Joseph’s face blanched at the word. “Mort?” he asked, looking back and forth between us. Henri spoke, evidently explaining while Joseph shook his head. When Henri had finished, the man spewed forth French at such a speed that I could not catch a word.
“He says your business is dangerous, that he worries for his family and Jean-Michel, and that he and his brothers will watch no more.” When Henri stopped talking, Joseph gave me one more long look and held out a calloused palm.
“He wishes you to give him the key, Miss Tulman,” said Henri.
“Wait. Ask him where we can find him, and will he come to us if he hears of Jean-Michel?”
This was done and Joseph said, “Rue Tisserand,” as he nodded. I put the key to the dining-room door in his hand. He said something quickly to Henri, unlocked the door, left the key in the lock, and after another moment I heard the front door slam. The slouching man was gone.
I turned to Henri. “What did he say? At the end?”
“He said that I should watch out for you, for Jean-Michel’s sake. That Jean-Michel used to talk of your beautiful hair.”
I got up and went to the sideboard, to see if the tea might still be hot, but mostly to keep Henri’s teasing eyes away from my face. I touched the red cap that sat there.
“Such amusing times I spend with you, Miss Tulman. Truly, it is never dull.”
I did not find it amusing in the slightest. Henri lit a cigarette. I let go of the hat, but did not turn around when I said, “Mr. Marchand, would you take me to the Tuileries? Are there public rooms?”
He blew out smoke. “I might take you, perhaps. If you are truthful with me.”
I turned around. “You think I am dishonest?”
“Maybe you do not lie, and yet you do not always tell the truth.”
“I can go to the Tuileries on my own.”
“No, Miss Tulman,” he said, teasing set aside. “No, I think you cannot.”
I thought of Mr. Babcock, canny and shrewd in his horrible waistcoat, and felt a sharp ache in my chest.
Henri asked, “Who are these Frenchmen that watch your house?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yet you thought they were perhaps English.”
“It seemed a logical question.”
“And who is this man Jean-Michel was looking for?”
I saw Ben Aldridge as I’d last seen him, his look of curiosity as I aimed the rifle scant seconds before his boat became a fireball. “He is no one. A dead man.”
Henri smiled as he blew a puff of smoke. “And you were also looking for a dead man, Miss Tulman. And now you seem to have found him.”
I had found nothing. Nothing that had brought him to me. I grabbed a handful of the red cap. Ten days since Lane had not returned to Mrs. Reynolds’s house, seven weeks he had lived there before that, and Mr. Wickersham had informed me of his death nearly two months ago. What had happened? He had left British employ and become the protégé of Mrs. Reynolds at about that time, that much was certain. But to what purpose? Certainly not to “pursue his art.” I knew Lane better than that. Could he have been arrested quietly, as a spy? Is that why Mr. Wickersham could or would not claim him? And yet Joseph had said he was to meet Lane six days ago at Rue Trudon, and Lane had been gone from Mrs. Reynolds’s for ten. Had he left on purpose? And if so, what had happened since? Joseph had not seemed aware of Lane’s ties to Britain or Mr. Wickersham, or anything concerning my uncle at all, but perhaps this was calculated as well. All Joseph had admitted was Lane’s dislike of the emperor, the man who had killed Mr. Babcock.
My thoughts swirled in confusion, and I felt the tears once again threatening my eyes. “I do my utmost for the house of Tulman,” Mr. Babcock had once said. And as Uncle Tully was at this moment sitting safe in his attic, that must have been exactly what Mr. Babcock had done. To the very end.
I looked up to find Henri watching me closely. All this time I had been still, squeezing the knitted yarn of the red cap. “Will you take me to the Tuileries?” I asked again. A flimsy clue at best, but it was all I had.
But before he could answer, Mrs. DuPont flung open the dining-room door. She was animated, flushed, actually suffused with a pale pink color that made her look distinctly … alive. I felt my eyes grow wide as she hurried to the table and handed me an envelope. Large, made of thick, pale ivory paper, and with a very official-looking seal pressed into red wax. I cracked the seal, looked over the contents without comprehension, and silently handed the letter to Henri.
He ran his eyes over the words and said, “I think there will be no need to escort you to the Tuileries today, Miss Tulman. You are invited there tomorrow. To the emperor’s ball. And you are invited by Napoléon himself.”
Mrs. DuPont erupted into excited speech that seemed to be for no one but herself while I looked again at the invitation. I saw my name now, formally inked in the midst of the print, and I felt the challenge, just as clearly as if I had been slapped on the cheek by my enemy’s glove. I had been called out. And then Mrs. Hardcastle was in the dining room, breathless, barely able to utter her words.
“Saw the royal messenger from the window, my dear. Is it so?”
I handed her the invitation. Henri stubbed out his cigarette and immediately pulled out another.
“It is so!” cried Mrs. Hardcastle. “Oh my, but won’t the Miss Mortimers be jealous! But what shall you wear, my dear? I’m certain you don’t have a thing. We’ll have to call in a seamstress, immediately, this very morning, or …”
I sat down at the table, trying to sift what I knew, to order, to sort, to calculate. What could I gain by facing the emperor? And yet, now that the enemy was clearly defined, what else was there? Despite all my best efforts, despite all that had happened, Uncle Tully was not safe, none of us were, and Lane was as lost to me as the day he left Stranwyne. And what of Uncle Tully? What if I left this house and did not return, like Mr. Babcock? Like Lane?
“Shall you go?” asked Henri, his voice low beneath the chatter. Mrs. Hardcastle was now discussing my clothing possibilities with Mrs. DuPont, of all people. I glanced at the invitation still in her hand, fluttering about as she talked, at the over-fancy, overconfident script that said my name. Nothing would be resolved by sitting at home. And I had been challenged. I turned to Henri.
“Will you escort me?”
He sighed, exhaling smoke. “I think I had better, Miss Tulman.”
And then the bell in the dining room rang, shrill and insistent.
I leapt to my feet. “I wonder what Mary could want,” I said over the ringing, snatching up Lane’s things and my skirts to go.
“Do you always run when your maid rings a bell, Miss Tulman?” Henri asked. I straightened my back.
“Almost always, Mr. Marchand. She’s a very good maid.”
I left him to chuckle in his self-imposed cloud.
20
For the next hours, my activities were polar extremes. I received a reply by telegram from Mr. Babcock’s offices, arranging for the transport of his body to the family burial plot in Westminster. And I was fitted for a dress, my perceived social standing high enough to gain me credit for the cloth. Mrs. Hardcastle, Mary, and a tiny French seamstress became an unlikely team, united in the common purpose of making me fit for an emperor I heartily despised. I could only hope the dress wouldn’t be the cause of my new life in a French debtor’s prison.
“Would you like to trade places with me, Marguerite?” I asked the child. She was sitting in the corner, one of the French fairy-tale books I’d found in my room propped open in her lap. I’d realized that these must be her books, that my grandmother’s room was a place she came often, but she was not reading this time. She was watching, wide-eyed, as I stood, arms over head in my underclothes, having swaths of cloth pinned all over me, listening to a frank discussion on certain aspects of my figure as if I were an interesting piece of horseflesh. “They’d never notice,” I whispered to her. I was rewarded with a giggle.