Page 1 of Under Her Protection

1

The car pulled up at the unmarked door on the rue de Sévigné, and Vivienne Strauss stepped out without waiting for it to come to a full stop. The driver knew better than to open the door for her. She had disliked that particular ritual for thirty years and had finally stopped bothering to explain why.

Paris in November was a dim, wet city pretending at dignity. She liked it. The cold suited her. She moved across the pavement in one motion, black coat, black heels, rings on her right hand catching the streetlight for an instant before the door closed behind her and the world outside ceased to exist.

She had come from an office where a man named Delacroix had spent forty minutes explaining to her why the Eastern partnership needed another round of revision. She had let him talk. She had let him believe she was listening. She had watched his hands on the table and counted three times he touched his own wedding band when he lied, and when he was done she had asked him two questions he had not expected and one he had been frightened of, and he had left her office at a pace that suggested he would not be in it again. Tomorrow would be soon enough to decide what to do about Delacroix. Tonight was for this.

Maison Noire.

The first room inside Maison Noire was not a room so much as a decompression chamber. Darker than the street. Warmer. The scent was smoke, faint, embedded in the velvet of the walls, smoke that had built up over decades in a building where the women who paid to be here did not want to carry the boardroom home. A single low lamp. A mirror. And Colette, already there, already smiling, already moving forward.

"Madame Strauss."

"Colette."

"You are early."

"I am on time. The others are late."

Colette's smile widened a fraction. She wore soft brown cashmere tonight, and her hair was pulled up in a way that looked effortless. She took Vivienne's coat without making a production of it. Her eyes, clear and patient, flicked once over Vivienne's face.

"The private lounge," she said. "Isabella and Helena are already there. Sienna is on her way."

"And Seraphine?"

Colette's expression did not change, but her pause said enough. "Tonight, perhaps."

Vivienne inclined her head. In twelve years of membership, she had heard that answer in one form or another most evenings she asked it. Perhaps. Possibly. It is not impossible that she will be seen. Seraphine Noir moved through her own building the way a weather system moved through a valley, and one did not issue invitations to a weather system.

Vivienne crossed the main corridor, heels silent on Aubusson, and pushed through the velvet drapery at the far end. The private lounges at Maison Noire were not decorated; they were composed. Low lamps. Oil on dark panelling. One crystal decanter on one walnut table, no more. The Circle did not tolerate clutter.

Isabella Devereaux was already lounging, which was her preferred verb, on a green velvet settee with one leg tucked under her. She was in oxblood silk tonight, shoulders bare, her dark hair loose over her collarbone. She glanced up when Vivienne entered and did not pretend at surprise.

"You," Isabella said, "look like you have been running meetings until the last possible minute."

"I have."

"Your lipstick gives you away."

"My lipstick is immaculate."

"Which is how I know."

Helena Kossek was at the window, a glass of clear liquid in her hand. She turned at Vivienne's voice, ash-blonde hair swept back, grey wool suit precisely cut, her face the face of a woman who had been at a board meeting in Geneva this morning and would be at another one in Zurich tomorrow. She nodded once, the Circle nod: acknowledgment without performance.

"Vivienne."

"Helena. You are still in Paris."

"Until Thursday. The EU is being predictable."

"Of course it is."

Vivienne did not sit immediately. She took the decanter first, poured herself two fingers of the Armagnac that was always there because Seraphine had observed, at some point in the last decade, that Vivienne preferred it, and moved to the armchair that faced the door. She had sat in that chair every evening she had been in this room for twelve years. No one else would sit in it. No one told Vivienne this; the room arranged itself around her.

"How is the daughter?" she asked Helena.

Helena's mouth tightened, then softened. "She is a nightmare. She is also top of her year at the Sorbonne. Both things are true."