The Paris Seamstress

by Natasha Lester

  Nothing betrayed that what she’d said had aroused his interest. “Shall we dance?” he asked, taking her hand and excusing himself from the crowd, leading her over to the couples swirling around in time to the music.

  He went to undo the bow of her cape which was still tied at her neck but she shook her head, not wanting the maps to pass into the hands of the theater attendants. “I’d prefer to keep it on,” she said.

  Then she found herself in his arms, circling the floor, the damned music having slowed to a waltz and, given the time of night and the state of inebriation of most of the theatergoers, proximity was all that seemed to matter and she knew it would look out of place if they were at arm’s length. As he stepped closer to her, she did the same until they were chest to chest, cheek to cheek. He was all hard muscle and tanned skin, as if he spent his time outside rather than in an office, his hair almost as dark as hers and his eyes brown. He was extraordinarily handsome and in other circumstances she might have felt rather more pleased at the situation she’d found herself in. He wasn’t French though; his command of the language was impeccable and so was his accent but it was almost too schooled, too perfect to be his birth-tongue.

  He was waiting for her to say something. And Estella knew from the way Monsieur Aumont had spoken, from the blood on Monsieur’s shirt that he, and perhaps her mother, were involved in something far more dangerous than helping refugees at the train station and that this man was a part of it. She wouldn’t have trusted him with anything except that Monsieur Aumont, who she’d known since she was a child, had said she should.

  “I believe I have something for you,” she said, switching to English.

  That surprised him. “Who the hell are you?” he asked, also in English, his voice controlled.

  “Nobody you know,” she said, reverting to French.

  “You’re not very good at being surreptitious.” He indicated the dress that she’d thought might spin heads, but that was the last thing she wanted right now.

  “No one with anything to hide wears a dress like this,” she said.

  He tried to hide it but she heard it. A laugh.

  “Nothing about this is funny,” she snapped, the last vestiges of her courage almost giving out. She needed to get this done and then return to help Monsieur Aumont—please God let him be all right—and finally go home and hope like she’d never hoped before that her mother was safe.

  “You’re very prickly.”

  “Because I’m so goddamned furious,” she retorted. “I need to hang my cloak somewhere safe. Where can you recommend?”

  “Peter, over by the staircase, will look after it.” All the while they danced and their faces continued to smile and nobody in the room except the man and Estella knew that things were not quite as they seemed.

  Estella nodded and pulled herself out of his arms, untying the ribbon at her neck as she walked away, letting her hand rest for just an instant on the left side seam, assuming if he was the kind of man who took delivery of maps that were worth bleeding for, he’d notice her action. She had no desire to lose her cloak; it had cost her a month’s wages to buy the fabric. But it was a small price to pay if it helped Monsieur Aumont. And her mother. And Paris.

  She passed the cloak to the man indicated and hurried down the stairs, desperate to be home. She strode out into the night, away from things she didn’t want to understand, things that scared her too much, things that made her realize the life she’d known, growing up in an atelier in Paris surrounded by beautiful things, was over.

  The touch of a hand on her arm made her jump. She hadn’t heard footsteps but somehow he was standing beside her, passing her a black jacket. “Put this on,” he said. “You won’t make it home alive at this time of night in that dress. Your cloak had blood on it. Is it yours?”

  He moved a hand up toward her cheek and she flinched, but realized from the attitude of his hand that he hadn’t been about to strike her, but to do something far more gentle—to check that she wasn’t hurt. Her reaction made him move his hand away so swiftly it was almost like he’d never raised it.

  “It’s not my blood. It’s Monsieur—”

  He cut in. “It’s best if I don’t know his name. Can you take me to him?”

  Estella nodded and he followed her, his knowledge of Parisian streets seemingly as good as her own, never questioning her route, walking quickly but casually beside her. As they went through the Passage Charlemagne and into the Village Saint-Paul, its crumbling whitewashed courtyards creating a maze that nobody would be able to follow them through, he looked across at her quizzically.

  She spoke the first words they’d shared since they left. “Not much farther.” Then, “Who are you?”

  He shook his head. “It’s safer for you if I don’t tell you.”

  A spy. She had to ask, even though she knew he could have, once they were hidden within the walls of the parish village, shot her or stabbed her or whatever it was men like him did to those who got in their way. “Whose side are you on?”

  “I haven’t said thank you,” he said, which wasn’t really an answer. “But those papers will help the French people a great deal.”

  “And the British?” She pressed for more information.

  “And all the Allies.”

  Suddenly the wooden doors of the house on the Rue de Sévigné stood before them and Estella slipped into the courtyard. She stopped when she saw that Monsieur Aumont had fallen to the ground.

  She darted forward.

  He stopped her. “I’ll do what I can,” he said. “He deserves a decent burial and he’ll get one. I promise.”

  A burial. Oh God! What about…? “Maman,” Estella breathed, the word barely piercing the true night of a blacked-out city.

  “Go and see,” he said.

  “And Monsieur?”

  “I’ll look after him.”

  She turned, fear finally unbuttoning the coat of rashness she’d been wearing until then, seeing only her mother’s face, praying that Monsieur Aumont had, in his final moments, been right. That her mother was truly safe.

  “Get out of France, if you can. And take care.”

  She heard the words slip through the air, the calculating tone gone now, replaced by something almost solicitous, and she held them to her as she raced for home. You take care too, Maman. I’m coming.

  Thankfully the concierge was snoring in his chair when Estella returned to the apartment and she didn’t have to explain her wild-eyed appearance, or the fact she was wearing a man’s tuxedo jacket over her dress. She curved around and around the staircase, going up and up until she reached the top floor. Relief slid over her like silk when she found her mother in the dark kitchen, sipping coffee. But the relief fell to the floor when she saw the whiteness of her mother’s face and that her coffee lapped in the cup because of the way her hands were shaking.

  “Tell me,” Estella said from the doorway.

  “I know very little,” her mother whispered. “Monsieur Aumont is working for the English, I think. He never told me exactly. He couldn’t. But he has so many cousins and nephews, all Jewish of course, in Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany; he was passing on information they sent to him. The Jewish people have no love for the Nazis, Estella. Nor does Monsieur Aumont. Nor I.”

  “And nor do I but does that mean you should risk your life?”

  “What would you have me do? You’ve seen them. The children we’ve helped OSE spirit out of Germany and into France and on to safety, the ones we can give nothing more to than soup and a hug. Their mothers and fathers taken from them just because of their religion. If we can help them, shouldn’t we?”

  Of course they should and they had. To stand aside and do nothing was to give up Paris entirely, to give up on compassion, to agree that the world should be run by monsters.

  “How involved are you?” Estella asked.

  Her mother sipped her coffee. “Not very. I’ve done nothing more than keep Monsieur Aumont’s confidence. And help him
find, in the crowd at Gare du Nord, the person he’s looking for. It’s easy to overlook a red neck scarf, or a green beret when only one person is watching. He always meets me back at the station and walks me home after he’s done whatever he has to do. But tonight he didn’t come back.”

  “He’s dead, Maman.”

  “Dead?” The word was like a dropped stitch, ruining the fabric of their lives. Estella’s mother reached for her hand. “He can’t be.”

  “I saw him. I delivered some maps for him.”

  “You did what?”

  Estella tightened her grip on her mother’s hand and told her what had happened. The house. The blood. The theater. The man. That he said he’d take care of Monsieur Aumont’s body. “I think he meant it,” Estella ended quietly.

  “But now you’re mixed up in it too,” her mother said, terror bleaching her face of all color. “There are spies everywhere. And who knows how much longer until the full force of the Wehrmacht is here.” Her mother took a deep breath and sat up straight. “You have to leave France.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “You are.” Her mother’s voice was determined. “You cannot stay here now. If anyone saw you tonight…” The sentence was unfinishable.

  “Nobody saw me.”

  “If you’ve seen the maps, you could easily end up like Monsieur Aumont. And here in Paris you’ll never be anything more than a midinette in an atelier. Like me. I’m sending you to New York.”

  “I like being a midinette in an atelier.” New York! How ridiculous.

  “No you don’t. Look at that dress. A couturier makes dresses like that. We’re in the middle of a war. Soon there won’t be a fashion industry left in Paris.”

  “What would I do in New York?” Estella tried to keep her tone light, as if it was all a joke. But the image of Monsieur Aumont’s body sprawled on the ground amid the weeds, the knowledge of how close her mother had come to danger, made her voice crack. “I won’t go by myself.”

  “Yes, you will. Monsieur…” Her mother stopped, eyes flooded with tears. “Monsieur Aumont asked me, weeks ago, to take over the atelier if anything happened to him. Our métier is a dying art. I must keep it alive, to honor him. I didn’t touch those maps tonight. You did.”

  “I’m not in any danger.” Get out of France, if you can. She remembered the words the man had spoken to her as she’d left.

  “That’s what Monsieur Aumont thought.”

  Estella stood up and searched in the cupboard for a bottle of port. She poured herself a glass, and one for Jeanne, draining it quickly, unable to conceive of life without her mother. She’d been the one to first let Estella loose on a sewing machine when she was only five, who brought home scraps of fabric so that Estella could make ever more fantastical clothes for her cloth dolly, who had let Estella, during holidays and evenings when she had to work late, sit at her feet under the worktable making her own versions of flowers out of offcuts of material.

  It had always been Estella and her mother. Estella and her mother walking to Les Halles every Saturday morning to buy food for the week. Estella and her mother praying in the church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis every Sunday morning. Estella and her mother lying in their shared bed side by side, some nights talking about what Estella had been up to at La Belle Chance with Huette and Renée, other nights falling into a dreamless sleep because Estella had been up sketching until late. There was nobody else. There never had been.

  Occasionally, Estella would wish for a sister, so that she would still have the blessing of family once her mother was gone. But it was a futile wish. When Jeanne—God forbid—died, Estella would be on her own. And the absence of a father, beyond the fact that he’d died in the Great War, was the only thing her mother never spoke of.

  Estella sat back down and took her mother’s hand, searching for reassurance. “There are no ships,” she said flatly. “Unless I can get to Genoa and that’s impossible.”

  “Last week, the American ambassador placed an advertisement in Le Matin urging all American citizens to go directly to Bordeaux where the very last American ship would be waiting to take them to New York.”

  “I’m a French citizen. How does that help me?”

  Her mother pulled away. She walked through their tiny apartment, which most people of sound mind would probably be glad to leave behind: the lack of running water and elevator, the six flights of stairs, the tiny rooms—only one bedroom, a kitchen-cum-dining room whose table was more often used for sewing than eating, a space for a sofa, nothing decorative, just the bare necessities of plates and cups and pots and wardrobes and, of course, the sewing machine. But it was all they could afford on their midinette’s wages.

  Jeanne picked up her boîte à couture, an antique beechwood sewing box, the most beautiful thing they owned. It was lithographed on top with an image of a stand of wild iris pummeled by wind, stems leaning away in a manner Estella had always thought of as dancelike and subversive rather than weak and bending to the storm’s will. Her mother opened the lid, took out the needle cases, the silver thimble, the spools of thread, the heavy scissors. Right at the bottom, she found a document. “You have American papers,” she said, holding something out to Estella.

  “What?” Estella replied.

  “You have American papers,” her mother repeated firmly.

  “How much did you pay for those? Nobody’s going to fall for false papers, not now.”

  “They’re genuine.”

  Estella rubbed her eyes. “How can I possibly have American papers?”

  The pause stretched out until Estella could almost hear it fray and then snap as her mother said, “Your father was American. You were born there.”

  “My father was a French soldier,” Estella insisted.

  “He wasn’t.”

  Silence dropped like heavy jute cloth over the room, making it hard to breathe. It was her mother’s turn to drain her glass.

  “I went to New York once,” Jeanne finally said. “To have you. I never planned to tell you any of this but keeping you safe is the only thing that matters now.”

  Estella unfolded the papers and saw her name written inside. The papers supported, without question, her mother’s story. “But how?”

  Tears flooded her mother’s eyes with anguish. “It hurts too much to talk about.”

  “Maman!” Estella cried, horrified at the sight of her mother in tears. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to understand.”

  “Understanding isn’t important now. You must leave Paris. The embassy’s last special train departs tomorrow. I went to the embassy last week to make inquiries. Just in case. Then I wasn’t brave enough to tell you. I didn’t want to lose you. But now I have to.”

  “How can I leave you?” Estella’s voice faltered, unable to imagine herself getting onto a train full of Americans, traveling through a country at war until she reached Bordeaux where she would get on a ship as an American citizen and travel to New York. Without Maman.

  “You can and you will.”

  Estella’s response was a sob.

  “Cherie,” her mother whispered, wrapping her daughter in her arms and tucking Estella’s head into her chest. “Don’t cry. If you cry, then I will too. And I might never stop.”

  The desolation in her mother’s words undid Estella and she couldn’t make herself obey. Instead she sobbed as she’d never sobbed before, thinking of her mother alone in the atelier, alone in their apartment, alone in their bed. Thinking of the years unspooling before them both, without one another, never knowing when, or if, they might see each other again.

  Chapter Three

  Morning broke to the sound of Stuka bombers screaming over Paris, dropping bombs on the nearby Citroën factory. And Estella knew, as much as she’d hoped that her mother would change her mind, that the bombing would only strengthen her resolve to get Estella out of the country.

  After a cramped and fraught morning in the bomb shelter, she and her mother hurried wordlessly to th
e Gare d’Austerlitz. Yesterday’s early summer sky had been burned black and smoke hung thickly and rankly in the air.

  “I hope they hold the train,” her mother muttered while Estella hoped the opposite; that it had somehow managed to leave on schedule during the bombing and she would have no choice but to stay with her mother in Paris.

  No one had knocked on their door in the middle of the night. Nobody had come looking for her. One young woman who knew so little wasn’t important enough to attract anyone’s notice, surely? Hard on the heels of that thought came the man’s warning: get out. What if, by staying, she put her mother in danger? She shuddered at the thought and that was the only thing that made her keep up with her mother, valise and sewing machine bruising her legs as they rushed along. Most of the room in the valise was taken up by her mother’s sewing box. Jeanne had insisted that Estella take it, and the sewing machine, and Estella couldn’t bear to think of her mother sitting in their apartment without either of those two things. But nor could Estella bear the hurt in her mother’s eyes when she’d tried to refuse the gifts. So she took them, one part of her grateful to have two such precious items which would remind her of her mother every time she used them.

  The Gare d’Austerlitz was so full of people it was almost impossible to move. The morning’s bombing had sparked a fear so great it ran like wildfire through the city. If two hundred German planes could drop so many bombs so close to their homes then few people wanted to remain behind to see what would happen the next time the planes flew over. Abandoned suitcases and items of furniture, things that hadn’t been able to fit on the trains, littered the floor—lamps and vases smashed to pieces, teddy bears with arms torn off, a grandfather clock unchiming.

  It was hot, so hot; sweat ran down Estella’s back even though she wore only a light summer dress. Her lungs snatched at air, the weight of bodies and the summer heat stealing it all away.

  She could smell desperation steaming from pores, could see it made manifest in the way babies were passed overhead through the crowd to lie on a table by the train so they wouldn’t be crushed, ready to be collected by their mothers when they reached the front of the pack. But Estella also saw those mothers step onto carriages of the train far from the table, assuming the babies had already been boarded, saw the train pull away and the mothers realize too late that they had left their children behind. Saw their hands bang at the windows of the train, their mouths open in soundless screams. Who would look after those children now? Estella wondered as she clutched her mother’s hand.