A Spark Unseen (26 page)

There was a long silence, just the
clop
of horseshoes, the echo of wheels on passing buildings. The streetlamps had been put out; the only lights were the ones swinging outside the carriage.

“This man who will die,” said Henri finally, “he is the artist. Your servant.”

“Yes.”

Another string of French came from the other seat, though softer this time, and resigned.

“Send the carriage away when we come to the house. I will get you to Rue Tisserand.”

Once inside the red doors, I hurried upstairs, leaving Henri to turn on the gaslights in the ladies’ salon and the dining room and kitchen, as if we intended to be awake for some time. The house was very quiet. I passed Marianna’s bedchamber, and now that I was alone I hiked the annoying hoopskirt up to my waist and ran the next flight of stairs. I entered Mr. Babcock’s room in the dark, closed the door behind me and, leaving the lights off, tried to feel my way to the wardrobe. I nearly screamed when the door kicked open in a burst of candle flame, but let the noise die inside me when I recognized Mary’s nightcap silhouetted in the light.

“It’s me, Mary,” I said, “only me.”

Mary lowered the arm with her fireplace poker. “Good Lord, Miss, what are you doing … ?”

“Blow out that candle and shut the door, Mary. I need a pair of trousers.”

We waited an hour before letting ourselves out the back door and into the courtyard, Henri in his shirtsleeves, jacket left behind, me in Mr. Babcock’s smallest pair of trousers, which were both too big and too short all at once. I’d felt ridiculous coming down the stairs, much worse than in the green velvet earlier, Mary shaking her head and giving her opinion freely all the way down. It felt absolutely wrong, like I’d nothing on but bloomers. But I forgot all that in the cool silence of the garden, where the shaking of the dying leaves in the night wind made it impossible to know if someone else might be out there with us. We scooted in the darkness along the edge of the buildings, finally crouching down at Mrs. Reynolds’s back door.

“Keep watch,” Henri whispered, quietly pulling what I took to be a ring of keys from his pocket. I had my hair braided, pinned up beneath Lane’s red cap, and I held it on my head with one hand while I watched the shadows move, wondering why Henri would have a set of keys to Mrs. Reynolds’s, then wondering why it was taking him so long to use them. I risked a glance behind me. Henri was not using keys; he was picking the lock.

The lock clicked, the door squealing lightly on its hinges, and I followed him inside. We flitted through the dark house to the foyer, trying not to bump, knock over, or be impaled by one of the myriad ornaments along the walls and in the corners. Henri put his hand on the front doorknob and whispered back to me, “We will walk quickly, and with purpose, like servants sent for the doctor, or … I don’t know what. Just walk …
avec confiance
, with confidence.”

I nodded. It did not matter in the least whom the men watching my house thought was coming out of Mrs. Reynolds’s, as long as they did not think it was us. Henri opened the front door, we stepped outside, and he closed it behind us with a
bang
, as if we were doing just as we ought, with no need of silence. We moved away down the sidewalk as a light came on in Mrs. Reynolds’s second floor.

“Where did you learn to pick locks, Mr. Marchand?” I asked as we turned the corner.

“I am a man of many talents and,
mon Dieu
, stop walking like a woman before you are arrested.”

A city at night, I discovered, was an uglier world, where things hidden by the nicety of sunshine dragged themselves out to revel in gaslit music halls and the light of the occasional streetlamp. It was a long way to Rue Tisserand. We avoided noise and crowds, keeping to the dark, but twice we were accosted by women, one painted and bedraggled, the other hardly more than a girl, and once we had to speak to a
gendarme
, or rather Henri did, loudly and with much laughter. I was fairly certain he informed the man that we were drunk. I stood half behind him, mute, thankful for the darkness that I suspected was the biggest component of my so-called disguise. Or maybe the policeman just didn’t care.

It was three o’clock in the morning before we arrived, having made several wrong turns after a consultation with a man sleeping on a door stoop. Rue Tisserand was small and narrow, rank with the odor of rubbish and cess. No lights shone other than a dim candle in an upper window, where a baby cried, and a house at the end, where the night-soil men were shoveling. Henri looked closely at a doorway and then knocked on it hard. He turned to me.

“And now … how do the English say it? It is your time to ‘call the shots,’ Miss Tulman.”

Footsteps came down the passage, and someone spoke on the other side of the door.
“Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?”
A girl’s voice, a little frightened.

“Joseph, please,” I replied, mouth close to the door.

“She wants to know who you are,” whispered Mr. Marchand.

“I am here about Jean-Michel.”

The door flew open.

We sat in a clean kitchen, which smelled of cabbage, with scrubbed pots hanging from the ceiling. Joseph, face creased from his blankets, leaned on his elbows on the opposite side of the table, seated beside a younger, longer-haired version of himself, a man who introduced himself as Jean-Baptiste, one of Joseph’s brothers. The young woman that had opened the door — rather healthy in all her curves, I’d noticed — heated coffee at the stove while Joseph and Jean-Baptiste listened to everything I said, interpreted as necessary by Henri. Joseph rubbed his stubbled chin, pondering, as the young woman set down our coffee. I was grateful for it. I’d been too anxious to eat all day, and I was feeling the lack. After a long time, Joseph spoke rapidly in French, and I elbowed Henri’s attention away from the girl to tell me what he said.

“If the man is high in the imperial court,” Henri translated, “then there will be a heavy price to pay if we are caught.” The girl’s smile had vanished.

“Tell him that all they need to do is get the information and hold the man at my house. If they remain masked, then there is no need for the man to know who anyone is, and we only need to hold him long enough to free Jean-Michel and get a head start out of Paris. I have …” I glanced away from Henri. “I have a secure place to keep him. But also tell them that I believe this man will tell no one at the imperial court, that he will not risk admitting a failure. They can leave the door unlocked and slip back to their streets, and we will be out of Paris before he even knows he is free.”

After the translation, we waited, listening to the rasp of Joseph’s chin against his palm. Henri lit a cigarette. When Joseph spoke again it was soft, and Henri lowered his voice as well. “He says Jean-Michel was very good to Marie, his sister …” We all glanced at the curvy girl, who was flushing prettily. “… that he helped her out of a … a bad position.”

“Did he?” I replied, eyes narrowing. I’d hoped this Marie was Joseph’s wife.

Henri was still listening to Joseph, who was speaking with an occasional soft addition from Jean-Baptiste. Henri’s expression became surprised. “He wants to know if you know who trained Jean-Michel in silver, and the names of his parents.”

It was my turn to be surprised, both by the question and by the realization that I had no idea where Lane had learned his trade. I’d never thought to ask. The bodies around the table were still, waiting for my answer. “He must have learned it from someone in the village,” I said, “or perhaps from his father. But his father was a French soldier.”

“Moreau?” Jean-Baptiste asked after Henri’s translation.

“Yes, Jean Moreau. His mother was English, of the name Jefferies. Why …”

Henri didn’t bother to repeat this for Joseph and Jean-Baptiste, as they seemed to understand enough already. They consulted, their like heads close together. The pretty sister stood against the wall, chewing a nail.

“We will do it,” Joseph said in English, “for Jean-Michel.”

I only knew I’d been holding my breath when I let it out in relief. “And you can make him speak?” I said. “You can make this man tell you where Jean-Michel is?” This was essential, but I wanted no part of it.

“Yes,” Joseph said after Henri repeated my question, continuing the rest of his thought in French. When he was done, Henri’s dark eyes turned to me.

“He says that it will be a small blow to the emperor, but it will also be justice, for the old man.”

I nodded at Joseph and held out my hand. And though he was French and I was a woman, we shook like Englishmen. When we were done, I said to Henri, “Two more questions. Joseph said before that he had helped Jean-Michel find out about certain chemicals. Ask him if he can get me this.” I held out one of the little brown bottles Dr. Pruitt had given me, now nearly empty. “To make someone sleep.”

Joseph took the bottle while Henri spoke, sniffed the contents, and put one tiny drop on his tongue. He slipped the bottle into his pocket, muttering, and Henri said, “He says he will find out.”

“Also ask him what Jean-Michel wanted to know, what he has been waiting by the lamppost to tell him. Was it news of the man we’ve been speaking of?”

Henri asked, and then listened to the response. “He says no, it was not about the man, but a woman. Jean-Michel wanted the name of a woman in the hospital at Charenton.” Our eyes met briefly. It was the asylum we had visited. “He says he found the name.”

“And what was it?”

Joseph did not wait for a translation, but merely replied, “Thérèse Arceneaux.”

W
e 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.