The Cathedral of Fear Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Chapter 1: RETURNING HOME

  Chapter 2: A COUNTRY VILLAGE

  Chapter 3: A LILAC-COLORED ROOM

  Chapter 4: GRACEFUL HANDWRITING

  Chapter 5: AN UNEXPECTED GUEST

  Chapter 6: THE RIVER

  Chapter 7: REVISIONS

  Chapter 8: SNAPS AND SECRETS

  Chapter 9: A GOOD REPAIR

  Chapter 10: THE MONTMORENCYS

  Chapter 11: A JOINT DECISION

  Chapter 12: THE ALCHEMISTS OF PARIS

  Chapter 13: THE DUMAS ARCHIVES

  Chapter 14: THE LADY OF THE CAMELLIAS

  Chapter 15: THE CARDINAL’S CAVERN

  Chapter 16: DESCENT INTO DARKNESS

  Chapter 17: THE DARK HEART OF PARIS

  Chapter 18: THE MASTER’S VOICE

  Chapter 19: AN EMPEROR

  Chapter 20: THE DARKEST TRUTH

  Chapter 21: AN EXTRAORDINARY DAY

  Copyright

  Back cover

  Chapter 1

  RETURNING HOME

  Wars are never fought only in the field. Especially when looked at from a distance with the knowing eyes of an adult — eyes that confuse black smoke fires with the glow of bonfires, in order to reassure children. As we passed through the French countryside during the slow stages of our return trip across the continent, protected by the gentle hills and the dense layers of trees, we could imagine that everything we had heard in the announcements on the radio was false. But that was not the case, and we all knew it. We had fled far away, Papa, Mama, and I. But now we were returning.

  Newspaper boys who couldn’t themselves read fanned the darkened pages of the papers loudly, and the names that I heard — Le Mans, Saint-Quentin, Lisaine — flew through my head like swallows. I had chosen to take in nothing about the war, because I knew that if I merely began to ask about what was happening to my city — to Paris — I might go crazy with grief. Or, even worse, I would ask to go back to the home we had left six months before.

  Actually, an entire winter had passed since we took the ferry from Calais to Dover. From there we had gone to London on one of those amazing trains that the English were famous for. According to my father, the ferry on the outbound trip would signal the beginning of our new life. A drastic break — like the stroke of a knife — between what had taken place before and what would happen there, in England, far from the war that kept disturbing Paris.

  During the months we had spent across the English Channel in London, the French had lost all they could lose — a war and much of their dignity. Again, this was according to my father, who was not actually French, although he had always lived in Paris. He was Prussian, like the victors of the war, and this put him in a strange light in the eyes of all those who had been his friends. His major business contacts, too, although even during the war, this had not kept him from working. My father worked in the iron business. And while he never admitted to me that iron from the Adler steelworks was used to produce muskets and cannonballs, I did think that from a certain point of view, Papa had not minded the war so much.

  “Now is a time of great turmoil,” he used to say to me when I was little, ruffling my hair. “Who knows if a better world will arise from it than the one we live in, my daughter?”

  And with these words, “my daughter,” I felt Papa’s hand shake slightly — so slightly that it took me many years and adventures before I remembered that detail — a detail that’s meaning is crystal clear to me now as I write.

  “My daughter,” my father used to say, before the war broke out and changed everything. The rich became poor, and rebels became statesmen. Soldiers became deserters, and deserters pretended to have fought to defend our flag. A flag that had been overwhelmed by the tumultuous events of those months, I discovered, much like so many other things.

  “It seems as though France’s flag no longer exists,” Papa said one day during our return trip, reading the news. The flag was that of the Revolution: blue, white, and red.

  “No? Well, what have they done with it?” my mother asked, shut into the safest corner of the carriage, her voice faint.

  My father did not answer her, or if he did I did not hear, because I was studying the countryside gently rolling outside my window.

  Another stroke of the knife, I was thinking — crossing the English Channel a second time, but this time in reverse, from Dover to Calais.

  And London, smoky London, had disappeared into the gray.

  * * *

  Our return trip was not pleasant. And not just due to the condition of my mother’s health.

  I kept remembering how badly Mr. Horatio Nelson had suffered on the ferry after we’d left France the previous autumn. Later on, our family butler told me about a nasty experience he’d had many years before onboard a ship. When he was serving as an ordinary seaman, he was accused of having murdered a passenger and throwing her into the sea. Then, when the ship had landed in London, Scotland Yard had arrested him unjustly.

  Now, during our return crossing from England to France, Mr. Nelson stood on the main deck, sniffing the air. Like a huge statue, he stood immobile, his gaze set toward the south, as if that way he could catch a glimpse of the glint of steel and the gunpowder exploding in the salty haze.

  My father stayed in the cabin the whole time, watching over Mama. Pale as a tallow candle, she had disappeared into her bed, greatly weakened by consumption. The British doctors — and even the one whom my father had brought in from Vienna — were sure of the illness she was suffering from.

  “A serious lung infection,” they had said.

  And that was that.

  My father had looked at me with that deeply sympathetic expression I had already seen on his face at other times. Seeing it then again was the real reason I had not asked him if he had ever manufactured weapons, as well as train tracks and wheels.

  “If even the Austrian doctor said so, my daughter, it must be true,” he had whispered to me.

  Papa had hoped to the bitter end that this was not the case. That my mother just had pneumonia or a particularly severe case of the flu, but nothing more. He comforted her, saying that spring would be coming soon, that this horrible London winter would be lifted by the blossoming cherry trees and the linden tree pollen in Hyde Park. But it did little good.

  My mother’s hands had grown increasingly pale, her pained bouts of coughing more pronounced, and her faint, scarce pulse ever weaker.

  Tentacles of silence had spread through our Aldford Street apartment, broken only by the ticking of the pendulum and the clash of the Limoges dishes as Papa and I dined, barely exchanging a word.

  “Do you still see your friend?” he’d asked me almost every evening, forgetting that my reply was always the same.

  My friend was Sherlock Holmes, and yes, I had seen him regularly until my mother’s sudden illness, which had reduced the frequency of our meetings.

  “Are you still quite fond of each other?” Papa had asked.

  Yes, we were. But something much more complicated was hidden beneath my father’s question. Papa was thinking of moving again, of leaving London. And in that awkward way only men can do, he was trying to figure out how much the news would upset me.

  Leaving London when we had scarcely arrived. It would not have upset me, if Papa had only asked me directly.

  But he never did.

  He o
nly told me the date we would be leaving — just as the linden tree pollen would arrive, but without waiting for spring.

  So we were returning to France, but not to Paris, because news from the capital didn’t sound at all reassuring. Papa revealed the existence of a country estate in the town of Evreux, about a hundred kilometers west of Paris. It was there that we were headed in our carriage. And it was the hills of Evreux that I was examining out my window.

  I pressed my knees between my hands, as if I had taken hold of something firm — a thought, an idea, or a sense of gloom. I forced myself to look at neither my father, his face as dark as a stormy sky, nor my mother across from him, pale as a ghost.

  How had my mother’s lungs become damaged like this? I wondered.

  During one of the breaks on the long return trip, I asked Mr. Nelson what he knew about my mother’s illness. Our butler simply shook his head.

  “It’s not what you think, Miss Irene,” Mr. Nelson explained to me. “Your mother’s illness is due to the city air. The chimney stacks and the unhealthy smog from the factories that fill London. Your mother has very delicate lungs, and that air is like poison for her.”

  Indeed, it was true. There were days when it seemed there was a screen of suspended dust — of dense, suffocating soot. I remembered how the sudden rain pelting down had covered my clothes with rivulets like dark tears. My mother suffered badly from this, and it was only aggravated by her severe homesickness for France and French ways.

  “Is that why we didn’t go to live in the English countryside, somewhere like Bath or Oxford?” I asked Mr. Nelson.

  I knew I should ask my father, but talking to him had become difficult. The happy, gentle man of a few months earlier — who had hugged me and spun me around in pirouettes — had hidden his feelings behind a closed curtain without warning, like a theater that had suddenly shut down.

  “Your father thought returning to France would do your mother more good than any other cure,” Mr. Nelson replied. “And I believe he was right.”

  I believed so, too, despite the chaos unfolding in our home country.

  And so, on March 6, 1871, we returned.

  Chapter 2

  A COUNTRY VILLAGE

  The country home my father had bought was just outside the village of Evreux, a town of squat, little houses tightly surrounding a majestic cathedral that frightened me when I glimpsed it from the carriage. It was visible from far away, and with its double bell tower and pointed spires like the tips of arrows, it soared above the other buildings in the village. The central rose window facing the park looked like a whirlwind to me. I turned away.

  “There are your cathedrals.” My father smiled, gently patting my mother’s hand. “Do you feel a bit more at home now, my dear?”

  Mama nodded, and a weak smile lit her face.

  A flock of crows disturbed our passage as we left the cathedral and the village shops behind us and rode over the arched bridge.

  Our new home suddenly appeared on the left, but I could not see it clearly from where I sat in the carriage. It was too much for me to stand.

  “Irene!” Papa shouted when he saw me fumbling with the lock on the carriage door.

  I didn’t hear anything past that. I opened the door wide and leaned out, clinging to the brass bar of the luggage rack that ran right above the window. With a single swift movement, I pulled myself up, just as Arsène Lupin, my other dear friend, had taught me.

  Two pairs of stunned eyes stared at me from the coachman’s box, but then Mr. Nelson signaled the driver to continue as if everything were normal.

  “Be careful with the luggage, Miss Irene,” he warned me in a tone of voice that, nonetheless, did not seem at all worried. “I’m not sure they were tied together well.”

  I sat down on one of my mother’s trunks. Meanwhile, from inside the carriage, my father pounded the ceiling under my feet with the knob of his walking stick, trying to convince me to come back inside where a young lady like me belonged. It seemed as though my mother’s illness had encouraged Papa to see things more from her perspective.

  I snorted and concentrated on what I could see.

  The house had an expansive garden descending all the way to the banks of a river, melting into a dense bed of reeds. I spied a wooden jetty stretching over the water. Then the carriage changed direction, turning onto the main road, which was flanked by two rows of centuries-old elm trees.

  The house was as cute as a button. It had two stories and a third row of round windows peeping over the roof. The gate was covered with vines and had not been closed properly. The many branches that had fallen on the dirt road snapped noisily under the horses’ hooves. Someone had arranged for the shutters to be opened before we arrived, but it was obvious that the house had been empty the previous season. A wisp of smoke rose from the chimney top, which reassured me, since the country air was still brisk despite the scent of spring.

  I went back inside the carriage and sighed with relief, noting that the grim cathedral was no longer visible. We traveled along the road as it ran past the entire garden before it continued on to the other estates. Venturing into the dense shadows projected from the branches, we finally stopped in front of the entrance to the house, where two servants were waiting for us, along with four stretcher-bearers who would help my mother.

  Papa got out to direct the operations and disappeared into the house, seeming to forget that he had just been scolding me. I was struck by how he did all he could for my mother and how he clearly felt lost without her help.

  Through the thick windowpanes, I watched the shadows of other people move inside the house for several minutes. Then I saw Mr. Nelson pass by, weighed down with luggage.

  “What would you say if I gave you a hand?” I asked, taking advantage of my parents’ absence to take a few liberties unthinkable for a young lady.

  Without waiting for Mr. Nelson’s reply — which I knew would be negative — I untied the ropes fastening the luggage. When he came back for a second trip, I unloaded the suitcases from the carriage, placing them in his arms.

  At my back, the reeds along the riverbank gently swayed.

  I did not go into the house right away. I walked along outside it, inspecting it with the careful eye of someone who has moved before, and would prefer to focus on what is wrong, rather than notice its delightful details.

  Yet, despite my suspicions, I liked the house a great deal. And when I finished my tour, I saw something that chased away my last doubts.

  I ran across the grass toward the riverbank, where a swing swayed from a tree near the water.

  I could not believe how beautiful it was. I played with the ropes and the little wooden seat, feeling as if I were inside one of those bucolic scenes that the good society ladies loved to hang on the walls of their proper parlors. I shook my head at that thought, quickly giving in to the rocking of the swing.

  I had to write to my friends right away. To let them know I was here and that they absolutely had to send me their news and come see …

  I burst out laughing. What did they have to come see? A swing? A picturesque garden?

  I waited until evening fell for someone to remember me.

  Then, as soon as I heard someone calling my name, I went into the house.

  * * *

  At dinner, it seemed like my father had found his voice again. His face was red and flushed, and he kept insisting I agree with him that this house would solve all our problems. As was usual then, it was just the two of us, but finally it seemed to me that the strong, stoic man I knew — who could give me a greater sense of security than anyone else — had returned.

  I replied that the house was beautiful and that I appreciated the effort he had put into getting it.

  “Nonsense!” he replied. “It went for a few francs, with what’s going on in Paris!”

  I felt a pang in my he
art. I knew nothing about what was happening in Paris, other than the little information my friend Lupin had included in his last letter, which was dated two weeks earlier by then.

  “Is it dangerous?” I asked him.

  “Dangerous? It’s much more than dangerous. It’s absurd! Imagine a pack of scoundrels influencing all the respectable people!” my father exclaimed. “That’s what’s happening. And if someone doesn’t take charge again, it will get even worse.”

  “Worse than what?” I asked him.

  “Worse, and that’s enough! I told Gautier, too. The city’s become an insane asylum! It needs Napoleon again, and it needs him in a hurry!” he thundered. But his eyes were smiling.

  And so I held my own with that Papa who was once again so happy to talk to me about politics. And even though I did not really understand the topics he was talking about, the return of his good mood was enough to comfort me.

  “Papa?” I said at the end of dinner, as our plates disappeared on a silver tray. “Before we got here, who lived in this house?”

  He wiped his mouth with his napkin, crumpled it into a ball, and stared at it for a long time, as if it were an ancient treasure map. Finally he said something. “Shall we go say hello to your mother?”

  Chapter 3

  A LILAC-COLORED ROOM

  Our first week in Evreux was a good week.

  There were four empty bedrooms on the top floor of the country home, but I chose a fifth, which was not a real room but rather the attic. It had whitewashed lime walls; strong, sloping beams looming at the ceiling; and a round window that faced the park, the bed of reeds, and the river bend. I helped Mr. Nelson carry up a mattress, which I eased onto the floor on top of a rug, to my father’s horror. He once again tried to play the role of a worried parent.

  “A young lady shouldn’t —” he began, when I showed him the mattress on the floor and the lamp resting on a pile of books beside it.

  I interrupted him, hugging him suddenly.

  “ … shouldn’t bump her head every time she gets out of bed?” he finished instead.