Page 20 of Tempting Mr. Vincent

“Did you know?”

“I knew Thursday. There’s nothing happens in this house that I don’t know by Thursday.” Mrs. Curry’s chin came up. “And I’ll say my piece and you may turn me out for it, for I’ve been in service thirty-one years and I know exactly what I’m doing.”

“Say it.”

“That girl has been up before dawn being sick since the second week of January, and never a word of complaint, and she’s put this house right in a month—the linens, the accounts, the fish man, and Josie’s hands aren’t cracked open no more because Miss Laurell made me change the soap.” Her voice began to shake. “She reads the paper for your name and she cuts flowers in January because she noticed there weren’t none. She waited up for you every night in the library till you come home. Every night, sir.”

“Mrs. Curry—”

“And you looked at that girl,” the housekeeper said, “and you offered her terms.”

Remy shut his eyes.

“For a man clever enough to run a whole city,” Mrs. Curry said, “you can be remarkable stupid.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.”

“She’s two streets over at the baron’s—”

“No,” said James Kilnworthy from the doorway. “She isn’t.”

Remy turned.

The baron was gray about the mouth. He had a wet hat in his hands and he had, Remy saw, been standing in this house since half past ten in the morning, waiting.

“She never reached us,” James said. “Ann saw it from the kitchen window—a carriage, a big fair-haired man, and Laurell running. That was nine o’clock this morning. We’ve had every man I own out since, and Willauby’s had constables on the wharves and the depot since noon. Nothing. I couldn’t find you; they said you were at the Cotton Exchange, then the Sixth Ward, then—” He stopped. “Vincent, I am sorry. I have been standing here for eight hours rehearsing how to say it.”

The room went very far away for a moment.

Then something in Remy Vincent came up from underneath—something older than the mayoralty, older than the careful, pleasant, useful man he had made of himself—and it was so cold and so clear that he could feel his own pulse slowing.

“Gauthier,” he said.

“Willauby thought so too, and went to the Esplanade house at three. Gauthier received him in the drawing room, gave him sherry, and let him look through every room in it. He’s been at home all day with his cook and his valet to swear to it.”

“Of course he has.” Remy was already moving. “Winston, my coat. Not the carriage—the gig, and the grays, and tell Beaudry I’ll drive myself.”

“Where?” James said.

“To fetch Madam Giselle.”

James blinked. “She sold him the girl.”

“She sold him a piece of paper,” Remy said, “for four hundred dollars, and she has kept every account book in that house for eleven years, and she is the only person in this city who knows where Abelard Gauthier takes a woman he doesn’t want anybody to find.” He shrugged into his coat. “She is also a businesswoman with a great deal to lose, and I have been her best customer for eleven years, and tonight I intend to collect on that in a way she will remember for the rest of her life.”

Laurell had counted the room twice.

Eleven paces by nine. One window, boarded on the outside, letting in gray light through the gaps. A bed with a bare tick. A chair. A door that had been locked from the corridor since midmorning.

It was a house on the far side of Storyville, past the good streets—she had seen enough through the carriage window to know that much, tall and narrow and half shuttered, with the smell of the canal in it. Nobody had touched her. That was the strange part, the part that made her stomach crawl. The big fair-haired man had carried her up two flights and set her on her feet almost politely, and Gauthier had said, from the bottom of the stairs, “See she has water,” as though she were a horse standing hot.

She had water. She had not drunk it.

Don’t sit down. If you sit down you’ll cry, and if you cry you’ll be sick, and you have eaten nothing since six.

She walked, and thought about Remy.

He would have the letter by now. He would read it and he would think she was safe at Lilian’s, and he would spend the whole of tonight being sensible about it. Perhaps in the morning he would come. And James would say she never arrived, and Remy would—