Cinderella Six Feet Under (4 page)

“Madame, I do understand that you are discomfited by this event. However, I must request that you do not intrude in police investigations. Indeed, I do realize that the gentle sex is prone to fancy, to making correlations where there are none—”

“Applesauce!”

“—but we officers of the police are trained to be
rationale
.”

“What of the coincidence of the perished girl being placed in her own mother's garden? And what, for that matter, are you doing in the way of locating the Marquise Henrietta? I must most emphatically suggest that the two concerns must be related, even, perhaps, interlocking.”

“Madame, I bid you good morning.” Foucher made a stiff bow and dodged out.

Ophelia stared after him. Then she looked at Malbert sitting lumpishly in his chair. “It is an outrage!” she said. “It is almost as though—yes, it is as though the police are deliberately averting their eyes from any evidence that does not fit their theory.
Rationale?
Horsefeathers! That Foucher is a buffoon, or lazy. Or both.”

“Madame Brand, I beg you to calm yourself. Come. Join me for a stroll in the garden. I would be most interested to hear of your charitable work in Boston.”

Ophelia stared at Malbert. Did the recent presence of a corpse in his garden not trouble him in the
least
? All of a sudden, Ophelia made up her mind: it was time to take matters into her own hands. To Tartarus with the police!
She
would discover the dead girl's identity;
she
would learn where Henrietta had gone.

“No, thank you,” Ophelia said to Malbert. “I've just remembered a most pressing engagement.”

She hurried upstairs to her chamber. Prue was snoozing with the cat.

Ophelia cleaned her teeth at the washbasin. Then she dug the Baedeker and her reticule out of her carpetbag, tied on her black taffeta bonnet, and shrugged on her woolen cloak. Downstairs, she found an umbrella and trooped out of the house.

W
hen Prue woke up, the ginger cat was purring on top of her, but Ophelia was gone.

Good.

She struggled to a seat. She seesawed her precious letter, Hansel's letter, out from under the cat and smoothed the puckers. Her eyes roved to the first troubling spot:

I do not wish you to suppose, dear Miss Bright, that when we last parted at Schloss Grunewald we had formed what one might call an understanding. That I hold you in the highest esteem goes, I daresay, without saying. But you are a very young lady, and until I have completed my medical studies and secured a living for myself, I could never presume to consider any lady, however our attachment might be felt or comprehended, as anything but free.

Prue read this line for about the hundred and tenth time. She still wasn't exactly sure she'd caught Hansel's meaning. The line was so cluttered up with commas and genteel words, she didn't know if she had it by the head or by the slick tail. Was he saying they'd have an “understanding”
someday
, in the future? Or was this his way of telling her to scoot off?

Prue fluttered away tears, and reread the letter's second troubling spot:

Frau Beringer
(She was the landlady of Hansel's student boardinghouse in Heidelberg, Germany)
keeps such a spotless house, it is truly a marvel. I do not believe I have met with such a fine housekeeper before, and I hope someday to be the master of such a gracious and meticulous household.

These lines pained Prue, fresh little heart stabbings each time she read them. Prue wouldn't be able to make a
doll's
house gracious and meticulous, let alone a real house. Ma had never taught her how.

Ma. Still missing. Her dead sister, gone forever. And Hansel acting just as sneaky as any other feller.

One fat tear plopped onto the letter. The ink of the word
spotless
blurred.

*   *   *

Ophelia may as
well have been in Timbuktu, for all she knew about Paris. The Baedeker map had a crease straight through Le Marais, the streets ran higgledy-piggledy, and the rain was coming down in buckets. But she found her way to a bustling thoroughfare called Rue de Rivoli. She rechecked the map. Yes. It looked to lead straight to the Louvre. From the Louvre she could walk to Rue le Peletier, where the opera house was.

Because opera houses, Ophelia well knew, were where ballerinas were to be found.

She paid thirty
centimes
for an inside seat in a horse-drawn double decker. She had changed some of her hard-won German money for French at the train station the other day. Inside, the omnibus was entirely taken up by ladies' bobbing crinolines, which was probably why all the gentlemen fled to the open-air upper level despite the rain.

Ophelia rubbed at the foggy window with her fist, but she couldn't see much. Black carriages, black umbrellas, black hats, bare black trees. Tight-packed old buildings with shutters and awnings. Steep roofs, jumbly chimneys, dripping gargoyles.

A queasy half hour passed. When Ophelia saw the looming side of what she guessed was the Louvre, she piled off the omnibus with a bunch of other folks, snapped open her umbrella, and set off on foot.

The opera house, called Salle le Peletier (however you pronounced
that
one) was built of white stone, with rows of pillars and arches and a shining-wet paved square out front.

Ophelia soon discovered that all of the doors at the front of the opera house were locked. Well, they would be. It wasn't even ten o'clock yet. Even a matinee performance wouldn't start for hours.

She paused to look at a big, colorful placard behind glass. The placard said
Cendrillon
—not that she could read French—decorated with ornate scrolls and spirals, interlaced with rats, mice, and lizards. Pretty.

She set off again. Perhaps the stage door was unlocked. She hustled around the corner.

*   *   *

Blubbering over Hansel
had worked up a hunger and thirst in Prue. She stuffed the letter down her bodice, tied on her boots, and repaired her hair. Downstairs, the breakfast salon was empty.

Crackers.

She poked around until she found the kitchen stairs. She tiptoed down.

The housekeeper, Beatrice, was bent at the waist, ramming a broom—
bang
-
bang-bang
!—under a china cupboard and muttering in a scalding whisper.

Prue coughed.

Beatrice spun around. Her jowls were flushed and wisps of gray hair sprouted from her bun. She was shaped like a church bell and she wore a soot-colored gown. A hefty ring of keys hung where her waist would've been. The mansion had only four servants: Beatrice, Baldewyn, the coachman, and the stepsisters' plump, spotty maid, Lulu. It turned out that Ma had fired all the other servants on account of they didn't speak English and they cost too much.

“Oh! Mademoiselle Prudence. You frighten me.” Beatrice's accent was juicy. “These mice make me jump! How I hate them.”

“Me, too.” Prue scratched her suddenly itchy arms. “Is there mice under that cupboard?”

Beatrice curled her lip.
“Oui
.
”

A mouse sprinted out from under the cupboard and across the flagstones, and disappeared into a hole in the chimney corner. A portly cat, balancing on a stool at the hearth, watched the mouse's progress with idle interest.

“What is the matter with these cats?” Beatrice said. “I cannot think how it happens that the mice are never caught! I lay traps with the nicest, most fragrant
fromage
every day, and every day the
fromage
is gone, but the mice are not caught. I bring home cats said to be the fiercest hunters, from the fish market, from alleyways, and what do the cats do? Why, they grow fatter and fatter.
C'est répugnant
.” Beatrice glared at the cat. Then she glared at Prue. “Ladies must not be in kitchen! Go—go!” She shook the broom. Dust and cat hairs billowed up.

“I ain't a lady, ma'am. Look at me.”

Beatrice looked at Prue's calico dress that was losing its dye at the elbows, the shiny-worn toes of her boots. “I have housework to do.”

That
was a snicker. By the looks of the kitchen, Beatrice didn't bother herself much with housework. A dead chicken, still in its spotted feathers, was draped over a chair back. Dirty dishes and pots filled a stone sink on the far wall. The floor didn't bear close scrutiny, what with all the cat fuzz, curls of potato peel, and tiny brown dots that Prue didn't fancy thinking too hard on.

“I wished to ask for a morsel to eat,” Prue said.

“You did not eat breakfast?”

“Slept late.” Prue's eyes fell on an apron, dangling from one of the wall hooks at the bottom of the stairs.

Hold it. Instead of idling away the days waiting for Ma to turn up, well, maybe Prue could learn how to keep a gracious and meticulous household, just like Hansel wished for. She could amaze Hansel—supposing she ever saw him again—with lavender-scented linens or a crispy-brown roast duck with those fancy fruits ringed around.

Beatrice had gone back to mashing her broom under the china cupboard.

“Would you teach me housekeeping, ma'am?” Prue asked. “How to cook up a nice roast fowl, say, or one of them soo-flay things? How to press linens?”

Beatrice screwed her neck around. Her mouth pooched. Skeptical. Yet her eyes gleamed, for some reason, with cunning. “Do you know how to cook?”

“No—but I might learn, and real fast, too. Matter of fact, ma'am, I was, up till just a couple days ago, a scullery maid.”

“We
are
understaffed here,
malheureusement
.” Beatrice twiddled her broom handle. “If I teach you to keep house, to cook . . . you will not tell Monsieur le Marquis?”

“Never. Only thing I won't do, I ought to mention, is work in that vegetable garden out there.”

“
Bon
. The garden is nothing, the silly fancy of the
mademoiselles
, who thought it would be a lark to plant pumpkins.”

“What's so funny about pumpkins?”

“Because this house . . . ah, no matter. You will start by cleaning the china cupboard”—Beatrice swept a hand— “from top to bottom.”

“Really? Oh, thanks something fierce, ma'am!” Prue pulled the apron from its hook.

*   *   *

Gabriel stalked the
ample-hipped auntie around the corner of the Salle le Peletier. The old dame plowed along like an ox.

After Gabriel had been barred from speaking with the Marquis de la Roque-Fabliau, he had directed his driver to wait one block from Hôtel Malbert. He had intended to follow the first member of the household who emerged, insinuate himself into his or her confidence, learn more about Miss Bright's death and, perhaps, gain access to the Marquise Henrietta. The marquise, of all people in Paris, might know of Miss Flax's whereabouts.

Gabriel did not like to admit to himself that his interest in Hôtel Malbert was not
entirely
restricted to Miss Flax and her whereabouts. Nothing in life was quite that simple, was it?

And it had been no easy feat following this auntie—Gabriel assumed that was what she was—from Hôtel Malbert, particularly after he had been forced to instruct his driver to deliver his luggage to his hotel, overpay him, leap onto the rear rail of an omnibus and ride, clinging to a handrail, for a mud-splattered half hour alongside a flock of smirking shop boys.

Auntie barged down Rue Pinon, which ran along the opera house's western side.

Ah. Perhaps she wasn't going to the theater after all; perhaps this was only a shortcut. To a tatting shop, perhaps, or a
pâtisserie
specializing in enormous chocolate
éclairs
.

Hold on a tick. Auntie was disappearing through a side door.

Gabriel followed and found himself in a simple, almost monastic passage. It smelled of damp plaster. The floorboards sighed.

Tallyho. There was Auntie. Trundling down the corridor, folded umbrella tucked beneath her arm.

What
could
the old game hen be doing?

Gabriel hurried after her, passing a gaggle of ballet girls with their hair scraped up in the tight buns only governesses and ballerinas wore.

Auntie launched up a flight of stairs. Piano music floated down the stairwell. A gentleman's voice bellowed rhythmically: “
Un! Deux! Trois!
”

Up went Auntie. Gabriel was four paces behind.

Tracked-in rainwater slicked the steps. Consequently, Gabriel was watching his feet, not the stair above him. Another herd of ballet girls stampeded down the steps—he heard their prattling—but he didn't realize that Auntie had paused on the stair to allow them to pass.

He crashed into her. She lost her balance. The ballet girls squealed. Auntie teetered, and then heaved forward onto a landing, breaking her fall with her hands. Her folded umbrella whipped upwards and caught Gabriel right in the wishbone.

“
Oof
” was all he could say. His mind wiped blank. He toppled onto Auntie.

The ballet girls slipped by, giggling, and hurried down the stairs.

“I
beg
your pardon!” Auntie squirmed beneath Gabriel.

He struggled to right himself. Auntie's enormous, wet, woolen cloak was tangled about his arms.

But—Gabriel froze. What was it about . . . that voice? “You are an American?” he asked.

Auntie went still. Slowly, she twisted her neck to see him.

Beneath that matronly bonnet, her gray hair was oddly askew. Gabriel found himself gazing into a pair of rather beautiful dark eyes.

“Professor Penrose?” she said. Her wig slipped another inch.

“Miss Flax.” Gabriel grabbed the bannister and pulled himself to his feet. His wishbone still throbbed, but his astonishment overrode the pain. He helped Miss Flax to her feet, and though he wished to hold, perhaps, for a moment longer her cold, fine-boned hand in its damp glove, she tugged it free.

“What in Godfrey's green earth are you doing following me, Professor? I believed you were back in England.”

“I was. Forgive me for saying so, Miss Flax, but you appear to be upholstered in not one, but two divans'-worth of cushions.” The absurd disguise hid her regal form. Which was perhaps just as well. Gabriel had spent more minutes than he cared to count attempting to recall the precise arrangement of this young lady's limbs.

“Keeps the rain off,” she said.

“Would it be terribly bothersome if I inquired what, precisely, you are doing backstage at the Paris Opera?”

She compressed her lips.

Miss Bright
. Dead. Something to do with that.

“I beg your pardon,” Gabriel said. “I quite—”

“Tell me what
you're
doing here, Professor. I thought I'd seen the last of you back in Germany. I was glad of it.”

“Oh? I thought I spied a tear or two when we parted.”