The Milliner's Secret

by Natalie Meg Evans

  She pressed the button for the lift, relief flowing in. Dietrich had been called away on business and would be back, or he wouldn’t have left his man in residence. Damn that clerk. She’d have it out with him later. As the lift rose, a prick of conscience made her search for the letter. She’d buy a fresh envelope while Dietrich was away, somehow forge the handwriting and steam off the stamp. It would be waiting for him when he came back.

  Except there was no letter. She rolled the rug over. Nothing. A cleaner, she told herself. A cleaner had found it.

  The door to Brownlow’s room was wide open. A chambermaid she didn’t recognise was stripping the bed.

  ‘The man who was here – is he coming back?’

  ‘Non.’

  Had a letter been left for her? Anything with her name on it?

  ‘Non.’

  She went down to her room, still confident of a note under the door. Again, nothing. She went to bed, her fist in her mouth, her knees pulled up.

  There was no drifting up through bubbles next morning. When the maid knocked, Coralie thought, I bet there’s no breakfast. Her stomach growled.

  But there was the usual generous tray. Coffee, though, not tea, as if, with her imminent departure, the kitchen’s memory had failed. She got the coffee down by stirring in all the sugar lumps in the bowl, and ate every morsel on the tray. Confusion added itself to misery when a bouquet of fragrant dark-pink roses arrived for her. Dietrich was back?

  ‘They were ordered yesterday afternoon, before Monsieur le Comte left for Berlin,’ the bellboy told her. And no, Monsieur was not back.

  She had about three thousand francs, money Dietrich had given her for taxis and which she’d squirrelled away by walking everywhere. How far would it stretch in Paris? No more hotels, for sure. It would have to be a hostel of the lino-floor-and-calico-sheet kind. The kind that catered for girls who’d been left up a gum tree.

  Her first task was to find something to pack her clothes in. In the end, she dressed in her bulkiest garments and stuffed the rest into two La Passerinette hatboxes, keeping the third for her hats. She’d sell the Javier clothes. Unworn, they were bound to be snapped up. If she bumped into her own nice chambermaid she’d ask the name of a second-hand-clothes shop. She bumped into nobody. The Duet was as quiet as Sunday, though it was the last Thursday of July.

  In the lobby, the porter coughed, implying, ‘Gratuity?’

  Bugger that. Hatboxes bumping her legs, she left without looking back. It would sweep around the hotel that Made¬moiselle had left no tip and had taken the soap from the bathroom.

  Miss McCullum’s words nipped at her heels as she headed in the direction of the river: ‘You really want to live somebody else’s life?’

  She’d replied, ‘Every minute of every day,’ with the impudent certainty of a one who had never truly been tested. Well, here she was, living the life of a girl abandoned in Paris, and it felt hideous.

  It was a long walk to rue de l’Odéon, but she needed to talk to somebody who knew Dietrich. Mademoiselle Deveau might have a rational explanation for his departure. If she wasn’t too late . . .

  During their last lesson, Mademoiselle Deveau had given notice that she would be leaving Paris at the end of July. ‘Come August, country air suddenly becomes an urgency,’ she’d explained. They would resume lessons at the end of September. They wouldn’t. Such luxuries were now out of the question.

  When Mademoiselle Deveau answered her knock, the relief was too much for Coralie’s fragile self-control. She burst into sobs.

  Mademoiselle Deveau led her to a chair in the hall. Through an open door, Coralie saw a pair of suitcases, strapped ready for travelling, and a box of vegetables that was presumably destined for a neighbour who was staying at home. Mademoiselle Deveau stood while Coralie sobbed out her story. Finally, she sighed. ‘You aren’t the first, I’m afraid. Herr von Elbing came to me for lessons in Berlin not long after he’d broken off an engagement.’

  ‘To Ottilia von Silberstrom. They couldn’t marry.’

  ‘“Couldn’t” depends on which rules you live by. It was put about that she’d thrown him over, but really it was his doing. I’ll tell you this: sometimes passion burns fast and hot, like dry straw. Men are good at walking away, while we women stay around poking the ash. A lesson to learn while you’re still young. What will you do now?’

  ‘Find a job. Soon, with luck.’

  ‘I wish you plenty of it – luck – but I have to go now or I’ll miss my train.’

  One last question. Did Mademoiselle Deveau know of a dealer who bought couture clothes?

  ‘Summer things? Try rue des Rosiers, but don’t sell them now. Women are buying autumn wear, if they’re buying at all. Wait till February.’

  February? If her counting was right, by February she’d have a child in her arms. Fear weighing on her like a wet overcoat, Coralie tramped back across the river, resting a while in the Jardin des Tuileries. As starlings pecked around her feet, she sketched a plan. During her daily ambles down the streets near the Madeleine, she’d counted any number of independent milliners’ shops; five on boulevard Malesherbes alone. One or other of them was bound to want an assistant of some kind. She told the starlings, ‘I have to have a job by evening or I’ll be fighting you for crumbs.’

  Boulevard Malesherbes was pleasantly cool on its shady side, boiling where the sun hit. Coralie marched into the first milliner’s she came to. Introduced herself and asked if they had a vacancy.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mademoiselle, we’re not hiring.’

  At the next place, an assistant fetched the owner, who looked at Coralie’s hatboxes and asked if she’d brought samples. Resisting the urge to claim La Passerinette hats as her own work, Coralie admitted, ‘No, Madame.’

  She was asked where her last employment had been.

  ‘London.’

  Instead of the flare of interest she’d expected, the proprietress bunched her lips. ‘I’m sorry, but you would not be suitable.’

  She tried to argue, named Pettrew & Lofthouse, ‘suppliers to the British upper crust’, only to find it wielded as much magic as Brasso. London, it seemed, carried no cachet in Paris. Different the other way round, she thought gloomily, as she wrestled her boxes out of the door.

  At the next shop she waited ages, only for a junior to inform her, ‘Madame says we’re not hiring. Try again in September.’

  By the time she’d worked both sides of the road as far as place de la Madeleine, ‘Come back in September’ had become a marching song. What was it about September?

  Sunlight bounced off the Madeleine’s columns and Coralie regretted her dress of paisley-pattern challis, worn with a cerise wool jacket. The air was so humid that even the flies were still.

  Directly in front of the Madeleine lay rue Royale, a short street of luxury shops that proved equally disheartening, every bid for employment answered with a negative – sometimes before she’d finished asking. She hesitated outside the famous salon of Rose Valois at number fourteen, peering at lace brims, summer flowers and perfectly angled feathers. They’d lay her bare in an instant and she couldn’t take much more rejection. A few paces on she passed the Ladurée tearoom with its platters of pink, mint-green and chocolate macaroons. She shut her eyes, but her mouth still watered. Next, was Suzanne Talbot’s smart establishment. A couple of hours ago, she’d felt she had something to offer Parisian millinery. Now – honestly? Even Jean McCullum would struggle in this milieu.

  But she had to keep going. How many times had she fallen off a bicycle before she’d learned to ride one? Spotting another milliner’s across the street, she took her chances with the traffic and opened the door to ‘Henriette Junot’ so forcefully that she fell inside. Chance of success? Scant, she told herself, as she got to her feet, but as a reward for trying she’d sit down at the next café, order an iced citron pressé and maybe a basket of bread.

  A vendeuse stood behind glass doors, brushing a felt hat as if she were stroking a kitt
en. Coralie used the silent moment to examine Henriette Junot’s spring–summer offering. There was none of the usual proliferation of ‘sunflower stalks’– the metal stands milliners used for display. Just a table draped in white satin with four marottes on it, sawdust-stuffed heads with prim lips and wide-awake eyes. But what hats! One marotte wore cherry-pink gauze with a brim full of clashing yellow lilies. Two green straw hats invoked a summer meadow, flowers apparently lobbed to land where they liked. The fourth had started life as a simple Breton bonnet but had ended up as a scoop of wild strawberries, complete with leaves, star-like flowers and berries. A peacock butterfly fed from one of the flowers, and Coralie was suddenly sure it was alive. She blew lightly on it and its wings trembled.

  ‘May I help?’ The vendeuse had come unseen from the rear of the shop.

  Coralie straightened up. ‘Are you good at catching butterflies? You have to be delicate or their wings break.’

  The vendeuse stared at her, then at the butterfly, and giggled. ‘It’s fake, you know.’

  Coralie extended a finger and touched a wing. Painted silk, veined with wire no thicker than a hair. After years at Pettrew’s, stitching grosgrain to felt, she was at last seeing into the soul of a truly beautiful hat. This confection of strawberries and leaves was no mere head covering. It was a mood. A caprice that captured a moment, stopping a butterfly in mid-air.

  ‘Mademoiselle? Do you desire a fitting?’

  ‘Oh . . . no.’ Coralie recited her speech in a breathless gabble, and awaited the polite dismissal.

  ‘Where did you train?’

  To Coralie’s surprise, the vendeuse had heard of Pettrew & Lofthouse, agreeing that it was a respected establishment. ‘For men’s headwear. Their ladies’ lines are considered very ordinary, and female millinery requires different skills.’

  ‘But I could learn.’ That note of desperation! Armouring herself for a polite, I regret, but . . . Coralie was astonished to be invited upstairs to the workrooms.

  ‘We are very quiet today,’ the girl explained. ‘This house provides millinery to the couturier Javier, whose autumn–winter collection is being launched –’ she consulted her watch ‘– in a couple of hours.’

  ‘Javier? Oh!’ Coralie suddenly remembered she had a fitting there tomorrow morning. The prospect of being measured and prodded was surprisingly attractive, compared to the likely alternative, tramping the streets. But as Dietrich wouldn’t be picking up the bill for any new clothes, it would be wrong to waste the fitter’s time. Coralie enquired if the ‘Madame Junot’, for whom the shop was named, was in today. Or perhaps she was at Javier, watching the collection?

  The vendeuse shook her head. ‘Madame Junot never sees her collections launched as she has such highly strung feelings. One cruel word, even a sharp glance, can throw her into despair. Her première has gone in her place. She is where she best likes to be, up in her studio.’

  On the second level, doors with glass portholes offered glimpses of women and girls at work. Neat buns and white sleeves under cotton pinafores. A silent machine, Coralie thought. I could be a little cog if I play my cards right. ‘What are they all working on?’

  ‘Rooms one and two deal with clients’ commissions. The rest are producing the autumn–winter collection – our in-house collection, I should say. That launches at the end of September. Orders will also come from Javier’s clients, so September is desperate. If Madame likes you, she may give you a trial. One more flight.’ The vendeuse pointed up narrow stairs. ‘I’m Amélie Ginsler, by the way.’

  This flight led up to an attic room where a lone figure sat at a table under an open skylight, stitching a cone-shaped hat, using a marotte as the support. Seeing cropped hair, loose trousers and a white tuck-fronted shirt, Coralie presumed she was about to meet her first male milliner – until Amélie addressed the figure as ‘Madame Junot’. ‘This young woman is looking for employment and says she has worked extensively in London.’

  Madame Junot stitched on. Coralie was wondering if she’d even noticed their presence, when she twisted her head in a sharp movement and pointed at the hatboxes Coralie had brought in with her. ‘What’s in those?’

  ‘My clothes. I’ve spent so many years travelling between London and Nivelles, where my family live’ – believing in a new identity was easy if you practised it several times a day – ‘that my worldly goods always end up in the wrong place. Yesterday, I took the Paris train on a whim. No time to find a suitcase.’ She added what she hoped was a musical laugh.

  ‘They’re La Passerinette boxes. Not a spy for them, are you?’

  ‘Of course not, Madame. I’m here to work. I live to create hats.’ To cover all possibilities, she added, ‘I can sell them too.’

  Henriette Junot stared so intently that Coralie feared she had sweat stains under her arms. The disturbing eye-contact broke only when a girl, not much older than fourteen, sidled in.

  ‘Loulou!’ Madame Junot clicked her fingers. ‘Go down again and fetch a slouch hat, one of the practice models.’ When the little assistant eventually returned with a floppy-brimmed felt hat, Madame Junot threw it to Coralie, then pointed to a pair of scissors. ‘Show me what you’re made of. Fit it to me. Trim the brim. Make it suit me.’

  Suit a woman with a domed forehead and what might tactfully be called a strong jaw? Coralie stammered, ‘Of course,’ and pretended to sink into thought while desperately fishing for inspiration. Trim the brim? She’d had so many ruler-smacks from impatient needlework teachers in her life that her knuckles throbbed when she even picked up a pair of scissors. It was one of the many reasons she’d preferred to stay in the make-room at Pettrew’s, why she’d dodged promotion.

  Taking the kind of breath that propels the brave into freezing water, she turned the hat round several times, opened the scissors and cut. The blades had a mind of their own, slicing deep into the brim. No choice now but to keep cutting. When a halo of black dropped to the floor, and she heard Amélie Ginsler gasp, she knew she’d reached the point of no return. Actually, she’d created a pudding bowl for a village idiot. Ignoring the raised eyebrows, she turned the stump this way and that, as if contemplating a beautiful enigma.

  Loulou unwittingly came to her aid – by yawning. It told Coralie that she needed an idea, fast. Her millinery skills were sorely wanting but perhaps she did have an eye for shape and proportion. Dietrich had thought so. ‘You think in pictures,’ he’d said.

  ‘So, I’m going to create for you . . . something absolutely simple.’ Coralie asked Loulou for a length of Petersham ribbon, and a box of pins. ‘Oh, and would you thread a needle with black?’ As the child searched inside a cupboard, Coralie amputated the last vestiges of brim. She folded the lower edges under and secured them with the pins Loulou brought. She was now holding something between a toque and a fez. ‘Needle, please.’ She made herself relax. Tense fingers always get stabbed.

  Her tacking was rough because she could hear feet shuffling. Nipping the thread with her teeth, giving the hat a final stretch with the insides of her thumbs, she asked Madame Junot to sit in front of the mirror.

  Henriette Junot didn’t so much sit as sprawl, one trousered leg extended, head to one side. That’s right, make it as difficult for me as you can. As she approached her, though, Coralie remembered how she’d felt at La Passerinette, sandwiched between mirror and milliner. A woman hands over power to her milliner, like a man offering his throat to the barber who shaves him. ‘Madame Junot will please say if I do anything to make her uncomfortable?’

  ‘You bet I will,’ came the reply.

  Henriette Junot’s nose was straight and her brown hair hung like curtains either side of her face. As for that chin – ‘doorstep’ came to mind. Coralie placed the makeshift hat, tilting it to the side and forwards to obscure most of Henriette’s right eye.

  ‘I can’t see.’

  ‘But we can see you, Madame.’ Coralie felt a flicker of excitement. Almost by accident, she’d minimised Henriette’s pr
otuberant forehead. Now she needed to give the impression of wider cheekbones to balance the jaw. She reached for some black gauze, scrunching it into a rough flower-head which she pinned to the side of the hat. Something interesting was taking shape.

  The woman’s best feature was her eyes, black as midnight, and Coralie thought, Had I the nerve, I’d cut her hair. She took the less radical option, tucking Henriette’s behind her ears. The finished effect was neat. Elegant, even.

  But reminiscent of the English nannies Coralie had seen wheeling their charges along the paths of parc Monceau. The hat needed further softening. Henriette Junot needed softening. Some part of her obviously yearned for it or she wouldn’t spend her life whisking up fragile frippery for other women. Coralie looked around for more trimmings but the attic studio was as spare as its owner. Not even a vase of flowers.

  Flowers . . .

  ‘Loulou, open those hatboxes carefully until you find roses. I want three or four heads.’

  Loulou found them, thornless Zéphirine Drouhins, Dietrich’s last bouquet. She’d worked out that he must have ordered them via the hotel desk before they’d gone to the Expo. Which meant he’d still cared for her then, even if his feelings had taken an abrupt turn later in the day. Her fault? Something she’d said?

  Being a delicate climber, the rose heads drooped prettily when secured to the front of the hat. Their rich hue lent tone to Henriette’s skin and lips.

  Nobody said anything as Coralie took a length of black lining silk from the back of a chair and draped it around Henriette’s neck. Framed in black, the Zéphirines leaped to prominence and Coralie suddenly thought, Two would have been enough. Trust her to bung four on. ‘A good picture, Madame?’

  Henriette looked to Amélie, who answered, ‘Very good. Actually, beautiful. Perhaps I have brought you a true talent, Madame.’

  ‘Been looking hard for one, have you?’

  Amélie flushed. ‘I meant, considering the raw material we gave the young lady, the result is extraordinary.’