City of Light

Chapter NINETEEN



Paris



3:15 AM



If Tom Bainbridge had not been so exhausted and worried, he would have laughed. He and Emma had slipped out of the apartment in full darkness so as not to waken Trevor or Geraldine – an unlikely complication since, just as Emma had predicted, both of them had begun loudly snoring within minutes of closing their bedroom doors. It was not until Tom and Emma were standing outside beneath a streetlight that he got his first proper look at her ensemble. She had borrowed a man’s shirt and trousers from a bureau, but Geraldine’s cousin evidently had the shape of a bear. Although it had been wrapped three times, the belt barely managed to keep the trousers attached to Emma’s slender waist and, despite the fact she had carefully rolled both the pants legs and shirt cuffs, the slightest physical effort would undoubtedly unfurl them.

“Those clothes are so ridiculously large that you’re swimming already,” Tom said. “When the cloth gets wet, you’ll be pulled straight under.”

Emma lifted her small pointed chin. “I’m a good swimmer.”

“No one is that good a swimmer.”

“Then when we get to the river, you can give me your clothes and take these.”

It was not a bad suggestion. If they exchanged garments, they would both be in clothes that were, while definitely too large, at least not floppy enough to drown them.

“Perhaps,” Tom said cautiously, a bit ashamed that his first thought had not been the viability of the idea but that it meant he’d get a chance to glimpse Emma naked. “But first we have to get to the river.”

They scuffled to the nearest avenue where they were both surprised to see that there was a good amount of activity. This hour would find the streets of Mayfair completely empty, but Paris were still bustling and Tom did not have the slightest trouble in hailing a cab. It took them to the bridge where Graham’s body had been found, which they had deemed as good a starting point as any. Once there, they left the lighted world of the street to pick their way down the increasing darkness leading to the riverbank.

On a rainy night there would have been any number of indigents sleeping beneath the bridge for shelter, but this night was clear and calm. Therefore, the unfortunates of Paris were scattered about the bank, looking a bit like bodies on a battlefield, as if each had simply fallen wherever he was struck. In this case, it was undoubtedly alcohol rather than bullets which had felled them, but it was still a bit startling to see so many people - men, women, and children alike - dotting the ground. Tom had almost tripped over one black-swathed form, which had growled in protest before returning to slumber. But their eyes eventually adjusted and, holding hands, Emma and Tom found their way to the bottom of the slope.

Since they could scarcely float along with Tom’s pocket watch in their possession, they had earlier determined that they would enter the river precisely as the church bells struck four, then leave the water when the same obliging chapel released a single peal to indicate the half hour. But the fact that they had found a cab more easily than expected now left them with more than twenty minutes to idle until the hour rang. It was very dark on the bank, as if they had been sunk into a great teacup with the lighted rim of the street above, and, with a perfunctory look around her in all directions, Emma turned her back and resolutely began unhitching the belt which held her trousers. Tom turned in the opposite direction and did the same until, having tossed their castoff clothing one item at a time over their shoulders, each had assumed the outfit of the other.

Then there was nothing to do but sit on the ground and wait. It was hard to see the actual river from this angle, but the bank did not look particularly steep and the gentle murmur of the water suggested that the current would not be especially strong. Emma closed her eyes, already dreading the icy sting that would come with their first immersion.

“When you float,” she said to Tom, “keep your legs straight out in front of you and headed downstream. Then, if there are any boulders in the water, you will strike them with your feet and not your head.”

“Indeed,” Tom said. “But there shouldn’t be many large rocks, should there? The river is used for commerce, so they’ve doubtless cleared the worst of them out.”

“Boulders on the shore, I meant.”

“Ah, yes. Quite right.”

A moment of silence, and then Tom added, “And keep your head up out of the water as best you can. City rivers are fed by sewers, not springs, and the less we expose our facial apertures to contagion, the better.”

“Facial apertures?”

“Mouth, nose, eyes, ears. That sort of thing.”

“Oh. Oh yes, I see what you mean.”

Another expanse of silence. Each waited for the bells, but none came.

“How did you know the bit about keeping the feet out first?” Tom finally ventured.

In the darkness, Emma smiled. “I was raised in the country, remember? This will not be the first river I’ve swum.”

Tom smiled as well. “Lest you forget, I was raised in the country too. When we were children at Rosemoral, Leanna and I once pirated our grandfather’s little skiff from the dock house and attempted to-“

Just then, the first bell.

4:00 AM



At the sound of the bells, Rayley stirred, causing his entire body to throb in protest. His muscles, his skin, the joint of his left elbow. All pulsing with pain and he could taste the salty warmth of blood in his mouth. He probed with his tongue. Two teeth loose, possibly three. But all still embedded into the gum, it would appear, and this was most fortunate.

The beating had been bad… but not nearly as bad as it could have been. This he knew even as he ventured to stretch and felt his shoulders spasming in response, even as he began to sense the contusions and cuts along his arms and hands. This had been a surface beating, with no serious blows to the ribs or abdomen – no more than a warning, a metaphorical shot across the bow. Gerard was certainly capable of more brutality and in fact had probably had trouble muting the force of his punches. His restraint was undoubtedly due to very specific orders from Armand Delacroix. The man had wanted Rayley frightened, but not immobilized. He wanted him to sense rather than experience Gerard’s potential force, to be stunned into submission, unnerved enough to betray Isabel’s hiding place.

Rayley put a throbbing finger to the corner of his split lip. He’d had nothing to confess to Delacroix, even if he had been willing to do so, and in terms of his own fate, he suspected it didn’t matter either way. Delacroix could hardly kidnap a Scotland Yard detective, reveal his identity to that same detective, and then let him go free. No matter what secrets were told or withheld, Armand’s willingness to personally appear in the cell had made one thing clear: this captivity would ultimately end in Rayley’s death.

That is, unless…

Trevor was in Paris. While Armand Delacroix had learned nothing from Rayley Abrams in this opening skirmish, the opposite had not been true. In fact, the conversation had been a bounty of information. Trevor had come to Paris, evidently bringing Tom, Emma, and – for reasons Rayley could not begin to fathom – Geraldine Bainbridge along with him. Rayley knew his only hope for survival was to either stay alive long enough to give Trevor and the others time to find him or to devise some means of escape.

But how? He was trapped in a room with nothing but a high window, a bed, and a bucket. And his wits, he supposed, although they had been compromised by steady doses of drugs and the almost complete disorientation that extended stretches of captivity can impose on the mind. Still, there had to be some way.

Gerard was coming to the cell twice a day to bring food, water, and chloroform. There was no evidence the man spoke English, and Rayley’s French was hopeless. So it was unlikely he would be able to trick Gerard into betraying some vital piece of information, and even less likely he would find some way to bribe him or appeal to any residual sense of mercy.

Rayley pulled back his finger, stared at the slight smear of blood, barely visible in the dull reflected glow of the streetlight. Across the room, something scuttled. A wharf rat, no doubt. They had been coming and going through the last forty-eight hours, taking more interest in the mushy potatoes Gerard delivered than Rayley had been able to muster. As he watched, the rat ran up the wall and out through the narrow window, his tail flicking against the rusty iron bars as it slipped out of sight. Rayley sank back on his bed, deep in thought.

4:10 AM



Tom couldn’t decide if he had merely adjusted to the cold of the water or was in the first stages of hypothermia. He and Emma had bobbed along for several minutes now, and it was becoming abundantly clear that their primary problem was not crashing into boulders or drowning beneath the weight of their oversized clothing, but rather moving at all. The Seine had turned out to be a stagnant river, faintly malodorous and slow. As they had expected, Tom’s heavier body had floated slightly faster than Emma’s, but only marginally so, and they had stayed with sight of each other for the whole of their limited journey.

“It’s certainly shallow,” she called up to him. “My feet keep scraping the bottom.”

“Try and keep them up,” he called back. “We need to measure how fast bodies float, not how fast we can walk.”

“I know that,” she snapped. “But the current is so weak that I keep sinking. Are you sure we can’t lie back in the water and travel like a proper pair of corpses?”

Tom tried to weigh the risks. She was right, their absurd efforts to remain upright in the water were forcing them to paddle and thus they were scarcely reproducing the movements nor the pace of the original two bodies. “All right then, lie back,” he finally yelled over his shoulder. “But keep your face out of the water. And thrust your fingers in your ears.”

“With pleasure,” Emma muttered. She released herself into the water, looking up into the night sky, and almost immediately began to float faster. The same was probably true for Tom, she thought, perhaps to the degree that their paths would diverge or that his increased weight would stretch the distance between them in the river. As annoying as it was to have Tom give advice about her own experiment, she didn’t really want to lose him in this darkness or in this cold river. Didn’t really want to lose him at all.

She drifted on, straining to arch her neck and keep her mouth and nose free from any splashing. The cold was gripping into her. The fingers she had thrust into her ears had gone completely numb, as had her feet. Her scalp was pricking with icy needles and Emma felt as if she were caught between two worlds of darkness. The moving one beneath her, which gently lifted and then lowered her body, as if the Seine was somehow keeping time with the pattern of her own breathing. And then the other great darkness above, the night sky stretched like a blue-black cloth punctured with stars.

There are times, she thought, when we are lifted quite out of ourselves, when we could be any person, in any place and time in history. The last six months had changed her beyond comprehension. In fact you might say that Jack the Ripper had turned Emma Kelly from one person into another, snatching away any hope of reconciliation with her sister but also giving her this unlikely new job and a life that was suddenly full of passion and purpose. Fate drives cruel bargains. We must always release one thing before we can grasp something else, Emma reflected, and with a strange internal jolt she wondered if Isabel Blout had ever felt this way. If so, she had come to the right city. Paris, so bright and full of hope. That wildly manic painter she had met at the party tonight, the one who had told her that he wanted to go to Tahiti. Gauguin had been his name and he had looked at Emma with such emotion that she had turned away, almost embarrassed, as if the man were exposing his very soul to her in the middle of the crowded party.

“This urge to reinvent yourself is very strong,” Gauguin had said. “I believe you may feel it as well, do you not?” He had leaned towards her to whisper, bringing his lips very close to her ear. Impossible rudeness, unthinkable presumption, an act of such raw intimacy that she had flushed with the feel of his breath on her cheek. And he had murmured, “Yes, Miss Kelly, I somehow sense that you do.”

A shudder gripped Emma. Her legs were cramping with the cold, and her breathing was becoming shallow and ragged. How much longer could this river go on? And in the very moment that she thought this, she drifted into something. Not a boulder, but Tom’s arms. He righted her in the water, but her legs were weak and they stumbled together toward the shore.

“Didn’t you hear it?” he said. “The bell for the half hour?”

She shook her head, teeth chattering. With their limbs gone numb, it took some effort for them to climb up the bank, short as it was, and then they each sprawled for a moment on the muddy shore to catch their breath.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Emma finally said. “Fingers too far in my ears, I suppose.”

“We’ve got to keep moving,” Tom said. “Otherwise we’ll take a chill. If you had heard the church bell and stopped, you would have come to shore just there, at that point in the river where the woman in white is sleeping. Close enough to where I pulled up, so I don’t think there’s any need to make separate counts.”

Emma nodded and struggled to her feet. They began walking back up the riverbank, trying to keep a steady trod and each silently counting every step. After a few minutes, Tom stopped at a section of the bank that had a greater congregation of people, some of them awake and moving in the darkness.

“Where are you?”

“1,138.”

“I’m at 1,123. Not too much of a discrepancy. Let’s split the difference at 1,130. Wait here a minute, I have an idea. Hold the count.”

Emma nodded and he climbed up the bank and out of sight. She repeated 1,130 over and over in her head and struggled to fight the impulse to lie down and rest. For Tom was right. The simple act of walking, even slowly, was returning life to her body. She could move her fingers and toes now and her lungs were expanding into deeper and more productive breaths.

Tom was shortly back, wearing dry clothes and carrying a shapeless armful of cloth.

“Here,” he said. “I’m sure Cousin Claude would be gratified to learn that his fine woolen boating jacket was worth a pile of rags in an honest trade. Get out of those wet things at once.” He went on to explain that he had managed to barter his clothes, which were soaking wet but clearly expensive, to a man at the top of the bank in exchange for his own. And for good measure the man had thrown in his blanket, which Tom now thrust toward Emma. She recoiled at the smell.

“I can’t walk through the heart of Paris like some sort of naked savage, with a blanket wrapped about me,” she protested, even though it was tempting to shed her own clammy and inconvenient outfit, with its long pants legs tripping her up at every step.

“Agreed, but you can certainly walk the bank wrapped in one, and your clothes will be partially dry by the time the sun is up. Come on, Emma, buck up. This is no time to start thinking like a girl.”

She turned to him with a snap, her expression freezing him more thoroughly than the water of the Seine.

“Very well,” she said. “At least turn away.”

He faced up the bank toward the street while she wiggled out of her wet clothes, draped the blanket around her with as much dignity as she could muster, and gathered the sodden shirt and pants from the bank.

“All right, let us continue,” she said when she had finished. “We were at 1,130 were we not?”

4:48 AM



Approximately 15,000 human steps from where Emma and Tom were methodically pacing the river bank, Rayley Abrams was pulling the mattress off his cot and considering the dried puddles of vomit below.

The rat on the wall had given him an idea. Perhaps it was not true that he was entirely weaponless, for he had become quite adept at expunging chloroform from his body in the last two days and the evidence of this newly-acquired skill was now crusted to the underside of this mattress. With a heave of his aching shoulders, Rayley dragged the thin pad to the most well-lit part of the badly-lit room and considered his options. If there had been enough chloroform lingering in Graham’s blood to kill a cage full of mice, would there be enough in his vomit to momentarily disorient a man?

Granted, it didn’t seem likely. Perhaps the drug lost its properties over time, perhaps especially rapidly when exposed to air. And Gerard was certainly far larger and stronger than a cage full of white mice. If Rayley could find a way to make himself bleed…He could chew his own wrists, he supposed, or entice one the damned rats into doing the task. Bleed onto a piece of cloth – he still had most of his clothing, after all – and hope that it held enough chloroform to subdue Gerard.

The darkness of the room also worked to his advantage. Rayley’s eyes had long since adjusted to the gloom – in fact he suspected he would be struck blind with the brightness if he were ever to return to the sunlit world. But he had noted that both Gerard and Armand had paused upon entering the cell and stood for several seconds, clearly disoriented, waiting for their own eyes to adapt.

It was an opportunity, was it not? A brief moment in which Rayley would be able to see far better than Gerard. Perhaps he could crouch by door with the chloroform-soaked cloth in his hands and when the man entered he could spring -

No, no. That was no good. After all, by his own efforts, Rayley had managed reduce the amount of chloroform in his system so, even if he did find some way to bleed onto his knickerbockers, any effect the drug still held would be diffuse. Not enough to kill a cage full of lab mice and certainly not enough to make a twenty-stone man weak at the knees. If Rayley were to spring on Gerald in the darkness and throw a pair of bloodied knickerbockers over his head in all likelihood such an act would merely piss the man off.

There had to be another way. For the first time since being taken into captivity, Rayley felt strong enough to explore the cell. He tried to walk but within seconds of his hand leaving the security of the wall, his legs buckled. Very well then, he would explore on his hands and knees. Gerard had most considerately left a tin cup of water near the cot. Rayley fingers almost immediately came upon it and he gulped half of it down, saving the rest for troubles to come.

He began to crawl about the floor. It was a comfortless concrete affair, and the first corner he came to was slimy with seepage from the river. Rayley lowered his head and sniffed. Yes, most definitely sewage and stagnant water. Would Trevor and the others ever find this godforsaken place on their own? Just the thought that there was someone out there looking for him had given him a flicker hope…but this cell was so obscure, so dank and hidden. Rayley crawled on, using one hand to trace the edge of the wall. In the second corner, nothing but more river muck. In the third…

Damn. A dead rat. Despite their days of forced cohabitation, Rayley still recoiled from the vermin. No, upon consideration, perhaps not a rat. The size and shape was right, and, from the best he could gather, even the color. But the fur had been too soft. Cautiously, he brought his hand back to the item on the floor and lifted it.

It was a woman’s glove.

Rayley scuttled, rat-like himself, back to the mattress, which still lay on the floor, in the room’s only puddle of diffused light. He rolled back upon it, exhausted from the effort of his journey around the cell, and squinted at the glove. He was still wearing his glasses, he realized with some surprise. They had not come off in the beating, further evidence that Gerard’s restraint had been noteworthy. And the glove - it appeared grey in the shadowy room, or perhaps plum colored, a thought that made Rayley go cold with fear. He could visualize Isabel’s hands clutching the brass rail of the Eiffel Tower elevator, her face splitting into an expression of pure joy as they had climbed higher and higher above the city. Was this her glove? Had Armand at some point brought her to this wretched room?

But no. That made no sense. As Armand himself had so clearly pointed out, if he had Isobel in his possession, there would be no need to keep Rayley alive. Rayley had always known somehow, that his fate was blended with that of Isobel, from the first moment he had spied her in that café. Rayley shut his eyes, indulging in the memories of Isabel as if each one was a gulp of cold water from a tin cup. At the time he had concocted the fantasy that their fates were woven in the manner of lovers. Now he knew that they shared a different, darker sort of destiny, for the moment that Isabel Blout was captured would be the exact moment that Rayley Abrams would be condemned to die.

But they didn’t have her yet. He had to believe that, and besides, upon more careful examination, this was likely not even her glove. It had probably been on the hand of the boy-girl and pulled off in some sort of struggle.

Rayley looked up at the faint light above him and searched for inspiration. He did not have much. A cot. A bucket. A tin cup. His glasses. A woman’s glove. A high barred window. The remnants of chloroform and the predictable visits from Gerard. Could it all add up to an escape plan or – same thing – some means of signaling his location to Trevor?

He could almost hear Tom Bainbridge’s cultured voice drawling “You have nothing to lose, after all.” It was one of Tom’s favorite phrases and, now that Rayley stopped to consider it, Davy and Emma had been known to utter it too. It must be the motto of youth, Rayley supposed, a motto born from the innocent belief that one’s life was continually on the upswing, that circumstances have no choice but to get better and then yet better again. But he and Trevor knew what it meant to have something to lose – in fact, they had both lost things they’d loved, had watched their cherished dreams fall to dust in their hands.

And Rayley supposed that even in his present desolate situation he still had something to lose. The three loose teeth clinging to his gums, for example, and the relative hospitality of his captors. He remembered how Armand had reacted earlier, when Rayley had momentarily choked. A look of sheer panic had flitted across the man’s face and Rayley had known, in that instant, that Armand Delacroix did not want a dead Scotland Yard detective on his hands.

“You have nothing to lose,” Tom would say, but as Rayley looked around the cell, he amended the sentiment to “You have little to lose.” A botched escape attempt would likely earn him another beating, but they didn’t intend to kill him. Not quite yet. This knowledge was his trump card - indeed the only card he held.

5:10 AM

“7250 paces,” Tom said, as he and Emma at last reached the bridge where their journey had begun. “That’s how far we’ve come in a half hour so if we walk 7250 paces farther upstream we should be at the approximate place where the bodies were released.” He looked at Emma, who was clutching the blanket around her and weaving slightly on her feet. “But the key word in that sentence is ‘approximate.’ Don’t get your hopes up too high with this little experiment, Emma. There are a thousand variables which were beyond our control.”

“I suppose we’ll know in 7250 more steps.”

“Wait,” Tom said. “Let’s rest here a minute under the bridge. It’s still too dark to see much and you’re so – well, we’re both so very tired. Aunt Gerry was right. If we don’t sleep just a little, we’ll be in too much of a stupor to think.”

Emma looked around her. “Sleep? Here?”

“Just a few minutes. The church bells will wake us.”

Emma hesitated. She knew the truth of what he was saying, for in that parenthetical part of her mind that watched from a distance, she could tell that not only were her feet slow and clumsy but that her thoughts were likewise becoming less under her control.

“Not even an hour,” Tom said, kneeling to the ground and gesturing that she should sit beside him. “The six o’clock bells will rouse us and the sky will be lighter then. We can better see our way.”

Emma looked down at him, suddenly remembering things she didn’t want to remember and feeling the urge to weep. Perhaps it was just exhaustion, or finding herself in this strange and unreal place. On a riverbank in Paris, naked beneath a tattered blanket. Standing before a man she might love but one that she would never truly have.

“For a minute,” she whispered.

“Put your head on my shoulder,” Tom said. “We can keep each other warm.”