An expression I couldn’t quite fathom passed over his face, and I thought we were about to quarrel the point when a key rattled in the front door. The latch clicked, and then Mrs. DuPont stood looking in at us, swathed in an enormous cloak that was blacker than the paling night behind her. But before I could move or react, both Lane and Mrs. DuPont erupted into a storm of angry French.
I looked to Henri and Joseph, who both seemed as confused as I was, but at one of Lane’s last words, something about money, I suddenly understood. I couldn’t believe the answer had not come to me sooner. I took a step toward Mrs. DuPont. “You sold him! Didn’t you?”
The room went quiet, Mrs. DuPont glancing over the soot stains on the wall before deigning to land her gaze on me. I was so livid I was shaking. How else could Ben have known about the attic room?
“How much did they pay you?” I yelled. “How much?”
Lane took my arm. “That’s not what she’s selling, Katharine,” he said. “Come on.”
Mrs. DuPont’s bone-white mask looked just a bit aggrieved as she nodded once at Lane, carefully closed the front door, and began to move, bat-like, through the smoky foyer, the two of us following close behind. Lane paused to look over his shoulder.
“Not you,” he said, the low voice forceful.
Henri stopped mid-stride, throwing up both hands as if in self-defense, Joseph right behind him with the gun in his hand. We chased after the billowing cloak of Mrs. DuPont, walking fast down the back corridor, the smell of burnt plaster going deep into my nose.
Mrs. DuPont slowed before the door to the kitchen, running her eyes over the charred, wet mess around the stove, then put a key to her door and disappeared inside, leaving it open behind her. I followed Lane into Mrs. DuPont’s lair.
It was a plain room, unadorned, two comfortable chairs and a smaller stool arranged around an iron stove, an open door showing a bed neatly spread in the chamber beyond. But the room was also full of crates and boxes in perfect stacks, some reaching to the ceiling, piles of gunnysacks, and a table that was completely covered in exacting rows of brown and white paper parcels. The place looked like an apothecary, or the storeroom of a dry- goods shop. Lane put out a hand, stilling my questions, his gray gaze on Mrs. DuPont.
“Our agreement?” he said.
Mrs. DuPont turned from the table with the packages and silently held out two folded white parcels. He took them, gingerly prying open one corner to peer inside.
“I would not get that on your hands, Monsieur,” she said.
I leaned closer to look, but he was already folding up the paper. “And how many did he purchase?”
“This is the rest of it?”
Mrs. DuPont nodded. “And my payment? You are late with my payment.”
Lane looked up. “I told you that I could not come sooner. But why don’t you tell me, Madame, how much Miss Tulman has paid you already?”
I thought this an extremely good question. But Mrs. DuPont merely returned Lane’s gaze and kept a stony silence.
“Well, I reckon you’ve gotten plenty, then,” Lane said. “Close up shop, Mrs. DuPont. Get rid of it all and get your family out.”
I looked about the room again, at the crates and boxes, this time reminded less of a shop than of the boat that had carried us across the Channel. And then, finally, the varied cogs in my mind meshed, clicking in rhythm. The mysterious comings and goings at the back door, and Mrs. DuPont’s stubborn need to stay. All these goods were illegal, one way or another. Smuggled or stolen or who knew what. And the woman had been selling her wares out of my house. Lane took my arm again. “Come on. …”
“No. Not yet. I want Mrs. DuPont to explain to me why I shouldn’t send for the police.”
Mrs. DuPont clasped her hands together, her bony mask well in place. “You know best, I am sure, Mademoiselle. The police and I would have such a nice talk. About so many things.”
I almost laughed, but the feeling in my chest was too bitter. “It’s rather late for that, Mrs. DuPont. I’m afraid that game is over.” I began to turn away.
“Wait, Mademoiselle!” Mrs. DuPont stepped forward, suddenly animated. “You must believe me! I have sold things, yes, many things, but it is for Marguerite!” She waved her hand about the room. “All for Marguerite, for her school! She shall be a lady! A proper French lady! Please, Mademoiselle! She is …” She lowered her voice, as if there might be eavesdroppers behind the sacks. “She is my grandchild. But I do not tell about lunatics, Mademoiselle. Even if they are English ones. I would not do that for money. I would not!”
“And why should I believe a lunatic is something you would not sell?”
She took a step back. “Are you simple? Are you slow? Because I am married to one, you fool!”
I opened my mouth, but then Lane had me by the arm and we were leaving, hurrying down the hallway. I looked back at Mrs. DuPont, standing in her room of contraband, thinking of lovely little Marguerite reading fairy tales in Marianna’s room, not one whit afraid of her corpse-like grandmother, or her grandfather. What it said about my own mental state, that I had never even thought to consider Mr. DuPont as officially insane, that I’d seen him as just part of the strangeness of the Parisian landscape, I could not speculate. Normal, evidently, was completely unfamiliar to me.
At the end of the hall, Lane stopped, hand on the door latch to the foyer. The gray gaze was hard, fixed at nothing. “I don’t understand. All this time, and I don’t understand it.”
There were hundreds of things I didn’t understand at the moment. I was still amazed by the fact that he was here, in a white shirt gone gray and with his hair uncut, present and by my side.
“I tracked him all over Paris,” he said. “Made lists, mapped the places he’d been, where he might go. I know where he bought his base metal, and sulfur and acid, and a host of other things. I know who his father is, and I know why he goes to Charenton. What I don’t understand is why Ben Aldridge has been buying arsenic, arsenic that he doesn’t have to sign his name for.”
He held up the two little white packages, his body coiled up, unnaturally still.
“But whatever he is doing, I will end it this time. Like I should have at Stranwyne. I swear that to you.”
I put my hand on his arm. “Let’s end it, then, and go get Uncle Tully.”
When Jean-Baptiste said he could find no one watching the house, we left him with Mary, who gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and stuffed a bun into Mr. Babcock’s shirt pocket, and I slipped into the streets with Lane and Joseph, again following the lead of Henri Marchand.
Henri took us through the back alleys, avoiding the main boulevards, snaking our way through the city as we had on our trip to Rue Tisserand. We moved fast, Lane at Henri’s left elbow, Joseph on his right, as if they were escorting a criminal or a dignitary. I trotted a few steps behind, watching Lane. He was shadowy in the predawn light, but a shadow that seemed natural, to belong, turning corners he knew, muttering the occasional word to Joseph in French. He seemed a man in his place, not a man in a place he has carved for himself, as he’d been at Stranwyne. It made me wonder what he saw now when he thought of home. The notion made me uneasy.
Despite our speed, the light grew, and even with a thin, early fog my anonymity was coming to an end. I received a long, penetrating look from a flower seller setting up her wares before Henri led us sliding down a short, steep embankment that ended in a stone wall.
My feet squelched when I landed at the bottom of the wall, the smell of the river wafting up foul from the fog. We were at the edge of the Seine. The water was lower here, or the banks higher; a thin strip of muddy land was just navigable between the river and the wall. We made our way beneath a stone bridge, and Lane hung back, speaking to me for the first time since our conversation in the corridor.
“Marchand thinks that we can’t have you on the streets anymore, that we need to go underground a little sooner than he’d planned.” A carriage rattled by on the street over our heads, the
I hesitated. Cold-blooded murder or leaving us lost underground was not Henri’s style, I thought. But then again, how could I be certain? It was not as if he’d ever been truthful with me.
“Do you agree, Katharine?”
