From a Paris Balcony

by Ella Carey

  Was she a magnet for out of control men? And yet, why should she be intimidated or put off? What if this was a chance to get some behind-the-scenes experience with an artist? Usually she only dealt with people who owned the art. She realized that she was conjuring up excuses to leave Boston, but in the end, did it matter what this artist was like?

  “I’ve read about him.” She kept her voice deadpan.

  “I’m sorry.” Loic sounded resigned. “I guess some people might find it hard to . . . deal with Laurent right now. He’s going through a rough patch. Something went wrong. But it’s not my place to tell you. That’s his story. It’s just that, it might help you to understand that he is a good person. He is brilliant, you know—”

  “Oh,” Sarah felt a chuckle rising in her throat. “Well, that will help.”

  “He’s incredibly talented.”

  Sarah stepped into the lift and felt her eyebrows rise to the roof.

  “Anyway, by rights the apartment belongs to my wife, Cat. She’s flat out with our first baby right now. Our little daughter is a month old. So I’m going to have to be the person you deal with, I’m afraid.”

  Sarah stepped out of the elevator and walked to the street. “Congratulations.” She knew she sounded vague, but her mind was locked onto Paris and wild artists and, for some extraordinary reason, Toulouse-Lautrec. “Congratulations on the baby.”

  She shook her head, rounded the corner, unlocked her car door, slipped inside, and memorized the address of the house she was visiting.

  “Laurent will be working hard all summer,” Loic said. “Just tell him to be quiet when he comes back in the door late at night. If you have real problems, then I’ll simply move you out. I can talk to him anytime too.”

  Sarah looked at her watch. It was time to go. She was never late. Never.

  She took a few seconds to think, right there, right then. After what she had been through, what was an artist in a tailspin? He didn’t have to affect her. No doubt Laurent would be all over his models and actresses anyway. He wouldn’t even notice Sarah was in the apartment at all.

  She collected her thoughts. “Alright then. I’ll still share with him. You know, I do appreciate this, thank you. I’m sure we will be just fine.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  They agreed that Loic would meet her at the apartment once she had arrived.

  “I’ll see you in Paris,” she said. And hung up. And shook her head. She had let a mad idea run to fruition. So unlike her. What she was doing, she had no idea. But she had to get away, she knew that. She wanted to find out about Louisa. For some reason, she felt closer than ever to her ancestor. For some reason, Sarah felt almost as if Louisa were calling to her from the past.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sarah’s boss, Amanda, insisted on hosting a farewell dinner for Sarah at her favorite tapas restaurant in town. It was one of Boston’s hardest-to-get-into places, but Amanda had cultivated a friendship with one of the hip owners, and she liked to show off the fact that she could get a table at the drop of an emerald brooch.

  Sarah knew the food would be as good as the tapas in Barcelona, or so everyone said. Long wooden tables ran down the center of the room. An artisan bar sat along the length of one exposed brick wall, and an oversize blackboard showcased the menu. Sarah hung her favorite leather jacket over the back of her chair, shook her coworkers’ hands, and ran a hand through her black bob. She had taken great care with her makeup this evening—had spent some time on her dark brown eyes. This evening she wanted to look particularly professional. She suspected her workmates were stunned that she was going to Paris.

  The first part of the evening passed well enough. Sarah found herself chatting her way through the entrées of smoked eggplant and wild mushrooms with summer herbs and plates of melt-in-your-mouth grilled corn, while her colleagues—graphic designers, along with art educators and marketing people, curators of paintings, and staff on research fellowships—kept up the sort of steady banter that Sarah always enjoyed on nights out.

  But once the food was done, Brian Doolan, one of the museum’s longest-standing curators, addressed Sarah, and the table fell quiet. “What we’re going to miss is your efficiency.” His eyes twinkled, and Sarah found herself raising her brow.

  Sarah toyed with her dessert wine, watching the sticky liquid move around in the bottom of the glass. “My efficiency?” she said. “Wow. Thanks.” She kept her tone light. She knew Brian. And she knew what he said was only a half joke.

  “You have to hand it to yourself,” Amanda chimed in from Sarah’s other side. The older woman tossed her long blond hair and fixed Sarah with her green eyes. “It’s what you do best. Don’t know how we’ll manage without you for the summer.”

  “Thanks.” Sarah knew her voice sounded as flat as a sunken soufflé.

  “You’re so reliable.” There was nothing nasty in Amanda’s tone, but Sarah had heard these words too many times to count. Responsible, efficient, sensible. Rational. Sarah had to push away a sigh. Was that how Steven had seen her? Reliable? Not novel enough?

  “You know,” Brian said, “I always say, if we need someone dependable, then Sarah’s our girl.”

  “Thanks.” Sarah knew she was sounding like a record player with its needle stuck on one song.

  “And you know what the best thing is?” Brian warmed to his theme. “You do things in an orderly fashion. Nothing is spontaneous with you. You work to a plan. Logical. We need people like that. I just find you invaluable. Wish I had more of your qualities myself.”

  “So when you said you were going to Paris,” Amanda laughed, “I nearly died on the spot. What, I thought, could Sarah possibly be wanting to do in the city of love? I mean, Paris is totally out of character for you. It’s not the city I’d choose for you at all. London, yes, but never Paris.”

  “Are you planning a little liaison of your own? You know, revenge and all that on that vile ex-husband?” Brian leaned in closer to Sarah. “Do tell.” He sounded wicked.

  Sarah pulled away. She liked Brian, but right now she could smell stale wine and garlic on his breath.

  “It’s not that,” she said.

  “So you just want to go to Paris for the summer, because you can?” Brian was not giving up.

  “Yup.”

  “Good for you.” Amanda sounded cheerful.

  “I don’t believe you,” Brian went on. “I’ve known you since you were twenty-three. Nine years is a long time, Sarah. You’re too strategic to do this for no reason.”

  “I admit that I do enjoy a plan.” Sarah shrugged. “But I don’t have one this time.”

  Brian’s eyes narrowed into a pair of tiny chinks. “I still don’t believe you.”

  Sarah pulled her jacket on. She was not, she reminded herself, boring. She wore leather jackets. And she used to have a life. It was just that it had exploded into a million tiny shards, and there was nothing she could do about it. Nothing at all.

  “Well. You have a great time in Paris no matter why you’re going.” Brian had reverted to his usual affable self.

  He leaned forward, kissed Sarah on the cheek. Chatter started up among the people at the table. Sarah smiled and patted her colleague on the arm. Hugged Amanda. Moved around the table and said good-bye to the rest of her workmates. As she walked out of the restaurant into the cool Boston air, she let her thoughts escape to Paris.

  The next morning, Sarah took a last look around her apartment from the top of the spiral staircase to the living area below. She held a porcelain bowl that had belonged to Louisa’s parents, Nathaniel and Charlotte West, which she was going to put away in her safe. She had collected the few precious items that her father had inherited from his parents, and now they were in her apartment. Nothing had been on display in her family; her father had always kept the few heirlooms that he did have protected, hidden away, and now Sarah felt compelled to do the same thing. It was almost as if she were following a script that she would never question. She took the por
celain bowl, which she had cleaned the evening before with her soft polishing cloth, and opened her safe up.

  Nathaniel and Charlotte West, Louisa’s parents, had inherited a tea-trading company from Charlotte’s father, a successful businessman in old Boston’s establishment. He had employed Nathaniel before he married Charlotte, and then once Charlotte’s father had died, Nathaniel West had ended up running the business. The family had exported cloth, wood, and opium to China in exchange for tea. Sarah knew that Nathaniel had been based in Hong Kong, and then so had Louisa’s brother after that.

  Now she carried the Canton bowl to her safe, placing the precious piece with its hand-painted dragons and people taking tea right next to her pair of Chinese Foo dogs—gifts Nathaniel brought back for Charlotte from China.

  As the late nineteenth century rolled on, Nathaniel had moved on to invest in railroads, seeking one lucrative opportunity after another. His fortune had been large back then. Other branches of the family included bankers and lawyers, with business and social ties to Harvard, the Boston Brahmins, and other blue bloods.

  Sarah closed the safe and locked it with her key. The taxi to the airport would arrive shortly. She took one last look around the apartment. She was ready. It was time to go back to Paris.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Hampshire, England, 1893

  Willowdale was different from every other house that Louisa had visited in England. She felt removed, here, from the constant bustle that was London—the endless balls, the same dull young men at every party. The relentless pressure to make a fortunate marriage. It was summer, not winter, not officially the season, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. Every mother and daughter was out for the same thing.

  Willowdale was not far from London, but here Louisa felt a sense of the England she had imagined before she left Boston. Climbing roses adorned the old house’s walls, framing the windows that overlooked the serene park.

  A table was set for tea on the terrace. Everyone wore white, as if by some mutual agreement that it was the only color that would suit, Louisa thought. The young ladies’ faces were shaded by parasols as the group sat, half-asleep in the afternoon sun. The two men sitting opposite her stretched their legs out in front of them, smoking cigarettes and staring out at the valley in the distance. Two villages sat in the valley below the house. Church spires peeped above the treetops, and rolling fields led down beyond the park.

  Louisa could almost forget she had any troubles at all.

  Almost.

  But the truth was, Willowdale was going to afford her great happiness and deep sadness in equal parts. Happiness for her childhood friend, Meg, who had just married Willowdale’s heir, Guy Hamilton, and sadness, because this was where Louisa would bid farewell to someone more dear to her than anyone else in the world. This was where she had to say good-bye to Samuel.

  Louisa regarded her brother with the air of an older sister who was a little proprietary, a little proud, and a little fearful at the same time. It was almost impossible to equate the grown man sitting near her with the childhood companion whom she had adored all her life. She was still becoming used to the idea that Samuel had grown up, even though she had been with him every step of the way, and they had gotten up to all manner of mischief together over the years.

  Louisa’s family had maintained the sort of cultivation, restraint, and dignity that was expected of those descended from the English colonists who arrived in the New World on the Arbella or the Mayflower. However, Louisa knew that she and her brother had enjoyed freedom that was uncommon to their class, largely due to their father’s continued absence as a trade merchant in Hong Kong. Their mother had been so caught up in her own social aspirations that she had hardly noticed her children at all. Charlotte West’s entire reason for living had always seemed to be to maintain an old aristocratic lifestyle in order to cement her social standing. Now, Louisa could see that her mother had dedicated herself to creating a replica of English life in America. Louisa grasped that she had not really understood either the motivations behind her mother’s behavior, or the roots of social structure until she came to England.

  Duty, restraint, discretion, these were ideals that Louisa’s mother stuck to with a genteel smile. Charlotte West made an art form of cultivating the correct dress, manners, deportment, character traits, and personal virtues that were expected of her class. She devoted herself to the arts, to charity—hospitals and colleges—and to the good works of the Episcopal Church.

  But Louisa had been blessed with a governess who had opened her mind to the fact that women should have better rights, rights equal to men’s. Louisa had been so drawn to the idea that women deserved to determine their own destinies that she had read more on the topic over the last few years. Her governess shared with her Mrs. Pankhurst’s pamphlets advocating universal women’s suffrage through her Women’s Franchise League. Louisa was inspired by the fact that Mrs. Pankhurst had taken up an interest in women’s rights at the age of fourteen, and she felt drawn to the woman’s ideas.

  She appreciated that Mrs. Pankhurst was a European woman living in the very society where Louisa found herself now, but Mrs. Pankhurst was leading the way for women in the New World too. The suffragettes proposed an alternative way to that of Louisa’s mother. And that excited Louisa.

  But Charlotte had found Louisa’s pamphlets and had been furious at her new ideas. Charlotte had informed Louisa that being labeled a bluestocking would mean she’d never be seen as a suitable wife. Any sort of activism among their class would simply not be tolerated, and Louisa would be dismissed from society faster than she could read one of her own silly pamphlets.

  Charlotte sacked Louisa’s governess and sent Louisa packing to England. Here she was kept under the watchful eyes of society and under a grueling social calendar to distract her, and to keep her from her unsuitable revolutionary ideas. Charlotte made it clear that Louisa would not be welcome back in Boston unless it was with an English husband, and that were Louisa to set foot near Mrs. Pankhurst in London, she would no longer be a member of the West family at all.

  Samuel had been instructed to accompany Louisa on his way to Hong Kong, and here she was about to see him off. Her mother’s plan had not worked so far—Louisa had not been distributed to a suitable husband, and she only wished that she could go to work in Hong Kong too.

  She stood up. Samuel, ever intuitive, stood up too. Louisa held her parasol up against the sun, appreciating the coolness of the shade on her white cotton dress, with its high collar and full sleeves.

  “I’m going for a walk,” she said to the party on the terrace.

  Guy Hamilton’s sister, Alice, and her young friend smiled, waving Louisa on, while Louisa’s dear friend Meg raised her hand in a nonchalant sort of response. It had struck Louisa that Meg had become very content here—no doubt confident in the knowledge that she would spend hundreds of afternoons just like this one, with her new husband, Guy, who was famous for his good humor, his fine jawline, and the fact that he had never fallen in love until he met Meg.

  Feigned delight at his engagement had fanned its way through debutante circles, while the innocent Meg remained oblivious to the fact that she was the object of both envy and hatred throughout half the English countryside. But Louisa sensed it, that tightness beneath the politeness of the other girls and their mothers, and she felt an odd need to protect Meg. She turned away from the terrace. Her mind was filled, as always, with too much. Which was what her mother always said.

  “I’ll join you.” Samuel removed his white suit jacket, rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, and smoothed back his corn-colored hair. His face was lightly tanned. The English summer suited him, Louisa thought.

  “You are agitated,” he said, holding his arm out for her to take.

  They stepped down from the terrace to the path that led through the rose garden. “No more than usual.” She knew she sounded vague, but it was a lazy kind of day.

  Samuel smiled and continued on
to the park. “I hate the thought of being so far away from you. I don’t want to miss out on any happiness of yours. You must keep me up to date when you make the most important decision in your life. You will need support. You know I’m always there for you.”

  Louisa turned her blue eyes to meet her brother’s. Her wavy, golden hair was swept up on her head, but the clammy English summer played havoc with her curls, leaving tendrils running out of place, and she had become used to droplets of perspiration falling on her forehead.

  “There’s little chance of me getting married,” she almost laughed.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Samuel spoke gently. He patted Louisa’s hand where it rested in the crook of his elbow.

  Louisa looped her hand away from Samuel’s arm and tied the parasol up in a neat, straight line.

  “Tell me.” He stood still.

  “Everything here is a game,” Louisa said. They moved across the park and stopped in the shade of a great oak tree, one of the oldest in the county, according to the Hamilton family. “You know I don’t want to play.”

  “Louisa. It’s got to the point where neither of us has a choice. The forces are too great. Surely, even you can see that.”

  Louisa sensed frustration rising through her system and she could not stop it at all. “You have choices, Samuel.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “You could marry, not marry, stay here, stay in Boston, go to Hong Kong. You are the center of your own life. And what’s more, people take you seriously. People listen to you. They don’t laugh when you speak. When you converse about a topic, as a man, you are seen as intelligent, not bossy; you are amusing, rather than mocked. But when I purport to have any opinions at all as a woman—”