Chapel Noir Read online

  When the fire flares high and the violins wail like wolves, he is dancing in their midst. His clumsy boots both seem to break the ground and break free of the ground. Gypsies dance like demons, but he is the very Devil himself. I have seen the mad, swirling tarantella of southern Italy and the whirling dervishes of Afghanistan. They cannot compare. Frenzy. Fever. Inhuman energy. He dances alone, and the violinists are sawing their arms off, sweltering in sweat, on their knees, silencing one by one.

  And still he dances. When at last he drops of exhaustion, the girls run to pour water down his throat. He soon submits them to his gropings and, having assembled his harem of the night, calls for more wine and more women.

  He never pays for his pleasures, but takes them, and the Gypsies let him, even celebrating his violations of the laws of all decent society and their own ancient, cruel, and pragmatic code.

  While Tasarla lays down a Hanged Man for me, for instance, he is lying like a sultan on a pile of rugs, his gathered pants disarranged, his huge hands tangling in the bodice laces of three nubile Gypsy girls in turn, exposing their breasts like a housewife weighing apples on a market stand and buying none.

  He is barely twenty, but like all men must have younger women, even if they are twelve.

  Yet I have seen him come behind some Gypsy matron of forty tending the campfire, embracing her with clumsy possession, groping under her many layers of coarse skirts. The men laugh, the violins screech and whine approval, the gold coins the women wear chitter with excitement.

  Even I find myself excited by his audacity, by the extremes to which the liquor will lead him, by watching him.

  The Gypsies are feral, abiding by their own mystical and clannish rules, mystical and savage. It is hard to study savagery without being taken with it. Civilization, I have found in my travels, is merely the velvet glove over the steel fist that all mankind aspires to.

  I have not yet decided how to use him, but there will be a way.

  15.

  In the Pink

  Inmates rose very late in the morning . . . They spent the

  days . . . talking singing playing the piano and reading.

  (Parent-Duchâtelet . . . expecting to find them engrossed in

  pornography . . . was surprised to discover that they preferred

  light romances.) After an early supper, dey prepared

  themselves to appear in the salon for an evening of comings

  and goings.

  —JILL HARSIN, POLICING PROSTITUTION IN 19TH CENTURY PARIS

  The note from Paris lay crinkled on my worktable.

  Irene had cast it there when she went to raid the household funds for a gratuity for the messenger who had brought it.

  I assumed the gawking horseman left well paid. The journey from Paris was long enough to be worth a pretty price. I read the alien handwriting as best I could.

  Madam! You are needed here at the maison, but must arrive discreetly. I should be called away on some pretext I confess I can’t think of at the moment. There is something still most mysterious in this house! Hurry!

  Your “American cousin,” Pink

  “You would think you were reading a French novel, Nell, so gingerly do you handle that note,” Irene said, reentering the parlor.

  I dropped it as if the ink had leprosy. It was not addressed to me, after all. “It was on my worktable.”

  “What does she say?”

  “You know it is from Miss Pink Whatever-Her-Real-Name-Is?”

  “The melodrama is purely American. I just interviewed the messenger-swain. She cast it down at his feet, wrapped in a silk handkerchief, from a window. The laundryman’s slow son was so eager to play the knight-errant he borrowed a nag from his father’s pair and plodded all the way here sans saddle. A veritable Don Quixote—tall, lank, and quite deluded by his lady fair’s favor. I paid him a sou for his pains, and he will indeed have them tomorrow.”

  “The minx! No doubt she flirted outrageously with the poor lad to gain his attention. A boy of that class surely cannot be aware of what sort of house she lives in.”

  “Nell, his father does the place’s laundry. Such assiduous changing of the sheets must be a sure sign of suspicion even for the laundryman’s horses.”

  “Oh,” I said, not sure why this was a clue, but aware that I should not admit this. “So we are to run off to Paris at the beck and call of an immoral snip?”

  Irene picked up the note and studied it. “We are to run off to Paris to see what she has discovered in the house that the police have not.”

  “That was why you did not argue with her determination to stay on in the brothel!”

  “She was not going to leave in any event. I had hoped that she would wish to consult us if she learned anything. We are, after all, ‘cousins.’ ”

  “I am not a cousin to anyone, and certainly not to any Americans,” I said hastily, if not quite accurately. “She is most presumptuous, but I begin to see that this is a national trait. We will go at once, I suppose.”

  “Perhaps you wish to abstain—”

  “I might wish it,” I said loftily, “but duty requires that I go. You are far too gullible in the case of this American girl. She is not even a decade our junior, after all, and obviously far too well acquainted with the ways of the world for her age.”

  “Two little nannies fresh from school are we,” Irene said-sang with an open grin at her Gilbertian paraphrase, making a demure curtsy, “and that is how we shall revisit the house.”

  Although Irene was fond of tormenting me by visiting articles of clothing from her many wardrobes upon me when necessary, in this instance she enjoyed rummaging through my humble assortment.

  “Seal brown, gray camel’s-hair, copper-colored jersey, dark blue silk . . . ah, black file and sadly out of style. This will do for me. You had better wear the camel’s-hair. Simple cuffs and collars will finish the ensembles, and untrimmed bonnets.”

  With this she stripped two of my best bonnets of their paltry ribbons and feathers.

  We stood before the looking glass inset into my wardrobe door, side by side, an hour later. My walking skirts were a trifle short on Irene, but it only added to her air of humble circumstances. Indeed, I was most impressed by her transformation. It is one thing to spring forth as a peacock, which Irene often did as if to the feathered train born. It is quite another to play common sparrow. I was surprised by how utterly a modest demeanor dampened the native fire and heat of her performer’s persona.

  “Here we stand,” she crowed pathetically. “Two poor but respectable women—perhaps caretakers of an inconvenient infant?—wishing to discuss what no one in the house wishes to acknowledge with the new young woman in residence.

  “We shall be shunned, Nell,” Irene predicted triumphantly as she studied our images, “like temperance workers in a tavern, and therefore we will be ignored and allowed to go about whatever surreptitious business we wish.”

  “Why are you so sure our business will be surreptitious?”

  “Because Pink would not need our help otherwise.”

  “Abominable name. Can we not find another more suitable for her?”

  Irene smiled as she pulled my borrowed bonnet brim onto her hair-bare forehead like a dark, louring cloud. She reminded me of a deranged Covent Garden flower seller. “Why should we? It is almost the only true thing about herself that young woman has told us.”

  Only the fact that our loyal coachman Andre drove us into the city and lurked around the corner to whisk us back to the security of the country allowed me to participate in this mad masquerade.

  I suppose it wasn’t much of a masquerade, but Irene had been right, and I had suspected as much from my own history: dress drably enough, and no one will notice you. Particularly at a bordello. It was a bit chagrining that my everyday wardrobe was so suitable for such an assignment.

  We knocked humbly at the service door, literally balancing on the worn stone stoop. When a harridan-faced woman jerked open the door Iren
e stuttered out her business in perfect if apparently low-class French. (In my opinion, everything French is inferior to everything English, but I admit that I adhere to very high standards.)

  I did recognize a request for “young mademoiselle Rose.”

  What can one make of a language without a word that precisely conveys the concept of “pink,” as opposed to red or rose-colored? Not much, if you ask me. In English, please.

  We were allowed inside to wait. Our antechamber was a redolent pantry, chiefly supplied with garlic and onions, to judge by my nose. Various glass jars housed hideous objects of uncertain origin that seemed suitable for erecting a Frankenstein’s monster. Pickled mushrooms for ears? Ginger root for nose? Leeks for . . . whatever. Witches’ warts?

  Irene looked truly drab in the smoky lamplight. I cannot say what it was—some slump of her shoulders, the dampening of her hair and all expression—but for the first time in her life she seemed quite unattractive.

  Miss Pink suddenly burst through the door, wearing her signature shade and a suspiciously high color in her face that could only come from a rabbit’s foot that had severed all acquaintance with the rabbit to become a rouge applicator. Rouge! Why not bow to a French translation of her English-American name as Red? Unfortunately, it was what one would call a cancan dancer in Montmartre, and quite unsuitable.

  Pink frowned at us for half a minute, then gasped. “Well, aren’t you two the dowdy Doras! My land! All right, ladies, as they say in vaudeville. I will pretend to be all upset at some indiscretion, and you two will steer me into the outer hall and through that nasty little wooden door beyond the pantry and down the stairs. It’s dark and it’s dank, but I’ve a candle hidden at the bottom, if somebody has a match—oh, of course Madam Norton. You would. Then we’re set.” She grinned like a mischievous child.

  I admit to a sentimental fondness for even grown-up girls who remind me of my former charges. Such a dainty, pretty young thing. Such a dreadful place and profession she was in. Such a miserable way of using the King’s English! Except it was the Queen’s now. And except she was no subject of any king or queen, more’s the pity.

  Miss Pink then commenced to shriek and wail as if we had brought her tidings of her grandmama’s death. Naturally, when irritated eyes rounded on our tragic threesome, we were forced to take Miss Pink by her furbelowed arms and escort her beyond the hearing of civilized ears.

  The moment the cellar door swung shut behind us Miss Pink ceased howling. Irene made up for this lapse by producing affective mewlings as we stuttered down the stone stairs in the dark, all clinging to the damp stone walls intermittently softened by moss or . . . slime.

  It is amazing that we did not break our necks on those rough steps. At the bottom a scratch and flare of light showed Irene keeping good her promise.

  Pink, looking like a furbelowed imp in the match-flare, produced the candle.

  In a moment a flickering light led us onward.

  “What have you found?” Irene asked, all business.

  “Something very strange, and very frightening.”

  “Good,” said Irene. “I should not like to go through this masquerade with nothing to show for it. Perhaps you could prepare us a trifle.”

  “This is the wine cellar,” Pink obliged. “I’m told it’s one of the finest in Paris. Only the sommelier comes down here, and only once in a while. The wines for immediate use are kept upstairs for expected guests in far more elegant surroundings, but this is where the vast majority of them are stored.”

  As she spoke, I felt a cool, damp brush of air on my cheek.

  Irene lifted the candle. Its light limned the low arches of an ancient cellar with arcs of highlight against the utter dark beyond.

  Great wooden kegs lined the stones. Bottles dotted walls of wooden racks. I sensed great age, and an almost funereal calm, as if these liquors had been entombed here, deep within the cool, chalk and oyster-shell-rich earth.

  Although I have no liking for spirits, I felt the presence of another, personified spirit here: the soul of France itself, which had amassed lifetimes of the vintner’s arts that passeth the comings and goings of generations and noble families and revolutions and the Rights of Man and the number of falling stars in a millennium.

  “Here.” Pink vanished into the dark beyond Irene’s candle glow. “I found it here.”

  I glanced at the floor, scarred by the pickaxes that had roughed it out from stone and dirt. I remembered that many monasteries distilled rare liquors, that hooded monks might pass in ghostly array among these bottles and kegs of their hidden brewing . . .

  Irene’s boot toe scraped the stone in a wide arc. “Shattered glass. Someone could not wait to decant some of these wines.”

  I looked down horrified to see dark burgundy stains on the floor.

  “Wine, Nell. Merely wine.”

  Under another broad arch we went, into a niche of sorts.

  Pink had squatted on her heels like a child inspecting tadpoles in a murky pond. “Here, Mrs. Norton, Miss Huxleigh!”

  Irene and I stood over her, our candle casting a surprisingly wide circle of illumination.

  Dollops of wax . . . red and black and gold candle wax blotted the stone floor like so many careless signet seals.

  I saw some crude marks, as if stone had scraped stone bone-bare. I saw—

  “Ah!” Irene lifted a pale crumbly object between her forefinger and thumb like a snippet of flesh. “Your etui, Nell?”

  I had not neglected to bring my chatelaine, and brought it jangling into the candlelight.

  Miss Pink frowned at my racket, but when I elevated another tiny crumb pincered from the etui beside the larger piece Irene held, her ingenuous features gaped in amazement.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “A remnant from the murder room,” Irene said. “And this is the motherlode”—she glanced at Pink with a familiarity that left me completely in the dark—“from which this ore has been mined, or I miss my guess.”

  “Oh, yes indeed,” said Miss Pink, beaming. “Isn’t this place strange? So oddly sinister? As if someone awful had passed through here but moments before us?”

  I was loath to agree with her, but then a faint breeze stirred a loosened filament of hair along my cheek, and I shuddered.

  “I do think,” said Miss Pink contemplatively, “that it connects with the sewers of Paris. Isn’t that absolutely wonderful?”

  16.

  Jacques the Ripper

  The earth below the city was not the firm clay known

  across the channel in England. It was a battling

  honeycomb of abandoned stone quarries, of age-old river

  deposits . . . of a seeping blanket of water that turned dirt

  hopelessly to slush.

  —TAMARA HOVEY, PARIS UNDERGROUND

  Even Irene Norton, nèe Adler, was not about to wade into the sewers of Paris wearing my best walking skirt, thank the Lord.

  We stood on the lip of a greater darkness than currently surrounded us, staring into the candle reflections on a glassy black expanse of water which did not ripple so much as tremble in an invisible, insensible wind.

  “We are not equipped to explore this channel,” Irene said regretfully, “but I am not ready to loose the police on so promising a path without more knowledge of my own. You will remain here a while longer,” she told Pink. “See if anyone of the household, or a visitor, shows any interest in this wine cellar.”

  She had led us back to the main cellar.

  My nose, fresh from the dank, sour air of the underground water, detected the musky scent of spilled wine here now.

  Irene began a circuit of the walls of wine kegs and bottles, her toe pointing out more shards of dark green glass, a jagged bottleneck even, scattered corks.

  “An unauthorized wine-tasting, I think. I believe the events that led to the deaths above began here.”

  “Jack the Ripper came by way of the sewers? Perhaps that explains his quick escap
es in Whitechapel,” I said.

  “The Paris sewers are far vaster and traversable than those of London,” Irene objected. “Perhaps it does explain this attack upon women in a luxurious house. The sewers are the great levelers that underlie all Paris. A highway for the aspiring murderer.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Pink said. “I will sleep like a Latter-Day Saint on that thought, Mrs. N.”

  “You might as well call me Irene,” she answered.

  I took a deep, indignant breath.

  “And Miss Huxleigh would much prefer that you called her Nell,” Irene said, neatly forestalling me from expressing my true preferences.

  “I would,” I interjected into this conference of girlish confidences, “prefer a Christian name to call you by.”

  I caught Miss Pink’s eye, and held it.

  Her lashes fluttered like a butterfly’s in a net, but my years as a governess had given me an authority less obvious than Irene’s stage presence, but no less commanding.

  “Elizabeth,” the girl muttered, as if ashamed.

  “A fine name, Elizabeth, with many splendid diminutives . . . Eliza, Beth, Bess, even that American derivative ‘Betsy,’ if you prefer and don’t mind sounding like the ragman’s horse—”

  “I prefer ‘Pink,’ ” she insisted despite my generous suggestions, “but you may call me Elizabeth if you must.”

  Frankly, I was loath to call a girl of ill repute by the name of England’s revered Virgin Queen, but it was either that or Pink.

  I remembered Irene’s remark that the nickname “Pink” was the only true thing our companion had told us about herself. I wondered if Elizabeth was also true, or merely another lie.

  I could not understand why Irene was drawing this mere witness into our orbit, and on a first-name basis now, really! However sad Pink’s personal history, it did not mean she had to misbehave in the present. I feared that their common American background was creating an instant and false sense of intimacy that was unearned. At least Irene was not totally taken in by the girl, and that cheered my spirits a trifle.