The Painted Girls

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  “It isn’t that,” she said. “I just wish I was as kind as you.”

  The last two days Monsieur Mérante has not shouted, calling me “you” or “you with the teeth,” and Madame Dominique has not said how a dozen girls know what I do not. And now, with Madame Daram’s fit, I am free to go to the Court of Assizes, to squeeze myself into the gallery and watch the last moments of the trial of Émile Abadie and Michel Knobloch for the murder of the widow Joubert.

  And this is what I think: Madame Daram’s shrieking, it was no accident. Her nerves were plucked taut by the hand of Fate, laying at my feet the chance to make things right with Antoinette. Before the boys are on the pavements calling out the news, I will arrive at Saint-Lazare and tell the greeting sisters I have come straight from the court with word of the trial. With the worn-out scrap of newspaper brought by Maman, my treachery was already shrunk. And soon, a verdict of innocent will shrink it even more. Antoinette will nod yes to sitting across the iron bars from me.

  I blink away, getting used to the lesser light inside the court, when who should come into view but Monsieur Degas, sitting in the first row of the benches on the jury side. I am stumped for a second, until my eyes fall upon the notebook opened up on his knees, no different from when he is in the practice room or the stage wings. Beside him, a woman with a plumed hat is making a show of brushing charcoal dust from her skirt. But his attention is on the prisoners’ box, on the watchful faces of Émile Abadie and Michel Knobloch. Monsieur Degas leans forward, and even if my view is of the back of his head, I know behind his blue spectacles his eyes pull tight, seeking the story he is putting down in charcoal lines.

  After a while of standing in the gallery of the court, struggling to follow a story already mostly told, I suck in my bottom lip. In summing up the trial, the presiding judge started with the findings showing the innocence of Émile Abadie and Michel Knobloch, including listing the many ways the details of his confession do not mesh with the known facts, and it seems he has shifted over to saying he made the whole business up, just like Antoinette said. The men of the jury nodded along. But they keep up the nodding now, as the presiding judge reminds them about the sack of hammers found in the storage shed that once served as the lair of Émile Abadie and how Chief Inspector Monsieur Macé proved there was ample time for the murder between the third and seventh tableaux of L’Assommoir. The jurors, their chins bob up and down, even as he finishes up his long speech, saying, “Members of the jury, you will have to choose between two Knoblochs; the one who confessed and the one in court, who denies. I need to remind you that he confessed in front of the widow Joubert’s sons, even his own sobbing mother as she begged him to tell the truth, that always, he answered, ‘Alas, Maman, alas, I am guilty.’!”

  The men of the jury leave, and suddenly, like a clap of thunder, the courtroom boils with the views of the one-eyed butcher behind me, the hacking mason beside him, the plump matron next in line. I strain, gathering snatches, keeping a count.

  “An acquittal.”

  “No doubt.”

  “Take his head. It isn’t worth the expense to get him to New Caledonia.”

  “Stupid as they come. But I say he’s going to get his dream.”

  “Knobloch opens up his trap and every time a new lie.”

  “He isn’t going to get the guillotine for lying.”

  “They’ll have his head just for tying up the court.”

  “Those boys, they did the bludgeoning, all right.”

  “Brutes, the both of them. The jury only has to look.”

  The jurors return, take up their seats, arms grimly folded, faces stern. The head juror gets to his feet, looks at the paper gripped in his hands, clears his throat. “We, the jury,” he says, “find defendants Émile Abadie and Michel Knobloch guilty as charged in the widow Joubert murder.”

  I clamp down hard on my lip and grip my hands together, as the judges file from the court to deliberate the sentencing. My knuckles turn white, ache, and I grip harder, fearing those judges coming back, the news they will bring. Antoinette said Michel Knobloch is a known liar, and I saw the tiny x, the proof that he lied in naming Émile Abadie as his accomplice. The odds are stacked that his entire confession was a tale made up with a dream of New Caledonia on his mind. Yes, I have cast further shame on Émile Abadie, but a thousand times worse, on account of me that lying boy could get the guillotine.

  Upon their return the presiding judge stands up, an emperor in his great red robe. With a scowl that looks like he has been sucking a lemon wedge, he says how Émile Abadie was sentenced to the harshest extent of the law in the Elisabeth Bazengeaud murder and so is prevented from suffering further chastisement for his previously committed murder of the widow Joubert. “As such,” he says, “the court, as penalty, can only order Émile Abadie to pay court costs.” The gallery breaks into hissing and stamping feet. Not me. I stand quiet and still as a scared cat. The presiding judge, he just watches, his thumb stroking the fur trim of his robe. When finally the court falls to quiet, he opens his mouth. “The court condemns Michel Knobloch to death by guillotine.”

  Michel Knobloch lied when he pointed a finger at Émile Abadie. Add this one last bit of proof to all those lies already listed by the presiding judge, and the only possibility is that the entire confession was made up. Michel Knobloch is just as innocent in the murder of the widow Joubert as Émile Abadie. My hand goes to my throat, and I make the two or three steps to the closest wall. I slide down the wainscot, end up curled in a hard knot with a ridge of molding digging into my back. The opinions, said earlier in the gallery, there were as many calling for an acquittal as the guillotine. A tiny x? A lowly ballet girl of the second set of the quadrille? A grain of rice? Was any of it enough to tip the scales? I put my face in my hands, feel the clamminess of the palms on my cheeks.

  Around me there are the sounds of the courtroom emptying out, first the rustling skirts and clacking walking sticks of the ladies and gentlemen ranking a bench up front, afterward the flapping shoe soles and shuffling feet of those standing in the gallery, knowing it is their place to wait. Then a hand touches my shoulder, and I look up to see Monsieur Degas’s blue spectacles, the muddle of his beard. “Mademoiselle van Goethem,” he says, shifting his hand from my shoulder to his frock coat pocket. “The statuette, I’ll be showing it at our sixth exposition in a week’s time.”

  I dip my chin, wipe at my eyes. There were broadsheets pasted up all over Paris again this year. I stopped dead on seeing the first, wondering, scolding myself for sniffing around a trap I already knew; but still, I had hoped, just a little, the tiniest bit. If Monsieur Degas put the statuette out for everyone to see—Monsieur Lefebvre and Monsieur Pluque and Monsieur Mérante and Monsieur Vaucorbeil—was there a chance they would overlook the wax, the hair, the skirt, the slippers on my feet? Wouldn’t they think nicely about a girl singled out?

  “You’re not crying, not over those ruffians?” Monsieur Degas says, now that I am looking him in the face. “I bought my newspapers from the widow Joubert.”

  I want to tell how the men of the jury with their scrunched-up brows and stroked beards and the others with their red robes, how they see a stone in the gutter same as he does, no different from me. No one can make out the flecks of dark, the quartz vein, not from standing tall, not without knowing to look. It was wrong to think the high-mindedness of a man gave him a special lens, one to make clear a little scratch he does not even know is there. I should say about the tiny x, about Émile Abadie having an alibi in Antoinette, about Michel Knobloch’s confession being a lie, about the court’s mistake. But I do not, not even with a boy sentenced to the guillotine. No. Proving my wickedness, I only say, “Michel Knobloch said he made everything up.”

  “Both are beasts. Their physiognomies tell us.”

  I nudge up a shoulder because what is physiognomies?

  “The facial features spelling out the character of a man,” he says.

  He means the features on
Cesare Lombroso’s list, the ones his born criminals have in common with the savages that turned into the human race.

  “Those two murderers are marked,” he says.

  “By looking like apes.” My fingers go to my own brow, drop to my jaw. I have peered into the looking glass above Papa’s sideboard and seen the beast staring back. I have seen it in the lowness of the forehead no amount of cut bangs can hide, in my protruding jaw, its sturdiness matching the muzzle of those brawny dogs with the pushed-in noses and wrinkled-up mugs. A match struck, flame caught the edge of a calendar page, and I made true the prophecy told by my face the day I was born.

  Monsieur Degas’s lips press tight, and then his eyebrows pull together, the ends closest to his nose lifting up. He holds a finger up to his lips, taps, lets his hand drop to his side. “Sabine will be expecting me,” he says, but he stays put, his pulled-close eyebrows holding still.

  At first tenderness is what I see. But tenderness comes with the shadow of a smile and there is none. No, it is pity upon his face. My forehead drops back onto my knees, and I listen to his retreating footsteps, growing quiet, then quieter still. Gone.

  After a while there are more footsteps, uneven and approaching this time. I look up to see a charwoman with a kerchief upon her head and a mop in one hand, a bucket set down by my feet. “You got to go,” she says, and then when I stay crouched, “I got the cleaning up to do.”

  “When will the boy go to the guillotine?”

  “What boy?” She scratches at her kerchief, using the hand holding the mop, which means water dripping onto the floor.

  “Knobloch. The one who made the confession up?”

  “Don’t know about that.” She bumps the wooden stick of the mop against my knee and makes a little upward nudge with her chin, and so I get onto my feet.

  Outside I find a stoop, dark, out of the way. I sit my backside down on the cut stone, grip my shawl, pulling it tight around my shoulders. After a while of peering into daylight fading from brash to soft, I switch to looking at my hands, and in the low light I see it there, red dried to black, lodged in the wrinkles of my fingers, the beds of my nails.

  Antoinette’s spit words come: “Upon your hands, the blood of an innocent.”

  I push myself up from the cut stone, point myself in the direction of the Pont Neuf, leading to the rue de Douai, instead of the Pont au Change, leading to Antoinette. Still, there is Maman’s small bottle, waiting, beneath her mattress.

  What I want is the sleep of the dead.

  Antoinette

  The last day of March, I wait for the Superioress on the same old hard bench I sat on a dozen times before. The bones of my rump dig in, bearing the weight of slumped shoulders, the tired head propped up by my hand. I been tossing and turning and staring into blackness through the night ever since Colette showed up with the watch of the woman Bazengeaud strung from her neck. For six days my eyes were red and swollen and weeping misery, and the skin of my nose was glistening raw from being blown a thousand times. But since yesterday not a single tear more. The bawling is done.

  Even before Colette fled from the visitors’ parlor, I put my hands over my ears, scrunched closed my eyes, tucked my chin tight against my chest. But it did not stop the ambush, not in the least. The money Émile was not saving up was going to Colette. He gave her the watch. The promise of being his one and only was nothing but a lie. It don’t make me proud, these being the first of my thoughts, knowing there passed at least a full minute before my mind went to the woman Bazengeaud. A lady’s watch was not something she gave her lover as a gift. It was not a blackmail payment made to Émile. No, he told me the threat failed. It was something he snatched, along with the eighteen francs that went missing upon her death. He took part in slitting the throat of the tavern owner and then in the thieving. My arms wrapped my gut. I leaned forward, folding myself in half. “Stop,” I said. “Just stop.”

  I remember rocking, clenching, every muscle pulling in tight. I wanted to grow smaller, to become a tiny crumb—a fading, shrinking speck. I craved blackness, like I never craved anything before, and I wondered if it was the kind of praying reached the ears of God. But, no, God does not care. What He put into my mind was the small house by the sea, the roof of thatch, the garden, the sunshine raining down, and it was what I clung to for six days, a dream I could make true. I lay there facedown on my little bed, not bothered in the least that Mole was standing over me.

  “I’ll tell the Superioress if you don’t get up.”

  The Superioress came five days in a row.

  “Get up.”

  “Get up now, or no recreation hour for a week.”

  “No evening meal for you unless you go to the refectory.”

  “You’re due in the sewing workshop. The girls miss you there.” She put her hand on my shoulder, and I shrugged it away.

  “On your knees. I’ve had enough.”

  I did not go to the refectory, and at first I was hungry. Always the evening meal was brought to me, but never once did I pick up a spoon, and after four days the hunger went away. I got up to use the chamber pot and felt my legs shaking and shaking more the next day. I took a glass of water twice, because the Superioress said Father Renault was coming if I did not, and, I suppose, I did not really want to die and she knew to give me an excuse for taking a glass.

  I bashed my wrists against the iron frame of that bed until they were swollen purple and red. All the while I racked my brain, sifting through scheme upon scheme that could make the dream of a small house by the sea true: Pierre Gille put the watch into the hands of Colette. The watch only resembled that of the woman Bazengeaud. I dreamt the visit, the words payment from him.

  But yesterday I found myself parched of tears. I blinked my lids open over dry, stinging eyes, and I knew never was I anything other than a mattress to that boy. And no amount of wishing, no amount of telling myself a different story of Émile and Antoinette, changed a single fact. The house by the sea was a dream, a dream I spun myself. It was nothing more. Same for getting adored. And having eyes like chocolate pools. And enchanting a boy putting mussels with parsley sauce into my mouth.

  I thought about Marie. That first time Émile came to our lodging room, she saw what he was. “There goes a beast,” she said after he was gone, and the next morning she was clutching a package wrapped in brown paper behind her back. It took a lot of nerve, a lot of love, knocking on the door of Madame Lambert, coming away with the advice about the vinegar, especially for a girl so skittish as Marie. She was firm in what she knew, in what I refused to believe. I pushed her onto the floor and screamed, “Don’t you call him a murderer,” and she screamed, “Murderer!” and I slapped her face. She tried reasoning after that, saying how Émile was the lover of the woman Bazengeaud, how the found knife was proof, how the blood-spattered shirt fit only him, how his stepfather said he was no good, how he held a knife up to his own mother for refusing a soused boy a glass of wine. But I stuffed my ears with woolen batting and covered them with my hands. “The missing watch has yet to turn up,” she said. “Émile ever show you a fancy lady’s watch?” I have come to think now that I saw that watch another time, long ago, catching the flickering light of a lamp, hanging from the neck of Colette. But I let myself forget. Marie heard me sorrowful in the stairwell, she said, those rows about a dead dog, about standing idle when Pierre Gille slapped my face, about the money he was not saving up. She said he put a darkness under my eyes. I pretended it was not true.

  And then she said there was no calendar in the gap behind the chimneypiece, the only lie I ever knew the girl to tell. I was on my knees begging, and in that black moment, I turned my sister into the liar she never was before. She would not bring the calendar to Monsieur Danet, not when I filled my ears with woolen batting, forgot, pretended the truth was not true. It was like asking her to open up a door so I could step through to the ruined life she knew to be lurking on the other side. But in refusing me, did she step through the door herself? It
is what I fear, what I don’t know, what I fear worse than ever since Charlotte turned up in the visitors’ parlor, twisting the fringe of her shawl.

  “I know I should’ve come before,” she said. “I don’t have an excuse except that I’m only ten and just figuring out about being nice.”

  “It’s a good excuse, pet.”

  She looked up, her eyes wide as saucers, taking in the iron grate, the jailers, my dull gown. “You’re coming home soon?” Her pretty brow was crimped with lines.

  “Three weeks.” She let out a happy sigh, and a little river of relief swelled through me that I would not ever be saying to her about New Caledonia.

  “Marie said you were never coming back, and I said it wasn’t true and it made her bawl.” Small shoulders drift up. “I don’t know about Marie.”

  “What is it you don’t know?”

  She leaned in close to the iron grate, like whispering would make the telling not so bad. “She got picked for the dancing in the Le Tribut de Zamora, and she doesn’t even care.”

  The Superioress is slow settling into her chair, fingering her crucifix, fiddling with the wimple already hanging perfectly straight. It is what she does, giving herself time for eyes to scuttle, for words to find her mouth. “My dear,” she says, leaning forward, reaching out across the desk to my hands gripped together atop the oak. “Such sorrow on a young face?”

  My head tilts forward a further inch, and the Superioress, her jowly cheek is almost upon the desktop as she peers up into my red eyes, their haloes of blue grey. “Antoinette,” she says, petting the knot of my fingers, “tell me why you have come.”

  I lift up my face, keep my voice meek. “I want news of the trial of Émile Abadie and Michel Knobloch.”

  “Ah.” She pulls back to sitting straight.