Cinderella Six Feet Under(15)

“Yes.”

“Tell me why you’re truly here.”

“The sightseeing here tends towards the vulgar.”

“Not that.”

“Everyone knows French cuisine is far too heavy on the butter.”

She scowled.

“Although I must confess to a weakness for Bordeaux.”

She stopped walking. “You, Professor, are as transparent as a windowpane. You’ve got a hidden motive.”

“What have I done to be worthy of such prodigious distrust?”

“You didn’t know it was really me when you followed me here!”

“The steward turned me away.”

“Sounds like him. Baldewyn, he’s called. Prue calls him Mister Lizard.”

“I decided to follow the first member of the household who emerged and strike up a conversation. In order, you see, to discover your whereabouts, Miss Flax.”

A half-truth. At this juncture, with Miss Flax careening so dangerously close to his secret, it must suffice.

Miss Flax fumed away down the corridor.

Gabriel touched the left side of his chest, felt the rectangle of the Charles Perrault volume nestled beneath layers of greatcoat, jacket, waistcoat, shirt. He shoved his hands in his greatcoat pockets and sauntered after Miss Flax.





5




Prue wiped her sweaty brow on her arm.

What had she signed on to, anyway?

The inside of the china cupboard, which Beatrice had commanded her to clean, turned her stomach: sticky cobwebs, mildew-blotted cookery books, chunks of something-or-other that was maybe bread but possibly cheese, judging by the reek of it. And an avalanche of mouse plops, both antique and fresh.

Beatrice had tied on her bonnet and cloak and taken a basket off to market, leaving Prue alone. Well, if the company of two tubby, dozing cats and mice playing peekaboo counted as alone.

Prue stacked the cookery books on the flagstones, swept rodent plops into a copper dustpan, and dumped the moldy whatsits in the rubbish bin outside the kitchen door.

Outside, she could just see the edge of that rotted vegetable patch. She still felt the coldness of her sister’s body and she had to keep swiping the picture of her staring eyes away. Where was her sister now? Still laid out at some morgue? All of a sudden, Prue longed to attend her sister’s funeral. To sew things up, maybe. But no one had said anything about a funeral.

On the sunny side, Prue was finally learning to be a housewife. For Hansel.

Prue’s eyes fell on the topmost cookery book on the stack she’d made. The words, stamped in flaking-off gold on the loose cover, weren’t in any language she knew.

She set aside her broom and dustpan and hefted the book. It was awfully thick, and it looked so, well, serious, as though the cookery or housewifing knowledge it held wasn’t womanly twaddle, but honest-to-goodness Important Work.

Prue cracked it open. Dust puffed up, and she sneezed.

Page after page of thick, hand-lettered black script, in more of that mystery language. But there were plenty of pictures. Little, intricate, inky-black pictures of soup pots and turtles, bedsteads, stones, bees, carrots, flowers, boxes, pies, and brooms. Fascinating. Befuddling.

But it seemed that if one were to study the pictures with mighty care, all the magic of housewifery might be squeezed from this single, magnificent volume.

The china cupboard was forgotten. Prue, for the first time in her life, set to studying.

*

The opera house corridor was a buzzing hive of rehearsal and practice rooms. A trombone honked out scales, a violin spiraled through arpeggios, a soprano warbled and, mingled through it all, more of that man yelling: “Un, deux, trois! Un, deux, trois!” Then, “Mon Dieu, Marie! T’es un éléphant! Encore!”

All as familiar to Ophelia as the back of her own hand. Of course, the violinists in Howard DeLuxe’s Varieties sounded much more screechy.

“Why are you still following me, Professor?” Ophelia asked. Encountering Professor Penrose, after months of scrubbing him out of her mind, made her heart flutter like a hatchling chick. And that was simply irksome. She felt angry at him, too, and embarrassed in his presence, and she was unsure how to behave. She figured she was missing a piece of her mind, a piece that other people had. The piece that allowed a person to do things like fall in love or believe in fairy tales.

Penrose drew something from his pocket and unfolded it. The morgue drawing of the dead girl that had appeared in all the newspapers. “You did not think to bring one of these along, did you?”