Headline Read online

  Copyright © 2013 Imogen Robertson

  The right of Imogen Robertson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2013

  All characters – other than the obvious historical figures – in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  E-pub conversion by Avon DataSet Ltd, Bidford-on-Avon, Warwickshire

  eISBN: 978 0 7553 9014 4

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Book

  Also By

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  PROLOGUE

  Part One

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  Part Two

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  EPILOGUE

  Historical Notes

  About the Book

  Paris, 1909: a city of contrasts and ambition, of beauty and treachery . . .

  Maud Heighton came to Lafond’s famous Académie to paint, and to flee the constraints of her small English town. It took all her courage to escape, but Paris eats money. While her fellow students enjoy the dazzling joys of the Belle Époque, Maud slips into poverty.

  Quietly starving, and dreading another cold Paris winter, Maud takes a job as companion to young, beautiful Sylvie Morel. But Sylvie has a secret: an addiction to opium. As Maud is drawn into the Morels’ world of elegant luxury, their secrets become hers. Before the New Year arrives, a greater deception will plunge her into the darkness that waits beneath this glittering city of lights.

  The Paris Winter is a dark and powerful tale of deceit and revenge from a master storyteller.

  By Imogen Robertson

  Instruments of Darkness

  Anatomy of Murder

  Island of Bones

  Circle of Shadows

  About the Author

  Imogen Robertson grew up in Darlington, studied Russian and German at Cambridge, and now lives in London. She directed for TV, film and radio before becoming a full-time author, and also writes and reviews poetry. Imogen won the Telegraph’s ‘First thousand words of a novel competition’ in 2007 with the opening of Instruments of Darkness, her debut. Her subsequent thrillers featuring Harriet Westerman and Gabriel Crowther, Anatomy of Murder, Island of Bones and Circle of Shadows, were also richly praised. Imogen was shortlisted for the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award 2011 and for the CWA Dagger in the Library Award 2012.

  Want to know more? Read Imogen’s blog at www.imogenrobertson.com or follow her on

  Twitter @RobertsonImogen.

  Gran, Gillian and Hazel with love

  Acknowledgements

  The support of friends and family make the writing possible and letters, emails and so on from readers make it fun. Huge thanks to my agent Annette Green, my editor Flora Rees and all at Headline for their advice and support. Particular thanks to David Downie and Alison Harris for their expert help guiding us round Paris; to artists Caroline de Peyrecave and Claire Zakiewicz for talking to me about their training and careers; to Richard Campbell at Lucie Campbell in Bond Street for showing me diamonds; Hervé Guyot for sharing his collection of photographs of the Paris floods and to Ahren Warner and Susan Powell for their help with the research. Thank you also to my husband Ned who arranged so much of our wedding while I was in 1909. This book was originally inspired by my grandmothers and great-aunts who travelled independently in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

  PROLOGUE

  At the Académie Lafond oil on board 29.3 × 23.6 cm

  This charming, loosely painted study shows a life-class in progress. The model is just visible on the left, but it is the students – bored, intent or nervous – who are the subjects of the painting. One seems to be blowing on her hands to warm them. Lafond began offering training to young artists, male and female, in 1875 and opened his first all-female atelier in 1890, seven years before women were admitted to the Académie des Beaux Arts. He managed his various studios in Paris with great success until his death in 1919. His students received a thorough training in oils and were encouraged to be both experimental and imaginative in their use of colour and in their composition.

  The tonal range in this painting is narrow and the colours cold, the model almost invisible and the students placed almost haphazardly in the frame. In this way, the artist gives an impression of a snatched, unstaged moment on a chilly morning. Note the middle-class appearance of the women in the portrait. Lafond’s fees for women were high, but his reputation was irreproachable.

  Extract from the catalogue notes to the exhibition ‘The Paris Winter: Anonymous Treasures from the de Civray Collection’, Southwark Picture Gallery, London, 2010

  Part One

  Saturday, 20 November 1909, Paris

  CHAPTER 1

  The news of the suicide of Rose Champion reached her fellow students at the Académie Lafond on a pale wintry morning a little before ten o’clock. The heat from the black and clanking stove had not yet reached the far corners of the studio, and the women on the outer reaches of the group had to blow on their fingers to make them warm enough to work. Maud Heighton was always one of the first to arrive each day and set up her easel, which meant she could have taken her pick of places on each Monday when the model for the week was chosen, but the Englishwoman liked to sit on the far eastern side of the room. The challenge of the narrow angle she had on the model throne and whatever man, woman or child happened to occupy it seemed to please her – and she returned to the spot week after week when warmer ones, or those with an easier angle of view were available.

  She was there that morning, silent and studious as ever, when the news of Rose’s death came tumbling up the stairs, so she was among the first to hear it. It was unfortunate – shocking even – that the news reached the female students so raw and sudden, but even in the best-run establishments, such things do occur.

  It was by chance the women painting in Passage des Panoramas heard so quickly and so brutally of the tragedy. One of Lafond’s male students, a young rom
antic Englishman called John Edwards, lived in the room beside Rose Champion’s in a shabby tenement hunkered off the Boulevard Clichy. It was an unpleasant building without gas or electricity, and with only one tap which all the inhabitants had to share. He knew his neighbour was a student in one of the all-female ateliers, but she was not pretty enough to attract his attention, not while the streets were full of French girls who made it their business to charm the male gaze; what’s more, he assumed that as a woman she would have little of interest to say about art. When he took up his residence, though, he noticed that Rose kept herself and her threadbare wardrobe clean and approved of that, then thought no more about her. In the month they had been neighbours they had had one short conversation on the stairs about the teaching at Académie Lafond. It ended when he asked to see her work and Rose told him he wouldn’t understand it. He had wished only to be polite and was offended by her refusal. They did not speak again.

  The walls that divided their rooms were thin and he happened to be awake and waiting that morning for the matt-grey light of the Paris dawn to filter into the sky. It was the hour and the season when the city looked unsure of itself. In the full darkness, the clubs and cabarets shone like the jewels. The city then was a woman in evening dress certain of her beauty and endlessly fascinating. The air smelled of roasting chestnuts, and music spilled out of every café, humble or luxurious, into the streets. In the full light of day Paris was chic and confident. The polished shops were filled with colour and temptation and on every corner was a scene worth painting. It was modern without being vulgar, tasteful without being rigid or dull. A parade of elegant originality. Only in this hour, just before dawn on a winter’s morning, did the city seem a little haggard, a little stale. The shutters were up and the cafés all closed or closing. The streets were almost empty – only the occasional man, purple in the face and stale with smoke and drink, hailing a cab in Place Pigalle, or the old women washing out the gutters with stiff-brushed brooms.

  Sitting in the window with a blanket round his shoulders and his pipe clamped between his teeth, John Edwards was thinking about Matisse, his solid blocks of colour that at times seemed ugly, but with an ugliness more honest than beauty. He pictured himself making this argument to the poets and painters who gathered at Le Lapin Agile in Montmartre; he imagined them nodding seriously then telling their friends they had found an Englishman of talent and wisdom. They would introduce him to the most interesting art dealers in the city, the most advanced collectors and critics. He would write a manifesto . . .

  He was enjoying the opening night of his first sensational solo show when he heard the sound of a chair overturning and the creak of a rope. There was no doubt where it came from. He dropped the blanket from his shoulders, ran into the corridor and started hammering at the door, calling her name, then rattling the handle. It was locked. By the time he put his shoulder to the door, the other residents of the house had emerged from their rooms and were watching, peering over the banister rails, their eyes dull with the new day. Finally the lock splintered and he tumbled into the room. She had hung a rope from one of the central beams. Her body still swung a little from side to side like a pendulum just before it stops completely. John had to scream in the face of the waiter who lived in the other room on this floor before he would help him get her down. It was too late. She was most likely dead even before he had begun shouting her name.

  They laid her on the bed and one of the women went to phone the police from Le Rat Mort on Place Pigalle. He waited with the body until they arrived. The misery in the room pressed on him, as if Rose Champion had left a desperate ghost behind her to whisper in his ear about the hopeless vanity of his ambitions.

  By the time the police arrived, John Edwards was not young or romantic any more. Once the gendarmes had been and the morgue van had taken away the body, he packed his trunk and left the building for good. He called at Académie Lafond to inform his professor what had happened and of his decision to leave Paris, but his master was not there and the rather off-hand way Mrs Lafond spoke to him irritated his already over-strung nerves. Rather than leave a note he simply told her what had happened, perhaps rather more graphically than necessary and without regard to the fact there was a servant in the room. The latter’s shocked face haunted him as he prepared to return to his mother’s comfortable house in Clapham and resume his career as a clerk at Howarth’s Insurance Company in the City. There can be too much truth.

  The servant in the room was the maid who tended to the ladies in the Passage des Panoramas atelier. She left the offices in Rue Vivienne before Mme Lafond could tell her to keep the news to herself and so it escaped, awkward and disturbing and stinking of misery.

  Even though the women who studied at Académie Lafond paid twice the fees the men did, their studio accommodation was no more than adequate. The only light came from the glassed ceiling and the room was narrow and high, so that it seemed sometimes as if their models were posing at the bottom of a well. The stove was unpredictable and bad-tempered. Nevertheless it was worth paying the money to be able to study art. The rough manners of the male students meant that no middle-class woman could work in a mixed class – and sharing life models with male students caused ugliness. At the women-only studios a female could prepare for a career as an artist without sacrificing her dignity or reputation, and even if the professional artists who visited them did not spend as much time guiding their female students, at least they did come, so the modest women could make modest progress and their families could trust that although they were artists, their daughters were still reasonably sheltered. The suicide of a student put a dangerous question-mark over this respectability, and news of it would probably have been suppressed if it had been given privately. As it was, it spilled out of Lafond’s office and made its way up the stairs and into the room where Maud Heighton and her fellow students were at work.

  Maud, perched on a high stool with her palette hooked on her thumb, heard their teaching assistant exclaim and turned her head. Mademoiselle Claudette was making the sign of the cross over her thin chest. That done, she squeezed her almond-shaped eyes closed for a second, then helped the maid set down the kettle on the top of the stove. When it was safe, she placed a hand on the servant’s shoulder.

  Maud frowned, her attention snagged by that initial gasp. There was some memory attached to the sound. Then it came to her. It was just the noise her sister-in-law, Ida, had made on the morning of the fire. Her brother, James, had driven the car right up to Maud where she stood at the front of the fascinated crowd, her hair down and her face marked with soot. Ida had got out of the car without waiting for James to open the door for her, looked at the smoking ruins of the auctioneer’s place of business and the house Maud and James had grown up in, and given just that same gasp.

  Maud turned towards Mademoiselle Claudette the moment the older woman rested her hand on the maid’s shoulder. The assistant was normally a woman of sharp, nervous movements, but this gesture was softly intimate. Maud wanted to click her fingers to stop the world, like a shutter in a camera, and fix what she saw: the neatly coiffed heads of the other young women turned away from their easels, the model ignored, all those eyes leading towards the two women standing close together by the stove. The finished painting formed in Maud’s mind – a conversation piece entitled News Arrives. The shaft of light reaching them from above fell across Mademoiselle Claudette’s back, while the maid’s anxious face was in shadow. Was it possible to capture shock in paint, Maud wondered – that moment of realisation that today was not going to be as other days?

  Mademoiselle Claudette ushered the maid out into the hallway then closed the door to the studio behind them. The semi-sacred atmosphere of concentration still hung over the women, keeping them silent, but no one put brush to canvas again. They paused like mermaids just below the water, waiting for one of their number to be the first to break the surface, into the uncertain air.

  ‘Rose Champion is dead!’ Francesca blurted
out. It was done. A flurry of exclamations ran around the room. The high walls echoed with taps and clicks as palettes were put aside, brushes set down and the women looked at the plump Prussian girl who had spoken. Her eyes were damp and her full bottom lip shook. The high collar on her blouse made her look like a champagne bottle about to burst. ‘The maid said she killed herself. She was found hanged in her room this morning. Oh Lord, have mercy on us! Poor Rose!’ She looked about her. ‘When did we see her last?’

  ‘Not since summer, I think,’ a blonde, narrow-hipped girl answered, one of the Americans whose French accent remained unapologetically Yankee. ‘She didn’t come back this year, did she?’ There was general agreement. ‘Did anyone see her about since then?’

  ‘I saw her,’ Maud said at last, remembering even as she spoke. She felt the eyes of the women swing towards her, she who spoke so rarely. ‘She was in the Tuileries Gardens sketching Monsieur Pol with his sparrows.’ The other women nodded. Pol was one of the sights of Paris, ready to be admired just outside the Louvre in his straw boater, whistling to the birds, and calling to them by name. ‘It was a month ago perhaps. She was thinner, but . . . just as she always was.’

  One of the students had begun to make the tea and the boiling water splashed a little. The girl cursed in her own language, then with a sigh put down the kettle and produced a coin from her pocket to pay her fine. Claudette used the money to buy the little cakes and pastries the women ate during their morning breaks. When funds were low they fined each other for inelegant phrasing. In the Paris art world, Lafond’s girls were said to paint like Academicians and speak like duchesses.

  ‘Poor Rose,’ Francesca said more softly. The women sighed and shook their heads.