Philippa Carr - Song of the Siren

We walked up the steps to the front porch. The concierge appeared.

Jeremy said: “This is Lady Hessenfield’s sister.”

The concierge surveyed me. She said: “Lady Hessenfield is dead.”

“Her daughter …” I began.

The next words terrified me.

“She is not here any more.”

“Perhaps there is a servant … Jeanne.”

“Madame Deligne would see you perhaps,” said the concierge.

“Oh, yes, please,” I cried fervently.

We were taken into a salon where the lady of the house received us.

Jeremy stated our reasons for being here and she answered in French, which I was able to follow.

Both Lord and Lady Hessenfield had died of some mysterious illness. It was a sort of plague, for a lady who had visited them, a Madame de Partière, had also died of the same disease. There had been quite a scare at the time.

Jeremy said: “Lady Hessenfield had a daughter and it is this child whom we have come for. We want to take her back to her family.”

“Ah, yes,” said Madame Deligne. “There had been a young child.”

She wrinkled her brows. She had not heard what became of the child.

“What of Jeanne, the servant?”

“Monsieur, when we came here we brought our own servants.”

“And what happened to those who were already here?”

Madame Deligne lifted her shoulders. “They went to other houses, perhaps. We could not take them, we had our own.”

“Do you remember this Jeanne?”

Again she thought back. “A young woman … oh, yes … I remember her faintly. I think she went back to what she was doing before she came to the house.”

“And what of the child? Did you hear about the child?”

“No, I never heard about the child.”

Madame Deligne was friendly and apologetic, eager to help but it was clear that she had no more information to offer.

I shall never forget coming out of that house. Despair and misery enveloped me. We had come so far and not found her.

What should we do now?

Jeremy, who was a pessimist when we were getting on well, was now full of optimism.

“We have to find this Jeanne,” he said. “That’s all.”

“Where … where …?”

“What do we know of her?”

“That she comes of a poor family and used to sell flowers.”

“Then we must question every flower seller in Paris.”

I was fearful; and yet Jeremy inspired me with hope.

“We must begin without delay,” I said.

He took my hand and pressed it. It was the first sign of endearment I had ever had from him.

“We’ll find her,” he said.

The days that followed were like a nightmare. At the end of them I was completely exhausted and would sink on my bed and fall into a deep sleep until I was awakened by dreams of horror. In these I was always searching for Clarissa; I would be running through the streets and I would find myself in a cellar and people with dreadful leering faces would be closing in on me. Good Mrs. Brown was invariably there.

My dreams came from what I had seen during the days, for I did see terrible things. I suppose I could have found life like this in any big city; but I had had little experience of big cities. Only once had I fallen into the clutches of Good Mrs. Brown of London and I had never completely forgotten it. It was an incident which had remained in my mind to be brought out now and then, and because of what I saw in this city it had been brought right into the forefront of my mind. I imagined Clarissa with Good Mrs. Brown; I imagined her running out of a house in a spangled shift and caught and taken back … to what?

These were the dreams which followed the frustrating, exhausting days, and in those dreams Clarissa and I were one and the same person.

What could we do? Even Jeremy had nothing to suggest. He had discovered people who had known the Hessenfields. Yes, they had died; the household had been broken up. No, they had no idea what had become of the child. The servants? Oh, they had dispersed … as servants do.

We had one clue. Jeanne had been a flower seller. It was a business she would know. It seemed logical to presume that she would go back to it. Therefore we must question the flower sellers of Paris.

What a task! We walked about the streets. It was spring now.

“A good time,” said Jeremy in his new wave of optimism. “People buy flowers in the spring. They are so glad to see them, they remind them that the winter is over. There will be plenty of flower sellers about.”

It was a frustrating task. We bought flowers and engaged the sellers in conversation. Did they know of someone called Jeanne, who used to be a servant in one of the big houses in the Marais?

Often we encountered blank stares; sometimes the flower seller would chatter volubly leading us on so that we thought we were on the trail. We even followed up one Jeanne who knew nothing of a child and was certainly not the sort of person with whom Carlotta would have left the child.

It was not only the fact that we found no success that depressed and frightened me. It was what I saw and the realisation of what could happen to someone alone in such a city.

I saw the beggars, the drunkards, the pickpockets; I saw little children scantily clad with a lifetime’s misery written on their little faces. And in everyone I saw Clarissa.

We wandered through the markets; we saw barefooted children creeping between the stalls to snatch a bit of fruit; we saw them struggling with baskets as big as they were. We saw them beaten and abused; it broke my heart. Good Mrs. Brown seemed very close to me. It was as though she walked beside me chuckling at my naiveté. I was being rudely awakened now.

I wanted to run away from all this, to go back to my couch, to be petted and pampered and shut out the world.

Of course it is so easy, I thought, to shut out the world if you are surrounded by people who love you. You can forget all this; you pretend it does not exist. You can shut yourself into a little cocoon and never, never think of Good Mrs. Brown and two people writhing on a four-poster bed.

But you cannot forget. You must know of these things. Because the more you know the more readily you will understand the trials of others … and your own. Ignorance, shutting your eyes to evil, will not find Clarissa.

As the days passed my anxieties grew. I thought of what could be happening to my darling child in this wicked city.

Those days were like watching a show of pictures … as soon as one faded another took its place. There was the bustle, the laughter, the excitement of the streets—the patched and perfumed ladies, the exquisite gentlemen in their coaches … eyeing each other. I saw meetings arranged between languishing ladies and languid gentlemen; I saw the beggars, the market sellers and always those with the baskets of flowers.

It was the children who moved me most. I could not bear to look at them with their poor pinched faces already marked with shrewd cunning, already showing the signs of depravity. My impulse was to turn away to save myself the pain of looking. But how could I be sure that one of these was not Clarissa?

What really upset me were the women whom they called the Marcheuses. They were the poorest, saddest creatures I had ever seen. Jeremy told me that they had been prostitutes in their youth, and God knew they were not old now—in their twenties perhaps, though they looked fifty or sixty. They had become diseased and worn out in their profession and their only hope of earning a sou or two now was to run errands for their more wealthy kind. Hence their name, the Marcheuses. Worn out, weary, finished with life—keeping themselves alive until a merciful death came and took them.

I saw the milliners and sewing girls—young and innocent—coming out into the streets laughing and eyeing the apprentices … and looking out for a milord who would give them a good supper in return for services rendered.