10 January 1910
If it had been a fine day Tanya would have had some warning, but the rain had been falling steadily, thin and unbroken all morning, so Passage des Panoramas was unusually full when she left Lafond’s at midday. There was a slightly low feeling in the air. The shop windows were offering discounts on Christmas goods and everything seemed a little shabbier, more grey than was usual in Paris, but still the Parisians came out in flocks to shop and crowd into the covered passageways to hunt for pretty bargains out of the rain. At times like these, when the gold and black shop-fronts and the polished mosaic floors were hidden by crowds of silk-lined coats, and the thick low bodies of the men seemed to press near to her, Tanya felt smothered.
Now she was free of the distractions of her work, the image of Perov in evening dress making his proposal returned to her. Thinking of it was like pressing on a bruise. He had come to dinner with her and her aunts as a close family friend, as if the thing were settled already. He had enjoyed his port and cigar, then as soon as he came into the drawing room to join her and her aunts at the tea-table, Vera and Lila had remembered urgent errands in other parts of the house and left them alone. Perov took a seat next to her, made himself comfortable and began to speak as if their marriage were already agreed. He spoke of where in Paris they might live and the size of house he thought suitable; it was some minutes before Tanya could interrupt him.
The memory was strongly tainted by the smell of cigar smoke, the stale sweetness of wine on his breath. Eventually she managed to break in and ask for more time before committing herself to be his wife. He was offended, pursing his lips and blinking rapidly. Only when she forced herself to smile shyly and ask submissively for his patience and understanding did he seem mollified. At no time did he express any sort of feeling for her. He was telling her the result of his negotiations with her family, not asking for her love. Tanya thought of her father and her aunts, the comforts and security of her life. The idea of being without them made her afraid. She had never met a problem before that could not be solved with money. How could she make problems go away without it?
Paul Allardyce she had seen only once since New Year, once again while walking in the Bois and with her aunts on either side of her. She could only thank him for the roses and look at him with a sort of desperate appeal, but he looked at her as if she was something he had already lost. At this thought, she turned her eyes upwards to the glass and ironwork roof of the passage, the light grey and the glass rain-spattered, trying to convince herself there was air here, there was space, but she felt caught in some low deep current.
Some of the men tried to get out of her way, others did not seem to notice her in their hurry to peer in at the shop windows, and her world was crowded with high shoulders in dark cloth. She was starting to pant. It had been useful to her many times in her dealings with her father, her ability to make herself faint when the drama of the moment required it, but it meant she was now liable to faint when she really didn’t want to at all. She was just about to break free into the rainswept freedom of Boulevard Montmartre when she felt a touch on her arm and turned to find herself face-to-face with Christian Morel. She stared at him, horrified. His smile became uncertain.
‘Dear Miss Koltsova, I am so sorry if I frightened you. I have been waiting here hoping for a moment of your time.’
Her concerns for herself disappeared like smoke in the wind and at once her nervousness in the crowd became simple rage. She wanted to strike him. She wanted to beat him to the ground and shout murderer. She had a vision of this pressing crowd closing over him, kicking his worthless body on the slippery stone floor till he was rags and nothingness. He gestured to the little table thrust into the crowd where he had been sitting. There was the half-drunk coffee of the murderer, the folded copy of Le Matin the thief had been reading. She wished for a knife, for a gun, for the strength to pick up the table and smash his head in with it while the crowd cheered. ‘Might I ask you to join me? Just for one moment?’
She managed to nod and he pulled out the other chair for her. His fingers brushed the back of her coat as he pushed it back in for her and it was all she could do not to turn round and spit in his face. The waiter hovered: no, Miss Koltsova required no refreshment but M. Morel would take another petit noir. He watched her while he waited for it to arrive. Tanya looked at the shoes of the men and women passing by. She could not kill him. She must be clever. He thought Maud dead, and he must not suspect otherwise. So Tanya should show not rage, but what? She thought hard of what she should be feeling as the low-laced boots of some idle Parisienne pivoted into the shop opposite. Grief and shame for her friend? With a sickening turn she realised she should be apologising to him, for helping to introduce a drug addict and thief into his home. She was already trembling – well, that would do for grief and shame. So much the better. His coffee arrived and he crossed his legs and sat back while he drank it. She glanced at him. So handsome and so respectable. She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and touched it to her eyes, preparing her performance.
‘I cannot believe this has happened, Monsieur Morel. Poor Maud. I should have answered your sister’s letter.’ He could take it how he pleased; she could not manage more at first. He set down his coffee cup and nodded. He must be here to see if I believe them, she thought. Why? Because I am the one person who might ask questions, who might have known Maud well enough to see he is a murderous lying thief. Oh, why haven’t you gone away? Why aren’t you in hell? She lowered her face, then lifted it again and looked straight into his deep brown eyes. ‘I had no idea her case was so desperate. The mention of opium in your sister’s letter was a terrible shock. I am so sorry. I did not know her as well as I thought.’ She blinked rapidly.
It was a tiny change in him, a slight relaxation in his shoulders, in the muscles of his face. The smallest disturbance on the surface of a pool fading and leaving it darkly smooth again.
‘I hope you do not blame yourself,’ he said. Tanya concentrated on her own hands. ‘Remember, we lived with Miss Heighton for some weeks and were thoroughly deceived.’
‘You are generous,’ she breathed, her mouth ashy.
His voice was comfortable now. ‘I have sought you out for two reasons. The first is, I know Miss Heighton had relatives in England. She mentioned a brother? I can find no trace of their address in her belongings and Lafond does not have it; his correspondence to her was always addressed to the post office. Hiding her ambitions from the respectable lawyer brother, I suppose. I hoped you might know it. We must write to them, but perhaps it would be kinder to say she met with some accident, rather than reveal the full ugly story.’
‘Her family have a right to know the truth,’ Tanya replied quickly, then groaned inwardly – too fierce. ‘Don’t you think, sir?’
‘Even in such circumstances as these?’ He shook his head slowly, his smile indulgent. ‘No, Miss Koltsova, you have the proper convictions of your youth. But I think that at times it is kinder to lie. Why poison whatever memories they have of her?’ He sighed and was serious, stroking his black eyebrow with the tip of his index finger. ‘Paris, Paris. So beautiful, so full of traps. Even the most virtuous can find themselves … lost. Do you have the address?’
‘I do not.’ She tried to concentrate on the newspaper between them. The wife of a former Governor of the Bank of France had been found dead. MYSTERY OF A TRAGIC DEATH the headline read, then just below it: Was she assassinated? Tanya looked away quickly.
‘How unfortunate. I have left my address at the Académie, but I think my sister and I will be leaving Paris at the end of January for America. If no one comes in search of her before then…’
The thought of Morel pawing his way through Maud’s possessions was repulsive. The headline kept pulling her back. Yes, she wanted to scream, yes, she was assassinated! She moistened her lower lip.
‘I have no plans to leave Paris until the summer,’ she said slowly. ‘If her brother comes, I would be willing to see him, and pass onto him anything you care to leave with me.’
She could feel the gentle smile in his voice as he replied, ‘You are too kind.’
‘It is the least I could do in the circumstances.’ I want to tear you apart with my teeth. I shall buy a dog the size of a wolf, like Valadon’s, only with a warrior soul, and he will hunt you over the city, run after you until you are sweaty and desperate and screaming.
‘There are her painting materials, of course. And her sketchbooks. Her clothes we thought it best to give to the poor.’
‘Perhaps you will have the rest sent to me.’
He smiled. ‘As it happens…’ he gestured to the floor under the marble table, and for the first time Tanya noticed a small suitcase sitting there. ‘I had hoped you might have the address and I could write my letter here and now. It has been difficult for my sister this last week or so, knowing these things were still there in her room.’
A huge dog, with great powerful jaws to rip your lying throat from your body.
‘Naturally that would be uncomfortable for your sister, Monsieur Morel. I shall take them with me at once.’ Tanya stood and he did the same before picking up the case and handing it to her. She hesitated. ‘Madame de Civray? What did you say to persuade her to keep this affair quiet?’
Morel gave a half-smile. ‘Oh, the dear Countess – she is as sentimental as every other American I have met. They are like children.’ He stroked his eyebrow again. ‘She was distressed indeed to hear of Miss Heighton’s fate. I am convinced the tiara means very little to her. She hardly looked at it, and the suggestion that the theft be suppressed was all her own.’
‘She is a good woman,’ Tanya said fiercely, then afraid she had been too emphatic, managed to smile. ‘I shall take proper care of these things, Monsieur Morel. Thank you for letting me take them.’
He bowed and she walked out into the street and out of his sight before stopping on the pavement and lifting her face so the light rain could freshen her skin. Sasha lifted the umbrella over her head and waved to Vladimir.
‘Was that the man, pudding? Oh, I knew it! Oh, he looks like my cousin’s eldest – and a devil that boy is. Half the bastards in the village are his.’
‘What shall I say to Maud, Sasha? He wanted to write to her family, but he hasn’t the address.’
‘Tell her that then. And be grateful you haven’t worse news to share. Now are we going to that old tart’s place or not? I’ve more soup for Miss Maud.’
* * *
Maud heard Tanya’s voice in the hallway, shouting up a greeting to whoever happened to be in the studio above. One of Valadon’s regular visitors was a crazed Italian. He came almost every day and Maud could often hear him, slightly muffled by the floorboards, declaiming Dante as he sat at Valadon’s feet while Maud lay drifting in and out of an uneasy sleep below them. The door was pushed open, and there was Tanya as bright as morning with her peasant maid trotting behind her and a fat bundle in her arms.
‘Dear! How are you this afternoon?’
The maid began clucking round the stove at once as Tanya trotted up to the bed.
‘Better.’
Tanya felt her forehead with the back of her hand and tutted. ‘But still not well. Not to worry, Sasha has driven half the French staff out of the house roasting bones and making all sorts of jellies. They taste horrid, but they’ve cured me every time I’ve been ill.’
Maud managed to smile, but Tanya became serious. ‘Now, my love, I am not sure how to say this to you, so I am just going to talk very fast.’ She did, watching Maud’s face. Maud made no sound, so Tanya watched the colour in her cheeks, the white of her throat. Eventually she ran out of words and set the suitcase down on the floor. She could hear Maud’s breathing.
‘Perhaps I should have kept quiet. Should I put this out of sight?’ Maud nodded and Tanya crouched by the bed to slide the case underneath. There was nowhere else to hide it, after all. She remained crouching and put her hand on Maud’s arm, trying to read her expression.
‘I can’t bear that they should go on in the world, Tanya. I know what Valadon said, but I bet if they had done this to her … Why? Why should I run away?’
Tanya nodded. ‘The whole time I was talking to him I was longing to shoot him through his black heart – if I could find it.’ She moved till she was sitting on the floor by the bed, her chin on her arm next to Maud’s face. ‘Perhaps if you shot him and we explained what happened, they would forgive you.’
‘I would like that.’ The two women were silent for a while. Sasha turned from the stove and sighed when she saw Tanya curled up on the floor. She decanted her soup and shuffled over with it. Tanya smiled when she saw the bowl. It was one of a grand dining set Vera Sergeyevna had brought from St Petersburg, stuffed in straw and only produced on the most splendid of occasions. Sasha had obviously taken a liking to Maud. Tanya wrinkled her nose when she smelled the soup, but Maud showed no sign of distaste and took the bowl carefully. Thinking about shooting Morel had calmed her a little.
‘How do you say thank you in Russian, Tanya?’
‘Spaceeba.’
‘Spaceeba, Sasha.’ The old maid blushed and she patted Maud on the shoulder before returning to a stool by the stove and rummaging around in her workbag for something to mend.
Maud was just finishing her meal when Yvette came charging in, her hair and coat damp with rain. She kissed Sasha before dropping the coat over a chair and throwing herself down on the bed. ‘Urff, what a day. Rain and rain. And nowhere warm in this whole damn city. Let me share your blanket, Maud, there’s a dear. I’ve spent the morning freezing my tits off for Adler, then when he’s done for the day it’s all, “Sorry – I’m a bit short at the mo! Come back for the rest on Tuesday when I’ve sold my canvases!” Arsehole. No one’s going to buy his stuff for more than firewood. The canvas was worth more before he started daubing all over it.’
Tanya tutted. ‘Why do you have to be so crude, Yvette?’
The French girl shifted round to look at her. ‘Why do you have to be so prissy? You know I’ve got tits. Painted them often enough, yourself.’
‘It’s not ladylike!’
‘Ladylike? Oh, save it for the ballroom, princess! I thought all you ladies loved my dirty comments. It’s as close as you virgins can get to roughing it in Paris, isn’t it?’
‘I wish you’d stop calling me a princess. I’m not! And even if I were, it’s not my fault.’
Maud put the soup bowl carefully aside and lay back down. ‘Oh stop it, both of you. Yvette, Tanya saw Morel today.’
Yvette’s eyes widened and she gathered the blanket round her and burrowed across the bed so she was closer to Tanya. ‘No! Tell at once! That bastard. How did you keep from throttling him?’
Tanya launched into her story at once while Yvette cooed and whistled. ‘Thank God he didn’t have your address, Maud. You think he was checking whether you believed them, Tanya?’
‘I think so.’
Yvette reached forward to stroke Tanya’s cheek with her knuckles. ‘Clever girl. Oh, by the way, has Perov proposed?’
Tanya picked up the pearls that hung around her neck and began running them through her fingers like a rosary. ‘Yes. On Saturday.’ Morel had driven the thoughts of Perov out of her mind. Now they came back, she could almost smell cigar smoke again.
‘And?’ Yvette said, her eyes wide.
‘I asked him to let me finish the spring classes at Lafond’s before I gave him an answer.’ The pearls were twisted so tightly around her fingers their tips turned pale and bloodless. In the quiet they could hear the rain beating in sudden squalls against the high window. ‘My father has written to me. He talks at great length about the advantages of the match.’
‘And Paul Allardyce?’ Maud said, shifting on her bed so she could see Tanya’s face.
‘He doesn’t ask me to choose. He just stands by and watches. I wish he’d just take me away. I’d go with him if he did, and I think he knows that – but he does nothing.’
Yvette got more comfortable in the bed, making the springs groan. ‘How can he? Oh Tanya, we all know you love the poor man and don’t like the rich one much. How is waiting until Lafond’s spring classes are done supposed to change that?’
Tanya scowled. ‘I don’t know. But something might happen.’
‘The horse might learn to talk…’
She looked round at Yvette. ‘What does that mean? Paul said it, and I don’t know what it means.’
Above them there was a muffled exchange of shouts and the sound of something being thrown across the room. They all looked upwards and waited for the drumroll of footsteps down the stairs and the front door to slam. Another of Valadon’s family dramas.
Yvette put her arms over her head, stretching out her shoulders. ‘It’s a story. A man is about to be executed but he says to the King, “Don’t kill me. If you delay chopping my head off for a year, I’ll teach your horse to talk.” The King says, “Fine, go ahead,” and the man’s friend says, “What are you doing? What’s the point in that?” The man says, “A lot can happen in a year. I might die, the King might die. And who knows – the horse might learn to talk.”’
Tanya frowned over this for some moments then said quietly, ‘Am I the horse?’
Yvette laughed under her breath, then clambered off the bed and kissed Maud’s cheek. ‘Come on, Tanya, let’s leave Milady here to rest.’ Tanya got to her feet, still looking thoughtful, and they left their friend to the sound of the rain and what good sleep could do.