“That is what it says on his papers for Dr. Maynard’s Formula. The doll receipts were written up for a Wilkins Micawber.”
“I presume that to be a name from yet another of the novels of Monsieur Dickens?”
“David Copperfield. Mr. Micawber is a financial disaster, but exceptionally kind. One can only surmise that our Farrington considers himself in possession of similar qualities.” The observant reader may have wondered whether I had forgot my—and Jeremy’s—earlier theory regarding our villain and the works of Mr. Dickens. Rest assured, I had not. The addition of Mr. Micawber provided just the insight I needed into the character of Farrington Jones (a name worthy of Dickens himself). Mr. Jones viewed himself as a good man, but one embroiled in some sort of criminal activity. His finances were a mess. His purchase of the dolls—each was expensive in the extreme—could be taken as a generous gesture to Estella’s obvious passion for the objects. What I could not decide was why he had not given her the doll we found in his wardrobe. Had she died in captivity before he could make the gift? I shuddered, picturing an eerie image of Estella clutching her four dolls in a dark tunnel of the Catacombs until death released them from her arms.
I could not let myself be distracted by such morbid thoughts. I took care as I combed through the rest of the documents in the drawer, going so far as to revisit the ones I had rejected as uninteresting before finding the doll receipts. I had not noticed it at first, but upon second study, I realized the significance of the papers that now lay in my lap. Mr. Jones had purchased a motley collection of items from a number of vendors: ammonia, scrubbing brushes, heavy work gloves, ribbon, wire, and a considerable quantity of mortar.
“Mortar?” Cécile blanched when I showed them to her. “You don’t think he has walled her in?”
I did not answer her question, but I had a fair idea of where we would find Estella.
Estella
xx
Egypt was exactly—down to the most insignificant detail—how Estella imagined it. Limestone monuments gleamed. The waters of the Nile reflected the sunlight as dancing jewels. The natives adored her. The temperature was not so fierce as she had feared.
But that last should have come as no surprise.
Miss Hexam delighted her, anticipating her needs and reminding her of things that she should have Monsieur Jones collect. Miss Hexam preferred French food to Egyptian, and Estella agreed, although she suspected that if Monsieur Jones were left to his own devices, he would seek out the dark cafés frequented by the natives. Estella insisted on things she knew would cause no digestive disturbances—had she not done so from the beginning?—and never had cause to regret it.
Having run through all her Egyptian books, Estella followed Monsieur Jones’s advice and read all of the works of Monsieur Dickens. She settled on Bleak House as her favorite, adoring Esther, and read over and over one passage:
I found every breath of air, and every scent, and every flower and leaf and blade of grass and every passing cloud, and everything in nature, more beautiful and wonderful to me than I had ever found it yet. This was my first gain from my illness. How little I had lost, when the wide world was so full of delight for me.
A shot of understanding coursed through Estella every time she read it. She knew what it was to find the world more enchanting than one had before thought possible. She knew what it was to be gone from it and then back—back to a place wholly different from what it had been before—back to a place that proved to her how little she had lost.
Estella bit into the last macaron in her box. She was going to read Belzoni again.
21
I sat beside Cécile in the carriage and held her hand the whole way back to the Catacombs. I reminded her that ammonia was often used to revive ladies from a faint, but she reminded me that in such cases, one used the solid form rather than the liquid.
“It is why, Kallista, they are called smelling salts, not smelling spirits.”
Colin and Jeremy were not above ground when we arrived, but the officer stationed at the entrance—the police activity at the site had caused a crowd to gather, and he was meant to keep them back—let us down the narrow steps after supplying us with candles and matches. At the bottom of the stairway, we reached a sizable vestibule that led to a stone doorway, carved over which were the words Arrête! C’est ici l’empire de la mort. Were we not on so important an errand, I might indeed have given pause before entering the empire of death. We followed the sound of voices along tunnels lined from floor to ceiling with neat stacks of bones, and I found I agreed with Cécile’s earlier judgment of the place. Here, the dead had lost their humanity. We reached two policemen, who at first mistook us for tourists who had somehow managed to finagle our way past the guard upstairs. A quick explanation led one of them to accompany us in search of my husband.
For more than half an hour we meandered through the subterranean maze, eventually turning in a direction not marked by the black arrows painted on the ceilings to guide the tourist route. The path became dirtier, littered with dust and chips of bones. Twenty more minutes and, at last, I heard Colin’s voice in the distance.
“Emily! What are you doing here?” He came to me the moment we were within sight of him. I leaned close and explained my theory in a hushed voice. He nodded, and laid a gentle hand on my arm. “I am afraid you are most likely right. How is Cécile?”
“As you would imagine. Not altogether well, but she insisted on accompanying me. I could hardly deny her.”
“Of course not.”
“It will take us nearly an hour to get back out, so I think we had better set off without delay,” I said.
“It will be quicker to leave through Jones’s cellar. We are closer to that than to the public entrance.”
“If only I had known.”
“I don’t think time will make any difference at this point, my dear.” I bit my lips and wished I could believe otherwise.
Jeremy had already taken charge of Cécile, and kept close hold of her as we traversed the route to our chosen exit. She looked ill when we reached that passage I remembered all too well, the one with bones scattered all over, where there was no way forward but to wade through them. Jeremy, sensing her discomfort, picked her up and carried her across to the steps rising from the far end of the tunnel. When at last we emerged through the door in the cellar wall, the policemen on guard registered a great deal of shock at seeing us ladies. They took it in stride, however. We collected a shovel, hand trowel, and wooden bucket from a corner and made our way upstairs. The concierge did not even bother to scowl at us as we passed her window.
The only cabs to be seen at that moment were open victorias, which only seated two. Colin and I—my husband carrying the tools—stepped into the first we hailed. Jeremy and Cécile would follow. It took nearly forty minutes to reach our destination, and we arrived at the gates of Père-Lachaise just as the closing bell rang, warning those visitors inside that they had only half an hour in which to make their way to the front and leave. Jeremy and Cécile approached as Colin was finishing speaking with the custodian, who, after seeing the letter from the Sûreté, agreed to let us take as much time as necessary.
The cemetery shut at seven o’clock, but fortunately for us, the light would last much beyond that on this summer evening. Cécile led us to the Lamar tomb. I held her hand while Colin picked the lock. The man at the gate had sent one of his colleagues with us—not another custodian, but a gravedigger, who had rejected our motley collection of tools, giving preference to his own. He used a crowbar to lift one of the stones in the floor, revealing a dark, narrow crypt below. Colin pulled off his coat and stepped forward to assist him. The top of a coffin was visible approximately six feet below the floor. Together, the two men worked to wrench the lid off it.
“Emily, Cécile, please turn away.” Colin’s voice, full of force, was not to be ignored. We followed his directions without complaint. I could hear the hideous sound of wood straining and the creak of metal.
“It is not she.”
Despite myself, I turned around. “Are you certain?” I peered into the open grave. Inside were the remains of a gentleman, remnants of a gray beard still visible on his badly decayed face. “Monsieur Lamar?”
“Most likely. I do not think there is reason to believe he would have removed her father’s coffin and put hers beneath. That would have been a complicated enough procedure to draw unwanted attention. Adding a single coffin on top of the rest would be much simpler.”
I stepped away from the tomb, and crossed the narrow cobbled street, where I pressed my hands against the cool wall of another monument, supporting my weight as I bent forward and did my best not to be sick. The sound of banging indicated that they were now closing the coffin.
“Why did he not bury her with her parents?” Cécile was behind me, her voice choked. “It makes no sense.”
“Perhaps he thought it would cause him to be discovered.”
“So where is she?”
“We may never know, Cécile.” Jeremy put an arm around her shoulder. “I am so very sorry.”
I was about to add my condolences when I noticed a wreath on a nearby simple slab grave. The inscription had long since been eaten away by rain and erosion, and the stone itself was not in good shape. Yet someone had taken the time to leave a memento. A memento, that if I remembered correctly—
I crossed back to the Lamar tomb. The gravedigger had not yet replaced the heavy stone in the crypt, but from outside I could see the wreath we believed Estella had left. It was nearly identical to the one on the slab. A quick study of the rest of the street revealed similar wreaths on—or in—three more tombs, each of which had clearly fallen into disrepair. As I examined them, I pointed out to my friends the evidence of recent repairs. On one, the door’s hinges had recently been oiled. On another, there were signs of fresh mortar having been applied where the stone must have crumbled.
“We cannot dig up grave after grave, Emily,” Colin said.
“I am perfectly well aware of that, but we may be able to spot some sort of a sign. Don’t you think that if he put her somewhere else, it would have been in a place he felt was appropriate? He bought her dolls, Colin. He must have had some warm feelings toward her, even if he did—”
“Yes, it is not uncommon for—” He stopped and looked at Cécile. “Madame du Lac, there is no need for you to stay here any longer. I assure you that Emily and I will—”
“I want to help,” Cécile said. “I know better than any of you what a—friend does not seem the right word—person acquainted with Estella might deem appropriate.”
We divided into pairs. Cécile and Jeremy would search the streets to the west of the avenue Principale, the wide drive that started at the main gate, while Colin and I would focus on the ones to the east. This gave us a larger area to cover, but we thought it best to give Cécile the less overwhelming task. The gravedigger stood, listening silently as we mapped out our strategy. Once Cécile and Jeremy had set off and gone almost out of sight, he approached my husband.
“There is a man, a very good man, who does much work restoring the deserted tombs in this cemetery. He is the one who places these wreaths for which you now search.”
“Could you describe him?” Colin asked.
“His hair is of a ginger color and his mustaches—”
“Farrington Jones!” I did not need to hear any more to identify the wretched man.
“You are a friend of Monsieur Jones?” the gravedigger asked.
“You know him as Monsieur Jones?” I could feel the deepening furrows on my brow. I would have expected another nom de guerre.
“Bien sûr. He is a favorite here. He comes nearly every day, always with fresh flowers, and always to make repairs.” This fully explained the items on Mr. Jones’s receipts that had led me to the cemetery.
“Are there any places in particular on which he focuses?” Colin asked. The gravedigger shrugged.
“He works everywhere in the cemetery. He doesn’t want anyone to lose his space, you see.”
“Of course.” I turned to Colin. “Cécile explained to me that if tombs become too derelict, the bodies are exhumed and the plots sold to someone else. Making repairs when there are no relations left to oversee them ensures that the bodies will remain where they were buried.” I took out the map I had pulled from my Baedeker’s guide before leaving Cécile’s, and held it up to the gravedigger, asking him if there was anywhere in particular he thought we should focus on during our search. The grounds covered more than a hundred acres; without direction, we might never find Estella. Alas, the man only shrugged, and told us that he could offer no advice. He wished us luck, then sheepishly slunk off, explaining that his wife would not forgive him if he were late for dinner.
“What a pity Mr. Dickens isn’t buried here. That would make things simpler.” I studied the map, focusing on the names of the famous personages identified on it, but there were none that struck me as particularly meaningful to Estella. “I don’t suppose you know the names of any famous doll makers?”
“I think it best that we work our way to the end of one street, go over to the next, and work our way back and forth, accordingly. Proceeding in an orderly fashion will in the end save time by allowing us to keep track of our progress.”
I agreed, and his method worked well enough on the central streets that kept to the basic shape of a grid, but many of the others did not, instead forming loops and curves. These were at best confusing and at worst caused us to lose our way, as it was not always a simple task to follow them. Many times we were forced to double back in order to make sure we had not missed a single tomb. Colin kept to the one side of every street, I to the other, and we made notes about each grave upon which Mr. Jones had left a wreath, as well as ones that showed signs of recent restoration. After two hours of this, I was growing frustrated. The shadowy veils of dusk had started to cover the sky. Colin had brought with him two lanterns, and had given one to Jeremy and Cécile. As the sun slipped away, he lit ours, and our search became even less efficient, as we could no longer cover opposite sides of the street simultaneously.
We had fallen into confusion after following the Chemin du Dragon to its end, where it curved off in three separate directions, and we were soon circling section number 28, seemingly over and over. “We have passed the Hertford family vault at least three times,” I said, indicating a stone tomb to our left, large enough to house myriad coffins. “A structure such as that wouldn’t require a crypt, would it?”
“It would not require it, but if the family wanted a chapel aboveground … are you thinking what I am?”
“Yes. If Mr. Jones chose a large tomb, he might not have had to dig to dispose of Estella.” This observation renewed our resolve, and we continued our quest with more vigor than before. We had agreed that when darkness fell, we would meet Jeremy and Cécile at the large chapel that stood on the top of a hill almost in the center of the cemetery. I did not like to stop our search, even for this, but I had no choice. With only one lantern between us, I could not continue without Colin.
Cécile, exhausted and drawn, begged off continuing. She could not face any more tombs. Jeremy wanted to go with Colin, leaving me to sit with Cécile, but my husband thought it best to not leave ladies unaccompanied, so we promised to come for them as soon as we had exhausted the secrets of the cemetery. We returned to section 28, neither of us feeling satisfied that we had finished exploring it. Halfway down a row of graves that stood so close together the effect was almost claustrophobic was one not so large as the Hertfords’, but three times as wide as its narrow neighbors.
“It is not derelict,” Colin said.
“Excellent care has been taken of it, but there are signs of repairs, especially on the corners. The mortar looks newer than the stone.” Godeau was carved over the door, which was locked. Holding the lamp up to it, I tried to peer inside, but could see nothing in the darkness.
“I think we should keep moving.” Coli
n took the lantern from my hand and we stepped back onto the cobbled street.
“Wait.” I pointed to a carving on the step below the door: a pyramid entwined by vines that ended with a flower on either side. It was identical to the image on the bottles of Dr. Maynard’s Patented Formula I had retrieved from Mr. Jones’s drawer. I explained this to Colin, who immediately set about picking the lock to the tomb.
“It is well oiled and clearly used regularly,” he said, as it snapped open. He held the lantern above his head and we stepped inside.
There were no wreaths or flowers here, and the space, approximately ten feet wide, though large enough to have housed numerous coffins, contained none. It was a chapel, grander than those in some of the smaller tombs, having four stained-glass windows and a padded kneeler—its upholstery looked almost brand-new—in front of a marble altar.
“The last burial here was in 1838.” I read the names of the Godeau family off the inscriptions on the wall. “He must have put her here. The careful maintenance would serve two purposes—it prevents the tomb from falling derelict and, hence, from being exhumed, and it assuages his guilt.”
“If he feels any.” Colin was examining the floor, looking for the spot in which he should apply the crowbar he had borrowed from the gravedigger. “The crypt below will be large enough that I may have to descend to inspect the coffins. I have a rope, but there is nothing to which we can safely secure it.”
“You could use it to lower me—”
“My dear, I do not want you—”
“I cannot bear to wait even another hour to find out what happened to Estella. Please, Colin. If we tie it around my waist using a knot that—”
“I am well aware of the best way to approach such a task.” His dark eyes met mine. “You are quite certain you want to attempt it?”
“There is no danger. The dead cannot hurt me.”
The Counterfeit Heiress: A Lady Emily Mystery (Lady Emily Mysteries) Page 24
