The Lantern's Dance, page 20
To be fair, I’d not been entirely dreaming. I had the journal translated and with a clean copy to give him. And if it turned out to have fallen into the crate by accident, or if he laughed it off as some classic Victorian parlour game that I’d never heard of—well, at least I could walk on my own two legs to the train station and leave him here to deal with lascars and film-world Indians.
In fact, why not do just that?
Not abandon him, no—but instead of settling onto a garden chair with a book and cool drink, awaiting his return, I could finish the project I’d started on. My foot would take me as far as a stationers. And if it meant travelling into Paris to satisfy my curiosity, the city was only a short train ride from Délieux. I would be back by evening.
There was really no alternative. Any attempt to curl up with a book was sure to end with me pacing and chewing my nails over Holmes. Never my option of choice.
I heard the key in the kitchen door, and walked in to find Mme LaRue, unpacking my breakfast.
“Madame,” I said for the fourth morning in a row, “there is no need to bring me a meal, I am more than happy to break my fast on coffee and toast.”
She gave me the same French sniff she’d given me on previous days, then shot a glance at my leg, and said she was glad to see it was feeling better.
I accepted a cup of coffee, and told her that I needed to go to the station, to catch the train into Paris.
“Bien sûr, Madame. When?”
“Now,” I said. When she did not reply, I glanced up and saw her looking pointedly at the clock on the wall, which informed me that even the slowest of trains would deliver me to Paris long before any of the shops had opened their shutters.
“In an hour, perhaps. Oh, and while I’m away, could we make sure that the crates in Damian’s studio are closely guarded? I don’t know if we’ll have another intruder, but I suspect we’re not finished with the matter.”
She made an exclamation of alarm, and agreed that Pierre would watch with extra care, and that M. LaRue would keep his shotgun to hand. I told her that I wouldn’t want him to shoot anyone, that whatever the boxes held weren’t worth a life—or a prison sentence—but she just shook her head and went out, her key turning in the lock with an extra degree of emphasis.
That gave me plenty of time to dress, eat the breakfast she’d brought, and choose a place to conceal the journal and notes. Holmes was quite capable of coming back, looking through the work I had done, pouncing on some clue I had either failed to notice or failed to possess some essential piece of complementary information, and haring off again into the wilds of France. I was not having that.
It took less than five minutes to open the drugs safe in Dr Henning’s surgery, which I judged a place where the translation would be found sooner or later, but not inconveniently soon. I folded the two sketches—mine of the watermark, and Damian’s showing the lascar—into a pocket, along with all the franc notes I possessed and a Baedeker’s Paris guide I spotted on the shelf.
M. LaRue took me into Délieux just as the shops were opening, and I had him drop me outside the town’s stationer. However, as I’d feared, neither the owner nor the girl at the register recognised the watermark, so I continued down the street to the train station. The ticket agent looked at Damian’s sketch, told me that he’d seen it the other day when M. LaRue had been showing it around, and shook his head. But he did not return it to me immediately. Instead, he frowned at it, and wondered aloud if it might be connected to those other men.
“Which men were those?”
Two, it seemed. Yes, that’s right, they might have been Indian gentlemen. A little over a week ago—Thursday? No, Wednesday, it was. The second of September. Though they did not have a picture, and were not asking about a man with a turban. An artist of some kind, that’s who they wanted. He’d sent them into town, with a suggestion that they ask at the postal office.
It was essentially what I knew already, but I gave him a tip and let him show me onto the Paris train. He even gave me a first-class seat—hardly necessary for the brief ride, but it provided greater comfort. Which I used to promptly fall asleep.
It had been a long night.
Chapter Forty-two
I came snorting awake as the train slowed into a station—not, fortunately, the end of the line at Quai d’Orsay, but the penultimate stop, Austerlitz. I hastily rose, fished Damian’s sketch out of my pocket, and went to speak with any uniformed employees I could find.
Had they seen this man, or a pair of men like him? Foreign, moustaches, older and younger, in more conventional clothing? When one after another said no, I checked to see what trains he had worked on two Wednesdays ago, and moved on to the next, distributing francs as I went.
Inevitably, it was in the final compartment, with the train emptying out onto the Quai d’Orsay platform, that one of the attendants finally nodded in recognition.
Yes, the Wednesday, ten days past, in the late afternoon. No, perhaps not this man, but foreigners like him. Yes, first class, although one of them did not look the sort, dressed in an old-fashioned and not very well made suit. Both had good French, although the older, shabbier one had a marked accent. From India, yes—the conductor had fought beside some men from Pondichéry during the War, and though both these men were lighter-skinned than the soldiers he’d known, and their accents less, they were still identifiable. Yes, both had worn suits—and hats, not turbans. No, they had not taken the train to its end, but had disembarked at the Quai d’Austerlitz. Yes, Madame was correct, that was the edge of the Thirteenth arrondissement rather than the Seventh, where we were now.
Did he perhaps overhear any of their conversation, or pick up any suggestions as to where they were from or where they were going? Not that a railway employee would intrude on the privacy of their passengers—of course not! But occasionally, a passenger will raise his voice or ask a revealing question, or…
Ah, Madame, but of course no self-respecting employee of the Compagnie de chemin de fer de Paris à Orléans would ever consider violating a passenger’s right to privacy. Of course not. Although occasionally, as Madame said, a passenger will carry on a conversation in rather a louder voice than was expected in a first-class car, and although two such men as the ones Madame is asking about naturally converse in their own language, not French, there are often words that drop into an exchange from elsewhere, and the younger of these two men did employ a number of French words in his otherwise incomprehensible talk. Such as tiare, bague, and la Comtesse. As if he were not certain of these specialised words in the language they spoke. And it was he who led the other to disembark at their station, as if he knew the way.
Tiara, ring, and countess: interesting.
I thanked him with francs and disembarked at last, to track down the nearest café with strong French coffee, where I might sit and stare off into space without rousing concern amongst the passers-by.
* * *
—
Three demitasses later—one laden with sugar—my blood was buzzing and my mind seemed capable of sequential thought. So I stirred my cup and let the ideas rise to the surface.
It could not be an accident that the three men who had come after Damian Adler were from India. Somehow, they knew of the link between Damian and those Institut boxes. Had they imagined that their family’s long-lost jewels might be inside? Or were they hoping that any Vernet who was given the boxes might have also, at some point, been given the jewels?
None of these men could possibly be Rajiv, who’d been in his thirties when he blackmailed Louise Holmes in 1872. However, as she’d said in her introduction, Memories are long when greed and resentments combine. An oft-repeated tale of theft and deception could become ingrained in the family mythos, fuelling resentments for succeeding generations. And knowing how stories expanded, this one might even have grown, from a handful of baubles to baskets of diamonds and gold.
Paris was too large a city to count on stumbling across a particular individual in its streets. A methodical approach was required. And even then, a touch of luck would be welcome—although I would not make that admission to Holmes.
I did not have sufficient information to prove a theory, but I might have enough to start building one.
First, the men themselves. The two in suits, whether they were related or not, came from different worlds. The older one in his out-of-date clothing was more fluent in whichever non-French language they had been speaking—Bengali, if they were from Chandernagore, or Tamil if they came from Pondichéry. The younger man, who had depended on the French words for “tiara,” “ring,” and “countess,” not only wore a suit that blended in here, but knew how to get where they were going.
Hypothesis: the younger man lived here, the older was a more recent arrival.
As for the third man, the one who had climbed in a window barefoot and in clothing from halfway around the world: He would appear to be an uneducated retainer brought along for his muscle and nerve. A thug, either hired or an amateur—although probably a lower-case thug, without the capital T of the now-suppressed Indian criminal organisation.
Second, the jewellery in the overheard conversation. There had been at least one ring among the things given to Arjun, but what to make of “tiara”? They weren’t a particularly Indian ornament—and how would Arjun have fit it into a hidden pocket? As for the “countess,” who on earth could that be?
Their conversation seemed only loosely connected with Lakshmi’s family jewels. Either they didn’t know—that mythos-building at work—or they, too, were casting around for a lead.
“La Comtesse” was specific. Referring to a given person. It was possible for a French countess to be friends with a young man from India—the Jazz Age affected the aristocracy as much as any other social class—but it was somewhat more likely that any such relationship would be a professional one. Cook, couturier…jeweller.
Or he was a Lloyd’s agent providing insurance for said tiara, or a policeman investigating its theft, but he was involved somehow with an aristocratic lady’s gemstones.
Hypothesis: the younger man was in some way professionally involved with jewellery, whether selling, restoring, or retrieving.
That left me with two thin threads to grasp: the journal watermark, and an Indian man working in the jewellery world.
Until a more substantial clue came my way, it was all I had.
With a sigh, I laid some coins into the saucer and went in search of stationery stores and jewellery shops, whichever I came across first.
Chapter Forty-three
The watermark results took me precisely seventeen minutes from the time I left the café. A cheerful papeterie called to passers-by with a display of pens, desk sets, and every kind of journal from cheap student note-book to Venetian leather. The woman at the desk did not recognise the mark, but her father, whose wispy white hair was bent over a hunched spine, took one look at the sketch I had done and told me the name of the manufacturer.
He also told me it was no longer in business, the last son having been killed in the War, and any records would have been lost long ago.
It had taken me longer to sketch the watermark than it did to solve the question.
I thanked him by making a purchase—although I would have bought the beautiful slim propelling pencil even if he’d had nothing to tell me—and went on to the bijouterie side of my search.
If I wanted a jeweller who might be selling tiaras to a countess, I needed to be on the other side of the river, most probably in the First or Second arrondissement. However, thinking that perhaps (oh, Holmes was going to have much to say about my clueless quest, strewn with guesses and baseless hypotheses) if these men did have a jewellery shop of their own, and if it was of sufficient quality to be in the First or Second, they would have taken the train all the way to the Quai d’Orsay. Unless, of course, they were headed home or to a restaurant or anything in the eastern sections, which given the hour had probably been the case. However, I thought I might have better…yes, luck in duplicating their steps from the east and heading west. Would they be in the topmost tier, or among the slightly less elite but still prosperous shop-fronts of the Avenue de l’Opéra?
Knowing that I should have stayed in Ste Chapelle and read a book, I boarded a tram to cross the river, and began to walk. The paint on the shop woodwork grew fresher, the shop windows became broader and exquisitely clean, more streets had caped and capped policemen to control their traffic. I took advantage of a few shops along the way to trade Dr Henning’s workaday cane for a shiny walking stick and my decidedly ordinary and noticeably sat-upon hat for a light straw number with a jaunty brim and a pretty blue ribbon that the salesman assured me was the same colour as my eyes, which cost five times what I anticipated. It did help to make the shopkeepers look more hopeful than critical when I stepped through their doors, and the conversations that ensued brought more information than if I’d been turned back onto the street straightaway.
I quickly learned not to show the sketch. Instead, I became a young lady in search of the exotic: Had they anything in an Indian style? No? Then could they perhaps recommend a place that did?
Eventually, a discussion between two shop-girls in their forties summoned their collective memory of a bijouterie exotique up in the…was it the Eighth? Or Ninth? It was that very hot afternoon in July—no, June, I’m certain it was June—and we had walked all the way from the Pagoda and thought the passage might at least get us out of the sun, but it was so unpleasantly crowded—those Americains, remember?—that we…
I thanked them and made my escape.
I thought the Ninth arrondissement marginally more likely, a district with grand magasins, a sprinkling of bijou little shops, and a number of the covered arcades the two women remembered. Not an arrondissement with the most fashionable, most exclusive, most French of shops, but one well suited to those with expensive foreign goods to offer. The sort of neighbourhood where a Jazz-Age countess might go in search of exotic jewels.
I dodged an elastic-suspender salesman and avoided getting flattened by a three-wheeled delivery bicycle carrying a bird-cage as large as I was, and elbowed my way onto a tram to continue my almost certainly pointless search.
* * *
—
I asked questions, paused for a very pleasant luncheon at a brasserie whose waiters wore clean, crisp white aprons, then went on and asked more questions. I bought a fountain pen I hadn’t known I needed until I saw it, evaded a young gentleman inspired by the dancing couples in a small park, and managed not to step into any of the horse droppings, stand-pipe mud puddles, or wayward streams from a couple of ill-placed pissoirs. I paused for coffee, walked another mile of to-and-fro gauntlet, crossed forty-seven streets, and was nearly run down by three motorcars, six motor lorries, a tram, an omnibus, and a three-wheeled bicycle with a pair of small children in the back. After the last, I stopped for a glass of wine.
During the afternoon, I questioned twenty-three jewellers and countless shopkeepers of loosely related establishments, and not one of them had ever seen a man from India selling a tiara, or spoken with a man from India about a ring, or indeed knew anything about any Indian man at all.
At a quarter after five, I said, “Enough.” This entire day had been a futile waste of time and energy, and soon I was going to be flattened by one of the scurrying motorcars that paid as little attention to a slow-footed pedestrian as they would to one of the city’s pigeons. I would pay for my foolish quest tomorrow with a swollen ankle and Holmes’ scorn.
I stood on the crowded pavement at the entrance to one of the many covered arcades in this district, planting the cane down to fend people off, and looked around. This end of the passage couvert held nothing but racing vehicles, but looking through to the far end, I saw a stationary taxi. I checked my pocket-book, decided there was enough to get me to the Gare d’Orsay, and limped off down the passageway of shops.
My arm ached from leaning on the cane all day, my ankle throbbed, I was hungry and thirsty and concentrating on the far street, praying the taxi had not been claimed by the time I reached it. I nearly walked past the shop.
One corner of the window’s display held several old pieces of jewellery, a porcelain vase, and two small sculptures, all thematically linked: ornate, colourful, delicately worked, and sumptuous overall.
They could only be from India.
Reluctantly, dutifully, I turned away from the waiting taxi and went through the door.
The man behind the desk was no more Indian than I. And when I recited my query for what felt like the hundredth time—I was looking for a necklace from India, did he perhaps know anyone who sold such a thing?—I saw the same shake of the head I’d seen each time.
“Non, Madame, I regret I have nothing of the sort.” I nodded and turned away, mumbling my half-hearted thanks. “Although if there is going to be a vogue for Indian jewellery, perhaps I will keep my eyes out for some.”
I paused with my hand on the door’s knob, then turned. “Have others been asking for such a thing?”
“Only one, Madame. And since he himself appeared to be from India, I paid it no mind. However, you, Madame—you, perhaps, are not seeking a necklace from your native land.” His smiling teeth were very white.
“He wanted a necklace?”
“He seemed willing to consider most anything. Although…to be frank, I believe he may have been the victim of a theft, looking for a shop that was, shall we say, the willing receiver of stolen goods. I assure you, Madame, that is not this shop.”
I limped back to the desk and took out the page with Damian’s sketch. “Could it have been this man?”
“No,” he said without hesitation. “This man looked, well, he looked like anyone on the streets. It was his accent, and I suppose his companion, that put me in mind of India.”
