Dangerous to Know

33

“I think perhaps I ought to be slightly affronted you didn’t come rescue us before sending for help,” Cécile said as we all sat at a rough-hewn table under the shade of a magnificent tree in the garden at Mrs. Hargreaves’s house the next afternoon. None of us had touched the spread of cakes on pretty silver platters, but the scalding hot tea proved a panacea for all, and we consumed pot after pot at an alarming rate.

“I was afraid if he woke up he’d catch me again before I could sound an alarm,” I said. In fact, he hadn’t regained consciousness until after Inspector Gaudet and his men arrived, having been summoned by Mrs. Hargreaves’s servants the instant I’d told them what happened. His physical condition was not great—I’d injured him severely—but his mind was intact, and the police physician who examined him predicted what he called a full-enough recovery.

“It’s terrifying to think—” my mother-in-law started, but stopped at a fierce glare from Colin. We all fell into a tense silence. Madeline was still with us, shaken and devastated, incoherent. I wished Dr. Girard could look after her. We’d arranged for his partner to come for both her and her mother, and I had no doubt they’d be well taken care of in the asylum, although seeing them committed felt something like a failure. George, for all his evilness, had started with a noble motive—trying to cure his wife’s illness so that she would never be relegated to hospital. His ill-formed plan had in the end served to do nothing but guarantee she would spend the rest of her life in one. And he would certainly be executed.

“Adèle!”

The sound of Madeline’s voice startled me. Cécile dropped her fan and Mrs. Hargreaves poured tea onto the table instead of into her son’s cup. Madeline had been only short of catatonic all day, but now her face was bright, her eyes eager.

“Adèle!” she said again. “What do you think? Should we go to Paris? It’s been too long since we’ve been to a real ball, and I’m desperate to see Mr. Worth about new dresses.”

“Oh, Madeline,” I said, sitting next to her and taking her hand. “Of course we’ll go to Paris.”

“I’ve met the most handsome gentleman and I’m certain he’s going to propose to me. He’s English—but I suppose I can learn to tolerate that. He’s called George, and I absolutely adore him.”

Mrs. Hargreaves rose from her seat and bent over Madeline’s shoulder. “Do come inside with me dearest,” she said. “I want to hear all about George and to ask your advice on my dinner menu. You will help me, won’t you?” She led her towards the house. I felt sick, unable to determine which was worse—that she believed she’d only just met George and was hoping to marry him or the fact that she’d never see him again. Would she even know?

“That’s a relief,” Sebastian said as soon as they were gone. I glared at him. “Don’t even think about scolding me, Kallista. It’s beyond awkward having her around here now in that state of mind. There’s nothing more any of us can do for her. No point in suffering with her.”

“You are so heartless,” Monsieur Leblanc said, tugging at his moustache. “It’s inspiring.”

“Why, thank you,” Sebastian said, puffing himself up. “It is a delight to be appreciated.”

“You’ve put me on a new track,” Monsieur Leblanc said. “I want to abandon journalism altogether—can’t be any more difficult than abandoning the law, wouldn’t you say?—and turn instead to fiction. I’m going to chronicle the adventures of a gentleman thief.”

“And base him, naturellement, on moi,” Sebastian said.

“Does your ego know no bounds?” I asked.

“I certainly hope not,” Cécile said. “That would be a grand disappointment.”

“I shall call him Arsène Lupin,” Monsieur Leblanc said. “And I will, perhaps, let it be known—or at least rumored—that he’s not altogether an invention.”

“I shall come to you at Étretat twice a year and update you on my exploits,” Sebastian said. “And I may even adopt the name Vasseur as a nom de plume, seeing as how it goes with eyes of a certain shade of blue. Might be useful if people thought I’d been in the Foreign Legion.”

“Capet!” Colin’s eyes gave a stern warning, then he looked away, his attention diverted by a bright flutter at the garden gate.

“We set off the moment we got your telegram,” Madame Prier said, Toinette trailing behind her in a yellow dress. “You have saved us all from the distress of never having justice done for our dearest girl!” She pulled me out of my chair and embraced me, not balking at my expression of disbelief. Toinette, however, was not yet so practiced in the art of selective notice.

“She doesn’t believe you for an instant, Maman,” she said, and took the seat closest to Colin, who immediately rose and crossed to me, standing behind my chair and putting a hand on my shoulder.

“You should treat your mother with more respect, Toinette,” he said. “Impertinence is not an attractive trait in a young lady. Not, that is, when it is full of malice.”

Toinette opened her mouth and closed it again without speaking. Her mother lowered herself onto a chair and accepted a cup of tea from Cécile.

“My husband apologizes for not coming with us,” Madame Prier said. “He is much engaged in business at the moment. But his relief at what you have done is palpable.”

Toinette snorted.

We all ignored her.

“Have you learned anything else from that horrible man?” Madame Prier asked. “I can’t believe I received him at my house. It makes me want to move. I can hardly bear to go into the sitting room anymore.”

“He admitted to having stolen the page from Laurent’s notebook after he found it in Edith’s room at the asylum during one of his visits to her,” Colin said. “He was already planning to kidnap your daughter, and considered Laurent’s words a sort of insurance should anything go wrong. Planted correctly, he thought it would implicate Laurent in his sister’s disappearance.”

“Despicable beast,” she said. “And he was calling himself Myriel?”

“Yes,” I said. “And disguised himself with a moustache and spectacles. Told her he’d been paying for Lucy’s care.”

“I always knew one couldn’t trust any member of the Foreign Legion. Mercenaries, all of them,” Madame Prier said.

“Did it ever occur to you, Maman, that had you actually visited Edith instead of pretending to she might not have accepted Myriel’s false friendship?” Toinette asked. “And hence you might have averted this entire situation?”

“There’s no point thinking that way,” I said. “George was fixed on his purpose. He would have got to Edith one way or another. No one could have prevented it.” I didn’t entirely believe my words, but saying them seemed the right thing to do.

Madame Prier leaned forward. “May we see Lucy now?”

My heart clenched. I hated the thought of the little girl in the hands of the Priers, even if they were her closest relatives. “She’s resting now,” I said. “But you’ll meet her soon.”

Toinette rolled her eyes. “And that will be a delight, I’m sure.”

Cécile cleared her throat, no more eager to see Lucy handed over to her grandmother than I. “I haven’t figured out all the details of this horrendous crime. Why did George take Edith away from Étretat?”

“He knew all along it wouldn’t be practical to stay there indefinitely, but it made for an excellent starting point—a perfect place to hide where there was no connection to him. He’d used Vasseur’s name to take the house, so if Edith ever were traced there, everyone would believe she’d gone with her lover.”

“As soon as her illness grew worse, he sedated her,” Colin said. “He told Lucy her mother was ill, and that he was taking her to hospital. Instead, they went to the château, where he’d set up a makeshift laboratory—”

“With which Emily is all too familiar,” Cécile said.

“Quite,” Colin continued. “He stashed Lucy away in a hidden room in the dovecote—one connected by secret passageway to his laboratory—and started to work on her mother. He was convinced it would lead him to a way to help his wife—something that until that point had seemed to him utterly hopeless.”

Already, Gaudet had found two physicians with whom George had consulted, asking them to do more aggressive electrical treatment on Madeline than either of them thought responsible. There hadn’t been enough research, they said, so he pursued it on his own, even building his own machine. And in the months that followed, he tortured Edith with his experimental treatment, until the fatal day when he turned the current too high.

“Why did he kill Dr. Girard?” Monsieur Leblanc asked, looking up from the notebook into which he had furiously been scribbling notes. “First, he was afraid Girard might recognize him as Myriel. Second, because he got nervous, and thought—erroneously—that another death so far removed from his life with Madeline would protect him from being considered a possible suspect,” Colin said. “He still had the page from the diary, and knew that we were suspicious of Laurent.”

“A dreadful business, all of it,” Cécile said. “Thank goodness it’s over.”

“All that concerns Markham,” Colin said, turning to Sebastian. “There is one further thing to consider: the matter of the stolen Monet. I know you, Capet, swear you had nothing to do with it.”

“I promised the artist himself I would never touch another of his paintings!” Sebastian said.

“Let me see…” I closed my eyes as if deep in thought. “You might not have actually touched the painting, correct? You could have used gloves, had an accomplice lift it for you. Or perhaps you get around your promise by claiming that you have not, in fact, touched another painting. You’ve merely re-stolen what you’d already taken once.”

“You wound me, Kallista,” Sebastian said, rising from the table and leaning against a nearby tree. “How could you think so ill of me?”

“All this crime!” Madame Prier said, fanning herself. “It’s beyond anything a decent person could tolerate.”

“Let’s hope we’ve reached the end of it,” I said. “As for the painting, I shall never change my mind about what happened to it.”

“I suppose it couldn’t have been Monet who took it,” Cécile said. “Although I half wish is was. It would make for a good story, an artist stealing his own work, don’t you think? Perhaps you should write it, Monsieur Leblanc.”

“An interesting suggestion,” Monsieur Leblanc said. “But somehow I don’t think Monet has much of the criminal element in him.”

“Fictionalize it, dear man!” Cécile cried. “Replace him with Manet if you must.”

All save Toinette laughed. She, instead, practiced what I could only imagine was an expression she thought made her appear particularly fetching: lips in a half-open pout, eyes wide. She looked as if she was about to speak and, I assumed, change the subject.

I wasn’t about to let her. Not when I had the opportunity to coax a confession from Sebastian, whom, there could be no doubt, was one hundred percent culpable for the missing Monet.

“Mr. Capet—” I began but stopped as I turned to the tree against which he had only just been leaning. Now he was nowhere in sight. I met Colin’s eyes and he leapt up at once, with me following as close behind as my impractical shoes (silk, lovely, heel far too high for running) would allow. He sprinted away from the others towards a forested section of the garden.

I did not make it far into the woods before I felt a rough hand on my arm as my husband disappeared from sight in the distance ahead of me.

“I owe you an apology.” Laurent’s face was dark, only half-visible in the shadows of the towering trees. “You did find justice for Edith, and for that I am grateful.”

A tingling warmth rushed through me. I’d not thought it possible to impress Laurent in any way under any circumstances. “You’re welcome,” I said. “I only wish she hadn’t found herself in need of justice.”

He scowled. “Don’t bother to congratulate yourself too much. If you think you’ve made things better, you haven’t. All you’ve done is delivered another child into the hands of my parents. Do you think Edith would have wanted that for her daughter?”

“I—”

“Though I’m not sure in the end I care. I’ll help Lucy as I see fit, but the truth is, I want to see the monster who killed my sister punished even if it does mean her child will wind up in a situation as bad as the one from which Edith escaped.” He stepped closer to me and I could feel his breath hot on my face. “It’s what makes us different, you and I, Lady Emily. You care for the living, and I for the dead.”

Footsteps approached, and Laurent started. He grabbed my hand, kissed it, and took his leave moments before Colin arrived on the scene.

“Interesting conversation?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Do you think Laurent capable of anything else?”

“He elevates brooding to the level of art.”

“Did you find Sebastian?” I asked. My husband shook his head.

“No one—and I know that you, Emily, of all people, will be delighted to hear me admit this—can escape like Capet. Our elusive friend is long gone.”

I sighed, not entirely displeased to see him make another successful escape. “I’d wager anything that if I were to wire Davis right now, our indomitable butler would tell me a package of just the right dimensions to match the missing Monet had arrived at Park Lane only last week.”

“That’s a bet I am not willing to take,” he said, taking my hand as we dropped, short of breath, onto a little bench far from the picnic grove where our friends, who had not joined the chase, waited for our return. “However, I must inform you that you have lost the wager we did make. Sebastian has agreed to work with me.”

“Oh, heavens!” I said. “I’m beyond disappointed. Not, my dear, because I hate to lose to you, but because there’s something painfully tragic about Sebastian taking up an honest occupation.”

“He won’t be abandoning his other work altogether. On that you may depend. What convinced him in the end were some dubious statements I made implying he might receive immunity from other indiscretions if he helped me on occasion.”

“And will he?”

“Possibly,” he said.

I sighed. “Well, I suppose it’s time I journey to Épernay, to Moët et Chandon, so I might collect your case of champagne. It’s a pity they’ve no special vintage or extravagant batch designed for only the most extraordinary of celebrations. Because I do hope you know, my darling husband, this is the last time I’ll lose a bet to you.”

“Perhaps you can convince them to pursue such a thing—a special-label vintage. Name it after that blind monk—what was his name?”

“Dom Pérignon, who said drinking champagne is like tasting the stars.”

“I’m sure he didn’t put it quite so elegantly,” he said, slipping his arm around my waist and pulling me closer to him. “But then, I’ve yet to meet anyone, man or woman, who could call himself your true equal when it comes to turn of phrase or anything else.”

“Are you trying to flatter me?” I leaned close to him, so that my lips nearly brushed his.

“Precisely,” he said. “I’ve learned my lesson, Emily. Trying to protect you backfired horrendously and I can hardly breathe when I think of how close I came once again to losing you. If I’d only left you to your own devices, you’d have been safe in Rouen with me.”

“And Lucy wouldn’t have been found, and George wouldn’t have been caught.”

“We’d have solved it eventually, and together,” he said. “A much better prospect than what in fact transpired. Can you forgive me?”

“I do seem to recall, from the days of our courtship, that you’re particularly gifted when it comes to persuasion. I must warn you, however, of the possibility I may have grown immune to some of the maneuvers you’ve already used on me.”

“Then I shall have to search the recesses of my soul for new ways to impress you. If I’m clever enough, will I be able to convince you to trade investigation for a more thorough pursuit of classical knowledge? Perhaps a term at Oxford?”

I laughed. “No, Colin, you’ll never dissuade me from wanting to pursue those things at which I excel, investigations included.”

“You’ll be the death of me, you know,” he said.

“Would you have it any other way?” I asked. The only reply he gave was a kiss, deeper and more passionate than any in my memory. It might have been he was avoiding the question, but I preferred to consider it his answer, and that I could live with for all the rest of time.