“Did you see her with any strange persons? Did she mention anything at all to you?”
“No. But it was as though all the color drained right out of her, and then . . . she was dead. Killed by a madman of the streets, I saw in the newspaper.”
“What was the name of the convent orphanage from which Mademoiselle Pinet came?”
The landlady passed Gabriel the crate. “I do not quite remember, but I fancy it had something to do with stars.”
*
“Stop keeping me out of the conversation,” Ophelia grumbled to Penrose, once they were back on the street.
“She was anxious to be rid of us.”
“What did she say?”
He told her.
This time, Ophelia allowed Penrose to hire a carriage. She was eager to look into the crate of Sybille’s possessions. Also, her feet were sore, but she’d never admit to that.
Once they’d climbed inside a carriage, Penrose lifted the crate’s lid.
A woman’s garments lay folded in a stack. Threadbare gowns, dingy petticoats, darned stockings, and a sad little pair of button boots that had been resoled even more times than Ophelia’s own. Beneath the clothes, a tarnished hairbrush and comb, a few stray ribbons and buttons, a tiny French prayer book, and a wooden rosary. That was all.
“Guess they don’t pay the ballet girls much,” Ophelia said. Sadness fell around her. Poor Sybille. Ophelia’s life had been just as humble, but she had never been so desperately alone.
“There is nothing here to suggest that Miss Pinet had . . . admirers.”
“No. She probably would have had finer things, wouldn’t she? Wait. What’s this?” A bit of paper stuck against the inside of the crate. Ophelia wiggled it loose. A lavish engraving of flowers and lettering—all in French—covered one side.
“A florist’s trade card. It lists its name and address, here in Paris.”
Ophelia flipped the card over. “Mercy.”
The back of the card said, in a lady’s hurried hand, Howard DeLuxe’s Varieties Broadway.
“That’s where Prue and I worked—where Henrietta worked.”
“Is that Henrietta’s handwriting?”
“I believe it is. What does this mean?”
“It suggests that at some point, Sybille Pinet met her mother.”
*
Ophelia reckoned that riding about Paris in a closed carriage with a fellow was scandalous. But she knew that Penrose was an honorable gentleman. Besides which, her virtue was well-padded by the Mrs. Brand disguise. She asked Penrose to drop her two blocks from H?tel Malbert.
“I ought not be seen alighting from mysterious carriages by any of the household,” she said to Penrose as the driver handed her down. “And would you keep Sybille’s things? I don’t wish to explain the crate to anyone. I do wish I could attend the Cendrillon ballet.” She paused. She detested asking for things. “Professor, perhaps you might go to the Cendrillon ballet—if you have the time, I mean to say—and inform me of any clues about the connection between Sybille’s Cinderella getup and the ballet.”
“Perhaps you would join me. This evening?”
Ophelia considered. “I might be able to pull it off. I’ll meet you in the opera house lobby just before eight o’clock, if I’m able.”
*
When Ophelia returned to H?tel Malbert, it was nearing one o’clock. The stepsisters were holed up in their salon—Ophelia heard them bickering through the doors. Baldewyn was polishing silver in the dining room. He did not greet Ophelia when she looked in, although his face grew instantly blotchy.
Baldewyn hadn’t warmed to Mrs. Brand.
Prue wasn’t upstairs. Ophelia searched for her, but only caught the lady’s maid, Lulu, trying on Eglantine’s fancy slippers in front of a mirror.
Ophelia finally found Prue in, of all places, the kitchen.