She paused, and then nodded.
“Well then. I shall order a chaise,” he assured her, “to carry us safely to church and then home again. We will be perfectly safe.”
And they were. Madame Roy went as well, and although it took Mary some minutes to quell the uncomfortable feeling of being exposed, the great beauty at last of the church with its frescoes and colored-glass windows and music that filled the whole soaring interior, fit for a choir of angels, allowed her to conquer her fears.
They returned the next week also, and in all the days between she saw no sign of the man watching from the window of the house across the street. The days settled into domestic routine, and she ceased writing anything down in her journal because there was nothing of note to record.
So on Wednesday the thirteenth, when Jacques said at dinner, “The cook’s boy says there is to be a new play in the rue de Bussy this night, just round the corner. An excellent pantomime. Shall we attend?” Mary managed no more than the smallest of protests, her own faint misgivings soon calmed by the thought of Sir Redmond’s advice that a man could hide best in a crowd.
And oh! The relief to be out of the house. Mary had to contain herself, trying to act with a confidence that would befit Mistress Jamieson were she to walk in a Paris street, here in the snow with the joy of the Carnival atmosphere spilling on all sides around her, the sounds of the Fair and a gentleman guiding her through it, her hand safely held in his arm with Madame Roy an ever-watchful presence just behind.
They found the playhouse without any incident and joined the crowd inside, and Mary watched enraptured as the clever pantomime unfolded, set to music that spoke for the silent actors as they told the tale of lovers kept apart by an unyielding mother who preferred a suitor much less worthy for her daughter. There was poignancy and laughter—mostly laughter, as the better suitor bested his dim-witted rival at each turn and finally won his mistress and her mother’s good opinion.
Mary had not ever seen a play performed before. For her, this was the Paris she had dreamed about, at long last spread before her in its glory and its opulence. The candlelight and costumes, and the music and the mirth within the playhouse, made her feel as though a veil had been drawn back to show her Paradise. Jacques looked at her and smiled and turned to Madame Roy. “I would not cut her pleasure short. Let’s walk back through the Fair.”
The older woman nodded her consent, and when the pantomime was finished they walked down together through the throngs of people to the grand and covered spectacle that was the Fair of Saint-Germain.
If Mary had been dazzled by the play, she was near ecstasy while walking through the Fair. It was a tiny village in itself all held beneath a wooden roof, with rows of open wooden stalls and balconies and stairs, the whole lit warmly with what seemed a thousand candles, some suspended from the ceiling overhead. Each stall held something new to see or buy—the vendors selling everything but books and weapons, or so Madame Roy maintained. There were performers here as well; they stopped to watch a man who juggled knives, and marveled at the flash of steel and his dexterity. They watched a couple dancing to the playing of an oboe, and a woman who walked lightly on a rope strung between balconies as though it were the ground itself, and did not fall.
And pressed around them seemed to be the whole of Paris, glittering as brightly as the finery contained within that festive place.
“Take care,” Madame Roy warned, “for with the nectar come the wasps. Guard well your purses.”
Mary, who had no purse to be careful of, felt free to simply wander and enjoy.
She was well satisfied and weary when they finally took the turning at the Fair’s end and walked through the little laneway to the rue du Coeur Volant and started up towards their lodgings.
With the Fair behind them it was quieter. The street for once looked empty and the wind that had so often chased between the houses now had changed direction and was blowing from the east, and so was blocked by the high walls. When Mary hummed a lilting line of music she remembered from the pantomime, it seemed to echo back to her as happily.
A little way ahead, she saw the cook’s boy had come out to sweep their front step clear of snow, and when he noticed their approach he stood and held the door for them and waited, letting lamplight from within slant welcoming and warm across the frozen ground.
Mary felt quite warm enough already. She had taken off her gloves to cool her hands a little in the air and started to push back her hood when suddenly a man burst from the shelter of a doorway she was passing.
Startled, Mary had no time to move aside. He roughly shoved her, snatched the kid gloves she was holding in her hands, and took off running.
Jacques reacted angrily. “Stop, you—!”
“Thief!” Mary cried in French across his words, alarmed as much because he’d spoken English as because she’d lost her favorite gloves.
The man who swiftly moved from close behind them seemed at first to have been born directly of the shadows. She saw but a passing blur of gray and heard a low cry as the thief was caught and briefly overpowered and released with flailing speed into the night, and then her gloves were being offered to her, held within the bare hand of a tall man in a gray cloak, whose bent head concealed a face already hidden by a dark three-cornered hat.
In height and in form he looked much like the coachman who’d come to collect Mistress Jamieson, but when she finally found her voice to thank him for his chivalry, the stranger partly raised his head to show a pair of eyes as hard as any she had seen, set in a face that was not handsome. With a silent nod he crossed the street ahead of them to enter through the doorway of the house that faced their own. The door closed after him, and Mary stood and stared at it, while Jacques and Madame Roy both sought to reassure themselves she was not harmed.