Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (82 page)

The sound of a footstep slightly off the rhythm of her own pulled her out of her thoughts and made her certain that someone was indeed following her, someone far more skilled than the lumpy character in the badly-cut suit. She didn’t look around and kept her pace even. At the next corner, she turned quickly, ducking into the first available doorway, that of a grotty hole-in-the-wall bar. The figure came around the corner and she grabbed her erstwhile stalker by the collar, at which it let out an undignified stream of gutter French, impressive both for its invective and array. A delicate and rather grubby face looked up at her and then spat just to the left of her feet. Pamela merely tightened her hold on the frayed collar of its overly-large coat.

“Why are you following me?”

The child looked a touch startled to be addressed in its own tongue.

“Why do you think I am following you? Maybe I am just going the same way as you.”

“I saw you loitering by the gates of the house I’m staying in, earlier.” She had not seen anyone but suspected that the child had to have been waiting for her there in order to have picked up her trail so quickly.

The child rolled its eyes with great Gallic insouciance. “I am to watch where you go and to deliver you to a certain place when the time is right, Mam’selle.” Liquid brown eyes just visible in the glow of the street lantern gazed up into hers in challenge.

“Who hired you to follow me? And where is it you are to deliver me?”

“The priest. He was very tall—and his French was good.
Il est Irlandais
.”

“An Irish priest asked you to follow me?”

“
Oui
, Madame. He was kind and fed me with hot soup before sending me out into the night.” The liquid brown eyes beseeched and the narrow frame within the coat sagged just a bit. Pamela knew the child was about to bolt given half a chance.

“You can ease up on the Parisian urchin act. What is your name?”

“Henri.” This was said stoutly.

Pamela pulled off the blue toque the child wore and a long dark plait fell over one shoulder and down the back of the worn coat.

“Henri, hmm?”

“Heloïse,” the child mumbled, “but I am as good as any boy could ever be at my work.”

“I don’t doubt that you are. Come with me. We’ll find something hot to drink and you can tell me just what the Irish priest looked like and where you’re to take me.”

They found a small café in one of those crooked streets that still exist in tucked away corners of Paris. Pamela ordered a pot of hot chocolate for the child and herself, as well as a plate of sticky pastries for Heloïse. In the light of the café and without the woolen cap, Heloïse looked ridiculously young, clearly no more than twelve, with a gamine face and the sort of delicate features and clear olive-toned skin that could only belong to a French girl. Her eyes dominated her face, long thick lashes delineating them as boldly as a stroke of ink from an artist’s hand. She was, despite the overly large and bulky coat, quite small and hungry, for the bones of her face lay a little too close to the surface of her skin.

Pamela waited until the child had devoured the pastries and two cups of chocolate before quizzing her.

“So this Irish priest—describe him if you would.”

Heloïse swallowed down her last mouthful of chocolate. “He was, like I said, tall. His hair was black and white. He was kind and I do not think he meant you any harm. In fact, it seemed to me, Madame, that he knew you.”

“And where did he ask you to deliver me?”

“To the cathedral, but not until tomorrow night. I was to follow you today and tonight and make sure that you weren’t being followed by anyone else.” She looked longingly at the empty pot. Pamela glanced over at the waiter who was lounging against the bar, talking to the pretty proprietor’s daughter. He nodded at her and brought another pot of chocolate to the table a few moments later.

“Which cathedral?” Pamela asked when the waiter had returned to flirting with the owner’s daughter.

“Notre Dame, of course,” Heloïse said sniffily, as if there were only one cathedral worth mentioning in Paris’ church-clogged environment.

From the child’s description, it sounded as though the priest was none other than Father Lawrence, a man whom she trusted. He had been one of the most influential men in Jamie’s life, having had the teaching of him as a boy. A priest of the Jesuit order, he had been a firm hand and guiding light for Jamie during dark times in his life. Father Lawrence had loved the boy Jamie had been and loved the man he had become as one would a son. She was curious about why he was having her followed but supposed all would be revealed, or rather, being that she was dealing with Jesuits, what he wanted revealed would be so tomorrow night.

“This other man who was following me, what did he look like?” She hoped it was the one in the ill-fitting suit because any more than two people hired to follow her for four days in Paris was an excess of intrigue in her books.

Heloïse assumed a very Gallic loftiness. “
Pah
, he was so obvious I’m sure you knew he was following you. He did not blend in well at all but perhaps he did not cost
la peau des fesse
to those who hired him. Once you started trying on dresses he gave up quickly. By the way, the black dress was lovely but I hope you also bought the green silk organza. The brown was all wrong for you. I do not know what the shop girl was thinking. It drained all the color from your face.”

“I did buy both—the black and the green that is.” Only in France would the urchin following one also be well versed in fashion and not timid about sharing her opinions on the subject.

They left a little while later, after Heloïse had polished off the second pot of chocolate and Pamela had bought her two croissants for her breakfast.

Outside the fog was gathering in delicate filaments, the grey silk fog of Paris that seemed to spool out of the ancient stonework and up from the twisting arteries of her streets rather than being manufactured in the air.

Heloïse stood for a moment, a subtle hesitation in her manner that Pamela had seen before and recognized for what it was.

“Do you have a home to go to?”

“Of course I do,” the girl said, tossing her plait as though insulted by the notion.

“Do you?” Pamela insisted.

The brown eyes met her own with a disarming candor. “Most nights I do. My family are
bateliers
and we live on a
peniche
. You understand?”

She did. The
bateliers
were Paris’ boat people who lived on boats from the ‘20s and ‘30s and plied their trade on the broad highway of the Seine delivering thousands of tonnes of goods: sand, coal, gravel, flour, potatoes, fuel oil and other staples of life upon land. They were a breed apart, floating gypsies who kept to their own tribe and lived on the knife edge of continual poverty.

“When we are in harbor in Paris I sleep on the boat. When the boat is away I sometimes choose to stay on land until my father returns.”

“When you stay on land where is it you sleep?” Pamela asked.

Heloïse shrugged, tucking her long plait underneath her wool cap. “Here and there.”

Pamela had her suspicions just what ‘here and there’ meant, and it did little to quell her sense of worry over the child. She had seen the haunts of children without homes, both here and in Belfast, and knew the frightening desperation that could come when one did not have a place to lay one’s head when night fell.

“It is alright, Madame,” Heloïse said. “Tonight I have a place to go. I will sleep warm and safe.”

“How did you know what I was thinking?”

“You have a most expressive face, Madame.” Heloïse smiled and then slipped off into the crooked streets, her slim form disappearing around the corner of a three-storied building, one second visible and the next gone as though she had only been an illusion.

True to her word, Heloïse, hair still artfully hidden
beneath her wool cap, appeared at the back door of the house the next evening just as twilight was settling into the walls and gardens of the city.

“We go now, Madame,” she said, neck pulled down into the collar of her coat, for it was cold, the air thick with fog and the scent of impending snow.

Pamela, well wrapped up in a wool peacoat with a scarf wound around her throat and partly muffling her face, followed the child out into the night. The streets were eerily quiet, their footsteps echoing off the pavement. She had a sudden vision of what Casey would have to say if he knew she was traipsing off after a street urchin on the assumption the Irish priest of whom she spoke was indeed Father Lawrence. It didn’t bear thinking about, so she wisely put the thought away.

It was a long brisk walk and even though her legs were twice as long as those of Heloïse, Pamela had to half run to keep up. But within the hour Notre Dame loomed up out of the spectral fog. On such a night as this one could almost hear the ghostly tolling of Quasimodo’s beloved bells and feel the medieval walls of the city rise once again out of the past. It was one of those places on the earth, rare, where something seemed to be in the very soil, something sacred that ran in currents inside the earth and hummed beneath a person’s feet so that it was unmistakable in its power. Before the great cathedral had been erected this site had been home to a pagan temple and before that there was evidence that Druids had once worshipped within a long-vanished grove of trees. Here Crusaders had bowed their heads and prayed before setting off to sack and pillage in the Holy Land. Here, too, the head of the mystic Knights Templar had been burned at the stake, as he had cursed both King and Pope, inviting them to join him at the gates of heaven—which both had obligingly done within mere months. Here, De Gaulle had knelt in thanksgiving after the liberation of Paris in WWII. Here was the center of France, from which all distances were measured.

Beyond lay the twisting grey-green ribbon of the Seine and the lights of the city. But here on this November night, they might have been swept back to an altogether earlier time, pilgrims on the road to worship, coming to tender their prayers to Saint Genevieve.

The cold and the hour had kept even the faithful to a minimum this night. The long shining marble expanse of the great aisle stretched before them. Above, the soaring ribbed vaults lay thick in shadow. Heloïse seemed Gallicly unimpressed by the grandeur and history. She led Pamela to a bank of candles to the left of the altar, dropped coins into the cup and took flame to light a candle. She looked terribly young in the soft light as she dropped to her knees.

“You do not pray?” she said, small face stern. Pamela knelt beside the child, dropped her own coins in the cup, and lit a candle. It was natural to pray then, for the Cathedral would take one’s words upwards so that they might fly toward God. Time dissolved and she felt that strange, still atmosphere that came rarely in life, as though one were suspended in a cocoon of no earthly making. She was startled when a gentle hand touched her shoulder and she looked up into Father Lawrence’s rough but reassuring face.

“I’m sorry for the subterfuge, my dear, but it is necessary, as you know.”

She stood, glancing at Heloïse. The child’s head was still bent in earnest prayer and Pamela was certain she would come to no harm here within the precincts of the Church. She turned and followed Father Lawrence’s black-garbed form, their feet tap-tapping against the marble floor.

“You will forgive the drama of the meeting place,” Father Lawrence said over his shoulder, “but it seemed best to choose somewhere public that can also provide private corners.”

The ambulatory in which they walked was lit with dozens upon dozens of candles, giving it the feel of a long closed honey-comb lined with amber. They walked the entire length of it, encountering only one other person, a priest who nodded and passed them without words.

They stepped out into the dark and she followed him to where a small gate closed off a garden. The church loomed up behind, the flying buttresses and sharp Gothic spire lost in the fog. She shivered. One could feel the stare of the stone gargoyles even through the dark night. She followed Father Lawrence through the gate into a long narrow area, where bare-branched maples were dewed with pearls of fog.

“This is where I leave you,” Father Lawrence said, and patted her shoulder before disappearing back through the gate. She was startled, believing Father Lawrence was the man she was meant to meet. Immediately she was aware of another presence and it drew her to the far end of the narrow garden as though she were an iron filing in the face of a magnet. He was seated on a bench and she knew who he was before he uttered a word. Giacomo Brandisi, the beekeeper, the Black Pope—the head of the Jesuit Order. He rose from the bench, a tendril of fog lifting from his shoulders, filling the entire garden with his presence, emanating power and something more, something that felt a great deal like grace.

“Please, come sit with me,” he said, his voice warm and steadying to her knees. Raised in the Catholic Church and still familiar with Catholic guilt, she could not help but have a dreadful case of nerves.