A Spark Unseen

“Than take a lady to a cafe? But that is exactly what every young man in Paris wants to do.”

I waited, eyes narrowing until he stubbed out the cigarette and shrugged. “What do you wish to know? I am Henri Marchand, and I have just inherited the house of my father, the house that was taken when my family went to the guillotine, returned when France once again had a king. I can only hope we do not lose it again under the regime of the emperor, as others have. I went to school in England, and for now I am what they call the ‘man of independence.’ I met the two Miss Mortimers at the opera, and the good Mrs. Reynolds wishes me to take one of them into my house, which I will not. In the meantime, she feeds me good dinners. And I meet the most interesting company, like sharp-tongued young ladies of whom I hear the strangest stories, who have the excellent arm for throwing and whose cheeks go pink with anger, as yours are doing now, Miss Tulman.”

He bit into a bun while I continued to stare. “So. Have you thought of the morgue, Miss Tulman? The day is ending, and it is on the way, more or less. I do not wish to offend, but it could be the more … what is the word? The more efficient place to start. You can look at the records, and rule that possibility from your search. And there is a viewing room for the public, for the latest finds, if your taste tends to such.” He shoved the buns toward me. “Here, eat.”

I ate, silent, as he knocked back his coffee like a shot of hard liquor, considering the morgue. If I could prove Mr. Wickersham a liar, if I could find no certificate of death, then perhaps Mr. Babcock might be more amenable to escorting me on my search, more willing to stay at home in the mornings. I certainly was not going again with the surprisingly observant Henri Marchand. He pushed back his chair.

“Come, Miss Tulman,” he said, making the coin I hadn’t even noticed was missing appear suddenly again on the table.

The morgue squatted near the banks of the Seine on a cluttered street, its chimneys belching black, gritty clouds. I did not wish to know what fuel made such a smoke. The tips of the towers of the Cathedral of Notre- Dame could just be seen through the hazy air, while below, people of all sorts milled about the morgue itself, a small but raucous crowd.

“The viewing room,” Mr. Marchand explained. “It brings them, like a show.”

I said nothing of my disgust. This was not where I wanted to look, to be, or to find. We threaded our way through the crowd and entered the building. A long, wide hallway extended to my left, its ceiling far above me, and I followed Mr. Marchand to the other side, going immediately to a door marked with a title in French that I could not read. Mr. Marchand’s knock was answered by a rather scruffy man in an ill-fitted suit, and after a few moments of explanation, during which the man’s replies took on the sound of irritation to my ears, we stepped into a small, paneled office smelling of stale cigars. I was thankful it smelled of nothing worse.

A long conversation ensued, the particulars of which I was not privy to. Several of Mr. Babcock’s papers were laid out and perused on a large, scratched desk, the scruffy man’s hands were thrown up in exasperation, and eventually he stormed out the door. Mr. Marchand grinned at me. Two minutes and the man was back, slamming a leather-bound book with brass clasps onto the desk. He marched back out again. I looked to Mr. Marchand, inquiring.

“It is the record,” he replied, “of the bodies brought for the past sixteen months.” His smile broadened as I immediately scooted my chair close to the desk and undid the brass clasps. “You would like my help, Miss Tulman?”

“No, thank you,” I said primly, unwilling to give him the name that I knew was all he wanted.

I opened the book, then briefly closed my eyes, stung by my own stupidity. The book was in French, of course. I looked down the page, at the paragraph-like entries, and then flipped to the back, where the pages were still blank. “Are you sure this is all? It doesn’t seem like much, for an entire city.”

Mr. Marchand went to the door and asked a question of someone outside. He came back inside, brows drawn together. “Only the bodies that have no name,” he said, “that is what is brought here.”

He shrugged once, as if to say, “How would I know?” and I frowned down at the book. Then this would prove nothing to Mr. Babcock and was a waste of my precious time. I saw Mr. Marchand watching me sidelong, waiting for me to give up or ask for help. I turned my attention stubbornly to the pages, studying their arrangement. I was here now and might as well make the best of it.

The column on the left gave the date — I could manage that much with the French I knew, while to the right a paragraph was written. I could not pick out much of this, though the writing was quite neat, but as I looked at the next stiff page, and the next, I saw that at the end of each paragraph there was a name, sometimes in a different hand or a different ink, and sometimes instead of a name, there was merely “non identifie.”

I smiled to myself. That was easy enough. With my smattering of French for colors and numbers, I could simply run through the names looking for either “unidentified” with its accompanying description of age and sex, or the name Moreau. The thought of seeing Lane’s name in that horrible book made me dread the turning of each and every page, and I had to remind myself over and over that this was only for whatever little good it might do me with Mr. Babcock, and for my pride in front of Mr. Marchand. That I would find nothing in this book because Lane was alive.

I sighed when I got to the end of the entries, slumping down slightly in my chair. I had thought the book small, but so much recorded death was difficult to comprehend. There had been only one “unidentified” that was a possibility, and that only because of hair color; I doubted Lane could be mistaken for a man of fifty.

I stretched, feeling pleased with my failure. Mr. Marchand was gone, I saw; I hadn’t noticed exactly when he had succumbed to boredom. And then I realized that the noise outside the office had gotten louder. Much louder. I left the book on the desk and stepped out the office door. The hallway was absolutely stuffed with people, a river of humanity flowing into the building, filling the long, wide space I’d noticed on my way in. I would have thought there was some sort of panic in the streets if it hadn’t all sounded so jolly. I craned my neck, trying to look over the shouting, laughing crowd for the scruffy French official or Mr. Marchand, when a woman in a stained purple bonnet gave me a good-natured shove from behind. I was jostled, pushed, and then swept away as if I’d stepped into a running tide.

I was surrounded by bodies, mostly cheerful, but also too hot and too unwashed, children darting disconcertingly past my feet. The noise was overwhelming. I could not see around the heads and shoulders, but I quickly learned that my elbows were useful and employed them, murmuring insincere apologies as I forced a path sideways through the crowd. What could be happening to bring such a surge of people?

Finally I found the wall, and began scooting back along it toward the dingy office. A few people were going my direction now, peeling from the front to give those complaining behind them a turn, and I finally grasped what they were here for. The entire end of the hall was spanned floor to ceiling by a wall of glass. The viewing room. There must be something sensational behind that window, I surmised, some murder made infamous in the papers. I could see none of it, thankfully, only three sets of clothing, displayed high on a rope behind the glass.

And it was this, of all things, that pulled my gaze, drew it as unwillingly as my body had been swept through the crowd. I moved, back the way I’d just come, pushing my way past arms and backs, stepping on feet, ignoring grumbles and curses in French. Someone knocked my bonnet from my head, and it was lost beneath the tramping feet. But I did not stop until I was pressed into the little iron fence that separated me from the glass.

Three bodies lay on display, slabs tilted to the crowd and heads propped up for our inspection. What the people had come to see was undoubtedly in front of me, a woman, bare-chested and cruelly cut. The part of me that was aware knew I was horrified by this, but the rest of me could comprehend nothing, because the body to her left had turned me into something made of stone, stone that melted in an instant from a rocklike numbness to fiery, liquid pain.

My chest squeezed, my throat clamped closed; I wanted to cry out, and could not. A woman in the crowd jostled me from behind and I pushed her back, hard, barely aware of what I was doing. All I could think was that I knew the head, the arms, every feature of the swollen, blue, and now lifeless face that lay on the slab behind the glass. I knew every flower of the horrible waistcoat, now mud-stained and dripping water to the floor from where it hung.

It was Mr. Babcock.