The Counterfeit Heiress (22 page)

“A warning! How terribly exciting.” Jeremy dropped the paper next to him on the settee where he was sitting. “I do think, Hargreaves, this calls for whisky?” Colin agreed, and Jeremy poured for them both. “Port, Em?” I saw no reason to deny myself the comfort of a spot of my favorite libation.

“What of your own travails?” I asked as he handed me a glass of the tawny liquid.

“Nothing yet,” Colin said, “but we expected little else today. I suspect that all the excitement in the park may keep him from collecting his post tomorrow—that would be wise if he has any inkling that we are onto him—but we will watch all the same.”

“I suppose you can’t spare Jeremy, then?” I asked, and described for them my strategy concerning the printers. “Neither Cécile nor I would make a good second should you require assistance in stopping the wretch if he manages to leave the post office. I proved that much by letting him get away this afternoon.”

“I am glad you got no further than you did,” Colin said. “The effort was admirable, my dear. I am most impressed.”

“I suppose Cécile and I could deal with the printers—”

“But you thought it sounded tedious and that is why you wanted to put me on the case,” Jeremy interrupted.

“Am I so obvious? Darling Jeremy, after seeing how well you did with the florists, I can hardly be blamed. I think, when we are in the neighborhood investigating printers, Cécile and I should inquire with Swiveller’s concierge as to the availability of apartments in her building.”

“Absolutely not.” Colin set his empty whisky glass onto the side table next to him with such force I feared it would shatter. “If he were there, he would recognize either of you. We cannot take the risk.”

“A fair point.” I sighed. “We shall limit ourselves to the printers.”

Cécile returned, wearing a frothy tea gown, and crossed directly to the
rafraîchissoir,
where, with a deftness one would not expect from a lady undertaking the task, she opened a bottle of Moët et Chandon. “I had a revelation while I was in the bath. If Estella is indeed in Paris, and for only a short while, it is likely that she will visit the graves of her parents. She was always devoted to them and had a habit of bringing a fresh wreath to them every week. Tomorrow, Kallista and I will go to the cemetery and watch for her.”

“Won’t she see us and run away?” I asked.

“Parisian cemeteries are not like English ones. There will be plenty of places for us to hide.”

As I was not particularly eager to trudge through a far-off neighborhood interviewing printers, I agreed to her plan. The truth was, I expected us to make little progress in the case until either the auburn-haired man collected his mail or until I, next week, was able to speak to Swiveller’s delivery boy. In the meantime, an outing to the cemetery sounded like an excellent diversion.

Estella

xiv

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

Estella, now three chapters in, was thoroughly enjoying Monsieur Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities.
She paused at this passage, reading it over and over, delighting in the thought that she, hidden away here in her little room in the cellar of some house—it must be a cellar, she had decided, for where else would a person build walls of stone for a room accessible only by trapdoor?—she herself was a secret enclosed.

She glanced at her clock. Six forty-five in the evening. She should think about dinner soon. The quiche might be too old now, and she did not want to risk any sort of digestive disturbance. She limited herself to bread and cheese and a small fruit tart. When she had finished eating, she returned to her book, and fell asleep with it still in her hands.

The next morning, Sunday—nearly the last of her imprisonment!—she awoke and was pleased when she saw the time. It was only seven-thirty. As much as she was looking forward to going home, she wanted to take advantage of these last hours on her own. She had relished staying in her nightgown all day yesterday, but today, she was going to dress. She lathered her soap, wrapping it in a flannel and dipping it into the bucket she used for her toilette. Soon she was clean and dressed in her old skirt, but with new undergarments and a fresh shirtwaist. She couldn’t manage her corset well without assistance, but was able to button the blouse even in the absence of her constricting stays. Her skirt would not fasten all the way, but who would see her to notice? She even put on her boots, but after several days of not having worn them, they felt stiff and uncomfortable, and she wondered how she had ever been able to stand them. She flung them into the corner of the room where she had already heaped her dirty clothes.

As the day progressed, Estella grew melancholy. She did not eat anything for luncheon, and did not even bother to open the wine her captor had left. Water kept her thirst at bay, but there was an ache building deep inside her that she could neither identify nor satisfy. She returned to her book, weeping when poor Lucie was reunited with the father she had believed to be dead, and soon found herself so caught up in the story that the ache had all but disappeared. She read, on and on, until hunger began to gnaw at her, and she reached for the last of her cheese and a piece of now stale baguette. The bread was so hard she could barely tear it, but she managed, and found it wasn’t so bad as she would have thought. At ten-eighteen her eyelids started to feel heavy. For the last time, she fluffed up her featherbed, changed into her nightgown, and settled down to sleep on her stone slab.

15

Paris’s Père-Lachaise bore almost no resemblance to any cemetery I had visited before, although I could see that it had originally been intended to conjure up visions of the ancient tombs lining Rome’s Appian Way. Far in the northeast of the city, the Cimetière de l’Est—its official name—had been constructed at the end of the previous century in an attempt to provide burial sites outside what were then the limits of the city. France, post-Revolution, was secular to its core—at least in theory—but the builders gave their grounds a Jesuitical nickname. The historical Père de la Chaise, confessor of King Louis XIV, had once acquired for his order the land on which the cemetery now stood to serve as a resort for the priests. When contemplating the luxurious holidays they must have enjoyed, one can hardly argue with the country’s desire for secularity.

Secular though their government may be, the Parisians are a devout lot, largely followers of the Roman church, and once the Cimetière de l’Est had been dubbed Père-Lachaise, the citizens began to accept that it was a respectable, hallowed place. There are few people more conscious than the Parisians of tradition and the importance of doing things in a manner suited to reflect their station, and the organizers initially had a great difficulty convincing members of the best families that they ought to choose this new cemetery as their final resting place. In an effort to manipulate attitudes, they began exhuming bodies of famous Frenchmen and reburying them in Père-Lachaise. Before long, high society was clamoring to rest in the same location as Abélard and Heloïse, Molière and La Fontaine, Louise de Lorraine—the widow of Henri III—and Caron de Beaumarchais, who had written
The Marriage of Figaro
.

Cécile’s driver left us directly in front of a steep set of stairs that, from the street, appeared to lead to the top of a high wall. In fact, the cemetery’s ground, on a hill, began above street level. Once inside, I felt as if I had entered another world, a true city of the dead, with long, narrow avenues crossing long, narrow streets, lined on both sides by tombs that looked almost like narrow houses. Cécile’s late and unlamented husband was buried here, and although she had never been fond of the man, she did very much appreciate the fortune he had left her, and she always credited him with having taught her how to shoot. Thus, she had brought with her a simple wreath to lay on his grave—or so I had thought before I understood the nature of things at Père-Lachaise.

We hiked what felt like a mile up a hill, then turned left and then right. There were some slab graves, but mostly tombs, and I assumed the bodies were buried, so to speak, inside the walls of these structures, but I quickly realized my mistake when, thirty yards down a narrow street, Cécile stopped and put her hand on the door of one of the tombs.

“You’re not going to open it?” I gasped.

“Why on earth not? The dreadful man is buried here. Where else would you have me leave his wreath?” The door swung open and revealed what to all appearances was a small and extremely narrow chapel, with an altar, a stained-glass window above it, and hooks attached on both sides of the walls running perpendicular to it. Cécile stepped inside, hung the wreath on one of the hooks, and frowned. She raised a gloved hand to one of the names carved on the wall and ran her fingers over it. “I suppose I ought to do this more often, and perhaps I would, if he had ever in his life given me cause to miss him.”

I stepped away from the iron door to give Cécile some privacy. The bodies of the dearly departed, I realized, were buried below these tombs. It was obvious when I thought about it, but I had assumed a raised tomb meant a raised grave. Most of the little houses above the graves were slightly wider and slightly longer than a coffin. The depth of the grave—or graves—below determined how many members of a family might be stacked, one on top of another. The condition of the tombs varied wildly. Some were beautifully tended: the doors gleaming, the stained glass polished, and fresh flowers arranged on the little altars. I could see all this through the windows in many of the doors. Others, however, were in a sorry state of disrepair, their doors hanging off the hinges, dust, dirt, and dead leaves accumulating on their floors, the dry remains of long-forgot flowers crumbling inside.

Cécile did not remain inside her husband’s tomb for long. She closed the door behind her and found me peeking into one of the more derelict tombs. “When one purchases a plot here, one is given a concession
à perpétuité—
they are to have the plot forever—so long as they tend to the grave. Ones like this”—she shrugged—“will eventually have their occupants exhumed to the Catacombs, and the space will be sold to another family.”

“How awful.” The door was already partly open. I pulled it the rest of the way, its rusty hinges groaning. Inside, the stained glass was broken, large pieces of it missing. I brushed aside an enormous spider’s web with my parasol and looked at the carving on the wall:

ICI REPOSE

MME V GIFFART

NÉE FLORETTE DAUVILLIER

DÉCÉDÉE LE 9 MARS 1822

À L’ÂGE DE 23 ANS

“So young to die.” I used my handkerchief to brush the dust of her inscription. “I wonder if she fell ill, or if it was childbirth, and why is no one taking care—”

“You already fall victim to Père-Lachaise, Kallista. It is impossible to come and not wonder about the stories of all the people resting here. There is no time for it now. We must hurry to the Lamar family tomb.”

My heart ached as I closed the door as far as it would go. Perhaps Florette had never had children, and her husband had remarried after her death. His new wife might not have wanted him tending to the grave of her predecessor, the woman up to whose memory she could never live. Or Florette’s husband could have died as well—with her, during an epidemic—I turned back, wanting to look at the other names on the walls, but Cécile took me firmly by the arm. “Another day, Kallista, you can return and study the dead.” We started back down the hill. “There is Molière—look quickly as we pass—it is easy to get confused on these roads and we don’t have time to get lost.”

The playwright rested in a large stone sepulcher held above the ground by four thick columns. His having been one of the bodies moved in an attempt to lure others to the cemetery, I wondered what he would have made of his new digs. Cécile was dragging me along too quickly for me to give much consideration to the question. We cut across another avenue—each was named, and there were signposts at every intersection—and soon were in front of the Lamar family tomb. Although it could not really have been, it seemed even narrower than some of the others. A large stone cross jutted up from the front of its steeply peaked roof, below which, on the structure’s façade, was a small Gothic window above an ornate ironwork door. Everything about the tomb was pristine. The door was locked, but we could see inside through its window.

“There is a wreath there,” I said, careful not to press my nose against the glass and leave a mark. “It looks fresh.”

“We have missed her.” Cécile shrugged. “It was worth trying, but who knows when she came here. It may have been immediately upon her arrival in the city.”

“How do we know it’s her wreath? Didn’t she have siblings?”

“Half siblings, who were so displeased by the distribution of their father’s estate that I would fall over dead with shock if any of them ever came to his grave, let alone tend to it.”

I sighed. “I do hope my dawdling didn’t ruin us.”

“You didn’t really dawdle for long, Kallista. For all we know, she came even before we suspected she was back in Paris.”

“This does seem to confirm she is here, somewhere. In Paris, that is.”

“Oui,”
Cécile said. “Come, I will show you my favorite tomb—”

“We ought to start on the printers,” I interrupted.

“It will not take long.” She led me to an imposing monument rising high above all those around it. Like Molière, this person did not have one of the little houses. Perhaps the famous among the dead preferred something more spectacular, more likely to draw the eye of every passerby. This sepulcher was topped by decorations of hideous winged skulls. A carving on a side panel depicted ordinary people cowering at the sight of demons and a grotesque flying skeleton.