Cinderella Six Feet Under(8)

Kill Prue? Leaping Leviticus. Where was Henrietta? “I must insist upon being taken to the marquise this very instant!” Ophelia cried.

Malbert’s cheeks trembled. “It is not . . . But you do not . . . the trouble is, Madame Brand, that the marquise, Henrietta, my darling wife, she is gone. Vanished. She has been missing since Tuesday.”





3




Fourteen hours after Gabriel had first seen Miss Bright’s morgue drawing in The Times, his train chuffed and screeched into Gare du Nord in the middle of a sodden gray Paris morning.

After leaving his study at St. Remigius’s College, Gabriel had made a ten-minute stop at his lodgings to fetch a valise of clothing, don a greatcoat, and give directions to his housekeeper. Then he had gone directly to London. From Charing Cross, he’d ridden the South-Eastern Railway to Folkestone. He had boarded, just in the nick of time, one of the night ferries that trundled back and forth across the Channel between Folkestone and Boulogne. Once in Boulogne, it was a few hours’ anxious wait for the first morning train to Paris.

Gabriel had had a surfeit of hours to mull over a plan. So it was with a brisk step that he alighted from his first-class railway car and into the steamy hubbub of the gare. He was deaf to the babble of porters and hawkers, to the hisses of long, gleaming, eel-black trains. He was blind to the glass vaults above the platforms. He scarcely smelled the coal smoke, the whiffs of sweat, musky perfume, fresh bread, cinders, roses.

His only thought was, after so many hours caged in railway compartments and trapped with his thoughts, that at last he could act.

*

Le Marais—“The Marsh”—on the right bank of the Seine, was a neighborhood that had been favored by blue bloods until about a century ago. Now its edges were tattered. The Roque-Fabliau mansion at 15 Rue Garenne was a grand private town house, what Parisians called an h?tel particulier, much to the confusion of British and American tourists. H?tel Malbert was, by the looks of it, a seventeenth-century noble house in the style of Louis XIII. Pale yellow stone, rows of tall windows, steep slate roofs, Italianate pediments and cornices.

Gabriel rapped thrice upon the front door. The knocker was shaped like a mouse’s head.

Poetic touch.

A prune-mouthed steward cracked the door several inches. “Oui?”

“Good morning,” Gabriel said in French. “Is a young lady by the name of Miss Ophelia Flax within?”

“No, indeed, monsieur, there is not. I have never heard of anyone by that name.”

Where was Miss Flax, then? Still in Germany? Returned to America?

“And the daughter of the house, the young American girl, is deceased as the newspapers claim?” Gabriel asked.

“Regrettably, yes.” The steward shut the door an inch. “None of the family had ever made the girl’s acquaintance, however, so although it was a great shock to discover a corpse in the garden, it was not felt as a loss as such.”

Unfeeling wretch.

“I had hoped to locate the young American lady, Miss Flax, who had lately been traveling with the marquise’s daughter. Alas, I fear she has journeyed elsewhere. No matter. I still wish to speak with the marquis.”

“Oh, you all wish to speak with Monsieur le Marquis.” The door closed another inch.

Gabriel wedged his foot in the remaining space. “You misunderstand. I am not a gentleman of the press.” He drew a solid gold card case—a gift from his mother—from his inner jacket pocket and pushed his calling card through the crack.

The steward took the card. “Lord Harrington, is it? My, my. One is able to purchase anything these days, is one not?” He returned the card. “My compliments to your engraver. Beautiful work.”

Another gentleman of Gabriel’s station—his brother, for instance—would have cursed the steward, waved a cane about, made noisy demands. But Gabriel preferred more subtle tactics. He pulled his foot from the threshold. “Merci, monsieur.”

The door thumped shut.

Gabriel was not in the habit of thinking a great deal about what one might term his heart. He had attained the age of thirty-four without anyone in particular stepping forward to claim that organ, and he was glad of it. His academic work consumed him utterly.

Yet, as he spoke to the driver of the hired cabriolet waiting at the curb, his heart constricted—or did it swell?—in his chest. Either way, it was behaving in a most uncomfortable and unaccountable fashion.