“And a wise woman, too,” Mr. Barrington said approvingly. “Come now, say you’ll both accompany me to the Chat Noir. We can leave at once, and perhaps convince Miss Goodrick to take the stage.”
Before she could decide how to reply, a jingling stomp sounded. From behind the screen appeared a dark-haired woman who folded her bare arms over her chest—but not before Gwen got a very good glimpse of what lay beneath: in a word, flesh.
The slits in her diaphanous rainbow skirts appeared to stop where her hip bones began.
Goodness. If that was what people were coming inside the elephant for, Gwen thought she had a good deal of ground to cover before she even approached the meaning of daring.
“Do I dance?” the woman demanded in heavily accented French. “Or do you go elsewhere? Others are waiting.”
“Oh, dear, our most abject apologies,” Mr. Barrington said. He reached into his coat and produced a banknote, which she snatched up with a sniff before trouncing back behind the screen. “Well?” he asked them. “I confess, I will perish of curiosity if I do not hear Miss Goodrick’s voice now.”
“As will I,” Alex said, and then defied all her expectations by adding, “but I suppose it is up to the lady.”
He looked to her with a slight smile.
Why, he didn’t think she could sing. He was counting on her to produce an excuse.
She smiled back at him. “To Le Chat Noir, then.”
Paris’s most infamous café-chantant was small, dark, and narrow, a maze of protruding knees and misplaced elbows and the glowing heads of cigarettes. The walls were covered with bric-a-brac, old copper pans nailed haphazardly next to rusting suits of fake armor, and between these were pinned various scrawled drawings, prints cut out from magazines, the occasional dried flower, somebody’s handkerchief. In the corner, a young man in a heavily patched velvet jacket was adding to the collection by drawing on the wall in charcoal.
Alex accepted a glass of brandy from one of the waiters, who wore green coats and cocked hats, in a mocking nod to the outfits of Parisian academics. Age and the pungent damp had warped the floorboards, so the three-legged tables sat at drunken slants; when he sat down his drink, it slid an inch before stopping.
The server loitered at the table a moment to exchange pleasantries with Barrington, who had been greeted, on the way inside, by several hearty slaps from various rough-hewn patrons.
“I do love bohemia,” Barrington sighed when the waiter moved on. “It makes one long to be a boy again, to begin anew.”
Alex didn’t judge him a day over thirty-five. A bit early to be mourning for lost boyhood. “Were you a bohemian in your youth, then?”
“No, never. But if given the opportunity to revise? I think I would make a fine vagabond.”
“Curious sentiment,” Alex said, “coming from a man who trades in property.”
Barrington threw him an amused look. “I told you, I discuss no business when in Paris.” His regard returned to the piano, where Gwen was conferring with the accompanist.
Alex was braced for disaster there. It had purchased him access to the man across from him, but the final balance between cost and profit would have to calculated later. Elma Beecham had seen them off this evening with a cheery Godspeed, but she had not imagined their itinerary continuing well into the small hours of the night. Nor would she have suspected that her charge would be masquerading as some sort of music hall temptress, and taking every secret opportunity to try to wrestle her neckline lower than the milliner had ever intended.
For that matter, he did not like the way Barrington watched her. The man showed no evidence of being dangerous, but he certainly had proven himself to be acquisitive.
Gwen shook out her skirts, squared her shoulders, and mounted the stage. Nobody took note of her. The place was filled to the rafters, but by reputation, the crowd at Chat Noir proved notoriously difficult to impress. It had its favorite composers and singers and poets—those who earned their fame through regular recitals here—but the rest, it either did a kindness by ignoring, or a savage cruelty by dismissing, in the middle of performances, at very high and often profanity-laced volume.
Sink or swim, Alex supposed: every fledgling learned the same way.
Gwen’s breasts rose and fell on a long breath. Nervous, no doubt. She looked across the crowd at him, and he barely recognized the smile that curved her lips. Perhaps it was a trick of the dim light and her adjusted neckline and this role she’d decided to play, but it occurred to him, suddenly, that he might not know her as well as he thought.
He lifted his glass to her. A mischievous angle took over her smile. She transferred it then to Barrington, who promptly bowed from the waist and sketched a pretty flourish with his hand.