Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (12 page)

A pause, agonizing in the shabby parlor. And then Quentin began to laugh. “Only you, Mademoiselle St. Clair, could make the entire English embassy your go-between.”

She felt her face heat; she knew she should carry it off with a high hand, smile and murmur something rich with innuendo. But she could not do it. She was tired and afraid, and she wanted Quentin’s arms around her so much she could barely breathe through the pain in her chest. She said, “You are doing me a favor, m’sieur. I assure you I can return it.”

“Enlightened self-interest,” Quentin said and sighed. “It runs in the veins of spies, you know, instead of blood. I will see what I can do.”

The Duc de Plaquemine received the amante dorée in a long echoing colonnade behind the ducal palace. Annabel had managed to pin her hair up, thanks to the generosity of Quentin’s landlady, but she felt small and grubby and very American before the sad-eyed elegance of the Duc.

He listened carefully, asked questions—and answered them, which was a courtesy she had not expected of him. Her understanding had been correct, however sketchy. Louis Vasquez had been hired by Don Esteban—who might or might not have been acting on behalf of Ferdinand VII—to claim the principate of Louisiane. If he had succeeded, which the Duc seemed to feel was unlikely but not impossible, he would have returned Floride, Mexique, and Californie to Spanish hands—“or, at least,” the Duc said sardonically, “to Don Esteban’s hands”—and with the French empire suddenly splintered and its former colonies now allied against it, it was possible that Napoléon IV would not have been able to muster a decisive response. He was not the military man his great predecessor had been.

But Louis Vasquez had had second thoughts. He had come to see the Duc, very privately, told him the truth and begged for his help in leaving Nouvelle Orléans. His plan had been to go to Saint François (which Annabel, in some last ineradicable American corner of her soul, still thought of as San Francisco), but his funds were not sufficient.

“I gave him a letter to the manager of the Banque Impériale in Saint François. In return, he was going to write an open letter, detailing the truth of his presence in Nouvelle Orléans, and give it to the bank manager to send to the newspapers of Nouvelle Orléans and Paris. And then the next night, he was killed.”

“But your letter wasn’t . . . oh.”

“Yes, mademoiselle,” the Duc said sadly. “The Spanish took the letter I had written off the body, which I did not know until this morning, when Monsieur Sevier came to return it to me.”

“Oh,” Annabel said again, uselessly.

“It seems that Don Esteban came to see him on Monday, and they reached an agreement. Don Esteban got rid of Sevier’s embarrassment—Louis Vasquez and my most unfortunate letter—and in return, Sevier got rid of his. I am afraid, mademoiselle, that you were merely a means to an end.”

“But Don Carlos wasn’t going to find anything.”

“Don Esteban did not care to risk it. Don Carlos is well connected, and fiercely loyal to King Ferdinand. He would not have kept silent if he had discovered that Don Esteban was harboring imperial ambitions of his own.”

“Do you think . . . ?”

“I think very little is beyond the reach of Don Esteban Castillo y Blas, though much remains beyond his grasp. But you do not need to worry about Monsieur Sevier any longer. I will speak to him.”

“Thank you, monseigneur.”

“And perhaps, Mademoiselle St. Clair, I may have the honor of dining with you one day soon?”

His protection would not be adequate, not in the long run, but it would give her space to maneuver, to renegotiate a perilous treaty with Sevier. She wished to serve France, and she did not know of another way in which she could do so.

“I would be enchanted, Monseigneur,” she murmured, dropping a curtsey and trying not to shiver. She knew what he was truly asking, just as he did. He knew what she was. Although she did not desire him, his patronage would be even more valuable to her than his protection. She was an amante dorée; although she had never had the arrogance to aim as high as the Duc de Plaquemine, she was not such a fool as to reject a treasure when it fell into her lap.

Desire, after all, was irrelevant.

On a rainy Thursday, a month after the death of Louis Vasquez, Salomé came upstairs and said, “Mademoiselle, that mad Anglais is on the doorstep again.”

“M’sieur Quentin?” Annabel had written him a letter, detailing the truth of the machinations surrounding the unfortunate Louis Vasquez, and had expected never to hear from him again. “What does he want?”

“To speak to you, he says.”

Annabel pinched the bridge of her nose. “I will see him.”

This time before descending to the parlor, she wrapped herself in a thick shawl.

Quentin was standing, shabby and correct, beside the window, and the desire she did not feel for her patrons kindled inside the cage of her ribs.
Irrelevant,
she told herself, but the word was hollow and false. “Mademoiselle,” he said and bowed. “You look unwell. I trust I am not disturbing you.”

“Not at all, m’sieur.” She had spent the previous night with a patron who was not as courteous as Don Carlos, or Monseigneur le Duc. But the aching brittleness she felt was not illness, nor even anything worth the mention. “Will you be seated?”

“Thank you.”

They sat down, each of them poker-spined and expressionless. Quentin said in English, “With your permission, Miss St. Clair, I would like to tell you a story.”

“A story, sir?” It was hard to speak English, got harder and harder every year.

“Yes. The story of an American. A young man of good if impoverished family, from Boston.”

“There are many such young men.” But her tongue was thick in her mouth, and she gripped her hands together so that they would not betray her.

“This one was named Martin Loftis. He seems to have been a wayward, unhappy boy, the cause of much grief and strife for his parents. But never more so than when he ran away.”

“Did he?”

“At the age of sixteen. His parents succeeded, by the outlay of a great deal of time, expense, and energy, in tracing him as far as St. Louis, but there he apparently disappeared entirely. He has been given up for dead in the city of his birth.”

“Good.” She bit her tongue, appalled at the savagery in her own voice, appalled at how much wounds ten years gone could still hurt.

“He was a tall young man, even at sixteen. Slender. Blond. Remarkably good-looking, from all accounts.”

“There are many such in Boston.” But her voice wavered, and neither of them was deceived.

Silence, and then Quentin said, “Why do you do it?”

“Because I must,” she said: a useless answer, but the only one she had ever found. “Why have you not betrayed me?”

“Because I could not.” He hesitated, then said, “You are a very beautiful woman, Annabel St. Clair.”

“Thank you, sir.” But it was a compliment, nothing more, untainted by any hint of desire. Or love. Her heart ached, as brittle as her body. The slightest touch would shatter it in a thousand shards around her feet.

But that touch would not come from Quentin. He rose, bowed, reverted to French: “I shall not overstay my welcome when you are so clearly troubled by other matters. But I wished you to know . . . ” Looking at his face, she thought there were many things he would have liked to have said, if there had been words for them. “I shall not tell anyone.”

“Promise?” she said wryly, knowing as well as he did that he could make no such promise and expect to keep it.

And he smiled wryly back. “Spy’s honor. Good day to you, mademoiselle.”

“Good day, m’sieur.”

She stood at the window, watching him go, and did not attempt to call him back. And though he glanced up to meet her eyes, he did not return.

184. Figurehead. Wood. 35” x 18”. American, ca. 1850. Figure of a woman holding a telescope and compass. Ship unknown.

The selkie stands at the window, staring out at the sea. Behind her, in the rumpled bed, the artist snores. She’s had better sex with her own fingers, but it doesn’t matter. He wanted it, and it amuses her to cheat on Byron. In their stalemate—she cannot make him give back her skin, he cannot make her love him—she takes her pleasures where she finds them.

She sighs, running one palm over her velvet-short hair. It would’ve been nice if the artist fucked as pretty as he talks.

197. Figurehead. Wood. 34” x 17”. American, ca. 1830-35. Figure of a woman in a hat. Ship unknown.

I found a museum today. Not a surprise, really, but I’d given up on there being anything interesting to do in this town. The only bookstore for twenty miles was a rare and used dealer along the “picturesque” main street specializing in the most abstruse and technical aspects of naval history. I’d spent hours on the beach, staring at the water and the gulls. The water was dark; the gulls were blindingly white. And malicious, I thought. They would have appreciated me more if I’d been dead, and I saw that truth in their little, bright eyes.

But this afternoon I turned up a side street, and there was the sign:
Maritime Museum
. I’d taken it for a warehouse. It was open, and I needed something to do for at least one of the three hours remaining before I could legitimately go back to the apartment Dale had rented and begin to wait for him. I pushed open the door, and pushed hard, for like all the doors in this town it was balky and swollen with the breath of the sea.

I’d been in more than my share of maritime museums, as Dale had a passion for them. This one seemed indistinguishable from the multitude: bleak and dusty and full of ship models and scrimshaw and all the sad mortal paraphernalia of a long-gone way of life. I stood for a long time before a case of glass pyramids, once set in the decks of ships to allow light into the cramped spaces below. I wondered how long you would have to stay down there before you forgot that you could not reach up your hand and touch the sun.

The museum’s collection was large, but not terribly interesting. “Thorough” would be the polite word. There was nothing there I hadn’t seen better examples of elsewhere, and I was unhappily conscious that the museum was not occupying enough of the long brazen afternoon. I walked more and more slowly, carefully reading each word of each printed placard, and still I was calculating: how long to finish at the museum, how long to walk back to the apartment, how long to take a shower. How long I’d waited for Dale the previous night and all the nights before.

And then I turned a corner, stepped through a narrow doorway, and found myself in a long hall, its stretch of narrow windows admitting dusty sunlight and a view of the sea; a hall bare except for the double row of figureheads, mounted like the caryatids of some great invisible temple.

I started down the hall, reading the placard beside each figurehead and studying awkward proportions, stiff shoulders, clumsily carved faces. The collection was composed entire of women: naked, half-dressed, clothed in Sunday best; blonde and brunette and redheaded; empty-handed and holding books and holding navigational instruments. And all of them staring, their eyes seeming to seek for something lost and irreplaceable, something that they would never find in this half-neglected room.

There was a feeling of incompleteness about them. They had never been meant to be seen on their own, nor from this unnatural angle. Their makers had intended them to be part of a greater whole, had intended them to lean forward fiercely, joyfully, into the crash and billow of the sea. By rights they were the eyes, the spirits, of ships far vaster than themselves. This room was not where they belonged; this room was not their home.

The dust motes floating in the shafts of sunlight, the long shallow gouges in the floor boards, the cracking, yellowing plaster of the walls—I had never been in a room so sad. The figureheads seemed like mourners, standing at the edges of a grave which was the aisle I walked down. For a moment, I felt truly buried alive, in my marriage, in this town, in this dreary, dusty hall.

But even as my heart pounded against my ribs, my breath coming short from imagined suffocation, I looked into the face of a figurehead whose long wooden hair was entwined with strands of wooden pearls, and saw that I was not the one buried in this room. Nor was I the one for whom they grieved, the one for whom they watched. They were waiting for something that could not enter the museum to find them.

After I worked my way up one side and down the other, I returned to stand in front of one woman, the pale green of sea-foam, her prim Victorian maiden’s face framing the wide-open eyes of an ecstatic visionary. I was staring into her eyes, trying to put a name to what I saw there, when I was startled nearly out of my wits by a man’s voice asking, “Do you like the figureheads, miss?”

After the silence of the figureheads, the man’s harsh voice seemed as brutal as the roar of a noreaster. I turned around. The door at the far end of the hall, marked
Employees Only
, was open, and a tall, gaunt old man stood with his hand on the knob. His hair was iron-gray, clipped short, and he wore jeans and a cable-knit sweater.

“Yes,” I said, groping after my composure. “They . . . they are very beautiful.”

“Aye,” he said, coming toward me, and I had to repress the stupid impulse to back away, “they are. There’s nothing like them made any more.” When he reached me, he extended his hand. “Ezekiel Pitt.”

I shook hands with him, although I didn’t want to. It was like shaking hands with a tangle of hawsers, even down to the faint sensation of grime left on my palm and fingers when he let go. I refrained with an effort from wiping my hand on my jeans. “Magda Fenton.”

“Nice to meet you, Miss Fenton,” Ezekiel Pitt said politely, and I did not correct him. “I do most of the collecting for the museum, and I must admit the ladies have always been my favorite.” His smile was unpleasant, the teeth prominent and yellow and wolf-like. His smell was musty and sweaty at once, and I gave in and backed up a step.

“Why do none of them have names?” I had noticed that on the placards; figurehead after figurehead was
ship unknown
.