BEAUTY, BEAST and
BELLADONNA
Beware of allowing yourself to be prejudiced by appearances. –Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve,
“Beauty and the Beast” (1756)
1
The day had
arrived. Miss Ophelia Flax’s last day in
Paris, her last day in Artemis Stunt’s gilt-edged apartment choked with woody
perfumes and cigarette haze. Ophelia had
chosen December 12th, 1867, at eleven o’clock in the morning as the
precise time she would make a clean breast of it. And now it was half past ten.
Ophelia
swept aside brocade curtains and shoved a window open. Rain spattered her face. She leaned out and squinted up the
street. Boulevard Saint-Michel was a
valley of stone buildings with iron balconies and steep slate roofs. Beyond carriages and bobbling umbrellas, a
horse-drawn omnibus splashed closer.
“Time to
go,” she said, and latched the window shut.
She turned. “Good-bye,
Henrietta. You will write to
me—telegraph me, even—if Prue changes her mind about the convent?”
“Of course,
darling.” Henrietta Bright sat at the
vanity table, still in her frothy dressing gown. “But where shall I send a letter?” She shrugged a half-bare shoulder in the
looking glass. Reassuring herself, no
doubt, that at forty-odd years of age she was still just as dazzling as the New
York theater critics used to say.
“I’ll let
the clerk at Howard DeLuxe’s Varieties know my forwarding address,” Ophelia
said. “Once I have one.” She pulled on cheap gloves with twice-darned
fingertips.
“What will
you do in New England?” Henrietta
asked. “Besides getting buried under
snowdrifts and puritans? I’ve been to
Boston. The entire city is like a
mortuary. No drinking on Sundays,
either.” She sipped her glass of
poison-green cordial. “Although, all
that knuckle-rapping does make the
gentlemen more generous with actresses like us when they get the chance.”
“Actresses
like us?” Ophelia went to her carpetbag,
packed and ready on the opulent bed that might’ve suited the Princess on the
Pea. Ladies born and raised on New
Hampshire farmsteads did not sleep in such beds. Not without prickles of guilt, at least. “I’m no longer an actress, Henrietta. Neither are you.” And they were never the same kind of actress.
Or so Ophelia fervently wished to believe.
“No? Then what precisely do you call tricking the
Count Griffe into believing you are a wealthy soap heiress from Cleveland,
Ohio? Sunday school lessons?”
“I had to
do it.” Ophelia dug in her carpetbag and
pulled out a bonnet with crusty patches of glue where ribbon flowers once had
been. She clamped it on her head. “I’m calling upon the Count Griffe at eleven
o’clock, on my way to the steamship ticket office. I told you.
He scarpered to England so soon after his proposal, I never had a chance
to confess. He’s in Paris only today
before he goes to his country château, so today is my last chance to tell him
everything.”
“It’s
horribly selfish of you not to wait two more weeks, Ophelia—two measly weeks.”
Not this
old song and dance again. “Wait two more
weeks so that you might accompany me to the hunting party at Griffe’s château? Stand around and twiddle my thumbs for two
whole weeks while you hornswoggle some poor old gent into marrying you? Money and love don’t mix, you know.”
“What? They mix beautifully. And not hornswoggle, darling. Seduce.
And Mr. Larsen isn’t a poor
gentleman. He’s as rich as Midas. Artemis confirmed as much.”
“You know
what I meant. Helpless.”
“Mr. Larsen
is a widower, yes.” Henrietta
smiled. “Deliciously helpless.”
“I must go
now, Henrietta. Best of luck to you.”
“I’m
certain Artemis would loan you her carriage—oh, wait. Principled Miss Ophelia Flax must forge her
own path. Miss Ophelia Flax never accepts hand-outs or—”
“Artemis
has been ever so kind, allowing me to stay here the last three weeks, and I
couldn’t impose any more.” Artemis Stunt
was Henrietta’s friend, a wealthy lady authoress. “I’ll miss my omnibus.” Ophelia pawed through the carpetbag, past her
battered theatrical case and a patched petticoat, and drew out a small
box. The box, shiny black with painted
roses, had been a twenty-sixth birthday gift from Henrietta last week. It was richer than the rest of Ophelia’s
possessions by miles, but it served a purpose: a place to hide her little nest
egg.
The omnibus
fare, she well knew from her month in Paris, was thirty centimes. She opened the box. Her lungs emptied like a bellows. A slip of paper curled around the ruby ring
Griffe had given her. But her money—all
of her hard-won money she’d scraped together working as a lady’s maid in
Germany a few months back—was gone. Gone.
She swung
toward Henrietta. “Where did you hide
it?”
“Hide
what?”
“My money!”
“Scowling
like that will only give you wrinkles.”
“I don’t
even have enough for the omnibus fare now.”
Ophelia’s plans suddenly seemed vaporously fragile. “Now isn’t the time for jests,
Henrietta. I must get to Griffe’s house
so I might go to the steamship ticket office before it closes, and then on to
the train station. The Cherbourg-New
York ship leaves only once a fortnight.”
“Why don’t
you simply keep that ring? You’ll be in
the middle of the Atlantic before he even knows you’ve gone. If it’s a farm you desire, why, that ring
will pay for five farms and two hundred cows.”
Ophelia
wasn’t the smelling salts kind of lady, but her fingers shook as she replaced
the box’s lid. “Never. I would never
steal this ring—”
“He gave it
to you. It wouldn’t be stealing.”
“—and I
will never, ever become. . . .” Ophelia
pressed her lips together.
“Become
like me, darling?”
If Ophelia
fleeced rich fellows to pay her way instead of working like honest folks, then
she couldn’t live with herself. What
would become of her? Would she find
herself at forty in dressing gowns at midday and absinthe on her breath?
“You must
realize I didn’t take your money, Ophelia.
I’ve got my sights set rather higher than your pitiful little field
mouse hoard. But I see how unhappy you
are, so I’ll make you an offer.”
Ophelia
knew the animal glint in Henrietta’s whiskey-colored eyes. “You wish to pay to accompany me to Griffe’s
hunting party so that you might pursue Mr. Larsen. Is that it?
“Clever
girl. You ought to set yourself up in a
tent with a crystal ball. Yes. I’ll pay you whatever it was the servants
stole—and I’ve no doubt it was one of those horrid Spanish maids that Artemis
hired who pinched your money. Only keep
up the Cleveland soap heiress ruse for two weeks longer, Ophelia, until I hook
that Norwegian fish.”
Ophelia
pictured the green fields and white-painted buildings of rural New England, and
her throat ached with frustration. The
trouble was, it was awfully difficult to forge your own path when you were
always flat broke. “Pay me double or
nothing,” she said.
“Deal. Forthwith will be so pleased.”
“Forthwith?” Ophelia frowned. “Forthwith Golden, conjurer of the
stage? Do you mean to say he’ll be tagging along with us?”
“Mm.” Henrietta leaned close to the mirror and
picked something from her teeth with her little fingernail. “He’s ever so keen for a jaunt in the
country, and he adores blasting at beasts with guns.”
Saints
preserve us.
* *
*
Ophelia meant to cling to her
purpose like a barnacle to a rock. It
wasn’t easy. Simply gritting her teeth
and enduring the next two weeks was
not really her way. But Henrietta had
her up a stump.
First, there had been the two-day
flurry of activity in Artemis Stunt’s apartment, getting a wardrobe ready for
Ophelia to play the part of a fashionable heiress at a hunting party. Artemis was over fifty years of age but,
luckily, a bohemian and so with youthful tastes in clothing. She was also tall, beanstalkish and
large-footed, just like Ophelia, and very enthusiastic about the entire
deception. “It would make a marvelous
novelette, I think,” she said to Ophelia.
But this was exactly what Ophelia wished to avoid: behaving like a ninny
in a novelette.
And now, this interminable journey.
“Where are we now?” Henrietta, bundled in furs, stared dully out
the coach window. “The sixth tier of
hell?”
Ophelia consulted the Baedeker on
her knees, opened to a map of the Périgord region. “Almost there.”
“There
being the French version of the Middle of Nowhere,” Forthwith Golden said,
propping his boots on the seat next to Henrietta. “Why do these Europeans insist upon living in
these Godforsaken pockets? What’s wrong
with Paris, anyway?”
“You said you missed the country
air.” Henrietta shoved his boots off the
seat.
“Did I?” Forthwith had now and then performed
conjuring tricks in Howard DeLuxe’s Varieties back in New York, so Ophelia knew
more of him than she cared to. He was
dark-haired, too handsome, and skilled at making things disappear. Especially money.
“You
insisted upon coming along,” Henrietta said to Forthwith, “and don’t try to
deny it.”
“Ah, yes,
but Henny, you neglected to tell me that your purpose for this hunting
excursion was to ensnare some doddering old corpse into matrimony. I’ve seen that performance of yours a dozen
times, precious, and it’s gotten a bit boring.”
“Oh, do
shut up. You’re only envious because you
spent your last penny on hair pomade.”
“I hoped
you’d notice. Does Mr. Larsen have any
hair at all? Or does he attempt to fool
the world by combing two long hairs over a liver-spotted dome?”
“He’s an
avid sportsman, Artemis says, and a crack shot.
So I’d watch my tongue if I were you.”
“Oh dear
God. A codger with a shotgun.”
“He wishes
to go hunting in the American West.
Shoot buffalos from the train and all that.”
“One of those Continentals
who have glamorized the whole Westward Ho business, not realizing that it’s all
freezing to death and eating Aunt Emily’s thighbone in the mountains?”
Ophelia sighed. Oh, for a couple wads of cotton wool to stop
up her ears. Henrietta and Forthwith had
been bickering for the entire journey, first in the train compartment between
Paris and Limoges and then, since there wasn’t a train station within 50 miles
of Château Vézère, in this bone-rattling
coach. Outside, hills, hills, and more
hills. Bare, scrubby trees and
meandering vineyards. Farmhouses of
sulpherous yellow stone.
A tiny
orange sun sank over a murky river. Each
time a draft swept through the coach, Ophelia tasted the minerals that foretold
snow.
“Ophelia,” Forthwith said, nudging
her.
“What is it?”
Forthwith made series of
fluid motions with his hands, and a green and yellow parakeet fluttered out of
his cuff and landed on his finger.
“That’s
horrible. How long has that critter been
stuffed up your sleeve?” Ophelia poked
out a finger and the parakeet hopped on.
Feathers tufted on the side of its head and its eyes were possibly
glazed. It was hard to say with a
parakeet. “Poor thing.”
“It hasn’t
got feelings, silly.” Forthwith yawned.
“Finally,” Henrietta said, sitting up
straighter. “We’ve arrived.”
The coach
passed through ornate gates. Naked trees
cast shadows across a long avenue. They clattered
to a stop before the huge front door. Château Vézère was three stories, rectangular,
and built of yellow stone, with six chimneys, white-painted shutters, and
dozens of tall, glimmering windows. Bare
black vegetation encroached on either side, and Ophelia saw some smaller stone
buildings to the side.
“Looks like
a costly doll’s house,” Henrietta said.
“I rather
thought it looked like a mental asylum,” Forthwith said.
Ophelia
slid Griffe’s ruby ring on her hand, the hand that wasn’t holding a parakeet. Someone swung the coach door open.
“Let the
show begin, darlings,” Henrietta murmured.
A footman
in green livery helped Ophelia down first.
Garon Gavage, the Count Griffe, bounded forward to greet her. “Mademoiselle Stonewall, I have been
restless, sleepless, in anticipation of your arrival—ah, how belle you look.” His dark gold mane of hair wafted in the
breeze. “How I have longed for your
presence—what is this? A petit bird?”
“What? Oh.
Yes.” Ophelia couldn’t even begin
to explain the parakeet. “It’s very nice
to see you, Count. How long has it
been? Three weeks?”
Griffe’s
burly chest rose and fell. “Nineteen
days, twenty hours, and thirty-two minutes.”
Right.
Forthwith
was out of the coach and pumping Griffe’s hand.
“Count Griffe,” he said with a toothy white smile, “pleased to meet
you. My sister has told me all about
you.”
Ophelia’s
belly lurched.
“Sister?” Griffe knit his brow.
“I beg your
pardon,” Forthwith said. “I’m Forthwith
Stonewall, Ophelia’s brother. Didn’t my
sister tell you I was coming along?”
The rat.
“Ah!” Griffe clapped Forthwith on the
shoulder. “Monsieur Stonewall. Perhaps your sister did mention it—I have
been most distracted by business matters in England, très forgetful . . . And who is this?” Griffe nodded to Henrietta as she stepped
down from the coach. “Another delightful
American relation, eh?”
It had better not be. Ophelia said, “This is—”
“Mrs.
Henrietta Brighton,” Henrietta said quickly, and then gave a sad smile.
Precisely
when had Miss Henrietta Bright become Mrs.
Henrietta Brighton? And . . . oh, merciful heavens. How could Ophelia have been so blind? Henrietta was in black. All
in black.
“Did Miss
Stonewall neglect to mention that I would chaperone her on this visit?”
Henrietta asked Griffe. “I am a dear
friend of the Stonewall family, and I have been on a Grand Tour in order to
take my mind away from my poor darling—darling . . . oh.” She dabbed her eyes
with a hankie.
Griffe took
Henrietta’s arm and patted it as he led her through the front door. “A widow, oui? My most profound condolences, Madame
Brighton. You are very welcome here.”
Ophelia and
Forthwith followed. The parakeet’s feet
clung to Ophelia’s finger, and tiny snowflakes fell from the darkening sky.
“You’re shameless,” Ophelia said to Forthwith in
a hot whisper.
Forthwith
grinned. “Aren’t I, though?”
A Clue in the Stew:
, A Broth of Betrayal
, A Roux of Revenge
, Ladle to the Grave
and A Clue in the Stew
are all set in the imaginary village of Snowflake, Vermont. Connie was born and raised in New England and now lives on the other coast. You can visit her at www.ConnieArcherMysteries.com
Historical Mystery
