Chapel Noir (14 page)

15.
In the Pink

Inmates rose very late in the morning . . . They spent the
days . . . talking singing playing the piano and reading.
(Parent-Duchâtelet . . . expecting to find them engrossed in
pornography . . . was surprised to discover that they preferred
light romances.) After an early supper, dey prepared
themselves to appear in the salon for an evening of comings
and goings
.
—
JILL HARSIN,
POLICING PROSTITUTION IN 19TH CENTURY PARIS

The note from Paris lay crinkled on my worktable.

Irene had cast it there when she went to raid the household funds for a gratuity for the messenger who had brought it.

I assumed the gawking horseman left well paid. The journey from Paris was long enough to be worth a pretty price. I read the alien handwriting as best I could.

Madam! You are needed here at the
maison,
but must arrive discreetly. I should be called away on some pretext I confess I can’t think of at the moment. There is something still most mysterious in this house! Hurry!

Your “American cousin,” Pink

“You would think you were reading a French novel, Nell, so gingerly do you handle that note,” Irene said, reentering the parlor.

I dropped it as if the ink had leprosy. It was not addressed to me, after all. “It was on my worktable.”

“What does she say?”

“You know it is from Miss Pink Whatever-Her-Real-Name-Is?”

“The melodrama is purely American. I just interviewed the messenger-swain. She cast it down at his feet, wrapped in a silk handkerchief, from a window. The laundryman’s slow son was so eager to play the knight-errant he borrowed a nag from his father’s pair and plodded all the way here sans saddle. A veritable Don Quixote—tall, lank, and quite deluded by his lady fair’s favor. I paid him a sou for his pains, and he will indeed have them tomorrow.”

“The minx! No doubt she flirted outrageously with the poor lad to gain his attention. A boy of that class surely cannot be aware of what sort of house she lives in.”

“Nell, his father does the place’s laundry. Such assiduous changing of the sheets must be a sure sign of suspicion even for the laundryman’s
horses.”

“Oh,” I said, not sure why this was a clue, but aware that I should not admit this. “So we are to run off to Paris at the beck and call of an immoral snip?”

Irene picked up the note and studied it. “We are to run off to Paris to see what she has discovered in the house that the police have not.”

“That was why you did not argue with her determination to stay on in the brothel!”

“She was not going to leave in any event. I had hoped that she would wish to consult us if she learned anything. We are, after all, ‘cousins.’ ”

“I am not a cousin to anyone, and certainly not to any Americans,” I said hastily, if not quite accurately. “She is most presumptuous, but I begin to see that this is a national trait. We will go at once, I suppose.”

“Perhaps you wish to abstain—”

“I might wish it,” I said loftily, “but duty requires that I go. You are far too gullible in the case of this American girl. She is not even a decade our junior, after all, and obviously far too well acquainted with the ways of the world for her age.”

“Two little nannies fresh from school are we,” Irene said-sang with an open grin at her Gilbertian paraphrase, making a demure curtsy, “and that is how we shall revisit the house.”

Although Irene was fond of tormenting me by visiting articles of clothing from her many wardrobes upon me when necessary, in this instance she enjoyed rummaging through my humble assortment.

“Seal brown, gray camel’s-hair, copper-colored jersey, dark blue silk . . . ah, black file and sadly out of style. This will do for me. You had better wear the camel’s-hair. Simple cuffs and collars will finish the ensembles, and untrimmed bonnets.”

With this she stripped two of my best bonnets of their paltry ribbons and feathers.

We stood before the looking glass inset into my wardrobe door, side by side, an hour later. My walking skirts were a trifle short on Irene, but it only added to her air of humble circumstances. Indeed, I was most impressed by her transformation. It is one thing to spring forth as a peacock, which Irene often did as if to the feathered train born. It is quite another to play common sparrow. I was surprised by how utterly a modest demeanor dampened the native fire and heat of her performer’s persona.

“Here we stand,” she crowed pathetically. “Two poor but respectable women—perhaps caretakers of an inconvenient infant?—wishing to discuss what no one in the house wishes to acknowledge with the new young woman in residence.

“We shall be shunned, Nell,” Irene predicted triumphantly as she studied our images, “like temperance workers in a tavern, and therefore we will be ignored and allowed to go about whatever surreptitious business we wish.”

“Why are you so sure our business will be surreptitious?”

“Because Pink would not need our help otherwise.”

“Abominable name. Can we not find another more suitable for her?”

Irene smiled as she pulled my borrowed bonnet brim onto her hair-bare forehead like a dark, louring cloud. She reminded me of a deranged Covent Garden flower seller. “Why should we? It is almost the only true thing about herself that young woman has told us.”

Only the fact that our loyal coachman Andre drove us into the city and lurked around the corner to whisk us back to the security of the country allowed me to participate in this mad masquerade.

I suppose it wasn’t much of a masquerade, but Irene had been right, and I had suspected as much from my own history: dress drably enough, and no one will notice you. Particularly at a bordello. It was a bit chagrining that my everyday wardrobe was so suitable for such an assignment.

We knocked humbly at the service door, literally balancing on the worn stone stoop. When a harridan-faced woman jerked open the door Irene stuttered out her business in perfect if apparently low-class French. (In my opinion, everything French is inferior to everything English, but I admit that I adhere to very high standards.)

I did recognize a request for “young
mademoiselle
Rose.”

What can one make of a language without a word that precisely conveys the concept of “pink,” as opposed to red or rose-colored? Not much, if you ask me. In English, please.

We were allowed inside to wait. Our antechamber was a redolent pantry, chiefly supplied with garlic and onions, to judge by my nose. Various glass jars housed hideous objects of uncertain origin that seemed suitable for erecting a Frankenstein’s monster. Pickled mushrooms for ears? Ginger root for nose? Leeks for . . . whatever. Witches’ warts?

Irene looked truly drab in the smoky lamplight. I cannot say what it was—some slump of her shoulders, the dampening of her hair and all expression—but for the first time in her life she seemed quite unattractive.

Miss Pink suddenly burst through the door, wearing her signature shade and a suspiciously high color in her face that could only come from a rabbit’s foot that had severed all acquaintance with the rabbit to become a rouge applicator.
Rouge
! Why not bow to a French translation of her English-American name as Red? Unfortunately, it was what one would call a cancan dancer in Montmartre, and quite unsuitable.

Pink frowned at us for half a minute, then gasped. “Well, aren’t you two the dowdy Doras! My land! All right, ladies, as they say in vaudeville. I will pretend to be all upset at some indiscretion, and you two will steer me into the outer hall and through that nasty little wooden door beyond the pantry and down the stairs. It’s dark and it’s dank, but I’ve a candle hidden at the bottom, if somebody has a match—oh, of course Madam Norton. You would. Then we’re set.” She grinned like a mischievous child.

I admit to a sentimental fondness for even grown-up girls who remind me of my former charges. Such a dainty, pretty young thing. Such a dreadful place and profession she was in. Such a miserable way of using the King’s English! Except it was the Queen’s now. And except she was no subject of any king or queen, more’s the pity.

Miss Pink then commenced to shriek and wail as if we had brought her tidings of her grandmama’s death. Naturally, when irritated eyes rounded on our tragic threesome, we were forced to take Miss Pink by her furbelowed arms and escort her beyond the hearing of civilized ears.

The moment the cellar door swung shut behind us Miss Pink ceased howling. Irene made up for this lapse by producing affective mewlings as we stuttered down the stone stairs in the dark, all clinging to the damp stone walls intermittently softened by moss or . . . slime.

It is amazing that we did not break our necks on those rough steps. At the bottom a scratch and flare of light showed Irene keeping good her promise.

Pink, looking like a furbelowed imp in the match-flare, produced the candle.

In a moment a flickering light led us onward.

“What have you found?” Irene asked, all business.

“Something very strange, and very frightening.”

“Good,” said Irene. “I should not like to go through this masquerade with nothing to show for it. Perhaps you could prepare us a trifle.”

“This is the wine cellar,” Pink obliged. “I’m told it’s one of the finest in Paris. Only the sommelier comes down here, and only once in a while. The wines for immediate use are kept upstairs for expected guests in far more elegant surroundings, but this is where the vast majority of them are stored.”

As she spoke, I felt a cool, damp brush of air on my cheek.

Irene lifted the candle. Its light limned the low arches of an ancient cellar with arcs of highlight against the utter dark beyond.

Great wooden kegs lined the stones. Bottles dotted walls of wooden racks. I sensed great age, and an almost funereal calm, as if these liquors had been entombed here, deep within the cool, chalk and oyster-shell-rich earth.