The Paris Seamstress

by Natasha Lester

  When it was time for the last two outfits—evening dresses—Estella slunk back into the parlor while all eyes were on the gowns. The silhouettes were as different from the mid-nineteenth-century look that was so pervasive right then and also so infantilizing that Estella heard at least one or two exclamations.

  The gowns were almost the exact opposite of the other: Janie, with her blond hair and extraordinary figure wore the black velvet, an off-the-shoulder dress with a strap circling the top of one of her upper arms, a cinched-in waist and full skirt that dropped away in thick, sensual gorgeousness to the floor. She wore black elbow-length gloves and she looked timeless, ageless, a beauty who could have stepped out of any portal of history. The other model wore a dress which was more of the time: Estella had taken on the trend for lamé and purchased a length of sparkling silver that tinkled through her fingers like pirates’ treasure. She’d designed a plunging neckline that draped in Grecian folds over the breasts, was sashed at the waist, and then fell, without clinging—because clinging and lamé were never meant to be paired—in gentle folds to the ground.

  The models looked spectacular and Estella felt herself smile for the first time. She looked over at Sam, who smiled back, and she mouthed, “Thank you,” at him. She could never have done it without him, the lamé especially, which needed the best cutter in the world to make it behave the way she’d wanted it to.

  But then she heard it again; that strange cackle, like a groan, almost spectral. It was coming from Harry Thaw. He was laughing—no, not laughing, moaning—with glee, with merriment utterly unfit for a parlor in Gramercy Park at a fashion showing. Estella knew it was the sound she’d heard earlier, that while she’d been putting months of work onto the backs of the models, Harry Thaw had been sitting in here convulsing, attracting the stares and whispers of everyone in the room. Diana from Harper’s Bazaar stood up and walked out, a look of utter disgust on her face.

  Estella’s heart dropped so far down she thought she heard it hit the floor. Of all the contingencies she’d planned for—a sick model, a dress splitting its seam, nobody turning up—she’d never imagined a madman might turn her show into a farce.

  She swept into the room and, in the loudest and most serene voice she could muster, said, “Thank you so much for joining us today to see the first collection of Stella Designs. I’d love to talk to you about how we might work together, so please stay and enjoy the champagne.”

  Throughout her short speech, Harry Thaw continued to howl, a hysterical wolf in the throes of full-moon madness. Immediately Estella had finished speaking, the ladies all stood and kissed various cheeks, declined offers of champagne and swept, en masse, toward the door, eager to be away from the brush of lunacy.

  Harry Thaw stood too and, without a word to Estella—but what did he need to say? He’d well and truly won—he left too. Within five minutes of the show finishing it was just Estella, Sam, Janie, Mrs. Pardy, and Elizabeth Hawes standing speechless in the room with the scent of failure clinging to the open and undrunk bottles of champagne, the uneaten pastries, the bent and embarrassed heads of the peony flowers.

  “You tried,” Elizabeth said sympathetically.

  “I’ve a good mind to hunt him down, seduce him and slice off a certain piece of his anatomy when he’s amid the throes of passion,” Janie said.

  “I think even that’s too good for him,” Sam replied darkly.

  “Dammit,” was all Estella could say.

  Never had anything hurt so much. The love and devotion she’d sewn into each gown now felt like a tawdry thing, a cheap gimmick. She’d squandered Janie’s and Sam’s and Mrs. P’s and Elizabeth’s time, she’d spent all her money; everything she’d feared before the show had now come true. It was just Estella and her rack of worthless dresses, destined never to be worn, as useless as all the hopes she’d clung to, alone in New York City.

  She strode out of the parlor, down the hall, through the front door, across the street to Gramercy Park, the quiet haven that nobody could enter without a key. She unlocked the gate and made it to the nearest tree, where she felt her back slide down the trunk, splinters ripping through the fabric of her dress and tearing into her skin. But she didn’t feel any physical pain because nothing could hurt more than her heart rending. She sat on the cold ground, rainwater soaking her dress, heedless, and she stayed there until the tears finally stopped and she was able to go back into the house and tell her friends that it was all over.

  Part Four

  Fabienne

  Chapter Fourteen

  May 2015

  Inside the Gramercy Park house, the replica of the house she’d just left in Paris, a similarity Estella had always explained away as the folly of relatives long past, Fabienne held out the birth certificate to her grandmother.

  “Where did you get that?” Estella asked.

  “In Dad’s desk,” Fabienne replied.

  “So he knew.” Mamie shrank back into the pillows, eyes closed, as if Fabienne had somehow diminished her. “All this time.”

  “Knew what? I don’t understand why your name and Grandpa’s name aren’t on Dad’s birth certificate.”

  Her grandmother didn’t reply.

  Fabienne’s breath caught as she saw the evidence everywhere of, not just old age, but a body at the end of its time, a body not meant to last for so long, a mind that Fabienne had thought indefatigable, worn out by the loss of her husband, the loss of her son, the loss of her friends, clinging on to life for who knew what purpose?

  “I don’t want you to die,” Fabienne said suddenly, picking up Mamie’s hand and holding it to her lips. “You’re too precious to lose.”

  “It’s my time,” Estella said. “I can feel it coming for me. I keep trying to ward it off but I know it’s a battle I won’t win. I want to last long enough, you see,” her grandmother opened her eyes and fixed them on Fabienne, “to convince you to take over the company. It wouldn’t suit anyone but you.”

  “Oh Mamie,” Fabienne said. “There are so many better qualified people than me. People who wouldn’t make a mess of it.”

  “Everyone messes up at least once. I did, when I first started. It was my biggest learning experience.”

  “You never told me about that,” Fabienne said.

  “Too many stories. Never enough time.” Estella smiled fondly at Fabienne.

  “Like this story.” Fabienne pointed to the piece of paper.

  “Like that one.” Her grandmother’s eyes closed again, and the silence felt as heavy as velvet, weighing them down, drawing them beneath its thick weave. “I will tell you that story, I promise. I need to work out how to tell it though.” Her grandmother looked up at Fabienne abruptly. “I want to tell it right. To do justice to Lena. And to Alex.”

  Fabienne watched in horror as her grandmother’s eyes flooded with tears, as her voice cracked on the name Alex, as a look so stark and sad passed over her face, a shadow of whatever had happened in the past suddenly finding form. “You don’t have to…” she started to say, frightened, knowing that if she’d understood the pain she’d cause, she’d have thrown the birth certificate away.

  “It’s best if you start at the beginning,” Estella interrupted. “In the bookcase over there, on the bottom shelf beside Gone with the Wind, there’s a book. Take it and read it and then we’ll talk some more.”

  After that, Fabienne had to return to the airport. She slept on the plane so she’d be at her best for her first day at her new job. She also managed a few hours in bed in her apartment but had to drag herself out when the alarm went off. From there, the day passed in a blur of coffee, of smiling determinedly through fatigue, of trying her best to demonstrate to everyone—especially her boss, Unity, who’d been appointed in the month while Fabienne was finishing up her old job and who had not, therefore, chosen Fabienne herself—that she had an expert knowledge of fashion history.

  She left work in the evening and fell into bed as soon as she arrived home. All too soon it was two o
’clock in the morning and she sighed as she checked the time on her phone again. She’d been lying awake for an hour, clearly still on New York time. She thought about checking her e-mails but knew that would only wake her up more, then realized she’d fallen asleep before calling Will to thank him for the flowers he’d sent to her at work. She propped her head up on her hand, found his name in her contacts list and before she could talk herself out of it, hit the FaceTime call button.

  The screen flickered and there he was, in suit and tie and so gorgeous she wanted to rub her eyes to make sure she wasn’t still asleep and dreaming him into being.

  “Hey,” he said, phone in hand, “let me shut the door.”

  Fabienne’s heart spun a little at the thought that she was the kind of person with whom a closed-door conversation was best.

  “That’s better,” he said, sitting down. “How are you? What time is it there?”

  “Two in the morning,” Fabienne admitted. “I wanted to thank you for the flowers but by the time I popped in to see my mother, then waited for it not to be too early to call you, I’d fallen asleep. But now I’m wide awake. So thank you. They’re beautiful.”

  “Just like their owner then,” he said softly and this time her heart turned a cartwheel. “Are you blushing?” he teased when she didn’t reply.

  “Are you flirting?” she replied, smiling.

  “Yep,” he said. “Shall I stop?”

  “Hmmm,” she said, pretending to think about it. “No, I quite like it.”

  “Besides,” he said, raising his eyebrows, “you can hardly accuse me of flirting when you’re calling me from your bed.”

  She laughed. “You’re right. I’m too tired to get up and sit on the couch like a normal person to make a phone call but not tired enough to go to sleep.”

  “I don’t mind,” he said. “Receiving a call from you in your bed is definitely the best thing that’s happened to me all day.”

  Now he really was flirting and Fabienne felt her whole body flush, the same way it had done when he’d kissed her and told her he’d like her to stay one more night in Paris.

  “How was your first day?” he asked.

  “Great,” she said. “I need to plan next year’s major exhibition so I’ve had to dive straight into things, which is the best way to learn. I’m thinking of doing an exhibition on adornment and decoration. Clothes with flowers, feathers, embroidery, lacework, leather work, sequins, and jewels. The old métiers. Estella started work in an atelier that made the flowers for haute-couture dresses and I’ve always loved the way she kept using flower-work on her clothes.”

  “You wouldn’t want to be lent a late-nineteenth-century evening gown worn by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt that has Tiffany diamonds sewn onto it would you?”

  “Are you kidding?” gasped Fabienne. “There isn’t really such a thing is there?”

  “It’s in the archives here,” he said, smiling at her obvious excitement. “I came across it earlier in the year when I was looking at some of Tiffany’s Gilded Age pieces. I’m sure it would like a trip to Australia. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “That would be amazing. But only if you’re sure you don’t mind following up on it for me. You probably have better things to do.”

  “I don’t.”

  A silence followed, a silence in which Fabienne yearned to reach out into the screen and run her hand across his jaw, to kiss him again. A silence in which she could feel his eyes trace her cheekbones, and then her lips.

  “I don’t expect anything,” she blurted. “From you I mean.” Oh God, why had she said that? But now that she’d started, she needed to clarify what she meant. “It’s just that I know we’re two people who met one weekend in Paris. That I live here and you live there. I know you’ll want to get on with your life and I think that’s right. That you should. And I’m not saying this because I don’t like you or anything, I do really like you but I know it’s kind of impossible…” Shut up, Fabienne, she told herself. She definitely should not call people at two in the morning. The filter part of her brain that would ordinarily stop her from embarrassing herself like this was obviously the only part of her that was napping.

  “I feel like I should say the same. That I don’t expect anything from you.” Will rubbed his jaw and glanced to the side as he spoke, as if he was embarrassed too. “I don’t want to stop you from doing anything you want to do just because of a weekend with me. But all the same I want to see you again, to find out where this might go. If you do.” He looked back at his phone and Fabienne cursed the physical limitations of FaceTime.

  “Don’t you have a line of girls in Manhattan who you could actually see every evening rather than a girl who only comes to New York once a year?”

  “I checked to see if it was possible to go to Sydney for a weekend. It’s not.”

  “You checked?” Fabienne thought that was probably the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for her. “I have no leave owing to me because I’ve just started this job,” she said.

  “And I’ve been taking long weekends every month to escort Liss around the world so I haven’t got any leave either.”

  “So it really would be once or twice a year.”

  “And phone calls in between.”

  “Is it enough?”

  “No. But I’d rather have that than nothing.”

  “Will,” Fabienne said softly. You are the nicest man I’ve ever met, she wanted to say. And what if he really was? What if she said no to him now, told him he should forget about her and she looked back at this moment later with the clear sight of experience and saw that this had been love and she’d been too polite to recognize it? “If you were here right now I’d kiss you,” she ventured.

  “If I was there right now I’d like to do more than kiss you.”

  Fabienne laughed. “You’re flirting again. Which means I should go.”

  He smiled ruefully. “You’re probably right. Sleep tight. And sweet dreams.”

  “They will be,” Fabienne said. And they were.

  The next day at work, Fabienne found an e-mail from Will when she arrived.

  Dear Fabienne, it said. I am pleased to confirm that, should you require a Poiret Gilded Age gown decorated with Tiffany diamonds for your forthcoming exhibition, Tiffany & Co. would be delighted to lend it to you. In order to make the arrangements, please contact our archivist, Tania Fowler, who has been copied into this e-mail. Regards, Will

  Immediately after was another e-mail: I really wanted to say it was good to talk to you and that we should make a habit of it. I’ll call you tonight. Will x

  Fabienne beamed, too much obviously, because one of her researchers, a young woman named Charlotte, who had a straight fringe, a sharp-cut bob, and intelligent glasses raised an eyebrow at her as she came into the room. “Someone looks happy,” she said.

  “I am,” Fabienne said. “I’ve just secured us the loan of the only gown in the world that was made in a collaboration between Poiret and Tiffany and has real Tiffany diamonds on it. It’ll be a fabulous centerpiece for our exhibition.”

  “That is a coup. How did you manage that?”

  “I met the Tiffany Head of Design while I was in New York. He offered me the dress.”

  “Is he as gorgeous as everyone says he is? I saw a profile of him in Vogue a few months ago and almost resorted to being a teenager and pinning his picture on my bedroom wall.”

  Fabienne cursed her fair skin, which showed every blush. “I didn’t really notice. I was talking to him about work,” she lied.

  Charlotte laughed. “Of course you were! I can tell by how red your cheeks are that you noticed nothing about him besides his professional qualifications.”

  Fabienne smiled. “Isn’t it time for our meeting?” she asked. “Get everyone in here. We’ve got an exhibition to plan.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Charlotte said teasingly. “And I promise not to ask you any more about it in front of everyone.”

  “Thank you.”<
br />
  The meeting went smoothly. Lots of ideas for the exhibition were put forward, the team went away with phone calls to make, and Fabienne and Charlotte spent the afternoon in the archives looking through some of the pieces they thought would work, imagining how they might fit together as an exhibition.

  Later, when she returned to her apartment in Balmoral, which she’d rented in a hurry after she moved out of the place she’d shared with Jasper—but which she fortunately loved—she knew she had to make herself stay awake. Otherwise she’d fall straight to sleep and find herself staring at the ceiling at two in the morning again. So she made herself a coffee and took out the book her grandmother had asked her to read. Its cover was worn with age, the binding splintery, the cardboard swollen, the pages as fragile as a 200-year-old bridal veil. It bore the words: The Memoirs of Evelyn Nesbit: The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing.

  Fabienne turned to the first page.

  My name is Evelyn Nesbit and more words have been written about me than the Queen of England, such is my notoriety. You think you know me: the girl in the newspaper, the girl whose husband murdered her lover in plain sight at Madison Square Garden, the girl whose virtue was taken from her on the infamous red velvet swing. But you don’t know me, not really. This is who I am.

  Evelyn Nesbit was, without question, an ambitious girl. Why shouldn’t she be? She had the kind of looks that would unroll the socks from any man’s legs.

  I discovered that when I was just twelve years old and my mother sent me to collect the unpaid rents from the men who took rooms in our boardinghouse. The men would invite me in, ask me to wait while they searched their wallets, and command me to come and take the money from their hands. They all thought they were so clever, toying with a twelve-year-old girl gifted with a face and figure that were too much for anyone to handle.