Dangerous to Know

by Tasha Alexander

  “Would you like the plat du jour?” she asked, scrubbing vigorously, her rough accent making it hard for me to understand her French. “Chicken with tarragon sauce and potatoes.”

  I wasn’t particularly hungry, but Colin instructed her to bring the special to both of us. “Gives an excuse to be here longer,” he said after she’d disappeared into the kitchen.

  “I fear for our health,” I said. “But we are in France, so there’s a distinct possibility that rather than poisoning us, this will be the single most spectacular meal we’ve ever eaten.”

  “Let’s just hope our poor poulet was better treated than the boar,” he said. He patted my hand. “I’ll be right back.” He walked up to the bar and spoke to the surly looking man standing behind it. From a distance, their exchange appeared congenial enough, and a few minutes later my husband returned carrying two glasses of tart cider. “I told the bartender that your cousin—your French cousin—was engaged to a girl who wound up here, and that he visited her constantly despite his parents forbidding it. When his father, despot that he is, tried to interfere, your cousin left home and disappeared. We, of course, are here in search of him.”

  “So what did he say?” I asked.

  The girl returned with our food before he could answer. She dropped the plates in front of us, uninterested in preserving the cook’s unexpectedly beautiful presentation. “You’re looking for a man?” she asked.

  “We are,” I said. “My cousin.”

  “He told me,” she said, tossing her head in the direction of the bar. “We’ve a gent who used to come in here. Sounds like it could be him, but he ain’t been around for the last couple of months. Thing is, he always said he was visiting his mother, not his fiancée.”

  “He wouldn’t have wanted to draw any attention to what he was really doing, lest his family discovered the attachment was still very much alive.” Fiction, it seemed, came easily to me. “Can you remember when you last saw him?”

  “Springtime, I think. That was the last time he came regular, at least. Seems like he was here once more, just a few weeks ago, but I didn’t talk to him and can’t be sure.”

  “Did you usually speak to him?” Colin asked.

  “He was very chatty,” she said.

  “Did he ever say where he lived?” I asked.

  “He kept a room at Madame Renaldi’s. The house across from the church?”

  Colin thanked her and dug into his chicken as soon as she’d left us to our food. “This,” he said, “is extraordinary. Have you tasted it?”

  The sauce was tangy perfection, the meat moist and flavorful. But I was still unnerved, still unsure as to what to think about this new turn in our relationship. I didn’t like being an unequal partner—or equal but different, whatever that meant—and I didn’t like the fact that it was distracting me from the work at hand. I took one more bite, but found I could stomach no more. Colin, unperturbed, traded his empty plate for my nearly full one and polished off my meal.

  “I know this is hard, Emily,” he said. “But it’s for the best. I’m not going to keep you from a fulfilling life. I hope you know that. Trust me, my dear. Together, we’ll find our way through this.” He folded his napkin into a crisp rectangle and placed it on the table. “Are you willing to miss dessert in favor of Madame Renaldi?”

  “Mais oui,” I said, fixing a smile on my face. I wanted real emotion back, but all I could summon felt false, painted on. “Lead me where you will. I can’t think of a worthier person to follow.”

  21

  Bright blue shutters lined the walls of Madame Renaldi’s stone house, and matching flowerboxes, overflowing with red and yellow blossoms, hung from each window. The proprietress herself greeted us at the door and ushered us into a comfortable and welcoming sitting room. Colin did a neat job explaining why we’d come, and I managed a few tears to lend verisimilitude of his story of my poor, missing cousin.

  “I can assure you Monsieur Myriel was an ideal tenant,” she said, as if the words would soothe a grieving relation. “He wasn’t here often, and always left his room in good order.”

  “Did he only stay when he visited the asylum?” Colin asked.

  “He did. But he said he wanted to keep the room available in case his mother—he told me he was visiting his mother—took a turn for the worse. He liked the idea that there was a little home waiting for him whenever he needed it. And his own house was so far away—near Marseilles, I think it was—he needed somewhere to sleep when he was here.”

  “When did you last see him?” I asked.

  “It’s been several months at least. I received a letter saying his mother had died and that he wouldn’t be back. He included a final month’s rent. Never collected the things he’d left in the room, though, and didn’t give a forwarding address so I could send them. Could I give them to you? I do hate holding on to someone else’s possessions.”

  “Of course,” I said, giving her what I hoped was a poignant yet weak smile. “When he resurfaces, we’ll be sure he gets them.”

  Colin carried the wooden crate she gave us to the carriage, slipped it inside, and went to speak to the driver.

  I settled into my seat, pulling the box close to me and opening its top. The contents appeared ordinary enough: two clean, white shirts, fresh socks, other assorted items of clothing, a razor, shaving lotion, a pen and ink. A neat pile of books, their spines facing up, was stacked down one side: L’Année Terrible, a book of poems about the Franco-Prussian War by Victor Hugo, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Émile Zola’s La Bête Humaine, and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. A small, leather-bound notebook and a golden watch missing its chain had been wrapped in a linen handkerchief embroidered with the initials HPC.

  The notebook appeared the most promising, until I flipped through the smooth, cream-colored pages and found them all blank. Ragged edges near the binding suggested some sheets had been removed, and not neatly, but as they’d been taken from the back, not the front, I couldn’t study later pages in hope of discovering indentations left behind. The watch appeared extremely old—older than the date, 9 November 1870, engraved on the inside. The case showed remnants of ornate decoration, but the detail had been mostly rubbed off, no doubt from frequent use over many years.

  “Anything interesting?” Colin asked, as he climbed in next to me. “Possibly,” I said. We lurched forward as the driver urged on the horses.

  “Are you all right, Emily?”

  “Not entirely. Last night’s revelations sent me reeling.”

  “I appreciate that,” he said, his voice grave. “But rather than give too much thought to things you can’t do, focus on what you can. Tell me about Myriel’s crate.”

  “Look for yourself,” I said, removing the top. “You may notice something I missed.”

  “Unlikely,” he said, leaning forward and examining the contents of the box. He leafed through it all with care, turning the pages of the notebook in much the same manner I had. I watched his hands, strong and competent, as he pulled out the books, checking their endpapers and leafing through the rest. “Did anything strike you about them?” he asked.

  “Only that Hugo also wrote Les Miserables, which Monsieur Prier is currently reading,” I said. “We’ve not seen any of Edith’s writings. Surely Laurent saved any letters she sent him. And she might have kept a diary—not, perhaps, after she got sick, but even her records of the months before that could prove useful.” I flashed him what I hoped was a wry look. “I don’t suppose you have a strategy in place for investigating convents in Gibraltar?”

  “Quite the contrary,” he said, a wicked smile spreading across his face. “I’ve already mobilized a crack convent investigation team. They’ll be on-site within forty-eight hours. We can expect answers in fifty. Sarcasm suits you, my dear.”

  “You’re dreadful,” I said. “Have I reminded you of that recently?”

  “Not recently enough,” he said. “Do you think there even are convents in
Gibraltar?”

  “Yes, but it’s irrelevant. Girard blurted out the first thing that came to his mind.”

  Our knees banged into each other as he leaned forward and took my hands in his. “Emily, I—”

  “Don’t, please,” I said. “I shall come to terms with this, but you must give me time.”

  “Can we talk about it?”

  “Not now. First because my thoughts do me no credit, and second because we must not let ourselves get distracted. We need to find Lucy.”

  Back in Rouen, we excused ourselves from dinner, asking instead for a tray of pâtés and other cold bites we could eat at our leisure. So while the family feasted on pressed duck, Colin and I set to work. He locked the door to our room from the inside and gave me a quick kiss.

  “I wish I was locking this for a different reason,” he said. While he began methodically searching and analyzing every inch of the room, I crawled through the passage to Laurent’s, heading straight for the door, which I locked. A cursory glance around the room showed me he, too, had a copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray, a volume that somehow felt more than a little appropriate for him. When I returned to my room, my husband was inspecting the armoire.

  “Did you ask Laurent why there is a passage between these two rooms?”

  “No,” I said. “But he and Edith used it often. A bit of fun when they were young, I imagine.”

  “The doorway in the armoire is far too sophisticated to have been done by children. And it would have been odd for them to have installed it as adults, don’t you think?”

  “It could have been included when the house was built five hundred years ago.”

  He nodded. “Maybe. But the armoire’s not that old. It would have had to be fitted later. I wonder if the Prier parents know about it.” He knelt down in front of the hulking wooden piece, running his hands along the base, then inside, where he focused on the mechanism of the hidden door. “This is without question modern. Newer than the furniture, in fact.”

  “There are no other rooms on this floor,” I said. “They could easily have visited each other back and forth through their doors—even without anyone else in the house knowing. To have such a thing installed suggests to me that someone—obviously Edith—was locked in her room.”

  “Which we know was the case.”

  “But the impression I’ve been given is that she was locked in only for the last couple months before she was sent away. Would there have been time for Laurent to have had the panel made? And would he have bothered—given that he was the one lobbying for her to be sent to Dr. Girard, he wasn’t expecting she’d be locked up in the house for long?”

  “What do you suspect?”

  “That Edith’s life was considerably more complicated than we’ve been led to believe. I think you ought to speak to her father when he arrives home. And I think we should make our way through Laurent’s room as quickly as possible. We can’t count on him to sit through a leisurely family meal.”

  Laurent’s possessions were shockingly uninteresting. Music scores covered the top of the piano, and an unsightly array of wine bottles and glasses had taken up residence on every other available surface. Other than the Wilde novel I’d already spotted, there were no books. A crumpled pile of discarded clothes was heaped on the floor next to the bed—but the unworn items in his wardrobe were perfectly pressed, crisp, and neat.

  “It appears he doesn’t allow the servants to do much to the room,” Colin said.

  “So what is it he doesn’t want them to see?” I asked. “I can’t say anything’s catching my attention.”

  “Nor mine. Pity we don’t know what we’re looking for.”

  “How about the attic? I’d like to see if Edith kept journals that might have been put up there.” I turned Laurent’s key so he’d find the door as he’d left it when he returned from dinner. We crossed back through the armoire and into the corridor from Edith’s former room.

  “A good idea, but I need to speak to Monsieur Prier. I’m more and more curious about what he does when he’s not home. And I’m afraid that I’m going to have to do that on my own. Can you explore the attic without me?”

  “I’ve no doubt Cécile can assist me.”

  Colin, wanting to interview Monsieur Prier, had made a sensible decision to set off without me. He wasn’t home, and odds were the gentleman was not spending his evenings somewhere it would be appropriate for me to appear unannounced. As soon as he’d left I dipped into the drawing room where the Priers had retired after dinner and pulled Cécile aside to whisper my plan to her. I needed her to occupy Laurent while I returned to upstairs.

  The attic, accessible through a narrow door on the landing by the main staircase, was lit by sunlight streaming through three gabled windows on the front of the house, and dust drifted in the air, making the bright patches look smoky, while the rest of the space was bathed in darkness. I placed the candle I’d brought from my room on the floor next to a pile of dusty trunks and opened the one on top. A mild tinge of guilt crept up on me—I wasn’t accustomed to rifling through other people’s belongings—but I had few options if we were to discover what happened to Edith. When I’d asked Cécile if she thought the Priers would allow my search, she shook her head and admonished me to proceed quietly. A conversation she’d had with Edith’s mother was the basis for her concern. I trusted her judgment and we agreed to reconvene and talk after the household had gone to bed.

  My search was not fruitful. But as I opened the seventeenth trunk, one far in the back of the attic, in a dark corner away from the windows, the temperature in the garret dropped; goose bumps covered my arms and I started to shiver. My lungs tightened in my chest. I rifled through the contents, only to find it, like all the others, contained nothing but old clothing. Then, before I could lower the lid, a crash from across the room jolted me into action, and I leapt up, gripping the brass candle-holder. One of the windows had blown open and was banging against its sash.

  It was the wind. The wind. I said the words over and over to myself, but couldn’t persuade any of my muscles to set into motion so that I might cross the room and refasten the offending panes. Another crash, this one from the trunk as the top lid fell back into place. I wanted very much to believe I’d caused it myself, when I jumped. But the delay between the two sounds was too great. Or was it? My mind didn’t seem to be operating in real time, and I felt disjointed and confused as fear robbed all of my focus. My feet still firmly planted on the floor—absolutely unwilling to move—I forced slow, deep breaths. The strategy to control my anxiety might have worked had my candle not blown out in the next instant.

  Now I did feel mad, and I wondered if this was how it had begun for Edith—if a series of small coincidences, catalyzed by her brother, had preyed on her mind, bludgeoning her like an implacable rainstorm bent on destroying a fine spring day. Repeat the scenario at frequent enough intervals and the soundest mind would come unhinged.

  I pushed a foot forward and began inching my way back to the doorway, trembling. But then came a sound that stopped me altogether: heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. Cécile wouldn’t have dreamed of clomping with so absolute a lack of elegance; she prided herself on always moving with lightness and grace. I pressed against the sloping wall formed by the roof, first taking comfort in its strength, then realizing too late I’d left myself vulnerable, with nowhere to escape. Not that my precise location in the attic could have made much difference—either I could reach the exit uninhibited or not. If an interloper was standing at the top of the stairs, I’d have no hope.

  And this proved just the case when Laurent appeared before me, his rage apparent in the flash of his eyes.

  “What do you think you are doing?” He lunged at me and gripped my wrist. “Who gave you permission to come up here?”

  “Your mother,” I lied, my voice shaking. She’d not specifically given me permission, but she’d made a point of telling me to treat the house as my own when I’d first arrived. “I’m t
erribly sorry if I’ve offended you, but—”

  “But what?” He scowled. “Let me guess. You’re exceedingly fond of attics and find them dreadfully romantic and you’d hoped your bored husband would come looking for you and rekindle whatever lost emotion there used to be between you. I shouldn’t bother if I were you. He’s more interested in flirting with my vapid sister.”

  “How dare you?” Anger flashed hot through me and I balled my hands into hard fists.

  “This is not your house, and my family’s concerns are none of your business. I suggest—strongly—that you leave before you come to understand too well exactly what this place, what these people can do to someone who’s fallen out of their favor. I suspect you’re not quite so strong as you’d like everyone to believe. So take your leave before it’s too late.” He spat the last words as he dragged me by the wrist to the staircase. “It would be best if you were gone before morning.”

  22

  “Mon dieu!” Cécile said as she embraced me and marched into my bedroom, where I’d been waiting for her since returning from the attic. She lowered herself onto a wide chair that stood in the space between two windows. “I do hope your adventure was productive. What an evening! I do not know how much longer we should stay here.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “There is so much—I must consider where to start. This visit, Emily, is making me crave your favorite, port. Champagne does not want to be in this house.”

  I nearly fell out of my seat. “I didn’t know such a thing was possible.”