Cinderella Six Feet Under(85)

The masked velocipede rider pedaled behind a delivery wagon. The rider turned his—or her—head. The eyeholes in the highwayman’s mask were shadowed by the brim of the bowler hat. The rider reached inside the flapping jacket, pulled out a revolver, aimed at Ophelia—

Penrose pushed Ophelia behind their carriage just as a shot cracked out.

“Are you all right?” he whispered, pressed against her.

“Think so.”

Penrose pulled something from inside his jacket. A revolver.

Their driver yelled at Penrose in French. Penrose signaled the driver to crouch down. He cocked his revolver. Slowly, he peered around the carriage, revolver poised. He watched for several seconds, breathing hard.

He turned to Ophelia. “He’s gone. Let us go, before Prince Rupprecht emerges and asks questions.” He said something to the driver, and the driver shook his head and waved his hands.

“He refuses to follow the cyclist,” Penrose told Ophelia.

“We could follow on foot.”

“He’s had too much of a start. Besides which, I won’t expose you like that, Miss Flax. That cyclist is mad.”

*

“That settles it,” Ophelia said, once the carriage was moving. “Someone’s trying to pop me off. That’s the third time! First at the exhibition hall, then two times with that creepy velocipede rider.”

Penrose nodded, his mouth grim.

“The only people possessing the slight build of the cyclist who were at the exhibition hall were Miss Smythe and Miss Eglantine,” Ophelia said.

“Are you really able to picture either of those young ladies on the loose in the city, dressed as a gentleman, shooting a pistol?”

“If she were desperate enough, sure.”

“Why would someone choose to follow us, shoot at us, from a velocipede rather than a closed carriage? They risk being identified, and it is wildly inefficient.”

“Not everyone is able to afford a carriage.”

“You suggest that the cyclist is short of funds?”

“Perhaps. Young ladies like Miss Smythe and Miss Eglantine, while their wants are taken care of by their parents, do not always have money of their own to spend.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Or it might be someone who is really and truly penniless.”

“That does not match the description of, say, Madame Fayette, or Monsieur Malbert, or Monsieur Colifichet—all persons who I wouldn’t blink an eye if you told me they wanted to harm us, but all who have sufficient funds to hire not only an assassin, but a carriage for their assassin.”

They made a detour to the Le Marais commissaire’s office. This time, Ophelia stayed behind in the carriage with the turtle. After her confrontation with Malbert, Inspector Foucher was the last person she wished to see, but the professor hoped to take a stab at speaking with the madman who’d been arrested last night.

Penrose slammed himself back into the carriage in fewer than five minutes.

“Did Inspector Foucher tell you to hit the trail?” Ophelia asked.

“After a fashion, yes.”

*

H?tel Meurice, Professor Penrose’s hotel, stood across from the Tuileries Gardens. Penrose booked Ophelia into a suite of rooms while she dawdled at his elbow, feeling mortified but at least reassured that, in her Mrs. Brand disguise, no one would take her for a disreputable lady. She held her reticule sideways in both hands because the turtle was inside, on top of the Baedeker.

They planned to meet at nine o’clock in the evening to go to Colifichet’s shop. Penrose left her at her door.

The suite’s windows overlooked a busy thoroughfare. Across the street sprawled the Tuileries Gardens: bare rattling branches, puddly walks, statues of wild beasts, and a large fountain in the distance.

The suite was staggeringly grand and Ophelia was afraid to sit down lest her mud-stained skirts soil the rich brocade. The four-poster bed was huge and downy-looking. Delicious heat, all for her, radiated from a coal fire. The lavatory taps would pump endless hot water, and a brand-new bar of lemon blossom soap, still wrapped, sat in a crystal dish.

She’d never experienced such luxury. It gave her the jitters.

But she took a hot bath and scrubbed away the face paint. Pity she couldn’t scrub away the guilt. Guilt at having this, enjoying this, while Prue was missing. Not to mention the green-at-the-gills fact that Professor Penrose was footing the bill.

After she dried off, she filled the bathtub again with cool water and let the turtle have a swim. While he did so, Ophelia inspected her run-over toe. Still swollen, purple, and shiny. She might’ve broken it. She dug through her theatrical case and rubbed some of her calendula flower salve on her foot. She really could’ve used a cup of the birch bark tea her mother used to boil, but this was Paris, not the New Hampshire hills.