Chapter 19
19
22 NOVEMBER
The key turns and I push the door slowly open, and of course it makes the obligatory horror movie-esque squeal. Manon crashes into the back of me in her rush to get in, but I’m frozen to the spot.
‘ Mon Dieu ,’ is all I manage.
‘It’s a… secret library?’ Manon asks, pushing my lower back so I have no choice but to trip into the suite. Every wall is lined with bookshelves that are double and triple stacked with books. ‘I think your wish for a fully stocked library just came true,’ Manon whispers, her voice full of awe.
‘ Oui. There are so many!’
Under the window is an ornate antique bed, the thick quilt lifted back as if someone just woke up and pushed it to one side. I inch closer. E. M. Foster’s novel A Passage to India lies face-down on a bedside table – did whoever lived here not get to finish reading it? For some reason, that tugs at my heart. I suppose chances are that we’ll all leave this mortal coil somewhere in the middle of an unfinished book, which makes me strangely sad. I lift it and check the publication date. It appears to be a first edition from 1924, so that means the guest came here sometime after that date…
In the middle of the room is a desk, cluttered and stacked with piles of paper. Novels. Dictionaries in various languages and a few gold-bound encyclopaedias.
The bookshelves are bowed with the weight of so many tomes, and the parquetry below them has stacks of books, as if they’ve spilled off the shelves over the years.
We’re all silent as we take in the spectacle before us. It’s like a time capsule going back to another era. I move to the shelves and run a finger along the spines of the leatherbound books. What would these be worth? While they’re in disorderly dusty piles, they’re in immaculate condition. I breathe them in, the scent of bygone times. Do I really want to share these special tomes with others? Part of me can’t imagine disturbing one single thing in this room. It feels special, somehow. Like the occupant just stepped out for a moment…
Noah goes to the old-fashioned rolltop desk that’s been left open and says, ‘Do you mind if I—’ He points to a drawer.
I don’t want to miss a thing, so I step around spilled piles of books and join him. ‘Go for it.’
The drawer is full of notebooks. He takes one and flips it open to find neat cursive writing, so curly that it’s hard to decipher. ‘Any idea who wrote it?’ I ask, reading over his shoulder. I can’t tell if it’s a journal or a manuscript.
‘ Non , I’m not sure.’ We each take a notebook and read, looking for some clue as to who stayed in this suite. The only sound is the rustling of paper as we turn the pages.
‘Found something,’ Noah says. ‘She writes that she’s escaped her husband and is relieved she won’t ever need to write under the pseudonym any more. She doesn’t go into much more detail, only that she hopes that he doesn’t find her.’
I gasp. ‘So the rumour is true? A mysterious writer from the twenties lived here, at L’Hotel du Parc!’
‘It could be. She was clearly a “woman of letters”, as they were so dubbed back then.’
I remember that day back in La Closerie des Lilas when Noah told us what he knew about the writer. ‘Didn’t you say she assumed another name when she moved to the hotel?’
‘ Oui , that’s what the previous hotelier told me. But does that mean she took another pseudonym, or a whole new identity?’
‘And why? To escape her husband, as she mentions?’
‘Must be.’
‘The plot thickens.’
Noah gently flicks the pages, looking for more details.
I take stock of the novels on the desk, wondering if our mystery guest penned any of them. I find an edition of Gigi by Colette, and under a stack of typed papers, there’s a copy of Chérie by the same mononymously known author. My heart stops for a moment. ‘It couldn’t be Colette, could it? A French icon famous for writing about love and sensuality who was well ahead of her time and lived what was considered a scandalous life back then…’
‘Let me check.’ Manon takes her phone and types. ‘ Non . It says Colette was living at number 9 Rue de Beaujolais in an apartment at the Palais Royal at the time of her death in 1954.’ She pockets her phone.
‘What a place to live.’ Very rarely apartments at the Palais Royal are offered for sale, but when they are there’s a hefty price tag attached for such a prestigious address.
Noah nods. ‘Colette’s life was well documented. She wrote semi-autobiographical books, and didn’t shy away from society. Plus, she didn’t write under a pseudonym.’
‘ Oui .’ I’m surprised at Noah’s knowledge about our infamous French author. ‘Have you read Colette’s work?’
‘Most of them.’ He shrugs. ‘I’m a fan of literature of that era.’
Manon sidles up to him. ‘So you wouldn’t read an Anais De la Croix novel then? Too modern for your tastes?’
‘Never say never. I’ll read anything.’
I bristle at his use of the word ‘anything’, as if in desperate times a book written by me would suffice. ‘How sweet,’ I say with a wooden smile. ‘As much as I’d love to explore every inch of this time capsule, I think it’s best we press on with our hotel work, so if you can find your way out?—?’
Noah’s face falls. ‘Of course. Thank you for sharing this room with me.’ He puts a hand on his heart and gazes around once more as if taking it all in to consider later. ‘I’d really like to help you investigate further.’
‘ Merci , but that won’t be necessary. However, if you don’t mind keeping your knowledge of this private, I’d be grateful. I’m not sure I’m ready to share this with the world yet.’ This room is special, not only because of the beautiful disorderly books but because there’s a real sense of a secret being kept inside these walls. A secret that I also feel is not mine to tell.
‘My lips are sealed.’
After he goes, Manon confronts me, eyes ablaze, arms akimbo. ‘Anais! That was rude. Why are you so prim and proper around him? You remind me of my maman , the way you’re acting. Pursed lips, huffy faced.’
‘Why did you bully him to come over here?’
Her eyebrows pull together. ‘Without Noah, we wouldn’t have the key for this suite, and he’s a word nerd, it’s practically tattooed across his forehead. Why wouldn’t you two literature lovers want to share in this musty, dusty find? While this space is intriguing, it’s also a little drab and boring for my tastes, so I figured he’d be the man for you. The person you could run to when you want to obsess over every little detail. Details, I might admit, that I would personally find excruciatingly boring to hear on repeat for the next lot of forever.’
I blow a lock of hair from my face. ‘You didn’t know what we’d find here, Manon, so how can any of that be true?’
‘I had an inkling. And my heart, my soft squishy heart, hoped for the best for you. And my suspicions were correct, were they not? You’ve unlocked a secret library, an office hidden for however long, and now you can share it with the ink drinker next door, and leave your poor overburdened cousin out of exclaiming about every word you unearth here. While you’re doing that, I’ll get back to doing menial labour.’
‘I see what you’re doing, Manon, and it isn’t going to work. Don’t forget, I’m a romance writer’ – suffering from crippling writer’s block, but still – ‘I can see a forced proximity ploy a mile away. This suite is a delightful, delicious literary mystery. Or it might well turn out to contain the mutterings of a reclusive woman who despised people and preferred to live out her days holed up in L’Hotel du Parc and, honestly, I can relate. But you putting Noah in my way isn’t going unnoticed. And can’t you see it’s having the opposite effect? Did you hear the way he said he would read anything? As if a book written by me would be… tedious but doable, because he’s so book smart and well read or something. Urgh, the man is pretentious.’
Manon takes a seat at the desk. ‘How is that pretentious? I took it to mean he’ll give any genre a go.’
‘You’re clearly not familiar with anti-romance bias. I am, and I can detect it a mile away. Men like Noah hate the fact that women write empowering stories where heroines take the lead and win against the ways in which they’re often oppressed.’
‘Not this oppression talk again.’ She groans and makes a show of dropping her head on the desk when there’s a clunk. ‘ Aie ! That hurt.’ Manon rubs her forehead while I move the stacks of papers to see what left a bump the size of a grape on her brow.
‘ Ooh la la it’s a typewriter!’ I practically hip and shoulder Manon from the chair so I can inspect it up close. It has a gold MAP logo and is an exquisite piece of history. ‘There’s a sheet of paper in the reel!’
‘What does it say?’
Keep my soul in peace. Keep my last manuscript safe.
A shiver runs through the length of me and, for some strange and possibly stupid reason, I wish Noah was here to see this.
Manon’s eyes sparkle with sudden interest. ‘Her last words?’
‘It certainly sounds like it. And someone, maybe the affluent family who owned the hotel through the generations, preserved the two suites, just as they were. Actively went to great lengths to hide them. Why? Do you think they were honouring her wishes? The way she wrote she was relieved to be finished with the pseudonym and had escaped her husband, as if both things were mutually exclusive, is odd to me. I’d like to find out more about that.’
‘ Oui , it does have an air of finality about it. Like she ran from an evil man, maybe?’ Manon leans against one of the bookshelves and spins a sepia-tinted world globe.
‘If the rumours Noah heard are correct, she lived here in the twenties, until… when? Her death? And for all that time, this secret library has been left alone? It can’t be. Let’s see if we can find anything online about L’Hotel du Parc’s history. There might be old photographs archived somewhere. We might even be able to find photos of what these suites looked like originally.’
‘Ooh, good idea. Let’s look on the laptop.’ I take a few of the notebooks from the desk to read later and hope to find clues on who our mystery guest was. We lock the door as we go.
In my suite, we sit together and look for any history about the hotel online but find nothing that fits with our mystery.
How has this secret been kept all this time? ‘I wonder if we can find out the name of the family who owned the hotel before the previous hotelier?’
‘Sure we can. We can even get on the dark web if you want?’
‘What! Non .’ My cousin has many a talent; if only she’d use them for good. Manon is a tech wizard, a gift that could essentially set her up for life, but, like with everything, she only uses this talent when it suits her.
With a few keystrokes, Manon has the sales history of the hotel, which is rather sparse; there’s the Toussaint family, the previous owner, and then me.
‘Toussaint?’ she says. ‘Why does that name ring a bell?’
I gasp when it comes to me. ‘The paintings in suite twenty! L. L. Toussaint!’
‘So do we think that our writer is L. L. Toussaint?’
I contemplate it. ‘Could be. So she wrote and painted? But wait… If she left her husband and came here under an assumed name, wouldn’t her family here think that strange? And if she was hiding from her husband, wouldn’t he look here first, at her family’s hotel?’
‘ Oui , it doesn’t fit, does it?’
‘ Non. Even if she did in fact “escape” her husband for whatever reason, surely her family here would have protected her from him. They were obviously wealthy by the standard of items in suite twenty, so it’s not as if they couldn’t support emotionally as well as financially.’
Manon fidgets with the hem of her jumper. ‘Not all of the items in room twenty were of the same quality though. There were some very plain dresses, made from coarse material. And there is a bed in each suite, leading me to believe there are two different people in this story.’
‘But we didn’t find any clothing in suite nineteen. It’s a library, an office. Writers take naps, it’s part of the process, so maybe that’s why there’s a bed in there.’
‘Hmm. Maybe. Do you think Francois-Xavier heard the rumours and that’s why he was so hellbent on buying this place? Hoping to find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?’
‘No way. If he had half a suspicion there was a secret library, or the potential of a forgotten manuscript, possibly writing that is valuable, he’d have kept this in the divorce. He would have ripped this place apart to find it and sold whatever he could to the highest bidder.’
Manon’s eyes open wide. ‘ You could do that, Anais. What if we found her last manuscript like they did with Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman ?’
‘It wouldn’t be mine to sell, it would be her family’s, or her estate, or whatever. Plus, she has expressly asked for the last manuscript to be kept safe. As a writer, I couldn’t go against those wishes, and as a human it wouldn’t be right.’
Manon slaps her forehead. ‘You and your morals.’
I laugh. ‘That doesn’t mean I won’t read the manuscript if we find it.’
‘There’s hope for you yet.’
I laugh. ‘One issue has been solved.’
Manon’s brows pull together. ‘What’s that?’
‘The name of our hotel will be L’H?tel Bibliothèque Secrèt.’
‘The Secret Library Hotel! Magnifique !’
The next evening, I sit at my desk, laptop open, and wait for inspiration to strike. I wait and wait. And I wait. I tell myself just to write one tiny little sentence. Just one. How hard can it be? There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet; I just need to arrange those letters to form a word, and soon a sentence will appear, then a paragraph. Then a page. Simple.
I remind myself that, if I don’t meet my deadline extension, Margaret will drop me, and my readers will be disappointed there’s no Christmas book next year.
When Hilary locked eyes with the brooding man in the café on Boulevard Saint Germain, she felt a frisson of something. Was it love, lust or… murderous rage?
I cup my head. Why can’t I write? I delete the sentence and sigh. Perhaps I’ll find a little inspiration reading the notebooks of our mysterious author. I take one from my desk, inhaling the scent of the parchment. It smells like ink, like vanilla. Who was she? Why did she leave her pseudonym and husband behind?
As I read the flowery cursive words, an unhappy picture forms. It seems even the passage of time hasn’t changed human nature. Our anonymous writer found her husband in flagrante delicto with a member of their household staff. I can relate.
This husband of hers also kept every penny she’d made writing, and threatened that, if she left him, he would tell everyone she was mad; the household staff would back him up, and he’d ruin her reputation. He was easily enraged and she feared for her life.
I must leave for my own sanity. While he may do his best to besmirch me, he cannot take away the words I am yet to pen. Those words, they are all that matter. I’ll never publish another novel as long as I shall live, thus he cannot profit from me. That will be the best revenge. The man is dangerous. I must tread ever so carefully.
My pulse races at the entry. I have to show Noah! Manon’s right. She will care not one jot about this, but I know he will. And maybe he can help me solve the identity of who this mysterious author is. But can I trust him with a secret as big as this? Perhaps I can give him some breadcrumbs, not the whole loaf, and see what he makes of it.
I swipe on some lipstick and head next door, only to see Noah through the window, in his element behind the bar, throwing cocktail shakers and joking with the small crowd who are dressed in reindeer ears and Christmas jumpers.
Perhaps he’s hosting a work Christmas do? It’s a Saturday night, probably his busiest time, so I don’t bother interrupting. When he notices I’m hovering outside, he waves me in. I wave back and leave it at that. I suddenly feel protective of the mysterious writer, so maybe it’s best I delve into this alone to ensure her last wishes of not only her manuscript being kept safe if I ever find it, but also her secrets.