“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. And yet…What if this Garrett was right? She had no way of knowing. Stopping the sale, as he suggested, required a cheeky daring that certainly appealed to her, but it also called for a confidence in the popularity of her work that, up to now, was completely unwarranted.
What to do?
She scrutinized Garrett. “You really believe there will be that kind of demand for these paintings?”
Without hesitation, he answered, “I do.”
She glanced back at the dealer, who was ushering in the waiting crowd. “Falconier will have an apoplexy.”
Garrett arched a brow. She detected a challenge lurking in his amused smile. “Would you like me to do it for you?”
There was something hidden in the smoky depths of his eyes that captivated her, beckoned her, told her she could…What? Trust him?
In that moment she made her decision. “Thank you. I’ll do it myself.”
She swiveled on her feet, marched over to Falconier, and announced, “I’m stopping the sale.”
He wheeled in alarm. “Stopping the sale!”
“Just until we can better assess the real value of the paintings. There’s just more interest here than I know how to deal with.”
“Mais
