to the reality of the coat that hung loose on his frame and the space he had been confined to. So much had been taken from him. But tonight he would sleep, and when he woke we would be back at Stranwyne with Lane, and he would play and we would find a way to keep up the illusion that my uncle’s only home was now the cemetery on the hill. Heaven knew what I was going to say to Mrs. Cooper, though surely bringing Lane with me would help. I saw that Uncle Tully was now plucking at his coat.

“You are not ready,” he said. “You are not thinking of clocks.”

I snapped back to attention and smiled at him. “Of course I am, Uncle. I came especially to help you wind them.” Nothing could have induced me to miss my uncle’s clock-winding, not when I was about to spin his carefully constructed world out of balance yet again. The clocks chose that moment to strike four times. Eight more hours until Ben Aldridge came. “See, they have said it’s time. Which shall we do first?”

We began, alternating the privilege of turning the winding key, always clockwise, of course; my uncle would not have had a clock that wound otherwise, if such a thing existed. He knew precisely how many turns each one of them required. The last clock fell to me and, as it was on the floor, we sat there, too, my uncle cross-legged and me in a poof of skirt, both of us mentally calculating the turnings.

My uncle shook his head and said, “There are not enough, Simon’s baby.” I paused in my twisting of the key.

“Is this one not thirty-seven?”

“No, no! Not windings! Clocks!”

I turned the key again, the tick of the mechanism soft in the sound-deadened room. The clock room of Stranwyne had held hundreds of clocks, the ticking alone a noise one almost had to swim through. We had only brought ten of those clocks to Paris, all we’d had room for, small ones, chosen in haste. It would give me much joy to see my uncle back with his clocks. Uncle Tully was still shaking his head, muttering.

“Shall I? Shall I tell her a secret? Should I? Shall I?”

I finished the thirty-seventh turn, returned the key to its place inside the clock, shut the glass door, and then folded my hands to wait while Uncle Tully argued with himself. This was a common enough debate, and one that almost always meant he told. He lifted his bright blue eyes to me for the briefest moment and then whispered, very loudly. “I went down the stairs.”

I nodded, thankful it was nothing worse. “I know you did, Uncle. It’s all right this time, but we —”

“No, no!” he said, voice rising. “It is not right! No!” He pulled on his coat sleeves. “The rooms were wrong, and the floors did not squeak where they should, and there were things outside, not the right things. …”

“What things? You didn’t go outside, did you, Uncle Tully?”

His head was in a permanent state of shaking back and forth now. “No, no. Not outside. They were all the wrong things. There were other places, not hills, not grass, and there was no Mrs. Jefferies. Where has Mrs. Jefferies gone, little niece?”

I kept my voice calm. “Mrs. Jefferies is Mrs. Cooper now, do you remember, Uncle? She is at Stranwyne, keeping your things tidy, just as Marianna told her to.” He rocked slightly in his position on the floor. “Just like we are doing what Marianna told us. Do you remember? But, Uncle, I want you to think about something. Sometimes we like one thing better than other things, isn’t that right? I like the flower best, and Marianna liked her piano, and you like your bells and the box with the lightning right now. Isn’t that so?”

He frowned, mulling this over, and I continued before he could find an objection.

“And sometimes we like one place better than another place, yes? We both like to be at Stranwyne, and would rather be there than here. But, Uncle, even if I like one place better than another, what I like best is when you are in it. If you are there, then I think that place is right. Do you understand?”

Uncle Tully’s face was screwed up, his mouth puckered, as if he were studying the complexities of a very tiny engine. Finally he looked up and said, “I think a place is better with clocks, little niece.”

“Yes, Uncle,” I said, smiling.

“Will Lane ever come? Or did he get tired and it’s the forever kind of gone now?”

I paused before I said, “He will come, Uncle Tully. I’m certain of it.”

“You always know, little niece,” he sighed, some of his distress ebbing. “You always know what we should do, and Lane always knows what is right. You always know what we should do, little niece, like Marianna said.”

How I wished that were true.

His words were still running through my head when I stood before the mirror in my bedchamber, Marianna’s portrait watching me from the wall, the silver fish now sitting beside the swan on the bedside table, trying on first one dress and then another before carefully arranging my hair. I had to believe that Lane was coming here just as much as my uncle did, and that Lane would know the right thing to do. That some of this weight inside me would lift, and that I would have to make no more of these decisions alone.

There were two more hours until Ben Aldridge came.

I turned down the gas, all the sconces dark except for two, leaving the salon in a soft yellow light, almost like candles. The shutters were latched, curtains drawn, the clock pointing to three minutes until midnight. Our stage was set. One of Joseph’s cousins waited on the upper landing, two were with Joseph in the library, and one with Jean-Baptiste in the cabinet beneath the foyer stairs, ready to block the doors as soon as Ben Aldridge and whoever came with him entered the ladies’ salon. I had not asked how they planned to subdue him or get the required information, but when Joseph shut the door to the library I had heard the distinctive click of a gun being loaded.

Henri leaned on the chimneypiece, smoking, his dark brows pulled down. He had spent part of the day napping on my settee while I did the same in my bedchamber, and I’d been too busy the rest of the time to pay much attention to his doings. I had not asked him to be here and he had not asked to stay, so we just didn’t speak of it. Mary fidgeted on the settee, playing with her apron as if she wanted to find something to scrub with it. I sat down beside her, nerves jangling, wondering what I had put in motion, and where it all might end. We watched the clock hands move.

A carriage went by, and our three heads jerked in unison toward the front of the house. But the rattling moved on down Rue Trudon, fading with the seconds. I smoothed my skirt, touched my knot of hair, feeling my pulse beat hard in my neck. The clock struck and I jumped.

Henri looked quickly away from my face, throwing his cigarette into the hearth, while Mary, who had been frowning at Henri, flipped out her pocket watch to adjust the time, a bit of tongue sticking out between her teeth. Eleven more times the chimes rang, and half an hour later they struck again, and then once more on the hour. Three more times this happened. Two thirty in the morning. The room was silent, the street outside was silent, and we sat like people in a sepulcher.

I stared down at my hands, still and folded in my lap, mildly surprised to see the tiny splashes of water dotting my fingers. He wasn’t coming. I counted the drips, five, six, seven, eight, as they fell from my cheeks. Something had changed. We had been too obvious. For whatever reason, Ben had decided not to trade. I heard his voice again in my ear, whispering, “And what do you think I do with things I have no use for? Do you think I will hesitate?”

My chest heaved, and heaved again, but no matter how hard I tried to fill my lungs, I was still short of air. I was suffocating. I stood, pushing away Mary’s hand, turned away from Henri Marchand, half hidden in a haze of smoke, and walked out of the salon. I passed the open door of the library, startling the half-asleep men inside, and then ran down the back corridor. Still struggling for air, I threw open the door into the cool green smell of the courtyard.

I needed to be thinking, laying out a plan. But I could not. I hurried down a graveled path, wiping my cheeks, until I was leaning over the edge of the fountain, letting the spray wet them again. The bricks along the fountain pool’s edge were loose, the mortar crumbling beneath my hand, like everything was crumbling. I didn’t know how to correct this. I didn’t know how to find Lane, how to take care of my uncle, how to provide for Mary and Mrs. Cooper and the village and Stranwyne, or even what to do when I went back to the house. It was like the numbers had no order, as if one no longer proceeded to two and three and four, leading in circles instead of straight, honest lines. The knot of pain returned to my middle, doubled in intensity; I couldn’t stand straight against it. I had failed them. All of them. I had, and I alone.

And almost as soon as this revelation came, I had two others: The first being that I was not alone, not in this garden, the second that I was very, very stupid. The water splashed and played and I heard the noise again, a sound that could not be made by wind or a falling branch or even the paw of an animal; it was the soft crunch of gravel beneath a foot, near, and directly behind me.

Now my mind was moving, thoughts shooting like the crackling blue electricity. I considered the speed of the unhurried footsteps, the nearest path and how fast I could get there, the brick that was cold beneath my hand, loose in its mortar. The sound of the footsteps disappeared, masked by the paving stones surrounding the fountain and the splashing water, but I felt the presence. Maybe it was the change in the wind or the atmosphere, or maybe I could almost hear breath. But the presence was there. And then I felt a touch on my shoulder.

I spun, swinging my hand as if delivering a slap, only my hand now held the brick. The brick connected with flesh, there was a grunt, and the tall figure that had been standing behind me staggered back a step before falling to the paving stones. And there he lay, rolled onto his side, hands clutching his head where the brick had done its job.

But I did not run as I’d meant to. I stood still as the man on the ground moaned once and sat up, still clutching his head, murmuring some of the same curses I’d heard Henri use in French. But even in the darkness, in the wrong time and place and in the wrong language, I knew that voice, and the long fingers, the way the elbows were now resting on his knees.

I knew the sound of my name when his low voice said, “Katharine, was that a brick you just hit me with?”