Read Chapter 14: The Salon Performance

The salon of Madame de Beaumont occupied the ground floor of a townhouse in the Seventh Arrondissement, all gilded mouldings and watered silk, the air thick with the competing perfumes of withered aristocrats and their younger, hungrier guests. Evie stood by the Bösendorfer in a borrowed gown of deep blue velvet that Julien had procured from a costumer on the Rue de la Huchette, the fabric too warm for the season but not nearly as suffocating as the room’s collective gaze.

Julien was at the keyboard, his back a rigid line of concentration. He had arranged their set from his salon repertoire—Debussy, Fauré, and one of their own new compositions that he had spent three nights transcribing into a form that might not scandalise the room. Madame de Beaumont had been explicit: a young lady singing jazz in a private home was one thing, but the salon crowd expected art, not the sounds of a Negro cabaret. Evie had swallowed the implication alongside the champagne she’d been handed upon arrival.

They had opened with “Clair de Lune,” her voice wrapping around the melody like smoke, and she had watched the glittering faces soften, the old woman in the front row tapping her fan against her knee in time. It was not jazz, but it was something. It was payment.

The applause had been polite. The fee, whispered to her by Madame de Beaumont’s secretary before she took her position by the piano, would cover nearly two-thirds of the debt. One more evening like this, perhaps two, and Aubanel would be satisfied. She had not told Julien the exact figure. She had not told him that accepting this had made her feel like a waxwork in a travelling show.

Between songs, she drifted toward the refreshment table to wet her throat. The conversation around her shifted like sand, voices low and clipped, and she was about to return to the piano when a phrase caught her and held.

“…the American girl, the one they sent away from the orphanage.”

Evie’s hand stilled over a glass of water. She did not turn. Behind her, two men, their voices carrying the lazy authority of old money, continued their exchange. She could see them in the corner of her eye: one aged, with a monocle on a ribbon; the other middle-aged, sleek, in an evening coat that probably cost more than her passage to France.

“Sent away?” the younger man said.

“Sent away, yes. Not expelled, not punished—sent. The mother’s family intervened.” The monocled man lowered his voice further, and Evie, thinking fast, stepped backward as though searching for a chair, positioning herself closer to their alcove. “Ridiculous business, all in the papers at the time. A singer at one of those River Café places took the child in, raised her as her own. Then the father’s family found out and yanked the girl back, sent her to a convent school in Lyon.”

Evie’s pulse hammered. A singer. A child sent away. Lily had never spoken of her parentage in detail, only that she and Evie were orphans of circumstance who had found each other in New York. She had been older when they met, already twenty-two, hardened by something Evie had never pressed her on.

She turned, feigning a stumble against the younger man’s arm. “Forgive me, monsieur,” she said, her accent slipping into something more careful than her usual drawl. “I couldn’t help but overhear—the American girl, sent away from an orphanage. Was that in Paris? Recently?”

The two men regarded her with the polite blankness of people who had been interrupted by furniture that had suddenly developed speech.

“I’m afraid I don’t recall the particulars,” the monocled man said. “It was some years ago, an old story. I mentioned it only because my wife had a niece who attended the same convent, and the girl left abruptly to go to America. Quite the scandal at the time.”

“The girl—did she have a name?”

The younger man’s brow lifted a fraction. “You have an unusual interest in old gossip, mademoiselle.”

Evie felt the heat rise to her cheeks. “I’m American myself. I thought she might be an acquaintance.”

“Unlikely,” the monocled man said, with a finality that closed the door. He raised his glass in a small toast and turned back to his companion, dismissing her.

She stood there, the polished floor swaying beneath her, and wanted to press further, to grab the man by his lapels and demand the name, but Julien’s fingers had found a soft run of introductory chords. She had a set to finish.

She sang the rest of the programme on memory alone, her mind churning through possibilities. Lily in Lyon. Lily, sent away, yanked back from a singer who had raised her. Lily, who had arrived in New York with no accent but a careful way of speaking that Evie had always found odd for a girl from nowhere. Lily, who had vanished.

The final song ended to more polite applause, and Madame de Beaumont descended on her with the complacent air of a woman who had successfully displayed a rare animal.

“Exquisite, my dear. You have a voice that crosses boundaries.” She pressed a folded envelope into Evie’s hand—payment, no doubt. “You must come again next Thursday. The Prince of Saxe-Coburg is a patron of new music. He will adore you.”

Evie murmured something appropriate and scanned the room for the monocled man, but he had melted into the crowd, gone. She stood at the centre of the drawing room as the tide of guests ebbed around her, a curiosity who had performed her trick and was now to be released.

At the entrance, a heavy-set older man with a groomed silver beard intercepted her, blocking the door with a kind of practiced charm. He had been seated near the front, she recalled, and had applauded with more energy than the rest.

“Mademoiselle Hart.” He took her hand and held it a beat longer than necessary. “Baron de Croisset. I must say, you have made the evening for me. Old music and old voices weary me, but you—there is something alive in your singing. It reminds me of New Orleans.”

She pulled her hand free gently. “Thank you, Baron. If you’ll excuse me, my accompanist and I need to—”

“Of course, of course.” He stepped aside, but fell into step beside her as she made for the front doors. “I was wondering, however, if you might be interested in a private engagement. My wife is hosting a dinner for some Belgian delegates next week. I would pay handsomely—far more than this afternoon’s affair—for an hour of your company at the piano.” His gaze travelled over her with an assessment that she did not care to read. “I understand such arrangements can be… mutually beneficial.”

Evie stopped at the threshold and turned to face him. At the bottom of the steps, Julien waited by the kerb, coat over his arm, looking up at her with a question in his eyes.

“I have a prior engagement,” she said.

The Baron’s smile did not waver. “Then I will call on you another time.” He pressed a card into her hand, his fingers brushing hers. “I am not a man who gives up easily.”

He bowed and retreated, leaving Evie standing in the open doorway, the envelope of payment in one hand and the Baron’s card in the other. Behind her, a footman closed the door with a soft click. She walked down the steps toward Julien, and she did not look back.

“What did he want?” Julien asked, his voice tight.

“An offer,” she said, and slipped the card into her clutch without showing it to him. “Nothing I intend to accept.”

Julien studied her face a moment longer, then said, “Your voice drifted on the final song. Something unsettled you.”

She hesitated. The salon had been a test, and she had passed it well enough to earn her fee. But the conversation she had overheard was a splinter under her skin, the first concrete trace of Lily she had found in Paris—if it was Lily at all. She could not yet say his name, say the words, have it be nothing.

“I’ll tell you later,” she said.

He offered his arm, and she took it, and they began the walk back through the lamplit streets in silence.

Before they had gone fifty paces, the card in her clutch felt heavy as lead. The Baron’s offer, the salon’s fee—it could clear her debt completely, and all it would cost was an hour alone with a man who looked at her like a horse he wished to inspect at auction. She thought of Julien’s mother, of Aubanel’s deadline, of Lily somewhere out in the dark.

The card would keep until she decided. But the name she had not caught, the girl who had been sent away—that, she could not let rest. She would find the monocled man again. She would learn that name.