The Adventuress

by Tasha Alexander

  “Most sorry for having disturbed you, Monsieur Soucy,” Colin said, and introduced us. “We have come to inquire after your tenant, Hélène Mignon.”

  “She is away, visiting her mother,” the man said.

  “May we take a look at her rooms?” I asked. “We are quite concerned about her. Her mother has informed us that Hélène never made it to Marseille, and we are hoping to find something—anything—that can explain her change of plans, if indeed it was she who changed them.”

  “Never reached Marseille? That is rather alarming,” he said, and ushered us inside. “The stairs are narrow and steep. Do be careful. I apologize for my appearance. I am working late tonight to prepare an order for a wedding feast tomorrow.”

  “There is no need to apologize,” Colin said. “It is we who have interrupted you.”

  We followed him up four flights of stairs to a battered door in the attic. He fumbled with the keys on a large ring, trying several before settling on the one that fit in the lock. “I never have been able to keep track of these well, but then I rarely have cause to come up here.” When at last the door swung open, a vile, overwhelming odor seemed to blast from the room. The stairway had been illuminated by gas lights, but Hélène’s apartment did not have any, so her landlord struck a match and lit an oil lamp that stood on a small table next to the door.

  Colin picked up the lamp, and we began to inspect the space. There was only one small room, furnished with a bed and two tables, one with a chair near the gabled window, the other by the door. A dresser was placed on the wall next to the bed, and on top of it was a pitcher and basin set. On the larger table was a package, wrapped in butcher’s paper.

  “I gave her a beef roast to take to her mother,” the butcher said. “She must have forgot it and now it’s a rotting mess.” The smell was so strong I nearly retched. “I had better open the window.” He tugged at the sash until it lifted, but the small amount of air it let in did little to dissipate the aroma clinging to everything in the room.

  A scrap of pale green muslin peeking out from under the bed had caught my eye and I reached to pull it out, a sinking feeling coming over me as I tugged and found it weighted down. I tugged harder and felt something hit my arm and looked down to see a cold, bluish hand. “Colin, could you please bring the lamp over here?”

  Amity

  Baccarat proved not quite so entertaining as Amity had expected it to be. The casino was beautiful—she loved the crowded rooms, the plush carpets, the glistening chandeliers, and the overwhelming sense of excitement—but the games themselves? Amity much preferred poker. Yet Jeremy was taken with baccarat, and bet again and again.

  “If you always bet on the banker, you shall come out ahead in the end,” Amity said, after more than an hour of watching him.

  “It is not that simple, my love.” He hardly even looked at her.

  “I am going to try a different game. You don’t mind, do you?” Now she had his attention.

  “Have I bored you? I am a cad, I know. I get too caught up in it. Just when I think I have it all figured out, I lose everything.”

  “Perhaps, then, this is a good time to stop,” Amity said. “I quite fancy roulette.” He pressed a stack of chips into her hand.

  “Let us see if your luck is better than mine.”

  Roulette was straightforward; there was no pretense of heavy thinking or strategy, no numbers to add up and consider, despite what the portly gentleman to Amity’s left insisted as he narrated his plans in a gratingly loud voice. She lost as often as she won and found she enjoyed both sensations equally. Losing felt so rough and real, she could not help but welcome it.

  “You are up a shocking amount,” Jeremy said. This was not true, Amity knew, but she had amassed a large stack of markers—no larger than what he had given her to start—so he assumed, like any gentleman to whom money is meaningless, that she must be winning. “Let’s have some champagne and sit for a while. I am so enjoying having you all to myself.”

  “I do hope Daddy hasn’t been tiring you out with all his talk of business. He does go on.” As they crossed the gaming floor and came out into the bright atrium, Amity caught a glimpse of two familiar figures. “Heavens! Is that the Hargreaveses?”

  “It is,” Jeremy replied, immediately stepping forward to flag them down.

  Amity gripped his arm. “Wouldn’t you rather we stayed alone? Have our champagne and then, perhaps, go for a stroll on the beach?”

  Jeremy laughed. “You would risk your reputation by allowing me to take you for a wholly unsupervised turn on the beach? At night? Have you no sense of decorum?”

  “None at all.” Amity lifted herself up onto her tiptoes and kissed him. “I am wild and wanton.”

  “You ought not do that here.”

  “Are you blushing?” Amity asked.

  “Of course not.” Jeremy pulled a face and brushed off the front of his jacket. “I merely have no desire to create a scene.”

  “We are to be married, my love. I do not think one brief kiss shall brand us as immoral, and even if it did, I should think that would appeal to your desire for debauchery.”

  “Quite right,” Jeremy said, tugging at his shirt cuffs. “Apologies.” He took her by the hand. “Why don’t we bring the champagne onto the beach?” He found a barman willing to give them a bottle, but not glasses, to remove from the premises.

  “I don’t understand why he cares where we drink it,” Amity said, “but I suppose he is right to be protective with his crystal. We probably would have dropped something before the night was over.”

  They fairly flew down the steps outside the main entrance, danced along the street, and crossed to the other side. “Should we go all the way down to the hotel?” Jeremy asked.

  “Not our hotel,” Amity said. “We don’t want to see anyone we know.” She started off in the opposite direction of the hotel.

  “It is too cold for anyone to be out, really, so I doubt very much that we would run any danger of—”

  “Come.” Now she took his hand and pulled him behind her. The air had turned chill, and she wished she had a warmer wrap with her, but Amity was not about to let the temperature dampen her spirits. They walked along La Croisette until they reached the quai with the ferry dock. “I saw a very pleasant little beach along here from the boat the other day.” She hiked up her skirts so that she could climb over the large boulders that separated the sand from the pavement. Jeremy rushed to get ahead of her so that he might offer her assistance, but she refused, nimbly navigating the rocks on her own. Before she stepped off the last one, she paused. “I have never been able to abide the feeling of sand in my shoes.”

  “I can carry you.”

  “No.” She sat down on a rock and pulled off her shoes. “Now you must look away. No cheating.” He could hear the rustle of silk. “All clear,” she said. He turned back to her and she was waving her stockings and laughing. This prompted him to remove his own shoes and socks, and they tramped across the beach in high spirits. Jeremy popped open the champagne and they guzzled it, straight from the bottle.

  “I never thought, my love, that there could be a girl like you.” He passed her the bottle. “You are a marvel.”

  “And you are a dear, sweet man,” she said, and then took another swig of champagne. “That’s the bottle, all but gone. Now will you let me kiss you?”

  15

  The sight of that poor, cold—and obviously dead—hand stunned me. I could barely control my voice, and my limbs were shaking so hard that I sat on the floor, uncertain whether I would be able to keep my balance. I did my best to steady myself and again asked Colin to bring the lamp.

  “I am afraid that I have found Hélène,” I said. Colin handed the lamp to the landlord, who held it above while my husband gently reached under the bed and pulled out the sad little body from beneath it. The butcher gasped and the light swayed. His wobble focused my own nerves, and I rose to my feet and stood next to him. “Is it she?” I asked. He no
dded. I took the lamp.

  Despite the discoloration and bloating of her body, one could still see a delicate beauty in her fine features. Her dark eyes were open, with that hideous blank look that marks the dead and leaves no doubt that the soul has fled from the flesh.

  “She has been dead for some time,” Colin said. “The back of her skull is badly fractured.”

  “I should have known,” the butcher said. “I should have noticed the smell. I—”

  “None of us noticed the smell until you opened the door,” Colin said. “Be a good fellow and summon the police for us.”

  “I don’t understand. She was to visit her mother. She must have fallen. If only—”

  Colin took him by the shoulders. “Right now, we must get the police, as quickly as possible. Can you do that for us?”

  “Yes. I should tell my wife—”

  “First, the police.”

  “All these days and she was here—”

  “I’ll go,” I said quietly to Colin. “Get him to sit down and do your best to calm him. He is in shock.” I pulled the blanket off the top of the bed and wrapped it around the man’s shoulders.

  “You are far better at this sort of thing than I,” Colin said. “I can get the police—”

  “I cannot bear to be in here with her for a single moment longer,” I said, the words tumbling out in a rush. He gripped my hand and let me go. I was in such a rush to get away from the hideous smell of death and the awful look on Hélène’s once beautiful face that I nearly fell down the stairs. When I reached the bottom, I pushed the door open and ran straight into the quiet street, gulping in the fresh air. Our cab was waiting for us at the curb, and once I had collected myself enough to speak coherently to the driver, I ordered him to take me to the police.

  I was moving through a haze and have no memory of speaking to anyone at the station, but must have done, because now I was back in the cab, a gendarme next to me. “The coroner will follow us shortly,” he said. “You say she has been dead for some time?”

  When we reached Monsieur Soucy’s building, I did not accompany the officer up the stairs. I could not bear to face again the horror of what that smell meant. The coroner arrived with his van and three more gendarmes followed shortly thereafter. The commotion had, not surprisingly, aroused the curiosity of the butcher’s wife, who had marched upstairs to see what was happening, only to turn on her heels and flee. She stood next to me.

  “I did not see her,” Madame Soucy said. “They would not let me in the room.” She was a sturdy, strong woman, thickly built, with kind eyes and greying hair pulled back in a tight knot at the nape of her neck. “I only kept renting to her because I thought she was a good girl, no matter what the implications of that job of hers. She did not run around with unsavory gentlemen. Never made a spectacle of herself.”

  “Can you think of anyone who would have wanted to hurt her?” I asked.

  “Hélène was a sweet girl.” Her voice broke. “Always had a kind word for everyone. She had wanted to join the ballet in Paris, but her mother forbad it, and she came here. Worked for a while as a maid at one of the fancy hotels, but that’s awful labor, waiting on the ungrateful rich.” She looked away from me. “Apologies.”

  “There is no need,” I said.

  “When they started doing performances at the casino, she auditioned. I warned her off it, but she wouldn’t hear me. The money was better, that much is certain, but I was never convinced it came on anything but very hard terms.”

  “Did she have many friends?” I asked.

  “The other girls she worked with adored her. One of them came round looking for her the other day. I gave her a piece of cake and some coffee and tried to convince her to look for other work. Sickens me to think that all the while poor Hélène was upstairs—” She stifled a sob. I put my arm around her.

  “I think we could all use some very strong coffee. May I help you make it?”

  In the aftermath of violent death, it often helps to give survivors a task on which they can focus. While Madame Soucy made the coffee, I took cups from a shelf in her pantry and put them on the kitchen table. “Hélène ate with us,” Madame Soucy said. “She paid for room and board. There is no kitchen in her room.”

  “You must have known her fairly well, then,” I said. Madame Soucy handed me a creamer and asked me to fill it. I looked around, and she pointed me to a deep windowsill where she stored her milk. The glass bottle was cool from the night air.

  “Not well enough, apparently.” She filled the cups and sat at the table. “You say she was murdered?”

  “I am afraid so.”

  “But it was her head, was it not? Couldn’t she have fallen?”

  “Even if she had, it would have been unlikely to have resulted in such an extreme wound. Furthermore, she was tucked under the bed. A blow strong enough to kill her would have rendered her unconscious, and she would not have been able to move.”

  “If only I had heard something or seen someone.”

  “Are you here most of the time?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did Hélène have many callers?”

  “Callers? Lady Emily, I do not think you understand our circumstances here. Hélène did not have callers. Her friends—the other girls from the casino—came occasionally to collect her. Other than that, no one ever came looking for her.”

  “Do you remember the day she was to go to Marseille?” I asked.

  “Oui, my husband prepared for her an excellent piece of meat to take to her mother.”

  “That is a generous gift.”

  “Hélène was careful with her money. We knew she could not afford to bring something for her mother, so we thought we would offer something.”

  “I imagine she would have got it from you just before she planned to leave for Marseille?”

  “Oui. She would not have wanted the meat to spoil.”

  “Yet she brought it back up to her room. I noticed no portmanteau there. Had she carried her luggage down with her when she came to get the meat?”

  “This I do not recall.”

  “Did you give her the roast?”

  “Non, we left it for her in the back so that she could fetch it whenever she wanted without disturbing us. Mornings are busy in our shop.”

  “Had you planned that?” I asked.

  “We left a note on her door the evening before so that she would see it when she returned home from work.”

  A clatter on the stairs signaled that the men had finished in Hélène’s room. All the color drained from Madame Soucy’s face. “Are they bringing her down?”

  I nodded. Only after I had heard the sound of the coroner’s van doors closing did I step back outside. Colin clasped my hand in his as we watched it drive away. We exchanged a few more words with the gendarmes before returning to our cab.

  “There was no valise in her room,” I said.

  “I noticed the same thing,” Colin said.

  “What a dreadful thing. I shall never forget her face.” I fought to control my nerves. “She was to take the eleven o’clock train the morning after Mr. Wells’s party at the casino.”

  “And we know that she did return home,” Colin said. “The gendarmes are going to question the neighbors to see if anyone saw her come in, and whether she was alone.”

  “Is that Augustus?” I pressed my face to the dingy window of the cab. Colin rapped on the wall to signal the driver to stop. A thin figure in evening kit stood in the distance, leaning against a streetlight, but before I could see his face, he turned around and disappeared into the darkness. In a swift move, Colin followed, but he returned soon after, shaking his head.

  “I could not find him,” he said. “Too many winding streets and too little light.”

  It was before midnight when we returned to the hotel, and the lobby was teeming with activity. There were several lively groups in the lounge, and a party of gentlemen, whom I supposed were returning from the casino, made a loud entrance.
Behind them, I saw Jeremy and Amity.

  “You ought to speak to him,” I said to Colin. “If he was with Hélène…”

  “Of course.”

  “Should I say anything to Amity?”

  “Not now, I don’t think,” he said. “There is no point in troubling her.” He gave me a quick kiss and headed for Jeremy. “Bainbridge, you are just the gentleman I require. Join me in the smoking room? I have some particularly fine cigars and I have never known you to object to whisky.”

  Amity did not look pleased to see her fiancé pried off her arm. “We ought to insist on going with them,” she said. “What are we left to do if they are so ready to abandon us?”

  “Ladies are not allowed in the smoking room.” I frowned. “I approve no more than you do of this slight. Did you enjoy the casino?”

  “It was everything I hoped,” she said. “Did you?”

  “Me?”

  “We saw you and Colin but couldn’t get your attention. We had wanted you to join us for champagne. Did my mother do something to make you flee her little fête?”

  “Not at all,” I said.

  “Then you have smoothed over the incident of the hat?”

  “Only so far as keeping her from insisting on placing the blame on me. Tomorrow I hope to start gathering answers as to who might have purchased it.”

  “I do not doubt you shall succeed.” Her eyes were bright and her hair was escaping from its pins. “Are you as taken with baccarat as Jeremy? I found it tedious, but promise me you will never tell him so.”

  “I would not dream of it. We were at the casino only briefly. Colin had to consult on a matter of business. Of course he would tell me nothing about it.” I hoped that lie would stop her questions.

  “What would the gentlemen say if we insisted on as many secrets as they have?” Amity asked. “I promised Christabel I would go to her the moment I returned. Will you excuse me?” We bade each other good night, and I watched her go. Her hair was in a state of some disarray, as was her gown. The hem was damp, and sand clung to it. Obviously she had not spent the evening in the casino any more than I had. I waited until she had entered the lift to go upstairs myself, and then took the stairs to Cécile’s room, where, as I had hoped, I found both her and Margaret. Margaret, who was standing on a chair, was reading aloud from Virgil.