July 1941
For weeks after the disastrous showing, Estella got up every morning and went to work at André Studios. She sketched copies without comment, dutifully and well, doing only as she was asked. She read the first of the newspaper reports of the showing, which were no more than gossip columns speculating on her relationship to Lena and which mentioned, right at the end, that she made clothes. She stopped reading them after that. She did not sketch anything of her own. She did not sew. At nighttime she dreamed because that was the best place to have fantasies, in the dark where nobody could see them.
She returned the first of Elizabeth Hawes’s telephone calls and thanked her for her assistance, apologized for letting her down and said, “I think you were right. That all the beautiful clothes are made in the houses of the French couturiers and all women want them.”
“I wrote that two years ago,” Elizabeth said bluntly. “Things are changing and you know it.”
“Yes,” Estella said. “Things are changing. I’ve learned not to be so overconfident. That unthinking optimism only turns out badly.”
And so she existed in the life she’d dreaded. Without her mother. In a strange land. Doing a job she detested. But she’d spent all her money, and scattered all her contacts with Harry Thaw’s maniacal giggles. What she did have, she could count on one hand: a cot bed in a room at the Barbizon; Janie’s and Sam’s friendship, which seemed unshakable despite everything; twenty clothing samples that she couldn’t bear to look at. What she didn’t have was a list far too long for anyone’s hand: her own atelier, her own designs sold in stores, a reason to do more than survive, a safe homeland, a mother who hadn’t lied.
In spite of his gravest misgivings and only after trying everything else he could think of, Alex found that he needed Estella’s help. One night in late July, after he’d returned to New York, he told Lena what he hoped to do and she nodded. A small gesture, bleak, hopeless, but that was Lena. A person wafting through life with no expectation of happiness or pleasure. Which was why he also had to help both Lena and Estella sort out their own mess.
Luckily for him, it turned out that Estella’s friend Janie was dating a big-shot banker who was having a society party the following night to which Lena had been invited. Janie would be there with her friends—Estella and that man, Sam, who Alex still hadn’t been able to properly place in Estella’s life.
“You can come as my date,” Lena said and he didn’t know if she was being bitter or pragmatic.
He chose to believe the latter and, when he collected her the following evening, she looked as stunning as ever in a gown made for her: silvery fabric that showed off her cleavage and a strand of spectacular pearls around her neck that he knew would never get the same attention that the body they adorned would.
“You look incredible,” he said as he kissed her cheek. He felt her shift a little so the kiss fell on the corner of her mouth.
I’m sorry, Lena, he wanted to say but then Lena smiled and said, indicating the dress, “It’s one of Estella’s. She made it for me.”
“She’s very good.”
“She is,” Lena replied, voice inscrutable.
When they arrived at the house on the Upper West Side, Alex saw Estella as soon as he entered the ballroom; she wore a black velvet dress the same color as her hair and she looked like midnight come to life. The gown had a strap that sat just below one shoulder; the other shoulder was bare and her creamy white skin beckoned a hand to run down the line of her neck. He breathed in sharply and Lena noticed.
“She looks beautiful,” Lena said.
“Like you,” he replied.
Lena moved away, drawn into a crowd of people who kept her like a pet for her infamy, just as they kept debauched Hollywood stars and Broadway showgirls for the frisson. He heard the rustle of gossip as fingers pointed subtly at Estella and at Lena, wondering about the likeness, eager for the latest installment in the legend of Lena’s notorious life. He frowned, seeing Lena’s back straighten into a false confidence that belied the way he knew she would feel about the whispers. At the same time as he made up his mind to join her—to shield her from the murmurings—she shook her head at him, which he should have expected. Lena always liked to fight her own battles.
So Alex turned his attention back to Estella, hoping she wasn’t aware she was the subject of rumor and speculation too. He watched her sip champagne and pretend to listen to a man who was flirting with her as appallingly as a schoolboy. Her eyes roamed the room and settled upon something that seemed to please her because she smiled a little and lifted one eyebrow and Alex could see that Sam was the recipient of those facial antics.
Estella made as if to move away and the callow youth bellowed loudly and enthusiastically at her, “Come find me when you finish powdering your nose.”
“She’s above your pay-grade,” Alex muttered as he strode over, lighting a cigarette and drawing on it deeply before taking his place next to her at the bar. “Sidecar?” he asked and she nodded.
“You’ve reappeared from wherever you vanished to. And Lena too, I see,” Estella said.
“Where’s Lena been?” he asked.
“How should I know?”
The barman passed them their drinks.
“You look…” He stopped. There wasn’t a word in the entire English language that would do. “Exquise,” he finished in French, which somehow seemed a closer approximation to what he meant.
“Merci.”
“Do you miss it?” he asked abruptly. “Speaking French? Being French?”
“I’m still French, aren’t I?” she asked lightly but her eyes had darkened from dusk to almost night.
“Do you still feel French here in Manhattan?”
“I don’t know what I feel,” she said and the pining in her voice, for what he didn’t know—wondered even if she knew—made his next words come out in entirely the wrong way and in entirely the wrong moment.
“Here,” he said, passing her a paper, a facsimile of one he’d found in Paris. The matrice cadastrale, or land ownership document; it showed that Evelyn Nesbit had sold the house on the Rue de Sévigné to Estella’s mother for the queenly sum of just one franc.
Estella’s face turned bloodless. She looked at him as if he was the most hateful man in the world and stalked off, out the front door.
He caught up to her on West 77th and let her walk on for a minute to let off some of the steam he’d once again caused.
“Can we stop?” he asked, but she didn’t reply.
“Please?” he put a hand on her arm which was a huge mistake because it was like putting his finger into a blazing fire. That even touching the skin of her upper arm could make him feel that way was shocking. But she stopped walking and he schooled himself to be composed, pretended she had a gun in her hand and it was his job just to get out of there with his wits, if not his life.
“Why are you doing this?” she whispered and her voice held so much pain that it even made his stony heart feel something.
So that you don’t turn out like me and Lena: ruined people, skeletons lacking heart and soul. “For Lena,” he said instead.
“You do love her?” she asked.
He nodded, because he did, just not in the way she thought. And if pretending to love Lena was what it took to get her to listen, that’s what he’d do.
“Where did you get that?” she asked quietly, glancing at his pocket as if it contained something dangerous and explosive which of course it did.
“Can we go somewhere and talk?” he asked. “Standing on street corners is all very well but not for this conversation.”
Estella lifted her head. “Your house,” she said, laying down a challenge. “I’ll talk to you at your house.”
The pause that followed stretched on and on. She somehow always managed to pick the one thing to say that made him acutely uncomfortable, giving him no choice but to forestall her, thus coming off as even more hateful than she already thought he was.
She turned away when he didn’t answer. “I knew it,” she said. “You poke around in my life but keep yours as well protected as Wolf’s Lair.”
He forced himself to say his next words because she was right and they both knew it. “Okay,” he called after her. “I’ll take you to my house. It’s quite a drive.”
“It’s only nine o’clock. I’m sure we have time,” she said in that same provoking voice.
He led her back to his car and drove northward, out of the city. She didn’t say anything, just watched Manhattan slip past, and then the green of upstate, the flow of the Hudson, the slow unrolling of city into paradise. Not that much of it could be seen in the dark but flashes of light every now and again showed just enough to make it clear that they were encroaching on a pastoral scene.
“What did Harry Thaw do to Lena?” she asked suddenly.
“I think you should ask Lena that,” he said. “It’s her story to tell. Or not.”
She was quiet again and he was glad she didn’t push. But her next question was, “What’s your story then?”
“I told you,” he said glibly. “Son of a…”
“Diplomat. Yes, I know what you told me. But there’s a hell of a lot more to that story than what you said. I want to hear it.”
She folded her arms determinedly across her chest and looked at him with those dazzling eyes, brilliantly silver. Ordinarily if he was in a car like this with a woman like that he’d be working out a way—no, he’d have already found a way—to talk her out of her dress. He frowned. Perhaps he ought to tell her some of what she wanted to know. At least it would send his thoughts along a more decorous line.
“My father was a diplomat,” he began and held up one hand at her impatient click of the tongue. “If you want me to tell you, I’m going to do it my way.”
She nodded, granting him permission to continue.
And then it came out, so much more truth than he’d ever told anyone. “He pimped me out, for want of a better expression,” Alex said flatly, eyes fixed on the road ahead, not wanting to see her face as he spoke. “I was a gun for hire for every crook, thief, rogue, and swindler in Rome, Paris, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Berlin from the time I was twelve to the time I was seventeen. We were moved every year because the British government knew something was rotten but all they could pin on my father was the smell, not the carcass. I ran drugs, I ran guns, I ran government secrets: everything illicit you’ve ever heard of and more.”
Estella shifted in her seat. “That’s not what I was expecting you to say,” she said, somewhat apologetically. “I thought it would be a story of…” She hesitated.
“Boy born into money and prestige behaving badly?” he suggested. “It is, in a way.”
“Just not quite the way I’d thought.”
“Shall I stop?”
“No. Tell me why you went along with it. You’re not the sort of person who seems easily pushed around, even as a boy.”
If he’d been hoping for a reprieve, he wasn’t getting one. “Because of my mother.” He stopped then, the words cutting too close to agony, to feelings he’d become so expert at excising from his heart. But then, unbelievably, beneath Estella’s now gentle gaze, he kept talking.
“She had tuberculosis,” he said. “Had been unwell for years. She was in pain and my father didn’t care but I did and he knew it. He told me he wouldn’t buy her the medicine she needed, wouldn’t pay for the doctors, unless I helped him out with his sidelines. So every time I passed on information or jewels or weapons or drugs I told myself I’d just bought my mother another day of care.”
“I’m sorry,” Estella whispered, stretching out her fingers toward him and then withdrawing them. “You’re right. It’s none of my business.”
He was able to let it go because they’d finally arrived at his home in the Hudson Valley, just past Sleepy Hollow, a house he’d bought for himself three years earlier, and where he’d barely lived for more than three months across those three years, a place nobody knew about. Until now.
He pulled up at the front door and climbed out, walking around to open her door but she’d already done it, her heels sinking into the gravel, her mouth dropping open at the sight of the house, at the points of light from the closest town shimmering on the satin ribbon of the river that lay far down below. The classic facade before them, fashioned from the region’s cream-colored fieldstone, was suddenly lit up and Alex knew the housekeeper must have heard them and turned on the lights.
Estella swore softly in French. “It’s very impressive. No, it’s beautiful.”
And it was, he knew. It was why he’d bought it. A place that felt like a castle in the air, a sanctuary where the real world had not yet found a way in.
“It’s like looking at a gown fashioned by a master,” she said, eyes traveling over the house, “where every stitch, every pleat, every fold has been made with the kind of devotion I feel when I sit down to make a dress.” She blushed. “I’m raving. Sorry.”
“That’s how I feel too. But less poetically.”
He smiled at her and, for only the second time since he’d met her, she smiled back and he felt that maybe it would all work out. That he could help her and Lena find out what bound them, that it would unshackle Lena—who was the innocent victim of a cruel man just like his mother had been. That Lena might find the love she craved with Estella, who must surely be Lena’s sister.
Then the front door opened and the housekeeper, the plump and always smiling Mrs. Gilbert, waddled down the stairs and kissed his cheek.
“One day, you’ll give me some notice that you’re coming,” she said, scolding him in a way that nobody ever did. “How long are you here for this time?” she asked.
“Just the night, I think?” He looked questioningly at Estella who frowned. He realized his mistake and added, hastily, “This is Miss Estella Bissette. She needs her own room made up. Perhaps in the east wing.” He added, so that Estella perfectly understood his intentions, “My room is on the opposite side of the house.”
“Good,” Estella said and all the camaraderie of before dissolved like a Nazi politician’s promise.
“Come with me, dearie,” Mrs. Gilbert said, beckoning Estella through. “I’ll show you where you can freshen up and I’ll put out some dinner for you in the sitting room.”
“Thank you,” Alex said, letting his housekeeper take Estella away, making sure they were well upstairs before he made his way to his own room. Once there, he splashed his face with water, feeling the scrape of stubble on his hand, took off his bow tie, undid the top button on his shirt, contemplated changing into something more appropriate for a late dinner and then thought, what the hell. It wasn’t as if he was trying to make any kind of impression on Estella. Which was just as well because he could see, in the mirror, that he looked tired, as if the strain of his head injury and the following months of dodging Germans and bedding down an escape line for evading airmen in France had finally, just as he was able to unwind on a week’s leave, caught up with him.
He threw his jacket onto the bed, rolled up his sleeves and readied himself to face whichever version of Estella he might find downstairs. She wasn’t there when he arrived, which gave him a chance to pour the whiskey and make sure Mrs. Gilbert had lit the fire and set the food out on a low table by the sofa.
Then she swept into the room in that way she had, but didn’t realize. He wondered if she’d picked it up from the models she’d sketched—as if she was making a grand entrance. She was still wearing the amazing gown, but no other adornment or jewelry because she had no need of it, just black hair, gray eyes, black dress.
“Hungry?” he asked, indicating the food.
“Yes,” she said and piled her plate high, sitting down on the floor, back against the sofa, her dress pooling around her like the night sky grounded at last.
He helped himself to a plateful too and sat in a chair before the fire.
They ate quietly for a few minutes. “You look tired,” she said.
“I am.” He sipped the whiskey, letting the familiar burn tease his throat, relax him at last.
“Were you in France?” she asked.
He nodded.
“What was it like?”
He knew she’d be able to tell if he lied. “In some ways it was like nothing had happened,” he said. “In other ways, it was…” He paused. “Worse than anything I’ve ever seen.”
“How?”
“The Germans are making life very difficult for anyone they think is working against them. The communists especially. And those who haven’t done anything other than be born Jewish. Every time anyone acts against the Germans, they shoot French hostages in retaliation. How can anyone resist when they know one single act of protest costs a hundred lives? But, unbelievably, the parties still happen and the women still dance and the men still drink and unless you stand quietly in a room, you almost can’t feel the terror. But it’s there on every street corner.”
“Is my mother…” Her voice was so low he almost couldn’t hear it.
The question he’d been dreading; all he had were reports from the field but sometimes they were wrong. He hoped, this time, they were right. “I understand she’s alive. I can’t go to her apartment to check on her. Any link to me could easily put her in danger.”
“How did you get the matrice cadastrale then?”
“From the mairie.”
“You think Evelyn and Harry are my parents. Mine and Lena’s.” Her voice was barely audible.
“God no!” He hurried to reassure her. “They’d divorced by the time you were born. By all accounts, Evelyn hated Harry by then.”
The fire crackled into the silence.
“Estella.” It was the first time he’d said her name aloud and the sound of it on his tongue was a provocative thing. “All I know is that you must be Lena’s sister. Evelyn Nesbit sold your mother a mansion, albeit crumbling, for just one franc. And Lena, a woman who looks just like you, was raised by Harry, Evelyn’s ex-husband. It’s too much for coincidence. But it doesn’t make Evelyn and Harry your parents.”
“You forgot to mention that Lena’s house is the double of the one in Paris if you wanted any more evidence with which to damn my mother and whatever she did twenty-four years ago.”
Her tone was that of someone who’d had everything they’d ever known stolen away, like his had been the day he found out his mother was dying. How could anyone’s mother ever die, he’d wondered back then? Mothers were the gold light in a gray day, the gentle hum on an otherwise too-silent night, the scent of violets when all else was rank.
“I’m not damning your mother,” he said, as gently as he could. “But with all of those connections…”
“We must be twins. But how? Who’s my father? And is my mother really my mother?” Her voice broke on the final sentence and then she pressed her lips closed and he knew she didn’t want to cry in front of him.
Alex sat down on the floor, leaning his back against the table so that he was facing her, rather than beside her.
“I don’t know,” he said. And then, “You can live with secrets if you have to. I’ve been doing it all my life.”
She stared at the fire, her eyes too shiny to be holding anything other than tears. “What happened?” she asked abruptly.
And he knew what she was asking: what happened to your mother? There were so few people he’d told this story to, beyond his boss when he was recruited into MI6, before he moved across to MI9; talking about oneself was generally a waste of time. You discovered more when you let others do the talking.
“She died on my seventeenth birthday,” he said, using every bit of his training to keep the words smooth, emotionless, but that only made them sound all the starker. “I stole the cash I was supposed to take back to my father that night after I’d run an opium exchange and I hid in Hong Kong for two weeks. Then I stowed away on a ship which landed in New York and I was taken to Ellis Island. I had British diplomatic papers so they called the British Consul. They did some digging, found out who my father was and then they knew they had me. They were kind enough to offer me their ‘support and protection’ in exchange for information about everything my father had done. Or else they’d send me straight back to him.”
He shifted a little, put down his plate, picked up his whiskey and made himself finish. “My father shot himself the day they went to arrest him. I told the Consul I wanted to stay in New York and they sent me to law school because I was valuable: I spoke Chinese, French, German, Italian and I’d played in more back alleys and knew more about criminals than anyone fresh out of Sing Sing. Law school here gave me the perfect cover; international lawyer is a better entrée into society than British spy.”
She didn’t say anything immediately, just stared at the fire. He watched the fire too; it snapped and spat, and he wished he hadn’t sat quite so close to it because now he was warm and drowsy from the whiskey and the release of confession. But he didn’t want to fall asleep because to sit here talking to her all night would be almost the best thing he’d ever done in his life.
He knew now, really knew, that she was a different person entirely from Lena. Looks were all they shared. The morning after the first and only time he’d ever slept with Lena a year ago, he’d known—and she’d known too—that whatever they’d both been searching for in one another’s arms, neither had found. That Lena wasn’t the woman he’d been looking for. But he owed Lena, wanted to show her that she wasn’t only the broken, slutty, drunk person beneath the polished facade who she pretended to be.
“Those might be things you’ve done,” she said. “They’re not who you are.”
He felt himself stiffen. He was suddenly aware of how near she was to him; if he stretched out his hand, he would touch the soft skin on her arm again. If he leaned over a little, he could graze his lips against hers. It took all of his willpower to steady his breathing and then he made himself say it because practicalities and logistics were always the best distractions. “I need you to come to Paris with me. Lena’s coming too.”
He wasn’t expecting her to laugh. But she did, the sound like a rip in the night and he realized he’d said it all wrong.
“What am I, the chaperone?” she asked incredulously.
She stood up, in one smooth, lithe movement and he dared to reach out a hand to stop her.
“I need your help,” he said, knowing he had to keep her in the room so that she wouldn’t steal his car keys and drive herself back to Manhattan, which he knew she was more than capable of doing. “I’ve got an agent with a broken leg stuck in Paris and no one can find him. He was hurt in an operation gone wrong and then taken by a friendly Parisian to the Village Saint-Paul, which is a great place to lose somebody; it’s such a bloody rabbit warren we can’t find the right building. The Parisian managed to get a note to one of our mailboxes, which gave us a few details of the location, but then he didn’t turn up to the rendezvous with another of my agents to show him the way in. My man says he can see a shuttered-up bookstore from the window, a pile of carriage wheels, and what he thinks might once have been a forge.”
“I remember there was a bookstore in the Village. I’ll draw you a map.”
“Can you draw a good enough map that somebody will be able to find him?”
She hesitated. “Probably not,” she admitted. “But I’m not going with you.”
She said it as if she loathed him, as if she doubted his motives. But there was no possible reason in the world for him to ask an untrained person to go with him to a war zone unless he was desperate. No one in MI9 or MI6 could fathom the Village Saint-Paul. Their handful of local operatives had tried and failed, saying that unless one had grown up near the Village Saint-Paul, it was impossible to navigate. Estella and her mother had lived just streets away. She’d taken him through the Village that night in Paris. He couldn’t ask her mother because word had reached him that she thought she was being followed.
Which left Estella. A woman who despised him and who was now saying things that made him furious.
“How do you lose a man?” she asked scornfully. “What kind of people do you have working for you?”
“The best kind,” he snapped. “French women mostly because, in case you hadn’t heard, there are no men left in France and English spies aren’t too well treated there. Those women have everything to lose and nothing personally to gain except a hope that their country might one day be returned to them.”
She still looked at him with doubt.
This time, anger seized him, hard and cold like the French winter he’d just been through, deadly. Each word he spoke was as precise and brutal as a sniper’s bullet. “There are women younger than you opening their houses to Allied airmen on the run, taking them in, feeding them, passing them on to the next safe house, knowing that all it takes is one slip of the tongue and they’re dead. All for the sake of France. I don’t care about seducing you or whatever you think I’m asking you to come to France for. I care about their lives. And then there are the women who smile at the Germans and sit on their knees at Fouquet’s, eating steaks and wearing couture dresses while the rest of Paris freezes in threadbare clothes and starves. Which would you be, Estella, if you’d stayed?”
It was blackmail of the worst kind but wasn’t that all he was good at? “Forget it,” he said brusquely. It was mad of him anyway.
“Why do you want to help him so much?” she asked and he could see the tremor in her hands, hear the falter in her words, the swallow of a tight throat resisting tears.
“He’s one of my best agents,” he said, laying out the whole truth for her. “He saved my life a few months ago when I jumped out of a plane and my parachute didn’t open properly. He got me where I needed to go while I was out cold. I owe him.”
“Why can’t you tell me more?”
“Because if you know any more, you put everyone’s lives at risk. You have no idea what the Germans do to people they think are colluding against them, nor how they extract information from those they arrest. The less I tell you, the safer everyone is.”
He could see her taking in what he’d said, that he wasn’t being evasive as some kind of game. That it was the best way to keep people alive, to protect those whose actions had put a gun at their backs, that he didn’t want her to be responsible for pulling the trigger. Her breath was ragged; he’d got her attention.
“I’ll come,” she said. It was her turn to reach for the whiskey. “And just so you know, I would never sit on a Nazi’s knee,” she added quietly.
I know you wouldn’t. Instead he said, “Thank you.” Then he stood up before she could leave the room. “I asked Lena along to chaperone you,” he said. “Not the other way around. So you’d feel safe from me. And because you want to run a fashion business, which means you can’t have anyone questioning your character. Nobody should think you’ve gone to Europe with me unchaperoned. Having Lena accompany you will keep your reputation intact.”
Then she stood up and ran upstairs, leaving behind more than just her scent, sweet and musky like gardenias and spice on a hot summer’s night. She left behind the devastating and also unbelievable knowledge that he had managed to, somehow, fall so far in love with her that he didn’t know if he’d ever be able to find his way back out.