The Counterfeit Heiress (12 page)

Colin raised his hand and opened his mouth to speak. Cécile silenced him with a glance.

“This is most terrible.” The servant wrung his hands and the look of panic on his face fell only just short of caricature. “Has she left Siam?”

“Is that where you believe her to be?” I asked. “Have you had a letter from her?”

“Not myself, madame, but if you will allow me to fetch the steward, he will be better able to assist you.”

He put us in a grand salon, where enormous tapestries covered three of the walls. Above the center of each hung the arms of France and Navarre within the collars of the Order of the Holy Spirit and the Order of Saint Michael. A heavy crystal chandelier illuminated the space, although it was hardly necessary; sunlight poured through four large windows in the outside wall.

“I cannot count the number of times I implored Estella to either move the tapestries or draw the curtains.” Cécile marched to the wall hanging nearest her and stood so close her nose nearly touched it. “The light is bound to fade the colors.”

I lowered myself into a chair near a wide marble fireplace edged with a simple gilt band fashioned in the shape of the Greek key. “Has the house changed from when you were last here?”

“The basics of what I have seen so far are unaltered, although I do not recall such a great profusion of flowers.” Nearly every flat surface held a vase, their sizes as varied as the blooms they held. “The smell of lilies is all but overpowering. What can she be thinking?”

The steward entered, pulling the door to the entrance hall closed behind him. Colin crossed to him before Cécile could interfere, gave his standard introduction, and began to interrogate the man at once.

“We have not seen Mademoiselle Lamar in ages, monsieur.” The steward stood very straight and was nearly as tall as my husband. “She departed for Egypt some fifteen-odd years ago and has not returned since.”

“Has she, in all that time, sent for any of her belongings?” I asked.

“Not once, madame, but that is hardly surprising. Mademoiselle took nothing with her when she left—she said her clothing was wholly inappropriate for her journey and had new items packed directly into trunks as the seamstresses completed them.”

“Who made the clothes? Worth?” Colin asked.

“
Non, monsieur
. Mademoiselle had not the desire for fashion shared by so many ladies. She preferred simpler things. You may speak to her maid if you like. She will know much more about this than I.”

“Her maid is here?” I asked.

“
Oui, madame.
Mademoiselle asked that we all remain here and at the ready so that she can arrive unannounced whenever she so desires.”

“I should like very much to speak to the maid.”

“Bien sûr.”
He opened the door, poked out his head, and called for the servant stationed in the hall, speaking to him in a low voice before retuning his attention to us. As we questioned him further, it quickly became apparent that the situation here mirrored what we had found in Belgravia. The house, fully staffed, operated as if its mistress had gone across town and would be back for dinner, not that she was gallivanting across continents with no evidence of a plan to return.

While Colin and Jeremy explored the rest of the house, Cécile and I remained in the salon to see the maid. Jeanne was of petite stature, wiry rather than round, and must have been approaching her sixtieth birthday. I wondered that she was still working, but then reminded myself that her duties, such as they were with her mistress away, could not have been taxing in the least.

“Was Mademoiselle Lamar eagerly anticipating her departure?” I asked. “I know it was ages ago, but surely you remember.”

“I remember precisely, madame, because she never spoke to me of it. Mademoiselle is not what one could describe as gregarious.”

“But she must have mentioned it, if only to tell you she was leaving you here rather than having you accompany her?”

“She did nothing of the sort. I have served the Lamar family for more than thirty years. Mademoiselle’s mother asked me to tend to her daughter when she started to go out in society, and I have been with her ever since. Mademoiselle did not much like society, and after her parents’ death, went out very little. When she did venture into the wilds of Paris, as she called it, she rarely gave me details. I never knew if I was dressing her for the opera or a ball. As you are her friend, Madame du Lac, you know that she paid no attention to what others thought she should wear.”

“That is true.” Cécile turned to me to explain. “Estella had two types of gowns: those with long sleeves and those with short sleeves. The weather determined what she wore on any given day.”

“Yet we are to believe she ordered a costume from Worth for the Duchess of Devonshire’s ball?” I asked.

“Non, non, non.”
Jeanne stifled a laugh. “Do please forgive me, I mean no disrespect, but Mademoiselle would never have hired Monsieur Worth. She had a seamstress who worked exclusively for her. It was not a simple feat to find someone interested in dressing someone so disinterested in fashion.”

I made note of the name of the seamstress. Jeanne was unsure of her current address, but gave me the one she knew from her last dealings with the woman. “Did your mistress take any of her personal possessions when she left?” I asked.

“She took nothing.”

“And this did not strike you as odd?” I asked.

The maid threw her hands in the air. “Madame, I do not think you understand what it is to work for her. Mademoiselle Lamar is most uncommunicative. She went out one afternoon, dressed in a long-sleeved gown and a cloak. She sent word to us that evening that she had decided to go to Versailles for several days. Soon thereafter, she wrote to inform the steward that she was leaving for a prolonged trip abroad, and that her seamstress, from whom she had new traveling clothes, was sending them directly to her. Mademoiselle had no firm date by which she planned to return, so she asked that we all remain as we were until she told us otherwise.”

“So years go by—
years
—and you all stay here, doing next to nothing, but continuing to draw your salaries.” This did not sit well with me.

“What else are we to do?” the maid exclaimed. “Mademoiselle Lamar’s orders left no room for doubt and were confirmed for us many times over by her solicitor, Monsieur Pinard. It is all very well to accuse us of taking advantage, but I can assure you that is not the case. I tried three times to give my notice and Monsieur Pinard would not hear of it. Mademoiselle Lamar is adamant about wanting nothing in the house different when she returns.”

“I am directing a great deal of displeasure in Monsieur Pinard’s direction,” Cécile said. “You may go, Jeanne, unless there is anything further you have to tell us.”

“What else is there to say?” the maid asked. “Why are you asking all these questions? Has something happened to my mistress?”

“That is what we are trying to determine,” I said. “The entire circumstance of this situation is suspicious.”

“It is easy for you to say that, coming upon us like this, so many years after Mademoiselle Lamar’s departure, but it was not so for us. Her manner of leaving may seem odd to you, but it did not appear out of character to those in her household. You, Madame du Lac, know her well. Were you shocked at the time?”

“I own to having felt a certain amount of surprise,” Cécile said. “I had never expected Estella to embark on a journey of any scale. She was loath to leave her house.”

“Mademoiselle had very little to say to me,” Jeanne said, “but she always read while I tended to her hair, always books about travel and exotic places. Perhaps they fired her imagination.”

“They must have.” Cécile dismissed the maid, leaned against the back of her chair in that elegant way exclusive to Parisian ladies, and tapped her closed fan against the palm of her left hand. “Estella was so very obsessed with her reading at times, and I do admit that I was not wholly taken aback at the note she sent me when she left. It was an odd way to announce her departure, but her manners had always left much to be desired. She paid little regard to what society expected in terms of ordinary behavior. If I invited her to dinner and managed to convince her to come, I knew to expect that she might leave before dessert had finished. She meant no offense by her actions, but did not stay on when she wanted to go home.”

“It appears that neither did she stay home when she wanted to depart.” I frowned. “It is most curious. Did you truly think nothing of it at the time?”

“At the time, Kallista, I believed she had decided to cruise up the Nile. This is hardly an earth-shattering course of action for someone who has spent years reading about the travels of others. Egypt led to Jerusalem, which led to Persia, which led to India, and so forth. I thought very little of it. Estella is a difficult person to know, and I had no reason to suspect anything was amiss.”

“The profusion of newspaper photos I have seen strike the wrong chord with me,” I said. “She had never before behaved in a way that suggested she craved attention, but we are to assume her travels changed this about her? I do not believe it. The pictures seem to me a way of proving she was where she claimed, but her face was not discernible in a single one of the photographs in your album other than the first, and that had been taken in a studio years before she left Paris. I am convinced that something has gone very much amiss.”

*   *   *

We sat in a café near the place des Vosges to have a council of war after we had finished at Estella’s house. Colin and Jeremy reported having found every room in perfect order. They had gone below stairs as well, and although the servants could not be described as overworked, neither were they at leisure. Their mistress’s absence meant the cook did not have to prepare her meals, and that the laundress did not need to tend to any of her undergarments, but there were still the servants’ meals, the bed linens and white goods throughout the house. Floors needed polishing, windows washing, and surfaces dusting. Because the house was not closed, the amount of work varied only slightly with Estella gone.

“So far as I can tell she kept no diary.” Colin flipped through his notebook. “I found no correspondence to speak of. The steward told me he sends all her mail on to the solicitor, Pinard. Other than that, there is very little in the house that speaks to Miss Lamar’s character.”

“You saw her dolls,
non
?” Cécile asked.

“I nearly ran when Hargreaves opened the cupboard.” Jeremy’s face contorted in disgust. “Creepy things, if you ask me, all lined up on the floor like that around a little stool.”

“Are they not in the nursery?” I asked.

“There were more than seventy on shelves in a room nearby,” Colin said, “but we found a smaller grouping in a cupboard in the corridor on the top floor of the house. It appeared to have been fashioned into a hiding place for a small child.”

“Estella must have kept it as it had been when she was a girl.” I shrugged. “No reason to change it.”

“She had a great affection for her dolls,” Cécile said. “Her father gave them to her and she developed what I can only call an unnatural attachment to them. She confided in me that her mother told her the most wonderful, fantastical stories when she was young, and that she eventually started telling them to her dolls.”

“Not entirely out of the ordinary, I imagine,” Colin said.

“It would not have been had she abandoned the habit when she came of age, Monsieur Hargreaves, but Estella often had one or more of her dolls with her when I called on her. When she did, she explained that she had been in the middle of a story. At the time I assumed she was being facetious. Now I am not confident in that judgment.”

“There can be no question that Estella is a strange lady,” I said. “Let us take that as read. A person with childlike qualities is vulnerable to those who want to take advantage, and her fortune would make her ripe to be so targeted. I want to see Monsieur Pinard immediately. From what the servants have told us, he holds the purse strings. Let’s see if he is controlling his client as well as her money.”

Estella

viii

When her captor had left her, Estella thought she would never be hungry enough to eat the food he had brought, but as the hours passed—was it hours? Days? She had no way to measure the passing of time—her stomach, despite the fear and anxiety consuming the rest of her, began to rumble. She lined the food up next to her on the slab, evaluating her bounty. The grapes had seen better days, but the cheese did not look bad. She broke off a corner of it and tore a piece of the baguette. He had left her no knife—wise man—so she was forced to attack the pâté with the crust of the bread. It worked surprisingly well.

He had brought the wine already opened, the cork crammed back into the bottle’s neck, so that she would have no need for a corkscrew. She had no glass, so was forced to guzzle directly from the bottle, an act that she found strangely appealing, so unlike anything she had been allowed to do in her regular life. The wine was atrocious, but it made her muscles relax and the sensation was so pleasant that she drank more than she perhaps ought to have. Her lids grew heavy, but she did not know whether to credit this to the libation or the hour. She wrapped the remaining cheese in its paper, popped a grape into her mouth—the fruit was not so bad as she had feared, but Estella acknowledged this, too, might be due to the effect of the wine—and made a neat pile of her provisions on the floor away from the slab.

She wanted to sleep, but even the wine could not disguise the intense discomfort one feels when reclining on bare stone. She had bunched her cloak into a ball, fashioning a sort of pillow from it. Her heavy petticoats provided a certain amount of padding, but nowhere near enough to make her position one that could be even generously described as comfortable. Eventually she was drowsy enough to decide it wise to blow out the candles and then, plunged once again into darkness, slumber at last overcame her.

She did not dream all night.