The Paris Seamstress

by Natasha Lester

  Estella felt Lena’s body shake. She let Lena go, offering a smile, which Lena returned, the tears in her eyes matching Estella’s. We are the same, Estella thought now. We both want this bond forged by blood to become something more, adamantine, lasting beyond forever, adding an unexpected brilliance to our lives.

  It was half an hour until curfew. Plenty of time to get to her mother’s house. Indeed, the streets were still busy with prostitutes, and with German soldiers soliciting. Estella felt ill that Paris, her city, was given over to this kind of filthy commerce but she’d never had to survive on only her wits and who knew what she might do in order to stay alive? What Lena had done? She shivered.

  As she walked, the warm air on her skin felt almost scalding. All her senses were heightened, raw, and she didn’t know if it was because of the war, because of Alex or because of Lena. Or if it was because she was about to see her mother for the first time in so long.

  At the familiar door, Estella rested her palm on the wood, then jumped back as it opened. Monsieur Montpelier, the slithering concierge, flashed his teeth. “Bonsoir,” he muttered and Estella noted that he hadn’t lost weight, that he didn’t look hungry, that somebody was keeping him well fed and watered.

  Collaborator. Huette’s accusation, directed at the similarly well-nourished Parisians they’d seen earlier in the night, sprang to Estella’s mind. She shivered. But who would care about anything Monsieur Montpelier might know?

  “You are looking for your mother?” he asked with more solicitude than he’d ever shown her before.

  Estella nodded.

  “Upstairs,” the concierge smiled, pointing. “You should go upstairs.”

  “I know the way,” Estella retorted.

  She took the stairs to the top floor, pushed the door open and snapped on the light but there was no power. She picked her way through the dark to the room she’d once shared with her mother. The bed was empty.

  “Maman?” Estella called softly. No reply came.

  Estella frowned. In the kitchen, there was little food. Dust clothed the table in a thin but noticeable layer, the cup on the table was filled with dried-out chicory. She returned to the room she’d once shared with her mother, lay down on the bed and felt the emptiness around her—the absence of her mother’s scent—as she listened to the sound of her city under the boot of the Germans: unfamiliar, joyless, afraid.

  Some time later she heard the front door open and she stiffened.

  “Estella?” Lena’s voice, followed by Alex’s, calling more loudly, “Estella?”

  She heard the sound of the light switch flicked uselessly, heard them moving through the main room. She heard Alex say to Lena, “Stay here.”

  After a moment, he stood in the doorway.

  “Was she helping you?” Estella’s words came out dully.

  “I asked her to stop.” His voice was wooden too. “But she made it very clear that she’d do it anyway, on her own, without British support, which is the most dangerous way. So I let her. I’m sorry.”

  Everyone was sorry. What good was sorry? But Estella knew how stubborn her mother was, refusing Monsieur Aumont’s insistence that they not pay back the money they owed him, pushing Estella to go to New York, working from the time she was fifteen to support Estella. If her mother had insisted, there was no way Alex would have been able to stop her.

  Lena joined Alex in the doorway, then moved over to sit beside Estella. And Estella knew that she’d come with Alex to find her because she’d refused to be left behind. That she’d wanted to help. That Lena was as stubborn as Estella and their mother.

  Estella slipped her hand into Lena’s.

  “Your mother was afraid someone was watching her,” Alex said. “Perhaps she’s moved to a safer place. I’ll do everything I can to find out.”

  “If she’s been taken by the Germans, what will they do to her?” Estella asked.

  “They might take her to a camp…”

  Rather than kill her. “Which is better?” she whispered. “A camp or death?”

  Alex swore. But he told her the truth. “Death.”

  “Then if you find out she’s been taken, that’s what I’ll pray for,” she said.

  “We need to go.” He hooked a finger around the blackout curtain and peered out, hackles obviously raised. Then he cursed worse than Estella had ever heard him swear. “Quick,” he ordered. “Down the stairs, before they come in. To the third floor.”

  Estella tried to hurry but it was as if grief had set itself in concrete inside her limbs, robbing her of nimbleness. As she stumbled down the stairs, she thought she understood why Alex had said the third floor, not the ground. One of the apartments there had a room that ran across and above the Passage Saint-Paul. They could get out that way.

  “In here,” Alex commanded, pushing open the door of the apartment and ushering both her and Lena inside.

  Estella could see that it was yet another abandoned home; the old couple who used to live there had probably left for the Free Zone or to stay with other family in Paris to pool their meager resources.

  But Alex didn’t take them across the Passage. Instead he opened the window above the Passage. “Out here. Lower yourself down, keep your hands on the sill and then drop. It’s not far enough to hurt you. Here,” he held out his hand to Lena.

  “Let Estella go first,” Lena said.

  So Estella found herself being bundled through a window unceremoniously, hands gripping the ledge, body hanging. Before she dropped to the ground, she heard running footsteps. A door crash open. An explosion, like a gunshot. Lena crying out. Terror dampened Estella’s palms and she almost slipped. Then a panicked shot of adrenaline gave her the strength to hoist her head up high enough to see what was happening.

  Lena lay on the floor. Alex stood in front, shielding her body. The concierge stood in the doorway, smiling toothily. A man in a German uniform had a gun knocked from his hand by Alex. Then Alex ran a knife viciously through the German’s belly. The concierge fled.

  Oh God! Estella remembered how insistent the concierge had been that she go upstairs. That Alex had said her mother thought somebody was watching her. The concierge, who’d always hated both Estella and her mother, was plump, most likely on the rewards paid by the Germans for feeding them information about anyone suspected of working against the Nazis.

  “Lena,” she tried to say but her mouth was dry from fear and her arms were shaking, unable to hold her head above the sill anymore. Her last glimpse of the room was of Alex picking up Lena, who was bloodied, insensate.

  “Move!” he hissed at Estella as he slid through the window, using one arm to maneuver himself, the other arm wrapped around Lena.

  Estella’s feet hit the ground, the shock of landing jolting her out of her uncomprehending state.

  Alex followed close behind, landing with a thud. “Dammit, dammit, dammit,” he swore, feeling Lena’s neck, leaning in to listen for breath.

  Estella stood frozen, unable to move or to speak, unable to care that the concierge might now be telephoning for more Nazis with more guns.

  Alex looked at Estella and shook his head.

  “No.” Estella’s mouth made the shape of the word but it was soundless, a protest she could not voice.

  Alex closed Lena’s eyes. “I’ll take her with us.”

  And he did, as best he could, struggling along the Passage Saint-Paul with Lena in his arms; lifeless Lena, her limbs swaying as they moved. But Estella knew, and she knew that he knew, they would move a lot faster without Lena and she also knew that he was bringing Lena for her. She led the way deep into the Passage, knowing the back door to the Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis lay right at the end and she prayed that whoever might be following them wouldn’t know, would think the Passage a dead end, and would search for them out on the street instead.

  They made it to the church. For the first time in her life in that sacred space Estella didn’t turn her eyes to the beautiful altar of Mary and her baby wi
th its columns of rufous marble slashed with white, its statuary, its gilded candelabra, the altar that bore the inscription Regina Sine Labe Concepta—Queen conceived without sin. Nor did she turn her mind to the continuation of the phrase: the exhortation to pray for us. Because who was praying for them? For Paris? For her mother? For Lena?

  She wanted to scream at Mary, holding her infant child so serenely. The only people left in the world who still believed in the power of the dome above, in the three-storied transept, the grand organ, the Delacroix painting, the clamshells for holy water that Victor Hugo had gifted to the church, were people who still believed in hope, holding on futilely to ridiculous bibelots.

  She could hear the noise of scuffle and shouting outside and she turned to Alex at the same time as he turned to her. She read the question in his eyes and she nodded. Gently, so gently it made Estella’s throat constrict and the tears stream from her eyes, almost made her turn away because bearing witness was an agony beyond pain, Alex lay Lena down and crossed himself.

  He kissed Lena’s cheek and whispered to her:

  “I am the soft stars that shine at night.

  Do not stand at my grave and cry;

  I am not there, I did not die.”

  His words fired a sob from Estella’s mouth, too loud.

  Then she bent down and kissed Lena’s cheek for the first time, weeping. That flare of hope she’d seen in Lena’s eyes as they sat on the rooftop, hands joined, was forever extinguished, put out just as it had begun. Far from making Lena’s life better, far from bringing her answers, far from showing her that love trumped violence, Estella had only proven the exact opposite. The sister she had always wanted, and that she thought perhaps Lena wanted too, was irrevocably lost.

  Alex reached out and took her hand. “We have to go.”

  She followed him out onto Rue Saint-Antoine, away from Lena, away from any sense of ever again being the person Estella once was.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  But the streets held still more horror. The day hadn’t yet taken hold, but the Germans had. As Estella and Alex stood in the main doorway of the church, peering out, Estella saw the French police, which was the worst thing of all—that her own people could do this to their fellow citizens—behaving like brutes. Hundreds of men, no thousands of men, were driven along by the police like animals, toward waiting busses. Few protested. The men of Paris were too cowed, too afraid. They walked with their heads down, in case the act of looking up was deemed a betrayal and thus punishable with violence. Red streaks of dawn fell across their faces like fresh wounds, or the unhealed scars of old ones.

  Alex tried to keep his body between Estella and the doorway so she couldn’t see but it was impossible to obscure so many men. “What’s happening?” she asked in a shocked whisper.

  “They’re Jewish,” he replied in a low voice. “It’s another round-up.”

  “Where are they taking them?”

  Alex’s voice was so low she could barely hear it. “Drancy,” he said.

  “Drancy?” she asked.

  “An internment camp.”

  A camp. A place Alex had said was worse than death. But there were too many for that surely? She looked up at Alex and he caught the question in her eye.

  “I’m doing everything I can. But not right now,” he said. “I’m not risking your life as well as…”

  As well as Lena’s.

  “It’s a hellish thing to admit but the confusion will help us get away,” he said grimly. “You have to do everything I ask though. No questions. None.”

  The first time he’d told her that, she’d thought he was stony. But now he was darker and colder than the Seine in winter. If she didn’t know him, she would have been terrified of him, transformed into the man who’d knifed another in an attempt to save Lena. She nodded.

  They hurried along, winding through side streets and gardens and courtyards. He stopped at a bar and had a heated conversation with a man with a limp, who Estella recognized as someone he’d spoken to at the club and also in Marseilles.

  When he rejoined Estella, he said, “The Rue de Sévigné is still safe. We can go back there.”

  Not long after, they pushed through the gates into the courtyard, then into the house. Alex disappeared up the stairs and closed the door to his room without another word. What was there left to say?

  Estella climbed back onto the roof where she’d lain with Lena just a few hours before. She pulled her mother’s drawing of the two babies out of her pocket and ran her hands over the pencil lines, thinking of Lena. A sister she wouldn’t have known had she stayed in Paris, had the war not happened. A sister Estella suddenly missed more than her own mother because at least with her mother she had memories. With Lena all she had were possibilities that had been suddenly and savagely snatched away.

  The only consolation was that the drawing meant Jeanne really was her mother, and Lena’s. But it didn’t solve the mystery of who her father was, nor why her mother had taken one baby with her, and left the other in America with the Thaw family. A wind blew up, almost tipping the box over and, as Estella went to rescue it, she realized there was one more thing inside. A photograph. She picked it up.

  It was a photograph of her mother smiling beside a man who looked like a younger version of Harry Thaw. Estella froze. Then white-hot fury seared through her. She ripped the photograph and hurled the pieces into the street below.

  Then she lay down and the tears came again, tears for Lena, tears for what she’d just seen in the photograph. Her mother had known Harry Thaw. She shut her eyes against that thought but behind her closed lids all she could see was Lena’s lifeless face, and the look in her eyes when she and Estella had discovered that they really were sisters.

  She must have fallen asleep after that because she awoke blinking, a midday sun beating down on her, burning her face. She put up a hand to ward it off, then she stood up and, as she did, the memory of the night before caused her to stumble. She needed to eat. To drink some water. Her stomach hurt with nausea and loss.

  She climbed back down to the hall. A noise made her stiffen. The sound of someone being sick. A groan. Low voices. She stepped over to Alex’s door and listened. She heard the sounds again. She put her hand on the door and turned the handle, furious.

  Inside, the room was so dark after the sunlight on the roof that she couldn’t see. She blinked a few times and heard Alex’s voice mumble, “Ask her to leave, Peter.”

  A man materialized by her side, the man with the limp. Before she knew what was happening, he’d ushered her out and closed the door.

  “Drunk away his sorrows, has he?” Estella asked sarcastically. What other reason could there be for the noises she’d heard than that Alex had gotten himself deeply and extraordinarily drunk? How like him, while she’d been mourning Lena, to go out and submerge himself in whiskey.

  Peter didn’t answer.

  “Is this how he recovers himself the morning after a disaster?” she prodded again and this time she got what she wanted. A fight.

  Peter took her by the arm and marched her down the stairs and into the kitchen.

  “You don’t know the first thing about him,” Peter said, scorn drenching each word. “Alex Montrose is the best man I’ve worked with. I’ve been with him for five years and he’d lay down his own life for any of his men.”

  “After he’s written himself off with whiskey so he can pretend nothing has happened you mean?”

  “I don’t know what happened last night but you’re responsible for it.” Peter spat the words at her like bullets. “You went to your mother’s apartment when he told you not to. You led him smack bang into a trap that your mother had been smart enough to run from. You mightn’t have noticed but a war is about people’s lives.”

  “My sister died for this goddamned war,” Estella blazed, “so I know very well it’s about lives.”

  “It’s about thinking of other people besides yourself.” Peter stepped closer to her, and Este
lla stiffened, wanting to move away, hating this man for making her feel weak and vulnerable.

  “He’ll kill me for telling you but I’m going to so that you take that look off your face, as if everything you’ve done was innocent and he’s the only one in the wrong,” Peter raged on. “He went back this morning for Lena’s body. He buried her in the garden outside. He sent out three men who should be doing something more important to find word of your mother. Only then did he let the fucking vertigo that’s plagued him since he dropped out of a plane with a broken parachute and almost died, the vertigo that raises its ugly head when he’s had more to deal with than he ought, ride over him.”

  He paused for a moment but the tongue-lashing wasn’t over. “Think about it,” Peter continued. “How much has he slept since you arrived in France? Who got you from Lisbon to Paris? Who got an agent with a broken leg over to the American Hospital in broad daylight and got him fixed up enough so he could be on an escape line, all within twenty-four hours of Alex being in Paris. It didn’t just happen, Estella. It happened because he made it happen. He kept lookouts posted and gathered intelligence and found the safest way and the whole time he was passing on messages to the French resistance and you just thought you were all here for a holiday. And now he’s upstairs so sick he can’t move off the bed and it’ll last until tomorrow night at least and he won’t even be able to stand up because the room is spinning so much it’ll swing right up and hit him in the head. But if you’d prefer to think of him as a selfish drunk, then go right ahead.”

  Sick? Alex couldn’t be sick. He was invulnerable, unassailable. But Peter didn’t look or sound as if he was joking. Estella tried to speak. She was unable to.

  Peter walked over to the stove, boiled the kettle, made a cup of coffee, filled a glass with water and went to take them up the stairs. All the while, his words reeled through Estella’s head as if she were the one with vertigo.

  She hadn’t thought of anyone but herself. She’d gone to her mother’s when Alex had told her she shouldn’t. Once there, she’d mindlessly gone upstairs as the concierge had suggested, never once considering the possibility that it was a trap, a trap that she’d led Alex and Lena right into. She’d let Lena send her out the window first. She’d spent the last year loathing Alex just because he’d been there when Monsieur Aumont had died and her life changed forever. And because he’d brought Lena into her life. But she couldn’t dislike Alex for that, not anymore.