My own three-star luncheon was a baguette and some cheese in a park, feeding the crumbs to the pigeons. I then went into a few shops to add to my meagre possessions. Back in the hotel, with nothing at hand but the Testament, I had just reached the Book of Romans, and was struggling with Paul’s arguments concerning justification by faith, when a key scraped in the lock of the next room. I lowered my book and waited. Holmes popped through the shared door.
“On your feet, Russell. The lady’s decided that she was indiscreet, that the wicked English, being capable of anything, could have stooped to subverting the priesthood to prise her address out of her. She and the boy will take the train today; the good monsieur, about whom I know only that he calls himself Tony, will turn the tables and lie in wait for the priest, in order to follow him to Lyons on the afternoon train tomorrow.”
I burst into laughter at the convoluted plot. “He didn’t suspect the priest of being anything but?”
“Apparently not. Nor has it entered their heads that a person in a cassock may smile and smile and be a woman. Their innocence is, I have to say, both charming and encouraging.”
“What time is the train?”
He glanced at his pocket-watch. “You have twenty-three minutes to reach the station.”
I handed him the Testament and began throwing off one set of clothing and pulling on another, pinning my hair to support my new hat, dabbing on powder, colouring my lips, and generally changing into another woman. The cassock, men’s shoes, heavy spectacles, and the rest of that persona were already in the valise I had brought here. My other clothing, English and French, went into my newly purchased leather suit-case. I turned my overcoat so the plain cloth was inside and the fur without, and dropped it nonchalantly over my shoulders. Holmes copied the address Terèse Hughenfort had given him and slipped it into my handbag along with a city map he’d picked up somewhere.
“Where shall I meet you?” I asked him.
“Take a room at the Hôtel Carlton. I’ll find you there. And as an alternate, at noon in the new basilica. Now, be off.”
I had no trouble getting a ticket to Lyons, taking my seat in first class, and gazing out of the windows until Mme Hughenfort appeared, struggling with luggage and a foot-dragging son. Neither, I would guess, was happy to have their Parisian holiday cut short.
They sat in the second-class cars. Which was fine with me; all I intended to do was follow them, with luck to the address I had in my bag, and watch to see where they went next. I suspected they would merely gather a few things and retreat to a friend’s house until Monsieur Tony caught them up, but it would be best if we did not lose them until we were certain.
When we were under way, I unfolded the map of Lyons that Holmes had put into my bag and located the address, then that of the hotel, and finally the tourist landmarks thoughtfully noted by the mapmaker. Would she believe the two priests intended to be on the next day’s train? Or would she go straight to a safe place? I decided she would go home first. Else why go to Lyons at all, if outright disappearance was the goal? I did not think she was suspicious enough to panic, merely not to be at home when the two priests rang her bell. She would, no doubt, count on the ungentlemanly Tony to follow the scoundrels to their own lair and put the fear of a vengeful God into them. My mind’s eye was taken up for a moment by the scene of Holmes in soutane and clouded spectacles blithely picking his way across the bustling gare while the prosperous and swarthy Monsieur Tony tip-toed along behind the pillars to keep him in view, taking up a hard third-class bench and settling in behind a newspaper so as never to take his eye off the dubious priest.
The vision faded, and I bent over the cartography of Lyons.
At the gare in Lyons, my first-class status and relative lack of bags meant that I was shut into my taxi before my quarry had joined the queue. I had the driver pull up, half a block away, and I gave him some story about my mentally disturbed sister-in-law who couldn’t be trusted to find her way home but insisted on trying. He accepted this blague (men do, I’ve found, accept the most arrant nonsense from a well-dressed woman) and sat with the motor idling. Mme Hughenfort eventually got her taxi, and passed us, going towards the city centre.
We pulled in behind her and followed her through the narrow Presqu’île and into the quiet area north of the busy centre, where her taxi pulled up in front of a block of flats with shops on the street level. I had my driver continue on slowly; when I saw the two travellers go through a door, I told him to take me to the Carlton.
Despite the hour, they had a room for me “and my husband, who will be arriving tomorrow, or possibly Saturday.” I went up, washed the travel from my face and hands, turned my coat to present a bland cloth façade to the world, and went back down and through the dark streets to the Hughenforts’ front door.
I had seen a brasserie across the street and up a bit—not ideally placed for my purposes, but seated at the window, I thought I should be able to see if a taxi pulled up in front of her building. It took the maitre d’ twenty minutes to produce the requested window table, but I did not think it likely their stop at home would be that brief.
So it proved. I no sooner took my seat than a glance out at the street showed a familiar dark-haired boy with a laden shopping bag coming out of a grocer’s. The shopkeeper locked the door behind the boy and tugged down the shades; the boy walked up the steps and into the building.
The Hughenforts would, it seemed, be stopping the night at home. I ate my lamb cassoulet and drank two glasses of Moulin-à-Vent, then returned to my hotel, where I slept very well indeed.
In the morning I was back at my brasserie, its evening linen and herbs-and-garlic odours given way to scrubbed-bare tables and the aroma of coffee and croissants. I manoeuvred until I was at a window table, which I shared with several changes of patrons during my own extended breakfast. I drank more coffee than I had at any one time since the Palestine wanderings (with an unfortunate effect on my nerves) and ate the equivalent of a couple of large loaves of bread, presented in a variety of shapes and sizes, from brioche to baguette, all laden with butter and preserves. Feeling like a child at a birthday party, quivering with excitement and stuffed with sweet things, I paid my bill, abandoned my table, ducked in and out of an unfortunately maintained lavatory, and traded the restaurant for the now-open shops.
Two hours in the brasserie, two more examining each shop’s wares with minute attention and a few purchases, and soon the noon hour would be upon me and I would be thrown out onto the street, to reclaim my window seat and eat yet more food. (I had, at least, left a good tip, by way of apology for my lengthy occupation.)
However, as the shopkeeper wrapped my parcel, too polite as he did so to point out that every other door on the street was closed tight and that all civilised persons were already seated at their tables, I saw a taxi pull up in front of the Hughenfort door. The driver got out to ring the bell, and I hastened to pay and scramble to find a taxi of my own.
Taxi drivers, too, are civilised people. It took me ten tense minutes to find a man hungrier for cash than for déjeuner and to urge him back to my target. To his disgust, we then sat at the end of the road, the engine idling, while the other driver and the two Hughenforts pushed the last of their cases into the car and got in. Only when the other taxi was moving did I allow my driver to follow.
We travelled little more than a mile through the city, ending up not far from the railway station where we had begun on the previous day. The taxi turned into a quiet street and came to a halt before a run-down block of flats that were considerably less appealing, both aesthetically and in their local amenities, than the house we’d come from. Mme Hughenfort would not, I thought, wish to remain here for long, not with her young son in tow: The butcher’s looked flyblown, the nearest greengrocer’s was two streets away, and there wasn’t even a boulangerie in sight for their morning baguette.
“Hôtel Carlton,” I said to the driver. He swivelled around to stare at me, at this crowning instruction
to the day’s fare, but for once I couldn’t be bothered coming up with a story.
He took me to the Carlton, accepted my money, and sped off to see what he could salvage of his lunch hour, shaking his head at the mad ways of foreigners.
Had I been in London, my next step would have been to discover who owned the building in which Mme Hughenfort had taken shelter. In this bastion of Gallic officialdom, however, it was a task I thought I would leave to Holmes, who was not only male but spoke better French than I. Instead, I thought I might go back to the woman’s neighborhood and show some photographs.
After the long lunch-time closure.
Besides which, I was growing quite fond of my brasserie’s fare.
Following lunch, with my coat still turned to show honest cloth and the dumpiest of hats on my head, I took out the envelope of family photographs Alistair had given me and began to work my way up one side of the street and down the other. My basic story was that I was a second cousin of Mme Hughenfort, but the embroidery I tacked on to that thin beginning varied with my audience. In the brasserie, where I started my community interrogation, there was an inheritance involved, a solid pile of francs for Mme Hughenfort if she could prove, well, “family concerns” (I let the precise nature of those concerns trail into speculation). To the good mistress of the flower stall there was a reference to a family madman, to the stout pair who ran the needlework shop a tinge of romance and scandal, and to the tobacconist a simple wager that had got complicated. And so it went, in the shops, among the neighbours. What I learnt, both through my deliberate efforts and through fortuitous accident, was most intriguing.
Her missing neighbours returned as darkness was setting in, and they contributed their own pieces to the puzzle.
Finally, as the rich odours of Lyonnais cooking crept into the evening air to mix with the damp from two rivers, I turned my steps back to the Carlton, where I was given, along with my key, the news that my husband had arrived. I held my breath as I inserted the key in the lock, knowing full well that with Holmes, arrival did not necessarily mean presence. But when I flung open the door, he was there, damp from the bath and working to get the cuff-links through his shirt. He looked up in surprise at my abrupt entrance, his thinning hair still tousled from the towel and giving him an absurdly boyish look. I laughed aloud in sheer pleasure: the perfect end to a satisfying day.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Say one thing for Holmes: Pompous he may occasionally be, but he does understand the need for physical expression when high spirits erupt, and he accepted my flinging myself into his arms and whirling around the room in a vigorous waltz with nary a repressive grumble. He even hummed an accompaniment for half a dozen twirls until I released him and subsided into a chair to loose my coat and free my tired feet.
“You have had a successful day, I perceive,” he commented.
“I know all about Madame Hughenfort and young Thomas,” I announced grandly.
“All?” he said, one eyebrow raised.
I waved away his skepticism. “All of importance. But if I begin now we won’t eat until ten o’clock, and considering the length of French meals, we shall still be at table when the café au lait appears on the bars.”
I had read rightly the sign of his crisp clean shirt: He, too, was ready to dine.
“An ascetic priest limits himself to thin soup and a prayer at midday,” he commented. I turned to the dressing-table to do my hair, and met his eyes in the glass.
“Did M Tony follow you all the way here?”
“Into Lyons, yes, although not, naturally, into this hotel, an institution not suited to a simple man of the cloth. I led him into the slums and lost him there. I spent three weeks here, back in the nineties,” he explained. “That sort of neighbourhood changes little in three decades.”
My hair rescued from disarray, my day shoes changed for evening wear, a gossamer Kashmir wrap with silver beads transforming my plain dark dress into formality, I placed my arm through his and went to dine.
Subdued piano music and the distance between the tables made it safe to speak. After we made our choices and approved the sparkling young Rhône in our glasses, I recounted my day. When I had finished following our pair to their hide-out near the gare, I paused to let the waiter clear our soup plates.
“It’s so nice when things go as easily as that,” I remarked. “It was as if nothing could go wrong: She couldn’t see me behind her, she didn’t leave while I was in the lavatory, her taxi didn’t take off while I was still hunting for one. Sometimes things go right.”
“Too much so, you think?”
I began to protest indignantly, that I should certainly have noticed if the woman had been leading us by the nose, but instead I paused, to do his question justice, before I shook my head. “She’d have had to know me, know my level of skills, in order to set it up so precisely. You might have been able to ensure I followed you without its seeming planned—might have—but not a stranger.”
He nodded, accepting my conclusion. We suspended my report long enough to appreciate properly my sole and his Coquilles St. Jacques, before I picked up with my tale in the afternoon. “With her and the boy safely out of the way, I began the rounds of shopkeepers and neighbours, with a story for each of them that was more style than substance. You know the routine: indignation and a demanding of rights for the strong woman, the impression of tears and lace handkerchiefs for the older women, hints that somebody will get it in the eye for the young men drinking at the bar. Madame’s only lived here for eight or nine months—came from Clermont-Ferrand, one of them thought; or Bourges, thought another; although a third swore he had seen her before, in the old city, a good two years ago.
“So I showed the photos, as we agreed, of the family she had either swindled or lost, depending on the story of the moment. No, no, they’d never seen any of those peculiar-looking English people.” I went into as much detail as I thought necessary—the delivery boy who thought Phillida resembled a woman who’d lived in the next street, the old man who believed Terèse Hughenfort a bad mother because the boy had once talked back to him, and a string of other statements that most likely meant nothing, but might potentially have some frail significance. The next course came and my duck was but a collection of bones and sauce by the time I came to the really interesting part.
“By this stage I was showing the pictures to anyone who would pause long enough to look. One mother in the fruiterer’s took pity on me and glanced through them, told me sorry, and then her young son and his friend wanted to see what she’d been looking at. They recognised the house.”
“What, Justice Hall?”
“None other. It would seem that young master Thomas has a photograph of Justice Hall that he hides from his mother. The boys couldn’t mistake that fountain.”
“He hides it from his mother?”
“A man gave it to him, they said, a month or two ago, along with a story that his father lived there, and some day would come and claim Thomas.”
“Which could be nothing more than the phantasy of a fatherless boy, but for the picture, which had to come from somewhere.”
“I thought you’d find that provocative. Particularly considering that shortly after that, Thomas’s hair went dark. But half an hour after that interview, I found a man who could identify Sidney Darling.”
It was a night for being demonstrative: Holmes was seized by such glee that he snatched my hand from its resting place on the table and kissed it briefly, startling the waiter who was overseeing the respectful entrance of four noble cheeses.
“Tell me,” Holmes commanded, when the cheeses’ trio of escorts had left us.
“It was about six weeks ago. He had purchased a piece of furniture from Mme Hughenfort—a cabinet or trunk of some sort, although the word he used was unfamiliar to me. Whatever it was, it was massive, such that he could not move it down the stairs on his own—that he made clear. One evening his wife’s brother arrived, and the two men decided to go and fetch
the thing. They went upstairs and knocked at her door. There were voices on the other side, and the woman’s voice, which the customer recognised as that of Terèse Hughenfort, continued speaking as she came to the door.
“My informant gained the impression that she was expecting someone, possibly her son, who came up the stairs as they were going down again, so that she opened the door without asking who was there. She seemed startled at seeing her visitors, and turned to look over her shoulder at the man in the room, but he was standing in plain view, so Madame merely allowed them to take the object and leave.
“The man was quite definite. He even thought the visitor was English, although he couldn’t decide if the man had just looked that way, being tall, blond, and aloof, or if he’d said something and had an accent. He looked at the photograph of Sidney, and said it could have been him, although he wouldn’t swear on his son’s head that it was. All Englishmen look rather alike to him, it would seem.”
Our pleasure in the delicate cheeses was surpassed only by the savour of being able to tie Darling in with Mme Hughenfort. Still . . .
“It doesn’t actually prove anything, though, does it?” I asked. “Darling could easily say that he wanted to see the boy for himself, to try to save Marsh the trouble. There’s no evidence that it was Darling who suggested that Madame dye the boy’s hair, or that she insist on going to London rather than invite the family to her home ground. That is to say, if Darling was out to present Marsh with an adequate heir so that Marsh would clear out of Justice and leave it to the Darlings to run for him, he’d hardly have sent her a signed letter of instruction, would he?”
Holmes, looking ever more pleased, folded his table napkin and drained his glass. “There is but one way of knowing.”
“Oh, Holmes. You don’t intend—”