The Coral Thief by Rebecca Stott Page B

voice.
    “Dangerous for
me
. Yes. But then that doesn’t matter to you.”
    “That’s not fair,” I said. “How long was I supposed to wait for you? Weeks? Months? What are you doing? Is this some kind of game?”
    “Don’t,” she said.
    She walked away from me a little. I kept close.
    “I know who you are,” I said clumsily, “and what you do. I know all about you.”
    Suddenly, afraid she would slip away again, I lunged toward her but stumbled, falling against her, pushing her hard. She fell toward the wall, tripping over some boxes and hitting her shoulder; then, regaining her balance, she turned, stepped toward me, and hit me across the face with her fist. The sound of the blow, her knuckles across my jaw, echoed against the walls. A caged bird was singing above us, repeating its refrain over and over.
    “You know nothing. You are blind,” she said, rubbing her hand, “as blind as it is possible to be, monsieur. You have no idea. You see nothing beyond yourself.”
    I kicked the wall several times. Everything else around me in the gathering twilight seemed to be turning to water.
    “Merde,”
I said. “Damn. Damn. Damn. That hurt. I hate this. What do you want me to do? I agree to anything. Everything. I will do … whatever. I am tired. I just want to—”
    “What? What is it you want?”
    “I came to Paris to make something of myself. You have no idea how hard I have worked or how long I have waited to get this position. You have no idea how difficult it was to persuade my father to let me travel here. And in a single night you have ruined everything.”
    “And what does that something look like, Daniel, this thing that you will make of yourself?” She was leaning against the wall next tome. “The Grand Tour, then home for church on Sundays, a practice, a spell on the town council, conversations with ladies taking tea in the afternoons? What will you make of yourself, M. Connor?”
    “If I had gone to Cuvier in the first place,” I said, “or done anything halfway sensible, I might have been able to salvage something….” I closed my eyes and watched the small pinpricks of light puncturing the darkness.
    “But then there would be no now.” Her voice had softened. “Keep your eyes closed,” she said, moving closer to me, putting one hand on my shoulder. “Now tell me what color you see when I do this.”
    I saw blue when she kissed me, there in the darkening alley. I could not open my eyes, afraid that if I did, I would wake up back in my room, or somewhere she wasn’t, where there was no smell of bergamot mixed with old beer and something like crushed herbs from the cobbles, somewhere not blue.
    “Blue?” she said when I answered her. “I see purple.”
    When I opened my eyes, the street was darker; the edges of everything had softened; the colors had drained away. Down at the end of the alley the lamplighter lowered a lamp on its rope pulley, lit it, and pulled it back up into place.
    “I have no plan, Daniel,” she said. “I am making this up as I go along. I make mistakes. Everything about this—about you—gets under my skin. The Caravaggio boy, the coral fossils, the clever questions you ask in those notebooks of yours, your beautiful drawings. I have dreamt about you—I was trying to talk to you, but you were shouting. But … there are other things. Things you don’t know about and … you are—”
    “Don’t,” I said.
    “Don’t what?”
    “Don’t tell me you don’t trust me.”
    “Shhh,” she said, and kissed me again. I could feel her breath, seeher eyebrows thick and dark, the crow’s-feet around her eyes. I closed my eyes again, and in the darkness I could see flowers opening infinitely slowly, rust-colored petals against dark blue, stamens dusted gold.
    “Doucement,”
she said. “Come inside. There’s always someone listening. Everywhere.” She looked up and down the street, pointed toward white sheets that billowed in the wind like sails. A shutter