City of Light (City of Mystery) by Kim Wright

forever, since the fumbling days of childhood, and her business with him
was of a totally different sort.  
    Anyone clever with
mathematics would see the problem immediately.  For a woman who began her
romantic life at sixteen, six and eight and three and one adds up to somewhat more
than Isabel’s current age of thirty-one.
    Yes, regrettably
there had been a bit of overlap between the affairs and this had at times proven
painful for both Isabel and the gentlemen in question.  Others might blame her
for this pain and even for the familial and marital upheavals which so often
accompanied her arrival in a man’s life, but Isabel did not blame herself.  She
knew she had been dealt a most unusual and very tricky hand to play.  Beautiful
and smart.   A woman should be one or the other, not both, or else she is in an
impossible situation – attractive enough to draw men, but shrewd enough to see
through them.  Once a woman realizes the frailties of men, her life can quickly
assume a nightmarish quality.  It’s as if she is being given a series of gaily
wrapped presents, and yet she opens them only to find each one empty, until the
floor around her feet is littered with piles of tissue and  abandoned boxes. 
    Isabel had traveled
a great distance.  Not just Manchester to Paris, obscurity to prominence, ignorance
to sophistication, or poverty to wealth, although these transitions, and many
others, were all certainly made along the way.  She often bemused herself with
the fantasy that she would someday return to the town of her birth.  She would
walk the streets in her finest clothes and wait to be recognized.  She
suspected it would take some time.  Manchester was a small town, but yet her
transformation has been so profound that she knew she may have to walk its
streets many times before the citizens would recall her name.  All those
spot-faced boys who’d thrown mud at her and sometimes worse, the ones that called
her The Princess for merely daring to be different, for wanting more out of
life than the men of Manchester could offer.  Her childhood tormenters would be
old now.  Worn down by too many children to feed and life in the mill.  They
might not know her at once but then, when understanding finally dawned…they
would see a woman resurrected. They would grab at the hem of her gown and beg
for healing.  They would reach to her like the lepers who tried to touch Jesus.
    Isabel looked
different, she knew.  Sounded different. Moved differently and carried fans and
furs and ivory-handled parasols, all the talismans of her new life.  But,
despite the trappings of change, her real journey had been an interior one.  For
the past fifteen years, Isabel had been her own artwork, her own invention, her
own opus.  She had created herself out of nothing, and this had taken a
tremendous amount of energy.
    The men she would be
meeting at the tower… They were not the sort with whom she would normally
trifle. The reporter, that boy, the kind of man who would still be called a boy
when he turned fifty.  And the other, the detective.  She had noticed his
solitude at the café Sunday last.   She had known who he was, of course, since
Armand made such a fuss about gathering information on people, especially people
who might prove useful at some point in the future.  Especially those who’d come
from London, who might carry gossip and rumors about their heads like lice. 
    She had been
instructed to spy on him and, as Armand so charmingly put it “to find the dirt.” 
Armand believed there was always dirt.  But it had been the detective’s
palpable solitude that Isabel had first noted. Perhaps she had even dreamed
about him afterward. She did that frequently - dreamed of men she had only seen
in passing.
    It occurred to
Isabel, as she dressed in the shadows of early morning, that she herself might
have been for the first time in her life genuinely lonely as well.   For it was
not only curiosity about the