City of Light (City of Mystery) (34 page)

And yet they asked
for her.  At the parties and in the streets and cafes.  But where is Isabel,
they would inquire.  They would hope that she was well.  Would he tell her that
they had sent their regards? 

It was a surprising complication,
Armand thought as he wandered through the dark and silent house.  The servants
were still an hour or more from waking, and Marianne would likely doze until
noon.  He called her by her new name exclusively now, for this was an essential
part of the game.  When a person assumed a fresh identity, they must dive in
wholeheartedly, like a sinner seeking rebirth beneath baptismal waters.  None
of this business of calling them one name in private and another in public.  That
made it too easy to make a mistake. 

In fact, learning to
automatically respond to a new name was an adjustment of the mind not unlike
learning to speak a foreign language.  Each time Armand went back and forth
between England and France there was a point – invisible to the naked eye perhaps,
but as real as this brandy glass in front of him now – when he would cease
being English and become French.  One person would recede and the other would step
forward.  Marianne had cried the first time he told her this, and he knew that for
one so young, the adjustment must feel like a death.  She would understand it in
time.  For the parts of our identity that we leave behind are never gone, but
merely sleeping. They can rouse and reassert themselves whenever needed.  What
was it that the philosopher said?  “We cannot change, but we can expand.” 
Anyone with an interesting life knows the truth of this.

Yes, he liked this deepest
time of night, when Marianne was tucked into her bed, the servants had all retreated
behind their closed doors, and the house was still.  He did not light a lamp to
guide his steps, for he had been blessed since boyhood with a gift for seeing
in the dark.  Besides, he did not wish to wake anyone who would feel compelled
to assist him in such minor tasks as refilling his glass or clipping his
cigar.  Armand appreciated solitude and, to his mind, did not get enough of
it.  He pushed open the glass doors and stepped out onto the small balcony
located just off his bedroom, then looked up with approval at the wispy moon. 
He liked Paris as well, especially this time of year.  It would never completely
be his home, but when a man is more than one person, then he must have, by
definition, more than one home.

Armand settled into
a woven chair and put his feet on the unsteady ottoman before him.  He had much
on his mind tonight and may well push through to the first light of dawn. 

Isabel had
disappeared the same night that she’d also, under protest, provided him with an
alibi.  The night they took the detective. So that had been….Armand paused,
blew out an explosion of smoke with a gentle cough.  They were coming into the
third day that she’d been missing.  An unexplained absence of this length was
noteworthy, even for a woman as mercurial as Isabel.  They did not share living
quarters, for she had made it plain that her willingness to accompany him to Paris
was contingent upon her having a home of her own.  In a way, she had always
been as private as he.  But he still had means of monitoring her.  Earlier
today he had slipped her maid a handful of coins and told the old crow to alert
him at once should her mistress return.  Yes, she was to send a messenger even
if it was the middle of the night.

For he simply must
find a way to get Isabel back.  At least for a few months, through the busy
summer of the Exposition, when she would be expected to play hostess at his
salons.  Her role in his success, he was now prepared to admit, was larger than
he would have guessed.  It was Isabel who lent beauty and grandeur to this
business and he supposed, as he paused to consider the situation from a
different angle, that her age could be as much an advantage as not.  The men
seemed reassured by the continuity of her presence. That was why they all asked
about her, even when they were standing on the sidewalks in front of their
places of business, churches, opera houses, the homes they shared with their
wives.  She was the one who stood proof that it was possible to sustain the
game for years. Proof that it could be sustained at even the highest levels of
society.  A woman come from Mayfair, the sort who had been painted by Whistler.

Ah, Whistler.  Armand
tilted back his head, stared again at the moon.  His nice, tidy little world
had begun to unravel on the very day that James Whistler had first been
commissioned to paint a portrait of Isabel Blout.

And the bitch of it
all was that it had been his idea.

The Whistler
portrait had been intended as the apex of their triumph.  The chance to see
Isabel standing there in clothing worth as much as the house she’d grown up in,
the most beautiful and desired woman in London, the paragon of society wives.
She had understood the joke at once.  Her lips had twisted in that ironic smile
he knew so well.   Even George Blout had favored the notion.  So nervous and
skittish in the beginning, so afraid someone would guess the unlikely truth
about him and his remarkable young wife. But having gone years without
detection had given him confidence and brought an old man’s deeply buried resentments
to the surface, until even George had been willing to enter into their sport. What
a chance to thumb their noses to the society which had so long rejected them,
or, much worse, the hypocrites who came calling at some times and snubbed them
at others.

Isabel in a Whistler. 
The perfect jest indeed.

What Armand
Delacroix and George Blout had both failed to anticipate was that Isabel would
befriend the painter.  It had occurred to Armand, and most likely to George as
well, that she might seduce him, for Isabel seduced instinctively, with no more
effort than it took her to breathe.   A liaison between Isabel and James
Whistler might even have proven useful at some point in the future, for the
painter’s social connections were impeccable, far surpassing those of Armand. 
But a friendship between the two – who could have foreseen that, and the
consequences it would wreck upon them all?

She had evidently
shown Whistler some sketches, rough drawings she had stubbornly dragged with
her from the early days of her youth. Those smudged pictures were the only
thing that could still connect her to Manchester and she held them as a
barrister holds evidence, for some ongoing trial that she was conducting
exclusively in her mind. 

But when Isabel had
shown them to Whistler, he had proclaimed her to be talented. Even the
revelation of her great secret had not dissuaded him from wanting to help her.
Who knows, it may have even charmed him more, artists being a uniquely tolerant
lot.  Whistler had accepted Isabel, in all her forms, as an acolyte, and he had
stood beside her at the easel, guiding her hand through the motions, teaching
her the differences between light and shadow.  Shadow was the hard part, he
told her. Once you mastered that, everything else in the picture became clear.
They worked together two mornings a week, at a set time of ten in the morning. 
He took the appointment seriously.  He was never late.   

In short, James
Whistler had given Isabel Blout the one thing no other man had ever attempted
to give her: respect.   

And it turned out,
unlikely of unlikelies, that this is what she had truly wanted all her life.

For after only a few
weeks under the artist’s tutelage she had announced to both her husband and
Armand that, in her words, “This charade is over.  I am simply no longer
prepared to sustain it.”

Blout had panicked. 
There was no telling how far she would push this, how many subsequent revelations
would come from the first.  For Isabel was no longer herself.  She had taken to
roaming the parks of London dressed as a man.  Drawing people, sometimes with
Whistler at her side and sometimes alone.  Her fingertips were perpetually
stained, colors driven beneath the nails and crusted around her cuticles.  She
envisioned herself to be a budding artist, whose talent would dazzle the masses
and allow her entrance into the sort of bohemian circle that would accept and
celebrate her unorthodox past.

All she wanted, as she
repeatedly said to any man who asked her and to quite a few who did not, was to
be herself.

But that, of course,
was the one thing she could not be.

Whistler panicked too. 
It was a fine thing to play at being professor and pupil two mornings a week, and
he had come to care for the girl.  But his livelihood came not from a bohemian
circle of artists but rather from the British upper class.  He did not wish to
abdicate his profitable role as a society portraitist for the dubious
distinction of being the man who had discovered the hidden talents of Isabel
Blout. 

It fell to Armand to
reason with her, as indeed it always had.  She would not always have to play
the game, he told her, but she simply must play it a bit longer. The official
story would be that Isabel ran off to Paris with Armand, a tale most people
would readily believe.  He was, after all, a handsome man close to her own age
and London had been expecting Isabel to abandon George Blout for years.  Wifely
desertion may be scandalous, but it is scandal of a tolerable sort.  George’s
social circle would tsk about it over the soup course at their next dinner party,
and then, with the arrival of the fish, they would move on to tsk about
something else.  

Granted, the portrait
itself was a bit of a hot potato. The truth was built right into it, visible to
anyone who had the eyes to look.  The artist did not wish to see it destroyed –
and nor would any sensitive person who had ever gazed upon its rather
remarkable brand of beauty.  But Whistler understood, as did George Blout, that
a portrait like this was best shepherded into a private collection where it
would never be widely viewed.  It was not to be a pearl before swine but rather
a pearl displayed in a very precise sort of setting.

And so it was mutually
decided that Isabel would go to Paris with Armand.  She would pose as his lover
and use her beauty and charm to help him establish a Parisian branch of his
business.  Even before the disaster at Cleveland Street, the opportunities in London
had been paling, and Armand had vowed not to make the same mistakes in Paris.  He
would not throw the net so wide.  Not a brothel this time with dozens of men
coming and going, but rather just a few very specialized procurements for the
wealthy.  All Isabel would have to do is help him through the Exposition, when
there was so much money to be made and then, then…

Then she could go
where she pleased and do whatever she wished. Vienna. San Francisco. Calcutta. Pretoria.
Milan.  It was all the same to Armand.  He would give her money and he would
give her freedom. She could take Henry with her if she wished.  

Armand had most
sincerely meant this promise.  He and Isabel had been together in this quest
from the beginning and he could have done none of it without her.  It was not
his intent to keep her in eternal thralldom and he would release her from any
obligation once the Exhibition had passed.  From there she could call herself
whatever name she chose, paint whatever she wished, speak whatever truth moved
her, travel to any city that beckoned. 

As long as it wasn’t
London or Paris.

Armand sipped his
brandy.  It had been a good plan, but now it had all somehow fallen apart. The
table had been tipped and any bets which had been placed on it had slid to the
floor, cancelled forever.

For Paris was a
changed place from just a year ago.  Too many reporters and far too many
lawmen.  He could not fault himself for failing to predict Isabel’s
transformation at the hands of Whistler, for that had been a true stroke of
fate, but Armand knew he should have seen this part coming.  He should have
anticipated that as the Exposition neared it would bring not only money, but
scrutiny.  Newspapers from all over the world had sent writers hungry for
stories, determined to find some angle on the fair that had not yet been
explored.  Nations sent not only their jewels, their art, their scientific
advancements, but also men to guard these assets – defenders of every sort,
from police captains in uniform to Mafia thugs.  No movement in Paris went
unmonitored, no aberration escaped analysis. 

All the fuss made it
rather difficult for a man to conduct his business.

Armand Delacroix had
spies of his own, so he had known of Rayley’s arrival within days of the man
setting foot in France.  On a rational basis, he knew it was unlikely that Scotland
Yard had sent a detective to net a small fish such as himself, a man whose only
crime was transporting young whores across the channel to meet the burgeoning
needs of Paris.  Isabel had told him he was being foolish. There was no reason
to believe that Scotland Yard either knew or cared that Armand Delacroix and
Charles Hammond were the same person or that the pretty boy from Manchester had
grown into a man of international business.

Which was all most
likely true, at least last autumn, when Rayley Abrams had blown into Paris on a
cool wind.  Armand’s informants had reported that Rayley was merely working in
the forensic lab, studying methodology with the French police.  Autumn had
turned to winter, and winter to spring, with the tower ever rising and Armand’s
coffers growing fatter.  For if procuring sexual entertainment for gentlemen
was a profitable business, it could not compare to the profit potential of
blackmail.