Paris by Starlight, page 1
Robert Dinsdale
* * *
PARIS BY STARLIGHT
CONTENTS
BOOK ONE THE MIDNIGHT GIRL
HALF A WORLD AWAY
THE ORIGINS OF ENCHANTMENT
THE DISCOVERY OF STARLIGHT
BOOK TWO THE MUSIC OF THE NIGHT
OLD WORLDS, OLD INCANTATIONS
THE NOCTURNE BELOW
THIS NIGHT OF SEVEN STARS
BOOK THREE AN ORDINARY ENCHANTMENT
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE
THE CITY AND THE STARS
BORDERLINE
THE DECREES OF THE NIGHT
BOOK FOUR THE FAR AWAY WORLD
THINGS FALL APART
THE DYING OF THE LIGHT
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Dinsdale was born in North Yorkshire and currently lives in Leigh-On-Sea. He is the author of three previous critically acclaimed novels: The Harrowing, Little Exiles and Gingerbread.
His bestselling novel The Toymakers was his first venture into magic.
ALSO BY ROBERT DINSDALE
The Harrowing
Little Exiles
Gingerbread
The Toymakers
For my parents, who have been reading my writing for thirty years; and for Esther, who is just beginning
See the small girl: she is waiting, as we all once waited, for her father to come and tell her bedtime stories.
Teeth brushed, hair combed; Esmé is the very picture of a model child. Tonight she is in her unicorn pyjamas – though unicorns, those magical beasts which once consumed her every thought, have (for reasons obvious to every parent in Paris) fallen out of fashion of late. With her bear in her hands, she sits impatiently at the end of the bed.
Patience, her parents tell her, is a virtue. But if virtue feels like this, well, surely it is overrated. Her father has been too long in coming tonight, so it is hardly Esmé’s fault when her eyes start roaming the nursery floor. Boredom is satisfied by so few things, now that she is almost seven years old. A turn on the rocking horse does so little to help. Settling her dolls in their wooden bunks and telling them a story of their own lasts barely five minutes. She upends boxes, puts together puzzles, makes an unholy mess and tidies it into her toybox again, but none of it will do. Something else is nagging at her. Something else demanding to be done.
She stands on the sheepskin rug and turns to the nursery window.
The curtains are already drawn, but by pulling a cord Esmé can draw them back. Hidden behind are the shutters that her father built to ‘block out the night’. She unfastens the latch and lets them roll back. On the other side, the window is covered in thick black felt, glued down in every corner. What it might be like, to lift just a corner, to catch a glimpse of the night-time world …
Such things are forbidden. And yet … the stories Esmé loves – the ones her father takes such delight in spinning for her each night – aren’t they full to bursting with courageous girls doing forbidden things?
‘Esmé?’
It is her father’s voice. When she turns, her face flushing a guilt-ridden red, she sees him standing there, across an ocean of all the books and toys he ever bought her. In his hands are a glass of milk, a bedtime biscuit, the threadbare cardigan she has been taking to bed with her since she was a babe.
She closes the shutter and goes to him. He has told her about the window before. She is not supposed to need telling twice. But her father’s admonishment is all in his eyes; he is too weary to scold her, so together they go to the bed and settle down in the blankets.
Once upon a time …
Words to soothe even the most troubled of souls. Esmé knows her father has been tormented of late. It is whatever is happening out there in the Parisian night, taking its toll on the man she loves more than anyone else. But she snuggles close and lets his words wash over her, and now she is safe, where she belongs – and she believes he feels safe as well, safe from everything that exists beyond the nursery walls. That feeling of sanctuary in arms: if only you or I were innocent enough to feel it again.
After he is done, they make their ritual of goodnights, kisses and hugs.
‘I love you, Esmé. Get some good sleep; your mama is coming in the morning.’
Goodnight is hardly goodnight; chances are, he’ll wake up to find that she’s crawled into his bed some time in the smallest hours.
After he has gone, Esmé turns in bed. The window is right there, right where she left it, and this presents the most tantalising conundrum of all. For an age, she tries to think of other things. In the morning there will be school. Élodie, who lives in the apartment downstairs, is to receive a bichon frise for her birthday. But these things can hardly keep away the idea which battles back to the top of her mind.
Ideas: such terrible, untrustworthy things. She hardly knows it when she gets out of bed. She is thinking nothing as she steals back to the curtains, unlatches the shutter, and sets to work at the blackout again.
First one inch, then a second and a third. Soon there is enough space for Esmé to slide her head between the blackout and the window pane itself.
She looks out upon Paris: this wonderful city of lights.
Esmé and her father live on the fifth storey, with only the apartment eaves above their heads. On the other side of Rue Saint-Rustique, the rooftops are lower, so that Esmé can peer down upon their gables and the flat terraces in between.
Once, there was nothing to see here but roof slates and gutters. Now … fountains of colour erupt.
Tonight, the gutters are a shimmering meadow of silver and gold, a thousand tiny flowers with their faces lifted up to drink in the light of the stars. Vines, replete with glowing petals and bells, tumble from chimneystacks and drainage pipes. A single tree, heavy in leaf – and those leaves webbed with veins which capture the starlight itself – has grown up through the roof slates, and its strange flame-coloured fruits dangle in clumps from its branches. One of the vagabond people is collecting windfall, piling them high in a basket and carrying them across one of the rope bridges between the rooftops, off to the night market – on whichever patch of abandoned ground it is being held tonight.
Esmé gazes out. From the rooftops of Rue Saint-Rustique, all the way to the great basilica of the Sacré-Cœur, the night-time world is waking up. Were her father to find her now, there would be no stories for a week – but Esmé wouldn’t care; there is enough enchantment in the city at night to make her wonder if she’ll need stories ever again. She likes the way the flowers turn to drink in the starlight; how, as the sun sets and the stars rise, each petal burns a different colour: incandescent emeralds, sapphires and diamond white. She likes watching the tiny finches as they flit from flower head to flower head, long beaks dipping to take in the nectar, and how their plumage flares first silver, then gold, depending on the flowers from which they drank.
Esmé can resist it no longer. She strains at the window latch until it opens. She should not do it (her father would be furious), but if she leans out of the window just so, she can take in a southern view of the city. She holds on tight.
On scattered rooftops, from here to the Seine and beyond: jungles of moonlight, iridescent gardens all drinking in the stars. Here and there are little columns of smoke; the vagrant peoples are stoking their rooftop cookfires tonight. From somewhere, she hears singing in a language she does not understand – but music is universal, and music like this will linger in her head for days.
Her gaze is drawn up and ever upwards, until at last her eyes land on what she has been desperate to see. Hold on to the window ledge with her; let us look that way too. The Tour Eiffel, that stalwart of the Parisian night, still stands sentry over the river, just as it has for one hundred years, but tonight the vines that grow around its lattice are in the full blossom of midnight. Each of their faces turn upwards to drink in the moonlight. Together they turn the tower into a radiant beacon, the city’s single, shimmering crown.
All of this, she thinks, happening in her Paris. Why it frightens her father enough to put up blackout blinds, she will never know.
Foolish adults! Her pragmatic mother. Her practical father. Once upon a time, they told her that magic did not exist.
BOOK ONE
* * *
PARIS, NOT SO VERY LONG AGO
Settle down. Pull your covers tight. Look to the window, and out into night. Darkness has fallen, the foul are abroad – but out there lies a world that will soon be restored. So let me tell you the tales of when we were born, between sunset and morning, between nightfall and dawn. Let me speak of the star that once shone in the sky, of the kingdoms of moonlight, the flowers-by-night. Let us travel together, through time’s lonely mist, to that long ago age where enchantment exists.
Settle down. Pull your covers tight. Look to the window, and out into night …
Opening lines of the Nocturne, era unknown
1
THE MIDNIGHT GIRL
It is said that you cannot truly know a city until you walk its streets after dark, but Isabelle had been tramping the streets of Paris every night for six long months, and still she found herself perplexed at its every corner.
Too often, it was the Métro that tricked her. The Métro could turn a country girl around, disgorging her in some corner of Paris where the sights were familiar but the smells and sounds all wrong. Tonight she emerged on the Rue des Martyrs and, taking in the vast, empty sky above, knew that she had somehow got twisted around. Sittin
By the time she’d picked her way to La Cave de Denis, the music had already started. Most of the night’s revellers had been bound for Le Bus Palladium – she’d already crossed that place off her list – but here couples still queued at the cellar door. Isabelle, who was no inveterate queue-jumper, felt a rush of shame as she hoisted her harp to the head of the queue and begged the doorman to let her in.
‘You’ll have missed your spot.’
Isabelle knew it. ‘But I have to try …’
The doorman shrugged, and Isabelle staggered down the narrow stair.
She’d seen a dozen places like La Cave de Denis. Paris, she had discovered, was a world replete with cellars and catacombs and repurposed sewers: the dead arteries of the city, where its people came to play. La Cave de Denis was made up of a dozen tributaries, lined with cubbyholes where couples drank cocktails, and at the end of each a bulbous stone cellar with a stage lit up in lights. At the various confluxes between the passageways, Isabelle could hear the music of some accordionist mingling with the chorus of lutes coming from one of the other stages; a bluesy stomp on the piano echoed out to touch the edges of some fiddler’s jig.
At the heart of the warren, she found its overseer. Denis was not his name, just the honorary title bestowed upon whoever had inherited the bar since it first opened. This particular Denis was the kind of man, Isabelle thought, who naturally gravitated towards cellars. His eyes were altogether too small, even magnified as they were behind thick spectacles – and these, together with his inconspicuous ears, gave him the appearance of a mole. Even his velvety hair and oversized hands afforded him the look of something subterranean.
‘I traded your spot,’ he said, nose crinkling up like the rodent from which he was surely descended, ‘for a man who plays spoons. Spoons! He’s brought his own washboard.’ Kneading his hands on his apron, he admired the case at Isabelle’s side. ‘I’d rather have you playing your harp. I liked your recordings. It reminded me of when I used to come here myself. They had a harpist here during the war. Just called himself “Le Harpiste”, like there was only one in the whole of Paris! You’ve got to admire arrogance like that.’
Denis took a stride along one of the passageways, as if to lead Isabelle on. But Isabelle herself remained.
‘Please, before we go …’
In the pocket of her green woollen coat, alongside the crumpled list, there lay a birthday card. She produced it now, its corners worn with the passing years. On its front was a picture of a frog princess, great jewels on her webbed fingers – but Isabelle opened it to reveal the photograph that had been hidden inside.
‘His name is Hector. He would be … forty-five years old.’
‘Strange,’ grinned Denis, ‘he doesn’t look a day more than twenty-three.’
‘It’s an old picture.’ It always felt wrong when somebody else’s fingers touched the face in the picture, with its wild blond curls – which perfectly matched her own – and big, luminous eyes. ‘He’d be playing the mandolin, or … the harp.’
Denis’ eyes flashed between the picture and the case standing at Isabelle’s side. ‘You’re the first harpist we’ve had in years, love.’
‘He might have drifted through.’
Denis took off along the passage. ‘I can look in the office for you. See if we booked a man named Hector … but I’d just be playing along, girl. Everything that happens in these cellars gets stored up here.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘And I’ve never seen the man in my life.’
Isabelle paused, letting Denis drift on. Later, she would take out her list and cross off yet another name. ‘La Cave de Denis’. But her heart didn’t sink – not yet. There were still a thousand bars to go.
The stage in La Cave’s smallest chamber barely had space for Isabelle to arrange her stool and harp. She’d played to smaller audiences, but there was something about the intimacy of a place like this that unnerved her. Perhaps it was the way that the music, with nowhere to go, was bound to get caught in the confines of the narrow space, smothering her where she sat. Or perhaps it was only the way that the spoon player – who had been summarily dismissed from stage – remained in the room, eyeing her with malevolence from the corner by the bar.
Without introduction, she closed her eyes and began.
You had to let your fingers do the work. Where your fingers ventured, the heart and soul were bound to follow. The whole world existed in those opening notes. Plucking the first string, rolling her wrist so that the melody began to take shape; in this way, her fingers charted all the years of her life, from the first lesson she’d taken, sitting at her father’s knee, to the day she’d come back to Paris, hoping to find him.
The melody beat its wings and prepared to take flight.
She dared to open her eyes – but, as she did so, her fingers lost their way. One poorly plucked string was all it took to obliterate the feeling of the song. She slowed down, retreated to the oasis she kept inside her, ventured out to find the melody again.
There it was. She dove towards it, fingers working like a spider spinning silk. But every time she thought she’d snagged it, it tore away from her. It was taunting her. It was … tempting her. Leading her into the outer dark.
Her fingers snatched for it one last time. She rolled her wrists, thinking that all the years she’d sat caressing these strings would ripple out, through her fingers, and bind her back to the song, but it was already too late. The melody dived away from her. Her fingers clawed at discordant strings. She stuttered. She stopped. She looked around.
The room was peering at her, with that curious cocktail of pity and horror with which she was becoming so familiar.
In the corner, the spoon player smiled.
‘Well, naturally, I can’t pay you. You understand that.’
Isabelle stood at the bar where all the many passages of La Cave de Denis conjoined, while Denis polished glasses.
‘It just wouldn’t do. I’d have performers turning up, playing half a song, taking their packet and going off to another job. They’d be running a racket all around the Place Pigalle. Imagine, you could play eight halls in one night, and scarcely a song between them …’
Isabelle’s shame was a palpable thing. It lit up the hidden corners of her. ‘I can’t explain it. Sometimes, my fingers …’
If it had happened only once, perhaps she might have forgiven herself. But five, six, seven times … that terrible litany kept replaying in her mind. First, at the Chapel of Sainte-Ursule, where the students from the Sorbonne had tried valiantly to hide their smirks; then, at the riverside restaurant beneath Notre-Dame, where the tourists stared fixedly at their dinner. Now, she felt both Denis’ pity and his scorn, and she wasn’t sure which was worse.
‘I’ll make it up to you. Denis, I’m already late on my rent …’
Denis’ round shoulders rolled in an enormous, affected shrug. Strange, how a gesture so outwardly cuddly could feel like a dagger in the side.
‘Well, there is something you could do.’
It wasn’t the first time Isabelle had heard those words (men in Paris were the same as men the world over), but Denis was not standing there with that expectant look in his eyes. Isabelle’s eyes were drawn down; until this moment, she hadn’t noticed the platinum wedding band on his ring finger, his hand so doughy it almost swallowed it up.
‘This way,’ he said, and led her through a small door behind the bar.
In a cramped office, where racks of old wine gathered dust, there sat a girl. Isabelle took in her long hair, matted all the way into the small of her back. Her complexion was dark, her eyes unusually large. It took a moment for Isabelle to realise that this was because of the way her skin had receded; evidently, the girl hadn’t eaten properly in days. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, as coiled as a spring.
