Becca and Daniel sat in the shade of a linden tree behind the mansion on a hot, windless afternoon. The servants had brought out a table and wrought iron chairs with their lacelike curves. Moisture beaded on the two cut crystal glasses of lemonade sitting on the table. Thin slices of cut lemons decorated the side of the glasses. Becca’s account book sat there, too.
“I have a list.” Becca dipped her quill pen into a pot of black ink and tapped it against the edge of the squat glass bottle.
“Of course you do.” Daniel looked up from the Journal de Paris, the four-page French newspaper he read daily to improve his language skills.
“You can read without a headache?” Becca asked.
Daniel growled, retreating behind the newspaper.
“All right,” she laughed. “I will stop asking how you feel.” He had improved so much in the three days since the accident. There were moments now when she forgot how close she’d come to losing him.
“I have a list,” she began again, “of all the things we do not know about Mr. Fenimore’s death.”
“I suppose that’s all the entertainment I can expect today.” Daniel folded the newspaper and set it down on the table.
“We do not know how he died.” Becca lifted one finger.
“A lightning strike, according to your mother,” Daniel said.
“But we do not know why or how he allowed himself to be tied to the lightning rod.” Becca put a check next to the questions she’d written.
She lifted a second finger. “We don’t know why he ran toward the perfume shop when he escaped the police.” Becca would have gone to visit the shop two days ago but wasn’t ready to leave Daniel’s side then.
Daniel nodded.
A third finger. “Did Mr. Fenimore conjure the letter to Dr. Franklin, or is someone else involved?”
“Another question,” Daniel said. “Mr. Fenimore was tied to the lightning rod with a rope. Where did the rope come from?”
Becca lifted her pen from the page. “Did the police leave it here?”
“I’ll find out,” he said.
A drop of her iridescent ink splashed onto the paper. “Patience Wright had a cut on her hand the morning we found Mr. Fenimore. She could have sliced her hand cutting a rope.” Becca made a note. “But she was so upset when she found him dead. It doesn’t make sense to think she killed him.”
“Unless she saw the body and discovered that she didn’t like thinking of herself as a murderer,” Daniel said.
Becca made another note.
“What about Edward Bancroft?” he asked.
“I don’t like the man. I wish he would leave Paris.” She placed her pen in the ink bottle and sipped the tart cool lemonade.
“Don’t be too hard on Mr. Bancroft. He is a doctor and a scientist, a well-known one at that. But he lives in Dr. Franklin’s shadow. It has made him bitter, I think.”
Becca thumbed through her account book and plucked a loose page from it. “I brought his love letter with me. There’s something more to it, isn’t there? There has to be.”
Daniel tilted his head, staring at the lemon slice in his drink. He leaned forward, scooping up a handbell and ringing for a servant. He plucked the lemon slice from the drink, threw it in the air and caught it, then began to laugh.
The servant’s face puckered with confusion at the request, but minutes later, he returned, carrying a tin lantern with a lit candle on a black lacquered tray.
“How did you learn this trick?” Becca stood over Daniel’s shoulder, watching as he lifted the conical lid.
“General Washington mentioned ‘sympathetic ink’ one night in Morristown. I waited until he’d left and asked Alexander Hamilton what the phrase meant. Ink that is invisible, he said. It is a way of sending secret messages, so long as the person receiving the note knows how to do this.”
Daniel waved Mr. Bancroft’s badly written love poem over the flame. He kept the expensive paper close enough to the candle to heat the note but not so close as to singe it. “This will work if the message is written in lemon juice. But there are other formulas.” His voice faded. “We should know in a minute.”
It was magic, Becca thought. Thin brown letters, spidery thin, one then the next, formed themselves into words between the lines of the poem. A death here. Jude Fenimore. The Cathedral of Notre Dame. Becca’s name was mentioned. So were Daniel’s, Hannah’s, and Augusta’s.
“What good news,” Daniel drawled.
“I don’t see anything good about it,” Becca said. “Who was to receive the letter?”
“Not France,” Daniel said. “Gabriel d’Aumont must have reported all of this to Versailles. Most likely, England. We can’t be certain.”
Becca swiveled to study the elegant white mansion with its soaring columns and high windows, its secrets, and its murder. “I wonder how often Mr. Bancroft reports on what is happening in this house.”
“And I wonder if the message was meant for the person who played ground billiards with my head.” Daniel blew out the candle and closed the lantern. “Dr. Franklin needs to know.”
“Doctor Franklin is gone to Versailles,” the servant outside the sitting room told them moments later. “No, I do not know when the good doctor will return. But Lady Augusta is asking for Mrs. Parcell,” he reported. “She and Mrs. Hannah, they wonder about the perfume.” The servant’s face creased with confusion. “They would not tell me what it is about the perfume that requires your attention.”
“You don’t mind, do you?” Becca asked. “I know you meant to come to the perfume shop with us, but that was before your attack.”
“Go,” Daniel said. “I shall be as tame as a lamb here. And if Dr. Franklin returns, I’ll wait until we can talk to him together to give him the news about Mr. Bancroft.”