Painting The Darkness (19 page)

A sweet tooth and a wandering eye. Often enough, he reflected they had been his downfall. Now he was sixty years old, stout, balding and troubled by flights of stairs.
He
smiled. The girl’s face reminded him of that minx in Stuttgart. She had been worth the thrashing he suffered at her father’s hands. Well, he had had his chances and wasted all of them: that he could not deny. He had common tastes but lacked the common touch: a fatal combination. In 1848, they had passed him over in favour of his scheming cousin, who had – against all odds – left a son behind him to sustain the Bonapartist cause in exile. Since then, being passed over had become commonplace: opportunity had only flattered to deceive.

He finished his pastry, brushed off the remaining crumbs and walked on. It was Black Friday – suitably ill-omened for the step he was about to take into a seamy reach of his past. He knew it was a step better not taken, but his life had largely comprised imprudent acts and he was too old to change now. That man Norton – or Davenall, whoever he was – had pricked his conscience, or touched a nerve. Whichever it was, he could not leave it alone.

There was number twenty-three, on the other side of the road, closed gates at the side bearing the name
G. P
ILON
(
C
ARROSSIER
). He crossed over and tugged at the first-floor flat-bell. A thin-faced maid answered. She flashed him a look of unsmiling recognition.

‘
Quelle surprise
,’ she said coldly.

‘
Pour moi aussi, Eugénie
.’

The maid’s lip curled. ‘
Comme si de rien n’était
.’

He ignored the jibe. ‘
Votre maîtresse, est-elle à la maison?
’

‘
Pour vous, sans doute. Suivez-moi, s’il vous plaît
.’

She led him upstairs to a sitting-room and left him there. He looked around, admiring the faded lavishness of the decorations – flock wallpaper, purple upholstery, an ormolu clock, a gilt-framed mirror he fancied he might once have owned himself. There was evidence of decline in the fortunes of his one-time mistress, but it was not yet overwhelming. She would be forty now, even if her own estimate was to be believed, which it was not. He had lately heard her name linked with a wealthy American. Perhaps
there
was more money in parvenus than in princes these days. Perhaps there always had been.

The door opened and she entered, smiling. Her face displayed with unmistakable starkness the eight years that had passed since their last meeting, though her hair was still dark and immaculately curled. He let his glance run over her body, wrapped in the clinging folds of a silk
peignoir
, and acknowledged that occasional privation had done her figure no harm at all.

‘
Bonjour
, Cora. How is my English pearl?’

Cora, mistress of her native coolness, maintained her distance. ‘I am Cora still, but minus any pearls.’

‘You still have Eugénie.’

‘Only because her arrears are so considerable.’

‘Come, come. An apartment on the Champs Elysées? It cannot be that bad.’

‘How would you know? You have kept away for so long.’

‘We have both had our troubles, Cora. We were never … friends in need.’

Cora smiled. ‘That is true. No rebukes, Plon-Plon. We are too old for them, are we not?’

In the look they then exchanged there was the silent complicity of two who understood that bitterness at the changing times was pointless. The Second Empire had raised them both high – Prince Napoleon as the Emperor’s honour-laden cousin, Cora as an English courtesan trading on the loose morals of an immature aristocracy. Now all that was gone, they could consider themselves lucky to survive, however precariously.

‘How is your wife?’ said Cora neutrally.

‘As saintly as ever.’

‘And your sons?’

‘Surely you know, Cora? The Prince Imperial was good enough to die young but cunning enough to nominate my son Victor as his heir. I have been passed over once again.’

‘Is that why you have come? For consolation?’

‘Hah!’ The Prince laughed his bellowing gale-like laugh, crossed the room and smacked a kiss on Cora’s forehead. ‘No, Cora. I am past consoling.’ He ran one hand down over her shoulder towards the inviting curve of a silk-cradled breast, then broke away and crossed to a side-table, where he began to toy with a piece of china.

‘Then, why?’

‘Do you remember the Davenall family?’

‘How could I forget? Your friend Sir Gervase was so very … insistent.’

‘Dead now.’

‘So many of my clients are. What of it?’

‘He had a son – James.’

‘I remember. He brought him to Meudon more than once. And we met him in Somerset – that last time. The young man who killed himself.’

‘Supposedly. Now somebody has come forward claiming to be James Davenall, heir to the baronetcy. An impostor, we must assume – after the money.’

‘What is this to me – or to you?’

‘I agreed to help Sir Hugo in resisting the claim.’

‘Why?’

‘For friendship’s sake.’

‘You are incapable of friendship, Plon-Plon. I do not say it to hurt you. You have admitted it often enough.’

He put down the piece of china. ‘
C’est vrai
. Well, Cora, since you ask, Sir Hugo agreed to make a substantial contribution to my campaign fund.’

‘Campaign? You still have—?’

‘I still have hopes. But not of Sir Hugo. The claimant knew too much about me for me to be of any use. It was quite … disarming.’

‘Perhaps he is not an impostor.’

‘He is certainly not a fool. He knew a great deal about how I first met Gervase Davenall. Tell me, did I ever … gossip to you about my first visit to the Davenalls … in 1846?’

‘Not that I remember. Your pillow talk usually revolved
around
how superior you were to the Emperor. Which you were, in all the ways that mattered.’

‘I might have said something – at some time.’

‘If you did, I have forgotten it.’

‘I would not blame you if you had sold the information.’

‘So that is it. No, Plon-Plon. I have not met this man. I have told him nothing.’

‘He uses the name Norton.’

‘Norton? Why didn’t you say so?’

He swung round on her. ‘You know him?’

‘Norton? Yes. But he is not—’

Suddenly, he was in front of her, grasping her shoulders with no hint of a caress. ‘Not who?’

‘I met a man named Norton earlier this year. Plon-Plon, you’re hurting me!’

He released her. ‘
Pardon
. Tell me quickly, Cora. How did you meet him?’

‘I have good days and bad days. This is a good day. That was a bad day. It was February, with snow lying in the Bois de Boulogne. I had gone there for a drive with … an admirer. We were both drunk. There was a time when I would have been … more selective. He took a fancy to a girl in the Pré Catelan and threw me out of his carriage. Can you imagine? The famous Cora Pearl, raddled and drunk, alone in the snow, with no fur stole to warm her. I sat on a bench and cried. Perhaps you find it hard to imagine.’

‘No. I wish I did.’

‘A young Englishman took pity on me. He gave me his overcoat and brought me home. He bought me dinner on the way. He was handsome … and generous. He said his name was Norton.’

‘What was he doing in Paris?’

‘Visiting a doctor, he said, though he scarcely looked as if he needed to.’

‘Did he ask you about the Davenalls?’

‘No.’

‘Or me?’

‘No. He said we had met before but doubted I would remember. I didn’t believe him.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘No. He was a model of courtesy.’

‘Damn his courtesy!’ The Prince strode across the room and slumped down heavily in a chair. ‘Do you have anything to drink, Cora? I feel in need of something.’

‘For you, Plon-Plon, I will broach the finest brandy. Wait here.’

She slipped from the room, and Prince Napoleon, cracking his knuckles and chewing his lip, slipped, too, in his mind, through the curtain of years, to the time a persistent stranger seemed to recall better than he did himself.

They called him the Prince de Montfort then. He had come from Italy to visit his exiled cousin, Prince Louis Napoleon, in Bath. Confined at Pulteney’s Hotel, the twenty-four-year-old Plon-Plon chafed at the recreational limitations of his escorts, Monsieur and Madame Cornu, until Louis Napoleon ingenuously introduced him to the household of Sir Lemuel Davenall at nearby Cleave Court.

Sir Lemuel’s son, Gervase, was five years older than Plon-Plon. They shared nothing beyond a love of excess, but that they shared exuberantly. Behind the staid and gracious terraces of Bath, Gervase knew of bewitching routes into a warren of debased sensation. Down them he led an eager Plon-Plon; it was his initiation into a world he never abandoned, at once his ruin and his salvation. It explained why, thirty-six years later, he sat lost in thought in an ageing whore’s apartment above the fading charms of the Champs Elysées, rejected and reviled by the world.

Gervase had a fiancée, a pretty, agreeable girl to be sure, but nothing more than a drawing-room ornament as far as he was concerned. The fiancée had a governess, Miss Strang, arch, graceful, entrancing Miss Strang, who lured
Gervase
hopelessly with her every forbidding glare. She represented the one indulgence he was absolutely denied: it gave her power over him. He watched her through all his dilatory courtship of her charge, watched and waited and never found his opportunity.

Until Plon-Plon came to Cleave Court, that is, for then Gervase, ever scanning Miss Strang for a single sign of weakness, noticed one at last and determined to exploit it. He explained it to his friend over a card game following the grand ball Sir Lemuel had held in honour of Louis Napoleon and his young guest. All the other revellers had departed. Only the two young men to whom it had been the tamest of entertainment drank still, and wagered and argued, as the small hours reached towards dawn on Sunday, 20th September 1846.

‘Did you see the way she looked at you, Plon-Plon?’

‘
Moi? Mais non, mon ami
. Mademoiselle Webster, she has the eyes for you.’

‘I’m talking about the Scots bitch. Catherine’s governess: Vivien Strang.’

‘Mademoiselle Strang
encore
? Gervase, you are obsessed.’

‘I’ve sworn to have her. And now I’ve seen a way. She couldn’t take her eyes off you.’

‘
Donc
, a lady of taste. For myself,
les écossaises
are … too cold.’

‘It’s what she thinks of you that’s important.’

‘We danced, we conversed: nothing more.
Mais c’est vrai
: I could have been having more if I had been wanting it. I think she found me … dazzling.’

‘So what do you say? Write her a note suggesting a secret rendezvous … at midnight. I could deliver it when I go there for this Godawful tea-party.’

‘What I say, Gervase, is that she would not come – and I would not want her to. She is too …
sévère
.’

‘I would keep the rendezvous for you, Plon-Plon. And I’ll wager you she would come.’

‘Wager? This becomes interesting.
Combien
?’

‘Aha! Now the dog sees the rabbit. Well, you’ve had the devil’s own luck tonight,
mon ami
. So what do you say to all I owe you: double or quits?’

‘
Alors
, I accept the wager. It is a noble wager. I will win,
sans aucun doute
. It will be a pleasure.’

‘You will lose, Plon-Plon. And the pleasure … will all be mine.’

‘Your brandy, Plon-Plon.’

Cora’s return to the room had taken him unawares. He looked up sharply – and caught his breath. She was standing by the door, holding a tray with a frosted bottle and two glasses on it. She was smiling, as she had been earlier, but now she had discarded the
peignoir
. She presented herself naked before him, walking slowly across to the low table beside his chair and leaning forward to place the tray by his elbow.

‘You always said you liked me in anything – but most of all in nothing,’ she said. ‘Excuse my vanity, but all is still, as you see, in good order.’

Prince Napoleon breathed out slowly. There she stood, better than he remembered, because so long forgone, the flesh still unwrinkled, the curves still unresisting, his intact inviting Cora. ‘
Superbe
,’ he murmured. ‘
Toujours superbe
.’

‘Do you remember when I was served like this, on a giant silver platter, at the Café Anglais?’

‘As the dish too good to eat.’

‘You do remember.’

‘Do you remember the card I sent you after our first meeting?’

‘“
Où? Quand? Combien?
”’

‘You remember also.’ Suddenly, he closed his eyes, Cora’s words drawing his mind to another distant bargain. He had accepted the wager. He had written the note. But he had not thought … She was close to him. He could smell her perfume. It was his favourite brand. She took his hand in hers.

‘
Chez moi. Ce soir. Pour rien
.’ She kissed his hand and pressed it to her breasts. ‘Or are you really past consoling?’

He opened his eyes and smiled broadly. ‘No, Cora,’ he said. ‘Not quite.’

Chapter Six

I

EDGAR PARFITT REACHED
Orchard Street even earlier than normal that Saturday morning, 14th October. He did not believe in giving the staff any room for complaint about him, in order that he should have ample room for complaint about them. To arrive before them was therefore an article of faith. Today, however, he had surpassed himself. It was barely light as he approached the rear door. He rubbed his hands in eager anticipation of a quiet half-hour, to be spent putting the finishing touches to his marbling scheme. It would soon be ready for presentation to Mr Ernest, whom he had high hopes of winning over. After all, Mr Ernest …

What was this? The door was unlocked, and the first post had been removed from the cage. He had been forestalled! Who could it be? The adjoining offices were empty, their shutters drawn. There was no sign of the post. Then he heard a movement above. Mr William already in his office? It was unprecedented. He hung up his hat and coat grumpily, then climbed the stairs.