Beauty, Beast, and Belladonna Page 22

  Later, when Gabriel was making his way to his own bedchamber after attempting—and failing—to read in the library, he passed Banks’s door. It stood half open, so he looked in.

  The nurse at Banks’s bedside had been sleeping, chin on chest, but she started awake at Gabriel’s arrival. “I was only resting my eyes,” she stammered in French.

  Gabriel replied, “I only wished to see if Mr. Banks has improved.” He hadn’t; he was still gray, sleeping, his whole body collapsing upon itself. That is what death looked like.

  The nurse said, “Perhaps, monsieur, we should send for the doctor again.”

  “Oh?”

  “Monsieur Banks woke this afternoon, only for a moment, and asked for his heart medicine.”

  “I was told that the doctor said he hadn’t a heart ailment, that it was something to do with his stomach.”

  “I could not understand what the doctor said to the young lady, monsieur, because they spoke in English. Still, Mr. Banks asked me for his heart medicine.”

  Gabriel wished to ask Ivy about this, but she had retired hours earlier. Should he wake her? It was improper for him to knock on her door at this hour, or, really, at any hour.

  Still, he went to her chamber. If Banks could be saved simply by taking the proper medicine, well, Gabriel must see to it.

  Ivy did not answer his knock. He sought out the maidservant Clémence and asked her to enter Ivy’s room, but they soon discovered that the door was locked. Ivy must haven fallen into a profound sleep.

  Gabriel resolved to send for the doctor first thing in the morning.

  * * *

  Gabriel slept with the jawbone and the loaded Webley under his pillow. Neither gave him peace of mind. For although he had in his possession an unspeakably important relic, both scientific and folkloric, Miss Flax had been cast out, and he knew not where she’d gone.

  His bedclothes tangled, and he perspired through his nightshirt. He gave up and got out of bed. But a glass of cognac at the fireside only succeeded in further disordering his thoughts.

  He should’ve ridden out after Miss Flax. She was penniless, alone—unless you counted that louse Forthwith—and in danger of arrest. Gabriel hadn’t done the right thing by her from the very beginning. She was, if nothing else, his friend, yet he had not valued, not protected, their friendship. He ought to have helped her more instead of chasing his private goals. He never should have allowed her to engage herself to Griffe. He should have never proposed marriage to Miss Banks.

  Tomorrow he would find Miss Flax and help her out of her predicament. That was the gentlemanlike thing to do.

  Soothed a little, Gabriel returned to bed and at last fell asleep.

  He woke at dawn to frigid wind gusting through an open window. Drawers lolled halfway out. Wardrobe doors splayed. Garments were scattered across the carpet.

  Tolbert in search of his prize.

  Gabriel reached under the pillow. The jawbone was still there. He must find a better place to hide it until he could carry it back to Oxford.

  * * *

  Clémence waited upon breakfast: more stale bread, cheese, and tepid coffee. Bernadette and Ivy were listless and ashen. Griffe was unkempt and red-eyed. Larsen was already gone hunting despite his wounded shoulder, and Master Christy was reportedly making a mess with books in the library. Tolbert still had not shown his face.

  Gabriel sat beside Ivy and said softly, “Your father—has his condition at all improved?”

  “Worse.” Ivy stifled a sob with her balled-up napkin. “He grows worse.”

  “The nurse told me last night that he has been asking for medicine—heart medicine.”

  “But why?”

  “He seems to believe that he had some, that he misplaced it, and that it’s all he requires to become well.”

  Ivy shook her head. “But he’s hasn’t got a heart condition. It is his stomach. It has always been his stomach—and the doctor from Sarlat confirmed as much. . . .” Her voice crumpled.

  “I am sorry that I mentioned it. Perhaps he has grown delirious.” Gabriel bit into rock-hard bread. He supposed it would only distress Ivy if he were to summon the doctor again.

  “I apologize for my poor hospitality,” Bernadette said. “We must hire new staff—perhaps from Sarlat, or even Paris. Dear Clémence will be promoted to housekeeper as a reward for her devotion to the family.”

  Perhaps that was why Clémence, standing just behind Griffe’s chair, appeared so radiant this morning.

  “Traitors, the lot of them!” Griffe roared. “Paid them better than anyone for fifty miles around, and this is the thanks I get! I cut a few trees—my own trees—and they stomp away like petulant children? What is more, my own footmen—former footmen—were brawling with the woodsmen last night. Disgraceful. I intend to hire even more woodcutters. Finish the job even faster. That will teach those fools.”

  “Brawling?” Gabriel said. “Was anyone hurt?”

  Griffe made a dismissive gesture. “A black eye here and broken tooth there. Nothing the brutes did not deserve. Now I must go into town myself to fetch the telegram the head woodsman told me is waiting for me at the telegraph office—Sarlat is a damnable rumor mill—even though I am occupied with the tree felling and this wretched beast nonsense. The woodsmen, by the by, claim to have seen a beast walking upright through their camp last night—”

  “Indeed?” Gabriel said.

  “Drunken scoundrels,” Bernadette murmured.

  “—so that telegram is going to sit and rot because now I have no servant to go and—”

  “I will fetch it for you,” Gabriel said.

  “Eh?” Griffe said. “I would be most obliged.”

  “You might keep to your overseeing of the tree cutting, and I will have a spot of exercise riding to town.”

  “I suppose that actress—Miss Flax, was it?—is in Sarlat,” Ivy said. “And the stage conjurer, of course.”

  “Probably,” Gabriel said into his coffee cup.

  A window burst in a shower of glass. A rock hit the table, bounced, and rolled to a stop beside Ivy’s plate. Bernadette screamed, and Ivy dissolved in weeping.

  Gabriel and Griffe dashed to the broken window to see a clutch of adolescent boys in peasants’ attire scattering into a stand of trees.

  A straggler turned and shouted in French, “That is only the beginning!” before disappearing.

  * * *

  Ophelia unglued her eyelids. Where in tarnation was she? She didn’t recognize the long crack running down that plaster wall, nor that window with such a deep wooden sill. Her head rested on her lumpy carpetbag, and that licking on her hand, what—?

  She struggled upright. Oh. This nightmare, still going strong.

  She was wrapped in her cloak on the cold floor of a boardinghouse, and Meringue was licking her hand. There was Forthwith, curled up like a lima bean in the chamber’s only bed. What a gent.

  Yesterday evening, they had walked almost halfway to Sarlat before a man driving a cart loaded with quarry stones had offered them a ride. Once in Sarlat, they’d slogged around until they found a boardinghouse with a vacant room. And here they were. The stinky shared lavatory was down the hall, and breakfast wasn’t included.

  Ophelia got up and prodded Forthwith. “Wake up. We’ve got to report our lodgings to the police station before Griffe tells them tales.”

  “Go away, you traitor,” Forthwith said.

  “If we don’t, we’ll look like fugitives.”

  “Mnngh.” Forthwith rolled over.

  “We’ve got to do something. They’re pinning it all on Henrietta and they’ll try to pin it on us, too.”

  “Surely they’ll see the light.”

  “No.” Ophelia set her chin. “Allow those bunglers to take charge of our fates? Let me show you something.” She went to her carpetbag and du
g out her box, the one in which she used to keep her money and the ring. She tossed it on the bed. “Open it.”

  Forthwith looked at the box groggily and sat up. “Henrietta’s birthday gift to you. I helped her select it in the shop, you know. You carried this with you all the way from Paris?”

  “Open it.”

  Forthwith opened it and pulled out the slip of paper. “I make my circumstance.” He snorted. “I took you for a reasonable young lady, Ophelia, so why on earth are you toting about gibberishy little notes?”

  “It’s not gibberish. Those words mean . . .” Ophelia swallowed the knob in her throat. “It means that one must not succumb to fate but take the reins. In this case, it means not allowing nincompoops and lazy police officers to decide—what are you doing?”

  Forthwith had been poking at the bottom of the box. Something clicked. He smiled. “Just like a lady in a crinolette, this box has a false bottom.”

  26

  Ophelia blinked.

  “It’s a magic box,” Forthwith said.

  “Henrietta gave me a conjurer’s box? Why?”

  Forthwith pulled out a roll of banknotes. “To fool you. God, if I’d known you had all this boodle, I would’ve allowed you to foot the bill for a proper hotel.”

  “That’s my money!” Ophelia snatched the banknotes, unrolled them, and counted. It was almost all there—every German and French banknote, although the coins of little value were missing. Henrietta had probably removed them because of their telltale jingling. “Why didn’t you tell me it was all there? I would never have come on this horrible journey to the Périgord! I’d be in New York by now!”

  “You just answered your own question.” Forthwith stretched back and lit a cigarette. “Henrietta was so keen to get to this godforsaken moist underarm of a provincial hell—”

  “In order to meet Mr. Larsen.”

  “Yes—that she hid your money to force your hand. She didn’t wish to actually steal your money, because as she explained to me, that sort of fraudulence was entirely beneath her. I often wonder how she would’ve turned out if she had ever gone to Sunday School as a wee one.”

  Ophelia’s hands shook. Magenta splotched her vision. “I ought to leave her in that jail and let her fend for herself.”

  “Come now, Ophelia, that doesn’t sound like you. You’re the long-suffering older sister we all wish we had. You know, I could have told you from the start that that pompous walking liver spot, Larsen, wasn’t the slightest bit smitten with her. He had ulterior motives for being at the hunting party himself.”

  “Yes, I know. He wished to woo Mademoiselle Gavage.”

  “Not that. Something else. You see, Larsen knew Mr. Banks already, had known him to my way of seeing things, long before they had arrived at Château Vézère.”

  “But they claimed to know each other only by reputation.”

  “Lies. They had secret little snarling spats every opportunity they got. I know because Larsen made me trail after him like a motherless whelp.”

  “He didn’t make you do that.”

  “Didn’t he?” Forthwith gusted cigarette smoke. “Have you considered Larsen as a murder suspect?”

  The thought had crossed Ophelia’s mind only yesterday, when she’d learned that Bernadette and Larsen were in love. Larsen had snored through the night of the vicar’s murder, but Bernadette could’ve been his accomplice. “Well, I have noticed that people in love sometimes forget all about their moral obligations to the rest of mankind.”

  “Here’s something: If Larsen knew Banks before, and if there is bad blood between the two of them, well, Banks is ill now. Deathly ill. What if that is Larsen’s doing?”

  “You suggest that Larsen is poisoning Banks? Why not do him in quickly, instead of making him merely ill?”

  “To make him suffer, of course.”

  Ophelia paced. How could she get back into Château Vézère to continue her sleuthing? Could she go in disguise? Pose as, say, some sort of gypsy lady in search of a glass of water?

  Forthwith went on, “At any rate, you oughtn’t be angry with me, because if you hadn’t come to the Périgord, you wouldn’t have found Professor Penrose again.”

  “What does he have to do with it?”

  “Oh, come off it, Ophelia. You’re in love with him, and he’s in love with you.”

  “He is engaged to marry Miss Banks, or has that escaped your notice?”

  “She’s not for him. He can’t take his eyes off you. Why are you allowing him to get away? He’s staggeringly rich, Henrietta says—”

  “His wealth means nothing to me.”

  “No? You’re a morally righteous young lady who’s just so happened to put on a costume and pretend to be a rich heiress from Ohio?”

  “I had to do it.”

  Forthwith snickered. “Not everyone would have resorted to such a bizarre theatrical ruse. No, I think you sleep soundly at night by distancing yourself from people like Henrietta and me. But the truth is, you’re just like us. A survivor, at all costs.”

  “I am a survivor. And trust you me, I don’t like tricking people, not one little bit. Folks can only use the abilities they have. I never finished school past the age of fifteen. I can’t read fancy books, I don’t know any important people, and I’ll never have enough money to sway anyone. But I’m resourceful, I’m good at disguises, like it or not, and I try hard.”

  Forthwith flicked ash on the floorboards. “And you’ve somehow managed to conquer the heart of an English earl who’s got slathers of money.”

  “I told you, money means nothing to me.”

  “Money means nothing to you? Look at the lengths to which you’ve gone—going along with Henrietta’s dirty little scheme—just to cobble together enough for steamship passage back to America. Money would change everything for you.”

  “I don’t need his money,” Ophelia said quietly.

  But she suddenly knew with her entire mind, body, and soul, something else: She needed Professor Penrose. Raw impossibility yawned before her.

  She went down the hall to the lavatory and splashed cold water on her face.

  She wiped the water from her eyes and looked into the tarnished mirror above the sink. In that silly Beauty and the Beast tale, Belle had met her reckoning when she’d seen, through her magical looking glass, the Beast dying in his garden. Bunkum indeed, except that, well, for a moment Ophelia fancied she saw the professor’s face in the mirror, and while he wasn’t dying, she saw the death of hope for a future with him.

  She could not leave France without telling him that she loved him, too. She would solve these murders, come clean to the professor, and be gone.

  * * *

  Ophelia went back to the chamber and put on her cloak and bonnet. Forthwith was already asleep again. Ophelia collected Meringue and her roll of banknotes, made a leash for Meringue out of a long corset lace, and left.

  She took Meringue to do his business in a park. Then she went to the police station and reported to a clerk where she and Forthwith were staying. After that, she bought hot rolls and a hunk of cheese. She started back towards the boardinghouse.

  She would eat, and then she’d arrange to rent her own chamber, because sharing with Forthwith was as unbearable as it was unseemly, even though they had told the proprietress that they were siblings. After that, she would find some sort of conveyance to carry her back to Château Vézère, where she would burst in and demand that Larsen explain how he’d known Banks previously. Or something along those lines.

  At a public pump, Meringue stopped to lap at a trough. As Ophelia waited, she munched a roll. She had the tingly feeling she was being watched. . . . Yes. That stringy-looking fellow in brown farmer’s togs, crouched on the steps of a church. She’d never seen him before, yet his eyes were stuck on her.

  “Come on, Meringue,” Ophelia whispered
. They hurried the few blocks to the boardinghouse. As she stepped across the threshold, she glanced left and right—

  My sainted aunt. The stringy man in brown was down at the corner, hands in pockets, staring right at her again. Ophelia pushed inside.

  * * *

  In the chamber, Forthwith lolled in bed smoking, and another man stood at the window. His back was turned to Ophelia, but she recognized Professor Penrose in an instant. He held an envelope.

  “You brought food?” Forthwith said. “Splendid.”

  Penrose turned. His face lit in that peculiar way when he saw Ophelia, but in a flash it was gone. “Miss Flax.”

  “Professor.”

  “I’m hungry,” Forthwith said. “Oh—and an officer of the police called while you were out. Something about a stolen ruby ring and how the count and his sister will demand your arrest if you don’t return it promptly.”

  So it had finally come to that. Ophelia set down Meringue and tossed the parcels of food at Forthwith. “What brings you here, Professor Penrose?”

  “To be honest, three things.” Penrose crouched so Meringue could sniff his glove. “I am ostensibly in town to fetch a telegram for Griffe.” He waved the envelope in his hand.

  “Oh. How is Mr. Banks?”

  “He has not improved.”

  “What of Abel?”

  Penrose smiled a little. “Making a tornado of the naturalia books in the château library. He has a caged parakeet on the table beside him at all times, for some reason. He’s as happy as a clam. There is something else I wished to speak of, Miss Flax. Perhaps outside—”

  “No,” Ophelia said, too quickly.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. Well, something. There was a fellow out there, skinny as a rake in drab brown sort of farmer’s clothing—I’ve never seen him before, but I fancied he was . . . following me. He’s down in the street.”

  Penrose tensed. “Are you certain he was a stranger—not one of the château servants, perhaps?”

  “He could’ve been one I’ve never seen before, I suppose.”