She was walking up and down the room unhappily as she spoke, wringing her hands together. Arcadius, though outwardly calm, never took his eyes off her.
'Stolen? Perhaps—'
'What do you mean, perhaps?'
'Don't be cross. I am merely thinking that whoever put it in the salon has simply taken it away again. You see, instead of trying to find out who took the portrait, I think we should do better to try and find out who put it there in the midst of all that wreckage. Because it is my belief that when we know that, we shall also know who has the portrait now.'
Marianne said nothing. What Jolival said was true. Instead of grieving, she began to think. She remembered the brightness of the canvas and the frame, how meticulously clean they were in contrast to the squalor around them. There was some mystery there.
'Would you like me to inform the Minister of Police?' Fortunée suggested. 'He will make inquiries, discreet ones if you like, but I'll be prepared to swear that he will find your portrait before very long.'
'No – thank you, I would rather not.'
What, above all, she would rather not see was the astute Fouché dabbling in something which concerned her so closely. She felt that by putting Fouché's men with their dirty fingers on the trail of her father's disappearing image, she would be in some way soiling the beauty of that image which she had so briefly recovered.
'No—' she said again, 'truly I would rather not.' She added: 'I prefer to try and find out myself.'
In that moment her mind was made up.
'Jolival, my dear,' she said calmly, 'tonight, we will go back to the rue de Lille, as unobtrusively as possible.'
'Go back to the rue de Lille tonight,' Fortunée protested. 'You cannot mean it? What for?'
'It would seem that there is a ghost in the old house. Don't ghosts prefer the night time?'
'You think someone comes there?'
'Or hides there.'
An idea was growing in her mind as she spoke. Or rather, a memory which was becoming clearer with every moment. Of a few remarks she had heard as a child. More than once, Aunt Ellis had told her of her adventures as a tiny baby, how the abbé de Chazay had found her, left all alone in the house after her parents had been taken away. At that time, the abbé himself had been living in the rue de Lille, in one of those secret hiding places which had been constructed in a great many aristocratic houses in town and country to hide refractory priests. 'That must be it!' she said, finishing her thoughts aloud, 'someone must be hiding in the house.'
'It is impossible,' Jolival answered. 'I have been everywhere, I tell you, from top to bottom.'
But he listened very attentively when she told him the story of the abbé de Chazay. Unfortunately, she did not know where this hiding place lay. It might be in the cellars, the attic or behind the panelling in one of the rooms. The abbé himself, whether intentionally or from sheer absentmindedness, had never told her precisely.
'In that case, we may search for a very long time. Some of these hiding places were completely impossible to discover, except by a stroke of luck. We shall have to sound out the walls and ceilings.'
'At all events, no one could live long in one of those hiding places without outside help,' Marianne said. 'They would need food and fresh air and all the other necessities of life.'
Fortunée, who was lying on a blue watered-silk chaise longue, sighed and stretched, then began rearranging the folds of her red cashmere gown, yawning widely as she did so.
'You don't think perhaps you two are romancing a little?' she said. 'I think the house has been empty for so long that some poor homeless wretch must have been living in it, and our going in like that, followed by the architects, must have disturbed him, that is all.'
'And the portrait?' Marianne said seriously.
'He must have found it in the house, perhaps in the attics or hidden away in some odd corner, which would explain why it escaped when everything else was wrecked. Because it was the only pretty thing left, he used it to adorn his desert and when we invaded his domain today he simply went away and took with him what he had come to regard as his own property. I sincerely believe, Marianne, that if you want to get your picture back the only sensible thing to do is to tell Fouché. It can't be easy to wander about Paris with a canvas that size under one's arm. Would you like me to send for him? We are reasonably good friends.'
It began to look as though the charming Fortunée had good friends everywhere, but once again, Marianne refused. Against all the evidence, some instinct was telling her that there was some other explanation, and that the eminently simple and rational theory put forward by her friend was not the right one. She had been conscious of a presence in the house, which she had at first put down to the magnetic power of the portrait, but now she realized that there was something else. She recalled the footfalls they had heard upstairs. Arcadius had decided it must have been a rat, but was it? She could not help thinking that there was some mystery about her ancestral home and she meant to get to the bottom of it, but she would do so alone. Or at least, with only Arcadius to help her. She turned to him now.
'I mean what I said. Will you come with me tonight and see what is going on in my house?'
'Why ask?' Jolival shrugged. 'For one thing, not for anything in the world could I allow you to go alone into that morgue, but for another – I must admit that this peculiar business intrigues me too. We'll leave here at ten o'clock, if that suits you.'
Fortunée sighed. 'And much good may it do you! My dear child, you do seem to be inordinately fond of adventures. For myself, I shall stay quietly at home, with your permission. Firstly because I have not the slightest desire to go and freeze to death in an empty house, and secondly because someone must be here to warn the Emperor in case you are running into another of those traps you seem to have a knack of finding. And I dread to think what he will do to me if anything should happen to you!' she finished with comical alarm.
The remainder of the evening passed in supping and afterwards in making ready for the intended expedition. For a moment, it did occur to Marianne to think of the mysterious danger against which Jason Beaufort had warned her but she rejected the idea at once. Why should she expect any danger? Surely no one could have foreseen that Napoleon would give her back the house which had been her parent's? No, the Hôtel d'Asselnat could be in no way connected with the American's fears.
But Marianne was not fated to go adventuring with Arcadius that night. The clock had just struck a quarter to ten and she had already risen from her chair to go and put on some more suitable clothes for what lay ahead, when Fortunée's black servant Jonas appeared to announce with his invariable solemnity that 'Monsigneur le duc de Frioul' requested admittance. Absorbed in their own conversation, neither Marianne, nor Fortunée, nor Arcadius had heard the carriage arrive. They gazed at one another blankly but Fortunée recovered herself at once.
'Show him in,' she said to Jonas. 'The dear duke must be bringing word from the Tuileries.'
The Grand Marshal of the palace was doing better than that.
Hardly had he entered the room and kissed Fortunée's hand before he said gaily to Marianne:
'I come in search of you, mademoiselle. The Emperor is asking for you.'
'Truly? Oh, I am coming, I am coming at once—'
She was so happy to be going to him that evening when she had been given no reason to hope for it, that for a second she forgot the business of the missing picture. In her haste to go to Napoleon, she hurried away to put on a pretty dress of green velvet braided with silver with a deeply scooped out neckline and short sleeves trimmed with a froth of lace, snatched up a pair of long white gloves and flung on a great cloak of the same velvet, cut like a flowing domino with a hood trimmed with grey fox. She loved these things and blew a kiss with her fingertips at the radiantly joyful reflection in her mirror before running down to the salon where Duroc was calmly drinking coffee with Fortunée and Arcadius. He was talking at the same time and, as he was talking about the Emperor, Marianne paused in the doorway to listen to the end of what he was saying.
'—and when he had seen the finished column in the place Vendôme, the Emperor went on to inspect the Ourcq Canal. He is never still for a moment!'
'Was he pleased?' Madame Hamelin asked.
'With these works, yes, but the war in Spain remains his greatest anxiety. Things are going badly there. The men are sick, the Emperor's brother, King Joseph, lacks imagination, the marshals are weary and jealous of one another, while the guerilleros harry the army and are helped by the local population, who are both hostile and cruel. And then Wellington's English are firmly established in the country.'
'How many men have we there?' Arcadius asked in a grave voice.
'Nearly eighty thousand. Soult has replaced Jourdan as Major General. King Joseph has Sebastiani, Victor and Mortier under him, while Suchet and Augereau are occupying Aragon and Catalonia. At this moment, Massena and Junot are joining forces with Ney and Montbrun ready to march into Portugal—'
Marianne's entry cut short Duroc's military disquisition. He looked up, smiled and set down his empty cup.
'Let us go, then, if you are ready. If I let myself be drawn into army talk we shall be here all night.'
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