The Paris Seamstress by Natasha Lester (12)

God she was beautiful. Alex kept the thought strictly locked away, far behind his eyes, as he watched her finger drop from her lips. Her face, so easy to read, moved through shock, annoyance, and anger, and he read her move to close the door just in time, stopping it with his shoulder and stepping into the apartment.

He took in the bed, shoved over to one side, the man sleeping in it, face turned away from the door. Alex couldn’t stop the movement of one eyebrow upward; he hadn’t realized she had a lover. But why shouldn’t she? Everyone else did. A sewing machine, fabric sprawled immodestly across a kitchen table, a rack on which hung two dresses. The lack of her in the room besides those things. She either didn’t stay here often or the man in the bed preferred she keep her belongings elsewhere. He was just glad he’d been able to find her here, rather than at the Barbizon, which would have challenged even his abilities to get inside secure buildings.

The wireless crackled and de Gaulle’s voice concluded its speech. Good. She listened. She hadn’t put France out of sight and out of mind. Because France needed everyone to care if the British were ever going to defeat Germany at a game the Allies were scrambling to play.

“I suppose I needn’t ask how you found me?” she said in a chilly voice, the distance of a hundred miles between them. “I imagine it’s the first thing they teach you at spy school; to hunt down unwilling parties to interrogate.”

“I didn’t come to interrogate you.”

“How did you meet Lena?” she asked abruptly.

How to answer that question without adding a million more miles to the distance that already separated them? “I met Lena six months ago. Here in Manhattan. Not long after I met you.”

“What are the chances,” she mused, “of you meeting both of us in different countries within a few weeks?”

Alex couldn’t help it. He gave a small laugh.

The tiniest hint of a smile touched the corners of Estella’s mouth, making her, if possible, even more beautiful. Even that minute suggestion of amusement added stars to her silvery-gray eyes. But a movement from the man in the bed removed her smile before it became indelible.

“How hard does he hit?” Alex asked about the man he assumed was her lover.

“I can wake him up and find out if you like,” Estella said.

Alex gave another muffled laugh. “Perhaps if we talk over there,” he indicated the table, “then I won’t need to.”

“Cake?” Estella asked, holding up a plate of the most deliciously fudgy-looking chocolate cake Alex had ever seen.

He nodded and she cut two slices and poured two glasses of whiskey, mixing her own into a sidecar. He chose the cake over the drink, taking an enormous bite. It took him a moment before he could speak. “That is possibly the best food I’ve ever had after midnight.”

“I used to make it at least once a week. It was my regular snack after I arrived home from a night out in Montmartre.”

“You made it?”

“I can do other things besides look the same as the women you sleep with.”

Alex’s laugh was a gasp. “I take it back. You’re more than prickly. France would have had more luck if they’d used you on the Maginot Line for their defenses.”

It was the smallest of sounds but it was definitely a laugh and it had definitely come from Estella. “Point made,” she said and this time she tossed him a real smile and he caught his breath. She was stunning. Completely, utterly bewitching and he needed to get his head back in order—and definitely not drink the whiskey—if this was going to end up anywhere other than him kissing her.

“I’m not kissing you again, by the way,” she said.

For the first time in a very long time he felt himself blushing. Did she read minds too? “Glad we’ve established that, and the fact you can smile if you want to.”

“What about we make a deal? I’ll stop being prickly if you stop flirting.”

“I’m not flirting.”

“You can’t help yourself. You don’t even know you’re doing it.” Her smile vanished.

Shame. He knew what it was the instant it seized his gut with its unfamiliar fist. He was behaving appallingly and he had to stop. He swallowed the whiskey, despite his vow not to, and put on the impassive face of the man who’d faced much more difficult and dangerous situations than Estella, the man so used to not being who he really was that he could no longer be Alex Montrose no matter how hard he tried to find a way back to him.

She noticed the shift in his demeanor. “That’s better,” she said quietly.

“And you’re making a lot of assumptions about Lena and me.”

“A man doesn’t kiss a woman the way you kissed me unless he’s sleeping with her.”

“No.” He paused. Unless he has slept with her. Once. Past tense, not present. “I thought you might want to read this,” he said, passing her a newspaper article, and helping himself to more of the cake. “I know Lena didn’t explain a lot the other night. It’s…hard for her to talk about Harry. But this might tell you who he is.”

He watched her eyes skim over the words Lena had shown him months before.

Below that piece of breathless reporting were photographs of three people: Thaw himself, or, as the newspaper called him, the “millionaire slayer”; the murder victim, an architect by the name of Stanford White; and Thaw’s wife, Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, an actress whose marriage to Harry the previous year had, according to the newspaper, caused its own sensation. Estella rolled her eyes and Alex knew she was wondering what any of those people had to do with her. But she read on anyway.

Estella put the newspaper down. “I need a drink.” She finished her sidecar. “What happened to him in the end? I’m not sure I can read any more.”

“To Thaw?”

She nodded.

He produced another article with more garish headlines by way of explanation. “He had a history of drug-taking and erratic behavior which meant that he was able to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. But he only served a few years before another team of lawyers proved he was no longer insane and arranged his release—don’t forget he had a lot of money. Evelyn filed for divorce then.”

“If what the paper says is true about what he did to her in Paris, why did she ever marry him in the first place?”

Alex shrugged. “I guess she was young. Young people do foolish things.” Which skated dangerously close to the truth of his own past so he pointed at the article to bring the conversation back to Harry Thaw, and thus to Lena. “Before the Thaws took in Lena, Harry whipped and abused a boy almost into unconsciousness in late 1916. He was found insane and locked up again. But it only took him seven years to prove his sanity this time and to be released. At which time he took on the care of Lena from his mother.”

“He doesn’t sound like much of a father figure,” Estella said with a frown.

“He wasn’t,” Alex replied shortly, wishing to God that Lena would just tell Estella what Harry had done to her, certain it would arouse her sympathy. But Lena had expressly forbidden it. So he was doing what he could, without betraying Lena’s confidence, to make Estella understand at least part of it. Because, like everyone else, he had no real idea of what any of this meant, of how it might connect Lena and Estella.

She stood up suddenly, surprising him. He’d relaxed too much with the whiskey and the goddamn cake. He sat up straighter, waiting.

She leaned her back against the wall and studied him in return. “Tell me about you.”

He reached over and switched off the lamp. “It’s bright in here for two in the morning. And no, I’m not turning off the light in an attempt to seduce you.” It was better without the lights. More places to hide. “What do you want to know?” he asked.

“Where are you from? How did you become a spy? And who are you spying for now?”

“Is that all?” he replied, pretending to joke but she didn’t respond. He supposed he owed her some information. He folded his arms across his chest, making sure to keep his face blank. “I’m from everywhere and nowhere,” he said lightly. “Born in London, son of a diplomat. I’ve lived in France, London, Shanghai, Florence, and even Hong Kong. I went to university here in New York, which gives me cover of being American; if I was in France as an Englishman I’d be interned. Whereas America is still neutral. I chose my job because I can speak more languages than most, because whispered conversations and politics are in my blood, and because it pays me a lot of money. And that’s about all I can say. Now, what about you?”

Estella turned to the window and stood with her back to him, looking out on the real witching hour of New York, the slice of time between true night and morning. When she spoke, her voice was expressionless and he listened hard for a change in inflection that would point him to the truth that would naturally lie somewhere between what she would say and what he heard.

“Apparently my father is American. I have American papers. My mother was abandoned as a baby and raised by nuns in a convent; they taught her to sew. She had me when she was only fifteen, told me that my father was a French soldier in the Great War, that he married her one day, and died the next. But if I have American papers, then none of what she told me is true.”

“You know as little about your background as Lena,” he said slowly.

“Which might not mean anything.” She turned a little, her face silhouetted by the streetlights, the same face he’d seen walking through the door at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal, the same breath-stealing, gut-punching, groin-stirring silhouette that he hadn’t forgotten at all. The face and the body that he thought he’d found in Lena until he’d realized, after just one night with her, that she didn’t have the spirit he remembered from Paris.

“Or it could mean everything,” he said.

“Why are you so interested in this?” she snapped. “It has nothing to do with you. Is it for Lena? Do you love her?”

They were the worst possible questions to have to answer. And she misread the silence.

“She loves you but you don’t love her,” Estella surmised. “You have quite a reputation, you know. The people at Lena’s party spoke of you as if you were as easy as a child’s puzzle.”

On any other occasion he would have laughed and shrugged. So, the whole world thought he was a womanizer. What did it matter? He was a womanizer. He was a man without a life, with a house in three countries, all of them hardly lived in, rootless, moving from one assignment to the next, living in the shadows, dealing with the kind of men she could never imagine existed. But, somehow, it mattered what she thought and she was staring at him as if she could see far inside him, to the person he used to be. As if she’d found what he’d thought was lost, leaving him, for the first time in his life, utterly discomposed.

“I’m here because I got you into trouble in Paris,” he said. “I’m here because Lena deserves a proper family and maybe you’re it. I’m here because…” I want to do one decent thing in my life was the part he couldn’t bring himself to say.

He stood up. “Talk to Lena,” he said abruptly. “Think of her for just one minute. Go and see her like you said you would. She needs you. She’s infamous because of Harry Thaw’s cursed legacy—and his money—which means she’s either treated like a curiosity or a momentarily diverting objet. She has no friends.” He stopped. Lena would be furious if she knew what he’d said about her, despite the fact that it was true. “You needn’t worry about me hunting you down again,” he finished brusquely. “I’m going away.” Then he left before he got involved in something that, as Estella had said, didn’t really concern him.

For the rest of the night, Estella replayed Alex’s words in her head: I’m here because Lena deserves a proper family and maybe you’re it. Think of her for just one minute. He’d shamed her. Made her see that, whatever was happening, it wasn’t just about Estella and her feelings. It was about Lena, another human being who had feelings too. And she’d promised Lena she would go and see her, but she hadn’t. It was time.

On her very next day off work, Estella took the subway to Gramercy Park, emerging into a foul day, rain beating down upon her head, the wind trying to tear off her coat. But even the weather couldn’t disguise the fact that it was a beautiful neighborhood, the square lined with gracious and ornate apartment buildings and townhouses. The park stood in the center, its locked gate keeping out anyone besides the residents who held keys, the black iron railings saying more about the exclusivity of the area than any number of butlers ever could.

Lena’s townhouse crouched like an unloved child on the street, resolutely determined to hide its sadness behind its grand facade but it seeped out anyway. Estella shivered and knocked on the door.

An older woman, thin and tall, like a Dickensian schoolmistress answered. “You must be Estella,” she said, with a warmth at odds with her spare figure. “Lena asked me to give you this.”

It was a note that said: I don’t know if you’ll get this but I’ve had to go away for a while. I hope you’ll see me when I return. You can still use the townhouse for the showing. My housekeeper, Mrs. Pardy, will help you with anything you need. Lena.

Estella crumpled the note in her fist. Alex had said he was going away. Now Lena had too. Most likely for a lovers’ rendezvous, leaving her with all the questions and none of the answers. Which she knew wasn’t entirely fair. Lena had asked her to come before the New Year. But she hadn’t.

“Come in,” the woman who must be Mrs. Pardy said. “I’ll get tea and cake for us.”

“Thank you,” Estella said.

She followed Mrs. Pardy down the hall, marveling at the way tasteful furniture, and walls lined with modern art—spanning Frida Kahlo’s exuberant use of color to the mind-bending trickery of Magritte—could transform the house she’d known in Paris as cold, neglected, even cursed, into something quite breathtaking. The entry void was magnificent, rising up to draw the eye to the inlaid and painted wooden ceiling. The furniture was Art Deco, sleek, polished metal, wood, and stone, the lines softened by the paintings and the use of luxurious fabrics for the drapes and sofas. Lena, she had to admit, had excellent taste.

Mrs. Pardy threw open the doors to a cozy room that, in the Marais house, had felt compressed by spiderwebs and disrepair. She invited Estella to sit, disappeared and emerged a few minutes later with a plate of pastries so similar to the ones Estella used to buy to go with her morning coffee that she almost felt as if she was back in Paris.

“This is delicious,” she said, picking pastry crumbs off her dress and smiling at Mrs. Pardy.

“Lena said you were French and I’ve always loved working with pastry.”

Estella put down her plate. Lena had thought to tell her housekeeper about Estella. She was as complicated and twisty as Alex, like a hedged maze in a French château: lovely to look at but terrifyingly complicated once inside. “That was kind of her,” she said. “How long have you worked for her?” A nosy question, she knew.

“Four years. Ever since Lena turned nineteen and took this house as her own. There’s nowhere I’d rather work. You’d have to search high and low for a mistress as good as Miss Thaw.”

“Really?” said Estella, unable to keep the surprise from her voice.

“Of course. She might be quiet on the outside but I prefer to think of her as restrained. Not like other ladies of money who can’t wait to spread it all around like butter.”

“Yes.” Estella nodded. “She is restrained. It’s very good of her to let me use the house. Are you sure she won’t mind?”

“She’d be most upset if you didn’t. She gave me strict instructions that I was to pay you a visit if you didn’t come by the end of the month. Shall I show you around?”

Estella wolfed down the last of her pastry and stood up.

“She suggested the models use this parlor for changing their outfits,” said Mrs. Pardy, gesturing to the room they were in. “Then they can walk down the hall to the front sitting room which looks over the park. It’s a lovely room.”

A lovely room. It was a gross understatement. Mrs. Pardy opened a door and Estella stepped into the loveliest room she had ever seen. Sure, she’d grown up in a two-room apartment on the top floor of a rundown building in a rundown part of Paris, where there was no running water and a shared toilet on the landing, so her points of comparison weren’t strong. But she’d also been in hotel rooms in the Ritz to hand over sketches to American buyers and those rooms had been wonderful. As was this one, with a view of the park that made it feel like a glasshouse, a row of windows looking out over lawn and leaf and shrub.

Over the fireplace hung another Frida Kahlo portrait, or rather a double portrait: two Frida Kahlos sat in chairs, their hearts exposed. From each heart ran a thread of vein joining one woman to the other. Estella couldn’t help but study it, wondering what it meant. Did Lena know that Estella had existed prior to their meeting or was it some force of sheer coincidence that had caused her to buy a painting of two identical women joined by the most tenuous, but also the most sacred of bonds: blood.

“That picture gives me the willies,” Mrs. Pardy admitted. “Can’t bear to see their hearts sitting on top of their dresses like that, for all the world to see.”

“It makes them fragile,” Estella said.

“It makes them macabre.”

Estella forced her eyes away from the picture. “The room is perfect.”

“That’s settled then. Miss Thaw left a list of people she thought should be invited. I’ll arrange to have invitations posted to them when you’re ready.”

“Thank you.” Estella felt horribly guilty for the way she’d delayed meeting Lena again. Lena had thought about which rooms Estella should use, had left her a list of names. But why had Lena run off?

“It’s my pleasure.” Mrs. Pardy beamed. “I like the house to have people in it. I’ll prepare some tasty treats for everyone to nibble on. We want them to be well fed and happy so they’ll buy lots of dresses.”

“That would be wonderful,” Estella said, laughing. “I feel almost too lucky to have this.”

“Nonsense, my dear. The skill and ability to put together a collection of dresses doesn’t come without hard work. Why don’t we meet each week in the lead-up to the showing? Then you’ll be assured that everything’s going smoothly. Now, before I forget, Miss Thaw wanted you to see this.”

Mrs. Pardy led the way upstairs to what Estella imagined was meant to be a bedroom. It was empty, save for a long table that Estella recognized as the twin of the kitchen table in the house in the Marais. The one before her now had an antique air about it whereas the one in the Marais had only the neglect of age visible in its surface. A piano—a Bösendorfer, the same as the one in an upstairs room in the house on the Rue de Sévigné—stood beneath a cathedral window that looked over the park, where bare tree branches waved to Estella, welcoming her.

“Miss Thaw said you could work here if you wanted to,” Mrs. Pardy said. “That you’d have more room than you do at present.”

“It’s far too much,” Estella protested.

“The house will be empty for three months or so. There’ll be no one here besides me. I’d like the company. It’s a house that doesn’t do well when left alone. It becomes…” Mrs. Pardy hesitated. “It starts to feel bedeviled.” She smiled a little. “Listen to me. Being a fool.”

“No. I understand exactly.” It was how the house in the Marais had always felt to Estella, as if it had, once upon a time, been a happy place. That happiness sometimes leaked out of its walls, making its neglect all the more haunting. As if it was trying to recover a time in the past that had been long forgotten. “What I don’t understand is why Lena’s being so generous.”

Mrs. Pardy smiled. “People don’t think it because she’s so reserved but Miss Thaw is one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. And there can be no doubt that you two are related in some way. I’ve never seen two people so alike. Miss Thaw has no real family. Perhaps it’s her way of welcoming you in, of saying that she’d like to know more about you.”

As Alex had forced her to, Estella again saw the situation from Lena’s point of view. Growing up without any parents, with a guardian who was, from Alex’s account, notorious and dangerous, couldn’t have been easy. How would you become anything other than reserved if you’d known so little love? Estella felt her heart contract with remorse; she’d been so abrupt, rude almost, to Lena and here was Lena offering her a work space, giving her everything she wanted when Estella hadn’t offered anything more than suspicion.

“If you’re in contact with her,” Estella said, “please tell her thank you very much. That I’ll repay her in dresses.”

“She’d love that.”

“She’s away for a few months, you said? That’ll give me plenty of time to make some things for her.”

Mrs. Pardy nodded. “Yes. A pity; I thought she’d found a man who interested her. Seems I was wrong.”

“She’s not gone with Alex?”

“No, she’s not gone with Mr. Montrose.” Mrs. Pardy sighed. “Shame about that. I think if she could just fall in love…” She stopped. “Well, falling in love is a good thing for anyone, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it is,” Estella said.

As she left the house, with a box of pastries in hand, forced on her by Mrs. Pardy, she reflected that she was the wrong person to ask such a question of. Her mother, as far as she knew, had never been in love with anyone. Estella had slept with two men in Paris, neither of whom she loved, and had only done so in an attempt to assuage her latent curiosity about this emotion that had been documented in so many books, in movies, in art, everywhere. She might have been almost torpedoed by a German U-boat, might have witnessed the poor and the starving and the desperate flooding out of Paris and away from a sinister enemy, might have somehow helped an Allied spy smuggle maps out of Paris, but she’d never been in love. And she mightn’t ever be, not now. She had no time for love. She had a show to get off the ground.