Tomorrow morning, at ten-thirty, further duties remained to be performed. A limousine was to be sent to collect Madame Duval and bring her to Cazarès; she was then to be settled backstage for the duration of the show. This was tradition. Mathilde Duval had always attended the collections, had done so for twenty years—more. In the past it was she who arrived there with Maria Cazarès, she who stayed by her side throughout, soothing her nerves, talking to her, keeping her calm, tucked away in a little private back room until the moment Maria dreaded arrived, the moment she had to face the audience, the cameras, the applause.

The fact that Maria was dead altered nothing, Lazare said. It would have been Maria’s wish for Mathilde to be present, and present she would be. Juliette shivered again and edged toward the doorway. She could hear the muttered praying continue. Through the open door opposite, she could see into that terrible pink shrine of a room. She turned back to the sitting room, frowning now. Was there something to conceal here? She had assumed she was here purely as a result of Lazare’s almost pathological secrecy concerning Maria. But what if there were a serious reason for his insistence Mathilde be kept away from the press? Was it Mathilde he was worried about—or was it this place itself?

This idea had not occurred to her before. The instant it did, she began to look around her with closer attention. She moved to the mantelpiece and inspected the ugly objects crowded there, then to a table on which were perched more photographs of Maria, all of them fairly recent, she judged. She edged between small rickety tables, toward the far end of the room, which was dominated by a huge, very ugly secretary piled with knickknacks and papers, like every other surface here. There were pens, and bits of string, and scissors and sticks of sealing wax, and bottles of ink. The old woman had spilled some ink, she saw. A little pool of it, now dried, blotched one of the sheets of paper. It looked as if she had been trying to write a letter. Juliette bent over the page: the old woman’s writing was as crabbed as she would have expected; she could read only the opening words: Mon bien-aimé Christophe. Il faut que je te voie, c’est urgent… Je suis navrée’ tu me manques…

Who was Christophe? she wondered. Some grandchild, perhaps? The rest of the letter, unfinished, was obscured by the spillage of ink, as if the old woman had been writing, knocked over the ink bottle, then abandoned the effort. Poor thing, Juliette thought. She straightened a few items on the desk, feeling guilty for her own curiosity. There was a small pile of tiny boxes, she saw, thrust behind the pile of papers. Their wrappings were scattered beside them, and those wrappings could have come only from Cazarès: she recognized the silver cord, the gold faille, the signature white silk scraps.