A Spark Unseen (11 page)

I saw a young lady with flowers in her blonde curls speaking surreptitiously to her companion behind a gloved hand. An older woman, perhaps in her sixties, stepped forward with an enormous pile of gray hair and a beaded bodice of magenta. “I am Mrs. Reynolds, Miss Tulman. Welcome to Paris.” But her expression did not say welcome, rather it seemed to ask Mrs. Hardcastle what she could mean by bringing me here.

Mrs. Hardcastle said quickly, “Miss Tulman is in mourning, Caroline, as you can see. She has recently inherited a large fortune and estate, and is now mistress of the house next door.”

Now both the young lady with the curls and her companion had their mouths behind their gloves, eyes demurely pointed to the floor. Mrs. Reynolds’s features softened just slightly.

“I will look forward to making your better acquaintance, Miss Tulman.”

“Thank you, Ma’am,” I whispered.

What followed next was a blur of exactly seventeen more faces, most of them English with three or four French, and other than the occasional title of
Sir
or
Lady
, very few to which I could later attach a name. I did note that the whispering young ladies were part of Mrs. Reynolds’s household, her nieces, both of whom were named Miss Mortimer. The eighteenth face presented to me belonged to a young man, French, dark hair slicked, and with a pencil-thin mustache. Instead of a bow or even shaking my hand, he leaned forward and, before I knew what he was about, had kissed both my cheeks. My face blazed first with shock, and then anger. Mrs. Hardcastle laughed heartily.

“For shame, Mr. Marchand! Miss Tulman has only just arrived, and is not yet accustomed to your French ways.”

“Forgive me, Miss Tulman,” he said, his accent light, brown eyes sparkling with amusement. “I hope I did not offend.”

I murmured something unintelligible, and the sparkle in his eyes became a gleam.

Dinner was something of a nightmare, as the table was obviously made to accommodate twenty, and my presence made twenty-one. I was crammed at one end, where I sat around the corner from a bearded gentlemen — one of those whose name began with a
Sir
— and directly beside a matronly woman who was the wife of someone I could not identify. Both were more interested in the food than my person, so I was left to eat in silence. The room was stuffy and hot beneath the gas chandelier and all my petticoats, the steaming dishes and flaming candles on the sideboard adding to the lack of air. I pushed at the food on my plate, feeling curls fly loose from my hair knot under the influence of the heat.

During the second course, I caught a lady in gold satin looking at me. Her gaze went instantly to her lap, where she fussed with her napkin, ceasing her low conversation with one of the nieces of Mrs. Reynolds. But I had caught the last word she spoke, watched it form, ugly on her lips. The word was
lunatic
. And as the dinner progressed, I noticed a similar undercurrent, a whispered conversation running beneath the acknowledged one, smooth ripples of gossip, neighbor to neighbor, flowing like a tide toward me.

I knew what they were discussing: the young heiress who had so scandalously and unrepentantly carried on with a servant in her uncle’s household, who had chosen to live with a lunatic rather than put him properly away in an asylum. My temper warmed like the hot air. I tried to put my thoughts on Uncle Tully, to think about rooms and walls, to lay the plan of Mrs. Reynolds’s house clear in my mind. Then I tried to take my mind away from my uncle, confused, ill, uprooted, and without me; the thought left me nearly unable to swallow. Fourth course, and I realized the table’s open conversation had turned to the war.

“… preposterous,” a man was saying. “Whipped like puppies when we had the Russians outmanned and outgunned. The shame of the Royal Navy. Admiral Price shot himself and no wonder. Fought like schoolgirls, they did.”

I raised a brow, thinking this man must have had a very limited experience with schoolgirls to make such a statement, but I also pricked up my ears. Mr. Wickersham had mentioned this defeat of the navy in my morning room.

“But do you not think, Monsieur Fortescue,” said Mr. Marchand, the impertinent young Frenchman, “that the shame of your navy is the age of its boats, and not its captains? If your English ships had fought with the power of steam instead of waiting for the winds, if your Royal Navy could have had the use of ironclad batteries to bombard the shore, like the French, do you not think the British would have defeated these inferior Russians?”

Mr. Fortescue spluttered indignantly. “Floating batteries of iron, you say? And you think Russian cannon shot will bounce right off them, do you?”

The young Frenchman grinned, stretching his tiny mustache. “Like so many rubber balls. And neither shall they catch fire, as your English ones do.”

Mr. Fortescue turned red in the face, evidently interpreting this remark as some sort of slight to his nation. “Gentlemen, do enjoy your pudding,” Mrs. Reynolds suggested, which did nothing to lessen the man’s color.

“I think, Monsieur,” Mr. Marchand continued, leaning back in his chair, “that the country that builds these ships of steam and of iron from which the shot will bounce, I think this nation will need a new name for its monarch. Which do you think it shall be, Monsieur? ‘Queen of the oceans’? Or shall it be ‘emperor of the seas’?”

The man threw down his napkin, blowing out his breath in outrage, but before he could speak, Mr. Marchand half raised his glass, his light French almost a purr. “To allies, sir,” he said, “and the ingenuity of both our countries.” And just before he drank, he looked straight at me and winked.

Every head at the table turned, instantly distracted from the political squabble. I looked away from the staring eyes, from Mrs. Reynolds’s rising brows, frowning at my place settings. How dare he treat me in such a familiar way? Did he think my character so tainted that I would tolerate such behavior, and in front of all these people? And who were these people to judge me, in any case, and who was I to care for their judgment? I sat up straighter in my chair, and turned to the bearded gentleman next to me.

“And what think you, sir?” I said loudly. “Will England and France continue to be allies, or will the Emperor Napoléon use these new iron ships to start a war in Europe and spill the blood of thousands of Englishmen, as his late uncle did?”

One rattle of a spoon disturbed the charged silence that now reigned in Mrs. Reynolds’s dining room. Not only had I spoken out, I had spoken on a subject that was not in a lady’s province, spoken of it rudely, and in such a way that one half of the guests was like to be set against the other. Good. I took a slow bite of my pudding, enjoying a moment of satisfaction as I waited politely for the poor man’s reply, his expression now that of a gasping fish. Mrs. Reynolds folded her napkin deliberately, set it beside her plate, and stood, her austere face thunderous.

“Ladies, we shall leave the men to their port. Coffee is served in the drawing room.” The only thing lacking from her statement was the command of
“Now!”

I dabbed the corner of my mouth, all my pleasure transforming into shame. So much for the demure young woman I’d described to Mr. Babcock, the one who had promised not to draw undue attention. I would be the talk of several drawing rooms tomorrow; I might as well have put an advertisement in the papers. I filed out with the other ladies, crushed among the bell-shaped dresses, careful to give the impression that I had not noticed the grinning young Frenchman once again half raise his glass to me. Never had I seen Mrs. Hardcastle look so amused.

I
was the last through the velvet curtain and into the foyer. The ladies were disappearing through the door I’d noticed before, the room I thought shared a wall with my salon, and I saw a little maid in a starched white apron pressed flat against a cabinet, eyes on the floor as the tittering conversations passed. The clock in the foyer said three minutes past eleven, and my heart squeezed. I would have to hurry. When the last skirt had been squashed through the doorway, I approached the maid.

“Excuse me, but can you tell me if there is a … retiring room, for ladies?”

The little thing looked at me quizzically, and I was afraid that perhaps she only spoke French, but then her face unclouded and she said in a bright, brass British accent, “Oh, you’ll be wanting the WC, Miss? Is that it? The water closet?”

I nodded, glancing at the open door to the drawing room. I hoped none of the ladies inside were hearing this conversation. Then I changed my mind and hoped they were.

“Well, you just go straight up the stair thataway, Miss, and be looking for the little door on your left.”

“Thank you, indeed,” I said, well pleased. She scurried off, and with one quick look back, I picked up my skirt and went noiselessly up the stairs, though I did not stop at the first landing. I took the next flight up, and then the next, pausing only to catch my breath. There was a small oval window straight ahead, looking into a bit of garden, the same as on our fourth floor, and surprisingly there were also two doors to the right of the stairwell, where I had thought there should be none. I tiptoed to the first door on the right, found it unlocked, and peeked inside.

The room was being used for storage, dim, dusty, and windowless, but in the light from the doorway I could see that it was shallow, not nearly as long as I might have expected. Leaving the door open, I tiptoed around piled boxes to press my ear against the only clear patch of peeling plaster I could find along the far wall, the rest being covered with cast-off furniture and stacked trunks. I could hear nothing, no voices, no movement. But I also could not be sure that Uncle Tully’s rooms were actually on the other side of this wall. I shut the door to the room as gently as possible, brushed off my skirt, and opened the next.

A plain bedroom, and just as shallow as the storeroom, though it had the sloped ceiling and one of the high windows like Uncle Tully’s new workshop, the moon shining down onto the floor matting. I stole quietly across the room, passing shapes in the dim that it took me several moments to realize were easels, cloths thrown over their canvases. I tried to imagine Mrs. Reynolds in a paint-spattered smock with a brush in her hand, ignored the urge to peek beneath one of the cloths, and again pressed my ear to the far wall.

Silence. Encouraged, I closed the door, hitched up my skirt and padded down to the next landing, pausing just a moment to listen for nonexistent noise. The dinner party seemed to have left the upper floors completely deserted. Directly below the rooms I had just visited, there were again two doors beside the stairwell. I chose the one closest to the front of the house, twisted its knob, and slipped inside.

The gas was on, and I saw a large bedchamber, more than double the length of the rooms above. I smiled. Then Uncle Tully must have been on the other side of the walls I had pressed my ear to, and therefore, had to also be just over the farther half of this room. I stood underneath the far section of ceiling, white plaster roses and ivy vines twisting out from the chandelier in its center, listening for noise or a
thump
or the sound of a footstep. I hoped Mary had not unintentionally nodded off. If she was asleep and so was my uncle, then this little exercise would have to somehow be repeated, and after my behavior at dinner, I was not expecting any renewed invitations. I saw the same proliferation of doilies and figurines and pictures as downstairs, as well as three separate beds, a pair of curling tongs near the fire, the same circumference as the blonde cylinders bouncing on the head of Mrs. Reynolds’s whispering niece. The wide, feathery hat Mrs. Hardcastle had been wearing that afternoon was perched grandly on a hat stand.
Both nieces must be sharing with Mrs. Hardcastle,
I thought. I wondered if any would come out of the experience unscathed.

Two more minutes without hearing the first squeak of a floorboard above me, and I decided to be satisfied. I smiled to myself and had taken two steps toward the bedchamber door before it swung open to reveal Mrs. Reynolds. She stood framed in the doorway, as if she were posing for a portrait, beaded bodice winking in the gaslight, her wrinkled face stony.

We exchanged a long look. I put what I hoped was an expression of apology onto my features and said, “I am so very sorry, Mrs. Reynolds, but I’m afraid I was in search of the WC … forgive me, the … water closet.”

I watched her brows go up, much as they had at dinner, and being rather large and prominent eyebrows, the effect was considerable. “The facilities for your convenience are on the next floor down, Miss Tulman.”

“I am sorry,” I repeated. “I must have misunderstood your maid. And actually, I hope you will not think me rude,” —
too late for that,
I thought wryly — “but I will use this opportunity to take my leave of you.”

I watched the woman’s eyebrows merge with her swooping piles of hair.

“I am quite exhausted from my trip and feeling rather ill.” That part had not even been a lie. “Thank you for an excellent and enjoyable dinner, Mrs. Reynolds.”

“Really, Miss …”

I gave her a small curtsy. “Please do give my regards to Mrs. Hardcastle and the rest of the party.” And I walked right past her, moving as fast down the stairs as my pride would allow. I reached the bottom close to a run, hurried across the foyer, and let myself out the front door. The clock had read twenty-two minutes past eleven.