The Paris Seamstress

by Natasha Lester

  “Wait!” she called.

  Peter stopped.

  “You’re right,” she said starkly. “You have better things to do. Like stop a war from going too far. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. He’ll hate it but he doesn’t have a choice.”

  He stared at her and she didn’t think he’d relent. But she stared straight back, not giving in.

  “Just get him through it,” Peter said eventually. “Make sure he doesn’t move. Make him drink water. He’ll be sick but distract him, make him keep it down. Do not let him sit up or stand up before he’s ready. You’ll be able to tell; look at his eyes. They’ll be flickering if the vertigo’s still there.”

  “Right,” Estella said. “Give me that.” She took the water and coffee from Peter. “He said we’re safe here. Is that true?”

  “Yes. Your former concierge was watching your mother. Alex knew it, and he went to the club with you to keep you away from her apartment. But I’m certain nobody has connected this house with your mother.”

  He went to the club with you to keep you away from her apartment. Again, she’d been wrong. Again she’d been selfish. But for Estella’s actions, Lena’s death could have been prevented. She’d all but killed her own sister.

  Of course Alex tried to protest, as much as he was able. But Estella ignored him.

  Alex cursed Peter and lay on the bed fuming, furious at Peter for letting her into the room, furious at Estella and, most of all, furious at himself. That he’d spent his whole life eliminating weaknesses and his goddamned body threw up one that he couldn’t control. He knew he was lucky; that his insistence on being an operative on the ground brought with it physical risks and he’d gone for a long time without anything too bothersome happening. But just when he thought he’d recovered from the broken parachute and subsequent too-fast collision with the ground earlier in the year, he’d discovered this legacy of vertigo, which he couldn’t control or predict. All he could do was lie on his back on the bed and watch Estella, through half-open eyes, as she busied herself with water and coffee.

  He’d tried to sit the moment she walked into the room, which was a huge mistake. The floor came up to wallop him in the face and the nausea flooded him. He was sick into a basin right in front of her, unable to even take the basin to the bathroom and wash it out. He saw her do it and he cringed, wasting energy telling her not to, asking her to leave, demanding that she leave.

  “I don’t need a nurse,” he’d barked once he’d recovered enough to speak.

  “I can see that,” she said sarcastically.

  “I don’t need you,” he’d insisted, which of course wasn’t true either.

  “I know that but I’m all you’ve got.” She sat down on the piano stool and folded her arms.

  Alex tried to stay awake but it was too hard and he soon dozed off. He woke later to find her leaning over the bed, water glass ready. He shuffled his head up the pillow the smallest amount, just enough to allow him to drink, and even that slight movement nearly undid him. She lay a cold cloth on his forehead while he fought back the nausea, grateful for the damp cloth soothing away the clamminess of his skin, calming the nausea at last.

  The trouble with lying in a bed so still and silent was that he had too much time to think. He thought of Lena, of Estella, of what had happened. Of how Lena’s death was his fault. Of how he’d broken his vow never to do anything that involved his heart, which he’d thought was safely preserved in cynicism, hiding away behind meaningless affairs with willing women, always moving on after one encounter because it was the only way to not drag anyone else into the ruin he called his life.

  The first time he’d followed his heart was back when he was fifteen and he’d made a stupid and dangerous plan to get his mother out of Hong Kong, behind his father’s back. But his father had discovered the ruse—he’d been told by someone Alex had trusted to help him—and Alex and his mother had been forced back to the house. His father had beaten Alex to within an inch of his life—his father was always very careful to go just far enough that he wouldn’t die. He’d been in the hospital for over a week, with more broken bones than he cared to remember.

  But his mother—he almost couldn’t bear to think of it. His father had beaten his mother to within an inch of her life too and he’d told everyone they were set upon by street thugs, which was an entirely believable story in Hong Kong. His mother had spent a month in the hospital. That was when he’d decided to kill his father.

  But his father had thought of that. He told Alex, “If you kill me, then your mother will die too. I’ve left instructions with friends to make sure she dies a painful, prolonged death if anything ever happens to me.”

  So he had to keep his father alive in order to keep his mother alive. He had to do what he was told and never let his heart rule his head again because the price of doing it once had nearly cost his mother her life. Just like the price of yesterday’s fracas had been Lena’s life.

  He must have sworn aloud because his eyes flew open at the movement of someone, Estella, touching his arm ever so lightly.

  “Alex, you’re dreaming,” she said gently.

  He shook his head, forgetting that shaking his head was like hurling himself onto a violent and relentless carousel. He winced and tried to breathe normally, prayed that he wouldn’t be sick in front of her again, that he could at least keep hold of a scrap of dignity.

  “Have some more water,” she said. “Here.” She put the cloth on his forehead again and it was so cold he realized he was sweating, that he’d been dreaming, that he’d probably said things in his sleep that he didn’t want her to hear.

  This time, when he lifted his head to drink the water, the room still spun wildly, but it settled more quickly. “Thank you,” he said, knowing he could at least be gracious despite the fact that he wanted her to leave.

  And then she did something that he both wanted and didn’t want. She walked around the bed and sat on the other side, leaning her back against the wall, a respectable distance away from him but still beside him on a bed. “I think you can leave me alone now,” he said, trying to ask nicely rather than demanding as he’d done before. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Yes, you look as if you’re ready to shepherd me single-handedly from one side of France to the other all over again.”

  “Just France?” he replied, more weakly than he would have liked, hoping banter would convince her he was feeling better, even though he wasn’t. “I think I’m ready to tackle flying one of those ships across the Atlantic.”

  She grinned. “Can you fly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there anything you can’t do?”

  It was a teasing question but all he could think was, yes, there was a long list of things he couldn’t do: he couldn’t bring Lena back from the dead. He couldn’t make everything better for Lena the way he’d wanted to, in some kind of strange apology to his mother for not being able to make her last years happy ones. And he couldn’t reach out and touch Estella, not because the vertigo was stopping him, but because it would be the most dangerous act of all.

  “Will you talk to me about Lena?” she asked.

  “Talking is probably the only thing I’m capable of right now,” he admitted.

  He wriggled a little and she leaned over, propping his pillow slightly. He felt the room tilt as he raised himself the smallest amount, suddenly aware that he wasn’t wearing a shirt. He wished he could ask her to pass him one but he wouldn’t be able to put it on by himself and there was no way he was going to ask her to help him with that.

  What do you want to know about her? he supposed he should ask. But he didn’t want to confine Lena to a series of questions and answers.

  “I met Lena at a party in July 1940. I was on leave for a week and I always go to New York when I’m on leave. We were at a masked ball. I noticed her hair. I asked an acquaintance about her and he laughed and said that he was surprised I hadn’t met Lena before. That her notoriety meant she was always at
the best parties, invited as an amusement because she was easy.” He winced. “Sorry, I should be sanitizing this.”

  Estella shook her head. “Tell me exactly as it was. I’ll know if you change anything; you have a habit of scratching your left little finger when you lie.”

  He laughed, then blanched because even that was still too much. “I didn’t know. I’ll have to stop.”

  “Keep going,” she said, wriggling down to lie her head against a pillow and resting her hands on her stomach.

  “Lena had quite a reputation, almost as bad as mine,” he confessed. “I asked her to dance because she had hair I thought I’d seen once before. We danced together but we didn’t really speak and at the end she kissed me. And…” He realized he’d moved his right hand on top of his left and was about to scratch the back of his little finger.

  “You slept with her,” Estella supplied. “You can skip that part.”

  “Thanks,” he said wryly. Then he hesitated. “It wasn’t what I thought it would be. She was…cold. For her, it was an act of the mind only.”

  “Because that’s the way it normally is for you.” Estella again filled in the blanks he didn’t know how to explain. “Like I said, I don’t need the details.”

  How to explain what he wanted her to understand without seeming as if he was bragging about his sexual prowess? “I just meant that I empathized; she thought she was ruined, not meant for the joys of life. She was doing it to forget. But her hair had reminded me of a magnificent woman who’d stormed into a theater at the Palais-Royal as brazenly as if she’d been spying for half her life and who’d delivered me papers with more flair than I’d ever seen in any of my counterparts.” He stopped; he’d said too much.

  “Surely you didn’t dance with Lena because you thought she was me?” Estella asked, slowly. “You must have women in every port around the world; I don’t believe I could have made such an impression on you.”

  You did. Instead he continued. “I knew after that first night that she couldn’t have been you because the woman at the theater was so full of life; she hadn’t had it crushed out of her the way Lena had.”

  Estella squeezed her eyes shut. “She all but told me that he raped her.”

  “Over and over. You’ve read Evelyn’s memoir. He’s a sadist. He locked Evelyn Nesbit up for two weeks and raped her too.”

  “I keep thinking that if Lena had been raised by my mother, none of this would have happened to her. That I’m the lucky one. It should have been me going out the window last. I should have given Lena a chance to live, just like, from birth, she’d given me that same chance.”

  “You’re not responsible.”

  “And you haven’t been lying here beating yourself up over it? Haven’t been blaming yourself?”

  He didn’t answer because he couldn’t, not truthfully.

  “All I know for sure is that none of it was Lena’s fault,” Estella said quietly and he heard her voice catch.

  He couldn’t help it; he reached out and took her hand in his, holding it very gently so she could easily slip away if she wanted to but she let him and it was almost unbearable, to feel the touch of her skin on his. He lay with his eyes closed, thankful that he could blame his inability to speak on illness.

  “Lena and I weren’t lovers,” he said abruptly, needing her to know that now. “I was never with her again, not after that first time. I cared about her though; nobody else did. So we became odd escorts for one another. If I was in Manhattan, we’d go to parties together because then neither of us would…” Feel the need to go home with strangers. He cut the words off. “I wanted her to find some sort of peace. A peace I could never give my mother. I know I pushed you to get to know her but I thought if anyone could make her happy, you could. It was stupid of me to even think that bringing the two of you together could make any kind of reparations for my mother.”

  “I didn’t know,” Estella said in a low voice. “I thought you and she were…an item.”

  “We weren’t.” Because she wasn’t the woman who’d sailed into a theater and stunned him, the woman who took his breath away by just being near him. A woman who’d grown up with love, not with hatred; he’d seen the evidence of it in her mother’s apartment, which was poor in material things, but there were mementos of Estella everywhere, testifying to a deep-held adoration of mother for daughter.

  He shifted a little in the bed, hoping to turn the conversation and it did, but not in a way that was any better. As he moved, the medallion engraved with three witches riding a broomstick that he wore on a silver chain around his neck caught the candle flame, sending out a sharp glint of light.

  “What is it?” Estella asked. Her hand reached out to touch the pendant, her finger grazing the skin of his chest in a movement so exquisite he could do nothing other than hold his breath.

  When he thought he could speak, he said, “Three witches. The Road to En-Dor. Rudyard Kipling?”

  Estella shook her head.

  So he quoted:

  “Oh the road to En-dor is the oldest road

  And the craziest road of all!

  Straight it runs to the Witch’s abode,

  As it did in the days of Saul,

  And nothing has changed of the sorrow in store

  For such as go down on the road to En-dor!

  “It’s a story about a witch who sees the future,” he continued, “but who comforts those before they step out into danger. The Road to En-Dor was the name of a book written about one of the greatest escapes by a soldier in the Great War. So the witches are the insignia of my unit now. They keep all of us safe.”

  Estella didn’t say anything, just returned the pendant to his chest, her finger again brushing his skin. “I’m glad you have something to keep you safe,” she said.

  Neither of them spoke after that. He was tired now, which always happened just before his head righted itself. He could feel himself drifting away into sleep and the last thing he thought before he went under was that if he died right now, he’d die happier than he’d ever been, knowing that a woman as extraordinary as Estella was lying on a bed beside him while he slept.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  It was a long night, punctuated by Alex’s nightmares, nightmares which told Estella that, whatever he’d done, whatever had happened to him in his past, he paid for it every day. That he cared deeply, too deeply, which was perhaps why he seemed so careless on the surface. Because Alex was good. He’d been more than good to Lena: solicitous, concerned, wanting to grant Lena the gift of a sister in an attempt to show her that love did exist.

  For Alex to have been as careful as he’d been with someone as broken as Lena made him worthy of a great deal more admiration than Estella had ever spared him. So every time he murmured something in his sleep, she drifted over to the piano and played a song, quietly, gently, hoping the music would lull him back into peace and it worked, mostly.

  Around midnight, when she was sitting at the piano, forehead propped on her hand, the things from her mother’s box resting in her lap, crying a little for Lena, for her mother, for Alex too, she realized, she heard him say her name.

  “Estella?”

  “I’m here,” she said, slipping back over to the bed and lying down next to him. In the dark, his eyes were open and she studied his face. “You were dreaming again,” she said, the papers in her hands crackling.

  “Bad habit of mine,” he said mirthlessly. “What’s that?”

  She explained what she and Lena had found—everything except the photograph she’d ripped to pieces—and held up the manuscript page that she and Lena hadn’t had time to look at. “It’s from Evelyn Nesbit’s memoir. But it’s not in the copy Lena gave me. It’s very intimate—I mean, I know the whole memoir is intimate—but this page isn’t salacious; it’s gentle, about her and John and their love. It even mentions the Rue de Sévigné as their sanctuary. And…” she stopped, unsure if she was reading more into it than was really there.

  “Go
on,” Alex said.

  “It mentions a gift from John that she couldn’t keep. A gift she had to give away and that it broke her heart.”

  “Your mother.”

  “I think so. Perhaps that’s why this page isn’t in the published version. Sadism and murder aren’t too sensational but giving away an illegitimate child is.”

  “When was Evelyn’s memoir published?” Alex asked.

  “I don’t know. But the date on this manuscript page is 1916.”

  “The year before you were born,” he said slowly. “Is that a coincidence? Does the writing of the memoir have anything to do with you and Lena?”

  Estella frowned. “It’s hard to see how.”

  Alex rubbed a hand over his face as if he was tired.

  Estella moved to sit up. “Sorry, I should let you sleep.”

  “Stay,” Alex said. “I was just thinking.” He paused, as if turning something over in his mind. “Lena said Harry had the Gramercy Park house built in 1917. That was the year you were born. Which means he must have seen the Paris house before 1917. Did he find out about it from Evelyn’s memoir?”

  “But this page isn’t in the published book. So that can’t be it. And it says here that neither Evelyn nor John used the house after 1902 when she had my mother. So it was empty for years.” She closed her eyes. Talking about Harry made her remember what Lena had told her about the things he’d done. She shivered. “Monsters,” she said. “Why is the world giving way to monsters? Harry Thaw. Hitler.” More pictures scrolled behind her closed lids: Huette starving, her mother’s empty apartment, the police marching the Jewish men out of the Marais. Her eyes snapped open.