by Kim Wright
Tom was shortly back, wearing dry clothes and carrying a shapeless armful of cloth.
“Here,” he said. “I’m sure Cousin Claude would be gratified to learn that his fine woolen boating jacket was worth a pile of rags in an honest trade. Get out of those wet things at once.” He went on to explain that he had managed to barter his clothes, which were soaking wet but clearly expensive, to a man at the top of the bank in exchange for his own. And for good measure the man had thrown in his blanket, which Tom now thrust toward Emma. She recoiled at the smell.
“I can’t walk through the heart of Paris like some sort of naked savage, with a blanket wrapped about me,” she protested, even though it was tempting to shed her own clammy and inconvenient outfit, with its long pants legs tripping her up at every step.
“Agreed, but you can certainly walk the bank wrapped in one, and your clothes will be partially dry by the time the sun is up. Come on, Emma, buck up. This is no time to start thinking like a girl.”
She turned to him with a snap, her expression freezing him more thoroughly than the water of the Seine.
“Very well,” she said. “At least turn away.”
He faced up the bank toward the street while she wiggled out of her wet clothes, draped the blanket around her with as much dignity as she could muster, and gathered the sodden shirt and pants from the bank.
“All right, let us continue,” she said when she had finished. “We were at 1,130 were we not?”
4:48 AM
Approximately 15,000 human steps from where Emma and Tom were methodically pacing the river bank, Rayley Abrams was pulling the mattress off his cot and considering the dried puddles of vomit below.
The rat on the wall had given him an idea. Perhaps it was not true that he was entirely weaponless, for he had become quite adept at expunging chloroform from his body in the last two days and the evidence of this newly-acquired skill was now crusted to the underside of this mattress. With a heave of his aching shoulders, Rayley dragged the thin pad to the most well-lit part of the badly-lit room and considered his options. If there had been enough chloroform lingering in Graham’s blood to kill a cage full of mice, would there be enough in his vomit to momentarily disorient a man?
Granted, it didn’t seem likely. Perhaps the drug lost its properties over time, perhaps especially rapidly when exposed to air. And Gerard was certainly far larger and stronger than a cage full of white mice. If Rayley could find a way to make himself bleed…He could chew his own wrists, he supposed, or entice one the damned rats into doing the task. Bleed onto a piece of cloth – he still had most of his clothing, after all – and hope that it held enough chloroform to subdue Gerard.
The darkness of the room also worked to his advantage. Rayley’s eyes had long since adjusted to the gloom – in fact he suspected he would be struck blind with the brightness if he were ever to return to the sunlit world. But he had noted that both Gerard and Armand had paused upon entering the cell and stood for several seconds, clearly disoriented, waiting for their own eyes to adapt.
It was an opportunity, was it not? A brief moment in which Rayley would be able to see far better than Gerard. Perhaps he could crouch by door with the chloroform-soaked cloth in his hands and when the man entered he could spring -
No, no. That was no good. After all, by his own efforts, Rayley had managed reduce the amount of chloroform in his system so, even if he did find some way to bleed onto his knickerbockers, any effect the drug still held would be diffuse. Not enough to kill a cage full of lab mice and certainly not enough to make a twenty-stone man weak at the knees. If Rayley were to spring on Gerald in the darkness and throw a pair of bloodied knickerbockers over his head in all likelihood such an act would merely piss the man off.
There had to be another way. For the first time since being taken into captivity, Rayley felt strong enough to explore the cell. He tried to walk but within seconds of his hand leaving the security of the wall, his legs buckled. Very well then, he would explore on his hands and knees. Gerard had most considerately left a tin cup of water near the cot. Rayley fingers almost immediately came upon it and he gulped half of it down, saving the rest for troubles to come.
He began to crawl about the floor. It was a comfortless concrete affair, and the first corner he came to was slimy with seepage from the river. Rayley lowered his head and sniffed. Yes, most definitely sewage and stagnant water. Would Trevor and the others ever find this godforsaken place on their own? Just the thought that there was someone out there looking for him had given him a flicker hope…but this cell was so obscure, so dank and hidden. Rayley crawled on, using one hand to trace the edge of the wall. In the second corner, nothing but more river muck. In the third…
Damn. A dead rat. Despite their days of forced cohabitation, Rayley still recoiled from the vermin. No, upon consideration, perhaps not a rat. The size and shape was right, and, from the best he could gather, even the color. But the fur had been too soft. Cautiously, he brought his hand back to the item on the floor and lifted it.
It was a woman’s glove.
Rayley scuttled, rat-like himself, back to the mattress, which still lay on the floor, in the room’s only puddle of diffused light. He rolled back upon it, exhausted from the effort of his journey around the cell, and squinted at the glove. He was still wearing his glasses, he realized with some surprise. They had not come off in the beating, further evidence that Gerard’s restraint had been noteworthy. And the glove - it appeared grey in the shadowy room, or perhaps plum colored, a thought that made Rayley go cold with fear. He could visualize Isabel’s hands clutching the brass rail of the Eiffel Tower elevator, her face splitting into an expression of pure joy as they had climbed higher and higher above the city. Was this her glove? Had Armand at some point brought her to this wretched room?
But no. That made no sense. As Armand himself had so clearly pointed out, if he had Isobel in his possession, there would be no need to keep Rayley alive. Rayley had always known somehow, that his fate was blended with that of Isobel, from the first moment he had spied her in that café. Rayley shut his eyes, indulging in the memories of Isabel as if each one was a gulp of cold water from a tin cup. At the time he had concocted the fantasy that their fates were woven in the manner of lovers. Now he knew that they shared a different, darker sort of destiny, for the moment that Isabel Blout was captured would be the exact moment that Rayley Abrams would be condemned to die.
But they didn’t have her yet. He had to believe that, and besides, upon more careful examination, this was likely not even her glove. It had probably been on the hand of the boy-girl and pulled off in some sort of struggle.
Rayley looked up at the faint light above him and searched for inspiration. He did not have much. A cot. A bucket. A tin cup. His glasses. A woman’s glove. A high barred window. The remnants of chloroform and the predictable visits from Gerard. Could it all add up to an escape plan or – same thing – some means of signaling his location to Trevor?
He could almost hear Tom Bainbridge’s cultured voice drawling “You have nothing to lose, after all.” It was one of Tom’s favorite phrases and, now that Rayley stopped to consider it, Davy and Emma had been known to utter it too. It must be the motto of youth, Rayley supposed, a motto born from the innocent belief that one’s life was continually on the upswing, that circumstances have no choice but to get better and then yet better again. But he and Trevor knew what it meant to have something to lose – in fact, they had both lost things they’d loved, had watched their cherished dreams fall to dust in their hands.
And Rayley supposed that even in his present desolate situation he still had something to lose. The three loose teeth clinging to his gums, for example, and the relative hospitality of his captors. He remembered how Armand had reacted earlier, when Rayley had momentarily choked. A look of sheer panic had flitted across the man’s face and Rayley had known, in that instant, that Armand Delacroix did not want a dead Scotland Yard detective on his hands.
“You have nothing to lose,” Tom would say, but as Rayley looked around the cell, he amended the sentiment to “You have little to lose.” A botched escape attempt would likely earn him another beating, but they didn’t intend to kill him. Not quite yet. This knowledge was his trump card - indeed the only card he held.
5:10 AM
“7250 paces,” Tom said, as he and Emma at last reached the bridge where their journey had begun. “That’s how far we’ve come in a half hour so if we walk 7250 paces farther upstream we should be at the approximate place where the bodies were released.” He looked at Emma, who was clutching the blanket around her and weaving slightly on her feet. “But the key word in that sentence is ‘approximate.’ Don’t get your hopes up too high with this little experiment, Emma. There are a thousand variables which were beyond our control.”
“I suppose we’ll know in 7250 more steps.”
“Wait,” Tom said. “Let’s rest here a minute under the bridge. It’s still too dark to see much and you’re so – well, we’re both so very tired. Aunt Gerry was right. If we don’t sleep just a little, we’ll be in too much of a stupor to think.”
Emma looked around her. “Sleep? Here?”
“Just a few minutes. The church bells will wake us.”
Emma hesitated. She knew the truth of what he was saying, for in that parenthetical part of her mind that watched from a distance, she could tell that not only were her feet slow and clumsy but that her thoughts were likewise becoming less under her control.
“Not even an hour,” Tom said, kneeling to the ground and gesturing that she should sit beside him. “The six o’clock bells will rouse us and the sky will be lighter then. We can better see our way.”
Emma looked down at him, suddenly remembering things she didn’t want to remember and feeling the urge to weep. Perhaps it was just exhaustion, or finding herself in this strange and unreal place. On a riverbank in Paris, naked beneath a tattered blanket. Standing before a man she might love but one that she would never truly have.
“For a minute,” she whispered.
“Put your head on my shoulder,” Tom said. “We can keep each other warm.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Paris
4:15 AM
What he had told Rayley Abrams had been absolutely true. All of his clients were asking for Isabel.
This was something Armand Delacroix had not foreseen, that so many people would have been so dismayed at her abrupt disappearance. In a business that valued youth above all else, Isabel was aging. In a city that demanded novelty, she was a known quantity. Any mystery she might have brought to the proverbial party had long since faded.
And yet they asked for her. At the parties and in the streets and cafes. But where is Isabel, they would inquire. They would hope that she was well. Would he tell her that they had sent their regards?
It was a surprising complication, Armand thought as he wandered through the dark and silent house. The servants were still an hour or more from waking, and Marianne would likely doze until noon. He called her by her new name exclusively now, for this was an essential part of the game. When a person assumed a fresh identity, they must dive in wholeheartedly, like a sinner seeking rebirth beneath baptismal waters. None of this business of calling them one name in private and another in public. That made it too easy to make a mistake.
In fact, learning to automatically respond to a new name was an adjustment of the mind not unlike learning to speak a foreign language. Each time Armand went back and forth between England and France there was a point – invisible to the naked eye perhaps, but as real as this brandy glass in front of him now – when he would cease being English and become French. One person would recede and the other would step forward. Marianne had cried the first time he told her this, and he knew that for one so young, the adjustment must feel like a death. She would understand it in time. For the parts of our identity that we leave behind are never gone, but merely sleeping. They can rouse and reassert themselves whenever needed. What was it that the philosopher said? “We cannot change, but we can expand.” Anyone with an interesting life knows the truth of this.
Yes, he liked this deepest time of night, when Marianne was tucked into her bed, the servants had all retreated behind their closed doors, and the house was still. He did not light a lamp to guide his steps, for he had been blessed since boyhood with a gift for seeing in the dark. Besides, he did not wish to wake anyone who would feel compelled to assist him in such minor tasks as refilling his glass or clipping his cigar. Armand appreciated solitude and, to his mind, did not get enough of it. He pushed open the glass doors and stepped out onto the small balcony located just off his bedroom, then looked up with approval at the wispy moon. He liked Paris as well, especially this time of year. It would never completely be his home, but when a man is more than one person, then he must have, by definition, more than one home.
Armand settled into a woven chair and put his feet on the unsteady ottoman before him. He had much on his mind tonight and may well push through to the first light of dawn.
Isabel had disappeared the same night that she’d also, under protest, provided him with an alibi. The night they took the detective. So that had been….Armand paused, blew out an explosion of smoke with a gentle cough. They were coming into the third day that she’d been missing. An unexplained absence of this length was noteworthy, even for a woman as mercurial as Isabel. They did not share living quarters, for she had made it plain that her willingness to accompany him to Paris was contingent upon her having a home of her own. In a way, she had always been as private as he. But he still had means of monitoring her. Earlier today he had slipped her maid a handful of coins and told the old crow to alert him at once should her mistress return. Yes, she was to send a messenger even if it was the middle of the night.
For he simply must find a way to get Isabel back. At least for a few months, through the busy summer of the Exposition, when she would be expected to play hostess at his salons. Her role in his success, he was now prepared to admit, was larger than he would have guessed. It was Isabel who lent beauty and grandeur to this business and he supposed, as he paused to consider the situation from a different angle, that her age could be as much an advantage as not. The men seemed reassured by the continuity of her presence. That was why they all asked about her, even when they were standing on the sidewalks in front of their places of business, churches, opera houses, the homes they shared with their wives. She was the one who stood proof that it was possible to sustain the game for years. Proof that it could be sustained at even the highest levels of society. A woman come from Mayfair, the sort who had been painted by Whistler.
Ah, Whistler. Armand tilted back his head, stared again at the moon. His nice, tidy little world had begun to unravel on the very day that James Whistler had first been commissioned to paint a portrait of Isabel Blout.
And the bitch of it all was that it had been his idea.
The Whistler portrait had been intended as the apex of their triumph. The chance to see Isabel standing there in clothing worth as much as the house she’d grown up in, the most beautiful and desired woman in London, the paragon of society wives. She had understood the joke at once. Her lips had twisted in that ironic smile he knew so well. Even George Blout had favored the notion. So nervous and skittish in the beginning, so afraid someone would guess the unlikely truth about him and his remarkable young wife. But having gone years without detection had given him confidence and brought an old man’s deeply buried resentments to the surface, until even George had been willing to enter into their sport. What a chance to thumb their noses to the society which had so long rejected them, or, much worse, the hypocrites who came calling at some times and snubbed them at others.
Isabel in a Whistler. The perfect jest indeed.
What Armand Delacroix and George Blout had both failed to anticipate was that Isabel would befriend the painter. It had occurred to Armand, and most likely to George as well, that she might
seduce him, for Isabel seduced instinctively, with no more effort than it took her to breathe. A liaison between Isabel and James Whistler might even have proven useful at some point in the future, for the painter’s social connections were impeccable, far surpassing those of Armand. But a friendship between the two – who could have foreseen that, and the consequences it would wreck upon them all?
She had evidently shown Whistler some sketches, rough drawings she had stubbornly dragged with her from the early days of her youth. Those smudged pictures were the only thing that could still connect her to Manchester and she held them as a lawyer holds evidence, for some ongoing trial that she was conducting exclusively in her mind.
But when Isabel had shown them to Whistler, he had proclaimed her to be talented. Even the revelation of her great secret had not dissuaded him from wanting to help her. Who knows, it may have even charmed him more, artists being a uniquely tolerant lot. Whistler had accepted Isabel, in all her forms, as an acolyte, and he had stood beside her at the easel, guiding her hand through the motions, teaching her the differences between light and shadow. Shadow was the hard part, he told her. Once you mastered that, everything else in the picture became clear. They worked together two mornings a week, at a set time of ten in the morning. He took the appointment seriously. He was never late.
