The Paris Seamstress Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Natasha Lester

  Cover design by Faceout

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First published in March 2018 by Hachette Australia

  First American Edition: September 2018

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018940376

  ISBN 978-1-5387-1477-5 (trade paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-5387-1475-1 (ebook)

  E3-20180730-DANF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One: Estella Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two: Fabienne Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Three: Estella Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part Four: Fabienne Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part Five: Estella Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Part Six: Fabienne Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Part Seven: Estella Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Part Eight: Fabienne Chapter Twenty-nine

  Part Nine: Estella Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Part Ten: Fabienne Chapter Thirty-two

  Part Eleven: Estella Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Part Twelve: Fabienne Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Newsletters

  For Ruby.

  I promised that you could start reading my books when you were twelve. It seemed so far away at the time. But now you are twelve and you are my kindred spirit. I hope you continue to love books and history forever. Happy reading, my gorgeous girl.

  Part One

  Estella

  Chapter One

  June 2, 1940

  Estella Bissette unrolled a bolt of gold silk, watching it kick up its heels and cancan across the worktable. She ran her hand over it, feeling both softness and sensuality, like rose petals and naked skin. “What’s your story morning glory,” she murmured in English.

  She heard her mother laugh. “Estella, you sound more American than the Americans do.”

  Estella smiled. Her English-language tutor had said the same thing to her when he ended her lessons the year before and joined the exodus out of Europe; that she had a better American accent than he did. She tucked the roll under one arm and draped the silk across her shoulder. Then she swung into a tango, heedless of the women’s cries of, “Attention!,” cries which only goaded her to add a song to her dance: Josephine Baker’s fast and frothy “I Love Dancing” bubbling from her mouth between gasps of laughter.

  She dipped backward, before soaring upright too fast. The roll of silk skimmed over the midinette’s worktable, just missing Nannette’s head but slapping Marie on the shoulder.

  “Estella! Mon Dieu,” Marie scolded, holding her shoulder with overplayed anguish.

  Estella kissed Marie’s cheek. “But it deserves a tango at the very least.” She gestured to the fabric, glowing like a summer moon amid the quotidian surroundings of the atelier, surely destined for a dress that wouldn’t just turn heads; it would spin them faster than Cole Porter’s fingers on the piano at the infamous Bricktop’s jazz club in Montmartre.

  “It deserves for you to sit down with it and start work,” Marie grumbled.

  Monsieur Aumont appeared in the doorway, drawn by the noise. He took one look at Estella draped in silk, smiled and said, “What is ma petite étoile up to now?”

  “Injuring me,” Marie complained.

  “It’s lucky you have enough flesh to withstand Estella’s antics,” Monsieur Aumont said teasingly and Marie muttered something under her breath.

  “What are we making with it?” Estella asked, lovingly stroking the folds of gold.

  “This,” Monsieur Aumont replied, handing over a sketch with a flourish.

  It was a Lanvin, a reworking of the 1920s La Cavallini dress, but instead of an oversized bow adorned with thousands of pearls and crystals, the bow was decorated with hundreds of petite gold silk rosebuds.

  “Oh!” she breathed, reaching out to touch the sketch. She knew the delicate rows of flowers would look like a brilliant swirl of gold from afar and that their true composition—an undulating ribbon of roses—would only become apparent if one was close enough to the wearer to see it properly. There wasn’t a military epaulet in sight, nor a gas mask case slung across the shoulder, nor was the dress colored one of the many variations of blue—Maginot blue, Royal Air Force blue, tempered steel blue—which Estella had grown to loathe. “If one day my sketches look like this,” she said, admiring Lanvin’s exquisite illustration, “I’ll be so happy I’ll never need a lover.”

  “Estella!” Marie reprimanded, as if no twenty-two-year-old should even know the meaning of the word, let alone speak it aloud.

  Estella looked across at Jeanne, her mother, and grinned.

  True to form, her mother continued to make tiny pink cherry blossoms from silk and didn’t look up or intervene but Estella could see that she was pressing her lips together to stop a smile, knowing her daughter loved nothing more than to shock poor Marie.

  “A dress is no match for a lover,” Monsieur Aumont admonished. He indicated the silk. “You have two weeks to turn this into a golden bouquet.”

  “Will there be a remnant?” Estella asked, still holding the bolt of fabric tightly to her.

  “They’ve sent forty meters but I’ve calculated that you only need thirty-six—if you’re careful.”

  “I’ll be as careful as a dream weaver making Leavers lace,” Estella said reverently.

  She took the silk away to be stretched over a wooden frame, held in place by rows of nails. A solution of sug
ar and water was applied to stiffen the fabric enough so that Marie could stamp circles out of it with the heavy iron cutters.

  Once Marie had finished, Estella covered a foam block with a piece of clean white fabric, heated her shaping ball over a low flame, tested the temperature in a pot of wax, set the first round gold disk of silk onto the white fabric, then pressed the shaping ball into the silk. It curled up instantly around the heated ball to form one lovely rosebud. She laid the rosebud to one side then repeated the process, making two hundred flowers by lunchtime.

  While she worked, she chatted and laughed with Nannette, Marie and her mother, as they did every day, until Nannette said quietly, “I’ve heard there are more French soldiers fleeing from the north now than Belgian or Dutch civilians.”

  “If the soldiers are fleeing, what stands between us and the Germans?” Estella asked. “Are we supposed to hold Paris with our sewing needles?”

  “The will of the French people stands before the Boche. France will not fall,” her mother insisted and Estella sighed.

  It was pointless to have the argument. Much as she wished to keep her mother safe, Estella knew that she and her mother weren’t going anywhere. They would continue to sit in the atelier and make flowers from fabric as if nothing mattered more than fashion because they had nowhere else to go. They wouldn’t be joining the refugees streaming down from the Netherlands, Belgium and the north of France to the south because they had no family in the country to whom they could run.

  In Paris they had a home and work. Out there, nothing. So, even though her mother’s blind faith in France’s ability to withstand the German army worried Estella, she had no reply. And was it so wrong that, inside the walls of the atelier, they could all pretend, for perhaps only a few more days, that if couturiers like Lanvin still wanted gold silk flowers made, then everything would be all right?

  During their lunch hour, as they ate bowls of rabbit stew in the atelier’s kitchen, Estella sat apart from the other women and drew. In pencil on paper she sketched out the lines of a long, slim skirt that fell to the floor, a dress with sleeves capped at the shoulders, a waistline with a thin sash of gold silk, a neckline cut into an elegant V and ornamented with lapels like those on a man’s shirt—a touch nobody would expect on a floor-length gown but one that Estella knew made it both modish and matchless. Despite the skirt’s close fit, it could still be danced in: it was bold and gold, a dress to live life in. And in Paris in June 1940, anything that promised life was welcome.

  Her mother finished her stew and, even though there was still fifteen minutes remaining of their lunch hour, she threaded her way through the atelier to Monsieur Aumont’s office. Estella watched their faces as they spoke quietly to one another. Monsieur, one of the gueules cassées of the Great War—men who’d had part of their faces destroyed, as he had, by flamethrowers, leaving him with distorted lips, barely a nose, a monstrous face that Estella no longer noticed and which he covered with a copper mask outside the atelier—was unabashedly vocal in his opposition to the Germans, or the Boche, as he and her mother preferred to call them. Estella had lately seen men coming and going from the atelier after they’d met with Monsieur on the stairs, men who were ostensibly delivering fabric or dye but whose boxes only the Monsieur ever unpacked.

  And her mother—one of the 700,000 women left a widow by the Great War, her soldier husband dying not long after they were married, when Jeanne was only fifteen. Two people who had reason to hate the Germans and who seemed to speak too often in whispers, whispers that looked too serious to be of the romantic sort.

  Estella bent her head back over her sketch when her mother returned.

  “Très, très belle,” Jeanne said of her daughter’s illustration.

  “I’m going to make it from the remnant tonight.”

  “And then wear it to La Belle Chance?” her mother asked, referring to the jazz club in Montmartre that Estella frequented still, despite the fact that since the French army had been mobilized last year and the British had fled at Dunkirk in May, there were few men to be found in the city; only those whose jobs in munitions factories exempted them from service.

  “Oui.” Estella smiled at her mother.

  “I will be at the Gare du Nord.”

  “You’ll be tired tomorrow.”

  “Just as you were this morning,” her mother chided.

  Last night it had been Estella who’d stood at the train station. She’d been the one handing out bowls of soup to the refugees streaming through Paris, some of whom had been lucky enough to arrive by train, many of whom had walked hundreds of miles to escape the Germans. Once fed, the refugees took up their trail again until they found a home with relatives, or else they continued on as far as their legs could carry them, as far as they could get from the war, across the Loire River where it was said they would be safe.

  The day drifted by, rosebud after rosebud. At six o’clock, Estella and her mother joined arms and left, walking along Rue des Petits Champs behind the Palais Royal, past the Place des Victoires and Les Halles, horse-drawn wagons for transporting food standing in a line out the front now, not vans. As they walked, the realities that Estella had been trying to ignore beneath a roll of spectacular gold silk asserted themselves.

  First was the eerie quiet; it wasn’t silent but at this time of night they should be surrounded by seamstresses and tailors and cutters and models all finished for the day and making their way home. But there were few people walking past the empty ateliers and empty shops; so much emptiness where, once upon a time, even a month ago, Paris had been full of life. But when the drôle de guerre—the phoney war—ended on May the tenth as Hitler’s army pushed into France, the rush of people out of Paris had begun. First the Americans in cars driven by chauffeurs, then the families with older cars, then those who’d been able to find a horse and cart.

  But the June night was warm and soft and scented with lilac, the horse chestnut trees wore strands of pearl-like flowers and here and there a restaurant was still open, a cinema, the House of Schiaparelli. Life went on. If only one could ignore the cats that roamed the streets, left behind when their owners fled the city, the covered streetlights, the windows obscured by blackout curtains, all of which told a different story from the romance of summer in Paris.

  “I saw you talking with Monsieur,” Estella said abruptly, once they’d crossed over Rue du Temple and were enveloped in the familiar scent of decay and leather that was the Marais.

  “He is coming with me tonight, as usual,” Estella’s mother said.

  “To the Gare du Nord?” Estella persisted, unable to shake the feeling that, lately, on the nights her mother had been out, it was to do more than serve soup to refugees.

  “Oui.” Estella’s mother squeezed her arm. “I will start at the Gare du Nord.”

  “And then?”

  “I will be careful.”

  Which confirmed all of Estella’s suspicions. “I’ll come with you.”

  “No. It’s better if you enjoy whatever time there is left.”

  And Estella suddenly understood that all the talk about France standing strong was a fervent wish, not false belief, a wish her mother held for her daughter’s sake. And, not for the first time in her life, Estella felt an overwhelming gratitude to her mother, who’d raised Estella by herself, who’d made sure she went to school, who’d worked hard to feed and clothe and shelter her, who never complained, who had such a small life, confined to the atelier and to her daughter.

  “I love you, Maman,” she whispered, kissing her mother’s cheek.

  “That’s the only thing that matters,” her mother said, giving a rare and beautiful smile, altering the contours of her face so that she looked more her age, which was only thirty-seven—not old at all. Estella wanted to stitch that moment into the night, thread it so tightly against the sky that it could never be unpicked.

  Instead she watched her mother walk up Rue du Temple toward the Gare du Nord. Then Estella continued on to the
Passage Saint-Paul, a tiny, dirty alleyway which led to a hidden entrance to the beautiful Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, and on which their apartment was also located. As she pushed open the front door of the building, the concierge, Monsieur Montpelier, an old drunk of a man, grunted and thrust a note at her.

  She read it and swore under her breath. It was the last thing she wanted to do tonight.

  “Putain,” the concierge hissed at her choice of words.

  Estella ignored him. She’d scald his eyeballs later when she left in her gold dress but, right now, she had work to do. She hurried up six flights of winding stairs to the apartment and, even though it was June, put on a long cloak. Then she walked back the way she’d come until she reached the buying offices of one of the American department stores off the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

  Madame Flynn, who must have been one of the only Americans left in Paris, was, as Estella knew she’d be, alone in her office. On the desk in front of her was a stack of boxes labeled Schiaparelli. “Be as quick as you can,” Madame Flynn said, turning her back as if she didn’t know what Estella was about to do when of course the opposite was true.

  Estella removed the dresses from the boxes and hid them under her cloak. Without a word to Madame Flynn, she hurried back down the stairs, along the street and up another set of stairs to the copy house where Estella moonlighted when the fashion shows were on. During the shows, sketchers like her could capture, on a good day, fifteen copies of haute couture dresses which she then sold to the copy house or American department store buyers.

  The market in Paris and America for copies of Chanel, Vionnet, Lanvin, Callot Soeurs, Mainbocher—all the couturiers—was insatiable. Estella had always known she could earn more money working at the copy house. But she also knew that if she spent every day copying—stealing really—other people’s designs then she’d never have the heart to create her own. So she only worked as a sketcher during the shows, pencil flying discreetly over the paper so that the vendeuse wouldn’t notice she was doing more than mark the number of the dress that had caught her attention, scrutinizing the models wafting elegantly through the salle, capturing details: the number of pleats in a skirt, the width of a lapel, the size of a button—praying for the model to be a slow walker so that Estella didn’t end up with unfinished sketches that she’d never be able to sell.