She stands in the shade of a silk merchant.
Across the way, the tailor’s shop bustles, the pace of business brisk even as the day wears on. Sweat drips down her neck as she unties and reties the bonnet, salvaged from a gust of wind, hoping the cloth cap will be enough to pass her off as a lady’s maid, to grant her the kind of invisibility reserved for help. If he thinks her a maid, Bertin will not look too close. If he thinks her a maid, he might not notice Addie’s dress, which is simple but fine, slipped from a tailor’s model a week before, in a similar shop across the Seine. It was a pretty thing at first, until she snagged the skirts on an errant nail, and someone cast a bucket of soot too near her feet, and red wine somehow got onto one of the sleeves.
She wishes her clothes were as resistant to change as she appears to be. Especially because she has only the one dress—there’s no point collecting a wardrobe, or anything else, when you’ve nowhere to put it. (She will try, in later years, to gather trinkets, hide them away like a magpie with its nest, but something will always conspire to steal them back. Like the wooden bird, lost among the bodies in the cart. She cannot seem to hold on to much of anything for long.)
At last, the final customer steps out—a valet, one beribboned box beneath each arm—and before anyone else can beat her to the door, Addie darts across the street and steps inside the tailor’s shop.
It is a narrow space: a table piled high with rolls of fabric; a pair of dress forms modeling the latest fashions. The kind of gowns that take at least four hands to get on, and just as many to take off—all bolstered hips and ruffled
sleeves and bosoms cinched too tight to breathe. These days the fine society of Paris is wrapped like parcels, clearly not meant to be opened.
A small bell on the door announces her arrival, and the tailor, Monsieur Bertin, looks up at her through brows as thick as brambles, and makes a sour face.
“I am closing,” he says curtly.
Addie ducks her head, the picture of discretion. “I am here on behalf of Madame Lautrec.”
It is a name plucked from the breeze, overheard on a handful of her walks, but it is the right answer. The tailor straightens, suddenly keen. “For the Lautrecs, anything.” He takes up a small pad, a charcoal pencil, and Addie’s own fingers twitch, a moment of grief, a longing to draw as she so often did.
“It is strange, though,” he is saying, shaking the stiffness from his hands, “that she would send a lady’s maid in place of her valet.”
“He’s ill,” Addie answers swiftly. She is learning to lie, to bend with the current of the conversation, follow its course. “So she sent her lady’s maid instead. Madame wishes to throw a dance, and is in need of a new dress.”
“But of course,” he says. “You have her measurements?” “I do.”
He stares, waiting for her to produce a slip of paper.
“No,” she explains. “I have her measurements—they are the same as mine. That’s why she sent me.”
She thinks it is a rather clever lie, but the tailor only frowns, and turns toward a curtain at the back of the shop. “I will get my tape.”
She catches a brief glimpse of the room beyond, a dozen dress forms, a mountain of silks, before the curtain falls again. But as Bertin slips away, so does she, vanishing between the dress forms and the rolls of muslin and cotton propped against the wall. It is not her first visit to the shop, and she has learned well its crevices and crooks, all the corners large enough to hide in. Addie folds into one such space, and by the time Bertin returns to the front of the shop, the tape in one hand, he has forgotten all about Madame Lautrec and her peculiar maid.
It is stuffy among the rolls of cloth, and she’s grateful when she hears the rattle of the bell, the shuffling sound of Bertin closing up his shop. He will go upstairs, to the room he keeps above, will have some soup, and soak his
aching hands, and go to bed before it is full night. She waits, letting the quiet settle around her, waits until she can hear the groan of his steps overhead.
And then she is free to wander, and peruse.
A weak gray light seeps through the front window as she crosses the shop, pulls aside the heavy curtain, and steps through.
The fading light slides in through a single window, just enough to see by. Along the back wall there are cloaks, half-finished, and she makes a mental note to return when summer gives way to fall, and the cold sweeps through. But her focus falls on the center of the room, where a dozen dress forms stand like dancers taking up their marks, their narrow waists wrapped in shades of green and gray, a navy gown piped white, another pale blue with yellow trim.
Addie smiles, and casts the bonnet off onto a table, shaking loose her hair.
She runs her hand over skeins of patterned silk and richly dyed cotton, savoring the textures of linen and twill. Touches the boning of the corsets, the bustles at the hips, imagining herself in each. She passes the muslin and wool, simple and sturdy, lingers instead on worsted pleats and layered satin, finer than anything she saw back home.
Home—it is a hard word to let go of, even now, when there is nothing left to bind her to it.
She plucks at the stays of a bodice, the blue of summer, and stops, breath held, when she catches movement out of the corner of her eye. But it is only a mirror, leaning against the wall. She turns, studies herself in the silvered surface, as if she were a portrait of someone else, though the truth is, she looks entirely herself.
These last two years have felt like ten, and yet, they do not show. She should have long been whittled down to skin and bone, hardened, hewn, but her face is just as full as it was the summer she left home. Her skin, unlined by time and trial, untouched in any way, save for the familiar freckles on the smooth palette of her cheeks. Only her eyes mark the change—an edge of shadow threaded through the brown and gold.
Addie blinks, forces her gaze away from herself, and the dresses.
Across the room, a trio of dark shapes—men’s forms, in trousers and waistcoats and jackets. In the low light, their headless forms seem alive,
leaning into one another as they study her. She considers the cut of their clothes, the absence of bone stays or bustled skirts, and thinks, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, how much simpler it would be to be a man, how easily they move through the world, and at such little cost.
And then, she is reaching for the nearest form, sliding off its coat. Unfastening the buttons down its front. There is a strange intimacy to the undressing, and she enjoys it all the more for the fact that the man beneath her fingers is not real, and therefore cannot grope, or paw, or push.
She frees herself from the laces of her own dress, and finds her way into the trousers, fastening them below her knee. She pulls on the tunic and buttons the waistcoat, shrugs the striped coat over her shoulders, fastens the lace cravat at her throat.
She feels safe in the armor of their fashion, but when she turns to the mirror, her spirits sink. Her chest is too full, her waist too narrow, her hips flaring to fill the trousers in the wrong place. The jacket helps, a little, but nothing can disguise her face. The bow of her lips, the line of her cheek, the smoothness of her brow, all too soft and round to pass for anything but female.
She takes up a pair of shears, tries to trim the loose coil of her hair to her shoulders, but seconds later, it is back, the locks on the floor swept away by some invisible hand. No mark made, even on herself. She finds a pin and fastens the light brown waves back in the style she has seen men wear, plucks a tricorne hat from one of the forms and rests it above her brow.
At a distance, perhaps; at a passing glance, perhaps; at night, perhaps, when the darkness is thick enough to smudge the details; but even by lamplight, the illusion does not hold.
The men in Paris are soft, even pretty, but they are still men.
She sighs, and casts off the disguise, and passes the next hour trying on dress after dress, already longing for the freedom of those trousers, the stayless comfort of that tunic. But the dresses are fine, and lush. Her favorite among them is a lovely green and white—but it isn’t finished yet. The collar and hem lie open, waiting for lace. She’ll have to check back in a week or two, hope that she catches the dress before it’s gone, wrapped in paper and sent on to the home of some baroness.
In the end, Addie chooses a dark sapphire dress, its edges trimmed in gray. It reminds her of a storm at night, the clouds blotting out the sky. The
silk kisses her skin, the fabric crisp and new and utterly unblemished. It is too fine for her needs, a dress for banquets, for balls, but she does not care. And if it draws strange looks, what of it? They will forget before they have the chance to gossip.
Addie leaves her own dress draped around the naked form, does not bother with the bonnet, lifted from a line of clothes that morning. She slips back through the curtain and across the shop, skirts rustling around her, finds the spare key Bertin keeps in the table’s top drawer, and unlocks the door, careful to still the bell with her fingers. She pulls the door shut behind her, crouching to slip the iron key back through the gap beneath the door, then rises and turns, only to collide with a man standing on the street.
It is no wonder she didn’t see him; dressed in black, from his shoes to his collar, he blends right into the dark. She is already murmuring apologies, already backing away when her gaze lifts, and she sees the line of his jaw, the raven curls, the eyes, so green despite the lack of light.
He smiles down at her. “Adeline.”
That name, it strikes like flint on his tongue, sparks an answering light behind her ribs. His gaze drifts over her new dress. “You’re looking well.”
“I look the same.”
“The prize of immortality. As you wanted.”
This time she does not rise to take the bait. Does not scream or swear or point out all the ways he’s damned her, but he must see the struggle on her face, because he laughs, soft and airy as a breeze.
“Come,” says the shadow, offering his arm. “I will walk you.”
He does not say that he will walk her home. And if it were midday, she would scorn the offer just to spite him. (Of course, if it were midday, the darkness would not be there.) But it is late, and only one kind of woman walks alone at night.
Addie has learned that women—at least, women of a certain class— never venture forth alone, even during the day. They are kept inside like potted plants, tucked behind the curtains of their homes. And when they do go out, they go in groups, safe within the cages of each other’s company, and always in the light of day.
To walk alone in the morning is a scandal, but to walk alone at night, that is something else. Addie knows. She has felt their looks, their
judgment, from every side. The women scorn her from their windows, the men try to buy her on the streets, and the devout, they try to save her soul, as if she hasn’t already sold it. She has said yes to the church, on more than one occasion, but only for the shelter, and never the salvation.
“Well?” asks the shadow, holding out his arm. Perhaps she is lonelier than she would say.
Perhaps an enemy’s company is still better than none.
Addie does not take his arm, but she does start walking, and she does not need to look to know that he has fallen in step beside her. His shoes echo softly on the cobblestones, and a faint breeze presses like a palm against her back.
They walk in silence, until she cannot bear it. Until her resolve slips, and she looks over, and sees him, head tipped slightly back, dark lashes brushing fair cheeks as he breathes in the night, fetid though it is. A faint smile on those lips, as if he’s perfectly at ease. His very image mocks her, even as his edges blur, dark into dark, smoke on shadow, a reminder of what he is, and what he isn’t.
Her silence cracks, the words spill out.
“You can take any shape you please, isn’t that right?” His head tips down. “It is.”
“Then change,” she says. “I cannot bear to look at you.”
A rueful smile. “I rather like this form. I think you do as well.” “I did once,” she says. “But you have ruined it for me.”
It is an opening, she sees too late, a crack in her own armor. Now he will never change.
Addie stops on a narrow, winding street, before a house, if it can be called that. A slumping wooden structure, like a pile of kindling, deserted, abandoned, but not empty.
When he is gone, she will climb through the gap in the boards, trying not to ruin the hem of her new skirts, will cross the uneven floor and go up a set of broken stairs to the attic, and hope that no one else has found it first.
She will climb out of her storm-cloud dress, and fold it carefully within a piece of tissue paper, and then she will lie down on a pallet of burlap and board, and stare up through the split planks of the ceiling two feet over her head, and hope it does not rain, while the lost souls creep through the body of the house below.
Tomorrow, the little room will be taken, and in a month, the building will burn down, but there is no sense worrying about the future now.
The darkness shifts like a curtain at her back.
“How long will you carry on?” he muses. “What is the point of dragging yourself through another day, when there is no reprieve?”
Questions she has asked herself in the dead of night, moments of weakness when winter sank its teeth into her skin, or hunger clawed against her bones, when a space was taken, a day’s work undone, a night’s peace lost, and she could not bear the thought of rising to do it all again. And yet, hearing the words parroted back like this, in his voice instead of hers, they lose a measure of their venom.
“Don’t you see?” he says, green eyes sharp as broken glass. “There is no end besides the one I offer. All you have to do is yiel—”
“I saw an elephant,” says Addie, and the words are like cold water on coals. The darkness stills beside her, and she continues, gaze fixed on the ramshackle house, and the broken roof, and the open sky above. “Two, in fact. They were in the palace grounds, as part of some display. I didn’t know animals could be so large. And there was a fiddler in the square the other day,” she presses on, her voice steady, “and his music made me cry. It was the prettiest song I’d ever heard. I had Champagne, drank it straight from the bottle, and watched the sun set over the Seine while the bells rang out from Notre-Dame, and none of it would have happened back in Villon.” She turns to look at him. “It has only been two years,” she says. “Think of all the time I have, and all the things I’ll see.”
Addie grins at the shadow then, a small, feral smile, all teeth, feasting on the way the humor falls from his face.
It is a small victory, and yet so sweet, to see him falter, even for an instant.
And then, suddenly, he is too close, the air between them snuffed like a candle. He smells of summer nights, of earth, and moss, and tall grass waving beneath stars. And of something darker. Of blood on rocks, and wolves loose in the woods.
He leans in until his cheek brushes against hers, and when he speaks again, the words are little more than whispers over skin.
“You think it will get easier,” he says. “It will not. You are as good as gone, and every year you live will feel a lifetime, and in every lifetime, you
will be forgotten. Your pain is meaningless. Your life is meaningless. The years will be like weights around your ankles. They will crush you, bit by bit, and when you cannot stand it, you will beg me to put you from your misery.”
Addie pulls back to face the darkness, but he is already gone.
She stands alone on the narrow road. Inhales a low, unsteady breath, forces it out again, and then straightens, and smooths her skirts, and makes her way into the broken house that, tonight at least, is home.
