The Art Of Seduction. Katherine O' Neal
greetings and pulling Lisette toward her. Lisette was about to scold them when she saw the object of their excitement. Her doelike brown eyes registered first shock, then recognition, then teary relief, all in an instant. Trying to keep herself from exploding with happiness, she whispered, “I’m not dreaming, am I?”
“Not unless I’m dreaming, too,” Mason smiled.
“But I saw you!” Lisette cried. “They made me look at what was left of your poor swollen body!”
“That wasn’t me. That was a woman I jumped in trying to save.”
Lisette grabbed her and began covering her face with kisses, giving her the welcome she’d so needed. “I should have known you could never do such a thing. But I thought it was you. It looked so much like you, the same coloring, the same height…. It broke my heart. How…Why…?”
Mason pulled away. “I’ll tell you all about it, I promise. But for now, tell me what’s been going on here. I read in the paper that—”
“Zut!” Lisette remembered. “Les journales! That was my fault. I was so desolate at the thought of you dying like that, so miserable, so unappreciated. I only wanted to make it up to you somehow. So I went to the papers, where they know of me from the circus, and I told them your sad story. I wanted you to have a little bit of the fame you deserved.”
“Fame.” The word sounded so strange in connection to her that it was jarring.
“Yes,” Lisette cried, “they love your paintings now! And can you believe it? I sold three of them!”
“You sold my paintings?”
“You can’t believe how eager people were to buy them. I sold them for five hundred francs each!”
Mason had to pinch herself. Five hundred francs!
“The galleries are fighting to represent you. I gave the rest of them to Falconier because he offered the best terms. He bought back the three I sold and he was hoping to show them all the day after tomorrow.”
“My own show?” Mason took a moment to savor the idea. “But all this attention…it’s because they think I’m dead, right?”
Lisette shrugged. “I suppose. The story has swept the city. You know how we French love a romantic tragedy.”
“But will they still be interested once they know I’m alive?”
“We’ll soon see, no?”
But Mason’s mind was charging ahead. “What if we don’t test it? What if I conveniently stay dead for a while? Until after the show. Maybe once people see the paintings, what they’ll care about is the work and not the ‘romantic tragedy.’ And then I can return from the dead. I was recuperating in the country, I had no knowledge of what was going on in Paris…I might just as well have discovered the mistake after the show as now.”
“But you didn’t give me a chance to finish. Falconier can’t show the paintings.”
“What do you mean he can’t show them? You said you gave them to him.”
“The police now say he can’t show them. You didn’t leave a will, so no one can say for sure who owns them. Until it’s settled in court, Falconier can’t open the show. He’s going out of his mind.”
Mason took a minute to consider this. Then a mischievous smile began to tug at the corners of her mouth. “What if I had a sister? As my only living relative, she’d inherit the paintings. What if you suddenly received a letter from this sister, who you didn’t know I had, saying she’d read about poor Mason’s demise in the Boston papers and was about to embark for France to settle her affairs? What if you cabled her aboard her ship telling her about the show and she cabled back her permission to go ahead with it?”
“But you don’t have a sister.”
“I do now.”
All at once Lisette saw the beauty of it and met her smile. “Wouldn’t that be a terrible thing for us to do?”
“Terrible.”
“We’ve got to do it, yes?”
“I don’t think there’s any power on earth that can stop us now, do you?”
Lisette clapped her hands. “This is going to be such fun!”
Early the next morning, Lisette went to Falconier and told him the story they’d concocted. Overjoyed, the gallery owner rescued the pile of invitations that hadn’t yet been tossed into the fire and whipped his staff into a frenzy of preparations. “We open in two days,” he proclaimed.
“You should have seen him,” Lisette told Mason later in her frilly bedroom overrun with stuffed toys and live dogs. “He was so delighted that he insisted on putting the sister up in his suite at the Jockey Club on the Rue Scribe. That’s one of the best addresses in town, you know. And because he was so desperate to show the paintings, I told him he had to cover the sister’s expenses while she’s here. Look at this! A letter of credit! All the money we need to dress you right. I already spoke to Madame Tensale, who will bring a selection of clothes this afternoon.”
“That’s perfect!” Mason cried excitedly. “We’ll give the sister an entire wardrobe, the kind of things I never wore. Create a whole new image for her.”
“Silks and feathers and all sorts of pretty things,” Lisette agreed, “instead of those plain clothes you wear. We’ll pretend we’re playing dress-up.”
That settled, they pondered how best to proceed with the transformation.
“I can cut bangs,” Mason suggested, peering at herself in the vanity mirror. “That’s a start, but it won’t be enough. We could dye my hair. How do we do that?”
Lisette gave her a defensive pout. “Me? How would I know? My hair is completely natural.” Mason answered her with a mock frown, which brought on a fit of laughter from Lisette. “Ça va,” she conceded. “I know a place where we can get some chemicals. We will dye your hair dark, no? Like a gypsy.”
“That’s a start.” Mason searched Lisette’s vanity for a small pair of scissors. With them, she cut the eyelashes on one eye to half their length.
Lisette screeched. “Your lovely lashes! You’ve killed them!”
“They’ll grow back,” Mason assured her, repeating the process on the other eye. “I cut them once when I was young just to see if they would grow back. They did, even longer than before. This is the one way I can guarantee that people won’t recognize me.”
“It’s true,” Lisette teased. “It wouldn’t occur to anyone that you would do such a stupid thing.”
They threw themselves into the planning like Sarah Bernhardt preparing for the Comédie Français. The extensive amount of weight Mason had lost added to the disguise. They took the initials from Mason’s first and middle name—Mason Emily—and twisted them a bit to form the name Amy. Once they’d purchased the new wardrobe, they packed it into steamer trunks and had them sent to the Jockey Club. Then, with Mason in full costume, they went to Gare St-Lazare, where they hired a finer coach and took it to the Opera Quarter as if Miss Amy Caldwell from Boston, Massachusetts, had just arrived on the train from Le Havre.
They giggled most of the way there. What they were doing was outrageous, but after all, it would only be a brief charade. Once the show was a success, Mason Caldwell would come back to life and her sister Amy would conveniently disappear forever.
Chapter 3
As the show was about to open to the public, Mason was faced with an important decision. Falconier had already unbolted the doors and people were beginning to stream in. Halting the sale at this point wouldn’t just be a major inconvenience for everyone involved, it would be considered an affront, particularly inconsiderate in light of the false start-and-stop Falconier had already endured.