A Lady in Shadows Read online

  That was probably the most suavely worded apology I had ever received. As for its sincerity, I did not believe it for a minute.

  “That is kind of you,” I said in a carefully neutral tone.

  Althauser rubbed his palms together. “Excellent. That should clear things up. Good-bye for now, M’sieur Falchenberg.”

  My towheaded rival clicked his heels together with an audible snap and bowed briefly to both of us. His face was expressionless. Despite my lack of belief in his good intentions, I reciprocated with a nod because anything else would have been unaccommodating to the point of rudeness.

  Althauser waited until Falchenberg’s steps had receded in the corridor.

  “Mademoiselle Karno, if you are exposed to any form of harassment from this young gentleman in the future, you will immediately come to see me. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, Monsieur le Professeur.”

  “I can inform you that his continued presence at this university depends on his behavior being flawless from now on. I can also report that he is no longer a student at Heidelberg and is unlikely to be so in the future. I expect you to treat this information with discretion, but since I know how deeply he has offended you, I think you have the right to know the truth.”

  Had Althauser heard about the assault with the pig’s bladder? If so, how? Had Falchenberg actually boasted to the others about it? The thought was unpleasant.

  “Starting on Monday, M’sieur Falchenberg will attend lectures here, and I will keep an eye on his behavior. As I said, if you experience any unpleasantness from his side, you must tell me. I will honestly admit that I was, myself, initially skeptical of your own commitment and aptitude, but you have put my doubts to shame. You and Malleau are without a doubt the most promising intellects in the class.”

  I attempted—unfortunately, without success—not to blush like a schoolgirl.

  “Thank you,” I said as calmly as I could. “Your opinion matters a great deal to me.”

  He actually smiled—a small measured smile that made his eyes look slightly less like those of a bulldog.

  “Well, then. Good-bye, Karno. I will see you on Monday.”

  I left with a bubbling sensation in my chest that I could barely contain. He had put Falchenberg effectively in his place. He had praised my work and my intellect. And as if that was not enough, he had finally left off the odious “mademoiselle” and addressed me on equal footing with my fellow male students, as simply “Karno.” My soul, what more could you desire?

  When I emerged from the colonnade, I saw Falchenberg’s tall, broad-shouldered figure disappear into Réunion Square. He walked with rapid explosive steps and did not look happy. I did not care. Whatever he tried, I would be ready for it. Today, I could handle both him and the rest of the world.

  I had decided to go by Fleur’s lodgings on the way home. Ironically, my high spirits almost made me change my mind, because it was hard not to be depressed by the world she lived in. What was it Aristide Gilbert had called it? The land of shadows. Stay in the light where you belong. For once, it actually felt as if I had a right to a place in the daylight. I was “an intellect.” I could see a future for myself, a useful and industrious one—discoveries I could make, knowledge I could contribute. When I then thought of Fleur and Rosalba, of Madame LaCour and her dollhouse, of that sordid basement studio and what had occurred there, of Rosalba’s desperation . . . then it was as if I was dragged down into a morass of fleshliness and degradation. I wanted to prolong my golden afternoon, I wanted to be on top of the world for a little bit longer.

  But when I was waiting for the streetcar in Réunion Square, it was the Number 4 that arrived first; its route would take me directly to Rue Vernier, where Fleur lived. I got on.

  She had only just risen. I could glimpse the unmade bed in the room behind her, and she had simply thrown on a loose morning dress that did not require a corset. Her hair hung down her back in a thick braid, and her face was without makeup. There was a sour, unwashed odor in the apartment, and I was seized with the desire to open a window and let in some air.

  “Have you found him?” she asked as soon as she saw me.

  “No.”

  “But you have news?”

  “Possibly. I have found the photographer who took the pictures.” I shared what Gaston LaCour had told me about the man with the mask. “He thinks that the man might be the child’s father . . .”

  Fleur let out a snort. “Oh, really?”

  “I don’t understand . . . ?”

  “Mademoiselle, think about it. The children of women like us have no fathers. Or many, if you will. How would Rosalba know which of them got her into trouble?”

  “I assume you use . . . certain preventive methods?”

  “You mean condoms. Yes. When we can. They are not very effective, and there are many men who do not like to put on a piece of sheep’s bladder just to please a whore they have bought and paid for. It is a bit better with the new rubber ones, but they are hard to get hold of and extremely expensive.”

  “So it was not possible for Rosalba to determine who . . .”

  “No. Mademoiselle, that is a professional risk. Prostitutes have children. That is the way it is. Rosalba knew that, and I don’t understand why she . . . We would have managed. I would have taken care of her. I would never have . . . if that wasn’t what she wanted.”

  “Fleur, what are you talking about?” Something was surfacing in this conversation, something I had previously sensed without quite pinpointing it. Fleur was not just grieving—she was also feeling guilty. The question was, about what?

  She did not meet my gaze. She sat picking at the end of her braid, like a schoolgirl caught whispering to her neighbor. But when one looked more closely, there was an awful bottomless depth to the guilt that no schoolgirl could have felt.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked as gently as I could.

  The silence stretched on.

  “If you don’t tell me everything you know,” I said at last, “how will I be able to discover what happened to Rosalba?”

  When she finally began to speak, her voice was cracked and frail.

  “There is a place . . . ,” she began. “A place we had heard of. Prostitutes have children, unmarried women have children. That’s just the way it is. Most cannot have the children with them, and not everyone has a grandmother willing to make the sacrifice, or money to have them fostered in the country. And it is better, surely, than leaving them with an angel maker!”

  “Of course,” I said, though I only partially understood what she was talking about. “And you suggested to Rosalba . . . ?”

  “Worse than that,” she said, and looked up for the first time. Her eyes were dark and red rimmed like gunshot wounds. “I brought her there . . . I don’t know what happened to her in that place, they would not let me stay with her for the admission interview. I only know that when she came home, she was inconsolable. And afraid. She was terrified, but she wouldn’t tell me why.”

  “When was that?”

  “Four days before she . . . was murdered.”

  “Who was present during the interview, do you know?”

  “The director, Madame Palantine, and some doctor, I think.”

  “A doctor?” I said. “Why?”

  Fleur’s braid had fallen forward over one shoulder. She threw it back with an unconscious gesture that suddenly made her look like a schoolgirl again.

  “It is . . . a very clean place. Like a hospital. You can give birth there if they let you.”

  She lowered her head again.

  “Get dressed,” I said. “You need to show me this place.”

  She was reluctant, to say the least, but I insisted. I would probably have been able to find the place myself, but I wanted to get her outside, into daylight and crowded streets, into a world that still had some life in it.

  I should have left her alone. It was safer there, in that airless, grief-choked room, even for a soul as anguished as
Fleur’s. But I had no way of knowing that.

  INSTITUTE OF CHILD CARE AND NURSING it said on the enameled plaque on the brick gatepost. INQUIRIES AT THE GATE. VISITORS WITHOUT APPOINTMENT BETWEEN 5 AND 6 IN THE EVENING ONLY. Below, there was a somewhat more makeshift, painted board announcing that the institute also undertook to provide HEALTHY AND RESPONSIBLE WET NURSES AND NANNIES.

  It did not look terrible, I thought: a large square ivy-covered building set among lawned grounds, like a scaled-down version of Saint Bernardine, where my father often worked. I don’t know quite what Fleur’s despair had led me to imagine, but certainly something much less orderly and hygienic. There was something comforting about the plaque, the cast-iron fence, the well-trimmed lawn.

  Fleur stood mute and unresponsive next to me. Her resistance was still palpable, and only repeated references to the ultimate goal—to discover what had happened to Rosalba—had goaded her into coming with me this far.

  It occurred to me that in the short time I had known her, she had undergone a change of such enormity that it seemed quite beyond reason. She was still small of stature, of course, but what there had been of softness and sweetness in her had been worn away by grief and fury. Her features had sharpened—I think she had lost several kilos that she could not afford to lose—and her eyes now seemed unnaturally large in her pale, thin face. Her hair seemed lifeless and greasy, her clothes uncared for, her entire presence was one of fierce determination and complete indifference to appearances. If a scientist, according to Althauser and his idol Claude Bernard, was a person so caught up in and absorbed by an idea that there was no room for other considerations, then Fleur was fairly close to that ideal now. Only one thing absorbed and motivated her, and where I had initially been concerned about what she might do to the masked man if I found him, I was now more anxious about what might happen to Fleur herself. If one took away this all-consuming purpose, what was left? Would she be able to hold herself upright? Would she be able to live at all?

  “Visiting hours will be over in ten minutes,” the gatekeeper informed us in a discouraging tone.

  “I am aware of that,” I said. “We are here on a different errand. I understand that one may hire a wet nurse here? Sadly, it is a matter of some urgency.”

  “In that case, you will need to speak with Madame Palantine. Through the main entrance, first door on the left.”

  Fleur threw me a sidelong glance but did not say anything until we had passed through the gate and were on our way up the gravel drive toward the central building.

  “A wet nurse?” she said. “Why did you say that?”

  “To get us in, naturally.”

  “Yes, I understood that. But why a wet nurse?”

  “Didn’t you see the sign? Wet nurses and nannies for hire, or whatever it said. If anyone asks, my cousin is unfortunately too ill to nurse her newborn. Also, we are lost.”

  A smile briefly illuminated the sharpened features.

  “Mademoiselle Karno,” she said with a small, appreciative nod. “Your poor cousin . . .”

  I felt a flush heat my cheeks. Had I perhaps become a little too good at lying and dissembling to receive such ironic praise from a practiced professional of that art?

  “There are only ten minutes left of visiting hours,” I said defensively. “And who were we supposed to claim we were visiting anyway?”

  “Most of the children are infants,” said Fleur. “They probably don’t care who ‘visits’ them.”

  Inside the main entrance, we discovered a long, deep foyer that went up three stories, to judge by the metal stairs that clung to the sidewalls. Our steps resonated against dark, hard-fired tiles, and it smelled comfortingly of carbolic acid and floor soap. INFANT HALL AND WET NURSE OFFICE it said on the first door to the left, and it turned out to be an entirely correct nomenclature.

  We entered a glass-walled corridor overlooking the hall in question. It stretched back for the entire length of the building—at the farthest end, the evening sun shone through the windows, muted by thin white muslin hangings. The infants lay in long straight rows, placed on broad shelves like ribbons and buttons and bolts of cloth in a draper’s shop. Even the cribs with their simple square wooden frames looked more like packaging than baby cots. Some of the children were crying, but the sound reached us only mutedly through the glass. Others lay quietly, apparently sound asleep. Between the rows walked two women dressed in black, with white aprons, their hair hidden under starched white caps, but they did not stop by the children who were crying, just went on patrolling, guards rather than nurses, or so it seemed to me. “Why don’t they pick them up?” I whispered to Fleur without actually expecting an answer. But she had been here before, after all.

  “It is a part of the regimen,” she said. “They are fed at the same time, they are changed at the same time, they are expected to sleep at the same time. We were told that they quickly adjust to the rhythm.”

  “I see.” At least it sounded like a logical and planned approach to child rearing. I really knew nothing about infants, I realized. I had no siblings and no small cousins nearby that I had been expected to take care of.

  At the end of the glass corridor, a group of young women had gathered, some in uniform blue dresses and caps and aprons similar to those of the patrolling guardians, others in a mottle of more civilian garments. A few spoke together quietly; the rest waited in silence. One had separated from the group and stood at the glass window staring at the rows of children on the other side.

  I noticed that some of the girls, especially those closest to the door, had the slightly absent expression of someone concentrating on listening. There were voices coming from inside, very loud voices. One violent outburst especially penetrated the closed door.

  “You can’t do that! How am I supposed to live?”

  A less audible voice answered: “. . . thought of . . . before you . . .”

  “You sanctimonious old cow!”

  Bang. The door flew open, and a young woman came marching out. She snatched off first the cap and then the apron and threw both on the floor. Her still childishly rounded face puckered with anger and outrage.

  “She is giving me the boot,” she said to the waiting girls. “It was just beer! Beer isn’t alcohol. Everyone drinks beer.”

  “Not Madame Palantine,” one of the others said.

  “There are many things that Madame Palantine doesn’t do,” said the girl. “Including . . .” She made an unmistakably vulgar movement with her right hand.

  “Pauline!”

  Pauline flung out her arms.

  “What is she going to do? Fire me twice?” She pushed her way through the crowd of young girls and strode past us. We received only a brief disinterested glare on the way—she clearly had other things to think about.

  “Fleur,” I said quickly and quietly, “follow her. Convince her to wait outside. Here, give her this. Tell her we’ll pay to speak with her . . .” I gave her what I had of change, observing with some dismay that my purse now held only a franc and a half. Hardly enough to bribe a clerk or a matron, or whatever Madame Palantine was, but might it tempt an unemployed wet nurse with nothing to lose?

  Fleur looked skeptical but turned and followed the girl. I was consequently alone when I introduced myself to Madame Palantine a few moments later, once again trotting out the story of my “poor cousin.”

  “I understand that you might be able to help me a engage a wet nurse?” I concluded.

  Madame Palantine was a stout red-haired woman with a complexion the color of buttermilk. A pince-nez perched on her nose, but the lenses were so greasy that they were unlikely to be of much use. She was dressed in a garment reminiscent of that of the matrons at Saint Bernardine, high-necked black dress with a white collar and white cuffs, and her cap was a tall monstrosity of a cone that stuck up like a Spanish mantilla with a multitude of streamers falling like a bridal veil down her back and shoulders.

  She glanced at a pocket watch that was mounted o
n her considerable bosom with the twelve facing downward, so that it could more easily be read by the wearer.

  “If you would wait here for a moment,” she said. “We start the evening nursing at precisely six ten, and unfortunately I need to redistribute the nurses.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  With queasy fascination, I learned that after Pauline’s departure, some of the young women were expected to nurse seven of the wailing infants, and the remaining, six. I was amazed that it was even possible to nurse more than two or perhaps three in an emergency, but most of the girls accepted the extra burden with a shrug.

  “And Evangeline, remember to wipe between feeds!” admonished Madame Palantine. “First carbolic acid, then hot water. Every time.”

  “But, madame . . . it stings so.” The young girl, apparently Evangeline, touched her breasts and made a face.

  “Would you rather spread disease down the entire line? No, thank you. We will have no epidemics here. If you cannot abide by the rules, we will have to find someone else. Is that understood?”

  The girl curtseyed anxiously. “Yes, madame!”

  “Good. Off you go, then. You too, Lise-Marie.” The latter was directed to the solitary girl who stood still, gazing at the children through the glass.

  “Madame . . . ? If I promise not to say anything?” she whispered.

  “No, girlie. It is better this way. If you knew which child was yours, the temptation to treat them differently would be too great. Here, it is the same for everyone. No special cases.”

  “Madame, I beg you . . .”

  “Absolutely not. Besides, it would only cause you unnecessary pain. Believe me, it is better this way! It is six ten, mademoiselle!”

  “Yes.” Lise-Marie curtseyed and hurried into the infant hall. Madame Palantine pulled a bell cord and a crisp peal broke out in the hall. Each girl promptly picked up a child and placed it at her breast. There was a symmetry to it that was at once aesthetic and yet oddly off-putting. I could not quite identify the source of my discomfort. It was well organized, meticulously planned, and very hygienic, and why should nursing and child care not be systematized?