“She did, but what are you doing here every day without any workers?”
“I’m making an inventory. If we are to turn the mansion into a museum, I need to know what items will be displayed and how to show them off and how much room will be needed for the different exhibitions so I can plan accordingly.”
I felt cold. Certainly I had not heard him correctly. A museum? “But she lives here. This is our home.”
He shrugged. “She never revealed her reasons to me. All I know is there’s more than enough here to make for a fine jewel of a museum. There are over thirty pieces of sculpture. Eighty paintings, some that rival anything in the Louvre. An excellent selection of china dating from as early as 1700. Your family’s holdings are a treasure trove of objets d’art going back to the 1600s. It’s astonishing.”
“But she’s going to live here after you’re done, correct?”
“I am so sorry to distress you.” He was looking at me tenderly. “But no, our conversations would suggest not. We’ve discussed using the second-floor bedrooms as galleries devoted to the art of seduction. Your grandmother has collected antique clothes and accessories used in the courtesan’s art, which will fascinate visitors.”
I gripped the edge of the table. Felt the chilly marble on my fingertips. A shiver ran through me. I could not allow this house to be turned into a museum . . . could not allow strangers to walk through the doors and examine the things that belonged to us . . . belonged to me.
I pulled myself up and walked out of the kitchen, down the hallway and out into the grand foyer, with its glass-domed ceiling. I then moved into the drawing room, where I stood and gazed around the most excessive and elaborate room in the house.
It was a riot of golds, reds, scarlets, purples, peacock feathers, ferns, palms, and orchids. From the turquoise and lapis tiles around the fireplace to the exotic Indian carpet to the ebony monkeys with ruby eyes holding up gold bananas outfitted with candles, the room was a marvel of opulence, style, and wit. How could she open it up to strangers?
I was unaware that Monsieur Duplessi had followed me until he spoke.
“She says she wants to call it the Museum of the Grand Horizontals. Quite an avant-garde concept, don’t you agree? A flirting museum. Centuries of artwork collected by France’s most revered courtesans.”
The cold I had experienced before intensified. Taking a step away from the sudden draft, I felt cobwebs brush against my face and hands. No, this had been my father’s home, too, and one of the places I could feel close to him. He had eaten breakfast at the kitchen table every morning, munching on hot pastries the cook had just taken out of the oven. I glanced over at the grand staircase. He’d gone sliding down that banister, and been spanked for it—more often, he’d said, than he could count. I knew he’d found hiding places under the piano in the music room, inside a giant brass vase in the smoking room, and under the four-poster bed in Little Red Riding Hood’s -chamber—some of the bedrooms in the house were named for -fantasy or fairy-tale characters that might incite a gentleman’s imagination. Other bedrooms were designed to evoke a particular exotic time period or place. I had yet to go searching for the little things my father had told me he’d stashed away: marbles, a frog skeleton, broken pottery he’d found digging in the gardens that he was sure dated back to Roman times. If this house was taken apart, it could not become my refuge.
“Are you all right? You look pale. I should not have said anything.” He was standing beside me and had taken my arm as if he was prepared to keep me standing if I became faint.
“I’ll be fine, thank you.” I looked into his face, and he returned my glance. The moment lasted one beat longer than was appropriate. I looked away first, but even when I did, he didn’t take his hand off my arm, and my skin felt hot where he was touching me.
The freezing air was gone now. The atmosphere around me had returned to normal. In fact, there was the faint odor of violets in the air. How was that possible? It was the dead of winter. Perhaps there was a bowl of potpourri in a corner somewhere, perfuming the room. There was almost gaiety in the atmosphere. As if the house itself was pleased.
But that was impossible. A house didn’t have emotions or personality. I was simply overwrought, as my grandmother had been telling me since I’d arrived in Paris. And for good reason. Losing my father would have been bad enough, but how I lost him—that my husband had ruined my father, had in effect killed him by destroying his ability to salvage his reputation if he turned Benjamin in—was enough to test anyone’s sanity.
“Are you sure you are fine?”
“Yes.” Of course I wasn’t, but I couldn’t share how I felt with someone I barely knew. Fury filled me. How dare my grandmother make a decision like this without me. Maison de la Lune was my birthright. She had inherited it; she had not built it. Not created it. It was not hers to destroy.
My eyes rested on an Ingres painting of a harem of sensual, naked women at a Turkish bath that hung above the fireplace. This one was far more evocative and erotic than the similar painting of the same scene in the Louvre. Heat rose up my neck, and I knew I was blushing. To be examining these with Monsieur Duplessi right beside me was brazen, and yet I didn’t turn away as I would have imagined.
It was one thing for the men who attended my grandmother’s evening salons and visited with her to see these rooms, but to have tourists walking through the house and gaping at our treasures?
All around me the house seemed to be reaching out and asking for help. I had to get to her heart and comfort her, reassure her that I would not allow this to happen.
Suddenly I was sure this emergency was what had brought me back to Paris. After all, I could have taken refuge with my Aunt, my mother’s sister, and her husband, who lived in Chicago and with whom I had spent so much more time. No, of course not. It was not my wild and irrepressible grandmother, who had always flitted in and out of my life on a whiff of L’Etoile’s bespoke fragrance, who had brought me here. It was the house, this living thing, that had called me back so that I might save her.
I began to run. Back out into the grand foyer. Up the sweeping stairs to the second floor. Up to the third floor. Down a long hallway past rooms used by servants. At the end of the hallway was another staircase that led to the attic. The pathway through the stored trunks and furniture seemed to circle in on itself, and I was caught in its coil.
I’d discovered this part of the house when I was fifteen. Remembered coming up here and finding a silk robe in one of the trunks and wearing it downstairs, showing off how I looked, only to have my grandmother fly into a fit of rage. It was the same robe as the women in the portraits wore. A beautiful burnt-orange silk, embroidered with russet and cream flowers and green dragons. My grandmother had ripped it off me. Why had she cared so much that I was wearing it? I couldn’t remember now, but she had lectured me adamantly about never venturing into this antique-filled part of the house after that excursion. There was nothing here but old, useless things, she’d said.
“But what about the door?” I’d asked her.
Her face fell at the mention of it. “The door?”