Chapter Twelve #2
Zeph could not believe it. Cosette is here? But with her father, who presented with a Paris card and the extended family name of Montagne-Jarre. “He looks well, does he, Friendly?”
“He does, miss. Do you know him? I can send a footman to Lord Ashley’s club. Does he need to come home to examine this man?”
She got to her feet and dusted off her hands. “No. I think him…” Careful. In hiding. “I had a friend in Paris by the name of Cosette. Describe this woman for me, please.”
“Pretty. Striking blue eyes. Blonde. Modest and polite.”
“That is my friend.”
The Parisian banker who had fled France in disgrace just prior to her own imprisonment had come to call on her! He had brought his daughter, too! Well! What a wonder.
Zeph turned to Vic. “Excuse me, please, my lady. I must receive these callers. Shall we meet again here tomorrow for tea?”
Eagerly, the little girl nodded.
Zeph bit her lip, suppressing laughter, as Vic reached for the remaining two biscuits.
Zeph waggled her fingers au revoir at Vic and Dolly. “Tomorrow, then.”
*
The moment Friendly closed the salon door, Zeph ran toward her friend. “Cosette! Monsieur Lenoir!”
They shot up from the settee.
The two women hugged and exclaimed over each other’s good looks, then Zeph turned to welcome Cosette’s father.
“Please do sit. I am so delighted to see you.” More than you know! “I wondered how you were, and where you were. I myself have been in London only a few months.” Zeph sat in a chair near her friend.
“We know,” Cosette told Zeph with eyes that spoke of happiness—and a caution.
She had always rued her father’s association with disreputable politicians in Paris.
René Vaillancourt was one of them—and Cosette also carried a particular distaste for the deputy chief of police.
Her father had fled Paris because Fouché, Vaillancourt’s superior, accused him of embezzling government funds.
Lenoir had taken Cosette abroad with him, reputedly because Fouché had told him to give back the money or he would lock him and Cosette in La Force.
Wisely, Lenoir had fled. But the day before leaving with her father, Cosette had gone to Countess Nugent’s h?tel particulier on the ?le Saint-Louis and said her goodbyes to Zeph.
Fearing, because of Vaillancourt’s vows to ruin her, that she would soon be in prison herself, Zeph had given Cosette the other precious item she had stolen from Vaillancourt’s office.
“We have come today,” said her father in French, his small eyes yellowed with some sickness, his silver hair straight and thin, “because we saw your name in the newspaper.”
“We also asked our friend, Monsieur Tauzain, if he had heard of you,” Cosette continued in her native language—to please her persnickety parent, no doubt. “He knew where you lived.”
Zeph shook her head, feigning innocence instead of showing the fear that stilled her.
To be known by others whom she knew not was one peculiar aspect of becoming so societally prominent that one’s name was in the newspapers.
But for Zeph to be known by a Frenchman who was a stranger to her sent a chill through her.
Containing her anxiety eluded her. She tried to smile and failed.
“I am afraid I have not met Monsieur Tauzain.”
“Oh, he knows everyone in London,” Cosette said with a nod of confidence.
“An émigré, is he?”
“Certainement. He is here since the end of the Terror.”
“So many years. Wonderful.” How would this man know her if he had been in England since the Terror? She had been only a schoolgirl then, and unimportant. And why were they discussing this stranger Tauzain? “He must know every Frenchman in town.”
“I would say so,” said Cosette. “A very nice gentleman.”
“Is that right? Was his home Paris?”
“I…I think so. Was it, Papa?”
“Oui, from the Croix de Rouge,” Monsieur Lenoir put in.
Zeph shook her head. “I do not know that part of town.”
The man smiled, happy to fill in information. “Ah, he was part of the famous tribunals in that quarter on the Left Bank that sent so many to the guillotine.”
Zeph held her revulsion in check. “Lucky he has escaped the razor himself.”
Lenoir shrugged. “I have not asked him.”
Zeph did wish to know why this Tauzain kept himself so well informed. The idea that an émigré of little-known status would keep up with London Society, with her whereabouts, was odd. Did this Tauzain have a purpose? A mission? Was he an agent spying on Lenoir?
Zeph suppressed a shiver.
Monsieur Lenoir gave her a tolerant smile. “Tauzain rents the house next to ours.”
“A nice man,” said Cosette. “His wife died a few years ago, and he keeps himself busy with friends.”
“I see. French, I suppose.”
“I think so,” Cosette said. “Many come and go at his house.”
Zeph wanted to ask if Tauzain knew these two by their real names, but held her tongue. She did not wish to frighten them, although she was alarmed for them. “And where are you living?”
“In Lambeth,” Cosette provided with a fixed stare at Zeph.
“Is that near here?” Zeph had not yet learned all the areas of London, nor which were to be valued and which avoided.
“No, we took a fiacre,” Cosette said, her distaste for it in her pursed lips.
“A hack,” Monsieur Lenoir corrected his daughter, pronouncing the word with a disdain for the English vernacular. “That’s what they call public carriages here.”
“Oui, c’est exact.” Zeph took to her visitors’ habit in speaking French.
“Forgive me,” he said, but the expression on his face said he did it as a painful courtesy. “I do my best.”
The man fell into solemnity, gazing at his nails.
Cosette did no better until she blurted, “Zephora knows all about what happened to you, Papa.” Her tone implied she excused the man his crime.
That Cosette would help justify her father’s actions did not sit well with Zeph.
Countess Nugent, with whom Zeph had lived for a few months before Vaillancourt’s men took her away to prison, had declared that Lenoir was ousted from his powerful place at court because of his corruption of military funds.
Yet the final straw that motivated him to leave Paris, his bank, and his vast properties was Vaillancourt’s demand that he pay all his debts plus twenty percent over that to “compensate the state for his fraud.”
In fact, Zeph knew that this now-infamous French banker had done his best for his business, but not for his only child.
When Cosette had fallen in love with a dashing cavalry officer and the man had come to propose, Lenoir had thrown him out.
Too poor, he yelled. Cosette had been devastated and vowed never to love again. Not even her father.
Still, Zeph should not have been surprised that Cosette was still with her father here in exile. The woman most likely did not have the financial means to separate from the sire who had ignored her, much as Zeph’s own father had.
Cosette was a lovely woman with hair the color of bubbly golden champagne and eyes like sapphires.
Weeks before the scandal of Lenoir’s embezzlement hit, Cosette had received another proposal of marriage.
The man, a banker sixty-two years old, had not appealed to her.
He was a lech, pawing her when he thought no one witnessed his groping.
He had also demanded a dowry twice the size Lenoir offered.
He wanted ten thousand Francs, half in gold bullion.
Lenoir had laughed at him. But when the man caught Cosette in a room alone, stripped her, and attempted to rape her, she had used a strong Sèvres flower pot to bash his head.
Afterward, the man had claimed he wanted no part of her or her father. Cosette was used goods.
Shaken but unbowed, Cosette had said she wished to wait for love to come her way.
Now, with her father’s lesser influence—and perhaps his finances were not as illustrious as once they were—Cosette might not have a dowry.
Two years younger than Zeph, Cosette had time to marry before the British called her a spinster.
But as the English feared their southern coast awash in French spies, few would wish even to befriend a lady whose name was tarnished with the possibility of her father’s misdeeds.
On the other hand, Cosette had a pastime that occupied her. She wrote novels. Originally writing in French when she began years ago, the stories were tales of love. Now, Zeph wondered if Cosette wrote her stories in English.
That topic—like that of the fate of her book—would be for another day, when Cosette and she were alone. Her father disapproved of her writings. But Cosette had continued in spite of him. The result was added tension between them. The only aspect he applauded was her income, which had been sizable.
“We come today to renew our acquaintance,” her father said to Zeph.
He was not a man who called upon others to pass the time of day. What more did he want?
“Also, I hoped that you might allow Cosette into your illustrious circle of friends.”
Zeph had no idea to what extent Cosette might be received among the Ashleys’ friends and colleagues.
Gus might be willing to see her often, but Kane would investigate the young woman’s friendships and activities before any familiarity occurred.
In truth, Kane would jump at the chance to pry open the mind of this infamous French banker, but Zeph had no idea how deeply Kane would permit a friendship.
“You and I can certainly meet, Cosette. I am not mistress here, but I will say of my hostess that she is a gracious lady.”
“I remember seeing her once here from afar on the street,” Cosette said with a smile. “A lovely lady. When Papa and I were in Paris, I was invited to a garden party at Countess Nugent’s. She spoke often of her niece.”
“I would ask Lady Ashley to come down to meet you both, but sadly, she took this afternoon to do her shopping. I know she would like to meet you both. Lord Ashley, as well.”