July 2015
Once Fabienne was in her pajamas, she took out the next piece of paper from the box. It was a letter, signed by Jeanne Bissette, Estella’s mother.
April 21, 1943
My dearest, dearest Estella,
I’ve been told you’re well. Alex, the man who’s offered to make sure you receive this letter, tells me that you’re in love, that you have a child. But as I look at his face, I can see that he loves you too.
I hope you haven’t turned him away because of me, but I suspect you have. I know something of Alex; I know that he’s worked to make sure I’m protected through this war, to make sure I can help the French people in my own small way, just as he does, but in much larger ways.
I know you’ve met Lena. Lena. When I think of her I want to die. Except that would be one more selfish act. I had to choose one of you and who can ever say that I made the right or the wrong choice? Here is the only explanation I can give.
I first met Harry Thaw in December 1916. It was a cold and bitter winter. I was fourteen, had grown up in a convent, knew nothing of the world. Harry charmed the Mother Superior, gave her money and asked to meet me as he was an old family friend of Evelyn Nesbit’s. Mother Superior, knowing nothing of who Harry Thaw really was and convinced by his solicitousness, allowed him to meet with me several times over the course of a week in the convent drawing room. We drank tea. He gave me a diamond ring and a diamond bracelet. He was the first man I’d met properly and his goal was to charm me. Charmed I was, having no model against which to compare him to other men.
The last time Harry Thaw came to the convent, he convinced me to leave with him for a day. I’d seen so little of Paris and there he was, prepared to show me. I was thrilled by the thought of seeing all the monuments.
At first he was considerate, taking me to the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. We stopped at a booth to take a photograph and then had lunch. He bought me one brandy, then two. Then more. I was drunk and feeling unwell so he took me to the house on the Rue de Sévigné, John and Evelyn’s love nest, which he knew hadn’t been inhabited for fourteen years. He bade me lie down on the bed until I felt better. I don’t need to tell you what happened next.
When I woke up, it was evening and he’d gone. I had to find my way back to the convent and, as I did, I remembered something Harry had said each time he’d visited me. That Evelyn owed him. I understood that I was the final payment in what he considered her debt to him.
After a few months, I also understood there was a consequence to what Harry had done, besides my own shame. Mother Superior noticed that I’d washed no rags for too long and I told her what had happened. Not about the violence. Just that I’d made a mistake with Harry. It would have been impossible for a nun to believe somebody could be so evil.
She wrote to the Thaw family, requesting they take responsibility for Harry’s actions. Harry’s mother said they would take the child. They would pay for my crossing to New York, where I would give birth, pay for the lying-in home and my passage back to France so long as I promised never to speak about what had happened. She promised—and this is the only reason I agreed to it—that the child would be protected from Harry. I had no idea that Harry’s madness comes from his mother; I thought she was a kindly woman helping out a girl her son had ruined. If I’d known anything about her, known she would give the child to Harry one day, I would never have done it. I thought the child would grow up with wealth and have everything I couldn’t, as an unmarried fifteen-year-old, give it. I thought I was doing the best thing.
Mrs. Thaw didn’t keep her promise, as you know. She wanted the child in order to prevent blackmail—I didn’t know, but after Harry returned to New York, he’d kidnapped a young boy, his rage obviously not having been sated by his actions with me. Harry’s mother had endured months of her name being dragged through the newspapers. She didn’t want me, the daughter of Evelyn Nesbit, Harry’s former wife, making any claims of rape which would be too good for the newspapers to ignore and would jeopardize his chance of once again making a plea of insanity and escaping incarceration in jail over what he’d done to the boy.
Mother Superior went with me to New York; she felt guilty for having put me in Harry’s path in the first place. She was as surprised as I when I was delivered of two babies. She’d met Harry Thaw’s mother by then—I hadn’t—and I think she had her doubts about her. Not strong enough to understand that leaving a child with her would be a dangerous thing to do but enough for her to make sure that the Thaws didn’t know anything about the second child. Mother Superior made sure to register your birth; she told me American papers might be useful one day.
We couldn’t take both you and Lena. Harry’s mother had been promised a child that she would pass off to the world as a symbol of her extraordinary charity—she’d told everyone she’d benevolently come to the aid of a poor fallen distant cousin in her time of need. Adopting this child would enhance her family’s reputation at a time when everything Harry did destroyed it, meaning their business associates wouldn’t desert them, their companies would remain profitable, the wealth they’d grown used to would be secured. She would have made it impossible for the Mother Superior and I to leave Manhattan without first relinquishing a baby. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered she’d given Lena to Harry.
I held Lena for a short time. I placed you both in a crib together for long enough that I could draw you together, so I had something of her to keep. I couldn’t choose which child to leave and which child to take with me because how does anyone make such a choice? Mother Superior did that. And I’m so glad to have had you, Estella. Every day I wished I could have kept Lena too.
I said good-bye to Mother Superior when we reached Paris. I told her I would find a job and care for the baby. She gave me some papers that Evelyn Nesbit had left with her when I was born. A rolled canvas—a painting of Evelyn and John—and the deed to the house Evelyn had bought on the Rue de Sévigné, a house she and John had used, a house I never wanted because everything about it made me think of Harry Thaw. That’s why we never lived there.
So that is my story. You are your own woman, Estella. If you let the facts of your birth stop you from being who you are, then Harry wins again. And that would be a legacy I couldn’t live with. Be brave. Love well and fiercely. Be the woman I always knew you would be.
Fabienne reread the letter twice. Then she flipped open Evelyn Nesbit’s memoir to the typewritten pages that had been taped into the book to be sure she had everything right. Evelyn Nesbit, chorus girl and femme fatale, had fallen pregnant to her lover John Barrymore, had had a baby in secret, and that baby was Estella’s mother. Evelyn Nesbit’s lunatic ex-husband, Harry Thaw, had discovered the fact fourteen years later and, in what appeared to be a pattern of calculated and rage-fueled acts, had gone to Paris, found the baby who was then a young woman, raped her, and Estella was the result. As was another baby: Lena. Estella had a twin sister called Lena. Lena’s name was on Fabienne’s father’s birth certificate.
“I need a drink,” Fabienne muttered, as her eyes fell on the death certificate that was the next piece of paper in the box. Lena had died when she was just twenty-four.
She mixed herself Estella’s favorite, a sidecar, and took several healthy sips, her mind reeling through the facts. If her father’s birth certificate spoke the truth then there was some good news: Fabienne was related to Estella. Estella was her great-aunt. And Estella’s twin sister, Lena, a person she’d never heard of, was actually her grandmother. Her grandfather, according to the birth certificate, was the mysterious spy called Alex Montrose, and it seemed likely that the medallion Estella had worn around her neck all her life was his. Why?
But the first lines of Jeanne Bissette’s letter said that Estella had had a child. Which surely, judging by the date of the letter, must have been her father. So the birth certificate was wrong, perhaps.
Another sidecar provided no further illumination and Fabienne didn’t feel as if she could deal with any more discoveries. If what was left in the box was as explosive as what she’d just found out, then it might be best to wait until after the collection was done. She had enough to deal with right now without excavating any more skeletons from the seemingly enormous closet of her grandmother’s past.
* * *
Melissa died one week later. Will’s text was brief. 9:05 this morning. RIP Liss.
Fabienne stared at her phone. How did anyone respond to a message like that? I can take the day off, come and see you? she replied.
Thanks, but I have stuff to do. I’m okay. x
The news swept away every scrap of creativity she’d found since coming to New York. So she went down to the factory floor and worked with the manager of the atelier, draping fabric on wooden dolls as Sam had taught Estella to do, seeing what variations could be made and whether or not they were an improvement on the original sketch.
That evening, as she was leaving work, her phone buzzed. The funeral is on Wednesday. 11am. St. John the Divine. See you then.
The funeral was sadder and lovelier than even her grandmother’s had been. The sense that Melissa had been taken before her time was palpable, from the age of the assembled crowd, right through to the image on the screen at the front of the church, of a beaming Melissa sitting in bed in her gold dress, Will’s arm around her, smiling too. Fabienne had taken it. It made Fabienne think of Estella, and of Estella’s sister, who’d also died far too young.
Will spoke beautifully, hauntingly, and everyone in the church was sobbing by the time he’d finished. At the wake, just as at her grandmother’s, there were so many people that she didn’t have a chance to do more than kiss his cheek and say hello, but she felt him hold her a little more tightly, and for a little longer than he’d held anyone else, felt him inhale as she bent her head up to his, heard him whisper, “Thank you.”
Fabienne left after an hour. She caught a cab downtown, took out her key, opened the gate to Gramercy Park, and went inside, sitting down on one of the benches not far from the statue of Edwin Booth, enveloped by the canopy of green from the trees. She closed her eyes, turned her face up to the sun and thought about Melissa, and about Estella. Around her, the sparrows twittered in the birdhouses, and when she opened her eyes they locked onto Estella’s home, now hers. The Parisian-inspired mansion that had its own double in the Marais far across the ocean, cut off, just like Estella and Lena had been separated for so much of their lives. Seeing the house, she had an idea, along with a stronger sense of peace than she’d ever experienced in her life, as if everything might turn out the way it was meant to.
She stood up and caught a cab to Will’s house. When he answered the door, his eyes were red and he was unsteady on his feet. “Drink?” he asked, holding up an almost empty bottle of red wine.
“Sleep,” she said firmly. “Come with me.”
She led him into the living room and told him to sit on the sofa. He complied, leaning his head back, closing his eyes, suddenly so vulnerable, so at odds with the man in the suit at the office of his fabulous job as Head of Design at Tiffany & Co. that Fabienne’s throat tightened.
“I’m going crazy,” he said. “Drinking too much. Like my father. I can’t…”
I can’t rush into anything like he did as a way to ease the pain, she knew Will was thinking.
So she went upstairs, found his room, took the pillow from the bed, a pillow that smelled so much like Will’s aftershave that she had to stop herself from drinking it in, and went back downstairs. She placed the pillow on the sofa.
“Lie down,” she said softly and he did.
She found a throw rug and tucked it around him, realizing he was already asleep. She took a key out of her pocket, wrote down the address of the house on the Rue de Sévigné, and added a note, telling him that her grandmother had always said Paris was the best healer of wounds. He should go to Paris and stay in the house, she wrote. Take some time. Recover. She’d miss him terribly, but she thought that, staying here, surrounded by memories of Melissa, mightn’t be the best thing for him.
Then she kissed his cheek and whispered, “Sweet dreams,” before she let herself out the door.
All too soon it was only a few weeks until the launch of Fabienne’s spring/summer 2016 collection. She read the newspaper with her morning coffee, smiling; Will had returned from Paris the day before. They’d talked on the phone most days and he was sounding more like himself. He’d even told her that Paris had inspired him and he’d managed to pull together the new Tiffany collection in its entirety.
Her smile faded when a headline caught her eye: “Matriarch’s Granddaughter Feeling the Pressure.”
She read further and realized that the matriarch in question was Estella and the granddaughter was none other than Fabienne. A disgruntled employee who Fabienne had had to fire a few days earlier for taking one of the samples home and wearing it out to a party, thus showing the entire world the design before it was launched on the catwalk, had decided to spin a little story for the newspapers. And the newspapers weren’t holding back:
The fashion world remembers the buzz and bravado of Xander Bissette’s only collection for Stella Designs, which had seemed to signal a true and exciting changing of the guard. But the excitement was short-lived when he followed his heart to the Antipodes and was never heard from again. Fabienne Bissette is, of course, his daughter but it remains to be seen whether she’s inherited any of her father’s and her grandmother’s considerable skills or if she’s just riding on the coattails of the Bissette name.
She turned the page.
Will’s face smiled out at her from the newspaper. She read the accompanying article about his return to work after a period of mourning for his sister, about the highly anticipated new collection he’d designed in Paris and which would be unveiled in the Tiffany catalog in a fortnight. The journalist raved about the éclat he’d added to the already solid Tiffany name and the certainty that his next collection would cement his reputation as one of the world’s greatest jewelry designers.
One of the world’s greatest jewelry designers versus riding on the coat-tails of the Bissette name.
She was thrilled for him. But when she sipped her coffee, all she could taste was its sharpness. She hated herself for what she felt, jealous of everything they’d said about Will and ashamed of everything they hadn’t said about her. But it meant only one thing: she had to work harder than ever over the next month. Everything had to be perfect. She had no time to do anything else.
Her phone rang and she answered before she’d registered that it was Will.
“Hi,” he said, his voice almost back to the way she remembered. “I haven’t seen you for too long. Can we go out tonight?”
Yes, was her first thought. But the words that came out of her mouth were, “I can’t. I have too much to do right now.”
He didn’t reply straightaway. “Did you see the paper this morning?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve never ridden on anyone’s coattails.”
“I have to prove myself, Will. So that everybody else believes it too. I can’t let Estella down. I just can’t.”
He was silent again and she hoped to God he would understand what she meant. She tried again. “I need some time. To focus only on the collection.”
Time. It was all they ever seemed to need from one another. Time to mourn. Time to work. Never time to be together. But right now, she couldn’t do her work well and spend time with Will. One of the two things would suffer. “I have to get to the office,” she said.
“You gave me time when I needed it,” he said then. “So take as long as you need. I just don’t believe you need as much time as you think you do.”