A Tangled Web (22 page)

“Oh, the desk,” Stephanie said, choosing a piece at random. “It looks very old.”

“Seventeen-thirty, perhaps -forty. The construction of the drawers and the curve of the legs . . .” She pulled open a drawer and Stephanie bent to look. The dusty smell of the wood enveloped her and suddenly she felt dizzy. Without thinking, she knelt on the floor and ran her hand over the smooth wood of the legs and around the carvings
of the feet, like a blind person identifying features. “It's in very fine condition,” she said at last, standing up.

“Yes.” The woman was peering at her closely. “Madame knows something about furniture?”

“No, I don't know anything, but I'd like to. I like old pieces, working with them, arranging them . . .” She moved to a bureau and touched a candelabrum centered on it. Fanciful animals played at its base and its arms stretched upward like tree branches, holding eleven candles. “Can you tell me about this? And what it costs?”

“It was made by Ladatte, about 1770. As you see, it is gilt bronze and the candles seem to rise out of flowers. It is a favorite piece of mine; its twin is in the Palazzo Reale in Turin.”

“And the price?”

“Fifty thousand francs, madame.”

Stephanie touched the candelabrum again. “Is that a good price?”

The woman smiled. “It is a very rare piece.”

Stephanie turned. “And it will be perfect for someone's home, and then cost will not be an issue.”

“As madame says.” They shared a smile. “Is there anything else I can tell you, madame?”

“Oh, I want to know about everything. I love this place, just being here . . . I never want to leave.”

She looked everywhere, her gaze coming to rest on a coat tree hung with boldly designed tablecloths in brilliant yellows and blues, ochers and splashes of vermilion. “Would you let me work here?” she asked abruptly. “I'd do anything, whatever you need, and I know I could learn, I'm
sure
I could learn and be useful, and I want to be here so much; I want it more than—” She saw Max pushing open the door and lowered her voice. “Well, I don't really know if I could . . . I mean, I'd have to ask . . . someone, but if I could work here, would you let me?”

The woman watched Max walk toward them; then she turned her back to him, facing Stephanie as if forming an alliance. “I wish I could, madame. I like you very much,
but you see I have two women who help me now and I cannot afford anyone else, especially someone I must train. I am truly sorry. Perhaps you would wish to ask me again in a few months. Who knows? Something may have changed.”

Max heard the last few words. “Ask what in a few months?” he asked Stephanie.

“If I can work here.”

“Why?”

“Because I love it, I love being here . . .” She was holding back tears, feeling as if a door, briefly opened on enchantment, had swung shut. “I don't have anything to do, Max, and I want to do something, and it would be so wonderful if I could work here . . .”

“Just here, or anywhere?”

“Just here.”

“There are other shops.”

“Not like this one.”

“You said you would redesign our house, buy new furniture; that should keep you busy for a long time.”

“I can still do that. But I want to be here, too.”

“I'd rather you were at home. Now that you can drive, you can visit other towns, buy anything you want for the house and for yourself. There's no need for you to work.”

“Oh, you're talking about money. I'm talking about something else. I want to work. I want to work here.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. What difference does it make? Max, I want this so much. Is it that you don't want me to work? Why shouldn't I? I'd like to find something I'm really good at, something I can be proud of. It really isn't the money, you know; I'd work for nothing just to be here.”

There was a silence. Max looked past her, seeing nothing of the shop, seeing instead Ambassadors, Sabrina Longworth's shop in London. He had considered from the time she was in the hospital the possibility that she would regain her memory, and he had worked out several scenarios for dealing with that if it happened, all of them built around the
central fact that there had been a bomb on his yacht and he—and probably she, too—had been the target.

He did not know how much she had known of the forged porcelains that had been a private sideline for Ivan Lazlo and Rory Carr, who had worked in his smuggling operation; for some time he had not known himself. He wondered if Sabrina had unknowingly bought one of the forgeries and then found out about it; if she had, and if she then confronted Lazlo or Carr, they would have been delighted to get rid of both Max and Sabrina with the same bomb. But it did not really matter if she had known something or not: she was with him and therefore Carr and Lazlo probably thought she was a danger to them, too.

He could tell her that much: that she had been a target because of him. But he could not explain why he did not want her to work in a public place, even in a town as small as Cavaillon, the center of the region's melon farming, not a place where tourist buses or hordes of visitors came in the summer.

Because he had realized, soon after they moved there, that they were not home free after all. As long as there was no body of Max Stuyvesant, whoever actually set the bomb would be wondering whether he really was dead. And looking for him.

He could not tell her that because she knew nothing of Max Stuyvesant. She did not know that Max Lacoste had dyed his hair and grown a beard to go with his new name, and lived more quietly than ever before and avoided places popular with English tourists. There was no reason for her to know any of that. But now she was asking him for something that seemed so simple he did not know how to continue to refuse. Something had broken free of the locked rooms of her amnesia and brought her here. Inwardly he shrugged. One more risk. And it will please her.

“Well, madame,” he said to the proprietor, who had walked a few steps away to give them privacy, “my wife seems to want to be an apprentice in your shop. For no salary. That eliminates the problem of your payroll. I
would expect, however, that you would reopen the discussion of a salary in six months or so, when you both know what she can do.”

Stephanie looked at him with such gratitude that the woman drew in her breath. What made a beautiful young woman so dependent on a man? She stood before him, her face as eager as a child's, her body bent forward slightly as if she could draw from him the answer she longed for. There is no way I can say no, the woman thought; I have to help her get away from her husband, if only for a few hours a day.

“It would give me great pleasure to have you here, madame,” she said. “My name is Jacqueline Lapautre; you will call me Jacqueline and I am sure we will work together in perfect harmony.”

“Oh.” Stephanie's breath came out in a long sigh. She held out her hand. “Sabrina Lacoste. Thank you, thank you; I'll do anything you want. Could I come every day?”

“Two days a week would be sufficient,” Max said.

Jacqueline glanced at him. “For stability and continuity, monsieur, it would be best if Sabrina came in every day for a few hours.”

“Well, we'll try it for a month. I want you at home for lunch, Sabrina.”

Stephanie's eyes met Jacqueline's; then she looked at Max. “I can't do that if I'm working. But you said you'd be traveling more . . . and we'll still have dinner . . . and breakfast. That's really quite enough, Max.”

“Is it,” he said. “Make your arrangements, then; I'll be in the car, just down the street.”

When he was gone, the two women looked at each other. “He wants to protect me,” Stephanie said.

Jacqueline smiled. “To my knowledge, there are no threats here.” She held out her hands and Stephanie took them. “Welcome, my dear. I think we are going to have a very good time.”

S
abrina climbed down from the ladder in the window of Collectibles and adjusted the antique lace curtains she had just hung from a rod at the ceiling. They filtered the April sunlight streaming through the glass, patterning the Italian silk armchair and needlepoint footstool she had placed in front of them. She contemplated the arrangement, then brought a heavy bronze Art Deco lamp to a spot beside the chair.

“Oh, Stephanie, I like that,” Madeline Kane said, coming from the back room. She was small and slender, with a thin, delicate face dominated by sharp black eyes. “I wouldn't have thought they'd go together at all.”

“It still needs something. What did we do with those old eyeglasses someone brought in last month?”

“They're on the Louis Quinze desk, aren't they? I'll get them.”

When she brought them back, Sabrina hung them over the arm of the chair, their round, spidery wire frames and glass lenses glinting in the sun. “And a book,” she murmured, and went into the shop and found an 1870 leather-bound
copy of
Alice in Wonderland
with faded gilt lettering and frayed edges. “Stephanie and I loved this book,” she murmured, and leafed through it until she found a page she liked, then laid it on the seat of the chair, opened to an illustration of Alice and the Caterpillar.

“What did you say?” Madeline asked.

“Oh, I was just talking to myself. I loved this book when I was growing up and I was thinking that I haven't read it in years. I'm not even sure Penny and Cliff have read it. I'll ask them.” She glanced at her watch. “I've got to change and get out of here; how did it get so late?”

“You were having fun. I like what you've done; it's so cozy I could move right in.”

Sabrina laughed. “You're our best customer.” She heard the telephone. “I'll get it; I'm going back there anyway.”

At the refectory table they used as a desk in the back room she picked up the telephone.

“Stephanie, it's Brian.”

“Oh.” It took her a minute to switch from Evanston to London, from Collectibles to Ambassadors. “Brian, I'm running late; can I call you back?”

“I just wondered when you'd be coming to see us.”

“I've been thinking about it; in fact, I'd planned on coming in February, but I couldn't get away. Is anything wrong?”

“I think it might be a good idea for you to pay us a visit. It is your shop, you know. I mean, I'm sure you're busy with your own life, but you said you'd be able to handle both, and if you expect me to manage here and deal with Nicholas—”

“Just a minute.” They're not getting along, she thought, and Brian is working himself up to hysteria, and who knows what Nicholas is working himself up to? “Brian, I'll be there; I'm just not sure when. I'll call you tomorrow; I'm sure we can handle this over the telephone, whatever it is.”

“Stephanie, I really would prefer it if you were here.”

I can't get away; I have too much to do.
This had happened in February, when she had told Garth she was going to London: everything in Evanston had tugged at her and so she had canceled her plans. I'll go in March, she had thought, but that was the month she began the Koner Building, and so March had come and gone. And now it was April and Brian said he needed her and all she felt was impatience with his demands.

It occurred to her, as it had before, that it might be a good idea to sell Ambassadors and cut her ties to London altogether. But immediately she thought, No, not yet. Some time in the future, maybe, but not yet. It's too soon. I want to know they're there for me.

She was ashamed of the thought and pushed it away. It was too soon to decide anything; there was plenty of time. But for now, with Brian's voice rising in anguish, she could not turn her back on her shop and on Blackford's, Nicholas's shop. “I'll do my best to get there, Brian. I have a project here. Can you wait a couple of weeks?”

There was a pause. “If absolutely necessary.”

“Good heavens, Brian, all these intimations of disaster . . . I can't imagine that you'll be unable to cope with Nicholas or anything else for two more weeks. I rely on you for your skill and ingenuity, you know.”

“Well. Yes, of course. I do know that. I'll do my best. When do you think—”

“I don't know. I'll call you when I've decided.”

In the dressing room she and Madeline had carved out of their work space, she washed her face and hands, pulled off her blue jeans and sweatshirt and opened the small overnight bag she had brought to work that morning. In a few minutes she came out wearing a red tweed suit and a pale gray silk blouse. “I'll be back at two,” she said as she walked past the refectory table where Madeline sat, a sandwich and a thermos in front of her.

“Have a good lunch.”

Sabrina caught the wistful note in her voice and turned
back. “Am I keeping you from something you wanted to do?”