Page 1 of Angel’s Flight (The Phantom Saga #4)

Yville-sur-Seine, France

S he had not been expecting visitors two days in a row, but the Baroness still managed to compose herself to meet the man from Paris.

She did not, however, mind making him wait for three-quarters of an hour in the drawing room before doing so.

The servants said she moved slowly because of her age, but in all her seventy-eight years, she had moved at the same pace: carefully and with poise.

She was of the old nobility, from a family whose name went back centuries.

Even though she had taken on a lower rank through marriage, Adelaide de Martiniac still comported herself with the dignity befitting her lineage.

So what if that appeared to others as moving slowly? They could wait. She was also very tired from the dramatic turns of the day before. Those shocks had been about lineage too, and she was proud of her old heart for enduring them.

Adelaide entered the drawing room with her head held high, her long skirts and petticoats whispering over the parquet floors as Jacques, her most loyal companion, tapped a path at her side. The small dog growled when he saw the man waiting by the fireplace, staring out the window.

“Good morning, Monsieur. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” the Baroness lied as the man turned and raised an eyebrow at Jacques’s threat.

“It is no trouble, Madame de Martiniac,” the man replied. He did not use her formal title, pointedly so. Impertinent. “I realize the hour is irregular, but the news I bring could not wait.”

“Everything can wait, Monsieur, when you are my age. Do have some chocolate,” Adelaide replied as the maid entered with a silver tray bearing the Baroness’s customary breakfast of chocolat chaud and apple pastries. She attributed her continued good health to her daily consumption of the drink.

“Madame, I am afraid this is not the sort of news to share over confections,” the man replied with a scowl.

He was of average height, this man, with neatly parted hair of pale brown.

His moustache was equally tidy in a thin line above his lip.

His posture was precise, and his pale green eyes were sharp behind his round glasses.

He had the look of a man of business - a marked contrast to her guest yesterday.

“I have come to inquire of you about—”

“You must tell me your name before you bring up my grandson’s disappearance, please,” Adelaide said. The man at least had the decency to look surprised. “Come, come: what else would you be troubling an old woman about at this hour?”

“I am Monsieur Bidaut. I am in the employ of a firm in Paris.”

“A firm that specializes in debt collections, I might guess?” Adelaide offered, but the man gave no indication she was right. “Antoine owed money to half of Paris. I would not have expected them to employ a lawyer."

“I’m not a lawyer myself, more of an investigator. Enough time has passed that at least one debtor has grown impatient and wishes to have your grandson declared dead.”

The man waited a beat, as if he anticipated the words to hurt or shock the Baroness.

They did not. She knew already that Antoine was rotting in the cellars of the Paris Opéra.

The reaction this man had anticipated had come many weeks ago, and for a different grandson, when Adelaide had read the mysterious words in L’époque: Erik is Dead.

The humble advertisement had shocked her.

She believed she would know in her bones when her firstborn grandson died.

She had dreamed of death for days before, and she felt something stop in her heart in the wee hours one spring morning.

She had thought it was Antoine – for she had always known he would meet a bad end, just like his father.

It had taken until yesterday for her to be proven right when a man in a mask arrived on her doorstep. The ghost of her past had come, bearing news both dark and remarkable. The death of one grandson and the marriage of the other. Not to mention his resurrection.

“I don’t see what the point would be in that,” Adelaide sighed. “Dead or disappeared, your client won’t get any money from Antoine. He had none.”

“That’s not necessarily true, now is it? A portion of your late husband’s estate remains unclaimed, thanks to you.” Bidaut said it plainly, with no guile or threat, which made it all the more impressive.

“Your client must be owed a great deal to have funded such thorough research. Who is it?”

“I am not at liberty yet to say,” Bidaut replied. “The interested party has a substantial claim. One which they cannot pursue until Monsieur de Martiniac is dead in the eyes of the law.”

“And you wish me to begin those proceedings?” Adelaide had to chuckle. Until yesterday, she had not even been sure that the awful boy was dead, but she couldn’t tell the world how or why she knew.

“They have already begun, actually,” Bidaut replied, much to Adelaide’s surprise and interest. How could a debtor have managed that?

“So you are here to give me notice.”

“And to try to persuade you to willingly pass over the inheritance that Monsieur de Martiniac was denied. I understand withholding it from him in life, as your grandson sounds like he was a less-than-honorable man.”

“He was a monster,” Adelaide corrected. “Like his father.”

The father Antoine had killed. It had been a strange shift in her guilt to learn that it had been Antoine, not Erik, who had started the fire that killed her son.

Erik had confessed it all in tight, tense words, gripping the hand of his beautiful new bride.

She had been a wonder, his Christine – poised and kind, protective of her husband and assured of herself.

It had been a balm to see that the grandchild she had failed over and over again had found a family, at last, that was worthy of him. Who loved him.

“Your words, not mine,” Bidaut went on. “There is time now to undo some of the damage he did in life by making things right.”

“What a strange way to characterize paying off his gambling debts.”

“I never said the debtor I represent was such a person. Suffice it to say, my employer was done great injury by your grandson.” Bidaut’s face darkened, and Adelaide suppressed a shiver.

“Even if that is so, there is nothing to be had from me to make this person whole,” Adelaide answered the man and the question in her heart. “The money you seek is gone.”

“What?” For the first time, Bidaut seemed surprised.

It had been a gift as much to Adelaide’s conscience as to the young couple to finally bestow Erik’s rightful inheritance upon him.

She had insisted he take the sum, even if it was blood money of several sorts.

He deserved it more than any de Martiniac did, and it would help him to start his new life, wherever that might be.

“I released it into the care of a charitable order,” Adelaide lied easily.

“I can’t tell you the name, for it was an anonymous donation.

It was done, as you said, to undo some of the evils my son and grandson brought into the world.

Seek all you want, but there is no money left.

I have retained enough to keep myself comfortable until I die, but that is all. ”

“Are there records of this transaction?” Bidaut asked, taking a notebook from his pocket and jotting something down.

“That is a question for my solicitor,” Adelaide shrugged. “Before you ask, he has recently gone to Geneva.”

“How convenient,” Bidaut muttered, annoyed at what he assumed was a lie.

It was not. The transaction was taking place in Geneva, where banks didn’t ask questions and where new names and lives could be easily procured for the inheritors of this not-so-small fortune.

It was there also that Adelaide had been assured she could write to them, and that they might, when they were settled, send some word to her.

“Is there anything else you need of me?” Adelaide asked coolly.

“I would give my condolences on—”

“They are unneeded. The de Martiniac name will die with me, but not for a long time.”

“I may be in touch,” Bidaut answered.

“I do hope not. Good day, Monsieur.” Adelaide busied herself pouring a cup of chocolate as her maid showed the detective (or whatever he was) out of her house.

She watched out the window as he made his way down the garden path, among the blooming tulips and hyacinth.

It was a perfect spring day, and she wondered if Erik and his love, wherever they were now, were enjoying it.

They had seemed happy when they looked at each other, full of relief at their dark tale having reached its end, or rather, finding a new beginning.

There had been such love in their eyes, love that reminded Adelaide of what she had shared with her own late husband.

The man who had given her the ring which Christine now wore. Love to the stars and beyond.

The memory of her late husband pierced her heart like a knife, the pain so sudden and fierce that it made Adelaide gasp. Grief was strange like that. It could leave her for months, or even years, then suddenly it was there, to remind her that the other half of her heart was gone and buried.

She hoped it was a long time before Erik and his love had to feel that pain before fate ripped them apart.

Despite the stability of one sort that Adelaide had been able to provide, there were so many more obstacles in their way.

Erik’s face and past, their lack of any friends in the wide world into which they now embarked. That world itself was a cruel place.

She hoped they found happiness, but the visit from Bidaut worried her.

Already, someone was asking about Antoine, seeking to uncover the mystery that protected Erik.

He wore a new mask sometimes, her grandson, a strange thing with glasses and a beard that let him pass more easily for a regular fellow if you didn’t look too closely.

This contrivance with Antoine (to have died for Erik and ‘provide the body in the Opera Ghost’s grave’ as had been vividly described) was such a mask and could just as easily be snatched away.

She would write to them of Monsieur Bidaut’s visit, Adelaide decided.

They deserved the warning that someone wasn’t content to let Antoine sink into obscurity and be forgotten.

It wasn’t surprising that his crimes would have consequences and echoes that were hard to evade. Some scars never fully healed.