Stars Across the Ocean

by Kimberley Freeman

  And she had an address. Well, a street name. That was a start.

  Suzette, the spotty lass who served the food, entered the kitchen at that moment with more dishes and a few sharp words in French. Perhaps a lifetime of being bullied for her feeble looks had turned her sour. Agnes had no idea what she said, so she kept her head down and continued working.

  After the kitchen was cleaned and swept, Agnes and Suzette sat down together at a small wooden table and ate the food the other girls had left. Suzette chewed and swallowed like a hungry dog, but Agnes had little appetite, and was first to excuse herself and trudge upstairs into the main house. It smelled of perfume, cloying and trapped in the lightless walkways of the house. Upstairs she went, hurrying past the floor where the girls worked, and arriving at the floor where Madame Beaulieu kept her rooms. She hesitated there, thinking about how difficult or easy it might be to snoop about and liberate her purse and papers; but before she could formulate a plan, a door opened and Madame Beaulieu appeared.

  She spotted Agnes instantly, and startled. Agnes could see in the dim lamp-light that she drew her eyebrows together. ‘What is it? Why are you standing there like a ghost?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to alarm you.’ Agnes smiled. ‘I wanted to talk to you. Do you have a few moments for me?’

  Madame Beaulieu beckoned, her irritation melting away. ‘Of course. Come.’

  Agnes realised the older woman probably expected her to capitulate now, and agree to entertain the male clients. She moved down the gloomy hallway after Madame Beaulieu, who used a key to unlock the door to a corner room. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Make yourself comfortable.’

  Agnes stepped into a spacious sitting room, with four windows – all of them covered, the last of the evening light edging the blinds. Madame Beaulieu lit lamps, and a soft glow illuminated dark patterned wallpaper, intricate gold and silver frames on small paintings of naked women, a delicately carved carriage clock and two deep sofas. A chaise under one of the windows.

  ‘Go on, sit,’ Madame Beaulieu said.

  Agnes sat. She expected Madame Beaulieu to sit opposite, but instead she sat directly next to Agnes, so close that Agnes could feel her breath as she said, ‘Have you decided to work for me?’

  ‘I am working for you,’ Agnes said. ‘I have worked very hard for you today.’

  ‘Don’t play innocent. Few things provoke me more than a woman who is deliberately naïve. You know what I mean.’

  ‘I will need more time. Will you give me a week? I will do any chores you ask and never complain.’ A week was enough time to find Genevieve on Boulevard des Italiens, she was sure of it. Almost.

  Agnes could see Madame Beaulieu’s face working. She was annoyed, but her mind was turning over.

  ‘I can’t afford to support you if you will not work for me,’ Madame Beaulieu said at last. ‘A girl like you, an English rose … We have many men who would pay a high price for your company.’

  ‘Then I will leave tonight. If you give me my purse, I will go immediately.’

  ‘Don’t be hasty!’ she said. ‘Of course I will not throw you out tonight.’ Clearly, Madame Beaulieu still hoped she might change her mind. She held up four fingers. ‘Four more nights. Talk to Molly. She will tell you. It isn’t so bad.’

  Agnes nodded. ‘Four more nights and I will talk to Molly.’ And in the meantime, she would find her mother or somewhere else to stay or perhaps both if Genevieve welcomed her.

  ‘Good girl.’ Madame Beaulieu was all smiles now. ‘This business, we need new girls all the time. My clients, they grow tired of the same pair of arms.’ She shrugged. ‘Some of my girls, they come work for me for a season, then go and marry good husbands who are … What do you English say? Never the wiser. As long as you don’t tell him.’

  Agnes grew curious. ‘And your husband?’

  ‘I have no husband.’

  ‘You’re called Madame.’

  ‘I tell people I am widowed. But I am never married.’ She leaned back in the sofa, growing pensive. ‘Though I did love. Many times. Too many times.’

  Agnes dropped her gaze. ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’

  ‘I am not offended by your questions. I am happy to tell you that when I was young and beautiful, like you, I fell in love with a man. He was a student, the son of a very wealthy family in England, and he came to study here in Paris. We met and we fell in love and he gave me a flower every day, and rented me an upper-floor apartment, and gave me money for beautiful clothes, and made me promises … ah, they made my head swim. But he finished his studies, and returned to his family, and he married the virgin he’d been promised to since his birth.’ Her eyes were sad for a moment, but that was soon banished. A grim set came to her mouth. ‘Then I met another young man, another student. I knew now how it would go. I took the gifts, I lived the life, and when he was gone I was no longer in the flush of my youth. So, the next time, I did not fall in love. I found the richest, ugliest fool I could, and I took everything given by him and I invested it with care, because I knew my looks would not last. Money, though; money lasts if you know what to do with it.’

  Agnes tried not to let her shock show. ‘You took enough from him to buy this house?’

  ‘To buy one apartment, where I set up my business. And because I am clever and because I only hire the best girls …’ Here she nodded towards Agnes. ‘And also because I knew important people who would prefer their business kept private, I thrived.’ She opened her palms. ‘I used what I could. Nobody can blame me for that.’

  The loud ring of the doorbell interrupted them, and Madame Beaulieu stood. ‘Who is that? All my clients are here this evening already.’ She scurried out of the room and Agnes followed her down a flight of stairs, but then stopped and let her go ahead. She wanted to watch from up here, if she could; to see what kind of person came to a bordello.

  The moment the door opened, she shrank back into the shadows – for the caller was Monsieur Valois. Madame Beaulieu was speaking with him in rapid French, and Agnes hadn’t a hope of understanding what they were saying. The conversation was soon over. Agnes heard the door close, and leaned out of hiding to see, with relief, that Madame Beaulieu was alone.

  ‘Well, Agnes,’ she said, ascending the stairs, holding her skirts so she didn’t trip on them, ‘you have made quite an impression on Alain.’

  Agnes didn’t want to know Monsieur Valois had a name, or that Madame Beaulieu knew him. She stood, still as a stone, wondering what was coming next.

  ‘In all these years, he has never once come to my door. But tonight, he says he wants the English girl.’

  Agnes’s heart picked up its rhythm. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said no, of course. But not simply because you have not yet come to your decision about working for me. I would never give a girl to a man with that expression on his face.’ She made a spitting noise.

  ‘What expression?’

  ‘I have seen desire in many forms, Agnes. But when it looks that hungry and that angry, it never ends well for my girls.’ She reached out and patted Agnes’s head. ‘You see? I do look after you.’ Then she withdrew her hand. ‘You look tired. Best to go to bed now. You will have to help Suzette with breakfast in the morning.’ Then she turned on her heel and departed back up the stairs, returning down the corridor to her rooms. Agnes heard the door to the sitting room shut, and thought about Madame Beaulieu sitting there alone in the lamp-lit room, among her beautiful things.

  •

  Finally upstairs in her bed, Agnes opened the Paris book and searched for Boulevard des Italiens. She unfolded the map and followed the index, and her heart leapt when she saw it was only half a mile long. Surely she could find Genevieve in four days. It looked to be one of those boulevards she had seen when she first arrived in Paris, on that wide sunny day before she had slunk into this narrow street and her horizons had contracted. She lay back on her pillow and imagined where Genevieve might live. An apartment with big windows where the b
linds were never drawn, where light and air filled the rooms, where Agnes might sit with her while the sounds of the city rattled and hummed outside. What would she ask her mother first? Not, Why did you abandon me? Agnes did not feel abandoned in life. She believed life probably felt the same for everyone: ultimately every man and woman was alone in their own mind. Perhaps, instead, she would ask, How do we get on in life, women like you and me? Agnes smiled, thinking of what Genevieve might say, and without realising it she drifted off to sleep with the lamp on and the map unfolded in the book on her lap. She was dimly aware that Molly came in much later, put her book away and extinguished the light, then remembered nothing else until morning.

  •

  Standing on Boulevard des Italiens the following afternoon, Agnes realised this job would not be as simple as she thought. The Parisians lived vertically. On both sides of the road, above shops, apartments stacked up four and five storeys; some floors with arched windows, some with square, and some little more than attic peep-holes. It had rained all day, and the tree branches were weighed down with water, the footpaths were wet and slick. Agnes stood outside a bookstore with an elaborate clock mounted over the door, and practised in her mind the sentence she’d had Molly teach her that morning: Je cherche Genevieve Breckby, ou Genevieve Valentine. I am looking for Genevieve Breckby, or Genevieve Valentine. Of course, she would struggle to understand their answers, but so far she had managed. And she also knew how to ask to please write it down, so she could show Molly later that evening. She took a deep breath and went in.

  Within an hour, she certainly knew the French word for ‘no’. Nobody knew Genevieve, under either surname, but one kind man had told her in broken English that not every shopkeeper knew the names of the people who lived above him, and that she would be better off knocking on every door.

  Knocking on every door? There were hundreds.

  She returned to the first building and crossed the chequerboard floor to the stairwell. She paused a moment, her foot on the bottom step and her hand on the wrought-iron balustrade, and it seemed she could hear her own heart loudly in the echoing space. Then she took a step and another and another, and began knocking on apartment doors. In and out of buildings she went, up and down curving staircases. In some buildings wary concierges would stop her before she could get to a single apartment, utter a declamatory ‘non’ at Agnes’s question about Genevieve, and gesture towards the street. In others, the stairs were in poor repair and no light fell. She stood at the thresholds of apartments with high ceilings and white light gleaming on precious objects with the intensity of Heaven; and at the thresholds of apartments where the floors were rough and bare, the beds were broken or the chairs were non-existent; and at thresholds where the door simply never opened. She asked her question thirty or forty times, ‘Je cherche Genevieve Breckby, ou Genevieve Valentine’; and a hundred times she was greeted with shrugs, shaken heads, or a ‘Je ne la connais pas’, which she came to understand meant something like, I don’t know her.

  Nobody knew her. And when Agnes realised she had spent nearly two hours and had not moved far down the street at all, she felt overwhelmed and tiny. She returned to Maison de Cygnes, to more back-breaking work, to more memorising French words with Molly, and this she repeated day after day. Four days passed and Madame Beaulieu said nothing about their agreement, and so Agnes stayed. In two more days, she might have finished the whole street. But then there were the apartments where nobody had opened the door, or where the concierge had refused to answer her question. She was barely closer to finding Genevieve, and she had to decide whether to stay in Paris, or go back to Marianna and Julius, to the quiet house and the easier life.

  No. She would not retrace her steps, not yet. Surely those who retraced their steps would end up trapped in the same place forever.

  On the fifth day, on her return to the bordello in the late-afternoon light, she passed coming the other way the young woman who had spoken to her at the tea merchant, on the day that Monsieur Valois had been so vile to her. At first, Agnes didn’t take much notice of her, but the young woman stopped and touched Agnes’s shoulder.

  Agnes turned around and said, ‘Good afternoon.’

  ‘Agnes?’ she said.

  ‘Oui.’

  Then the young woman said a long sentence in French; her voice was urgent, and Agnes’s pulse prickled.

  ‘Wait, slow down. Parle lentement. Je ne comprends pas,’ Agnes said.

  The young woman took a deep breath, glanced over her shoulder at the tea merchant, then back to Agnes. ‘A man look for you.’

  ‘What man?’

  More French. Agnes willed herself to understand, but couldn’t.

  ‘Not Monsieur Valois?’ Agnes asked.

  The young woman shook her head. ‘A man look for you,’ she said again, then spread her hands as if to say she couldn’t help any more than that, and went on her way.

  A man look for you.

  What man? Had Madame Beaulieu been bragging about her virginal English rose to her clients? Agnes checked all around her. The buildings were so close together the street had grown dark early. She felt a long way from the wide, well-lit boulevards. She shivered, and went inside.

  •

  Later, an hour or so after Agnes had fallen into an exhausted sleep, her shoulders aching from moving trunks of crockery in the basement, the door to her room opened and Molly came in and lit the lamp. Agnes was used to her late arrivals, so rolled over to go back to sleep, but then she heard Molly sniffing softly as she brushed her hair on the edge of the bed.

  Agnes sat up. ‘Molly?’

  Molly turned to face Agnes, and she sported a swollen cheek with a cut across it. Tears dripped off her chin.

  Agnes threw back her covers. ‘What happened to you?’ She touched Molly’s face, and Molly winced.

  ‘That was his ring,’ she said. ‘The cut. The rest was his fist.’

  ‘One of the clients hit you?’

  Molly nodded. ‘And worse. He threw me across the room. Everything went dark. I woke up and he was …’ She shook her head. ‘He didn’t pay me, and he kicked me in the stomach.’ She parted her robe and lifted her nightgown, and Agnes could see an angry red mark.

  ‘Have you told Madame Beaulieu?’

  ‘No. She’ll be asleep. All will be well. It isn’t the first time I’ve been hit, but it’s certainly the worst. My head is so sore. My face …’ She trailed off into big, open-mouthed sobs that made her look like a little girl.

  Agnes gathered her in her arms and held her tight, rubbing her back. She felt as fragile as a bird. ‘Sh, Molly. Sh. Don’t cry. He’s gone now and he can’t hurt you any more. Madame Beaulieu will make sure he never comes back. I’m going to fetch her right now.’

  Molly extracted herself. ‘I don’t want to wake her or be a bother.’

  ‘It’s her job to protect you.’

  Molly sniffed dubiously. ‘It’s her job to make money. We used to have a man, a big Russian fellow named Oleg, and he guarded the door all night and if one of the clients got rough or didn’t pay, he’d come and sort them out. But he left and she said it wasn’t worth hiring anyone new, as things hardly ever went wrong.’ She wiped her nose on her sleeve. ‘Madame Beaulieu does hate to be woken.’

  ‘Then let her be angry at me. You need to see a physician.’ Agnes pulled on her dressing gown and went to the door. ‘Don’t go to sleep. Once at … where I grew up, there was a girl who fell down a staircase and couldn’t be roused for nearly a minute. Then she sat up and seemed perfectly fine until she went to sleep that night. She never woke up the next morning.’

  Molly nodded, her face drawn and solemn. ‘I’m too sore to sleep anyway.’

  Agnes opened the door and felt her way down the staircase in the dark. She knew which was Madame Beaulieu’s office and which her sitting room, so one of the remaining rooms must be her bedroom. Agnes knocked on each in turn, trying the doors. The first opened on a dark bathroom, the second didn’t open a
t all. But by then, Madame Beaulieu had woken and was standing at the door of her bedroom. In the gloom, her eyes looked almost black. ‘What is that racket?’ she hissed. ‘Is that you, Agnes? What a lot of trouble you are.’

  ‘Molly’s hurt,’ Agnes said. ‘Badly. She’ll need a physician. She’s taken a blow to the head and a kick to the stomach.’ At this last, Agnes’s voice began to tremble as the full horror of the situation sunk in. She had never been safe here. ‘She may have broken bones or bleeding in her skull.’

  ‘So, you’re a nurse now, are you?’ Madame Beaulieu said icily, but nonetheless she closed her bedroom door and said, ‘Come. Take me to her.’

  Agnes led her back up the dark stairs and into the tiny lamp-lit room. Molly sat on the bed. She had her tears under control but the swelling on her face was worse, distorting her eyelid. It was with an odd gratification that Agnes noticed Madame Beaulieu take a sharp intake of breath.

  ‘Who did this to you?’ she asked, sitting next to Molly and gently turning her face to the light.

  ‘Monsieur Bergeron.’

  ‘Did he pay you?’

  ‘No, madame.’

  ‘I will get Sergeant Vermette to apprehend him. Do you need a physician?’

  ‘I don’t want to be a bother.’

  ‘She needs a physician,’ Agnes said emphatically. ‘Look at her. Molly, show her your middle.’

  ‘No, no, I don’t need to see,’ Madame Beaulieu said.

  ‘I can go out and find one,’ Agnes said. ‘Just tell me where to look.’

  ‘We have a physician that we use,’ Madame Beaulieu said, rising to her feet. ‘Molly, get dressed. I shall do the same and meet you at the front door. We shall go to see Doctor Lemaître. He looks after my girls.’ She swept out of the room, and Agnes helped Molly to her feet.

  ‘Will you help me dress?’ Molly asked. ‘I can’t wear a corset.’

  ‘Right you are.’ Agnes turned to her crate. ‘Here, this old house dress of mine will suit. I used to wear it at my last position, in London. I never left the house much.’