The Coral Thief by Rebecca Stott Read Free Book Online Page B

I trust you still have them. We have only to arrange for me to pick them up. I will send someone. Please give me an address, and I will do the rest.”
    “Your notebooks—” she said.
    “You’ve been reading my notebooks?” I said, my voice constricted. No one had read those notebooks. They were full of speculations, ideas about species and strata and comparative anatomy, mixed with poetry, drawings, and observations about people, women I had seen, private feelings.
    “Your work on homology is very good,” she said, “very interesting. You have insight and curiosity. But you are reading the wrong books.”
    “You shouldn’t have looked at my notebooks.”
    She saw me glance toward the guard. We were both waiting for me to do something. Her black eyes, now very close, glittered. Was she daring me?
    “And if I refuse to return them?” she said, leaning up against a marble pillar with that maddening flicker of a smile that seemed to hover about her mouth whenever she talked to me. “What then?”
    Fragments of conversation in several languages reached us from men and women crossing and recrossing the space, the sound of shoes on marble, the keys of a guard, the creak of a door. Somewhere far away, a gunshot.
    “I have money,” I said.
    She laughed. “I don’t want your money.” I watched the guard begin his walk down the gallery.
    “I’m going to have you arrested,” I said, grabbing her arm. “I shall call the guard.”
    “And what will you say to the guard?” she said, her face suddenly close to mine. “How will you prove that I am the woman you saw in the dark on the mail coach? I will deny it of course. My French is better than yours, and I have excellent identity papers. It’s all about evidence, you see. I shall tell the guard that you accosted me. That you are a little drunk. That I have never seen you before. I think you had better take your hand off my arm.”
    “I will take you myself to the Bureau de la Sûreté.”
    “Take
me?” Her black eyes flashed. “You propose to take me by force to the Bureau?” she whispered. “Do you think a man like you can force a woman like me to go anywhere and not be stopped? If I call out, people will be concerned for my safety. It is quite a distance from here to the Île de la Cité.”
    She had paralyzed me a second time, I thought, like a wasp with its prey. I let go of her arm. I had stepped into a spell, across a threshold. Curiosity had prevented me from calling out when I first saw her, and the delay had been critical. Her talk. Her voice. I had wanted her to talk to me. I began to plead like a child.
    “Yes, yes, I will give them back to you,” she said, “but come. Walk this way. I want to show you something. If you have time, of course, M. Connor. I know you are in a great hurry.”
    She turned away from the Laocoön toward the door to the Long Gallery, where scores of fashionably dressed visitors crowded in front of paintings by Veronese, Titian, Rubens, and Raphael. We walked through arches of light falling slantways from the tall windows onto the marble floor, easing our way between groups, slipping in and out of hushed conversations. I watched her black slippers appear and disappear beneath the blue silk drapery of her skirts, offering the occasional glimpse of white lace.
    “Taking me to the Bureau will not get your things back. That will do nothing for you. And it will be bad for me. I think you had better sit down, Daniel. You are pale.” She gestured to a marble seat in an alcove. I sat down, my hands and legs shaking. She took the seat next to me.
    “Jameson will never trust me with anything again,” I said. “Without those things I have no job, nothing…”
    She didn’t respond. She was watching a woman dressed in gray who was sitting nearby. Her long cloak, fastened at the neck, was thrown back from her arms, and one beautiful ungloved hand pillowed her cheek. Her white bonnet made a halo around her braided dark brown