Chapter Two
The train shuddered to a halt beneath the great arched roof of Gare du Nord.
Beyond the glass, the platform teemed with porters and passengers amid a chorus of shouts and whistles.
Elizabeth rose from her seat and, with a final glance around the compartment, slipped on her cinnamon serge coat and straightened her cloche in the window’s reflection before stepping into the corridor.
She descended onto the platform, the last of the summer heat thick with coal smoke and engine oil. Steam hissed from beneath the carriages, rising towards the vaulted glass roof until it thinned and vanished among the iron rafters.
“Gare à vous, mademoiselle!”
Elizabeth sprang back as a porter’s trolley piled high with leather steamer trunks swept past, inches from where she’d been standing. A second rattled hard on its heels, the porter calling his warning over his shoulder without breaking stride.
“Mademoiselle Hawthorne? Mademoiselle Hawthorne?”
A porter in a navy uniform worked his way through the crowd, her trunks stacked on his trolley.
“Here.” Elizabeth raised her hand.
“Taxi, mademoiselle?”
“Merci, non. A friend is meeting me.” She glanced towards the concourse.
“Bien s?r, mademoiselle.” He touched his cap. “Follow me.”
Elizabeth fell into step behind him as he threaded a path through the concourse with the unhurried ease of a man who’d done it a hundred times before.
She kept close, slipping through the gaps before the crowd closed in again: past a news kiosk, past a café with every table taken, past a young woman in a pale linen dress who stepped backwards without looking and caught Elizabeth squarely on the arm.
“Pardon, mademoiselle!”
“Ce n’est rien.” Elizabeth pressed on, determined not to lose sight of the porter.
He swung left through the main doors, and Elizabeth followed him out onto the Boulevard de Denain, where taxis and private motorcars jostled for position along the kerb.
“Elizabeth!”
She turned as Clemmi hurried towards her through the crowd, one hand pressed to the brim of her straw hat, her teal crêpe de chine dress floating around her calves.
Clemmi pulled her into a tight embrace, then drew back, both hands still clasping Elizabeth’s, her smile wide and warm. But up close, the shadows beneath her blue eyes told a different story – a pallor no amount of powder had entirely covered, a slight hollowness at her cheeks.
“I’m so glad you’re here.” Clemmi squeezed Elizabeth’s hands. “The journey wasn’t too dreadful, I hope?”
“Not at all. The crossing was smooth.” Elizabeth held her friend’s gaze. “You look well.”
“Liar.” Clemmi’s smile flickered for a moment. “I’m enormous already. Oliver insists I’m blooming, but I feel like a whale.” She laughed, the sound brittle, then turned to the porter. “Merci, monsieur. La voiture est juste là.” She gestured towards a maroon Citroen waiting kerbside.
By the time they reached the motorcar, the driver had already begun strapping the trunks to the luggage rack. Clemmi pressed a coin into the porter’s palm. “Merci beaucoup.”
“Merci, madame.” He wheeled the empty trolley back towards the station.
The driver opened the rear door, and Clemmi climbed in first, gathering her dress as she settled into her seat. Elizabeth slid in beside her.
“Où allons-nous, madame?” The driver glanced back over his shoulder.
“à la maison, Henri, s’il vous pla?t.”
Henri steered the motorcar into the stream of traffic on the Boulevard de Denain, easing between taxis and a horse-drawn dray stacked with luggage.
Hotel porters whistled for cabs beneath the plane trees, and a vendor at the corner cried his headlines over the traffic.
“Le plan Dawes! Les Américains à Paris!” The words thinned behind them until the purr of the engine swallowed them.
“And how are you getting on with your French?”
“Apart from the staff, I get less practice than you’d think.” Clemmi’s laugh faded as quickly as it came. “There’s the odd charity function with Lady Davenport, but otherwise I hardly leave the apartment these days.”
“Lady Davenport?”
“Sir Conrad’s wife. He’s the British Ambassador here. Honestly, I seem to spend most of my time with Sylvie.”
“Who’s Sylvie, a friend?”
“My maid.” Clemmi turned in her seat to face Elizabeth. “Didn’t I tell you? Millie returned to England barely two months after we arrived.”
“No, what happened? Was she homesick?”
“A little, perhaps, but I suspect it had rather more to do with Arabella. How am I expected to manage without her?“ Clemmi’s voice took on her sister’s dramatic pitch before returning to her own.
“Arabella’s always had a flair for the dramatic.”
“Quite. And you know, Papa, anything for a quiet life, so Millie was summoned back to Mayfield Manor.”
She did indeed. Uncle Geoffrey and Aunt Helena had always been indulgent parents, and as the youngest of three, Arabella had been indulged more than most.
Henri turned onto the rue La Fayette, where a woman leaned out from a third-floor balcony, hauling in her washing.
“You’ll have a little one of your own to spoil soon enough.”
“Don’t! We haven’t even decided on a colour for the nursery yet, let alone found a nurse.”
“The next four and a half months will fly by, nursery or no nursery. What are you hoping for, a boy or a girl?”
“Mamma swears by boys. She says they’re far less trouble than girls, and after Arabella, who can blame her?”
“True.” Elizabeth glanced across at Clemmi, a little of her old sparkle back. “And what about Oliver?”
“I think he’s secretly got his heart set on a girl, though he’d sooner die than admit it.” Clemmi’s hand strayed to her middle. “He claims that growing up with four brothers meant his childhood was one long boxing match.”
“How is he settling into the new post? I imagine Paris is keeping him busy.”
“Terribly. With the Americans here to discuss the German reparations loan, he barely has time to sleep. And when he is home, he’s watching me constantly, what I’m eating, if I’m resting enough.” A sigh escaped her lips. “It’s almost … suffocating.”
Then, as if catching herself, she brightened.
“But enough about me. I want to hear all about what happened at Hawthorne Hall and that dreadful little man. Mamma wrote and filled me in, of course, but you know what she’s like.
And I simply cannot believe Inspector Sparrow had the nerve to arrest Aunt Beatrice.
He wouldn’t normally say boo to a goose. ”
Elizabeth recounted the events at Hawthorne Hall as they wove deeper into the city, filling in everything Aunt Helena had left out.
From the stranger who’d presented himself as the rightful heir to the Hawthorne title and fortune, to the evidence that had finally cleared Aunt Beatrice’s name, and the unsettling discovery at Southampton docks.
“Thank heavens you and Meli were there.” Clemmi sank back into the leather upholstery. “I dread to think how it all might have ended otherwise.”
The motorcar slowed where the rue La Fayette met the Boulevard Haussmann.
An agent de police stood at the centre of the crossing, halting the traffic with a blast of his whistle and a sweep of his white baton, and at his signal Henri eased the Citroen onto the boulevard, where six-storey facades rose beneath steep slate mansards and striped awnings shaded the shopfronts.
They talked of Meli’s new position in Oxford and the latest news from Surrey, Clemmi breaking off now and then to point out the sights as they passed.
“Galeries Lafayette.” She nodded towards a grand corner facade, its windows dressed with autumn silks.
“The most magnificent department store in all of Paris. I shall take you before you leave, I promise.”
They swept past the Opéra, pigeons scattering from its steps, and ahead the columns of the Madeleine rose above the street as Henri turned off the rue Royale, joining the traffic threading along the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where the dress shops and milliners soon gave way to high walls and gated courtyards.
“That’s the embassy.” Clemmi tapped the glass as they passed a Union Jack hanging above tall iron gates.
“And the chancery beside it. And along there is the élysée Palace, where the French President lives – and the spire behind us is Sainte-Mérance, you’ll hear her bell soon enough.
We’re all rather grand at this end of Paris. ”
“I can see why you took the apartment. It’s a beautiful part of the city.”
“Isn’t it?” Clemmi’s shoulders dropped. “It feels like such an age since I was last here; I’d almost forgotten how lovely it is.”
Elizabeth studied her friend as she turned back to the window. She had seen Clemmi like this once before, at Mayfield Manor, in the days before her wedding, when she’d almost been forced to call it off. Whatever was troubling her now, Clemmi would share it when she was ready.
The rue de Louvencourt opened before them, a quiet stretch of honey-cream facades behind a double row of plane trees, their roots lifting the kerbstones along the narrow pavement.
Henri drew up outside number twenty-four, six storeys of pale limestone rising to a steep zinc roof, and before the engine had died, the door beside the porte cochère swung open.
“Madame Sterling!” A stocky, silver-haired man came down the steps, clean-shaven and ruddy-faced, tucking a cloth into his pocket as he reached the motorcar. He opened Clemmi’s door and handed her down onto the pavement.
“Merci, Georges. Voici Lady Elizabeth Hawthorne. Elle séjournera chez nous pendant quelques semaines.”
“Milady.” He inclined his head, already moving towards the trunks, waving Henri back behind the wheel. “Laissez, laissez. Je m’en occupe.”
“The fare’s already taken care of; Oliver keeps an account with the garage.” Clemmi turned for the door. “Come, I could murder a cup of tea.”
Elizabeth stepped to the motorcar and pressed a coin into Henri’s hand through the open window. “Merci, Henri.”