Electra did not regard herself as a hand to be played, but she was an obedient daughter. Thus in the spring of her eighteenth year she found herself drinking tea in a Parisian drawing room on the day that all the talk was of a woman who had been found on the steps of Notre Dame, her clothes sliced away from the desecrated body, her throat cut cleanly at the artery. A picture had reached the newspapers and fascinated all of Paris—the victim’s head thrown back, lips white and parted, her face alabaster and her eyes wide but utterly empty now.
In a corner of Madame Cirque’s Tuesday salon she heard a soft suggestion from the Viscount Pronauge that the victim looked like a mythic virginal sacrifice. “A draggle-tail homeless creature, a prostitute, apparently,” someone in the little cluster around the viscount added. “No, no,” another said, clearly agitated. “We’ve all passed her in the street—she’s the baker’s daughter. A simple, good girl!” Electra turned away from them, covering her fear with a practiced smile, and at the crest of her turn she saw the face that changed her life forever—Basil Le Cherche, standing out in the select gathering like an obsidian shard in a bank of snow. All evening she struggled to keep her eyes from him, and all evening she failed. Each time her eyes found him she met his gaze. No matter the quickness of her turn or the interval between searching glances—he was waiting with a stillness deeper than any she had ever observed in man or woman.
She drifted toward Madame de Lac, a woman who would know the worst of anyone in the upper social circles of the city. “Who is that man?” she asked, dipping her chin in the dark stranger’s direction as quickly and unobtrusively as she could.
“Someone to avoid at all costs, my dear. His name is Basil Le Cherche. He is brother to a judge on the highest courts—Monsieur Henri Le Cherche. They say that his brother’s influence is all that keeps his neck from a noose now. Basil Le Cherche is rich, but his wealth, they say, is rooted in piracy and smuggling. He is also a noted swordsman.”
“But duels are illegal in the city!”
“My pet, the sword he wields is not brought to the battlefield but the bedroom.”
Madame de Lac laughed to see her young companion flush crimson.
Electra was still taken by surprise in this place where one’s clothing and connections mattered all; one’s character and intelligence not a whit. “I heard of tiresome difficulties after your father’s death. But you and your mother seem to have had a change of fortune,” Madame de Lac observed, her eyes tracing the French seams of Electra’s kidskin gloves. Electra merely nodded. She refused to tell the lie her mother had invented to explain this new wealth if anyone asked pressing questions—a departed long-lost relative from England who had left them this inheritance. No such thing or person existed, Electra had argued, and one lie will only demand ten more to prop it up when it totters. But her mother had not hesitated. “You have no idea how easy it is to lie,” she sniffed. “And you will be moving in a world where lies are legion—it is easier to identify a liar if you are one yourself, Electra. I suggest you learn the skill.”
Electra’s mother had moved them by now into a more acceptably fashionable address on ?le de la Cité. From their windows they could see the river parting as it reached the island. They could see the falcon family that waited patiently beneath the roof balustrades of Notre Dame, see them carry up the rats and pigeons they hunted and delivered to their young. Electra watched them dismember the rodents, shredding them into pieces small enough for their fledglings.
“They keep the city rid of vermin,” her mother would say when Electra grieved the little animals’ deaths, imagining their terror and pain as they were carried upward in the falcon talons. “All things die. All things must hunt to live. If you did not learn this lesson during our time in the country, you will learn it here in the city.”
Perhaps. Already she was finding similarities between some of the people she encountered in this sophisticated city and the falcons that had made Notre Dame their home. Already she was vowing to herself that she would be carried in no raptor’s talons.
And now in this Parisian drawing room she once again turned to find Basil Le Cherche’s dark eyes upon her. She met them, straight-on, and was shocked to see that this made him smile. So forward and rude! She knew enough of both London and Paris etiquette to feel that she was being tested as well as assessed, and she resented it. When she and her mother arrived home at last she found herself in a most unsettled mood.
“I will not be ogled,” she whispered to herself. “Not by anyone!”
Who was this dark creature whose presence made the rest of the world so much less important? Why did he distract her so? Was what she felt anger?
Her mother noticed none of this shift in her daughter. She was taken up entirely with preparations for the Grand Ball, which was only a week away. On this night young women were shown to the world in hopes of attracting a bidder who could offer the girl’s weight in gold. Marriages to the most powerful men in Europe had begun in evenings such as this.
Electra’s mother had endeavored to discover all there was to know about a certain Monsieur X. Did he prefer women in modest gowns or daring ones? Upswept severe hair or something looser and more flirtatious? What topics did he most enjoy discussing? And Monsieur Y, worth ten thousand a year—did his attention run more to breasts or ankles, either of which could be safely exposed without severe judgment? Electra mocked her mother gently at first when she pressed these topics, and then, rebuked, sighed and did what good young women did: practiced certain topics for discussion and traveled from the tenth arrondissement to the ?le and back in search of the right shoes.
“Mother, surely shoes will not determine the course of a lifetime,” she said as she sighed from her seat at yet another shopkeeper’s establishment.
“Do not patronize me with your na?ve romanticism,” her mother said drily. “Your future lies entirely in the hands of the man who chooses you. The rest of your life could depend upon this night,” she insisted as she pressed a beautiful frock against Electra’s lithe form to test its effect. “The sooner you understand that, the better.”
Electra had followed her mother from shop to shop, taken lessons in dance and locution, agreed—sometimes with nothing but her silence—with her parent’s strategies and perspectives. But something happened between the day her mother selected a dress for her to wear to the ball and the date of the ball itself: Basil Le Cherche.