“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.
Chapter Eighteen
Flying boat,” Sam said the next morning, with the same disbelief Estella’s voice had carried when she’d discovered exactly how she, Alex, and Lena were getting to Paris. “Do you think you’ll come back alive?”
“I don’t think the flying boats are the worst danger,” Estella said.
“You’re going to a war zone with a man you hardly know…”
Her stomach turned over and the sidecars and whiskey of the night before made her feel nauseated, sweaty, fearful. You’re going to a war zone with a man you hardly know. But what she did know, she realized, was that, despite his reputation, his womanizing wasn’t directed at her. Lena must have tamed him.
Lena. Who’d grown up with Harry Thaw while she, Estella, had not. Through some accident, through some quirk of fate, she’d had her mother, while Lena had had Harry. Like it had done all night as she’d lain awake in her bed at Alex’s home outside Sleepy Hollow, terror squeezed her heart. What if Jeanne Bissette wasn’t her mother? By going to Paris, Estella would have to ask her mother that question.
Before her panic became too overpowering, Estella thought of the man stuck in Paris, hiding from the Germans. The agent Alex had said was one of his best. The agent who could help so many of her countrymen and -women if he was free. Estella must go to Paris. Her fists clenched. Once she’d helped Alex, she would take Lena to see her mother and they’d ask her to tell them everything. Otherwise, Estella’s fear of whatever secret her mother had kept from her would haunt her for the rest of her life.
“I’m also going with a woman who might be my sister,” Estella said to Sam now. “She’s there to protect my reputation. I’m doing some translating for Alex; his French is shocking.” It wasn’t true of course but it was the story he’d asked her to tell—that he had legal work to do for some American clients in Paris and she was there to help him with the language. “And I can see my mother. That’s worth anything.” And it was, no matter what she learned. Her final words were sober and Sam squeezed her hand.
“Besides,” she said, forcing a smile, “I seem to remember traveling out of a war zone last year with a man I hardly knew and look how well that turned out.”
“Come here,” Sam said gruffly and she stepped in closer and found herself enveloped in an enormous hug. “Estella,” he began.
At the same moment, the door to Sam’s apartment flew open and Janie rushed in, holding out her hand. “Look at this!” she shrieked. “I’m engaged. Nate asked me to marry him. And I said yes. Isn’t it huge?”
“It really is,” Estella said, leaning over to examine the proffered finger, then reaching out to hug her friend as if she could, without words, say everything she wanted to which was: Don’t get married. Stay exactly who you are. But nobody ever stayed who they were.
“We should toast,” Sam said. “This is the last time we’re all going to be in the same room for a while.” He poured out three whiskeys in water glasses and passed them around.
“What were you about to say before Janie barged in?” Estella asked him.
“Nothing.” He raised his glass. “To your adventures, Estella.”
“What are you doing?” Janie demanded.
“I’m going to Paris.”
Janie laughed.
“I really am,” Estella said. “In a Pan-Am flying boat.”
“Why the hell would you do that?” Janie asked with disbelief.
“It’s a long story,” said Estella.
“It really flies?” Estella asked for possibly the tenth time that morning, shouting so that her voice would project from the rumble seat and into the front of the car where Alex and Lena sat as they drove to wherever flying boats departed from.
“It really does,” Alex replied.
“But isn’t that just the teeniest bit exci
ting?” Estella said. “Have you been on one?” she asked Lena.
“I haven’t,” Lena said and she turned and gave Estella a small smile.
“See!” Estella said triumphantly. “You’re excited too. As for you,” she said to Alex, “you’ve probably been on them dozens of times and are so jaded by the whole experience that you’d rather us just be there already.”
“Dozens of times?” he replied, in a mock-boastful voice. “Try hundreds.”
Estella laughed. So did Lena, and then Alex.
They soon arrived at the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia and Alex ushered them inside. Estella watched him talking to two men in military uniforms, who both laughed with him and seemed to know who he was.
While they waited, Estella turned to Lena. “Thank you for coming.”
Lena’s eyebrows lifted a little in surprise. “I’m happy to.”
Then Estella made herself ask. “Will you come with me to meet my mother while we’re in Paris?”
Lena shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
Estella reached out and took Lena’s hand, the first time she’d ever dared touch her. “Harry came to my fashion show. He came to the Gramercy Park house another time too. He’s everything you said he was. A monster. I grew up with nothing but love; I can’t imagine what it would have been like to grow up with him. So I want you to meet my mother. I want us both to talk to her. I think…” She hesitated, unsure if this was pushing Lena too far. “I think there are things you would like to ask her, just as I have questions for her too.” Then she let go of Lena’s hand and waited.
Instead of replying, Lena searched through her handbag and passed Estella a book. The title—The Memoirs of Evelyn Nesbit—was emblazoned in red on the cover, along with a sensational picture of a red velvet swing. “I thought you should read this,” Lena said. “It might fill in some of Harry’s background better than I can.”
She didn’t look at Estella as she spoke but Estella heard something fragile in Lena’s voice and she understood that Lena really meant it might fill Estella in on things Lena found too difficult to say. The moment of vulnerability touched Estella but she knew if she acknowledged it, Lena would freeze over once more. “I’ll read it on the plane,” was all Estella said.
Lena turned away from her, as if she was watching Alex walk back over to them, and, while her face was obscured, said, “I would like to meet your mother.”
Estella tried not to let out the breath she was holding, tried not to let that one poignant sentence make her cry. Once the tightness in her throat subsided, she said, “Then you will.” And added, “I’m sorry I was so awful to you when we first met.”
Estella thought she saw Lena reach up her hand to her eyes. “You’re the last person who should be sorry,” she heard Lena say before Alex reached them.
He led them down a gangplank that stretched out over the water to where the flying boat was perched, like a large and lazy bird, atop the water. Estella saw the way Alex kept his hand just behind Lena’s back, helping her down the gangplank, then handing her into the airship. He turned to do the same to Estella, reaching out his hand to take hers.
“I can manage,” she said.
“I know. But I’m trying to show you I have some manners,” he said.
“All right then. I don’t want you to think I have none,” she said.
She slipped her hand into his and saw his face stiffen, as if she’d done something wrong. She didn’t know what it was and could hardly wait for the three seconds to pass until she’d stepped into the flying boat and could remove her hand from his. Perhaps she’d held on too tightly and he thought she meant something by it. Perhaps he thought she was attracted to him, just like every other woman he encountered. She’d do her best to make sure she gave him no such signals for the duration of the flight. She’d be polite and reserved and speak only when necessary.
Her resolution left her the moment they were inside. “It’s like a palace,” she said, taking in the linen tablecloths, the crystal glasses, the wood paneling, amazed that something so luxurious and capacious could be hidden inside an airship. “It’s almost as lovely as…” She stopped, uncertain if Lena knew of her sojourn at Alex’s house in the Hudson Valley. Something about the way he was looking at her made her say, “Your home, Lena.”
“We should move along,” Alex said. “We’re down the end. In the bridal suite.”
“You’re joking,” Estella said. “There’s a bridal suite?”
“Can you think of a better place to spend your honeymoon?”
The truth was, Estella had never once thought about a honeymoon, let alone having one while suspended over the Atlantic Ocean. “You won’t want me staying in the bridal suite with you,” she said.
“I think Alex will be able to control himself,” Lena said dryly, walking ahead.
“I’m sure I can talk to the, whoever—somebody—and have another seat arranged,” Estella said.
Alex took Estella’s arm and propelled her forward. “Can you please keep going. We’re holding everybody up. I promise not to behave like a man on his wedding night with anyone for the duration of our time in the bridal suite. Happy? I fly back and forth a lot. So they give me the best seats when they can. I’m going to France because the Chase National Bank and the American Hospital in Paris need some legal help and you’re my translator and Lena’s your chaperone. The bridal suite is big enough that I can work on the way over.”
“Oh,” Estella said, understanding that everything was about his assignment in France, nothing more. “Of course.”
“Have a seat,” he said brusquely at the very last room. “I’m closing the door for my own privacy, not because I have any evil intentions.”
“Of course you don’t,” Estella stuttered. “I never thought you did…”
Her voice trailed off. She determined to sit down and be quiet. But the suite was spectacular. “I’m speechless,” she said, looking around.
Lena smiled and Alex looked at Lena and said, “Will you say it or will I?”
“Go right ahead,” Lena said.
“You’re never speechless, Estella,” Alex said.
“Well, pardon me for being unable to be blasé about my first voyage in the bridal suite of a flying boat,” Estella said crossly, sitting down in the nearest chair. “I almost think it would take someone blowing this up before you reacted at all.”
“We’re not that bad, are we?” Alex teased.
But Estella didn’t want to be placated. “Yes,” she said. “You are.”
“I bet if I told her it cost $675 each she really would be speechless,” Lena mused and Estella stared at her in horror.
“$675? That can’t be true.”
“Lena,” she heard Alex say in exasperation.
She turned to him. “You spent $675 to put me on a flying boat to France?” Whoever they were getting out of the Village Saint-Paul must be even more important than she’d realized. None of this was a game. Which would explain Alex’s demeanor, his lack of excitement. It was a job. A dangerous job, one that he must be desperate to accomplish, one that he must have used all other resources for and failed, if he’d asked her to help.
Alex didn’t reply. He sat down in a chair, unfolded a newspaper and began to read. Lena closed her eyes. Estella pulled out the book Lena had given her, read the first line—My name is Evelyn Nesbit and more words have been written about me than the Queen of England, such is my notoriety—and braced herself for what Evelyn would have to say about Harry Thaw. She put the book aside half an hour later when her stomach began to churn from the horrors revealed, most of which she already knew from the newspaper articles Alex had shown her, but hearing from the victim, who used a childish and breathless tone to recount the various cruelties, was so much worse.
Not long after, an impeccably made sidecar appeared at her side. “Peace offering,” Alex said.
“Isn’t coffee more appropriate for this time of day?”
“It’s
already nighttime in Paris,” Alex said.
“I suppose that’s true,” Estella said grudgingly as she put the book down and sipped her drink. A sudden roar of engines jolted her upright and she jumped to her feet. “Are we starting?”
“Taking off, you mean?”
“Look!” Estella remembered Lena had her eyes closed so she said again, more quietly, “Look!”
Out the window, water rushed past, waves created by the movement of the flying boat over the water lurched up onto the glass, and she was moving faster than she ever had in her life. The whole ship vibrated so intensely she wondered if it might burst apart from the force, from the noise. Then she felt the boat tip to one side and she grabbed hold of the wall at the same time as Alex put one hand on her back to steady her.
“Sorry,” he said, ripping his hand away. “I promised to behave myself.”
Estella relented. This was the experience of a lifetime; she might as well relax her hackles. “It’s fine,” she said.
Suddenly the flying boat was no longer a boat but an airship and she was suspended in the sky, surrounded by blue, soft clouds floating within arm’s reach.
Alex stepped in closer to her. “Look over there. You can see the Chrysler Building. And you can just make out the Statue of Liberty.”
Estella smiled up at him. “It’s amazing.”
“It is,” he said, and for the next couple of hours, while Lena slept, they stood shoulder to shoulder in the bridal suite of a flying boat, staring out the window, not speaking, reveling in the wonder of passing over the ocean, of migrating, birdlike, from one country to another, of soaring into the blue, of almost touching the sun.
I’m coming, Maman, Estella thought as her palm lifted to touch the window. Looking out at the blue promise of sky, Estella knew that, as well as wanting to ask her mother about Lena, she wanted, more than anything, just to feel her mother’s arms wrapped tight around her once more.
The flight was long—twenty-seven hours Alex had told her, including a stop at a place called Horta in the Azores, which she’d never heard of—but Estella couldn’t settle enough to sleep. She tried once or twice but after an hour she’d be up and about and back at the window, staring out, suddenly realizing, in a way she hadn’t on the ship from France, how vast the world was, how small she was, how insignificant her place in everything. As she watched, she imagined dresses in all of the colors of the sky: an optimistic morning-blue, an almost white, gold-shot midday hue, the deeper blue of the afternoon, the violet-gray of dusk, the silvery ripple of early evening and then the fathomless inky black of night.
The Paris Seamstress Page 21
