Secrets of Paris (36 page)

A young woman who closely resembled Kelly opened the door. Lydie cleared her throat, ready to introduce herself, when the woman called out, “Kelly! Patrice and Lydie are here!”

“We’re famous,” Patrice whispered.

Kelly came to the door. Members of her family stood behind her, fanning into a semicircle. Lydie looked from one to the other, wondered which was the brother who had smuggled Kelly across the border in his trunk.

“Hello, Lydie, hello, Patrice,” Kelly said, twisting her hands. She tried to smile. She glanced over her shoulder, then back. “I wish I had known you were coming; I would have … prepared.”

“We know you don’t have a phone,” Lydie said.

“Please come in,” one of the older sisters said, smiling brilliantly. “We are honored by your visit.”

“Yes, please come in!” Now that they had absorbed the shock, they all began to speak at once.

“Listen,” Patrice said, in a voice both strong and kind, “we have some disappointing news for Kelly. It’s about, uh, your petition.”

Kelly’s face fell so hard, Lydie had no doubt that she understood what Patrice was saying. Some of her family took a small step back. “It was denied,” Lydie said, looking into Kelly’s eyes.

“You can’t take me to the States?” Kelly asked.

“No,” Lydie said, knowing there was no way to soften the word.

“Don’t worry about me,” Kelly said right away. Her words were brittle, her smile quavering, and Lydie knew then they had made a mistake to tell Kelly the bad news in front of her entire family. In the first seconds, Lydie had thought they would provide strength, but now she saw that Kelly was ashamed to have them hear it.

“That’s the spirit,” Patrice said, her eyes shining, taking Kelly’s hand. “Didier and I are going to make you legal here: I promise.”

Kelly nodded, still smiling but unable to speak.

“I’m glad to finally meet all of you,” Patrice said to the others. Several of them stepped forward to shake her hand. “Kelly, I want
you to know that you’ll always have a place with me, and that Didier and I will look after you.”

“Thank you, Mum,” Kelly said.

“And if you don’t feel like working at the ball,” Patrice said, “I’m sure Lydie will understand. Maybe you need a little time to yourself.”

“I’m sorry,” Lydie said, stepping forward to kiss Kelly’s cheek, wanting to close her eyes so she wouldn’t always remember the look in Kelly’s eyes. Then she and Patrice walked away, leaving Kelly to suffer the disappointment and kindness of her brothers and sisters.

Michael left the Hôtel Royal Madeleine with endings in mind: an end to his time at the clean but impersonal hotel; an end, in twenty-eight days, to the Paris year; and an end to his relationship with Anne. The taxi, a Mercedes with a poodle sitting next to the driver, took him to Anne’s building. He held the key she had given him, knowing he wouldn’t use it; he wished merely to return it, but she wasn’t home.

“
Elle n’est pas là, Monsieur
,” the plump Spanish concierge said with a mean glint in her eyes. Michael had always felt her disapproval. “
Elle n’a pas revenu hier soir.
”

“That’s her business,” he said, not wanting to give the concierge the satisfaction of seeming alarmed by the fact Anne hadn’t been home all night.

At the Louvre, the guard stopped him. “She walks again,” he said to Michael.

“What do you mean?”

“The ghost of Catherine de Medici,” the guard said. “She was sighted last night, for the first time in seven years.”

Michael laughed, tapped the guard’s shoulder, brushed past him. He walked straight up the stairs to Anne’s office. On the museum’s top floor, Anne worked in a small room with a circular window overlooking the Seine. She loved telling visitors that in the days of Louis XIV it had been an artist’s studio.

“Anne,” Michael called, tapping at the door. He felt divided by worry for her whereabouts and by the wish to put this meeting off. He stood there a minute; he had just turned his back to the door, started walking away, when he heard footsteps down the corridor. Here came Anne in her wig and an ancient dress; although different from the last one, it was recognizably from the seventeenth century. Her smallness made her seem even more vulnerable, more capable of being hurt.

“ ‘I can already notice his absence,’ ” she said in her Madame de Sévigné voice. “ ‘Yesterday I went to the post office … to see whether he had turned me over to someone else there. I find all new faces, unimpressed with my importance.’ ”

“Anne, were you here all night?” Michael asked.

“That is a question I should ask as well,” she said. “Where were you last night? No longer do you visit or call me …”

“I was at my hotel,” he said steadily, alarmed by her appearance.

“I understand you have a ball to go to.”

“Who told you that?”

“You told me about the ball,
chéri
. I have always hoped we could go together. We would be the most elegant couple there …”

“Anne, I’m going with Lydie. I’m going back to her.”

“I am not terribly surprised,” she said.

“I do care about you,” Michael said. “Are you all right?”

She laughed harshly. “Did you think I would fall to pieces when you told me?”

“The guard told me he saw a ghost last night,” Michael said uneasily. “Did you sleep here?”

She smiled, saying nothing. He thought he detected something dark behind her smile, and it frightened him. For one moment, he saw her as an evil force, now revealing a side of herself no one had ever seen. Like the moon, rotating as she revolved, she presented only one face to those who saw her. Like the moon, half of whose surface is never seen from earth, Anne turned her other face away.

“Don’t worry about me, eh?” Anne said. “We had a good time together, and I treasure it.”

Michael nodded but said nothing.

“Leave now, Michel,” Anne said, in as sane a voice as Michael had ever heard. He obliged.

D
AWN WAS ABOUT
to break and Château Bellechasse stood in mist rising from its moat and from the Loire River, wide and sluggish, on whose banks it stood. Built of smooth stone, asymmetrical, the château had pointed turrets, balconies, massive doors that could hold back an army. Roses clung to its walls, and perhaps it was the château’s fairy-tale delicacy that made Lydie give the roses old names: Florizel, Belle Isis, Belle de Crécy. Lydie remembered telling Kelly the news last night and pressed closer to Michael. All the way down from Paris he had responded every time she’d stirred; now he pressed her right back.

“Sleeping Beauty, we’ve come to rescue you,” Patrice said from the front seat, but in a flat voice. How were they going to accomplish this? How could they stage a festive ball when everyone felt
miserable? Lydie felt like a bundle of nerves: the least thing was going to set her off. She had arranged for several country-house-weekend sort of activities for the photographer’s benefit: the grouse hunt, dressing for the ball, and the ball itself. Now all she wanted to do was snuggle under an eiderdown.

Tiny stones crunched under the wheels as Didier steered the car into a lot behind the stable. The other vehicles in their caravan from Paris followed. Lydie, Michael, Patrice, and Didier climbed out without speaking, stretched, looked around. A perfect lawn stretched to the riverbank in one direction, to a dense forest in the other. Lydie and Patrice stood together as Michael and Didier directed the truck, full of props and two borrowed hunting dogs, and four cars, full of servants, photographers, and d’Origny’s guards, to park beside his car.

“Did you sleep last night?” Patrice asked.

“No,” Lydie said. “Did you?”

“No,” Patrice said. “I can’t bear to face her today. I wish she’d decided to stay home.” Both women looked toward the truckload of servants, Kelly and her sister among them. They had urged Kelly to stay with her family; when she would not, they had invited her sister to come with her.

“Once Kelly says she’ll do something, she does it,” Lydie said. “She would think that by not coming she’d be letting me down.”

“There’s a sorry little tone in your voice that tells me you think you let Kelly down,” Patrice said. “You didn’t. You went to the mat for her.”

“We’re going to miss our chance, if we don’t hurry,” Didier said, removing his gun case from the trunk.

Lydie tried to organize herself; they would have to rush to set up the hunting shots in time to catch dawn and the morning mists. Then the entire day loomed ahead, until the ball that night.
Michael came to stand beside her. Although he didn’t touch her, his presence strengthened her. Lydie sighed.

“You did your best,” Patrice said. “Tell me you know that.”

“At the moment I’m a bit distracted. Here we are, photographing jewels at a beautiful château. Doesn’t it seem a little … unbalanced?” Lydie asked.

“But you’ll get through this, won’t you?” Patrice asked anxiously. “For Didier?”

At Patrice’s concern for her husband’s project, Lydie smiled. “Yeah. I’ll even do a good job.”

Patrice gave her an impetuous hug, then walked toward Didier. Lydie and Michael stood alone. Lydie realized that Michael had never been with her at a major shoot, and that gave her something new to feel nervous about. “Just pretend I’m not here,” Michael said. “Or else let me be your flunky and give me something to do.”

Lydie laughed. “There’s nothing I can think of … just watch, if you want.”

“If I want? Are you kidding?” Michael said.

Lydie forced herself to concentrate, to explain her ideas to the photographer. “Mysterious and funky, very dramatic,” she said. “We want the feeling of modern people carried back in time—a hundred years. You’ll want to contrast the magic and timelessness of this setting with anything high-tech or contemporary. Didier’s rifle, for example, or his sunglasses. Patrice’s hairstyle. Always have the jewelry in focus, but off center. Remember you are photographing a
story.
” She tried not to lecture, but she wanted to make sure he understood.

Guy nodded, trying out settings on his light meter. They had worked together often, and Lydie knew he didn’t need specific direction. She caught sight of Kelly, standing with other servants.
She waved to Kelly, motioning for her to step away from them so that Lydie could speak to her privately, but Kelly misunderstood, or pretended to. She waved back at Lydie, then turned away. What did it say about Kelly’s spirit and drive that she would come to the Loire, having been told she didn’t have to, the day after her world was rocked forever?

As Patrice came toward Lydie, Lydie had the impression of looking into a funhouse mirror. Patrice was a tall, dark-haired, identically dressed version of herself. Lydie had borrowed “shooting clothes” from Patrice and dressed at home, before dawn. This was the first time they’d been face-to-face in near daylight. A khaki skirt, rolled at the waist to shorten it; a tawny suede jacket with compartments full of shotgun shells. “Didier is out of his mind with joy,” Patrice said. “He’s already seen a deer on the front lawn.”

“He’s not going to shoot deer, is he?” Lydie asked, momentarily distracted from Kelly.

“No, just birds.” She looked from Lydie to Michael to the photographer. “We about ready?” she asked.

“As ready as ever was,” Lydie said. Her concentration had kicked in, and she discovered that she meant it. Then Didier came forward, followed by a guard carrying a black lockbox, and the hunt was on.