And Armand was desperate to be important.
He thought over his plans for the next day. He would go to the hotel, tell Colette he needed to see her alone, and declare his intentions of uniting their families when she reached eighteen or nineteen years old. She would protest — she was always protesting about something — but then he would kiss her.
And Armand knew how to kiss a girl in a way that would change her mind about pretty much anything.
As for Hannah, she’d been a useful tool to get to Colette, but she was growing tiresome. Her latest idea was to transfer to a French school so she could be near him! He almost relished the idea of telling her he’d never really been interested in her. As if he would have anything to do with such a vulgar fool — as if mere money could buy her the kind of pedigree he demanded from the girl who would be his wife.
No, there was only one choice. And he was going to break the news to Colette very soon.
She might not be happy about it, but given enough time, he could wear her down. He was sure of it. After all, he had to think of his legacy.
There had been one small obstacle — that loser Jules. According to Hannah, Colette had gone out to dinner with him the night before. But Armand had spoken to Jules first thing this morning and let him know that Colette was off-limits. And Jules was too much of a goody-goody to put up a fight for some silly American girl.
Carefully refiling the page, Armand placed the folder in its hanging file and surveyed his desk to be sure it was spotless. He wondered for a moment if Colette kept her things clean.
Well, she would learn to, if she was to be his wife.
He glanced down as his cell phone lit up with yet another text message from Hannah. His nostrils flared in distaste. How desperate! At least Colette had this much going for her — she had dignity and didn’t act like a lovesick child.
Spritzing cologne on his wrists, he took one last look at himself in the mirror and then opened the door that led from his bedroom to the living room.
Then he stopped.
He wasn’t alone.
WE SPENT THE morning at the Musée d’Orsay. I tried to appreciate the works of the famous painters on display there — Monet, Degas, Renoir, Picasso … but in truth, I couldn’t focus very well on the art.
Half of me kept expecting to see the swish of a massive skirt out of the corner of my eye, and the other half of me kept stealing glances at Jules, who was leading the group as usual, playing it cool.
Not wanting to seem needy, I waited until we were breaking for lunch before I approached him.
“Bonjour,” I said, standing a little closer than normal. I couldn’t keep a little smile from creeping onto my lips.
“Bonjour,” he said, not looking at me.
“How are you this morning?”
“Very well, thank you.” He was leafing through his notebook, so I stopped talking for a moment to give him a chance to find whatever he was looking for. But he didn’t seem to find anything. He just kept leafing. Finally, he glanced up. “Can I help you?”
I stared at him, not comprehending his coldness. “I … I just wanted to say hi.”
He gave me a quick, fake smile. “Hi,” he said, and then the smile disappeared.
Okay, correct me if I’m wrong, but this was not the way you treat someone after you’ve kissed her at the top of the Eiffel Tower on the most romantic night of her entire life.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, hating the breathlessness of my voice.
“Nothing is wrong with me, Colette,” he said, not looking at me. “Is something wrong with you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. I don’t understand what you’re … why you’re …”
He didn’t raise his eyes, but he finally stopped flipping pages, so I knew I had his attention.
The horror of the situation was sinking into my skin like rain through your clothes when you’re caught in a downpour. “Or … or maybe last night didn’t mean …” What I thought it meant.
It was too humiliating to come out and say it, so I stopped.
To my surprise, he closed the notebook with a loud snap and glared at me. “It did mean something. To me, anyway. But maybe American girls like to do things differently … to play with people’s emotions.”
“Wait,” I said. “I played with someone’s emotions — with yours?”
He shrugged.
“No I didn’t,” I said, my voice rising. “How can you say that?”
“Please keep your voice down,” he said softly.
“I didn’t play with your emotions,” I said. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Well.” His voice was clipped. “Maybe you should discuss it with Armand Janvier.”
“Armand?” I repeated, really loudly. Then I had to look around to see if Hannah had heard me say his name. Luckily, she was nowhere in sight.
“Oui, Armand.” The look in his eyes told me exactly how he felt about Armand — and we’re not talking warm fuzzies. “He called me early this morning and told me to stay away from you.”
My jaw dropped. “He had no right to say that!”
“He told me that you two were … how did he put it? ‘Connected.’ And that I should leave you alone because you are too far above me.” He shook his head. “He’s not a good person, Colette.”
“I know that,” I said. “I’m not the one who likes him —”
“What did he mean when he said ‘connected’?”
Telling Jules that I might be a secret duchess seemed embarrassing, like I was a little girl trying to play princess and taking the game too far. “It’s hard to explain. It’s something to do with our families.”
His eyebrows pressed downward in confusion. “I don’t think you should see him. You are too young to —”
“Too young?” I asked, bristling. “You think I’m too young? You didn’t think so last night, when we were kissing.”
His cheeks turned red. “That is not what I am saying. You have not dealt with people like Armand before. He has spent his whole life watching his father, who is one of the greatest financial criminals in France.”
“So he’s trying to steal my money?” I asked. “Ha ha — too bad for him.”
“No.” Jules sighed. “It is about his philosophy that I am warning you. He sees people as objects to be used and manipulated for his own profit.”
I wanted to shout, I’m a freaking duchess; I can handle myself!
The thing was, I knew Armand was just using me. But if he was using me for something that benefited me as well as himself, didn’t that sort of make it okay?
“There’s nothing going on between me and Armand,” I said. “I swear.”
“Of course I believe you.” Jules turned to me, his expression less severe. “I just need you to promise me you’ll stay away from him.”
I took a step back. “Why are you telling me what to do?”
“For your own good.”
“I can decide what’s good for me or not,” I said. “But thanks anyway.”
His mouth made a pinched-looking frown. “You obviously can’t, Colette.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just look at your friends,” he said. “They’re wrong for you, yet you cling to them.”
Okay, now I was getting mad. To warn me about Armand was one thing — but to get angry at me for even knowing him? Then to order me to stay away from him? And then to criticize my friends?
“I don’t feel the need to continue this conversation,” I said. “So I’m going to just … go away now.”
Way to zing him, Colette, Hannah would have said.
Except I didn’t want to zing him. I just wanted things to be the way they were before. I wanted life to have a rewind button. I wanted Armand to mind his own stupid onions.
“All right.” Jules sounded tired and disappointed.
I wandered away in a fog.
I’d been avoiding Hannah and Pilar as much as I could, prete
nding to be really drawn to the art and listening to what Jules was saying … but now that we were finishing up at the museum, there was nothing left to pretend about. We were all going to lunch, and then to the Eiffel Tower. The thought of going there now, a glaring reminder of how perfect the previous night had been and how messed up everything had become, made me feel ill.
But unless I could find an excuse to get out of it, I was stuck.
“Colette, hang on a sec.” Audrey touched my sleeve as I started to walk past her. Her voice shook, like she was about to cry. “I’m so sorry about yesterday. I feel terrible.”
“What?” I said. “You didn’t do anything.”
“Exactly.” She turned her wide, miserable eyes down to stare at her shoes. “I should have warned you about the Catacombs. I was going to — but then I didn’t.”
“Well, Hannah didn’t exactly make it easy for you. She was pretty rude. I think you were justified in staying away.”
“I hope I never start judging my actions by Hannah Norstedt’s standards,” Audrey said. “Anyway, I had to apologize. I know we’re not really friends, but … I’m scared of heights, and the thought of someone knowing that and letting me go to the top of the Eiffel Tower anyway …”
I stared at her, remembering how she’d gone out of her way to show me the key symbol. And how she and Brynn had helped me in the Conciergerie.
“Wait,” I said, “so you don’t want to go to the Eiffel Tower? Do you have other plans for this afternoon?”
“No,” Audrey said. “Why, do you?”
“I was thinking about walking and looking at that cemetery, and I’m positive Hannah and Peely won’t want to go with me. Want to come?”
“Which cemetery?” she asked.
“The one that Jules said doesn’t exist anymore.”
She looked confused. “Tell me the truth, Colette … are you just inviting me because you can’t go without a buddy?”
For a second, I was speechless. Even a little offended. Then I realized that I’d never done or said anything to earn Audrey’s trust or to show her that I wasn’t just using her.
“I promise,” I said. “I do need a buddy, but I think it would be kind of fun. Is that … is that weird?”
She smiled. “No, it’s not. I just had to be sure. Do you know how to get there?”
Um, nope.
“Are you going to check with Jules?” she asked.
I hesitated and inspected the sleeve of my cardigan. “Could … uh … is there any chance you could ask him? I would, but … it’s a long story.”
Her right eyebrow went up, but she didn’t say anything else. She disappeared for a minute and returned with a half sheet of paper covered in notes. “It’s called Errancis…. It was located in the block between boulevard de Courcelles, rue du Rocher, rue de Monceau, and rue de Miromesnil. It’s not far from here. But you know it’s not a cemetery anymore, right? He said the only thing left is a marker on one of the walls.”
“I know,” I said. “But I want to find it anyway.”
I basically ran past Hannah and Pilar, calling out that I was going somewhere to see something boring and that they should have fun without me. While I did that, Audrey was clearing our expedition with Madame Mitchell. No teacher has ever been able to say no to Audrey — and besides that, Madame Mitchell was eager to avoid two fainting episodes on a single trip.
And then we were on our way.
“WE’RE HERE,” AUDREY said, looking up at a sign on the corner of a building that read RUE DE MIROMESNIL.
We slowly circled the block. But aside from some little shops and a lot of apartment buildings, we didn’t see anything.
“Wait,” Audrey said. “Look!”
We were near the corner of Monceau and Rocher, and she was looking up at a small plaque on the wall. “Eleven hundred and nineteen people guillotined during the Revolution were buried here,” she translated.
“But … where?” I looked around. There was absolutely no sign — besides the actual sign — that the area had ever held a thousand-plus dead bodies.
“Just … here, I guess.” Audrey peered around us. “Wow. Do you think any of those people have ever seen this?”
She was looking two doors down the block at a preschool, outside of which waited a couple dozen mothers.
“Fair question,” I said. “Maybe French people aren’t afraid of death.”
“Or they’re not afraid of plaques.”
I laughed a little. “Yeah, or that.”
Personally, I wasn’t sure if I would be comfortable dropping my four-year-old off on the site of a grisly burial ground, but who was I to judge? Even if, as Jules had said, the remains had been moved down to the Catacombs. They couldn’t have possibly gotten them all.
I took a picture of the plaque and then we kept walking, circling the block. Once again, I expected to see the ghost pop up, but there was no sign of her. Maybe she’d grown bored with me.
“I guess we’d better get back,” Audrey said. “We could find someplace to grab a baguette along the way.”
“I’d rather not,” I said.
She didn’t answer, but I was starting to recognize the way she smiled into the distance when her feelings were hurt.
“I mean, I need to eat at the hotel,” I said. “I’m … I just …”
Why couldn’t I come out and say I didn’t have any money?
“Oh, right!” she said. “I wasn’t thinking. Free food always tastes better anyway.”
We turned the corner onto rue du Rocher and stopped.
The sidewalk ahead of us was blocked off.
The street was completely torn open. The roadwork was enclosed by orange mesh walls, but as we got closer, I could see excavators and trucks moving around inside, digging roughly at the ground. Piles of rubble surrounded the work site. Nothing about the way the men worked seemed to show that this was a place where a thousand bodies had been buried in a mass grave.
Again I wondered if there was a chance that something of the remains had been left behind. If so, it would be entirely feasible that those remains might have been unearthed by the construction —
And not just any remains — the queen’s.
There seemed to be a chill in the air that I hadn’t felt that morning.
A man walked by carrying a clipboard and wearing a hard hat.
“Pardon, monsieur,” I said.
He stopped, and I realized that I had absolutely no way to ask what I wanted to ask.
“Parlez anglais?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Um,” I said, trying but failing to come up with the correct French words. “Ah …”
Audrey looked at me oddly. “What are you trying to say?”
“I just want to know how long they’ve been working here,” I said.
“Combien …” she said to him, “Combien de jours … travaillezvous ici?”
The man looked confused, but seemed to decide that there was no harm in answering. He spoke in slow French to Audrey, ignoring me completely. Then he gave us a quick, unfriendly smile and walked away.
“A week,” she said to me. “They started on the twenty-fourth. The day before we got here. Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” I said. “Just curious.”
The evening was growing chilly, so we decided to take the Metro instead of walking. The route maps might as well have been the technical specs for a rocket ship, for all the sense they made to me, but Audrey knew exactly which train we should take and where we should change, too.
“I don’t know how you can tell what goes where,” I said.
She shrugged. “It’s a lot like the subways in New York City. Once you learn to read the map, you can get anywhere.”
A flutter of excitement traveled through me as I pictured myself riding the subways around New York over the summer. Next time we were in a Metro station, I would pay careful attention, to prepare myself. I imagined my father’s surprise the first time I’d say,
I can just take the subway, no big deal.
As we emerged from the Saint-Michel Metro station and began the short walk to the hotel, Audrey cleared her throat. “So, uh … what’s going on with you and Jules?”
“Nothing,” I said automatically.
“Are you sure?” There was a gentle, teasing tone to her voice.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” I felt my cheeks redden, and the memory of the painful exchange Jules and I had had earlier echoed miserably in my mind.
“Okay,” she said, sounding taken aback. “I just wondered if —”
“Look, Audrey,” I said, stopping and turning to her. “I know we keep doing stuff together, but that doesn’t mean we’re BFFs or anything.”
“Oh.” She adjusted her glasses and looked away.
“We’ve had fun, but we’re just too different. I mean, you’re really nice, and I’m sure —”
“I get it, Colette.” There was none of the usual lightness in her voice. She sounded tired. “I’m sorry I expected you to treat me like a human being. I should have known better.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. So I didn’t say anything.
Neither of us spoke, all the way back to the hotel.
I felt awful. And I was on the verge of apologizing, but as we stepped into the lobby, someone called out, “Colette!”
Jules was waiting for me.
I was caught off guard. “Oh — hi.”
Audrey took the opportunity to slip away.
Jules didn’t smile. “We have to talk.”
“Okay. Can I just —”
“Right now,” he said. “I need to speak to you right now.”
Something prickled at the back of my neck. “Why? What’s going on? If this is about before —”
“It’s not,” he said.
Jules took hold of my elbow and led me to the small sitting area where I’d talked with Armand a couple of nights earlier. My throat went dry.
“What happened?” I asked. “Please tell me.”