Ran Away (12 page)

Since Madame Scie permitted nothing to interfere with the rehearsal of her corps, it was not until almost four that January was able to approach the austere and beautiful ballet mistress herself – Marguerite Scie generally knew everything – and then he was forced to wait for almost half an hour after the rehearsal’s end while this or that girl or gentleman or costume mistress or director of the Opera came to her with matters that absolutely
had
to be dealt with  . . . 

When they were at last able to speak – with barely half an hour to go before he knew he had to present himself at the studio rented by La Doucetta’s protector for
her
rehearsal – Marguerite replied, ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if Sophie de Longuechasse is going around Paris saying that brother-in-law of hers converted the Sultan’s whole harem.’ She slipped on a short velvet jacket, much worn, and folded her arms. Every portion of the opera house, allegedly ‘temporary’ and built of wood and painted plaster, was at all times freezing, and Madame taught in the same garments worn by the ‘little rats’, as they were called – chemise, corset, and a short petticoat that barely came past the knees. During rehearsal black clouds had gathered, and rain now beat drearily on the long windows that overlooked the court. Gaslights had been kindled (January had a bet with Jeannot Charbonnière that the newfangled lighting would one day burn down the theater), and in the sulfurous gleam Madame rather resembled a cold-blooded Venus surrounded by attendant nymphs.

‘The King depends on the Pope to make it good with the people that they have a cretin on the throne and another in line to follow him,’ she went on, without bothering to lower her voice. Two of the ‘lions’ chatting up the gazelles were relatives of the King, but Marguerite’s father, the Marquis de Vemandois, had been guillotined while the parents of the ‘lions’ had fled the country, so it took more than sour looks from a couple of Ducs to impress her. ‘He wants, in fact, to lead the whole population of Turkey to the Light, but it doesn’t do to say so to the Sultan, whose support he needs against the Austrians. Give that to me,’ she added, to a middle-aged little gentleman in a bottle-green coat, who was holding out a note to her, and a couple of banknotes. ‘For Musetta?’

‘It must be delivered before tonight’s performance.’

Madame Scie tore up the note, then the banknotes, and placed the scraps firmly back into the shocked gentleman’s kid-gloved hand. To January, as if nothing had interrupted them, she continued, ‘His Majesty would love nothing better than to have it seen that the scion of the old aristocracy has snatched a helpless young girl from the clutch of the Infidel.’

‘And has he?’ inquired January. ‘The scion, I mean, not the King. Snatched a helpless young girl from the clutch of the Infidel?’

‘Not that I’ve heard.’ Marguerite shrugged. Anything that did not involve ballet held only limited interest for her. ‘I know the brother – this is the Abbé we’re speaking of, correct? – taught French to those ladies, but one would be very rash indeed to suppose that Arnoux de Longuechasse would get up a flirtation with even the most forthcoming concubine.’

‘You know Arnoux de Longuechasse?’

‘We’ve spoken. Like Our Lord, he’ll speak to anyone. The Marquise’s idiot brother brought him backstage a few days ago to introduce him to that dreadful new soprano they’ve saddled us with, who I believe the brother wishes to mount as a mistress. He – the idiot – was aflame over Arnoux’s “conversion” of the Sultan’s harem in the name of God and the King, and Arnoux corrected him. He seemed embarrassed by the praise. And perfectly impervious to the young ladies who remained after rehearsal was done, I might add, despite their interest in
him
 . . .  A most comely boy.’

‘Cold?’

Coldness was not the impression January had received of the young man.

‘No. He is filled with that singular fire you find in men of the Church, that takes hold physically as well as spiritually: I have no doubt that the boy is a virgin. And unless he is obliged to marry for the family’s sake, will probably die one, after a lifetime of wearing a
cilice
. And on the subject of the fires within the flesh, how is the lovely Ayasha?’

‘Well.’ January grinned at her: he and the ballet mistress, half a dozen years his senior, had been lovers when he’d first come to Paris. ‘Filled with ire at the newest fashions in sleeves  . . .’

‘I always knew her for a woman of taste.’

‘And how is young M’sieu – Basile?’ He hazarded the name of the most recent of Marguerite’s lovers that he knew about.

‘Theo,’ she corrected him. ‘Also well, or as well as any young man can be who has just discovered Socialism and must share his discoveries or die.’ She smiled with the astringent tenderness of a woman who has been through all this before. ‘At least it isn’t Rosicrucianism. I’m not sure I could take another of Basile’s lectures about allegories of Egyptian gods. Give my love to Ayasha,’ she added as January glanced at his watch, cursed, and made his bows. ‘And let me know whether this La Doucetta you’re going to rehearse with can sing at all. There’s a rumor that her lover’s going to finance a production here of
Euryanthe
so she can star in it, and I’d like to know what we’re in for.’

January was used to the musically-inclined mistresses of wealthy gentlemen, whose patrons provided them with private lessons if the Paris conservatories did not share their opinion of the young lady’s talents. At least La Doucetta, a plump and statuesque brunette, though profoundly self-deceived about her own abilities, was kind-hearted and teachable, and she seemed to take a great deal of pleasure in being rehearsed for an audition of Weber’s opera. Her singing master was a Viennese who made his living from such arrangements, and the location and furnishings of the rented studio on the Rue St-Dominique left January in no doubt that this young woman’s lover was prepared to pay everybody handsomely to retain her good mood, so in fact the rehearsal went quite pleasantly. The tip La Doucetta bestowed at the end of the afternoon enabled January and Herr Blick to have a very decent dinner together at the nearby Serpe d’Or, before January proceeded – through the drenching black Paris rain – to the Hôtel Tambonneau for a ball.

And though the Comte de Tambonneau was a Bonapartist noble and looked with an outsider’s contempt upon the old nobility which surrounded the King, between waltzes, cotillions, and quadrilles in the brilliantly candlelit Grand Salon, the talk was of nothing but Arnoux de Longuechasse and the Converted Concubine.

‘A powerful Mohammedan nobleman, dearest, and absolutely savage! She took French lessons in Constantinople from l’Abbé de Longuechasse, and he managed to convert her to the True Faith, right under her master’s nose!’

‘Never!’

‘And, when she came here to Paris, he was able to spirit her away to a convent!’

‘Think of that! God’s call was so strong in her, that she found a way to go to Him  . . .’

‘It’s like a romance—!’

‘Nonsense, Elvire, it’s a most elevating and Christian story! Romance indeed!’

‘—whole family held to the Faith in the face of the Terror—’

‘—poor Clémence and Anne-Marie went to the guillotine rather than renounce God—’

‘—the girl heard God calling to her in a vision, night after night—’

Fragments, snippets, glimpses of details that January knew were absurd – he knew quite well that there was no hereditary nobility in the Sultan’s empire, for instance – yet it was clear that the news was everywhere. Ladies in gowns of pinks and plums, with what appeared to be entire forests of silk flowers and wired curls trembling on their heads, clasped their hands over it, with expressions that reminded January of the schoolgirls at St Theresa watching their friend become a nun in the full blaze of sanctity and attention.

It was the most romantic thing they’d ever heard.

Early in the evening January glimpsed Sabid, clothed in immaculately proper evening-dress of dark-gray coat and spotless white stockings, in conversation near the door of the salon with a man January recognized as a high official in the prefecture of police. But after that he looked for the Arab in vain.

When Daniel ben-Gideon appeared, much later in the evening, with the daughter of a prominent banker on his arm, he confirmed the rumors.

‘According to my sister – who heard it this afternoon, so the story can’t have started much before this morning – Arnoux “converted” this girl in the course of their French lessons, then managed to send her messages through laundresses and grocery deliveries and the woman who sells butter and eggs. He set a time and place to be there with a chaise and carried her off  . . .  I’ve always had great admiration for the organization of the Holy Church. It’s astonishing what they can get people to do. Quite ordinary folk are delighted to carry notes and risk their lives poking about where they’re not supposed to be, if they think God’s going to take favorable notice of them as a result. One would think they all had guilty consciences or something.’

And he glanced in the direction of his young lady-friend, deep in talk with old Moses ben-Gideon and a hard-faced man whose build and nose were clearly echoed in her own.
A match in the making?

‘I thought it had to be worked through the laundresses,’ January said. ‘But it’s ridiculous to think Arnoux would convert anyone through a French lesson under the eyes of guards, some of whom would certainly know French. My guess is that the girl contacted him after the lessons began and told him she wanted to convert. It was an appeal he would not ignore. Can Hüseyin take her out of a convent?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. At least,
I
shouldn’t like to try to pry a prospective novice out of the fists of that frightful Mother Abbess at Batignolles. Particularly not one who’s become a
cause célèbre
for the Church  . . .  which might be one reason for spreading the story. But if—’

Lucien poked January in the back with his fiddle bow. Ben-Gideon pére and Daniel’s prospective bride started to stroll in the direction of the little orchestra, and January, with a gesture of thanks, turned back to his piano. For the rest of the evening he concentrated on olivettes and cross-passes, moulinets and brisés, and on keeping an eye on where the top couple of the set was, so as to end the dance at the proper moment – not easy when one had had only an hour and a half of sleep. Only now and then did it cross his mind to wonder whether Hüseyin Pasha, when he returned on Friday, would succeed in forcing Mother Marie-Doloreuse to relinquish her prize – and whether he would take vengeance on the women of his household, for not keeping a better watch on his property.

He wondered if he should pay another visit to the Convent of St Theresa tomorrow (
and will that be in the quarter-hour you have between rehearsal at the Opera and the first of your lessons?
); whether he should offer his assistance to the girl who, he was fairly certain, had no intention of converting.

The dancing lasted until three. The rain had ceased by then, and when he reached the Rue de l’Aube again, above the uneven medieval roofline the stars seemed to stare, untwinkling and cold. In the windows of the bakery, the first glow of the fire reflected red through the uneven glass; the smell of woodsmoke lay thick in the misty air. As January turned down the street, the bells of St Séverin rang for matins.

He was so tired that the thought of going to sleep on the second-floor landing and not bothering with the rest of the stairs had a certain appeal.

‘Ben!’ A tiny form darted out of the shuttered doorway of the Café L’Empereur.

‘Chatoine—’

‘Ben, they got her!’ The little girl caught the long tails of his coat; she was shuddering with cold. ‘The Arabs. They went to the convent with the police and a bunch of the Arab’s guards, with guns and knives. The flics had a piece of paper, they made the Mother Abbess let them in—’

‘They took Shamira?’ In his mind he saw again Sabid al-Muzaffar, deep in conversation with the official of the Paris police  . . . 

The urchin shook her head violently. ‘The Arab girl got away,’ she said. ‘We couldn’t follow – there was just the two of us, and Poucet said to come get you. They got Ayasha.’

NINE

T
here was a statue of St Peter in a niche a few houses down, beside the door of the oldest house in the street; January shoved his music satchel behind it, with a prayer that it would still be there when – if – he got back. His blood like ice and all thought of sleep rinsed from his brain, he caught Chatoine’s hand. ‘Sabid’s house? In Charenton?’

She nodded. He caught her up – she weighed no more than her namesake kitten – set her on his shoulder, and strode off toward the river in the icy dark.

At this hour even the student cafés in the Rue St-Jacques were dark, and the workers’ taverns along the Quai de la Tournelle had not yet opened. Only in the Hôtel Dieu did lights burn, sullen orange dribbles on the moonless blackness. The towers of Notre Dame reared against the starry abyss, like the sterncastle of a ghost ship being swept through nightmare waters toward the uttermost ends of the earth.

‘Poucet’s keeping watch.’ Chatoine’s little fingers clung to his collar. ‘This afternoon the
mec
you put us on – the Abbé – went to the convent. Poucet sent me back to tell you, but you were gone, so Ayasha came out with us, all dressed up like a servant. She went in just before it got dark, and we all stayed outside to wait for her. But she didn’t come out.’

Virgin Mary, Mother of God
, January prayed as he walked,
show me what to do
. The cold air cut his lungs; beneath the arches of the Pont de la Tournelle the Seine sounded thick and menacing, sable water curling against the worn stones, invisible in the darkness.

‘We waited and waited, and it rained and got really cold. Poucet sent Malapatte back to look for you twice. Then just when the clock struck midnight the flics came  . . .’