Evan Hunter - Lizzie

On my return from the telegraph office, I met Mrs. Churchill at about the same place in the entry or hallway — the kitchen hallway — at the same point. She said, “They’ve found Mrs. Borden.”

“Where?” I said.

“Upstairs in the front room,” she said. “You’d better go up and see.”

I went directly through the dining room and the corner of the sitting room into the front hall, up the stairs, front stairs, and stopped a moment at the door of the front chamber... guest chamber... front bedroom. At that point, I looked over the bed and saw the prostrate form of Mrs. Borden. I was standing directly in the door of the room. My first thought, when I was standing in the doorway and saw the form... my first thought was that she had fainted. I went around the back of the bed — that is, the foot of the bed — and between the form and the bed, and placed my hand on her head. It was a little dark in the room, somewhat dark, not very light. The shutters on the north side were partly closed. The shutters toward Mrs. Churchill’s house. The inside shutters, the board shutters. I placed my hand on her head and found there were wounds in the head. Then I placed my... felt of her pulse... that is, felt of the wrist, and found she was dead.

The peculiar thing about Lizzie’s illness was that it came without warning. In the hectic days that followed their visit to the Moulin Rouge, there wasn’t the slightest hint that her energy was waning; indeed, when finally she was stricken, it seemed that Anna’s predictions of ill health befalling one or all of them had been heeded by a vengeful God — and a capricious one at that, else He would most certainly have chosen Anna herself as the victim.

As had been the case with Geoffrey in London, Alison had immediately put herself at their disposal, taking them to tourist attractions she had surely tired of long ago, a favor for which Lizzie was enormously grateful, having discovered early on that Rebecca’s much vaunted French was as much a figment of her imagination as were Anna’s dire predictions of ill health. At the Louvre, where a French guide promised “I show you much in Anglais beautiful,” Alison answered him in fluent French (not a word of which Lizzie understood) that caused the man virtually to cower away from them, and then went on to lead them familiarly to all the treasures she felt they “absolutely must see”. Their heads were spinning when at last they came out into bright sunshine at the noon hour.

“You must on no account loiter under the arcade across the street in late afternoon,” she said, “for you shall certainly be mistaken for ladies of quite another sort,” but then proceeded anyway to lead them across the rue de Rivoli and to show them, in the various shop windows, the photographs of actresses “and other conspicuous people” (as she called them), many of them depicted in toilettes that recalled that of the Young Lady of Crete.

“But we must not stand about gazing and admiring,” she warned, “as it is incomprehensible to the French mind that nice girls should do so.” Whereupon she promptly hailed a pair of victorias, as the larger of the Parisian cabs were called, and gave the driver of the lead vehicle (carrying only herself and Lizzie) the address of a restaurant suitable for ladies — again the stress on the word — to frequent alone.

“Were that wretch Albert not occupied with business the livelong day,” she said in the cab, “we might lunch in style. As it is, we shall have to settle for one of the Bouillons Duval, where the company may not be terribly exciting, but at least it will be respectable. A woman must be even more careful here than in London,” she said, “making certain she dresses quietly and behaves with reserve and discretion. A married woman, of course, may go anywhere her husband chooses to take her, and read any book he doesn’t specifically forbid. But single women do not, as a rule, read French novels — it would be unthinkable for them to even glance at a single page of Maupassant’s Bel Ami or Daudet’s Sappho — far too wicked, my dear. Nor would an unmarried woman dare to go to the theater alone, unless the offered piece is entirely unobjectionable.

“Had you any desire to see Ibsen’s Ghosts, I should suppress it, were I you. Verboten, dear Lizzie, to lapse into my sainted mother’s language. But I’m sure something ‘harmless’ will be showing at the Theatre Français or the Odéon — I’ve already asked Albert to see to getting us tickets, in fact. We ladies shall have to sit in the orchestra stalls, of course, though we shan’t be allowed in the first three rows. And sans chapeaux, naturellement. Women are not permitted to wear hats in many of the theaters here, a rule prompted by necessity — oh, the towering absurdities some of them are wearing these days!

“On the whole, Lizzie, because so many American girls have begun studying and living here now, a young lady roving about alone won’t attract as much attention as she might have formerly. But I should nonetheless avoid walking on the boulevards in late afternoon, and never — I repeat never — look at any man, however well dressed and gentlemanly he might appear. But, oh how silly! I shall be with you every moment, and shall see to it that no harm befalls you.”

She was as true to her promise as Geoffrey had been in London, taking them to all the places they had planned to see, anyway — the Cathedral of Notre Dame, of course, and the Eiffel Tower, built only the year before for the great Paris Exposition; Sacré-Coeur and the Place des Vosges; the Luxembourg Gardens and the Conciergerie; Sainte-Chapelle... and St. Séverin... and St. Pierre... and St. Julien-le-Pauvre... and... all of it, everything she knew would delight their tourist eyes.

But she took them as well (as Geoffrey had in London) to places they might otherwise have missed. In the rue de Prony, she escorted them to the studio of a talented French painter who had died only six years earlier and whose journal had only recently been published in English and French. Here, the concierge led them up a dim, narrow staircase and into the gloomy studio itself, where she cranked a handle that caused a metal panel to slide back off the roof. Sunlight streamed in to fall upon the dead girl’s portrait — palette on thumb, an alert Parisian face (“She was twenty-four when she died,” Alison said), a somewhat disdainful, determined and inquisitive look about the painting’s eyes.

All around the room, there were charcoal studies and other paintings; the concierge indicated a large canvas standing apart from the others, and spoke to Alison in French. “It’s the one Miss Bashkirtseff was working on when she died,” Alison whispered in English. The painting showed a scene on the boulevards, men and women sitting on a bench, one or two of the heads and figures almost finished.

The concierge was speaking again.

“Her work killed her,” Alison translated. “She caught cold from sketching too much in the open air.”

Marie Bashkirtseff’s things were everywhere about the room: a pair of guitars with flaccid strings; a square, turntable bookcase with only a book of poetry upon it; a chiffonier with a glass front behind which were piled her shoes and slippers and a pair of boots with her initials worked into the front.

The concierge whispered something in French.

“Those are the boots she wore whilst shooting in Russia,” Alison said, and then, with sudden poignancy, “Oh, how sad!”

On one of their nighttime excursions, and of course in Albert’s company, she took them to a place called Le Rat Noir (which even Rebecca was able to translate as The Black Rat), a room with a large quantity of heavy black oak and a high Jacobean fireplace, a massive, highly ornamented bar, and long low beams — “Reminds me of the old Cock,” Albert said, “as it used to look by Temple Bar” — at the farthest end of which was an inner chamber from which they could hear laughter and loud voices and the sound of piano, cello and fiddle.