CHAPTER SEVEN
Laurell waited two days, because she was not brave enough to do it the first morning.
She packed the smallest of the bags Mrs. Curry had found for her, and she packed badly on purpose: two day dresses, the wrapper, her comb, the handkerchief she had never given back.
She left the evening gowns hanging. She left the fur-collared coat and wore her own old cloak, which smelled of a house on Royal Street and did not keep out the wind.
The letter took her four attempts.
Remy,
I have gone to Lilian. Please don’t come after me—there is nothing to come after; I am only a young woman with a bag going two streets over to sit in a friend’s kitchen, which is the most ordinary thing in the world and the first ordinary thing I have done since the autumn.
Gauthier wants a story. There is no story if I am not in your house.
In a month nobody will remember, and you will win your election, and that matters, whatever you said.
You have done more for this city in six years than the last three men together, and I have read every word of the municipal news since January, so you cannot argue with me about it.
I am taking two dresses and I will pay you back for them. Do not laugh.
You gave me a home for as long as I wanted one, and I want it very much, which is exactly why I can’t stay in it. Please believe that I know the difference between a man who bought me and a man who saved me. I have always known.
Laurell
She put it on his desk, where he would see it at six o’clock, and she went down the back stairs, because Mrs. Curry would have physically barred the front.
It was a raw gray morning and the wind came up off the river with rain in it. The Kilnworthy house was two streets and a corner away; she had walked it twice with Lilian in January, and it had taken eleven minutes.
She had gone perhaps three hundred yards, past the shuttered Aucoin place and the empty lot where the fig trees were, when she heard a carriage slow behind her.
She did not look round. Women who looked round invited conversation. She shifted the bag to her other hand and walked faster, and the carriage kept pace, and it was only when it drew ahead and stopped at the curb ten feet in front of her that she felt the first real prick of fear.
The door opened. A man got down—big, sandy-haired, in a good coat that didn’t suit him—and Laurell knew him instantly, though she had seen him only twice: he was the one who had carried the bags from Giselle’s upper rooms, the one who had come to the mayor’s house at midnight for the bank draft.
“Miss Beaumont,” he said. “There’s a gentleman wants a word.”
She turned and ran.
She got four steps. The bag went into the gutter and her cloak caught, and a hand closed round her upper arm hard enough to bruise, and then there was an arm around her waist lifting her clean off the pavement.
She screamed with everything she had, and the sound went out over the wet empty street and hit nothing at all, and she thought, with a clarity that surprised her, not the stomach, keep your arms across your stomach—and then she was in the carriage and the door slammed and the horses went.
Abelard Gauthier was sitting on the opposite seat with his gray gloves folded in his lap.
“Good morning,” he said. “You’ve made this very much easier than I expected.”
Laurell pressed herself into the corner of the seat. “What do you want with me?”
“Very little.” Gauthier considered her without any interest whatever, which was the worst part of it.
“You’re not to my taste and you’re carrying, and I have no use for either.
But your mayor stood in his office and told me what sort of man he has decided to be, and I find I should like him to spend a few days learning what it costs him.
” He looked out at the wet street. “You’ll be fed.
Sit still and don’t make me have you tied. ”
ANN was scraping carrots at the kitchen window of the Kilnworthy house when she saw a woman running in the street.
She was up on the sill before she’d thought about it. She saw the cloak and she saw the dark hair come loose, and she was through the kitchen and up the back stairs shrieking before the carriage had reached the corner.
“They’ve took her! They’ve took Miss Laurell!”
Remy came home at ten minutes past six and knew before he had his coat off.
The house was wrong. Every house has a sound; his had been a hollow one for twenty years, and for two months it had been something else, and standing in his own hall he heard the hollowness back again like a note struck in an empty church.
Winston’s face told him the rest.
“The note is in your study, sir,” the butler said. “She left before nine. And Baron Kilnworthy is in the front parlor. He has been here since half past ten.”
Half past ten.
Remy read the letter standing up, in eleven seconds, and it was as if the floor had gone out from under him.
“Mrs. Curry.”
The housekeeper had been waiting in the doorway with her hands folded, and she came in with the expression of a woman who had been composing a speech for eight hours and meant to deliver it whatever it cost her.
“She went down the back stairs, sir, so as not to have to look at me.”
“Did you know?”
“I knew Thursday. There’s nothing happens in this house that I don’t know by Thursday.” Mrs. Curry’s chin came up. “And I’ll say my piece and you may turn me out for it, for I’ve been in service thirty-one years and I know exactly what I’m doing.”
“Say it.”
“That girl has been up before dawn being sick since the second week of January, and never a word of complaint, and she’s put this house right in a month—the linens, the accounts, the fish man, and Josie’s hands aren’t cracked open no more because Miss Laurell made me change the soap.
” Her voice began to shake. “She reads the paper for your name and she cuts flowers in January because she noticed there weren’t none.
She waited up for you every night in the library till you come home. Every night, sir.”
“Mrs. Curry—”
“And you looked at that girl,” the housekeeper said, “and you offered her terms.”
Remy shut his eyes.
“For a man clever enough to run a whole city,” Mrs. Curry said, “you can be remarkable stupid.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know.”
“She’s two streets over at the baron’s—”
“No,” said James Kilnworthy from the doorway. “She isn’t.”
Remy turned.
The baron was gray about the mouth. He had a wet hat in his hands and he had, Remy saw, been standing in this house since half past ten in the morning, waiting.
“She never reached us,” James said. “Ann saw it from the kitchen window—a carriage, a big fair-haired man, and Laurell running. That was nine o’clock this morning.
We’ve had every man I own out since, and Willauby’s had constables on the wharves and the depot since noon.
Nothing. I couldn’t find you; they said you were at the Cotton Exchange, then the Sixth Ward, then—” He stopped.
“Vincent, I am sorry. I have been standing here for eight hours rehearsing how to say it.”
The room went very far away for a moment.
Then something in Remy Vincent came up from underneath—something older than the mayoralty, older than the careful, pleasant, useful man he had made of himself—and it was so cold and so clear that he could feel his own pulse slowing.
“Gauthier,” he said.
“Willauby thought so too, and went to the Esplanade house at three. Gauthier received him in the drawing room, gave him sherry, and let him look through every room in it. He’s been at home all day with his cook and his valet to swear to it.”
“Of course he has.” Remy was already moving. “Winston, my coat. Not the carriage—the gig, and the grays, and tell Beaudry I’ll drive myself.”
“Where?” James said.
“To fetch Madam Giselle.”
James blinked. “She sold him the girl.”
“She sold him a piece of paper,” Remy said, “for four hundred dollars, and she has kept every account book in that house for eleven years, and she is the only person in this city who knows where Abelard Gauthier takes a woman he doesn’t want anybody to find.
” He shrugged into his coat. “She is also a businesswoman with a great deal to lose, and I have been her best customer for eleven years, and tonight I intend to collect on that in a way she will remember for the rest of her life.”
Laurell had counted the room twice.
Eleven paces by nine. One window, boarded on the outside, letting in gray light through the gaps. A bed with a bare tick. A chair. A door that had been locked from the corridor since midmorning.
It was a house on the far side of Storyville, past the good streets—she had seen enough through the carriage window to know that much, tall and narrow and half shuttered, with the smell of the canal in it.
Nobody had touched her. That was the strange part, the part that made her stomach crawl.
The big fair-haired man had carried her up two flights and set her on her feet almost politely, and Gauthier had said, from the bottom of the stairs, “See she has water,” as though she were a horse standing hot.
She had water. She had not drunk it.
Don’t sit down. If you sit down you’ll cry, and if you cry you’ll be sick, and you have eaten nothing since six.
She walked, and thought about Remy.
He would have the letter by now. He would read it and he would think she was safe at Lilian’s, and he would spend the whole of tonight being sensible about it. Perhaps in the morning he would come. And James would say she never arrived, and Remy would—
Laurell stopped in the middle of the floor and pressed both hands over her mouth.
She had been so proud of that letter. She had gone out into the street on her own two feet to keep a story out of the papers, and she had put her hand flat on her stomach a hundred times in two months and thought I will manage this, I will find a way, and here she was, eleven paces by nine, exactly where her father had sent her in the first place.
“No,” she said aloud.
The child would be born in August. She was going to be somebody’s mother in August, and she was standing in a locked room in the last hours of daylight, and there was no one coming who wasn’t already on his way.
She looked at the chair. She looked at the boarded window.
She sat down on the edge of the bed with her arms wrapped around herself and began, very deliberately, to think—about the corridor, and the man’s heavy tread on the stairs, and how many minutes there were between the sound of a key and the sound of a door.
Below her, in the front of the house, a door opened and shut, and a man laughed.