Tasha Alexander - Dangerous to Know

As we expected, no one answered our knocks. I looked to Sebastian, confident there was not a door in the Western Hemisphere that would not bend to his will.

“You wouldn’t rather wriggle through a window, then?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Such a shame,” he said. With a sigh, he pulled something out of his jacket—a thin metal strip—and within seconds the door flung open. He gestured flamboyantly, waving his arm with the grace of a courtier, and bowed. “After you, dear lady.”

Nerves filled me as I stepped into the house. What we were doing wasn’t strictly unethical—although Sebastian had picked the lock, I rationalized our actions, telling myself looking for clues to find Lucy was working for the greater good. A small entryway opened into a comfortable sitting room filled with books and papers and watercolors of the Norman countryside. I started for the desk in the far left corner, but Sebastian grabbed my arm.

“Allow me, Kallista,” he said. “This is my territory.” Moving silently, he glided through the room, examining every object, every paper, every square inch of the floor, walls, and ceiling. But when I followed him as he moved into the doctor’s bedroom, he stopped me.

“No,” he said. “I will help you, Kallista, but you can’t expect access to the secret methods of my success. You might decide to turn to a life of crime and steal everything good that I want.”

“Sebastian—”

“No.” He silenced me with a firm hand over my mouth. “I will not have it. You’re welcome to search after I’m done, but I’d be more than surprised if you turned up anything the police didn’t.”

“The police weren’t looking for information about Lucy.”

“Be my guest,” he said, taking an extravagant bow. “But if you do make a mess, I’m not going to follow and correct your mistakes.”

“There’s no arguing with you, is there?” I asked.

“You can argue for days if you’d like,” he said. “But it will get you exactly nowhere. I’m implacable.”

“And proud of it.”

“Absolutely.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll wait for you here.”

He closed the bedroom door behind him while I managed to stifle a sigh. Sebastian was a handful, but an amusing handful, and not without his charms. While I waited for him, I perused Dr. Girard’s books. Most of them pertained to medicine. There was also a copy of John James Audubon’s Birds of America , a Bible in Latin, and a small collection of fiction. Nearly all the novels were French. I glanced through the titles and pulled down one of the few in English, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. I selected it not because it was in my native tongue, but for another reason altogether: it was the story of a young orphan with a mysterious benefactor.

A perfect place to hide information about Lucy’s guardian.

By the time Sebastian came out of the bedroom, I’d read nearly three chapters of the book.

“I’m glad you’re amusing yourself,” he said. “There’s nothing of particular interest here. Not, that is, anything that would interest you.”

“What did you take?”

“Moi?”

“Sebastian.” I gave him a severe look.

“Some cuff links. No one will miss them.”

I closed the book and crossed my arms. “And?”

“You can’t possibly think his paintings are worth my notice. They’re pedestrian.”

“What else?”

“He has some fantastic eighteenth-century brass buttons.”

“Put them back,” I said.

“For what? So they can be sold to some unappreciative fool who’s as likely to put them on doll’s clothing as to use them for something reasonable?”

“It’s not for you to decide, Sebastian.”

“And why is that? I have a good eye. I love the objects I liberate and I make sure they have good homes. What’s wrong with me correcting small injustices?”

“I’d hardly call buttons falling into the wrong hands an injustice,” I said.

“I shall remember your insensitivity, Kallista, and will strike you at once from the list of people to whom I would give such exquisite objects.”

“Put them back.” I glowered at him. “And then we can go speak to Lucy’s guardian.”

“If we can find him. I’ll need to search the rest of the house,” he said. “And can’t do that until I have some time to mourn the loss of these buttons.”

“Return the cuff links as well.”

“You’re a disappointment.”

“Your kind words mean the world to me,” I said. “But you don’t need to continue the search. I’ve found everything we need.”

“No,” he said, badly feigning breathlessness.

“Go,” I said. “And don’t forget the cuff links.”

“You are so horrible to me,” he said. “Yet I adore you still. And if you have indeed found what you say, I may have to recruit you to my nefarious lair of criminals.” He disappeared into the bedroom, where I doubted he was returning anything. Still, I had to at least try to make him do the proper thing.

I flipped through Great Expectations , pausing again at the pages in the part of the book where Pip learns the identity of his benefactor. There, in the margins, someone had scrawled a name and address—Marie Sapin in a not too faraway town called Barentin—and it had to be that of Lucy’s guardian. The context was too perfect for it to be anything else.

My deduction did not completely convince Sebastian upon his return from the bedroom, but he could not argue we had anything better to try, and agreed we should go investigate.

“It will, however, be a fruitless expedition,” he said, clearly irritated to be without the buttons. I couldn’t decide whether his mood was for show, to make me believe he’d put them back, or whether his frustration was genuine.

“Why else would Dr. Girard write such a thing in that precise spot in that precise book?” I asked as our carriage sped towards Barentin.

“There are countless answers to that question, Emily,” he said. “Perhaps this Marie Sapin is a beautiful woman the doctor met while on holiday, when he was reading Great Expectations .”

“Perhaps Marie Sapin is a patient he had to collect from her home,” I said. “Perhaps she is a nurse he wanted to interview. Or the woman he hired to look after his elderly mother—that’s the sort of name a person would certainly want to bury in a novel.”

“I’m glad to see you’re getting into the spirit of things,” he said, tugging at his spotless gloves.

“But you may find, Sebastian, that I’m right. My reasoning is not without logic. That does not prove it’s without flaw, but it’s a lead worth pursuing. And in this line of work, not every lead pans out.”

“Don’t you find that tedious? You’d be much happier treasure hunting through Europe with me. I could get the Trojan gold for you—Priam’s treasure, the jewelry that cad Schleimann excavated and draped over his horrible wife. It would look far better on you. And you know, Kallista, my leads never fail to pan out.”

It felt as if the drive to Barentin spanned centuries. The roads were bumpy, and we were jostled so hard I feared my teeth would fall out. But it was not all unpleasant. Sebastian regaled me with some excessively diverting stories about the perils and pitfalls of being a Thief of Refined Taste, and by the time we reached Madame Sapin’s modest but well cared for house, I was laughing so hard I couldn’t immediately step out of the carriage.

Once I’d returned to a state of calm, we approached the door. We’d debated the best approach to convincing Madame Sapin that Dr. Girard condoned our expedition. Sebastian persuaded me to come around to his way of thinking which, at the time, seemed a decent option. Now that the moment was nearly upon us, my heart was pounding and our plan seemed a dismal one.