It was not until after they had finished eating that Maud mentioned the strange old woman who had visited, and apologised for giving the address of the club.
‘I’m afraid she rather frightened me. I hope she didn’t give any trouble.’
‘Oh, it was you who sent her, was it? That was kind, I must say.’ Morel pushed his plate away from him. Maud started to apologise, but he stopped her and said more seriously. ‘Poor lady, no, you did quite right to give her the address. Though I am afraid I was not there when she called and she caused quite a row. The porters saw her off the premises and threatened her with the police. By the time I got back there, she was gone. I came here this evening to warn the concierge to keep an eye out for her. I hope she has decided to go home. Perhaps I should send a telegraph to her son and say she has been up to mischief before she does any worse.’
‘Who was it, Christian? Maud, you didn’t say anyone had called.’ Sylvie had as usual eaten very little, just picking at her food.
‘You were resting, Sylvie.’ How deep must her dreams be, Maud thought, not to have heard that.
‘It was poor Madame Prideux,’ Morel said. His voice was solemn, like a clerk of the court reading a charge. He scraped at the lace tablecloth with his fingernail. Maud noticed how neatly trimmed and polished they were.
‘Madame Prideux? Here in Paris?’ Sylvie half-sat up, then dropped again into her chair and turned her head away. ‘What an awful bore. I hate her. You must take the proper precautions, Christian. I have only just begun to explore, and now I fear I will see that foul crone round every corner. It could ruin everything. Did it cause a problem at the club? Did she tell the porters where she was staying?’
Morel looked across the table at her, his nails still making a little scratching noise on the lines of the cloth. ‘They understood the lady was a little mad. Yes, she told them where she was staying, and you are right. I shall deal with it in the morning.’
Sylvie shook her head, all at once more animated and more present than she was normally at this time in the evening. Maud had not realised her dream-like state could be set aside so easily. ‘No, I shan’t be able to sleep. You had better go now.’
He sighed. ‘If it will make you happy, Sylvie.’
‘It is what should be done,’ Sylvie replied simply. ‘But first perhaps you should explain to Maud who she is.’
Morel folded his hands in front of him on the tablecloth. ‘You spoke to her, Miss Heighton. What did she say to you?’
Maud felt deeply embarrassed. She could think of nothing but her own cowardice when the woman was reaching for Sylvie’s door. The amount of money that Morel was paying her above her bed and board would entitle him to expect her to make some effort to protect his sister, but she had done nothing of use. She had let the old woman into the apartment, given up Morel’s club at once when a lie would have served just as well, and then stood there without speech or action until the concierge arrived. ‘She said many things. But you have no need to explain yourself to me. None at all.’
‘She said we stole from her, I imagine. I can assure you she is a confused old woman and we did no such thing,’ he said.
‘Naturally, I did not for one moment believe it. The lady was obviously quite mad.’
‘We are grateful for your confidence, Miss Heighton. You see, Sylvie, ladies of sense like Miss Heighton are aware that she is nothing more than a mad old woman to be pitied. We need say no more about it.’
Sylvie shook her head again. ‘I think you had better tell her the whole story, Christian. The siege and the diamonds. Then she can understand why Madame Prideux is as mad as she is and not think me a coward for wishing to avoid her.’
Sylvie got up from the table and fetched her cigarette-case from the side-table. ‘Let him tell you, Maud. Or I shall worry you will think him a fiend. I am sure she told you we are man and wife.’ She settled back down, lit a cigarette and dropped the case on the table. Maud still found the sight of women smoking rather shocking and flinched. ‘See, Christian? Maud is blushing. She did say so.’ The enamel stripes on the case were of subtly different blues. French ultramarine, brilliant ultramarine, new blue.
‘Perhaps you can tell her the story as you see fit, Sylvie, after I have left.’ Morel’s voice was a little clipped.
‘Oh no, Christian. You tell it so much better than I do.’ She tapped the ash off her cigarette and sat back in her chair watching him.
Maud put her hands together on her lap. ‘If you do not wish to tell the story, sir, I am sure I do not wish to hear it.’
‘Unfortunately, Miss Heighton, Sylvie wishes the story told and wants you to hear – and we must in all things be ruled by her.’ He took a cigarette himself and leaned forward so Sylvie could light it, cupping her hand to protect the flame from an imaginary breeze. Maud said nothing. Morel filled his glass. The apartment was particularly silent this evening. The slight creak in the chair, the rub of cloth on cloth as Morel settled himself was quite audible. ‘Miss Heighton, do you know anything of the Siege of Paris? And the terrible week that followed the break-up of the Paris Commune?’
‘A little.’ The electric lamps around the room shed a dull orange glow about them; the smooth curves of the furniture seemed to shift a little in the light, like the vines of a forest floor caught in the act of growth. She recalled a hot summer’s afternoon and her teacher reading from Lessons of History. In 1870 the Prussian army had defeated the French and for a year laid siege to the capital. The poor suffered the worst of it, but in the end even the rich who had not escaped in time were eating rats. Napoleon III fled and the new government made terms, but the militias formed for the defence of the city wanted something more for their sacrifices than the new government were offering. Suddenly France was at war with herself. For a little while the Paris Commune made its laws and decrees before the new French government sent in troops from Versailles and slaughtered them.
‘Madame Prideux was born and has lived most of her life in our home town,’ Morel said, ‘but she was in Paris in 1871 with her husband and her young child – a boy of about four years of age. Her husband was a diamond polisher who worked on Rue de la Paix. It was possible if he was skilled and lucky that they could have had a respectable, even a comfortable life – but seeing those diamonds every day made him greedy. It became harder and harder for him to work with such priceless rarities and then take home only a few francs for his wife and child. The chaos in Paris seemed too good an opportunity to miss, and with the help of his friend who worked in the same establishment, he managed to steal half-a-dozen good-quality stones. He needed only to pay off his accomplice and meet his family before returning to his native soil with the means to buy a good-sized farm. His accomplice was a man named Christian Gravot.’
Morel drank slowly from his glass and Maud noticed him seeking out Sylvie’s gaze. She smiled brightly at him and blew out a long thin stream of smoke from between her pale lips.
‘This was just the time when the troops were beginning to pour through the streets. They were searching for the ring-leaders of the rebellion, but in truth anyone not obviously bourgeois who had remained in the city was regarded as guilty. A patrol approached him when he was in sight of the place where he had agreed to meet Gravot, and in a desperate attempt to conceal his crime and protect his plunder, he swallowed the stones. The patrol was not put off. Perhaps they had taken fire from that building. No doubt Prideux looked guilty and afraid, perhaps his hands were dirty and they took him for an arsonist. For whatever reason they shot him where he stood. Many others met the same fate. Often the bodies were buried in the roadways where they fell. There was no trial, no arrest and examination in those days.’
Maud remembered her history lessons. The bodies stacked in piles like wood ready for the fire. The stories of the burning of Paris when the Tuileries Palace was reduced to rubble and Notre Dame itself was threatened by the mob. She tried to imagine Paris in chaos: the fresh-washed streets she walked along every morning pooled with blood, the sound of soldiers marching, of men and women trying to build barricades across the wide streets, and gunfire, a man hauled off to be shot with a group of strangers against the shop windows where now rich women bought their silk gloves. The bodies rotting to nothingness under their satin slippers.
‘How horrible,’ she said.
‘Oh, just wait,’ Sylvie said, blowing out another smooth flow of smoke. ‘It gets a great deal worse.’
‘Oh!’
‘What is it, Miss Heighton?’
‘Only the old lady, Madame Prideux, said she wanted her diamonds. She asked if you’d swallowed them.’
Sylvie made a noise of disgust in her throat, and Morel’s skin became a little grey. Maud tried to imagine that angry old woman, young and caught among the gunfire and flames.
‘So the diamonds were lost?’ she asked.
‘I wish they had been. This is where, as Sylvie says, it gets worse. Madame Prideux was waiting for her husband nearby. He did not come at the appointed time and she could hear shots being fired so she went to find him at the place where he was supposed to meet his accomplice, Gravot. His plan too must have been to leave Paris at once as he had his pretty wife and their bundles with him. Madame Prideux saw them bent over a body in the street and ran towards them. She was just in time to see her husband’s corpse being gutted for the diamonds he had swallowed. She threw herself on them, but Gravot’s wife held her back. All she could do was watch.’ Horror made Maud’s skin crawl. ‘It is terrible what people will do for a little wealth, Miss Heighton, terrible.’
Maud felt a touch on her arm. Sylvie had put out her cigarette and now drawn her chair close. She lowered her head onto Maud’s shoulder. Without thinking, Maud put out her hand and Sylvie took it. Their hands lay loosely entwined on Maud’s lap. Morel stubbed his cigarette out fiercely on the edge of his plate.
‘Tell her what happened next,’ Sylvie said.
‘She went home, borrowed enough money from her family to open a grocery shop. Ran it for more than thirty years and told that story to her child every night for his bedtime story. I fear he did not turn out well.’
‘Did she want revenge?’
His mouth twitched – a sad quick smile. ‘No, Miss Heighton, she wanted the diamonds that they had cheated her of. She believed her husband’s sacrifice should have made her a rich woman. Instead she spent her life scrimping for the basic necessities of existence while watching richer women come and go in her shop, and sacrificing any ounce of comfort to pay back the money she had borrowed. She was always a bitter woman with a sharp tongue. She would flatter her customers and spit acid when their backs were turned. Her son was no better. He was sent to the prison camps in Guiana in the end after he was caught stealing.’
‘A harsh punishment,’ Maud said quietly.
‘He was caught stealing diamonds. A lot of them. I suspect he meant to give them to her.’
Maud squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, trying to think. ‘But why does she believe you are Gravot, sir?’
‘She is mad,’ Sylvie said without lifting her head. ‘It came on her slowly. I remember she was found once or twice on the street apparently unaware of where she was. Christian was away on business at that time, but when he returned, her mania fixed on him. There was some resemblance perhaps. I am not sure she understood that it all happened forty years ago. She began to call at our house. I tried to be kind, but it was a terrible strain.’
Maud looked down at her profile; the young woman’s skin was golden in the lamplight. ‘Is that why you came to Paris?’
Sylvie shook her head. ‘No. Her son came home, claiming to be a reformed character. He took over the shop and kept her off the streets. She must have escaped him.’
Maud was silent for a while. Her father used to rant about Quakers, claiming that the fact he was losing business to an auctioneer in Darlington who was of that faith was proof of a conspiracy against a good Methodist like himself. The conviction would grow on him as he talked, and when Maud and her stepmother could take no more and left the table to go to their separate pursuits, he could be heard continuing his monologue with only the walls for audience. Outside, a drunk was singing to his lady-friend, his slurred swooping songs punctuated by her laughter. ‘What a terrible story.’
‘I am sorry to tell it, sorry that Madame Rémy did not do a better job of protecting your peace, but perhaps Sylvie was right and it is best you know, having seen her.’
Sylvie moved and stretched; the fabric of her gown slipped down her arms, showing them smooth and glowing.
‘You will take the proper steps, Christian?’
He stood, tucked his chair under the table and brushed down the sleeves of his coat. ‘I will, at once. I shall telegraph. Her son must come and retrieve her. She shall not spoil Paris for us, Sylvie. I promise.’ She kissed her fingertips to him. He came round the table to kiss his sister on her white forehead. Maud noticed there was more blue in his skin than usual. She looked up at him.
‘I know it is a difficult story to tell,’ she said, ‘but you tell it beautifully. It almost reminds me to be sorry for her and her son again.’
‘Then I suppose it is worthwhile. And now, dear ladies, I must leave you. I may be late back.’