“You have done all that is possible.” She shooed away the maid and scooped up the little dogs. “There is no point in continuing until we have finished with the wretched thing.”
I asked the footman to bring us chairs and a narrow table, and we set to it. We did not need to fiddle with the lock; I presume the police had seen to that. Of the four drawers, two were filled with older versions of what we had found on Mr. Jones’s desk: itineraries, notes about hotels, railway timetables. The other two were of more interest.
The first initially appeared to have nothing at all to do with Estella. The front section contained papers detailing plans for something called Dr. Maynard’s Patented Formula—a substance that, so far as I could tell, differed not from hundreds of its kind, worthless liquids of indeterminate color and bitter taste that had no effect whatsoever on the complaints they claimed to treat. Six bottles of the stuff took up the back of the drawer, their exuberant labels claiming myriad health benefits.
I paged through the documents, not expecting to find much of interest, but was taken aback when I came across a drawing of the label, done as a sample, on a single sheet of large paper. In the center was a large pyramid, much like those found at Giza, entwined with vines that ended, on either side, with a burst of floral blossom. Across the bottom of the page was Estella’s signature, and the word
approved.
“Have you ever heard of this?” I held one of the bottles up to Cécile. She shook her head. “It seems that Estella was in business with Mr. Jones. At least she was consulted as to the design of the label.”
“I do remember this,” Cécile said. “She mentioned it in passing once, some months before she left Paris, when she had been casting about for something in which to invest. I told her at the time it was an awful idea, and she never brought it up again.”
“It must be how she met Mr. Jones. Perhaps she thought he would make a better porter than a salesman and convinced him to abandon the stuff in favor of world travel.” The last drawer, the bottom one, held a mishmash of receipts, most of no consequence, but among them were four that merited further consideration, from Au Nain Bleu, a name I recognized because I had intended to procure for my boys little presents from this well-known toy shop. Each of the receipts was for the purchase of a doll, and each was dated after Estella had supposedly left Egypt. None of the descriptions of the dolls matched the one currently residing in Mr. Jones’s wardrobe.
“I cannot believe he bought these for anyone but Estella?”
“He could have sent them to her abroad.”
“Theoretically possible, yes, but my instinct tells me he did not. He has her, I am convinced of it.”
“In the Catacombs, you think?” Cécile asked. I very much appreciated my friend not pointing out the general inadequacy of intuition in detective work. My husband would not have been so kind.
“Where else but the Catacombs?” Adopting my husband’s habit, I started to pace. “The tunnels go on for miles, and Jones had ready access to them from his own cellar. He has kept her alive all this time in order to steal her money.”
“But we had already determined, had we not, that he does not seem to be benefiting from her money?”
“Not so far as we can yet tell, but we have missed something fundamental about the character of Mr. Farrington Jones.”
“Farrington?” Cécile looked down her nose, disgust writ on her face.
“That is what it says on his papers for Dr. Maynard’s Formula. The doll receipts were written up for a Wilkins Micawber.”
“I presume that to be a name from yet another of the novels of Monsieur Dickens?”
“
David Copperfield
. Mr. Micawber is a financial disaster, but exceptionally kind. One can only surmise that our Farrington considers himself in possession of similar qualities.” The observant reader may have wondered whether I had forgot my—and Jeremy’s—earlier theory regarding our villain and the works of Mr. Dickens. Rest assured, I had not. The addition of Mr. Micawber provided just the insight I needed into the character of Farrington Jones (a name worthy of Dickens himself). Mr. Jones viewed himself as a good man, but one embroiled in some sort of criminal activity. His finances were a mess. His purchase of the dolls—each was expensive in the extreme—could be taken as a generous gesture to Estella’s obvious passion for the objects. What I could not decide was why he had not given her the doll we found in his wardrobe. Had she died in captivity before he could make the gift? I shuddered, picturing an eerie image of Estella clutching her four dolls in a dark tunnel of the Catacombs until death released them from her arms.
I could not let myself be distracted by such morbid thoughts. I took care as I combed through the rest of the documents in the drawer, going so far as to revisit the ones I had rejected as uninteresting before finding the doll receipts. I had not noticed it at first, but upon second study, I realized the significance of the papers that now lay in my lap. Mr. Jones had purchased a motley collection of items from a number of vendors: ammonia, scrubbing brushes, heavy work gloves, ribbon, wire, and a considerable quantity of mortar.
“Mortar?” Cécile blanched when I showed them to her. “You don’t think he has walled her in?”
I did not answer her question, but I had a fair idea of where we would find Estella.
Estella
xx
Egypt was exactly—down to the most insignificant detail—how Estella imagined it. Limestone monuments gleamed. The waters of the Nile reflected the sunlight as dancing jewels. The natives adored her. The temperature was not so fierce as she had feared.
But that last should have come as no surprise.
Miss Hexam delighted her, anticipating her needs and reminding her of things that she should have Monsieur Jones collect. Miss Hexam preferred French food to Egyptian, and Estella agreed, although she suspected that if Monsieur Jones were left to his own devices, he would seek out the dark cafés frequented by the natives. Estella insisted on things she knew would cause no digestive disturbances—had she not done so from the beginning?—and never had cause to regret it.
Having run through all her Egyptian books, Estella followed Monsieur Jones’s advice and read all of the works of Monsieur Dickens. She settled on
Bleak House
as her favorite, adoring Esther, and read over and over one passage:
I found every breath of air, and every scent, and every flower and leaf and blade of grass and every passing cloud, and everything in nature, more beautiful and wonderful to me than I had ever found it yet. This was my first gain from my illness. How little I had lost, when the wide world was so full of delight for me.
A shot of understanding coursed through Estella every time she read it. She knew what it was to find the world more enchanting than one had before thought possible. She knew what it was to be gone from it and then back—back to a place wholly different from what it had been before—back to a place that proved to her how little she had lost.
Estella bit into the last macaron in her box. She was going to read Belzoni again.
21
I sat beside Cécile in the carriage and held her hand the whole way back to the Catacombs. I reminded her that ammonia was often used to revive ladies from a faint, but she reminded me that in such cases, one used the solid form rather than the liquid.
“It is why, Kallista, they are called smelling salts, not smelling spirits.”
Colin and Jeremy were not above ground when we arrived, but the officer stationed at the entrance—the police activity at the site had caused a crowd to gather, and he was meant to keep them back—let us down the narrow steps after supplying us with candles and matches. At the bottom of the stairway, we reached a sizable vestibule that led to a stone doorway, carved over which were the words
Arrête! C’est ici l’empire de la mort.
Were we not on so important an errand, I might indeed have given pause before entering the empire of death. We followed the sound of voices along tunnels lined from floor to ceiling with neat stacks of bones, and I found I agreed with Cécile’s earlier judgment of the place. Here, the dead had lost their humanity. We reached two policemen, who at first mistook us for tourists who had somehow managed to finagle our way past the guard upstairs. A quick explanation led one of them to accompany us in search of my husband.
For more than half an hour we meandered through the subterranean maze, eventually turning in a direction not marked by the black arrows painted on the ceilings to guide the tourist route. The path became dirtier, littered with dust and chips of bones. Twenty more minutes and, at last, I heard Colin’s voice in the distance.
“Emily! What are you doing here?” He came to me the moment we were within sight of him. I leaned close and explained my theory in a hushed voice. He nodded, and laid a gentle hand on my arm. “I am afraid you are most likely right. How is Cécile?”
“As you would imagine. Not altogether well, but she insisted on accompanying me. I could hardly deny her.”
“Of course not.”
“It will take us nearly an hour to get back out, so I think we had better set off without delay,” I said.
“It will be quicker to leave through Jones’s cellar. We are closer to that than to the public entrance.”
“If only I had known.”
“I don’t think time will make any difference at this point, my dear.” I bit my lips and wished I could believe otherwise.
Jeremy had already taken charge of Cécile, and kept close hold of her as we traversed the route to our chosen exit. She looked ill when we reached that passage I remembered all too well, the one with bones scattered all over, where there was no way forward but to wade through them. Jeremy, sensing her discomfort, picked her up and carried her across to the steps rising from the far end of the tunnel. When at last we emerged through the door in the cellar wall, the policemen on guard registered a great deal of shock at seeing us ladies. They took it in stride, however. We collected a shovel, hand trowel, and wooden bucket from a corner and made our way upstairs. The concierge did not even bother to scowl at us as we passed her window.
The only cabs to be seen at that moment were open victorias, which only seated two. Colin and I—my husband carrying the tools—stepped into the first we hailed. Jeremy and Cécile would follow. It took nearly forty minutes to reach our destination, and we arrived at the gates of Père-Lachaise just as the closing bell rang, warning those visitors inside that they had only half an hour in which to make their way to the front and leave. Jeremy and Cécile approached as Colin was finishing speaking with the custodian, who, after seeing the letter from the Sûreté, agreed to let us take as much time as necessary.
The cemetery shut at seven o’clock, but fortunately for us, the light would last much beyond that on this summer evening. Cécile led us to the Lamar tomb. I held her hand while Colin picked the lock. The man at the gate had sent one of his colleagues with us—not another custodian, but a gravedigger, who had rejected our motley collection of tools, giving preference to his own. He used a crowbar to lift one of the stones in the floor, revealing a dark, narrow crypt below. Colin pulled off his coat and stepped forward to assist him. The top of a coffin was visible approximately six feet below the floor. Together, the two men worked to wrench the lid off it.
“Emily, Cécile, please turn away.” Colin’s voice, full of force, was not to be ignored. We followed his directions without complaint. I could hear the hideous sound of wood straining and the creak of metal. “It is not she.”
Despite myself, I turned around. “Are you certain?” I peered into the open grave. Inside were the remains of a gentleman, remnants of a gray beard still visible on his badly decayed face. “Monsieur Lamar?”
“Most likely. I do not think there is reason to believe he would have removed her father’s coffin and put hers beneath. That would have been a complicated enough procedure to draw unwanted attention. Adding a single coffin on top of the rest would be much simpler.”
I stepped away from the tomb, and crossed the narrow cobbled street, where I pressed my hands against the cool wall of another monument, supporting my weight as I bent forward and did my best not to be sick. The sound of banging indicated that they were now closing the coffin.
“Why did he not bury her with her parents?” Cécile was behind me, her voice choked. “It makes no sense.”
“Perhaps he thought it would cause him to be discovered.”
“So where is she?”
“We may never know, Cécile.” Jeremy put an arm around her shoulder. “I am so very sorry.”
I was about to add my condolences when I noticed a wreath on a nearby simple slab grave. The inscription had long since been eaten away by rain and erosion, and the stone itself was not in good shape. Yet someone had taken the time to leave a memento. A memento, that if I remembered correctly—
I crossed back to the Lamar tomb. The gravedigger had not yet replaced the heavy stone in the crypt, but from outside I could see the wreath we believed Estella had left. It was nearly identical to the one on the slab. A quick study of the rest of the street revealed similar wreaths on—or in—three more tombs, each of which had clearly fallen into disrepair. As I examined them, I pointed out to my friends the evidence of recent repairs. On one, the door’s hinges had recently been oiled. On another, there were signs of fresh mortar having been applied where the stone must have crumbled.
“We cannot dig up grave after grave, Emily,” Colin said.
“I am perfectly well aware of that, but we may be able to spot some sort of a sign. Don’t you think that if he put her somewhere else, it would have been in a place he felt was appropriate? He bought her dolls, Colin. He must have had some warm feelings toward her, even if he did—”
“Yes, it is not uncommon for—” He stopped and looked at Cécile. “Madame du Lac, there is no need for you to stay here any longer. I assure you that Emily and I will—”
“I want to help,” Cécile said. “I know better than any of you what a—
friend
does not seem the right word—person acquainted with Estella might deem appropriate.”