The Counterfeit Heiress: A Lady Emily Mystery (Lady Emily Mysteries)

by Tasha Alexander

  “Why on earth not? The dreadful man is buried here. Where else would you have me leave his wreath?” The door swung open and revealed what to all appearances was a small and extremely narrow chapel, with an altar, a stained-glass window above it, and hooks attached on both sides of the walls running perpendicular to it. Cécile stepped inside, hung the wreath on one of the hooks, and frowned. She raised a gloved hand to one of the names carved on the wall and ran her fingers over it. “I suppose I ought to do this more often, and perhaps I would, if he had ever in his life given me cause to miss him.”

  I stepped away from the iron door to give Cécile some privacy. The bodies of the dearly departed, I realized, were buried below these tombs. It was obvious when I thought about it, but I had assumed a raised tomb meant a raised grave. Most of the little houses above the graves were slightly wider and slightly longer than a coffin. The depth of the grave—or graves—below determined how many members of a family might be stacked, one on top of another. The condition of the tombs varied wildly. Some were beautifully tended: the doors gleaming, the stained glass polished, and fresh flowers arranged on the little altars. I could see all this through the windows in many of the doors. Others, however, were in a sorry state of disrepair, their doors hanging off the hinges, dust, dirt, and dead leaves accumulating on their floors, the dry remains of long-forgot flowers crumbling inside.

  Cécile did not remain inside her husband’s tomb for long. She closed the door behind her and found me peeking into one of the more derelict tombs. “When one purchases a plot here, one is given a concession à perpétuité—they are to have the plot forever—so long as they tend to the grave. Ones like this”—she shrugged—“will eventually have their occupants exhumed to the Catacombs, and the space will be sold to another family.”

  “How awful.” The door was already partly open. I pulled it the rest of the way, its rusty hinges groaning. Inside, the stained glass was broken, large pieces of it missing. I brushed aside an enormous spider’s web with my parasol and looked at the carving on the wall:

  ICI REPOSE

  MME V GIFFART

  NÉE FLORETTE DAUVILLIER

  DÉCÉDÉE LE 9 MARS 1822

  À L’GE DE 23 ANS

  “So young to die.” I used my handkerchief to brush the dust of her inscription. “I wonder if she fell ill, or if it was childbirth, and why is no one taking care—”

  “You already fall victim to Père-Lachaise, Kallista. It is impossible to come and not wonder about the stories of all the people resting here. There is no time for it now. We must hurry to the Lamar family tomb.”

  My heart ached as I closed the door as far as it would go. Perhaps Florette had never had children, and her husband had remarried after her death. His new wife might not have wanted him tending to the grave of her predecessor, the woman up to whose memory she could never live. Or Florette’s husband could have died as well—with her, during an epidemic—I turned back, wanting to look at the other names on the walls, but Cécile took me firmly by the arm. “Another day, Kallista, you can return and study the dead.” We started back down the hill. “There is Molière—look quickly as we pass—it is easy to get confused on these roads and we don’t have time to get lost.”

  The playwright rested in a large stone sepulcher held above the ground by four thick columns. His having been one of the bodies moved in an attempt to lure others to the cemetery, I wondered what he would have made of his new digs. Cécile was dragging me along too quickly for me to give much consideration to the question. We cut across another avenue—each was named, and there were signposts at every intersection—and soon were in front of the Lamar family tomb. Although it could not really have been, it seemed even narrower than some of the others. A large stone cross jutted up from the front of its steeply peaked roof, below which, on the structure’s façade, was a small Gothic window above an ornate ironwork door. Everything about the tomb was pristine. The door was locked, but we could see inside through its window.

  “There is a wreath there,” I said, careful not to press my nose against the glass and leave a mark. “It looks fresh.”

  “We have missed her.” Cécile shrugged. “It was worth trying, but who knows when she came here. It may have been immediately upon her arrival in the city.”

  “How do we know it’s her wreath? Didn’t she have siblings?”

  “Half siblings, who were so displeased by the distribution of their father’s estate that I would fall over dead with shock if any of them ever came to his grave, let alone tend to it.”

  I sighed. “I do hope my dawdling didn’t ruin us.”

  “You didn’t really dawdle for long, Kallista. For all we know, she came even before we suspected she was back in Paris.”

  “This does seem to confirm she is here, somewhere. In Paris, that is.”

  “Oui,” Cécile said. “Come, I will show you my favorite tomb—”

  “We ought to start on the printers,” I interrupted.

  “It will not take long.” She led me to an imposing monument rising high above all those around it. Like Molière, this person did not have one of the little houses. Perhaps the famous among the dead preferred something more spectacular, more likely to draw the eye of every passerby. This sepulcher was topped by decorations of hideous winged skulls. A carving on a side panel depicted ordinary people cowering at the sight of demons and a grotesque flying skeleton.

  “Robertson,” I read off the tomb. “Étienne-Gaspard. I do not recognize the name.” Beneath the dates of his birth and death were three words:

  PHYSIQUE

  FANTASMAGORIE

  AEROSTATS

  “Monsieur Robertson was a magnificent magician,” Cécile explained. “He could conjure spirits in front of an audience—there was a scientific explanation, bien sûr, but who is interested in such a thing?—and his show was once banned when a royalist asked him to summon the ghost of the dead king. This was not long enough after the Revolution, you see.”

  “They forced him to stop?”

  “What else could they do? Have the king’s spirit floating about Paris unattended? I have often wondered whether his head had been returned to his body after death. At any rate, those who believe in the black arts insist that if one is to come here, after dark on a moonless night, one will see the skulls on Monsieur Robertson’s tomb dancing.”

  “You can’t possibly believe that.” I certainly didn’t, but neither could I deny the goose bumps prickling up my neck.

  “I have never been tempted to scale the walls after the cemetery is closed. Dancing skulls, to me, are not enough of an enticement to merit the effort.”

  “It is a dreadful thought. Let us leave the black arts behind us and enter a more pedestrian world: that of the printer.”

  * * *

  The trek from the far northeastern corner of the city back south of the Jardin du Luxembourg, into the Fourteenth Arrondissement, past the entrance to the Catacombs—I had had enough of the dead for one day—in the general direction of the Parc Montsouris, took long enough for Cécile to have a little snooze in the carriage. The printer we had visited in Saint-Germain-des-Prés had given us the address of a shop he knew in the neighborhood, and I planned to start our search there. The proprietor showed no signs of recognition when he looked at the samples I had brought with me of the pages the auburn-haired man had flung in the Tuileries, but he was quick to point out that he would never have made such an outrageous error in typesetting. He referred, of course, to the English manner in which the punctuation had been handled. The man was genial and kind, and made a list for us of his colleagues in the area. Fortunately for us, there were not too terribly many. If we were efficient, we would be able to speak with all of them before the afternoon was over.

  What followed was a series of visits that went much like our first. Every printer balked at the terrible way the punctuation had been butchered. No printer claimed the work as his own. At three o’clock Cécile insisted that we needed a bre
ak, so we took a table in a café across from the entrance to the Catacombs, where a line of tourists, fueled by morbid curiosity, waited to exchange a few coins for permission to descend below the ground.

  We had missed luncheon, so I took the opportunity to order a croque-monsieur, while Cécile chose an omelette aux fines herbes. We shared a small carafe of house wine. The warmth of the sun had lured us to sit outside, which made watching the progress of the Catacomb visitors impossible to avoid.

  “I object in the strongest of terms to the parade of individuals marching through that disgusting place.” This statement took me aback. So far as I knew, Cécile had no concerns about tourism in any other catacombs. She had toured them in Rome (I believe as part of a romantic rendezvous) and had pressed me for details of my own visit to the ones in Vienna (when I had refused Jeremy’s request to entomb his bones there).

  “What is so awful about these in particular, other than the piles of moldering bones?”

  “These skeletons come from all the old cemeteries of Paris, dug up in the last century and moved to what used to be part of les carrières—limestone mines. I cannot recall the details, only that when houses started sinking into the ground, the tunnels were rediscovered and repurposed. The bones of six million people—six million—are heaped up in the most grotesque arrangements: skulls one on top of another, femurs packed tight, sometimes combined to form repulsive little decorative shapes. Hearts, even. There is no dignity in it. None at all. It is one thing to choose to be interred in catacombs. It is another entirely to have your remains dug up and flung into a pit during what is meant to be a modern and enlightened age. The entire endeavor was rampantly unscrupulous.”

  I was trying to remember the story of the catacombs in Rome. So far as I could recall, the Christians had used them for burials, and they were decorated to honor the dead—no skulls forming precious patterns like hearts—and hence were deliberately chosen by the people who had lost their loved ones. The Paris Catacombs, it seemed, removed the humanity from its occupants. It reminded me a little of the derelict tombs in Père-Lachaise. There, too, no one was left to care about what happened to the mortal remains of individuals who, no doubt, had once been dearly loved.

  Cécile divided the rest of the wine between us. “I do not like things that are morbid.”

  “How can you say that when you have only just shown me the tomb of Étienne-Gaspard Robertson—surely that, and the accompanying stories—could be considered nothing but morbid.”

  “There is a difference, Kallista, between morbidly entertaining and morbidly depressing.”

  I considered her point. “I understand what you—”

  During the course of our meal, I had kept an eye on the tourists, as they were amusing to watch. Children tugged at their nurses’ hands—I wondered what their parents would have to say about the day’s outing—lovers looked at each other with mooning expressions, and an unaccountably large number of young gentlemen were all but chomping at the bit to gain entrance. Two of them caught my attention when they began balancing on the rail that ran around the garden that stood in the center of the circle where the queue had formed. One of them was about to fall, but what brought me in that instant to my feet was something else altogether.

  The auburn-haired man was walking in the street on the other side of the queue.

  Estella

  xv

  Morning light!

  Not sunlight, but the beam from Estella’s lamp. She had not slept well, a curious combination of anxiety and sadness disturbing her slumber all night, but was determined not to light the lamp until morning. This proved difficult, as reading the clock’s hands in the thick darkness of her room was well nigh impossible. When at last Estella struck a match, it was nearly nine o’clock. The lamp, now shining bright, illuminated the space around her with its warm golden glow. It was time to ready herself to leave.

  There was no need to rush. Her captor would not arrive until late afternoon—he would have to collect his money from the bank and then pay off the notorious usurers with whom he had entangled himself. Estella got dressed, tugging at her corset until it was tight enough that the clothes she had been wearing when he had abducted her would fit. That done, she completed her toilette, smoothed her doll’s hair—she had not yet bestowed upon her a name—and sat down on the slab, the doll on her lap. She studied the porcelain face, the green eyes that opened and closed, and the ringlets of dark hair that spilled from beneath a green velvet cap. Lucie. She would call her Lucie, after the girl in Monsieur Dickens’s novel.

  That decided, she collected the bits of food that still remained, the empty water flasks, and the full bottle of wine, and packed them back into the picnic basket. None of the food appealed to her. She wanted macarons. She tidied up her clothing, folding her nightdress and robe, along with the new items her captor had brought for her, and bundled them all up. She did not want to take them home with her, but also did not want to leave her little room a mess. Her boots, which she had carelessly discarded, she lined up against the wall, near to where the ladder would be lowered this afternoon. Satisfied with her work, she opened her book, but it did not fall open to the page she had marked, instead to one she had read before:

  Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.

  Estella sighed when she read this passage and touched the words, feeling the ink beneath her fingers. She said the words aloud, repeating them again and again, feeling a kinship to the man of good abilities and good emotions. Like him, she was incapable of her own help and her own happiness, but she would not—could not!—let it eat her away.

  She slammed the book shut, jumped down from the stone slab and walked the perimeter of her room. For the first time, the sound of her clock ticking plagued her, as if it were mocking her, counting down the rapidly diminishing number of seconds before she would be thrust back into the world. Tick! Tock! Tick! Tock! Estella was convinced the sound was growing louder, and she covered her ears against it, but to no avail. She picked up the clock and shook it, then raised her arm to fling it, with all her might, against the wall.

  But then she stopped and reconsidered.

  There was another way.

  16

  He was there—that villainous soul—just beyond my reach. Almost without thinking, I moved forward, ready to pursue him. Cécile grabbed me by the wrist. “We cannot risk alerting him to our presence.”

  She was right, but I was not about to let him disappear once again. Our waiter stood only a few steps away, taking an order at another table. I crossed to him, thrust at him a handful of coins, more than enough to cover our bill, and then took Cécile by the hand. “We shall follow at a reasonable and safe distance, taking every precaution against him seeing us.”

  We used the queue outside the Catacombs to block our initial approach, slouching to avoid detection as we made our way around the circle. I kept a close watch on our prey, who was headed south on the avenue d’Orléans. We kept on the opposite side of the street from him, taking great care to hide ourselves by staying behind individuals of, shall we say, greater girth than that possessed by either Cécile or myself. This proved problematic only once, after Cécile had taken on the idea that she would be even less visible if she adopted a (ridiculous) hunched-over position. Ambling along in this awkward pose, she bumped into the large person meant to be shielding her. This substantial individual, a lady clothed in an unattractive gown of burnt orange—a shade wholly at odds with the bright rouge painted onto her cheeks and lips—shrieked when she felt Cécile slam into her, and turned around, swinging her parasol as if it was a weapon she felt confident would be effective, but possessed no idea of how to wield.

  Cécile, abandoning the posture that had caused the trouble, made a quick apology and shoved past the woman. The aub
urn-haired man was nearly a block ahead of us as we approached the église Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge. The church, an excellent example of the Romanesque revival of our current century, rose beside us, its bell startling me when it clanged to life. At rue Beaunier, the man turned left, and following him on this smaller street proved more of a challenge, but, fortunately, a challenge we were able to meet, thanks to a few obliging doorways against which we pressed ourselves. The road ended at the avenue Reille, which he crossed and then turned immediately left, shortly thereafter making a quick right into a small, cobbled street, lined with unremarkable houses, that led directly into the Parc Montsouris.

  “Someone ought to pull all these houses down,” Cécile said. “This location lends itself to something rather more charming, don’t you think? Perhaps I should hire an architect—”

  I shushed her, paused outside the entrance to the park, and then poked my head through the gate. The auburn-haired man was almost out of my sight. Following him through the park proved significantly more difficult than it had in the street. Although the grounds were full of trees and hedges, the paths cut through them were not so crowded as one would hope when in the midst of a clandestine operation. He traversed the park while we kept a fair distance behind, using our parasols to block our faces whenever we feared he might turn around and see us. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the gates on the opposite edge. He crossed out of one of them and back into the street.

  From there, he took a circuitous route to a modest apartment building, whose address I recognized at once as the one Jeremy had identified as Swiveller’s. We hung back as he opened the door with a key and entered the building. I studied the windows after he had disappeared inside, hoping that the flutter of a curtain or the raising of a sash might alert us to the location of his particular apartment. Alas, it was not to be.