“If it is divided-”

“Oh, it is.”

“If it is, then it is largely due to you.”

“As I say, you both flatter and overestimate.”

“That is not what the people I’ve talked to say.”

“People on the Council? Who?”

Mrs Mulverhill remained silent. There was a pause while Madame d’Ortolan – who had taken the call on the house phone, on an extension with a long lead – twirled the extension cord round her longest finger. After a few moments, a sigh sounded down the phone line and Mrs Mulverhill said, “So, what is the thinking on this matter?”

“The thinking?” Madame d’Ortolan asked innocently.

“What do you intend to do?” Mrs Mulverhill said, voice suddenly sharp.

“I think that matters need to be resolved.”

There was a silence, then: “I hope that is not settled. It would be the incorrect decision.”

“Is that what you think?”

“It is.”

“What a pity we did not have the benefit of your opinion earlier, before the decision was made.”

“Theodora,” Mrs Mulverhill said crisply, “don’t pretend that you’d have taken any notice of anything I’d have said.”

“And yet you have chosen to call me now, my darling, and I presume you are only doing so in an attempt to influence that very decision, after it has been made. Are you not?”

A shorter silence, then: “I would appeal to your sense of pragmatism.”

“Not morality? Decency? Justice?”

Mrs Mulverhill laughed delicately. “You are a card, Theodora.”

“Yes, I like to think of myself as the queen of spades.”

“I have heard something to that effect.”

“And what do you think you might be? The joker, perhaps?”

“I could not care less.”

“I’d imagine something like… the two of clubs, yes?”

“Theodora, enough of this. I am asking you to reconsider.”

“Very well; the three.”

A silence Madame d’Ortolan would have termed “tight” reigned for a moment. It sounded subsequently as though Mrs Mulverhill might be speaking through clenched teeth. “I am attempting to be serious, Theodora.”

“They do say the struggle against adversity is highly character-forming.”

“Theodora!” Mrs Mulverhill first raised her voice, then dropped it. “Theodora. I am asking you: please do not do this.”

“Do what?”

“Whatever decisive, divisive step it is you intend to take. It would be a mistake.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Madame d’Ortolan was losing patience. She sat forward in her cane chair, flicking free the twisted phone cord from her left hand. “Alors, my sweet, my pretty! What do you really care about the fate of people you’ve already turned your back on? People you oppose by opposing the Council. What are they to you? A couple of mealy-mouthed, grinning half-castes and a lesbian Negress?” A thought struck her and she beamed. “Unless she excites you, of course, our crepuscular friend; so well camouflaged, in the dark. One would hardly know she was in one’s bed of a night, would one? Well, until she smiled, at any rate. Don’t tell me; you’re a secret admirer. Has one put one’s finger on something?”

Another telling silence, then: “You old, racist bitch.”

And then she put the phone down! Just like that! The nerve of the woman!

Madame d’Ortolan was unsure who had come out best from the exchange. For most if not all the way through she had felt that she was having the best of it, but then the Mulverhill woman had been the one to hang up on her, which counted for something. Most vexing. And to be called a racist! Not for the first time, she wondered what Mrs Mulverhill herself might have to hide in that regard. She habitually wore a veil; Madame d’Ortolan had always assumed this was mere affectation, but perhaps the lady wished to conceal some angle from which she looked less than racially pure, when the race concerned was human. Who knew?

But still, to call her a racist. When it was meant as an insult. And, worse, “old!”

And now she had to meet that objectionable and seemingly unkillable little man Oh, or whatever he was called for now (at least they were meeting elsewhere and she didn’t have to suffer his presence in the house; he never looked clean). And meet him not a moment too soon, if the Mulverhill woman had heard rumours already. Madame d’Ortolan smiled to herself. “Divide” the Council? Was that the best, or the worst, that she’d heard?

“I’ll show you divide,” she muttered to no one present.

She shooed the white cat called M. Pamplemousse from her lap and rose, smoothing her cream skirt. Madame d’Ortolan favoured her various cats according to the colour of the clothes she was wearing at any particular time. Had she been wearing dark grey or black, the black-haired cat called Mme Frenolle would have been the one allowed to warm itself on her lap. Though perhaps not for much longer; recently Mme Frenolle, who was eight years old now, had started to produce white hairs amongst the black, which was most annoying. Depending on how well she behaved over the next week or two, Mme Frenolle would either have to suffer regular visits to the Maison Chat to have her white hairs plucked or dyed, or be put down.

Madame d’Ortolan was, she liked to think, of elegant middle age, though to the casual observer this might imply that she expected to live to be about one hundred and twenty. Of course, being who and what she was, this was would have been a perfectly reasonable expectation on her part, had the truth not been much more complicated.

She used the house intercom. “Mr Kleist, if you would.”

The gentleman himself arrived a minute or so later, a pale, slightly hunched, somehow dowdy figure despite being, to all appearances, quite smartly dressed in a conservatively cut grey three-piece suit. He looked to be about the same age as his employer, though the same dispassionate observer called upon to judge the lady’s looks might have taken a second glance at him and decided he was really a decade or more her junior, just worn-looking. He came to her side, blinking in the orangery’s hazy sunlight.

“Madame.”

“Mrs Mulverhill,” she told him, “is rapidly approaching the stage where she will know what I intend to do shortly before I do myself.”

Mr Kleist sighed. “We continue to search for her, ma’am, and to look for her informants.”

“I’m sure we do. However, we must start to act.” She looked up at him. Mr Kleist could contrive to look only half-glimpsed in the brightest sunlight. He carried his own shadows about with him, she was sure. “I am seeing Mr Oh today,” she told him, “for what I have now decided ought to be the last time. I think we set him on his way as fully wound as possible. You catch my drift?”

“Yes, I do, ma’am.”

“And we take all further steps to make sure his work is carried on after whatever point he is no longer able to do it.”

“I’ll have the draft orders finalised.”

“I shall leave in ten minutes.”

“That’ll be sufficient, ma’am.”

“Thank you, Mr Kleist.” She smiled at him. “That will be all.”

For some moments after Mr Kleist had turned and gone, Madame d’Ortolan sat where she was, staring at nothing and tapping her long pink nails against each other with a hollow, clacking sound. The cat M. Pamplemousse jumped back onto her lap, startling her. She threw him off immediately, hissing.

She called for her car, left the orangery, freshened up in her downstairs boudoir, collected the orders for the objectionable Mr Oh from the efficient Mr Kleist as she walked down the hallway and then allowed the second most attractive of her Egyptian footmen to place her jacket over her shoulders before she walked out to the car and instructed Christophe to take her to the Café Atlantique.

The car swivelled on the ribbon of gravel looped in front of the tall town house and exited to the Boulevard Haussmann as the ornate black gates swung silently closed.