26 January 1910
Yvette brought her coffee again in the morning and declared her intention to go back to Valadon’s place and her own. ‘My clothes are stinking,’ she said. ‘If you insist on staying here until we have not got a franc between us, well and good, but I shall do so in clean clothes.’
Maud only nodded and Yvette began her weary slog across a shattering Paris. The Cours de Rome was becoming a lake fed by the Metro tunnels, and they said part of Place de l’Opéra was collapsing. Back at her room she found four messages from Tanya pinned to her bundle and then another crop at Valadon’s. She fished out a length of cord to tie up Maud’s clean clothes and cut it to length with her knife. A present from Maman the day she had finished her schooling with the nuns. She would rather have had a book as the nuns only handed out Bibles, and Yvette had already decided there was nothing much in those pages for her. She had used the knife to scare other children away from her things and twice used it to protect herself. Once from Louis. After the other men on the hill saw his scar they kept away when she told them to. It was the only gift she remembered being given and she had carved her name into the bone handle and gone out into the world with it. Not gone very far into the world though. She put it back into her pocket and headed to Saint-Sulpice where the latest appeals from Tanya had directed her.
* * *
Most of the refugees flooded out of their homes round Paris, Bercy and Javel had been directed here, and Saint-Sulpice had been transformed to receive them. There were cots and mattresses everywhere you looked, and people huddled into little groups round portable heaters. At the back of the church a procession of men and women collected bowls of soup from a trestle table. It was strangely quiet given the number of people there. Even the children were silent. The air smelled slightly rotten. A woman in a Red Cross uniform at the door looked relieved when she realised that Yvette was looking for someone rather than a place to sleep. ‘We are nearly full and the waters still rise,’ she said. ‘On the first night we had only five, now there are five hundred. Oh, it breaks my heart to see them praying. They can only be praying for other people, since they have already lost everything. Miss Koltsova is in the back with a few of the children while their mothers sleep. Take her out for a little while if you can. She was here half the night and from early this morning too.’
When Yvette approached, Tanya saw her through the crowd and put a blonde girl off her knee, kissing her dirty head as she did. Then she flung her arms around Yvette’s neck and held her for a moment. ‘Oh, you are here! Thank the Lord!’ Before Yvette could do anything more than grin at her, Tanya took her by the hand and led her into a quieter corner. ‘What I have to tell you seems less important after what I have seen here,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, it is dreadful. Have you been near the river today?’
Yvette nodded. ‘It is higher than the road near Concorde. Only the wall holds it back. And there are crowds everywhere … But what is your news, Tanya? Are you engaged to Paul?’
She blushed. ‘I am. He is here, talking with the refugees. His paper had already set up an appeal and the American Ambassador has already pledged such a sum.’ Yvette thought she looked rather proud of this, as if every generous American action reflected rather well on her now. ‘But Maud? What news?’
‘All my congratulations, sweetheart. There, now you are resolved to work for a living I shall stop calling you Princess.’
Tanya looked pleased. ‘Sasha says she will believe I can earn money when I learn to dress myself.’ Yvette snorted with laughter and Tanya’s eyes danced. ‘Yes, I know, but some of these very expensive dresses are terribly complicated. I’m sure it will be much easier with cheaper clothes.’ She tried to say it stoutly but Yvette was not convinced. ‘But Maud…?’
Yvette told her what she could, murmuring low so that the passing men and women would not hear her, but each seemed so sunk in their own distress and shock she could have sung it. ‘Now she watches and waits, for what I do not know. Perhaps if she sees him sick, sees that he believes she is haunting him it will be enough, but she seems … not herself. She frightens me.’
Tanya nodded. ‘Sasha said she found something dark in the river and brought it back into the air with her.’
‘She found the strength to live, that’s something. But I must go back to her. Kiss your fiancé for me and tell him he is a lucky man, even if his wife-to-be can’t dress herself.’
Tanya put out her hand to stop her. ‘Yvette, it wasn’t just to tell you I was engaged. That girl, the maid the Countess threw out, came to see me.’ Yvette waited, frowning a little. ‘She wanted to thank me. She is going to take a stenographer’s course, but the thing is, she followed Morel. Yvette, I know where the diamonds are.’
* * *
They found Maud still in her place at the window but looking more animated than she had been the previous day. She told them she had seen Morel himself at the window twice since Yvette had left, looking anxiously towards the river then shivering and looking up and down the street, searching the faces of the people coming and going on the pavements, their steps hurried or cautious as if afraid the road was going to give way beneath them. She greeted Tanya with warmth and congratulated her, though even as she did so her eyes flitted towards the window again. When Tanya began to tell them of Odette’s visit, however, she became more attentive.
‘Morel had taken her to Café Procope in Cour du Commerce once or twice,’ Tanya explained. ‘Poor thing, she was rather in love with him, I think, and she went back there a few times after he gave her up.’ Tanya looked tired; her work at Saint-Sulpice seemed to have drained her, but her eyes were bright. Yvette found it strange to see her in such a plain dress, but she seemed more substantial sitting there than in her usual silks and chiffon. ‘She was hoping to see him, and see him she did, going into Cour de Rohan. She followed him whenever she could. Apparently he spent hours a day there, and she said she saw him go into the cellars in the yard a couple of times. The second time she tried to speak to him and he was cruel.’ Yvette could imagine. ‘Then that very evening the Countess cast her off.’ Yvette remembered what Valadon had said about women being fools and wondered if she were right.
‘So you think he’s keeping the diamonds there?’ Maud said. ‘In the cellars below Cour de Rohan?’
‘What else could it be?’ Tanya said, looking up at them with her round dark eyes. ‘Close, but not too close. Secluded but somewhere a man like him might easily be dining in the cafés.’
‘And you think we should go and search for them?’ Maud said, looking back again over her shoulder.
‘Of course we should!’ Tanya said. ‘They can be returned to the Countess and he will have lost what he has worked for so hard. Then Maud, you can be free again. You will have beaten him.’
Yvette watched the Englishwoman’s face. There was a moment of light there, like a shifting of the clouds against a stormy sky, as if she had perhaps caught some scent of a future free of this, but then she shook her head. ‘I don’t care about the diamonds. What is their theft, taking jewels from a woman who has too many already, compared to what he did to me?’
Yvette put out her hand and rested it on Maud’s knee. ‘It is not what is important that counts, but what is important to him, isn’t it, Maud?’ For herself she thought collecting the diamonds would be by far the best idea. Tanya was right, and for the first time since they had left Henri in the cellar she thought there might be a chance of an ending which Maud might survive. Maud hesitated, then nodded.
‘We should go at once,’ Tanya said, standing up. ‘The waters are reaching higher and higher through the cellars and sewers. If we don’t go now it might be weeks before we get another chance, and he might be well enough by then to stop us.’
They hurried Maud up and into her long coat and into the street, but she could not resist looking back towards the apartment. He was there again, looking out of the window towards them, his face grey and his mouth a gape of despair. She turned away and let her friends sweep her along the street.
* * *
Still Sylvie would not go. He begged her to but she would not. She tried to dose him with laudanum but he tasted it in the wine and spat it out. He could stand today, and in those moments she left him to himself, he went to the window and strained to see how near the waters were approaching. What if she came in the night? If the waters reached to the road under the window, would she be able to leap up to the first floor and throttle him? Would he wake up to find her squatting on his chest, dripping with the foul waters of the Seine? He thought of her face, livid with rot like those of the drowning victims he had seen at the morgue. She would bare her yellow teeth and wring out her sodden clothes so the poisonous damp would trickle into his throat.
His heart thudding, he leaned out again. And he saw her looking up at him from the street below, her eyes a-glimmer with hatred. She was going to take the diamonds, his beautiful diamonds, the emerald-cut great stone five times the size of all the rest that would make him a king in America. She would take it and then force it down his throat with the riverwater and cut it out of his belly again. He saw it in her eyes. He whimpered. Sylvie could come back any moment and she would tell him he was ill, that his imagination was disturbed and his fever high, but she had not seen it, had not felt the hatred of the ghost as he had.
Morel dressed as quickly as he could. The buttons were difficult to fasten with his shaking hands and the sweat on his forehead stung his eyes. He took his coat and waited behind his door for a moment till he was sure the corridor outside was empty then made a dash for the front door, scooping up the large key to the apartment door as he passed the hall-table. His hand caught the flower vase and it went crashing to the floor but he didn’t pause until he was outside and had turned the key in the lock. He heard Sylvie call his name and hesitated on the landing; her footsteps came close and then the door handle rattled. He could hear her breathing and put his fingers lightly onto the wood, knowing she was just the other side.
‘Christian?’ she said softly. ‘Christian, my love, I know you are there. Come back and come to bed. Let me look after you, my darling, you know you are not well.’
He felt tears in his eyes; her voice was so soft but she could not protect him from the dead. ‘She is coming for the diamonds, Sylvie,’ he whispered, pressing his cheek to the wood. ‘For our diamonds – and we shall not be tricked. No, I will fetch them and then I will come home and you will care for me.’ His mind would not work as he wanted it to, his forehead was damp. ‘I know I am not well.’
‘Christian, unlock the door. We shall go together.’
He smiled, a wave of love for his pretty clever wife lifting his heart as it had lifted the first time he laid eyes on her. ‘No, Sylvie. You will stop me. Be patient. I will fetch them and then we will be happy for all times, best beloved.’ He let his cheek rest against the wood one moment more then turned and stumbled down the stairs. He could hear her calling his name and the rattle of the door handle as he went.