The Painted Girls Read online

  Not knowing is eating me up, inside to out. Still, I put on an ugly snarl and slouch low upon the hard bench, all the while getting lectured to death by the Superioress: The woolen coverlet of my bed is not pulled tight. I do not join in the singing. She will not tolerate me calling Sister Amélie by the name of Mole.

  What the Superioress don’t know is how my fingers gone shaky, how I prick myself when I sew. Yesterday I had to bend my head low over my work, teary eyed as I was over a speck of red upon a length of lace. I pace the floor in the pure blackness of my cell and snap at the Superioress in the morning when I sit before her—a loafer—for sleeping late. “No workshop for you,” she says. “You’ll stay in your cell.”

  I look down my nose, cross my arms. “Dock me the few sous I get for slaving all day. I don’t care, not in the least.”

  “When, Mademoiselle van Goethem, will you learn to bite your tongue and put that quick mind of yours to better use?”

  I jut my chin, stick out my tongue, clamp down with my teeth, and the Superioress, she pretends interest in some item written in the ledger on her desk.

  I use up another day of banishment from the workshop laying on my bed, wondering and chewing on my lip, a new habit, like that of Marie. Was truth spoke in that court I have no faith in, not since that verdict in the woman Bazengeaud trial? Is nothing changed, even with the betrayal of Marie? Is Émile still dreaming of New Caledonia? Or is he back to fearing daybreak, a cell door opened up to the solemn faces of the Abbot Crozes and Monsieur Roch? Just thinking the thought, my tongue goes dry, a hand goes to my heart.

  I get onto my knees to pray because, well, why not? I spend the twelve hours of each nighttime behind the bolted oaken door, pacing or flat upon my bed. A good part of that time I spend wishing for justice in the court. And isn’t that what praying is? Wishing hard, asking for something for someone other than yourself?

  After begging for truth for Émile, I pray for him to be warm and nourished and feeling hope. “Let him know there is something keeping me from visiting him at La Roquette,” I whisper into my lonely cell. “Put it in his head that it is jail or sickness, anything but my heart gone hard against his own.” For Charlotte, I ask for her to dazzle in her Wednesday class, for her to have the good sense to let the older girls take their spots at the barre before grabbing her own. For Maman, I request a bit of peace, a bit of cackling among the hens ironing wrinkles flat, scrubbing away at other people’s dirt. I skip Marie, because what I really want is the hole in my heart filled up, that place where she used to be. What I asked was easy: Take my calendar to the office of Monsieur Danet. Explain the meaning of the tiny x marking the eleventh of March. She said there was no calendar behind the chimneypiece, a betrayal no different from twisting an auger into my heart. There is no point praying for the hole left behind to disappear, because it is not possible to turn back time, to undo what already is done.

  I hear the bolt of my door scraping open, and thinking better than to be caught on my knees, doing as the sisters would have me do, I scramble to my feet from the brickwork of the floor. They gloat, chins tucked, mouths hidden behind their wimples. I know they do. Another lost sheep herded into the flock. But, no need to trouble myself. It is only Mole in the doorway, and she is far too caught up in twitching her nose to waste a moment speculating about me shaking out the creases of my prison gown. “You have a visitor in the parlor,” she says.

  “My sister, is it, Mole?” I keep hope out of my voice but make a small lurch in the direction of the door.

  She shakes her head.

  “My mother, who was here two weeks ago?”

  “A girl calling herself Colette.” I gallop through the doorway, the coarse wool of my gown brushing past the fine black serge of her own, and she follows me into the corridor on tiny, scuttling feet. Finally, news of the trial.

  The sight of Colette is a shock after months of the sisters in black, the girls in drab brown and faded blue. Her dress is velvet, orange red, like the breast of a robin, and edged with black lace. The bodice is tight and a ridge of her flesh is bursting from the neckline, low and wide and square. The jailers gawk, and Colette makes her mouth pouty. She leans forward, touches fingertips to her heaving flesh, strokes the silver chain of the watch hanging from her neck.

  “Antoinette,” she says, when she sees me looking. “A sight for sore eyes.”

  I drop myself onto the chair waiting across the iron bars from her own. My gown is shapeless, dull. My face is unwashed. Locks of hair hang loose of the plait I bothered making yesterday. “A sight, all right.”

  “Never mind,” she says, waving. “You were just as scruffy the night we hauled the dead dog.” She smiles, pretty teeth shining, even if what I remember of the night is a whole lot of tears.

  She never was more than lukewarm on Émile, and so instead of jumping straight into asking about the trial, I give her a little smile back and say, “You look a queen in that dress.”

  She makes a tiny, tilting shrug. “When you getting out?”

  “Twenty-eight days. Not a single one more.”

  She huffs a short laugh, leans in close to the iron bars. “You planning on another house?”

  “Seems so.” And then I have Jean Luc Simard nipping into my head—his probing, choking tongue; his tugging, prying fingers; the taste of him that no amount of gargling can take away.

  “When you’re out, I’ll take you around,” she says, and pinpricks of sweat collect to beads at the back of my neck. “Go to the tavern downstairs at Madame Brossard’s and tell Maurice—you remember Maurice—tell him a place and a time. We can meet up any afternoon.”

  The first of those beads slips down my back in a straight line between my shoulder blades.

  “A girl gets used to it,” she says.

  “Don’t mind in the least.” There was singing in the washhouse, a glint of pleasure the first time I poured boiling water through a stain and saw it disappear, another when Monsieur Guiot put his hand upon my shoulder a month after those two spoiled shirts and said I was doing just fine. And for a tiny second I see myself scrubbing and joking and singing along. But breathing in the steamy heat of the washhouse would mean I gave up on Émile and New Caledonia, that or he never got to go. “You tell old Maurice to be expecting me.”

  “Maybe I’ll find a house for the both of us.” She says it quiet, like she is not so sure what I think of tying myself closer to her, and a little knot rises up in my chest.

  At the house of Madame Brossard, Petite and Odette and Constance shared a single room, with Colette getting one to herself. She was the prize of the house, and always I thought that room of her own was the doing of Madame Brossard. But now I think maybe it was the scheming of the other three. Sometimes I walked into the kitchen and found Petite and Odette slapping down cards in a game of bezique. Sometimes Odette was whispering, head tilted close to that of Constance. Sometimes Constance was teaching Petite about crocheting a tiny drawstring purse or a flower for pinning on a hat. Once the three of them hired a carriage and went to the Bois de Boulogne on a Sunday afternoon. I knew because in the evening each was scorched red across her nose. But not Colette. “You didn’t go?” I asked. “A headache,” she said.

  That knot in my chest swells, and I gulp it down. She don’t need to know about New Caledonia, that I won’t be staying in Paris long. Me and Colette, her arm linking mine before a string of madams in doorways, all admiring her pouty lips. It is just what I need.

  Then she says, “Never had a sister before.”

  And out of my trap comes, “I got to tell you, Colette, once I save enough, I’ll be going off to New Caledonia.”

  “You’re following Émile Abadie?”

  It is my chance to find out what she knows about the trial. “Assuming he don’t get the guillotine first.” I say it almost like a joke, even as I grow rigid, fearful of what her next words might say about his fate.

  “No, Antoinette.” She waves her head slow. “Don’t. Just, no.” Sh
e presses her mouth against a knuckle of her lifted up hand. She shuts her eyes tight, like someone with an aching head, and there is dampness when she opens them back up. “He isn’t going to the guillotine. You never heard?” And then, twisting the lace of her cuffs, she tells about Émile getting spared his head no matter what.

  “You’re sure?” I clutch my hands together.

  “Isn’t a soul in Paris don’t have an opinion about it all,” she says.

  Those gripped-together hands, they go to just under my chin.

  “Once already the court proved his guilt,” she says. “You got to think of that.”

  “The court!” I arch my neck, laugh, stamping my feet. I leap up, cover my face and shake my head until I feel a jailer hovering close, getting ready to shove me back down into my chair. “All right, all right,” I say, holding up a hand to within a fingerbreadth of his fleshy nose and dancing a tiny jig, which don’t end even when I have my rump plopped back down upon the chair.

  Colette watches, pouty lips clamped to a skinny line, fingers continuing to work the lace. “Antoinette,” she says, “you’ve got to listen,” but she is talking all quiet, like she don’t want me to hear.

  “You’ll take me around, still?”

  “Émile Abadie, he isn’t good.” Again, that quiet voice.

  I laugh. “I love that boy, that boy who is not setting foot near the guillotine.”

  She licks her lips, locks her eyes onto my own. “He poked fun when you weren’t there.”

  Of me? Is that what she is meaning? “Those boys from the Ambigu, they talk nonsense half the time.”

  “He called you my old mattress. Pierre Gille said it to your face that night you were sniffling outside the Brasserie des Martyrs.”

  I keep my eyes still, my mouth from twitching hurt, while I remember, while I wonder, while I decide it is true. But New Caledonia is far-off from the bluster of raised beers, and Émile called my eyes chocolate pools, too. I’ve got to remember that. He said about adoring me every single day. “Don’t believe it,” I say. “You want a friend. You want me staying put.”

  “He isn’t deserving, Antoinette.”

  “Being a sow about him isn’t going to change my mind.”

  “He don’t love you.”

  She looks close to bawling. But there are all those times in the salon at the house of Madame Brossard—her catching her breath and patting her chest even when a joke was flat; her flattering and flirting even when a gentleman was foul; her looking gripped even when the company was dull, the hour late. That girl, Colette, she is the champion of putting on a face. “I heard enough.” I get up from my chair.

  “Don’t.” Something in her voice—a whimper like a prayer—stops me. She fiddles with the watch hanging from her neck. “I took more than two hundred francs from him.”

  She don’t breathe a good long while, until I say, “How?”

  “Like you think.” She is shrinking in her chair. “Don’t follow him, Antoinette.”

  “You’ll say anything.” I whisper it through my teeth. I spit, aiming for her feet, hitting the hem of her skirt when she don’t lurch away.

  Her fingers grip the watch. She tugs, snapping the chain. “Here,” she says, shifting, like she is intending to lob the watch through the iron bars. But I don’t put my hands up to catch. No, I leave them at my sides. Then she is stooping, putting the watch on the ground, and sliding it across the floor and between two bars. It hits me in the toe, but I keep my eyes upon her still.

  The jailers snap back awake. “You’re done with visiting,” one says and grabs me roughly by the arm. Another is picking up the watch, turning it over in his hands, wiping a thumb over its face.

  “Payment from him,” Colette says, her face shriveling, tears spilling. “I told him no, always, once you were my friend, after the dead dog.”

  “Where’d you get this?” The jailer holding the watch jerks his chin toward Colette.

  She wipes at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Émile Abadie.”

  “It’s the watch,” he says, with all the wonder of a blind man seeing for the first time. “The woman Bazengeaud’s watch.”

  The jailer wrenching my arm lets go, shifts his attention to the watch, a pretty thing with an enamel dial laying underneath an opening shaped like a heart. In that moment I remember the inspector at the washhouse, the portfolio he opened up, the drawing of the watch. I remember Émile saying about the failed blackmailing, the drained cognac and then leaving straight after that, a story that is not true, and my breath is gone.

  EXCERPTS OF COURT TRANSCRIPTS PUBLIC PROSECUTOR VERSUS ÉMILE ABADIE AND MICHEL KNOBLOCH

  23 March 1881

  PROSECUTOR: Do you admit that on the eleventh day of March in the year of 1880, you, with the help of Émile Abadie, murdered the widow Joubert?

  KNOBLOCH: Monsieur Prosecutor, I lied. I never touched the widow Joubert.

  PROSECUTOR: What? Is this your new claim?

  KNOBLOCH: Yes, I lied. Everything I said is untrue.

  PROSECUTOR: It was not you who conceived the crime and then discussed it with Émile Abadie? It was not you who forced the widow Joubert to reenter her shop as she closed the shutters and then, with Émile Abadie, beat her to death?

  KNOBLOCH: I lied, I tell you! I confessed only because I wanted to go to New Caledonia. (sensation in the crowd)

  PROSECUTOR: For the last time, do you deny your guilt?

  KNOBLOCH: Yes, Monsieur Prosecutor. I am not guilty, and I lied when I pointed a finger at Abadie. (sensation in the crowd)

  PROSECUTOR: According to the confession of Michel Knobloch, you beat the widow Joubert with a hammer while he held her arms behind her back.

  ABADIE: I am innocent. I’d put my hand in a fire to prove Knobloch is a liar.

  PROSECUTOR: So you persist in asserting that you did not participate in the crime?

  ABADIE: Monsieur Prosecutor, I am a changed man. I would like to serve justice. If I had anything to say about the unfortunate death of the widow Joubert, I would have said it.

  24 March 1881

  From the plea of Monsieur Crochard, attorney for Michel Knobloch: In his alleged confession, Michel Knobloch never ceased lying. His description of the widow Joubert, the snow on the ground, the stolen hundred-franc note changed at a money lender, the hammer discarded behind the newspaper shop—in each of these points, he is proved to be out and out lying. He changed his confession over fifty times and has been caught daily grossly misleading or lying. The truth is he is a liar and braggart. Everyone who knows him describes him as such. His obvious and stated goal in the alleged confession was to get to New Caledonia.

  From the plea of Monsieur Danet, attorney for Émile Abadie: Why would Michel Knobloch implicate Émile Abadie in the widow Joubert’s death? The answer is simple: At the precinct where Michel Knobloch made his alleged confession, his outlandish claims were at first dismissed as untrue. But the moment he said he knew Émile Abadie, he was listened to and lavished with attention. When he went so far as to claim the assistance of Émile Abadie in committing the crime, he was offered breakfast, brought a carafe of wine, spoiled. In short, his lying was encouraged.

  Marie

  I fly down the hundred stairs leading from the practice room to the bright day outside the Opéra. I am supposed to be rehearsing my tricky role as a stage prop in act two of Le Tribut de Zamora. But Madame Daram, who plays the maiden snatched out from under her fiancé, shrieked about more time upon the stage to practice the duet she sings with him in act four, and Monsieur Vaucorbeil sent all but the two of them away.

  What a week I have lived. I learned the slave dance faster than I would have believed I could, running through the steps a thousand times—in the practice room, the wings, on the stage, in my dreams. I saw Blanche watching, just once, and asked in the meekest voice if she wanted me to show her any of the footwork, but she only glared and said “slut” loud enough for three stagehands and a dozen of the quadrille to hear. I s
wallowed and got back to work, because still my shoulders crept up and it meant the slave dance was not yet easily enough remembered by my feet. And then there was the disaster of my Wednesday class. I did not much like that Charlotte was put up with the older girls one day a week. She thought nothing of edging over to me and asking for help with a combination I was still sorting out for myself. And once she muttered “easy” when Madame Dominique asked for sixteen entrechats in a row, which made her huff and ask for thirty-two instead. Always Charlotte stepped in front of me in line, and it was no different two days ago when I was awaiting my turn to make a string of piqué pirouettes. Madame Dominique thwacked the floor good and hard with her cane. “Enough, Mademoiselle Charlotte,” she hollered. “Over there.” She pointed to a corner at the back of the practice room. “Not so much as a twitch, a peep from you, or you won’t be coming back.”

  I made my pirouettes, and after that an allegro combination including assemblés and glissades. Awaiting my turn to make a chain of grands jetés en tournant, I glanced over to Charlotte, to the strange look of dread twisting her face, and that was when I saw it—the puddle at her feet, the shadow of wet on her stockinged legs. Madame Dominique nodded, and I began leaping diagonally across the room. Once finished we were expected to run gracefully, arms in low à la seconde, back to the corner where we began. But that day, as I ran, I knocked into the watering can, toppling it onto its side with a thud. Water poured from the mouth, swamping the puddle at Charlotte’s feet. Madame Dominique’s cane skittered across the floor, and she yelled, “Dismissed, the lot of you,” without even asking for a révérence. Afterward Charlotte bawled, shuddering and gasping like never before. “But no one saw,” I said. “No one noticed a thing.”