Beauty Like the Night

by Joanna Bourne

  “Neither do I. Neither does Sanchia’s daughter.” Without moving, he’d gone some great distance from her, hiding behind a level gaze. “Coincidences follow you, Séverine de Cabrillac. They circle you like vultures.”

  There was no friendliness in his face, none of the admiration she’d seen when they danced. When he’d kissed her. That was gone. They had become opponents in the ring, waiting for the fight to start.

  She was dismayed on many levels. She’d thought her attraction to Deverney was straightforward and simple, the hunger natural to a woman who’d once loved joyfully and now slept in a lonely bed. She’d seen it as a weakness, but one she could ignore. Easy to explain. Easy to set aside. Trivial.

  This though . . . She looked straight at Deverney’s suspicion and hostility and she was still attracted to him. She hadn’t expected this and didn’t know how to fight it.

  He was a hard, straight, well-knit man. His expensive clothing slid over an admirable strength. She saw herself touching him. Making love with him. His mind, too, attracted her. He was brilliant and irreverent, with a ruthless insight she respected. The man enticed her, body and soul. Any minute now she’d start making bad decisions because of it.

  She drew her knees up close to her chest and decided not to look at him for a while.

  In front of her was the coverlet—rough-woven cotton, white, and shabby from many washings. She picked off a tiny ball of gray that clung there and rolled it between her fingers. It spoke to her. Inanimate objects were always talkative.

  She cleared her throat before she spoke. “I have a piece of good news. See this?”

  “Dust.”

  “Not merely dust. This is what you find in corners when the maids have been lackadaisical.” She picked a bit of fluff off her dull, anonymous skirt and set that wisp on the flat of her hand, next to the fluff she’d taken from the coverlet. “The great secret of dust is, if you look at it under a magnifying glass you can tell where it comes from. Even without my lens I can see these two dusts are the same. The fluff on the coverlet comes from under the bed.”

  She was proud of herself. She was engaging in a calm, reasoned discussion. The jumpy nervousness in her belly was entirely hidden. Soon she’d remove herself from Deverney’s presence altogether and the feeling would stop.

  Deverney looked down at her palm. At her. “I see.”

  “This tells me your Pilar wasn’t taken out the front door by the men who searched the parlor. She hid under the bed and scratched that message, which makes it important. She knows me or something about me. I have to think she sent someone—you—to find me.

  “All right.”

  “Then she crawled up across the coverlet—see how the bedclothes are rumpled—and escaped through this window, leaving this evidence of bad housekeeping behind. Your Pilar left the house, ran across the yard in back, and out into London. Clever girl.”

  She tucked her feet under her and stood up. Deverney offered a hand, but she didn’t take it. She did not feel cordial toward him. Also, there was a difference between imagining the hard, warm strength in his hands and knowing it, skin to skin. She didn’t want to cross that divide again.

  Deverney took the rebuff so well you’d think it hadn’t happened. Maybe he raised an eyebrow.

  She said, “This must have happened while the men were in her parlor. She took the time to leave a message. She would have been very afraid, but she was thinking every minute. And she’s no fool.”

  “No. I suppose not.”

  It would serve no purpose to imagine that time of hiding, alone in the cramped space of dust and dark. Pilar would have felt the vibration in the floorboards as those men walked around, searching the front room. Probably she’d known what happened to her mother.

  “You’re seeing it, aren’t you?” Deverney said. “You look around and get a picture of what happened.”

  “Something like that.” She didn’t talk about the vivid ugliness that took shape in her mind at scenes of murder and violence.

  His eyes, which saw too much, followed her as she crossed the room. He said, “Seeing murder would be one of the less comfortable ways to go about your investigations.”

  “There are no comfortable ways.” Part of her was still there, with the young girl, Pilar, in the stuffy darkness under the bed. “It took her a while to scratch those letters in the wood. Five or six minutes. We’ll find a nail she worked loose somewhere under the bed.”

  “She left it behind on the floor. I have it.”

  “She knew she had to run. She worked up the courage to do it.” Sévie crawled across the bed to open the window and look out. Not a loud window at all. It moved in a well-oiled sash.

  She thought about Pilar, who’d lived in this bare bedchamber, furnished with the discards from the other rooms. She imagined the girl putting one leg out the window and then the other, letting herself hang down, full-length, faced against the cold brick till her feet could find that barrel and balance on it. Pilar had scrambled away, through the cluttered yard with dustbins and sheds, out the back gate, down the alley, and into the streets of London.

  Where did you go, Pilar?

  Sévie scrubbed her face, still feeling cobwebs on it, though they were gone. She wondered what window Pilar looked out of this morning. The story of a twelve-year-old on her own in London generally didn’t have a happy ending. She’d hope the girl who’d grown up in this barren, dreary room had become tough enough to survive.

  Pilar’s clothes were piled on the floor. Wool dresses, poorly made. Calicos, washed too many times. On top was a shift, a dispirited and limp garment, shabby, perfunctorily ironed. She poked the pile with her boot. “My sisters would give this selection to the kitchenmaids. Your daughter wasn’t pampered in this household.”

  “She’s not my daughter,” Deverney said automatically.

  “She doesn’t seem to have been anyone’s daughter. This is a rich appartement, stuffed with pretty things. She lived in this bare room like an orphan.”

  Deverney’s face was without expression. “I gave Sanchia a generous allowance.”

  “And you trusted her to take care of a child.”

  “I trusted my man of business.”

  “So you did.” She started to pick up the box she’d filled with Pilar’s schoolbooks and papers, but he was there before her. He lifted it with a nonchalant twist and stretch of muscles that caught at her mind and captured all her attention. So foolish of her. She couldn’t even think he did it on purpose. She said, “I’m done here. Let’s go.” He carried the box and followed her down the hallway, past Sanchia’s much larger bedroom and the little kitchen, into the front room. She didn’t stop being aware of him for a minute. He lingered at the edge of her mind, a whisper and an enticement and a damned nuisance.

  They came to the parlor and she stopped, looking the parlor over, taking in last impressions.

  He said, “Where do we go next?”

  She didn’t say anything quickly, and when she did she didn’t answer his question. “I am impressed by this. Pilar climbed from the window and ran across the yard, uninjured and free. She didn’t yell for help. That’s important. She didn’t go to the Watch or the beadle or the magistrate. Didn’t knock on doors up and down the street. She just ran.”

  He saw what she meant. He’d always see the subtlety. He said, “She ran from someone so powerful she didn’t trust a magistrate to keep her safe.”

  “That’s what I think. She has no relatives in England, I suppose. I wouldn’t go to your business agent if I were bleeding to death and choking on a fishbone. You were in—”

  “Vienna. Sanchia didn’t know that though.”

  “So Pilar didn’t know where to find you. The best possibility is, she went to a friend and she’s still in hiding. That’s what I’d do.”

  “So we discover her friends.”

  �
��I’ll go to her school. The girls should know something. I’ll send a note.” Before he could speak, she shook her head. “I don’t need you. You can wander off and do whatever it is you do. Sell wine.”

  He put the box he was carrying down on the desk and leaned his elbow on it, insolent and elegant and perfectly amiable. “I’m sure you have the influence to break down the door of any school in London, Séverine.” There was that use of her name again. He went on, “But not today. On the other hand, no one can deny me the right to ask questions. My name will get you in faster.”

  He was right and they both knew it. She said, “Write the letter. We’ll go there together.”

  He didn’t gloat over his little victory. She watched him carefully not gloat, which was just as bad.

  She added, “I’m thinking about one more thing. That girl who isn’t your daughter left a message under her bed, staying to carve it into the wood when she must have been terrified.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was the message for, Monsieur Deverney, if not you?”

  She left him finding ink and a quill and went outside. Her Eyes and Ears had arrived. They gathered around the front steps, smiling and cozy to MacDonald, who was being monosyllabic back. They liked to tease him.

  Her ladies. Her gossip gatherers and rumor collectors. She had a good number for such short notice, fifteen. Sarah, Jane, Emily, Susie, Anne and Annie, Laura, Rebecca, Motley Jean, Rose . . . all the regulars. A few more might turn up later. Her people were plump middle-aged women and gray-haired grannies, every one of them sharp as an Italian dagger, not a pretty one in the lot. They were shabby, ordinary and harmless, comfortable, with neatly pressed skirts and pleasant faces. Chattery women. Nosey, gossipy women, fluffy and fluttery as pheasants. They were invisible on the street. Put a basket over their arm and they could go anywhere.

  She listened to good news and some bad. Sympathized and congratulated. A new grandchild. A husband out of work again. A son joining his ship tomorrow. She asked after the women who weren’t there.

  Then she brought them in close around her and described what she wanted. Find someone who’d seen Pilar Deverney on the day her mother died. Find her friends. Who did she know? Who did she trust, this slight, shabby small girl who was so disregarded under her own roof? What was she like and where did she spend her time? Come back with any whisper at all.

  These women would catch rumors for her. They’d pick them right out of the air. She could send them off knowing that within a day Pilar would begin to take shape for her. They might even find someone who’d seen her run down the streets, alone and scared, without a cloak, on a cold day three months ago.

  • • •

  ROBIN Carlington didn’t like this grimy mercantile building. Didn’t like this whole section of town. It was the sort of place a man drove through on his way to somewhere more interesting—sordid, ugly, and crowded with the hoi polloi. He didn’t like the people Séverine de Cabrillac met here or the damn hobby her family let her play at. He’d been polite about it when he was cultivating the chit. At least he didn’t have to do that anymore.

  He banged on the door again, loudly, and called. There was no sound inside, nothing stirring, so she wasn’t there. Sévie wasn’t the kind of woman to skulk behind closed doors. He only wished she had a little more feminine modesty.

  Oddly, now that any chance of marrying Séverine de Cabrillac was at an end, the prospect had never seemed more attractive. They would have dealt well together, once she settled into being a wife. The first thing he’d have insisted on was an end to this idiocy of meddling in the affairs of the unwashed.

  He went up and down the hall, trying knobs. Every door locked. Everything closed up tight as a drum.

  There was no point leaving a note in her letterbox. He didn’t want to leave anything behind him that might turn up in court. Besides, she’d tear it up and throw it away. He had to track her down.

  Somebody in this grubby place would know where she’d gone. One of the stinking apes in the loading yard or a vacant-eyed clerk in the front office. Just a matter of laying down the right bribe.

  Where was she?

  Twenty-one

  THE Belvedere Academy for Young Ladies of Quality possessed no least sign of a belvedere or cupola or battlements or spire or any other architectural adornment. The school occupied an ordinary private house on a dull, quiet street not far from Sanchia’s rooms. Sévie had to wonder how many Ladies of Quality had been attracted here.

  She pulled the bell and listened to the faint ring in the distance. No one appeared. Deverney’s message had been delivered an hour since, so they were expected. As minutes passed she tried to decide whether this was the most incompetent household in West London or if she was being offered a deliberate slight. She narrowed her eyes and considered possibilities.

  Here was a whole host of objects telling her stories. The plaster façade was fresh, with a new coat of limewash. The brass plaque with the school’s name was bright in the sun, as were the windows upstairs. The doorknob was spotlessly polished. All very well.

  But the windows down on the kitchen level weren’t clean. The stairwell that led below street level was cluttered with leaves and stray papers from the long winter months. Not just untidy, it was an invitation for some hapless maid to slip and break her neck.

  This was a household of surface cleanliness and neglect anywhere it didn’t show, of cheap cuts of meat with thick sauces, day-old bread from the baker’s, of darned stockings in well-polished shoes. In the old days in Spain she would have been suspicious of the finances of a person that lived in such a house.

  Did Deverney see what she did—an establishment of appearance and pretense?

  He was looking around, just as she was. “My agent had money to give the child better than this.” Anger didn’t break the surface of Deverney’s voice, but it swam underneath like a creature with sharp teeth. “I said to put her in a good school. Sanchia was a Gavarre. This is not the school of a Gavarre.”

  “Nor a Deverney,” she said.

  “Nor a child who bears the name of Deverney,” he agreed. “She’ll be better provided for in the future.”

  “She hasn’t been a major expense so far, if this school is anything to go by.”

  Almost silently, Deverney ground his teeth.

  In the front room of the school, someone moved behind the curtains. They were being watched. This delay was to establish that they were not important. That they had no power here. A wiser schoolmistress would have welcomed them in and made much of them and told lies. But then, a wiser schoolmistress would have washed the windows on the kitchen level.

  Deverney raised his voice. “The bourgeois English school. A dispiriting place. Non?” He had suddenly acquired a strong French accent. “And careless of its students. I ask myself if they are perhaps culpable in her disappearance.”

  However annoyed she might be with Deverney, it was pleasant to work with a man who understood the art of the threat. “The magistrate will know. He is a good friend of Papa’s.”

  She also spoke to be overheard.

  “Then let us converse with him. Bah. I waste my time to speak to these silly schoolgirls who will know nothing at all. It is better to question the parents.”

  “I had hoped to avoid that. But it seems not. The patroness is Lady Hadley, who knows me and will be frank. She will have a list of names.”

  “In any case, my patience is at an end,” Deverney said. “Come.”

  Footsteps hurried toward the front door. A woman’s deep voice called out, “Jane. Jane, you lazy girl! Where are you? There’s someone at the door.”

  The door jerked open to reveal what must be the headmistress of the Belvedere School, a creature of dour face and wide, muscular body. A bulldog of a woman in black bombazine. Mrs. Bowker.

  “Count Verney.” She panted from the sudden effo
rt of scurrying through the halls. “I am so sorry you’ve been kept waiting.”

  Deverney bowed, not low. He was now one of the old nobility acknowledging a shopkeeper. “Good morning, madame. We disrupt your routine, peut-être, despite the note I sent.”

  “Not at all, Count Verney. This is an unexpected—”

  “You may address me as Monsieur Deverney. I do not use my title in England. I have come”—Deverney achieved all that was disdainful and aristocratic—“to discuss the disappearance of Mademoiselle María del Pilar Teresa Catarina Deverney y Gavarre, your pupil, who was last seen at your school.” He extracted a silver note case from an inner pocket of his jacket. He clicked it open, one-handed. “My card.”

  “Count Verney, it is an honor to—”

  “You may call me ‘monsieur,’ as I said. This is Lady Séverine de Cabrillac. You may address her as ‘mademoiselle.’ Do you intend to conduct this interview on the street?”

  “No. Yes. Of course. My office is this way, Count. Please come with me.”

  Deverney removed his hat and carried it through the halls with him in preference to setting it upon one of the several tables in the hall. This was the behavior of a man in a low gaming club or some commercial establishment where the rules of civility did not hold. It was a very subtle insult and Mrs. Bowker probably did not recognize it.

  The hall smelled of onions. Behind the open door of a classroom nine little girls wrote in their copybooks with pen and ink. A pair of older girls passed them, walking arm in arm, whispering.

  She hadn’t been in many girls’ schools. They were dismal places if this was typical.

  The headmistress’s lair lay at the end of a gloomy corridor. Mrs. Bowker pushed ahead through the door and left them to follow. She sat at her desk. “Although I am not involved in the unfortunate disappearance of your daughter, I feel your concern, Count. I am sorry for your loss—”