The Paris Seamstress

by Natasha Lester

  “You know as little about your background as Lena,” he said slowly.

  “Which might not mean anything.” She turned a little, her face silhouetted by the streetlights, the same face he’d seen walking through the door at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal, the same breath-stealing, gut-punching, groin-stirring silhouette that he hadn’t forgotten at all. The face and the body that he thought he’d found in Lena until he’d realized, after just one night with her, that she didn’t have the spirit he remembered from Paris.

  “Or it could mean everything,” he said.

  “Why are you so interested in this?” she snapped. “It has nothing to do with you. Is it for Lena? Do you love her?”

  They were the worst possible questions to have to answer. And she misread the silence.

  “She loves you but you don’t love her,” Estella surmised. “You have quite a reputation, you know. The people at Lena’s party spoke of you as if you were as easy as a child’s puzzle.”

  On any other occasion he would have laughed and shrugged. So, the whole world thought he was a womanizer. What did it matter? He was a womanizer. He was a man without a life, with a house in three countries, all of them hardly lived in, rootless, moving from one assignment to the next, living in the shadows, dealing with the kind of men she could never imagine existed. But, somehow, it mattered what she thought and she was staring at him as if she could see far inside him, to the person he used to be. As if she’d found what he’d thought was lost, leaving him, for the first time in his life, utterly discomposed.

  “I’m here because I got you into trouble in Paris,” he said. “I’m here because Lena deserves a proper family and maybe you’re it. I’m here because…” I want to do one decent thing in my life was the part he couldn’t bring himself to say.

  He stood up. “Talk to Lena,” he said abruptly. “Think of her for just one minute. Go and see her like you said you would. She needs you. She’s infamous because of Harry Thaw’s cursed legacy—and his money—which means she’s either treated like a curiosity or a momentarily diverting objet. She has no friends.” He stopped. Lena would be furious if she knew what he’d said about her, despite the fact that it was true. “You needn’t worry about me hunting you down again,” he finished brusquely. “I’m going away.” Then he left before he got involved in something that, as Estella had said, didn’t really concern him.

  For the rest of the night, Estella replayed Alex’s words in her head: I’m here because Lena deserves a proper family and maybe you’re it. Think of her for just one minute. He’d shamed her. Made her see that, whatever was happening, it wasn’t just about Estella and her feelings. It was about Lena, another human being who had feelings too. And she’d promised Lena she would go and see her, but she hadn’t. It was time.

  On her very next day off work, Estella took the subway to Gramercy Park, emerging into a foul day, rain beating down upon her head, the wind trying to tear off her coat. But even the weather couldn’t disguise the fact that it was a beautiful neighborhood, the square lined with gracious and ornate apartment buildings and townhouses. The park stood in the center, its locked gate keeping out anyone besides the residents who held keys, the black iron railings saying more about the exclusivity of the area than any number of butlers ever could.

  Lena’s townhouse crouched like an unloved child on the street, resolutely determined to hide its sadness behind its grand facade but it seeped out anyway. Estella shivered and knocked on the door.

  An older woman, thin and tall, like a Dickensian schoolmistress answered. “You must be Estella,” she said, with a warmth at odds with her spare figure. “Lena asked me to give you this.”

  It was a note that said: I don’t know if you’ll get this but I’ve had to go away for a while. I hope you’ll see me when I return. You can still use the townhouse for the showing. My housekeeper, Mrs. Pardy, will help you with anything you need. Lena.

  Estella crumpled the note in her fist. Alex had said he was going away. Now Lena had too. Most likely for a lovers’ rendezvous, leaving her with all the questions and none of the answers. Which she knew wasn’t entirely fair. Lena had asked her to come before the New Year. But she hadn’t.

  “Come in,” the woman who must be Mrs. Pardy said. “I’ll get tea and cake for us.”

  “Thank you,” Estella said.

  She followed Mrs. Pardy down the hall, marveling at the way tasteful furniture, and walls lined with modern art—spanning Frida Kahlo’s exuberant use of color to the mind-bending trickery of Magritte—could transform the house she’d known in Paris as cold, neglected, even cursed, into something quite breathtaking. The entry void was magnificent, rising up to draw the eye to the inlaid and painted wooden ceiling. The furniture was Art Deco, sleek, polished metal, wood, and stone, the lines softened by the paintings and the use of luxurious fabrics for the drapes and sofas. Lena, she had to admit, had excellent taste.

  Mrs. Pardy threw open the doors to a cozy room that, in the Marais house, had felt compressed by spiderwebs and disrepair. She invited Estella to sit, disappeared and emerged a few minutes later with a plate of pastries so similar to the ones Estella used to buy to go with her morning coffee that she almost felt as if she was back in Paris.

  “This is delicious,” she said, picking pastry crumbs off her dress and smiling at Mrs. Pardy.

  “Lena said you were French and I’ve always loved working with pastry.”

  Estella put down her plate. Lena had thought to tell her housekeeper about Estella. She was as complicated and twisty as Alex, like a hedged maze in a French château: lovely to look at but terrifyingly complicated once inside. “That was kind of her,” she said. “How long have you worked for her?” A nosy question, she knew.

  “Four years. Ever since Lena turned nineteen and took this house as her own. There’s nowhere I’d rather work. You’d have to search high and low for a mistress as good as Miss Thaw.”

  “Really?” said Estella, unable to keep the surprise from her voice.

  “Of course. She might be quiet on the outside but I prefer to think of her as restrained. Not like other ladies of money who can’t wait to spread it all around like butter.”

  “Yes.” Estella nodded. “She is restrained. It’s very good of her to let me use the house. Are you sure she won’t mind?”

  “She’d be most upset if you didn’t. She gave me strict instructions that I was to pay you a visit if you didn’t come by the end of the month. Shall I show you around?”

  Estella wolfed down the last of her pastry and stood up.

  “She suggested the models use this parlor for changing their outfits,” said Mrs. Pardy, gesturing to the room they were in. “Then they can walk down the hall to the front sitting room which looks over the park. It’s a lovely room.”

  A lovely room. It was a gross understatement. Mrs. Pardy opened a door and Estella stepped into the loveliest room she had ever seen. Sure, she’d grown up in a two-room apartment on the top floor of a rundown building in a rundown part of Paris, where there was no running water and a shared toilet on the landing, so her points of comparison weren’t strong. But she’d also been in hotel rooms in the Ritz to hand over sketches to American buyers and those rooms had been wonderful. As was this one, with a view of the park that made it feel like a glasshouse, a row of windows looking out over lawn and leaf and shrub.

  Over the fireplace hung another Frida Kahlo portrait, or rather a double portrait: two Frida Kahlos sat in chairs, their hearts exposed. From each heart ran a thread of vein joining one woman to the other. Estella couldn’t help but study it, wondering what it meant. Did Lena know that Estella had existed prior to their meeting or was it some force of sheer coincidence that had caused her to buy a painting of two identical women joined by the most tenuous, but also the most sacred of bonds: blood.

  “That picture gives me the willies,” Mrs. Pardy admitted. “Can’t bear to see their hearts sitting on top of their dresses like that, for all the world to see.�
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  “It makes them fragile,” Estella said.

  “It makes them macabre.”

  Estella forced her eyes away from the picture. “The room is perfect.”

  “That’s settled then. Miss Thaw left a list of people she thought should be invited. I’ll arrange to have invitations posted to them when you’re ready.”

  “Thank you.” Estella felt horribly guilty for the way she’d delayed meeting Lena again. Lena had thought about which rooms Estella should use, had left her a list of names. But why had Lena run off?

  “It’s my pleasure.” Mrs. Pardy beamed. “I like the house to have people in it. I’ll prepare some tasty treats for everyone to nibble on. We want them to be well fed and happy so they’ll buy lots of dresses.”

  “That would be wonderful,” Estella said, laughing. “I feel almost too lucky to have this.”

  “Nonsense, my dear. The skill and ability to put together a collection of dresses doesn’t come without hard work. Why don’t we meet each week in the lead-up to the showing? Then you’ll be assured that everything’s going smoothly. Now, before I forget, Miss Thaw wanted you to see this.”

  Mrs. Pardy led the way upstairs to what Estella imagined was meant to be a bedroom. It was empty, save for a long table that Estella recognized as the twin of the kitchen table in the house in the Marais. The one before her now had an antique air about it whereas the one in the Marais had only the neglect of age visible in its surface. A piano—a Bösendorfer, the same as the one in an upstairs room in the house on the Rue de Sévigné—stood beneath a cathedral window that looked over the park, where bare tree branches waved to Estella, welcoming her.

  “Miss Thaw said you could work here if you wanted to,” Mrs. Pardy said. “That you’d have more room than you do at present.”

  “It’s far too much,” Estella protested.

  “The house will be empty for three months or so. There’ll be no one here besides me. I’d like the company. It’s a house that doesn’t do well when left alone. It becomes…” Mrs. Pardy hesitated. “It starts to feel bedeviled.” She smiled a little. “Listen to me. Being a fool.”

  “No. I understand exactly.” It was how the house in the Marais had always felt to Estella, as if it had, once upon a time, been a happy place. That happiness sometimes leaked out of its walls, making its neglect all the more haunting. As if it was trying to recover a time in the past that had been long forgotten. “What I don’t understand is why Lena’s being so generous.”

  Mrs. Pardy smiled. “People don’t think it because she’s so reserved but Miss Thaw is one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. And there can be no doubt that you two are related in some way. I’ve never seen two people so alike. Miss Thaw has no real family. Perhaps it’s her way of welcoming you in, of saying that she’d like to know more about you.”

  As Alex had forced her to, Estella again saw the situation from Lena’s point of view. Growing up without any parents, with a guardian who was, from Alex’s account, notorious and dangerous, couldn’t have been easy. How would you become anything other than reserved if you’d known so little love? Estella felt her heart contract with remorse; she’d been so abrupt, rude almost, to Lena and here was Lena offering her a work space, giving her everything she wanted when Estella hadn’t offered anything more than suspicion.

  “If you’re in contact with her,” Estella said, “please tell her thank you very much. That I’ll repay her in dresses.”

  “She’d love that.”

  “She’s away for a few months, you said? That’ll give me plenty of time to make some things for her.”

  Mrs. Pardy nodded. “Yes. A pity; I thought she’d found a man who interested her. Seems I was wrong.”

  “She’s not gone with Alex?”

  “No, she’s not gone with Mr. Montrose.” Mrs. Pardy sighed. “Shame about that. I think if she could just fall in love…” She stopped. “Well, falling in love is a good thing for anyone, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose it is,” Estella said.

  As she left the house, with a box of pastries in hand, forced on her by Mrs. Pardy, she reflected that she was the wrong person to ask such a question of. Her mother, as far as she knew, had never been in love with anyone. Estella had slept with two men in Paris, neither of whom she loved, and had only done so in an attempt to assuage her latent curiosity about this emotion that had been documented in so many books, in movies, in art, everywhere. She might have been almost torpedoed by a German U-boat, might have witnessed the poor and the starving and the desperate flooding out of Paris and away from a sinister enemy, might have somehow helped an Allied spy smuggle maps out of Paris, but she’d never been in love. And she mightn’t ever be, not now. She had no time for love. She had a show to get off the ground.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Alex couldn’t get out of London fast enough, despite his superiors’ protestations that he stay out of the field, that he was more good to them alive in an office than dead in France. “Depends on your definition of alive,” he said, before being dropped by a Lysander into a field in France.

  This is it, he thought, as he pulled the ripcord and his parachute only half-inflated. Flying, in a way no man was ever meant to fly, through the sky and down to the ground.

  Luckily his welcome crew were there. Luckily the farmer had made a fresh haystack that morning. Luckily, he landed in it. But he didn’t know any of that until much later. Months later, when he’d recovered from being knocked senseless and breaking his arm and his leg, when he emerged from the Seamen’s Mission in Marseille, a rallying point for resisters, to discover that the war hadn’t ended, that it was raging as brutally as ever.

  He finally got to Paris, via Toulouse, and made his delivery to Estella’s mother. Not that he took it himself; he asked another of his operatives, Peter, to take it for him to the mailbox, just one of many scattered throughout France. He knew he couldn’t risk getting any nearer to the mother of a woman he couldn’t shake from his mind. He didn’t want to do anything to put her in more danger.

  The parcel contained three things. First, a letter from him, unsigned, imploring Jeanne Bissette not to continue in Monsieur Aumont’s footsteps, not to use her apartment as a safe house for downed airmen because he knew her daughter would be furious if she found out her mother had put herself in any kind of jeopardy, and that Alex had known about it. He expected though, if Jeanne Bissette was anything like her daughter, she’d burn the letter and ignore him.

  The second item was a stack of German money, enough to buy liquor on the black market to keep the concierge in the building drunk enough that, if Jeanne continued to help the Allies, she could at least do so knowing the concierge would be too sozzled to notice. The third was a letter from Estella to her mother that he’d purloined, knowing it would never get to Paris via regular mail. He wished he could wait for a response but that would be one risk too many.

  All through France’s length, from Paris to Lyon to Marseilles to Perpignan, he delivered similar parcels—money, cigarettes—to the passeurs and couriers. They were all women, like Jeanne Bissette, women who held together the resistance movement in France, which nobody would suspect, but that was their great strength. It was up to him to make sure that everyone who risked their lives had the means to do so. But Estella’s mother was the only person to whom he delivered letters from a daughter.

  The Gramercy Park workroom was paradisiacal. So much light came through the windows in the early mornings as Estella sat at the big old table—it had become her workbench—for a couple of hours before going to work at André Studios. She sewed the pieces that Sam had cut the night before, making the most of the sun and the quiet, feeling warm, safe, almost as if she were in a trance, as if she somehow belonged in the room, as if the room was cheering her on. She even spoke to it aloud at times, holding up a finished dress and saying, “What do you think?” If she strained her ears, she could just hear a rustle of approval from the drapes, could swear the Tiffany pendan
t lights glowed a little brighter, that the windows curved outward into a smile.

  In the evenings after work, she and Sam would go to Gramercy Park and Mrs. Pardy would bring them delicious food, stopping to eat with them sometimes, and Janie would join them before she went out with Nate. It was a time of joy, she and Sam laughing over creations that didn’t quite work out the way she’d hoped, and never getting discouraged because Sam would just say, in the gentle way he had, “Try again. It’ll work next time.”

  And if it didn’t quite work the next time, then it might work out the time after. He was an expert cutter and she said to him, late one night after they’d been working solidly for six weeks, “How is it possible that, of all the men on the ship, I happened to stand on the deck and smoke cigarettes with the one who could help me the most?”

  He smiled and put down his scissors. “I don’t know if ‘happened’ is quite the right word. I’d seen you on the ship and thought you were probably the most striking woman aboard. I figured if I was going to be sailing across the Atlantic for two weeks, it’d be best to do it in the company of someone like you.”

  Estella laughed. “Were you planning to seduce me before the U-boat interfered?”

  “No. I just wanted to talk to you. To see if you could possibly be as beautiful as you looked from far away.”

  Estella found herself blushing. “Don’t,” she said, unsure where the conversation was going. She and Sam were uncomplicated friends and that made everything so much easier. She could be in a room alone with him at midnight and there were no expectations. She could accept that he was giving up so much of his time to work with her simply because he enjoyed it; she didn’t need to be fearful that he wanted something in return.

  “But then I realized what a slave driver you were and now I don’t see anything in your face other than a woman passing me design after design, along with rolls of fabric, and telling me to ‘cut this as fast as you can!’” he joked and the mood shifted back to one Estella felt more comfortable with.