Dr. Pruitt. He was a good man, and I did not believe for a moment that he would give my uncle away. And he had assured me again and again that though experimental, he had used the contents of his little brown bottles many times with no ill effects. But this long, enforced sleep was so unnatural. I stroked my uncle’s hair, trying to ignore the tightening pain in my middle.
Mr. Babcock had dropped himself back onto a crate, once again mopping at his brow. “You put men in the cemetery, I assume?”
I nodded in response, laying the discarded dresses carefully back on top of my uncle before shutting the lid and locking the trunk. Mr. Babcock
The boat pitched, and my stomach went with it. I barely heard Mary’s exclamation of “Lord!” before I vomited hard into the metal bowl she held out for me.
7
It was an action I repeated many times over the next few hours, catching only snatches of sleep, curled between crates on two moth-eaten blankets we had found in a corner. Mary, to my shame, was not the slightest bit indisposed, and neither was Mr. Babcock. I could not crawl far from my bowl. As the rising sun lit the sea, it was Mary, her nose against the little window, who got our first glimpse of France.
When the boat docked and the engine thrum I’d forgotten I was hearing sputtered and stopped, I pushed against the floor and experimented with being upright. Seagulls were crying, bells clanging, and I could hear scurrying footsteps above us. Mary was instantly at my side, snapping shut the pocket watch.
“Now don’t you worry, Miss. We’ve got to be staying right here until that captain has paid out the money Mr. Babcock was giving him. Then somebody will come and say we can be getting off. Mr. Tully’s had another dose, and I’ve gotten his water down him, too, so there’s no trouble there, and there’s to be wagons or some such at the docks that will take us to a place called Rouen, though I never heard of such a name as that, and Mr. Babcock, he says there will be something to eat on them as we go. …”
“Nothing to eat,” I whispered, “please, Mary.” Though the uppermost thought trickling through my mind was the amazing power of Mr. Babcock to make impossible things happen. The man should have been prime minister. That would have settled Mr. Wickersham. And possibly the emperor of France.
“… and there’s a train here, too, he says, though he don’t want us to be getting on it just yet, ’cause that’s too easy.” Mary began stuffing my wayward hair back into order. “And when you’re on the train, you can rest proper, Miss — though I won’t be resting ’cause having never been on a train, I ain’t planning to miss a thing — and then we’ll be in Paris in a snap, and we’ll hire a carriage to be taking us to the new house. But Mr. Babcock, he says not to be looking worried or in a hurry when we get out there. To just be easy, like ‘ladies on their way.’ That’s what he said to me, Miss, ‘ladies on their way.’ Ain’t that kind of him to say such a thing? My mum, she would have said —”
“Where is Mr. Babcock?” I interrupted.
She pointed to the other end of our little room, even dingier now with the bit of sunlight that came through the porthole. Mr. Babcock lay on top of a crate, curled up like a bulldog, sleeping beneath his coat.
When all the proper bribery had been accomplished, and the captain had taken his incomprehensible leave, our items were unloaded and I stepped, squinting, onto the dock. The sun was hot and bright, welcome after the dim dampness of the boat, and a wagon was waiting. Mr. Babcock climbed into the back to sit with the steamer trunk and other luggage while Mary and I were squashed in beside the driver. He was an elderly man with a deeply tanned face, no English, and some sort of stinking tobacco that was as good for my delicate insides as the rutted roads outside the city.
We bounced and bruised against the hard wooden seat until Mr. Babcock leaned forward, tapping the driver on the back. He spoke gruffly in the man’s native tongue, causing the driver to grumble, shrug, and avoid the potholes with more diligence. I looked over my shoulder at Mr. Babcock, one eyebrow raised.
“You speak French?”
“Passably, my dear, passably,” he replied, settling his round little frame more deeply among the boxes.
“But you didn’t tell the captain that. You let that grinning sailor say whatever he wanted.”
Mr. Babcock smiled his steely smile, the one that was often dismissed, yet caused the wise to shake in their boots. “Sometimes it is best to keep one’s advantages close,” he said. “Those are words to live by, my child. This time it saved us five hundred francs.”
I turned back in my seat to see Mary, large eyes on Mr. Babcock, drinking in these words like nectar. If Mr. Babcock should have been prime minister, then before this trip was over he was going to have Mary Brown fit for minister of war.
Endless fields in the midst of harvest gave way to a town again, a rail station with an enormous four-faced clock tower and great puffing engines that made Mary’s eyes bulge, and then the noise, smoke, and blessed speed of the train. Mr. Babcock rode in the luggage car with the trunk. I was still weak from the Channel crossing, sick to death of movement and nearly comatose with fatigue, but before I’d even properly looked at the passing villages, we were in the bustle of a station — Gare Saint-Lazare, I heard it called, sooty from the trains and a nearby ironworks — then into a rocking carriage and onto the streets of Paris.
The road was narrow and congested. We stopped and started frequently, the inevitable wagon rolling along just behind us with the trunk and our luggage. Mary succumbed to sleep at last, and Mr. Babcock dozed, but I could not close my eyes. Not here. Rickety buildings rose upward on either side of the carriage, built in teetering overhangs that stretched toward one another, as if threatening to touch over our heads, or perhaps collapse on top of us, until we made a turn onto a wide boulevard. The sky opened out and the sun shone, and we rolled on smooth paving, newly planted trees lining the center of the street and both sidewalks. It was brighter here, both with light and color, and I could hear music from a passing cafe, just as foreign to me as the shouts from the sidewalks. The smells that had been penetrating the walls of the carriage — not quite as putrid as what I remembered of London — eased as well. Hammers banged, and I saw skeletal rows of newly erected timbers, piles of grubby stone and plaster being hauled away by the wagonload. Block after block, this scene was replayed. The old Paris was being replaced with the new, it seemed, entire streets’ worth at a time.
But it was the people that were keeping my attention, standing about in front of stores and shops, crossing the boulevards through a maze of horse and omnibus; I realized I’d been involuntarily counting the number of tall, dark heads our carriage passed. The twenty-second of these had long hair, loose and almost shoulder length, and he was coming down the sidewalk at a slow stride, not three feet from my window, face downward, searching for something in a jacket pocket. A red cap was tugged down low on his forehead. I leaned forward, hand to the window glass, and a pale face, stubbled and with a hooked nose, suddenly jerked up and looked directly into my stare, as if I’d called to him. I sat back, air returning audibly to my lungs. It was not Lane Moreau. But it could have been.
I watched every face that passed by our carriage.
“Katharine, child, if you are not too indisposed, we need to discuss the situation with the house.”
I started, prying my gaze from the window. I had not realized Mr. Babcock was awake. We were stopped, in any case, in a glut of carriages that appeared to be traveling at cross purposes, temporarily making the road impassable.
“Of course,” I replied, scooting back into the space where Mary still slumped, though not so far as to
