City of Light

Chapter TEN



Paris



April 24



4:20 AM



Help me, the note said. I must go home.

Rayley held it in his trembling hand.

Even before he had received the last telegram from London - the one which contained a terse sermon from Trevor on the dangers associated with beautiful women - Rayley had already told himself he would not become further involved in the serpentine destiny of Isabel Blout. She was, after all, the mistress of a powerful man and the wife of a rich one. However sullied her reputation might be, these stations would fuse together to collectively protect her. She need hardly throw herself on the mercy of a Scotland Yard detective, a man who lived in a rented room, a man with no friends, little money, or even the verbal acuity to order a boiled egg.

She didn’t need his help. To pretend that she did was sheer manipulation on her part. To respond to this dramatic note – had she actually sprinkled water on the notepaper to simulate tears? - would be sheer folly on his.

Meet me at sunrise, the letter said. At the base of the tower.

Sunrise. A poetic and imprecise term, so typical of Isabel.

No, she didn’t really need his help but undoubtedly she was frightened, this much he would concede. And in light of recent events he could hardly blame her.

Once again, Rayley had spent a night battling insomnia, although at least this time he knew the reason. It is always hard to sleep when one knows one must rise early. He took a restive powder, which did nothing, counted the traditional sheep, fretted, masturbated, mentally composed a stinging reply to Trevor’s pompous message, and finally rose from his bed and dressed. Walked swiftly through the cold and silent streets. It was dark, very dark, and a church bell struck four, telling him what he already knew.

He had come far too early.

4:15 AM



London



Three hundred and fifty kilometers away, Trevor rolled over in his own bed and reached for the water carafe on his nightstand. His throat was like sandpaper, his head already aching. They had all drank too much at Geraldine’s house, as was quite often the case.

Emma had seen him to the door, as always.

Davy had left with him. Tom, of course, had stayed behind.

Trevor had spent the last five months distressed that he was never alone with Emma. Even when he came to Mayfair on Friday nights for his standing French lesson, Geraldine was there, and Gage. And, half the time, Tom. Troublesome Tom, who was younger, richer, cleverer, and infinitely more handsome.

And now he had gotten his chance to be alone with her and had utterly muffed it.

Tom would’ve had the good sense to stay with Emma in Manchester. Tom would’ve known how to turn it all into a grand adventure. He would have made those grimy mill town streets shine like the Champs-Elysees.

This was the second time within a year that Trevor had developed a romantic attachment to a woman who clearly preferred another man. The irony of this fact was not lost on him and at times it caused Trevor to question, usually after hours spent in the velvety grip of Geraldine’s fine wines, if he was deliberately choosing women whom he knew in advance would either ignore or reject his advances. After all, he’d been a bachelor for some time. He’d grown comfortable with his arrangements and he knew they benefited his work. Perhaps it was easier to admire from a distance than to subject himself to the inevitable compromises and irritations which would accompany a real marriage to a real woman.

There was no one to discuss the matter with, if indeed he were so inclined. Rayley was in Paris, battling lavender-scented demons of his own, and Trevor certainly couldn’t speak of this particular matter to Davy or even Geraldine. In setting himself up as the leader of the Tuesday Night Murder Games Club, he had also set himself up for social solitude.

Oh, they cared about him, certainly. All the people he had dined with tonight knew the pain he had inflicted upon himself when he’d fallen in love with Tom’s sister Leanna the autumn before. With tact so extreme that it bordered on absurdity, they even avoided saying her name, referring only obliquely to her upcoming wedding to John Harrowman, which would take place at the Bainbridge country estate in June. Tom sometimes made mention of “when I go home in the summer” and Geraldine, even more bizarrely, had removed Leanna’s portrait from the family collection in the hallway, replacing it with a bad watercolor of a horse.

But Leanna was a pain that had faded and when Trevor thought of her now, his primary emotion was chagrin at his foolishness. How could he have ever thought he would draw a woman like Leanna Bainbridge from the side of a man like John Harrowman?

The affection he held for Emma Kelly was more sensibly placed and he could only hope that it would have the chance of a different outcome. As the orphan of a country schoolmaster and his middle-class wife, Emma was a far more socially plausible target for Trevor’s attention than Leanna had ever been. Geraldine made constant broad hints that Trevor should court Emma, and had all but said she believed any overtures would be welcomed. But anyone with an ounce of objectivity could see that Emma was in love with Tom Bainbridge, that she held for him precisely the same sort of doomed devotion Trevor had once held for his sister.

What a muddle.

He could casually invite Emma to dine, he supposed, or take her to the theater. The problem today, all those awkward misunderstandings, may well have resulted from the fact that their journey was for the purpose of work. That was likely why she was so prickly and quick to take offense. Why he had felt compelled to assume the tone of her superior.

But in London it was possible. He could contrive some situation which would give her the opportunity to more clearly show her feelings. Emma was a practical girl, and perhaps she was prepared to put her infatuation for Tom in some sort of box and place it on some a high shelf in the back of some very deep closet. Perhaps she was more prepared than he knew to accept invitations from Trevor and she didn’t really think of him as – dreadful phrase! – “like a brother.” She did treat him with affection, but it was the sort of democratic affection that was difficult to interpret. Last night as she showed him the door, she had leaned in and brushed his cheek with hers, sending a sharp and no-doubt inappropriate thrill throughout his frame. But of course then, in a killing instant, she had taken Davy’s hand and likewise brought her cheek to his.

So Davy and Trevor had turned away. Descended the steps, then parted to walk in their separate directions. Davy had gone home to his family, Trevor to his bachelor’s room. And Emma had gone back into the warm, well-lit house. The house she shared with Geraldine and Gage.

And, of course, Tom.

Paris



4:52 AM



They could call the tower a marvel of engineering all they wanted, Rayley thought, but to him it would always be a monstrous thing. Especially when viewed from below. Rayley tilted his head to study the structure, which rose into the night like a curved black blade, then pulled his coat around him and shivered. There was only one reasonable explanation for why Isabel had asked him to meet her here at such an hour. Apparently she planned not merely to flee Paris but to also flee the man who had brought her here. And she wished to return to London without the assistance, or even the knowledge, of the husband waiting there.

Now that he had risen from his bed and dressed, Rayley’s head had cleared and he was less inclined to self-pity. He might not be rich or socially connected, but he did have power of a certain kind. It came in the form of the Queen’s seal, which was embossed upon all his paperwork. The French may have snickered at it when he arrived, but Rayley had no doubt that this smear of gold would be quite enough to silence a border clerk in the channel office. His status in Paris was gossamer, insubstantial, far less than the glamour that lay casually tossed all around her, left behind by – he was fully prepared to admit this – any number of men. But it was still of a type that might afford Isabel a quick journey home with no questions asked, enough to get her back to the rocky shores of England and whatever redemption she hoped she might find there.

Rayley had now waited for nearly an hour. His notebook was in his pocket, because he had plans of his own. He’d come here to make a deal, the only deal he knew how to make. He would help her escape in exchange for her telling him everything she knew about Patrick Graham - what he had been investigating, and how he had died. Frightened and beautiful the woman might be, but Rayley was still a detective, and he knew on an instinctual level that it had been no accident that he had met Isabel. She had known who he was, or at least what he was, on the day that she seated herself so ostentatiously before him at the café and begun to sketch. And that night at the tower party, she had been sent across the crowded room by someone, most likely her brutal lover, specifically to befriend Rayley and Graham. To distract them, to mislead them, to learn precisely how much the reporter and the detective might have discovered about some scheme her lover had undertaken. Rayley still didn’t know what it was they were all so afraid that he knew, and it was painful to admit, in this cold dark place, that even the giddy Graham must have managed to learn things that he had not.

Not to mind. Rayley may been slow to see how it was all connected, but he had his wits about him now. The wheel was turning, the play was drawing to a close. Isabel’s lover and his friends were not merely upstart businessmen trying to buy respectability by investing in the Eiffel Tower and the Exposition. Something far more sinister had brought her to France. But Isabel’s usefulness to her lover was waning and her knowledge of the true nature of his business - the very knowledge which had once made her valuable - now made her vulnerable. Graham’s death must have shaken her to the core. She undoubtedly feared a similar fate awaited her.

Yes, Isabel Blout was frightened and desperate and beautiful but Rayley could not let any of this move him. He would pull out his notebook and he would stand firm in his demands. She would earn her passage back to England only with the truth.

And then there was a rustle. A sound, subtle but persistent.

A woman’s skirts, perhaps.

“Isabel?” he called.

No answer. Something moved above him. The sensation of swooping, a flapping of wings in the wind. It had been a bird, no doubt. They were nesting amid the legs of the tower. A thousand birds, a thousand nests, perhaps four thousand babies when the full warmth of spring was unleashed.

“Isabel?” he repeated. He was still looking up. He cursed himself for coming so early, but here he was, shivering and coughing in the morning cold, waiting for Isabel. Waiting for the chance that had been seized by so many men before him, the chance to be useful to Isabel Blout.

And then he saw it. Another movement, quicker and more definitive. This one coming from the direction of a streetlight. Advancing steadily until at once and at last, it was upon him. A sharp-edged shadow slicing though the bright circle cast by the streetlight. A sheet of darkness falling like a –

Darkness falling like...what?

For once he had it. This one he knew. For once the French had the better word, the proper word.

The darkness fell across him like a guillotine.