Moonlight Over Paris

by Jennifer Robson

  Agnes was wearing one of her glorious velvet devoré caftans, this one in a burnt orange color that ought to have looked dreadful but instead suited her admirably. In her hair, which had been hennaed to a shade that very nearly matched her frock, her aunt wore a peacock feather aigrette, its clip adorned by a diamond the size of a quail’s egg.

  The Hôtel du Cap, which occupied an enviable swath of seafront at the southeastern tip of the cape, was all but deserted in high summer, its wealthy and titled clientele preferring to holiday in milder climes. Monsieur Sella, the hotel’s proprietor, had been planning to shut the hotel for the summer, Sara had confided, but Gerald had persuaded him to keep it open.

  Gerald and Sara were sitting with a single man, his back to them, when she and Agnes arrived. The table, which had been set for five, was at the edge of the dining room, its linen napery fluttering in the soft evening breeze.

  Gerald was the first to notice them. “Sara, darling, they’re here!”

  Just then, the man turned to face Helena and Agnes, and she was astonished to see that it was Sam Howard. It was such a surprise that she simply stood and gawped while Gerald made their introduction.

  “Sam Howard, may I introduce you to the Princess Dimitri Pavlovich, and to her niece, the Lady Helena Montagu-Douglas-Parr. Ladies, may I introduce you to Mr. Sam Howard, a correspondent with the European edition of the Chicago Tribune.”

  “Good evening,” they chimed.

  He was somehow even taller than she remembered, though not as young as she’d first thought, for there were deep-set laugh lines around his dark blue eyes when he smiled. His hair, in the lamplight, looked more brown than auburn, but his freckles were just as noticeable.

  “Good to meet you, Princess Dimitri, Lady Helena.”

  “Please do call me Agnes, or Mrs. Paulson if you’re obsessed with minding your elders. Our royals anglicized their names, so why shouldn’t I? Besides, all that grand duchess folderol seems so terribly old-fashioned to me. I know dear Dimitri expected it, but he was the great-grandson of a czar, after all.”

  “Well, then, Mrs. Paulson it is. Glad to make your acquaintance.”

  It seemed as if Mr. Howard was about to say more, but the arrival of their waiter forestalled any further conversation until everyone had been furnished with their first course of sliced tomatoes with olives and a basil dressing.

  “The chef is short-staffed, so I ordered for the table ahead of time,” Gerald explained. “After this we’ll have grilled leg of lamb, and then some figs and cheese to finish.” Instead of wine, they had one of Gerald’s cocktails with their first course. “I call it ‘Juice of a Few Flowers.’ My own recipe. Orange, lemon, grapefruit, and lime juices, with just a splash of gin. What do you think?”

  Helena took a careful sip, for she had learned to be wary of Gerald’s concoctions, and promptly choked on it when Mr. Howard spoke again.

  “Lady Helena and I actually met earlier today. On the road into town. She was having some trouble with her bike, so I stopped to see if I might help.” He smiled, revealing the boyish dimple in his cheek again.

  “Helena! You didn’t say a thing,” Agnes chided. “You know how I feel about your riding miles and miles on that contraption. You might have become ill with sunstroke.”

  She directed a frostbitten glare at her aunt. “I was fine. I am fine.”

  Mr. Howard drained his cocktail, grimacing a little, and shook his head. “It wasn’t anything worth worrying about, Mrs. Paulson. Just a slipped chain. We fixed it in no time.”

  Helena couldn’t help but smile at his generous use of the collective pronoun. “There was no ‘we,’ I’m afraid. I’d still be there if Mr. Howard hadn’t come along.”

  “You divine man,” Agnes all but cooed. “You must come for lunch—tell me you will. Tomorrow? I insist absolutely.”

  “Oh, Auntie A,” Helena pleaded. “I’m sure Mr. Howard has better things to do than—”

  “I’d love to, but I’m only here a few days,” he explained. “One of my colleagues is in Nice for the summer with his family. They took the train down, but he wanted his Peugeot, too. So we drew straws, all of us on the rewrite desk at the paper, and I won. Wish I could stay longer, though,” he added, and he looked directly at Helena.

  “You’re staying here at the hotel?” Agnes asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Lovely. How long have you known Gerald and Sara?”

  “Oh, three or four years—does that sound right, Gerald?”

  “We have mutual friends in Paris,” Gerald said. “Archie and Ada MacLeish.”

  “Archie and I were friends at Harvard, and then we served together during the war,” Mr. Howard added. “He and Ada have been nice enough to introduce me to people of taste and refinement, unlike the crowd I run with most of the time.”

  “Your colleagues at the newspaper?” Helena asked, belatedly realizing how insulting that sounded. “I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said with a grin. “They’re Philistines, almost to a man. And we deskmen are the worst of the lot.”

  “What’s a deskman?”

  “I work on the rewrite desk most evenings. Though I’ll sub in on days if they need an extra body.”

  She nodded, though she still had no real notion of what he was talking about. “I’ve seen your paper. There was a copy on the train when I came here. It was very interesting.”

  “Thanks. I’m glad you liked it. What do you do, anyway?” he asked.

  It was such a surprising thing to be asked that she yet again found herself lost for words. Most people, after hearing her title, and learning a little about her upbringing, simply assumed she did nothing. That she had no identity beyond being the youngest daughter of the Earl of Halifax.

  Sara answered him first. “Helena is an artist, and we all think she is terribly talented. She’s starting classes in September at the Académie Czerny.”

  “I can vouch for Helena’s talent,” Gerald said. “She has a fine eye, particularly for color. Far better than my own.”

  This was a grand compliment indeed, for Gerald, though largely self-taught, was an artist of some renown, with work that the great Picasso himself had praised. Only that spring, one of his paintings had caused a sensation at the Salon des Indépendants.

  “Gerald and Sara are too kind. I still have so much to learn.”

  “No better place than Paris. Not that I’d know—I can hold a pencil well enough to scribble down notes, but that’s about it. Is that the connection between you and my friends here? Art?”

  “You know, I suppose it is,” Sara answered. “I was in London just before the war, and met Helena when I was there. Of course I was quite a bit older, but we soon discovered we had a lot in common. She came to my rescue one day, when I was trying to champion Cubism to some grandes dames—”

  “You were doing perfectly well on your own,” Helena insisted. “I merely contributed some moral support.”

  “All the same, I was very grateful to find a friend with similar interests and enthusiasms.”

  “I was heartbroken when you and your sisters left for Italy,” Helena added.

  “We’d hoped Helena might visit me in America, but the war got in the way, and then . . . well, you know what they say about one’s best intentions. We’re making up for lost time this summer.”

  Sara and Helena reminisced throughout the rest of the meal, while Mr. Howard divided his attention between Gerald and Agnes. As they were eating the last of the figs that had been serving in lieu of pudding, the Murphys’ children were brought in to say good night. A little surprised by the lateness of their bedtime, Helena glanced at her watch and saw it was only a quarter to nine. Hardly more than an hour had passed since her and Agnes’s arrival at the hotel.

  “Honoria, Baoth, Patrick. Please say good night to Mrs. Paulson and Lady Helena, and to Mr. Howard.”

  “Good night, Mr. Howard,” they chimed, coming round t
o shake his hand. “Good night, Mrs. Paulson. Good night, Ellie.”

  “Good night, my dears,” Helena replied, not minding their use of her childhood nickname at all. “Shall I see you on the beach tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Yes, oh yes! Yes, pleeeeease!” shouted Patrick, who was only four years old. “We’re going on a treasure hunt!”

  Gerald smiled indulgently. “You won’t be going anywhere if you don’t listen to Nanny and hop straight into bed. It’s already an hour past your bedtime.”

  The Murphys were such wonderful parents, and their children really were delightful in every way. It did pain Helena at times, the knowledge that she was unlikely to ever have her own children, but moments like these went a long way in making up for such disappointment. And it was something, besides, to be everyone’s favorite aunt.

  With the children settled and their meal at an end, Gerald suggested they go out to the terrace and watch the sunset. So they trooped after him and stood before the modern, chromed railing as the sun descended ever closer to the wine-dark, slumbering sea.

  Gerald passed around his cigarette case, but Helena’s parents had forbidden her to smoke when she was younger, and consequently she had never taken up the habit. In any case, she quite disliked the smell. Rather to her surprise, Mr. Howard declined as well, and moved a little distance away from the others.

  “Gassed in the war,” he explained. “Smoking just makes it worse.”

  “I see,” she said. “I’m sorry to—”

  “So . . . Ellie,” he said, turning to face her, his hip against the railing. “You don’t seem like an Ellie.”

  “It’s my pet name. From childhood. Didn’t you have one?”

  “Well, I was christened Samuel, so I guess that Sam is it. Never felt like a Samuel. That’s my uncle’s name.”

  “I don’t feel like an Ellie, not really. But I don’t mind when the children use it. Or my aunt.”

  “Earlier, when I was fixing your bike, you introduced yourself as Helena Parr.”

  “I’m only the daughter of an earl,” she protested. “The ‘lady’ is a courtesy title; no more. I’m nothing in my own right.”

  “Aren’t you?” he asked, suddenly serious.

  “You know what I mean. It’s something that belongs to my father, not me. That’s why I don’t like to use it. And it does seem rather, well, pretentious. Especially when speaking with an American. Please call me Miss Parr.”

  “Would you mind if I called you Ellie instead?”

  Oddly enough, she wouldn’t. “No,” she said, and found herself smiling up at him.

  “And would you mind if I join you at the beach tomorrow?”

  “Not at all. Do you know how to dig for buried treasure? Build a sand castle? The children will expect us all to join in.”

  “Does an American know how to play baseball? Of course I do.”

  “Then I’ll—”

  “Helena, dear, do you mind awfully if we trundle back home?” Aunt Agnes called.

  “No, I don’t mind.” She took a step back from Mr. Howard and offered her hand. He shook it firmly, just as he’d shake hands with a man. “Good night, then,” she said.

  “Good night, Ellie. See you tomorrow.”

  Agnes, normally so chatty at the end of an evening out, complained of a headache as they got into the coupe for the short trip home, and the resulting silence gave Helena a chance to reflect on their dinner with the Murphys and Mr. Howard. She decided that she rather liked him, and not only because he was handsome and interesting and really quite amusing. He was, she reflected, simply unlike any man she’d ever met in her circle of acquaintance at home. He was honest and straightforward, and she hadn’t discerned even a hint of artifice or pretense in his manner.

  With the exception of Gerald, whom she knew by virtue of her friendship with Sara, she’d never had a male friend before. There had been her fiancé, and before him a handful of suitors, but she couldn’t honestly say they’d known anything about her. Certainly she’d never felt she could speak to them with candor, or share her thoughts and feelings in any meaningful way. Yet Mr. Howard, on the strength of a few hours’ acquaintance, had asked her questions and, even more surprising, had actually listened to her answers.

  Most surprising of all, she’d managed to speak with him as Helena Parr, a confident and articulate adult. The shy and awkward debutante of ten years past? Gone. The rejected fiancée, so cringing and apologetic, of five years ago? Absent.

  Just the thought of it made her smile. And it made her wonder: here, in France, might she finally be free of the past?

  Chapter 6

  Helena rose at dawn the next day, and spent a happy and solitary morning in her studio, fortifying herself with cups of tea from her aunt’s silver samovar. She fueled it with lumps of the ersatz coal the French called boulots, which threw off about as much heat as a firefly’s dying breath, but the samovar didn’t seem to mind. It did look rather ridiculous amid such rustic surroundings, but it boiled water quickly without heating the already-warm studio and meant she didn’t have to invade Jeanne’s kitchen whenever she wanted a cup of tea.

  Having decided to work up one or two of her sketches from the day before in pastels, she looked them over and chose one that was little more than a few penciled lines. A swath of lavender had colonized a ruined drystone wall, rooting wherever pockets of soil had collected, and she’d been entranced at the way the plants spilled in a leggy jumble over the scattered blocks, as if there were no place on earth they’d rather be growing.

  She began with blocks of color, which she pressed onto the paper with broken pieces of hard chalk pastels: a pale gray, almost white, for the mass of the wall, a bluish gray for the undulating mass of the foliage, and airy smudges of cornflower blue and violet for the blossoms. Dipping a flat brush in water, she used its damp bristles to sharpen the pigments here and there, adding intensity to the blossoms and depth to the ruined wall. She worked quickly, never lingering in any one spot for fear of overworking the pigments.

  At this stage, the painting needed some time to dry, so she made herself a cup of tea, washed and dried the brush she’d used, and walked down to the edge of the top garden terrace. The sky was a dazzling blue already, without a shred of morning cloud. It would be another fine day, and very hot. Perfect weather for an afternoon on the beach.

  She stood at the edge of the terrace and sipped at her tea, and tried to recall what life had been like before she had discovered she could draw.

  She could still remember, if vaguely, how she had loved to make sketches of her toys and pets when she was very little, and how her parents had been pleased when presented with examples of her artwork by her nanny and governesses. No one had ever encouraged her to do anything more, however, and after a while she had become frustrated by her inability to capture what her eyes saw.

  And then, the year she’d turned twelve, Miss Renfrew had been engaged as governess to her and Amalia. The woman hadn’t been especially friendly or kind, and most of her lessons had been extremely boring, but she had known a little about art. Miss Renfrew had taught Helena the basic rules of composition and perspective, had shown her how to use pastels and watercolors, and had encouraged her to always carry a sketchbook and pencils, just in case inspiration struck when she was far from home. When Miss Renfrew had been replaced by another, less artistically inclined governess the following year, Helena had been disconsolate, but she hadn’t given up. She had, instead, saved for months to buy an illustrated guide to figure drawing, and once she had memorized its precepts she had bought and devoured similar volumes devoted to watercolors and pastels.

  And there she might have stayed, a self-taught but woefully inexperienced artist, if not for the war.

  In the early years of the conflict, she hadn’t done much in the way of volunteer work, apart from the same sort of Red Cross meetings and bandage-rolling parties that every other girl her age seemed to do. She had been bored and restless, and before long had
started to pester her mother for permission to do more.

  It had taken months and months, but eventually she had worn Mama down. By the middle of 1917 she had begun to volunteer at a small auxiliary hospital in Grosvenor Square. At first her work had been confined to letter-writing for men too weak to do so themselves, but one day she had found herself at loose ends, and without anything else to do had pulled out her ever-present sketchbook and pencil and had sketched one of the wounded men. He had been turned away from her, his face in profile, and it had been surprisingly easy to capture his likeness. One of the nurses had noticed, and complimented her, and soon every patient on the ward was asking for a portrait to send home.

  Art had sustained her that year and the next, all those long, bleak months at the rag end of the war after Edward had gone missing and her happy, naïve dreams for the future had melted away like so much sand before the tide. In the years that followed, art had become her salvation. No matter how horrid people had been to her, no matter how lonely she had become, she’d always been able to escape to her room, to her easel by the window where the light was best, and forget everything.

  Helena returned to her easel, again working with fragments of hard pastels, breaking them as needed to find a sharp edge for the details she sought. A mossy green traced the length of individual stalks of lavender, a shard of dark indigo further shadowed the crevices between the wall’s ancient stones, and tiny pools of warm white, softened with her fingertip, caught the fractal path of sunbeams through a parasol of olive leaves.

  She took a step back and surveyed her work. It was a simple scene, nothing that would ever turn the world on end, but it nonetheless filled her with a deep sense of satisfaction. Out of nothing more than a sheet of paper and a handful of broken pastels, she had created something beautiful.

  And a year from now? What would she be capable of creating then? The possibilities alone were enough to make her feel nearly dizzy with excitement.