Heat hangs like a low roof over Paris.
The August air is heavy, made heavier still by the sprawl of stone buildings, the reek of rotting food and human refuse, the sheer number of bodies living shoulder to shoulder.
In a hundred and fifty years, Haussman will set his mark upon the city, raise a uniform facade and paint the buildings in the same pale palette, creating a testament to art, and evenness, and beauty.
That is the kind of Paris Addie dreamed of, and one she will certainly live to see.
But right now, the poor pile themselves in ragged heaps while silk- finished nobles stroll through gardens. The streets are crowded with horse- drawn carts, the squares thick with people, and here and there spires thrust up through the woolen fabric of the city. Wealth parades down avenues, and rises with the peaks of each palace and estate, while hovels cluster in narrow roads, the stones stained dark with grime and smoke.
Addie is too overwhelmed to notice any of it.
She skirts the edge of a square, watching as men dismantle market stalls, and kick out at the ragged children who duck and weave between them, searching for scraps. As she walks, her hand slips into the hem pocket of her skirts, past the little wooden bird to the four copper sols she found in the lining of the stolen coat. Four sols, to make a life.
It is getting late, and threatening to rain, and she must find a place to sleep. It should be easy enough—there is, it seems, a lodging house on every street—but she is hardly across the threshold of the first when she is turned away.
“This is no brothel,” chides the owner, glaring down his nose.
“And I’m no whore,” she answers, but he only sneers, and flicks his fingers as if casting off some unwanted residue.
The second house is full, the third too costly, the fourth harbors only men. By the time she steps through the doors of the fifth the sun has set, and her spirits with it, and she is already braced for the rebuke, some excuse as to why she is unfit to stay beneath the roof.
But she isn’t turned away.
An older woman meets her in the entry, thin, and stiff, with a long nose and the small, sharp eyes of a hawk. She takes one look at Addie and leads her down the hall. The rooms are small, and dingy, but they have walls and doors, a window and a bed.
“A week’s pay,” demands the woman, “in advance.”
Addie’s heart sinks. A week seems an impossible stretch when memories only seem to last a moment, an hour, a day.
“Well?” snaps the woman.
Addie’s hand closes around the copper coins. She is careful to draw out only three, and the woman snatches them as fast as a crow stealing crusts of bread. They vanish into the pouch at her waist.
“Can you give me a bill?” asks Addie. “Some proof, to show I’ve paid?” The woman scowls, clearly insulted. “I run an honest house.”
“I’m sure you do,” fumbles Addie, “but you have so many rooms to keep. It would be easy to forget which ones have—”
“Thirty-four years I’ve run this lodge,” she cuts in, “and never yet forgotten a face.”
It is a cruel joke, thinks Addie, as the woman turns and shuffles away, leaving her to her rented room.
A week she paid for, but she knows that she will be lucky to have a day. Knows that in the morning she will be evicted, the matron three crowns richer, while she herself will be out on the street.
A little bronze key rests in the lock, and Addie turns it, relishes the solid sound, like a stone dropped into a stream. She has nothing to unpack, no change of clothes; she casts off the traveling coat, draws the little wooden bird from her skirts and sets it on the windowsill. A talisman against the dark.
She looks out, expecting to see Paris’s grand rooftops and dazzling buildings, the tall spires, or at least the Seine. But she has walked too far from the river, and the little window looks out only onto a narrow alleyway, and the stone wall of another house that could be anywhere.
Addie’s father told her so many stories of Paris. Made it sound like a place of glamour and gold, rich with magic and dreams waiting to be uncovered. Now she wonders if he ever saw it, or if the city was nothing but a name, an easy backdrop for princes and knights, adventurers and queens.
They have bled together in her mind, those stories, become less a picture than a palette, a tone. Perhaps the city was less splendid. Perhaps there were shadows mixed in with the light.
It is a gray and humid night, the sounds of merchants and horse-carts muted by the soft rain beginning to fall, and Addie curls up on the narrow bed and tries to sleep.
She thought at least she’d have the night, but the rain hasn’t even stopped, the darkness barely settled when the woman bangs upon her door, and a key is thrust into the lock, and the tiny room is plunged into noise. Rough hands haul Addie from the bed. A man grips her arm as the woman sneers and says, “Who let you in?”
Addie fights to wipe away the dregs of sleep.
“You did,” she says, wishing the woman had only swallowed her pride and given a receipt, but all Addie has is the key, and before she can show it, the woman’s bony hand cuts hard across her cheek.
“Don’t lie, girl,” she says, sucking her teeth. “This isn’t a charity house.” “I paid,” says Addie, cupping her face, but it is no use. The three sols in the pouch at the woman’s waist will not serve as proof. “We spoke, you and
I. Thirty-four years you said you’ve run this house—”
For an instant, uncertainty flashes across the woman’s face. But it is too brief, too fleeting. Addie will one day learn to ask for secrets, details only a friend or intimate would know, but even then it will not always gain their favor. She will be called a trickster, a witch, a spirit, and a madwoman. Will be cast out for a dozen different reasons, when in truth, there is only one.
They don’t remember.
“Out,” orders the woman, and Addie barely has time to grab her coat before she’s forced from the room. Halfway down the hall, she remembers
the wooden bird still resting on the windowsill, and tries to twist free, to go back for it, but the man’s grip is firm.
She’s cast out onto the street, shaking from the sudden violence of it all, the only consolation that before the door swings shut, the little wooden bird is tossed out, too. It lands on the stones beside her, one wing cracking with the force.
Though this time, the bird doesn’t mend itself.
It lies there, beside her, a sliver of wood chipped off like a fallen feather as the woman vanishes back inside the house. And Addie stifles the horrible urge to laugh, not at the humor but the madness of it, the absurd, inevitable ending to her night.
It is very late, or very early, the city quieted and the sky a cloudy, rain- slicked gray, but she knows the dark is watching as she scoops up the carving, buries it in her pocket with the last copper coin. Gets to her feet, drawing the coat tight around her shoulders, the hem of her skirts already damp.
Exhausted, Addie makes her way down the narrow street and takes shelter beneath the wooden lip of an awning, sinking down into the stone crook between buildings to wait for dawn.
She slips into a feverish almost-sleep, and feels her mother’s hand against her brow, the faint rise and fall of her voice as she hums, smoothing a blanket over Addie’s shoulders. And she knows she must be ill; that is the only time she saw her mother gentle. Addie lingers there, holding fast to the memory even as it fades, the harsh clop of hooves and strain of wooden carts encroaching on her mother’s whispering song, burying it note by note until she jerks forward out of the haze.
Her skirts are stiff with grime, stained and wrinkled from the brief but restless sleep.
The rain has stopped, but the city looks just as dirty as it did on her arrival.
Back home, a good storm would wash the world clean, leave it smelling crisp and new.
But it seems nothing can rinse the grime from the streets of Paris.
If anything, that storm has only made things worse, the world wet and dull, puddles brown with mud and filth.
And then, amid the muck, she smells something sweet.
She follows the scent until she finds a market in full swing, the vendors shouting prices from tables and stalls, chickens still squawking as they’re hauled off the backs of carts.
Addie is famished, cannot even remember the last time she ate. Her dress doesn’t fit, but it never did—she’d stolen it from a washing line two days outside of Paris, tired of the one she’d worn the day of her wedding. Still, it hangs no looser now, despite the days without food or drink. She supposes she does not need to eat, will not perish from hunger—but tell that to her cramping stomach, her shaking legs.
She scans the busy square, thumbs the last coin in her pocket, loath to spend it. Perhaps she does not need to. With so many people in the market, it should be easy to steal what she needs. Or so she thinks, but the merchants of Paris are as cunning as its thieves, and they keep twice as tight a grip on every ware. Addie learns this the hard way; it will be weeks before she learns to palm an apple, longer still to master it without the faintest tell.
Today, she makes a clumsy effort, tries to swipe a seeded roll from a bread-baker’s cart, and is rewarded with a meaty hand vised around her wrist.
“Thief!”
She catches a glimpse of men-at-arms weaving through the crowd, and is flooded with the fear of landing in a cell, or stock. She is still flesh and bone, has not learned yet to pick locks, or charm men out of charges, to free herself from shackles as easily as her face slips from their minds.
So she pleads hastily, handing over her last coin.
He plucks it from her, waves the men away as the sol vanishes into his purse. Far too much for a roll, but he gives her nothing back. Payment, he says, for trying to steal.
“Lucky I don’t take your fingers,” he growls, pushing her away.
And that is how Addie comes to be in Paris, with a crust of bread and a broken bird, and nothing else.
She hurries from the market, slowing only when she reaches the bank of the Seine. And then, breathless, she tears into the roll, tries to make it last, but in moments it is gone, like a drop of water down an empty well, her hunger barely touched.
She thinks of Estele.
The year before, the old woman developed a ringing in her ears.
It was always there, she said, day and night, and when Addie asked her how she could bear the constant noise, she shrugged.
“With time,” she said, “you can get used to anything.” But Addie does not think she will ever get used to this.
She stares out at the boats on the river, the cathedral rising through the curtain of mist. The glimpses of beauty that shine like gems against the dingy setting of the blocks, too far away and flat to be real.
She stands there until she realizes she is waiting. Waiting for someone to help. To come and fix the mess she’s in. But no one is coming. No one remembers, and if she resigns herself to waiting, she will wait forever.
So she walks.
And as she walks, she studies Paris. Makes a note of this house, and that road, of bridges, and carriage horses, and the gates of a garden. Glimpses roses beyond the wall, beauty in the cracks.
It will take years for her to learn the workings of this city. To memorize the clockwork of arrondissements, step by step, chart the course of every vendor, shop, and street. To study the nuances of the neighborhoods and find the strongholds and the cracks, learn to survive, and thrive, in the spaces between other people’s lives, make a place for herself among them.
Eventually, Addie will master Paris.
She will become a flawless thief, uncatchable and quick.
She will slip through fine houses like a filigreed ghost, move through salons, and steal up onto rooftops at night and drink pilfered wine beneath the open sky.
She will smile and laugh at every stolen victory. Eventually—but not today.
Today, she is simply trying to distract herself from her gnawing hunger and her stifling fear. Today she is alone in a strange city, with no money, and no past, and no future.
Someone dumps a bucket from a second-floor window, without warning, and thick brown water splashes onto the cobbles at her feet. Addie jumps back, trying to avoid the worst of the splash, only to collide with a pair of women in fine dress, who look at her as if she were a stain.
Addie retreats, sinking onto a nearby step, but moments later a woman comes out and shakes a broom, accuses her of trying to steal away her
customers.
“Go to the docks if you plan to sell your wares,” she scolds.
And at first, Addie doesn’t know what the woman means. Her pockets are empty. She’s nothing to sell. But when she says as much, the woman gives her such a look, and says, “You’ve got a body, don’t you?”
Her face flushes as she understands.
“I’m not a whore,” she says, and the woman flashes a cold smirk. “Aren’t we proud?” she says, as Addie rises, turns to go. “Well,” the
woman calls after in a crow-like caw, “that pride won’t fill your belly.”
Addie pulls the coat tight about her shoulders and forces her legs forward down the road, feeling as if they’re about to fold, when she sees the open doors of a church. Not the grand, imposing towers of Notre-Dame, but a small, stone thing, squeezed between buildings on a narrow street.
She has never been religious, not like her parents. She has always felt caught between the old gods and the new—but meeting the devil in the woods has got her thinking. For every shadow, there must be light. Perhaps the darkness has an equal, and Addie could balance her wish. Estele would sneer, but one god gave her nothing but a curse, so the woman cannot fault her for seeking shelter with the other.
The heavy door scrapes open, and she shuffles in, blinking in the sudden dark until her eyes adjust, and she sees the panels of stained glass.
Addie inhales, struck by the quiet beauty of the space, the vaulted ceiling, the red and blue and green light painting patterns on the walls. It is a kind of art, she thinks, starting forward, when a man steps into her path.
He opens his arms, but there is no welcome in the gesture.
The priest is there to bar her way. He shakes his head at her arrival.
“I’m sorry,” he says, coaxing her like a stray bird back up the aisle. “There is no room here. We’re full.”
And then she is back out on the steps of the church, the heavy grind of the bolt sliding home, and somewhere in Addie’s mind, Estele begins to cackle.
“You see,” she says, in her rasping way, “only new gods have locks.”
 |
Addie never decides to go to the docks.
Her feet choose for her, carry her along the Seine as the sun sinks over the river, lead her down the steps, stolen boots thudding on the wooden planks. It’s darker there, in the shadow of the ships, a landscape of crates and barrels, ropes and rocking boats. Eyes follow her. Men glance over from their work, and women look on, lounging like cats in the shade. They have a sickly look about them, their color too high, their mouths painted a violent gash of red. Their dresses tattered and dirty, and still finer than Addie’s own.
She has not decided what she means to do, even when she slips the coat from her shoulders. Even when a man comes up to her, one hand already roving, as if testing fruit.
“How much?” he asks in a gruff voice.
And she has no idea what a body is worth, or if she is willing to sell it.
When she does not answer, his hands grow rough, his grip grows firm. “Ten sols,” she says, and the man lets out a bark of laughter.
“What are you, a princess?” “No,” she answers, “a virgin.”
There were nights, back home, when Addie dreamed of pleasure, when she conjured the stranger beside her in the dark, felt his lips against her breasts, imagined her hand was his as it slipped between her legs.
“My love,” the stranger said, pressing her down into the bed, black curls tumbling into gem-green eyes.
“My love,” she breathed as he entered her, her body parting around his solid strength. He pushed deeper, and she gasped, biting her hand to keep from sighing too loud. Her mother would say that a woman’s pleasure was a mortal sin, but in those moments, Addie didn’t care. In those moments, there was only the longing and the want and the stranger, whispering against her skin as the tension deepened, the heat building like a storm in the bowl of her hips, and then in her mind, Adeline would pull his body down on hers, drawing him deeper and deeper until the storm broke, and thunder rolled through her.
But this is nothing like that.
There is no poetry to this unknown man’s grunts, no melody or harmony, save the steady noise of thrusting as he pushes himself against her. No rolling pleasure, only pressure, and pain, the tightness of one thing being
forced inside another, and Addie looks up at the night sky so she won’t have to look at his body moving, and she feels the darkness looking back.
Then they are in the woods again, and his mouth is on hers, blood bubbling up on her lips as he whispers.
“Done.”
The man finishes with a final thrust, and slumps against her, leaden, and this cannot be it, this cannot be the life Addie traded everything for, this cannot be the future that erased her past. Panic grips her chest but this stranger doesn’t seem to care, or even notice. He simply straightens up, and tosses a handful of coins onto the cobbles at her feet. He trundles off and Addie sinks to her knees to collect her reward, and then empties her stomach into the Seine.
|
When asked about her first memories of Paris, those terrible few months, she will say it was a season of grief blurred into a fog. She will say she can’t remember.
But, of course, Addie remembers.
She remembers the stench of rotten food, and waste, the brackish waters of the Seine, the figures on the docks. Remembers moments of kindness erased by a doorway or a dawn, remembers mourning her home with its fresh bread and warm hearth, her family’s quiet melody, and Estele’s strong beat. The life she had, the one she gave up for the one she thought she wanted, stolen and replaced by this.
And yet, she remembers, too, how she marveled at the city, the way the light swept through in the mornings and evenings, the grandeur carved out between the unhewn blocks; how, despite all the grime, and grief, and disappointment, Paris was full of surprises. Beauty glimpsed through cracks.
Addie remembers the brief respite of that first fall, the brilliant turning of leaves over footpaths, going from green to gold like a jeweler’s showcase, before the short, sharp plunge into winter.
Remembers the cold that gnawed at her fingers and toes before swallowing them whole. Cold, and hunger. They had lean months in Villon, of course, when the cold snap stole the last of a harvest, or a late freeze
ruined new growth—but this is a new kind of hunger. It rakes at her from the inside, drags its nails along her ribs. It wears her down, and while Addie knows it cannot kill her, the knowing does nothing to dull the urgent ache, the fear. She has not lost an ounce of flesh, but her stomach twists, gnawing on itself, and just as her feet refuse to callus, so her nerves refuse to learn. There is no numbing, none of the ease that comes with a habit. This pain is always fresh, brittle and bright, the feeling as sharp as her memory.
And she remembers the worst, too.
Remembers the sudden freeze, the brutal chill that stole upon the city, and the wave of sickness that blew in behind it like a late-fall breeze, scattering mounds of dead and dying leaves. The sound and sight of the carts rattling past, carrying grim cargo. Addie, turning her face away, trying not to look at the bony shapes piled carelessly in the back. She pulls a stolen coat close around her as she stumbles down the road, and dreams of summer heat, while the cold climbs down into her bones.
She does not think she will ever be warm again. Twice more she has gone to the docks, but the cold has forced the callers in, to the warm shelters of brothels, and around her, the cold snap has turned Paris cruel. The rich board themselves up inside their homes, cling to their hearth fires, while out in the streets, the poor are whittled down by winter. There is nowhere to hide from it—or rather, the only spots have all been claimed.
That first year, Addie is too tired to fight for space. Too tired to search for shelter.
Another gust whips through, and Addie folds herself against it, eyes blurring. She shuffles sideways, onto a narrow street, just to escape the violent wind, and the sudden quiet, the breezeless peace, of the alley is like down, soft and warm. Her knees fold. She slumps into a corner against a set of steps, and watches her fingers turn blue, thinks she can see frost spreading over her skin, and marvels quietly, sleepily, at her own transformation. Her breath fogs the air in front of her, each exhale briefly blotting out the world beyond until the gray city fades to white, to white, to white. Strange, how it seems to linger now, a little more with every breath, as if she’s fogging up a pane of glass. She wonders how many breaths until the world is hidden. Erased, like her.
Perhaps it is her vision blurring. She does not care.
She is tired.
She is so tired.
Addie cannot stay awake, and why should she try? Sleep is such a mercy.
Perhaps she will wake again in spring, like the princess in one of her father’s stories, and find herself lying in the grassy bank along the Sarthe, Estele nudging her with a worn shoe and teasing her for dreaming again.
|
This is death.
At least, for an instant, Addie thinks it must be death.
The world is dark, the cold unable to hold back the reek of rot, and she cannot move. But then, she remembers, she cannot die. There is her stubborn pulse, fighting to beat, and her stubborn lungs, fighting to fill, and Addie realizes her limbs aren’t lifeless at all, but weighted down on every side. Heavy sacks above, below, and panic flutters through her, but her mind is still sluggish with sleep. She twists, and the sacks shift a little on top of her. The dark splits, and a sliver of gray light shines through.
Addie writhes and wriggles until she frees one arm and then the other, drawing them in against her body. She begins to push up through the sacks, and only then does she feel bones beneath the cloth, only then does her hand meet waxy skin, only then do her fingers tangle in the strands of someone else’s hair, and now she is awake, so awake, scrambling, tearing, desperate to get free.
She claws her way up, and out, hands splayed across the bony mound of a dead man’s back. Nearby, milky eyes stare up at her. A jaw hangs open, and Addie stumbles out of the cart and collapses to the ground, retching, sobbing, alive.
A horrible sound tears free from her chest, a harsh cough, something snagged halfway between a sob and a laugh.
Then, a scream, and it takes a moment for her to realize it is not coming from her own cracked lips. A ragged woman stands across the road, hands to her mouth in horror, and Addie cannot even blame her.
What a shock it must be, to see a corpse drag itself free from the cart.
The woman crosses herself, and Addie calls out in a hoarse and broken voice, “I am not dead.” But the woman only shuffles away and Addie turns her fury on the cart. “I am not dead!” she says again, kicking at the wooden wheel.
“Hey!” shouts a man, holding the legs of a frail and twisted corpse. “Stay back,” shouts a second, gripping its shoulders.
Of course, they do not remember throwing her in. Addie backs away as they swing the newest body up into the cart. It lands with a sickening thud atop the others, and her stomach churns to think she was among them, even briefly.
A whip cracks, the horses shuffle forward, the wheels turn on the cobbled stones, and it is not until the cart has gone, not until Addie thrusts her trembling hands into the pockets of her stolen coat, that she realizes they are empty.
The little wooden bird is gone.
The last of her past life, carried away with the dead.
For months, she will keep reaching for the bird, hand drifting to her pocket the way it might to a stubborn curl, a motion born of so much habit. She cannot seem to remind her fingers it is gone, cannot seem to remind her heart, which stutters a little every time she finds the pocket empty. But, there, blooming amid the sorrow, is a terrible relief. Every moment since she left Villon, she has feared the loss of this last token.
Now that it is gone, there is a guilty gladness tucked among the grief.
This last, brittle thread to her old life has broken, and Addie has been set well, and truly, and forcibly free.
