The Counterfeit Heiress (21 page)

“They didn’t pull it down immediately after it had burned, did—” My question went unfinished, as at that moment Cécile fell to the ground, pushed down by a man who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. He barely broke his stride after the assault, continuing to run perpendicular to the direction we had been walking. I bent over to check my friend was not badly hurt, gathered my skirts, and then ran after the depraved villain.

Estella

xiii

Estella rose at precisely eleven forty-seven, and found it one of the most pleasing things she had ever done in her life. Eleven forty-seven! Nurse had never allowed such sloth, and it was only rarely that her mother tolerated sleeping beyond eight o’clock, and then, only if one had been out nearly all night at a ball. Estella stretched, reaching her arms toward the top of her stone room, and then bent at her waist until her fingertips skimmed the floor. The movement felt good, particularly as last night was the first time she had been without a corset since her captor had thrown her into this place. She considered the pile of discarded clothing she had left in a heap on the floor after she had dropped over her head the soft linen nightgown he had brought for her, and decided that she did not want to get dressed.

That her room was chilly could not be denied. She picked up her cloak, but it had suffered under hard use for too many days and nights as blanket, pillow, and sheet, and had taken on a not very appealing odor. She pulled on the loose robe that matched her nightgown and then wrapped a blanket around her shoulders before sitting on the floor—now soft with her new carpets—in front of the picnic basket. It was time for breakfast.

Estella wished there were more macarons. She would have to ask him for some, she thought, before remembering that would not be necessary. The next time he came, he would be ready to release her. She had brioche, but no jam to go with it—he was loath to give her any sort of cutlery, even a spoon—so she decided on pain au chocolat instead. On biting into it, she realized she wanted the quiche she had rejected the night before, skipping dinner having left her hungrier than she usually felt at breakfast. She abandoned the pain au chocolat and picked up a piece of the quiche, glad that he had thought to cut it into slices. There was no decorous way to attack a whole quiche in the absence of utensils.

Sated after three pieces, Estella washed her hands with the soap and water she had already made such good use of the previous night—bathing had never before seemed such a luxury—and picked up her book. This caused her to frown, as she realized she had fewer than a hundred pages left to read. She would be finished this very afternoon and left with only that miserable tome of Monsieur Dickens. There was nothing to be done about it. She devoured the rest of Belzoni in a greedy gulp. It was four o’clock now. Too soon for dinner. More macarons would have been perfect. She finished the pain au chocolat and paced around the room for a while before picking up
A Tale of Two Cities. The best of times and the worst of times,
she thought, remembering the line that had so offended her when she first read it.

She opened the cover of the book and started again. The featherbed nestled her comfortably as she sat on the slab, leaning back against the wall. She had thick, warm, and, best of all, clean socks on her feet. No one could bother her. Perhaps Monsieur Dickens was not so foolish as Estella had originally thought.

14

I may have a reputation for dressing finely, and I admit freely and wholly without embarrassment to having a weakness for beautiful clothes. As I have said on many a previous occasion, I have never believed that an appreciation for high fashion precludes possession of common sense. I might allow my maid to lace me tightly into a stunning Worth evening gown, but when in the midst of an investigation, I choose clothing that will not hinder my work. My stays were never pulled too tight, my skirts were never too narrow, and, perhaps most important, my boots were sturdy and comfortable.

Cécile’s assailant had not counted on that last point. I flew after him with the speed of Hermes, the pale dust of the Tuileries’ paths rising like smoke in my wake. I am well aware that this may be considered something of a mixed metaphor, but believe I may be forgiven the faux pas. It is what I thought in the moment, and one can hardly be expected to summon eloquence when apprehending the vicious attacker of one’s dearest friend.

He had not expected me to follow him. If he had, I am certain he would not have made the mistake of slowing his pace so measurably as he approached the gate at the edge of the park. Feeling almost triumphant as I grew close, I decided that I would fling myself against him with all my weight, screaming for help all the while. I had no doubt that, once the miscreant was on the ground, any number of gentlemen would step up to assist me. They could hold him in place while I summoned the police.

But I had made a grievous error of my own. He had slowed down specifically because he did know I was following him. When I was very nearly upon him, without stopping, he flung over his head a sheaf of papers that scattered over me. They broke my pace and disoriented me—there must have been hundreds of them, each the size of the page of a novel—and when I regained my composure, he was gone.

Furious that I had allowed myself to be so easily thrown off course, I stomped through the papers and out of the gardens. He had exited back into the rue de Rivoli, and would have had no difficulty disappearing into the throngs of tourists there. I felt a tug on my arm—a policeman—who, upon having assured himself that I was unharmed, began to scold me for having caused a scene, not to mention a grievous mess in le Jardin. I brushed past him, knowing he would follow me, and returned to Cécile, who was now back on her feet and being propped up by an extremely handsome gentleman. On my way to her, I stooped over to collect a handful of the papers the villain had thrown. They had already blown all over, littering the park in a most indecorous fashion. I could understand the displeasure of the policeman. Printed in thick block letters on each sheet were two short sentences:

LAISSEZ ESTELLA SEUL. DÉSOBÉISSEZ À CET AVERTISSEMENT À VOS RISQUES ET PÉRILS.

“Did he elude you, Kallista?” Cécile was doing her best to remove from her walking dress the fine layer of dust that had clung to it after her fall. Her efforts did not accomplish a great deal; the navy blue was all but covered with white.

I thrust a bunch of the papers at my friend. “It was the auburn-haired man. I did not have to see his face to confirm as much.”

The policeman was beginning to growl again. “Monsieur
,
you must not be so horrible. It is not my friend who caused this mess,” Cécile said. “It was a diabolical criminal.” The officer listened carefully to her story, nodding and making sympathetic noises when she reached the part in which she had been flung to the ground.

“Are you injured, madame?” he asked.

“Only my pride, but I am greatly concerned that you have let this man escape.”

“Madame, I was not on hand—”

“One ought to be able to take a turn in a public park without suffering at the hands of a maniac. I am not interested in any excuses as to where you or any of your colleagues were at the time of the incident. I merely want your assurance that it will not happen again.”

“Madame, I—”

Cécile raised a hand. “I am not interested. Are we quite finished here?” I had gathered up as many of the papers as I could, and told her I thought it best that we return home. The handsome gentleman who had leapt to Cécile’s side offered to escort us. His carriage, he said, was waiting near the Pont Royal, just outside the gardens.

“Absolutely not.” I looped my arm through Cécile’s and pulled until she had no choice but to move. She hobbled along, fighting me all the way to the river. Although the Pont Royal was nearer to us than the Pont Solférino, I elected to walk the longer distance, as I had no intention of putting us near the gentleman’s carriage. A glance behind us told me he had not followed us, but I did not trust that his driver had not been instructed to intercept us.

“You cannot think Monsieur Aguillon is in league with the auburn-haired man!”

“Monsieur Aguillon? He had time to introduce himself in the midst of all the commotion, did he?”

“Marcel, as I hope to soon be calling him,” Cécile said. We were on the bridge now, and she tugged hard on my arm to force me to stop walking. “Enough, Kallista!”

“So I am to believe it was a happy coincidence that landed Monsieur Aguillon so conveniently at your side following the attack?”

Cécile shrugged. “With a face so handsome as that, his criminal connections, whatever they may be, are of little interest to me.”

“Don’t be absurd. What would have happened if I hadn’t returned with the police? He might have been deliberately lurking, waiting, so that he could spirit you away while I was distracted.”

“It is a risk I am willing to take.” She put her arm through mine again, congenially, and patted me with her other hand as we started to walk again, crossing the bridge. “You are kind to worry about me, Kallista, but when a lady reaches a certain age, she finds that her standards become more fluid than they once were. Monsieur Aguillon is very nearly as handsome as your own Monsieur Hargreaves. Do you really expect me to fling him aside on the grounds that he may possibly have a connection to someone we may possibly believe to be engaged in what may possibly be a criminal activity?”

“Yes. That is precisely what I expect.”

“You are so very young,
ma chère amie.
When Monsieur Aguillon calls—and I assure you he will—I have every intention of receiving him.”

“You are impossible, and I am not so very young. I was only recently lamenting the demise of my impetuous youth.”

“No matter how rapidly you age, Kallista, you will always be younger than I.” We had crossed the river and continued along the rue de Solférino until we reached boulevard Saint-Germain, where we turned left toward Cécile’s house. Soon after, I noticed a printer’s shop, and an idea struck me. A bell tingled from the door as I pushed it open, and before long a wiry man with a fine example of an aquiline nose stepped from the back room to greet us as he wiped his hands on the long, ink-spattered apron tied around his waist.

“Bonjour, mesdames.”

We returned his greeting. “I was hoping you might be able to assist me.” I smoothed one of the pages I had collected from the ground in the park and pushed it across the counter to him. “Is there, so far as you know, any means of identifying who printed this?”

He picked up the leaf, studied it, and then held it up to the light. “There is a watermark on the paper, but I am afraid it identifies it as one of the most commonly used brands in France. The typesetting, however, is more unique. It may look to you like any other serif font, but it is more special than that.” He flipped the paper around so that we could see the words right side up. “This typeface is designed to have only capital letters—you see that all the letters are capital, but the ones we would expect to see capitalized, such as the first in each sentence, are larger than those that follow. Other than that, what is most strange is that although the words are written in French, the spacing has followed English rules.”

“Could you explain?” I asked.

“In France, we leave a single space before and after most punctuation marks. In England, there are generally no spaces before punctuation, and one inserts a double space between sentences. You see here that there is no space before either period, but a double space after the first one. No Frenchman would set type in this manner unless specifically directed by his customer, and even then, would argue strongly against it.”

“Bien sûr,”
Cécile said.

“Is the typeface itself common?” I asked.

“Not so much. I have seen it before, but it is not one I use.”

“Have you any suggestions as to how we might locate the printer?”

“It would be very difficult,” he said. “There would be no way to know except by asking shop by shop.”

“How many printers are there in Paris?”

“Hundreds, madame.”

We thanked him for his time and continued on our way. “This confirms what I already suspected—the auburn-haired man is English. He would have insisted that his flyer be punctuated correctly.”

“Or incorrectly, given that he is in Paris and writing in French,” Cécile said.

“
Touché. This will make an excellent assignment for Jeremy to tackle once he has finished at the post office.”

“You cannot expect the poor man to go to every printer in Paris! That would be too cruel.”

“I am never cruel, Cécile. We believe Swiveller’s lair is in the neighborhood around the Catacombs. He can focus his search accordingly. It does him good to be of use.”

“What are you going to do, Kallista, when at last he does marry? I suspect you will miss his attentions more than you think.”

“Ridiculous. Jeremy will marry, but not for ages, and I can assure you when the glorious day at last comes, I will be more delighted even than his own mother.”

Cécile arched her eyebrows. “Skeptical does not begin to describe me.”

*   *   *

We called in at Café de Flore on our way home, on the chance that the auburn-haired man had returned there. He had not, but this did not detract from my enjoyment of a superb
chocolat.
When at last we returned to Cécile’s—I confess we lingered over our beverages for more than an hour—Colin and Jeremy were already there. Cécile made a dramatic entrance in her dusty dress, sending both gentlemen shooting to their feet the instant they saw her, alarm etched on their faces.

She raised a weary hand to her forehead and begged them to forgive her—she was enjoying every second of this performance—she would tell them everything once she had bathed and changed into more suitable attire. I was not party to this anticipatory delay, and, once she had retired upstairs, I gave them the whole story, unabridged, presenting them each with one of the printed sheets.