The Paris Seamstress

by Natasha Lester

  “I’m sorry,” he said and his voice had softened.

  All part of his charm, she supposed. The lies, the brusqueness hadn’t worked so now he was resorting to the age-old tactic of seduction. One woman who looked like her wasn’t enough; he wanted two. But maybe if she went along tomorrow night and had the meeting he might leave her alone. “Where?”

  “Café Society. In Greenwich Village.”

  “Café Society,” she repeated, raising an eyebrow. Of course he moved in society, unlike Estella. That much had been plain in Paris.

  “It’s not the way it sounds. It’s jazz like you’ve never heard it before.”

  “I’m from Paris. I’ve heard better jazz than anything you can imagine.”

  “Well, even if you don’t want to come for me or for Lena, come for the music. At least that way you’ll be able to tell me who was right about the jazz.”

  A tiny smile touched her lips but she smoothed it away before he noticed.

  “I’m taking your silence for a yes. Café Society—ten p.m.,” he said before he walked away.

  Estella was deliberately late. Spectacularly dressed. Shielded and bulwarked with her gold dress, ready to deflect anything she didn’t want to know about. Which she suspected would be quite a lot.

  She took Sam and Janie with her for protection, Janie squealing with delight when she heard where they were off to. “It’s known as the wrong place for the right people,” Janie said by way of explanation. “And everyone wants to go to the wrong place.”

  “I don’t,” Estella said shortly. “I just need you to reassure me that she looks similar to me but not identical.”

  “You probably drank too much,” Janie said.

  “I’d had one sip!” Estella protested before she saw Alex coming from the opposite direction. They met at the top of the steps to the club.

  “This,” she said to Sam and Janie, “is Alex. Paramour of my lookalike.”

  Alex raked his hand through his hair. “Pleased to meet you,” he said to her friends. Then, to her, “This is already going badly.”

  “Did you expect it to go anything other than badly when you invite me to a club and you turn up on the arm of a woman who looks exactly like me? Are you so incompetent at kissing that you can’t tell one conquest from another?”

  Estella could see Janie and Sam eyeing each other and then Janie shrugging as if to say: I’ve no idea what she’s talking about.

  Alex winced. “I seem to remember that you didn’t behave as if I was a complete stranger either.”

  “You thought I gave you special treatment at the party?” Estella laughed, as if she wasn’t at all concerned about what she would find inside the club. “Perhaps that’s just how I am with every man I meet.” Which was a lie, but he didn’t need to know that.

  She walked down the stairs before she became any cattier, a disposition she’d never thought she possessed but Alex seemed to bring out the worst in her. She found herself in a basement club where the jazz reminded her of Paris and where the mix of patrons—black and white, well-dressed and louche—was unlike New York’s usual inclination for segregation by class and skin color. Some people danced, some people listened to the music, and others talked in groups around tables. On the stage, Billie Holiday, who Estella had heard of but never seen perform, began to sing “Strange Fruit.”

  “I’ll find us a table,” Sam said, ushering Janie forward, leaving Estella and Alex to bring up the rear.

  Estella strode over to the bar and smiled at the bartender. “Sidecar. Best make it extra strong.”

  “He giving you trouble?” the bartender asked, eyeing Alex.

  “Nothing I can’t handle. Besides, he’s paying for the drinks.” She winked at the bartender and left Alex to settle the bill. As she turned away she walked straight into a woman. Lena.

  Estella took a large sip of her drink and pushed on a smile that could’ve lit up Broadway. “I’m Estella,” she said to Lena. “I don’t believe we’ve met, although I feel as if I see you in the mirror at least a dozen times a day.”

  “Only a dozen?” Alex remarked sardonically.

  Estella couldn’t help laughing. “Touché,” she said. “I’m not really that vain.”

  “I’m Lena,” the woman said, smiling the kind of smile one gave out of politeness, rather than any notion of gladness.

  It made Estella shiver. She watched Lena bestow the same smile on a couple who waved to her, a man who said hello, another one who smiled at her. It seemed people knew who Lena was, but her poise and the way she was dressed indicated that she knew her way around moneyed society.

  “My friends have found a table,” she said, indicating Janie and Sam who were watching with mouths open. She walked over to them and sat down. “I take it from your expressions that I wasn’t exaggerating.”

  “If anything, you underplayed it,” Janie said. Then she dazzled her smile at Alex. “I didn’t have a chance to say so outside but it’s lovely to meet you.”

  “And you,” he said. “You’re Australian?”

  “I am,” she said, flashing him a Janie-special smile. “I’m a model. I’m not the type to nurse wounded soldiers. I’m the type they dream about instead.”

  Estella rolled her eyes. Janie was the most brazen creature she’d ever met. Sam laughed and Alex smiled. Only Lena didn’t react. She’s colder than the North Pole, Estella thought, wondering what Alex saw in a woman so devoid of emotion. Not that she cared. She studied Lena unobtrusively and the only difference she could see between them was that Lena was slightly heavier and curvier than Estella.

  “I thought, given your reluctance to discuss how you and Lena might be connected, you’d want to have this conversation in private,” Alex said to Estella, glancing across at both Sam and Janie.

  Estella shook her head emphatically. “Privately would mean just Lena and me. If she gets to have you here, then I get to have Sam and Janie.”

  “I know!” Janie exclaimed. “You’re twins. Kidnapped at birth. Heirs to a fortune.”

  Estella laughed, even though Janie’s joke rattled her unaccountably because it reminded her of how much she didn’t know: an American father, American papers, a house in the Marais that Alex said was her mother’s. She took a long sip of her drink. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” she managed to say.

  Alex passed Lena a cigarette, which he lit for her in the way lovers do, and Sam tugged Janie’s hand. “Let’s dance,” Sam said and, despite her misgivings, Estella let them go. They didn’t need to suffer an uncomfortable night too.

  After Sam and Janie departed for the dance floor, Lena stared at Estella. “Your dress is beautiful,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Estella stammered in surprise. “I made it. I’m a designer.”

  “I haven’t heard of you,” Lena said smoothly.

  Estella flushed. “I’m just starting out. I hope to have samples ready to show in a few months.”

  “How are you funding yourself?” Lena asked, in that same unruffled voice.

  Estella’s cheeks went even redder and she looked around for Sam and Janie, but Janie was twirling from one beau to another and Sam was buying a woman a drink at the bar. “You don’t need much besides a sewing machine and some samples to get started in fashion.”

  Lena eyed her appraisingly. “You’ve heard of the Fashion Group?”

  “I might be broke but I’m not stupid,” Estella said. Of course she’d heard of the Fashion Group, a collective of some of Manhattan’s most influential women in fashion, including Dorothy Shaver from Lord & Taylor and Carmel Snow from Harper’s Bazaar.

  “Elizabeth Hawes, one of the members, makes dresses for me. You might like to meet her.”

  Did she want to owe Lena anything? Estella was desperate to demur but meeting a member of the Fashion Group wasn’t something she could afford to say no to. “I’d be very grateful,” she said, knowing that there it was, the thing that made her the most deficient at the table. L
ena clearly had money; her clothes and jewels dripped with it. Alex, for all that he must be a spy, had suits tailored so impeccably that they must come from the best bespoke service. And then there was Estella, a poor French refugee who didn’t even know who her father was. Nor how she’d come to be sitting beside another version of herself.

  “Who are you?” Estella blurted.

  Lena gave a small and mirthless smile. “That’s a very good question. For all intents and purposes, I’m Lena Thaw. Godchild and distant relative of the Thaw family. Have you heard of them?”

  Estella shook her head.

  “They’re a family of lunatics.”

  “Lena,” Alex said gently and Estella watched them, how Alex was protective of Lena in a way that didn’t sit with the man she thought he was, as if Lena was a fragile gem, like a topaz, prone to breaking.

  Outwardly, Lena didn’t seem as if she needed protection, except if you looked deep into her eyes, which was the only place where Estella could see a difference between the two of them. Lena’s eyes were ancient, a muddied blue like a once clear lake that had been dirtied beyond repair.

  “Lunatics?” Estella repeated. “Enough of the drama or my heart might fail from the suspense.”

  “The Thaws are Pittsburgh coal tycoons,” Lena continued, her words dripping with a world-weary sarcasm that was painful to listen to, suggesting that she was so cynical about life that she’d ceased to dream. “Their son, Harry Kendall Thaw, is my godfather. ‘Uncle,’ he likes me to call him. I was born in August 1917 and foisted upon the Thaw family by an unwed young relative who was only fifteen. The Thaws were so very kind in taking me in and then giving me to Harry to raise once he was let out of the asylum in 1924. Harry’s a convicted murderer who was eventually found not guilty of his misdeeds by reason of insanity. He’s cruel, depraved, deranged, and obsessive. Luckily, he moved to Virginia once I was off his hands. I think that about sums me up.” Lena leaned back into Alex’s arm.

  “I’m not sure Estella is going to get a lot out of that explanation,” he said.

  They were toying with her, giving her half answers to big questions, dragging out something that should be so simple. All they needed to do was to tell her who Lena really was, then Estella would know that they couldn’t be related because their stories didn’t connect. Estella had never heard of any of the people Lena had mentioned. Except that she was also born in August 1917. She finished her drink in one long swallow that didn’t render her as insensible as she’d hoped.

  “Why is this anything to do with you,” she demanded, rounding on Alex. “Actually, I don’t care. I’m going to dance.”

  But before she could find someone to partner her, Alex was beside her, swinging her around, and she had to move with him or else be knocked out by the couples encroaching on either side.

  “When I told you to leave France, I didn’t expect to see you here,” Alex said.

  Estella couldn’t tell if his words were apology or accusation. “I caught the last American ship out of France. The SS Washington. The one that almost got torpedoed. You might have heard of it,” she said bitingly, as if that was his fault too.

  “I didn’t know it was you,” Alex said. “At the party, when I kissed you, I thought you were Lena. Which makes me an idiot. I’m sorry.”

  She spun away and then back to him, as required by the dance. Was he really sorry? “You’re a spy,” Estella said, testing him to see what else he might disclose.

  “You know I can’t answer that.”

  “Or a map thief?” Estella said. “Which title would you prefer?”

  “You’re still as prickly as ever,” he said.

  Estella felt Lena’s eyes on them.

  Perhaps Alex felt it too because he hurried on. “I was in France for government work, yes. And this is not something you can repeat, but since you know half of it already, maybe it’s better if you know the real story rather than coming to your own half-baked conclusions. Monsieur Aumont was helping the War Office. I was…facilitating the exchange of papers.”

  The way he spoke, hard and remote, should have made her angrier but she remembered that he’d cared enough about the consequences of his work that he’d come with her to find Monsieur Aumont, that he’d told her he’d look after his body. That his response to seeing Monsieur Aumont was not like Estella’s—that of someone who’d never seen a dead body before—but of someone who’d seen too many.

  “What were the maps of?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer straightaway and she thought he’d avoid telling her but then he said, “Maps of Oflag IV-C. Otherwise known as Colditz Castle. A prisoner-of-war camp in Germany where Allied prisoners are held.”

  A long silence stretched before them, and the music changed to a slower song but she didn’t even notice, her body moving to the music unconsciously, following his lead. “You’re helping prisoners of war to…what? Escape?”

  “Nobody wants to be left in German hands until this damn war ends.”

  “No.” There was nothing more to say. He hadn’t actually confirmed her supposition but nor had he denied it. But he’d made it harder for her to hate him when he was doing something so dangerous to help her country.

  “I’m a lawyer,” he added. “I work for international companies like the Chase National Bank so I divide my time between here and London.”

  “And France.”

  “Occasionally.”

  “Are you English?” She still hadn’t been able to place his accent.

  “It’s a long story,” he replied, then smoothly changed tack. “Do you know how your mother came to own the house in Paris? Because it’s the same as…”

  Estella drew away before he could finish. Every thread of her body felt unpicked but somehow he thought he had the right to hold on to his own questionable dignity? “No longer than the story of how a woman who happens to be my doppelganger is sitting over there, surely? And you seem so very keen to have that story told.”

  “She’s got to be more than your doppelganger.”

  She caught Alex’s eye before she turned away and what she saw there, a concern, a solicitude for someone—surely not her, it must be for Lena—almost made her drop her anger like a pair of rolled hose. Why were he and Lena trying to forge some scant facts into a bond? If what Alex had said was true—she’s got to be more than your doppelganger—then he was implying a relationship between Estella and Lena that transformed her mother into a stranger. And Estella wanted more than anything for that not to be true. So she would not help Alex and Lena tear away the fabric of the stories she and Lena had been told because that would leave her naked and with nothing.

  Instead she would pretend she could still sit across the worktable at the atelier and that her mother would smile at her, reach out her hand and say: everything is just as it was ma cherie. There is you and there is me and that is all that matters.

  Chapter Eleven

  At the front desk of the Barbizon the next morning, a note from Lena waited for Estella. Lena hoped that Estella would come to her house at half past nine. Then Lena would take her to meet Elizabeth Hawes. Estella showed it to Janie.

  “It might not be so bad,” Janie said. “Lena looks as if she knows people who matter. Did you find anything out last night?”

  “Just that it’s a huge coincidence that I look like Lena.” Estella picked up a pair of scissors and searched diligently over her seams for loose threads that might need trimming. But she didn’t find any.

  Janie raised one eyebrow. “And I’m the president’s mistress. Are you kidding? You’ve gotta be related.”

  “What does it matter if we are?”

  “Aren’t you curious though? I would be.”

  “Isn’t there a saying about curiosity killing cats?” She finally met Janie’s eye.

  “Lucky you’re not a cat.” Janie grinned as she left the room in her robe and headed for the bathroom.

  Estella knew she’d be more curious if it didn’t implicate he
r mother in some way. But, despite her reluctance, Janie was right; Lena did look as if she knew the right people. Which would be immensely helpful if Estella was to make anything of Stella Designs.

  So she tidied her hair and caught the subway to the address in Gramercy Park that Lena had left for her, realizing now that the party Janie had stolen the invitations to had been at Lena’s house. Despite having a mad, murdering uncle, Lena hadn’t done too badly for herself if she could afford a place in Gramercy Park.

  Estella emerged from the subway into a brilliantly cold and blue winter’s day. A smile dropped onto her face when she saw the sun. She’d meet Elizabeth Hawes, take whatever help she could get from her, work feverishly on her collection, and aim to show it in the spring of 1941. It was a plan, a plan that made her feel good, a plan with certainties attached to it unlike the many uncertainties presented by the evening before.

  But as she swung into Gramercy Park East, her smile was quelled by the grip of nausea in her stomach, by the fingernails of terror sweeping over her neck.

  She was standing outside the house it had been too dark to see on the night of the party. But now she could see it too well. And Alex’s words, the ones she’d cut off, played over: Do you know how your mother came to own the house in Paris? Because it’s the same as…Now she knew what he’d been about to say: it’s the same as Lena’s.

  As well as Estella having a double in Lena, the hôtel particulier in the Marais on the Rue de Sévigné had a Manhattan double and Estella was standing right before it. Lena’s house was an exact replica of the one Estella had been in with Alex the night her world turned upside down.

  She stared at the massive arched portal. In daylight, the house was so out of the ordinary for New York that it seemed impossible she wasn’t drunk or dreaming. The portal led to a courtyard through a carved wooden door—which must have been open on her previous visit—and was even flanked by chasse-roues, the guard stones that used to protect the walls from the damage inflicted by carriage wheels curving in too close. Redbrick trimmed with blond stone, a blue-gray slate roof, a courtyard garden with swept gravel paths and the scent of mint freshening the air, the Four Seasons sculpted onto the facade of the townhouse—Winter looking hunched and despairing, Summer’s head affixed, his gaze brutal.