The Coral Thief (21 page)

I pushed my way through the crowd, and Lucienne followed me, until I reached the first mounted Austrian officer. As quietly as I dared, I asked permission to pass. Hearing my English voice, the officer gestured to me to join a group of foreigners gathered under a cluster of parasols.

“Why so many soldiers?” I shouted to her. “What’s Wellington doing?”

“It’s to keep out the Parisians. They’ve shut up the palace to protect the king. Look.” She pointed in the direction of the palace, where all the shutters were closed. “What kind of king is too frightened to face his own people and has to be protected by the Allied army?”

In the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, people pressed up against the windows, pointing, gesticulating. Journalists from the world’s newspapers also stood in front of us in the square, their artists assembled with easels. This was a political performance. Here was proof that Napoleon was not returning. Show the French people. Pull down the horses, the chariot. The Emperor Napoleon is no more.

Shielding my eyes from the sun, I could see the first of the four
horses moving slightly as more ties were unfastened. The crowd, gathered around the perimeter of the square, groaned or gasped, I couldn’t tell which, and began to point. The bronze horse swung into the air, high above the square. My head swam. I felt a rush of blood, the sense of flight and fall, people pressing in from every side; I watched pins of lights come on across my vision and then go out. I fainted.

When I came to, a crowd had gathered. I looked up to see heads silhouetted against a bright white sky. Lucienne had disappeared, and a man with a voice I recognized was making the crowd disperse.

“Ah, M. Connor,” Jagot said. “You should be more careful in this sun. You need a hat.”

“Yes,” I mumbled, allowing him to help me to my feet. “The sun is hotter than I had realized.”

“I am glad to see you again, M. Connor,” he said, waving away the last onlookers. “It has been a long time since we last met—a month perhaps. Paris has been good to you, I think.”

“Yes, it has, thank you,” I said, relieved that Lucienne had gotten away.

“My men tell me you are now working in the Jardin,” he said, “and that your things—the papers, the corals, and the bones—they have come back to you. It is most unusual, you see, for stolen things to come back in such a way. There is usually a story behind such things. Is there a story, M. Connor?”

“There is no story,” I said quickly, wondering what else Jagot’s men might have told him, what else they might have seen. “It was just a mistake,” I said. “It wasn’t a theft at all. My travel bag had been taken by another passenger—a man—not by the woman I described to you. He, the other passenger, tracked me down and returned my things. All of them.” My hands had begun to shake. I put them in my pockets.

“Good. That is good news, monsieur. So you must come and give
me the name and the address of the passenger who took your bag by mistake, the man who returned your things, because that person might be able to tell me something about the woman you described seeing on the mail coach, the savant, Lucienne Bernard. I will send a man to your lodgings to take details. Perhaps I will even come myself. Good afternoon, M. Connor. Remember, you must buy a hat for this
sun. À bientôt
.”

He slipped away into the crowd.

I walked to the Turkish café on the rue de la Victoire where Lucienne and I had agreed to meet if we became separated in the crowd. But though I waited for two hours, she didn’t come. Instead I heard the clatter of wheels approaching. A number of carts flanked by Prussian cavalry and infantry made their way slowly over the cobbles. For all the world it looked as if they were coming for me. The four horses, each in a separate cart, lying on its side on a straw base, bronzed hooves pawing the air, passed alongside me, so close that I could see into their eyes—eyes that had looked down on Rome, Constantinople, and Venice, for hundreds of years. For them I was nothing, of no significance.

Now I wondered if Jagot’s apparent disappearance for almost a month had been engineered to make me—us—feel complacent. The stakes were high. I thought of what Manon had said about Coignard’s body being found in the Seine with no hands or feet. Jagot had been following Coignard that day in the fiacre; Manon had said that Coignard’s tortured body had been thrown into the Seine as a warning to others on Jagot’s list. How much more proof did I need of the danger we were all in?

Whatever I had chosen to believe, Jagot was not a man to abandon his prey. He was just taking his time. For a month I had been distracted, enraptured by Lucienne and by my work at the Jardin. But that was no justification for failing to protect her. While I had been
blinded, Jagot’s men had continued to watch and to file their reports. The net was closing in.

I had to get Lucienne out of Paris.

For Professor Cuvier, pacing in his studio in the museum, the hands of the clocks seemed to be moving faster than usual. A Dutch professor of medicine and chemistry and the rector of the University of Leiden, M. Sebald Justinus Brugmans, was on the road to Paris, sent on ambassadorial duties by the newly reinstated stadtholder of Holland. Somewhere on the outskirts of Belgium, Brugmans had stopped to see the battlefield of Waterloo, and in his bed in the inn on the road from Waterloo to Paris, he was reading through his notes, preparing for his meeting with Wellington.

Brugmans had been sent to Paris to reclaim the world-famous collection of the Dutch stadtholder, requisitioned by Napoleon when he captured Holland. It had been transported in 222 cases carried on 103 wagons, then shipped by barge from The Hague along the North Sea coast and down the Seine into Paris. The cases were filled with rare books, specimens, scientific instruments, rocks, and the complete skeletons of a fifteen-foot giraffe, an orangutan, and a hippopotamus.

These specimens—thousands of rare fossils, minerals, bones, shells, and crystals—now filled the shelves of the museums of the Jardin. The stadtholders’ collection was now Cuvier’s collection. Brugmans was coming to Paris for restitution. He was patient; as a young man he had written a dissertation on the effect of rain on plants, and he had spent long hours tapping the barometer and waiting for rain. That experience would stand him in good stead for the waiting game he was to play in Paris in 1815.

In his house in the Jardin, the Baron Cuvier, sleepless, in a purple robe, paced his studio trying to think of what terms he could offer Brugmans, trying to think of ways to persuade the Dutch professor and Wellington that those objects must stay in the Jardin. Without
those thousands of objects from the stadholders’ collection, the Museum of Comparative Anatomy, he would say—indeed all the museums of the Jardin—would be nothing. What he knew all too well was that without the stadtholders’ collection Cuvier would be nothing.

In his house on the quai Voltaire, the director of the Louvre, Dominique-Vivant Denon, the man they called “Napoleon’s eye,” the man who had personally drawn up the list of artifacts to be taken from the great museums and galleries of Europe, was overseeing his men, who in some haste were packing up a series of valuable paintings and objects. Time was running out for Denon. That day Wellington had asked him to account for a series of objects listed as stolen that were still unaccounted for—unaccounted for because Denon had made them disappear from the Louvre into his own cellar: a Caravaggio painting, Egyptian artifacts, a Titian drawing, and a sixteenth-century cabinet of curiosities called the Montserrat Cabinet. And now that Wellington was coming to the quai Voltaire, these objects needed to disappear even deeper into Paris. Completely beyond sight. But Denon had a plan.

14

ELPHINE HAS ASKED TO SEE YOU
, M. Connor,” Lucienne said the following morning, a Sunday, when I finally woke and went to find her writing at the table among the corals, in her blue silk dressing gown. “She writes to thank you for the figurine of Napoleon you sent her last week. She says it is a good likeness but a little too stout. Would you like to visit her with me? If you have time—that is, unless you would like to sleep some more.”

Of … of course,” I stuttered. This was the day I had resolved to urge her departure. Although I had tried several times the night before, she had changed the subject, and now I was wary of telling her about the conversations I had had with Jagot—the accusations and the threats. “Yes, of course I’d like to go,” I said. “But I wish you’d warned me. I was thinking about one of those little wooden boats they sell in the Luxembourg Gardens. I was going to buy one and ask you to take it to her.”

“She’d prefer some accurate news of Napoleon to one of your boats, I think,” Lucienne said, pulling on her shirt and trousers. “What the nuns tell Delphine about the Emperor is always distorted
by rumor. Manon took her a map and some pins so that she can trace where he is on his journey. She has that on her wall. I must remind her to pack it into her luggage.”

“Lucienne,” I began. “You must be especially careful. I think Jagot may be closer than you think.” It was too vague, but it was a start.

“Jagot won’t move yet,” she said. “He cant. He’s waiting. Manon is going to take Delphine back to Italy, and I will follow next week. I have my ticket. But there are a few things I have to finish in Paris first. Newspapers,” she said. “Remind me to buy some newspapers so I can tell Delphine about the Emperor’s journey. The ship crossed the equator, they say, two or three days ago. He’s unlikely to be rescued now. But I can’t tell Delphine that. She is convinced the Americans will capture the
Northumberland
and crown him Emperor of America.”

Lucienne was wrapping a long, narrow object in brown paper and tying it with string. “I have an errand to run,” she said. “And I want to show you a new place that won’t be in your guidebook.” Although I knew she had to go, I could hardly meet her eye.

A few moments later she said, “It’s a week, Daniel. A whole week more. Please don’t look so dejected. I have already stayed a month longer than I had planned to. Seeing Jagot yesterday, like that in the crowd. So close. That worried me.”

“But shouldn’t you go immediately?” I asked, relieved that I might not need to tell her about my conversations at all. “He is so close. He could find you at any moment. Look what happened to Coignard.”

“A week,” she said. “I need a week. Manon is already packed. I know what I’m doing.”

The air was cool by the river, the trees beginning to lose their leaves after the heat of the summer months; in the wind the leaves, browned, curled, and desiccated, scurried along the pavement, hissing, scraping—the sound of winter approaching. In a strange way it reminded me of home, of the autumn landscapes of Derbyshire. The Daniel who had walked those hills with his notebook and geological hammer
seemed a stranger to me now. That Daniel could never have imagined what it was to be so tangled up with love and anticipated loss.

Lucienne, dressed in a long green velvet jacket with a high collar and white cravat, sand-colored breeches, and boots, walked fast, striding as if she owned everything, as if all these streets and that great swollen river and all the boats on it were hers.