Chapter 2
Claire
I’ve been watching her for months. I know her habits, her routines. I know she leaves in the morning to fetch milk for her son, takes him with her to meetings throughout the day. She returns home at night looking bone-tired and defeated.
Her husband, Theo, begged me to check in on her, to try to protect her.
But for months I only watched.
The night I properly meet Jo van Gogh is the night I save her life.
It’s late, but I have only just finished with work.
When I walk past her apartment, I notice candles burning in the window.
As I shift my gaze down from the attic flat, the door to the street opens and a hooded silhouette slips into the entryway.
The apartment still burns bright, but it is Jo’s tiny figure slowly stumbling over the Pigalle’s cobblestones.
I follow in silence. Why is she leaving so late?
Jo hesitates at the corner and continues uncertainly up the hill toward the unfinished dome of Sacré-Coeur on the Butte Montmartre.
It is the time of night when even women like me are usually in bed, the hours when the streets are turned over to stray cats and men intent on bad deeds and harm.
On this night in particular the city is filled with a certain bloodlust. The papers have dubbed it guillotine frenzy, as today was the public execution of a notorious murderer, one whose crimes have been well documented and much gossiped about throughout Paris.
His beheading in the Place de la Roquette was attended by thousands, a jeering and enthusiastic mob of mostly men who then retired to the bars and brothels, bloated with savage hunger.
A hulking figure emerges from the darkness of a doorway and grabs Jo by the arm.
The man is massive, and even from a distance I can tell he is intoxicated.
Jo attempts to shove him away, but he slaps her face with an open palm, sending her reeling to the ground.
At this time of night he must have assumed she is a worker like me.
No proper lady would be out alone at this hour.
He yanks her tiny body into an alley. My heart gallops against my ribs. I glance around for anyone to help her, but the streets are empty, the bars and cabarets dark. This man will be able to do whatever he wants with Jo and leave her for dead.
Jo screams out in pain. “No! Stop!” My eyes finally land on a shattered wine bottle, the long neck intact but the bottom a thick, sharp shard.
It will have to do. As I slide around the corner, the man is pinning her small frame to the wall and hiking up her skirts as his thick fingers wrap around her delicate throat.
I don’t think twice before lunging at his side with the bottle.
He startles and wails in pain as the glass slices into his abdomen.
“Run!” I scream at Jo.
The monster is injured and shocked, his ugly features contorted in fury.
Jo manages to slip from between him and the wall.
Our eyes meet and she takes off. I spin on my own heel and follow, leaving the brute to bleed in the alley.
The bottle did not make it that far beneath his skin. He will live. Unfortunately.
My ankle twists on the uneven stones and I collapse. Jo turns at my cry and hesitates before doubling back to help me up.
“You saved my life,” she rasps in disbelief, her gaze darting in the direction of her attacker.
I’m in too much pain to speak. Jo slings my arm over her shoulders as if she is an expert at lifting others. I wonder how many times she had to lift a weakened Theo into bed before he was put into the institution.
“Where do you live?” she asks in her husky Dutch accent. “Can I get you home?” I nod up the hill in the direction we’d come from.
“That will be impossible. He will be waiting there for us.” Jo shakes her head. “But I think I can get you to my place and look at your leg.”
Together we make it up her stairs into her small and cozy flat. It’s only a few rooms. The floors are rough, the wood planks slightly slanting to the south. A thick, dusty curtain separates the sitting room from the hallway leading to the bedrooms.
She brings me to a sofa and removes my battered boot with the care of a mother.
I look away from her in shame. The sole has begun to peel away and there’s no money to have a new one put on.
The madam I work for keeps all of us in fashionable dresses and lingerie, but walking shoes are an unnecessary expense for her.
Beneath the leather my ankle is red and angry.
“You will need to elevate this, and I can bind it,” Jo says. “When the swelling goes down we shall put your boot on as tightly as possible and you should be able to make it home. I can give you some sherry for the pain.”
“Thank you,” I say, considering all her features up close for the first time, her broad face, apple-dumpling cheeks, and strong nose. She is a tiny thing, frail like a baby bird. Purple bruises bloom against the pale white of her neck.
“I am Jo,” she finally introduces herself as she wraps my ankle in a brightly patterned silk scarf.
“Claire,” I say.
My name inspires no recognition for her. I shouldn’t be surprised. Theo wouldn’t have spoken of me to his wife. “Why were you on the streets so late, Claire? I am grateful, but surprised that anyone was awake to find me.”
“I could ask the same of you. Why were you walking so late?”
Jo glances down the narrow hallway and I hear a muffled wheeze. “My boy is sick. I was hoping to reach the midwife’s home to see if she could prepare something for his cough. He’s barely more than a year old.”
Vincent. Her little boy, named after his uncle the artist. Theo had been overjoyed when Jo delivered a son. I remember him telling me what a gift the boy had been to both of them as his own health declined.
I want to give her a more noble reason for my being out in the middle of the night, but there is not one.
I was there for her, watching for her. There is another truth I can tell her.
I’m not proud, but also not entirely ashamed.
“I was returning home from work.” It takes Jo a minute to understand and I wait for the disgust to cross her face, but it never comes.
“You should not walk alone so late.” Jo pours the two of us generous glasses of sherry.
“Neither should you.”
“I know.” She sighs. “But lately I’ve found myself wandering more than once in the middle of the night. My husband passed some months ago and sleep has eluded me. I stay awake and worry. I walk and think perhaps I will never return, but my boy needs me.”
I want to hear about her boy. I want to hear about her.
I miss Theo in ways I should not, but I cared for him much more than I should have.
Whenever we spent time together, he confided in me.
Not all of my customers want to talk, but many do.
They pay for the conversation, camaraderie, and care as much as they pay for the other things.
Many times talking was all Theo wanted to do when we were together.
He longed for a woman’s opinion about Jo before they married.
He was desperate to be a good husband to this woman he was completely enchanted by.
He stopped seeing me once she moved to Paris, but I worried for Jo when I learned of Theo’s confinement not even two years later.
He sent word for me from the institution in Utrecht.
And I cobbled together money to make the long trip to Holland to see him.
It was the first time I’d left Paris. His official diagnosis had been dementia paralytica, caused by a type of syphilis.
His pupils were small and unequal and he’d been tied to his padded cot to protect him from his seizures, but he was in a state of reasonable calmness when I arrived and confided in me that Jo would be left with very little if he succumbed to his many illnesses.
“You are so strong. You have built a life for yourself from nothing. Watch out for her for me, please,” he begged me.
“Of course,” I’d agreed. And now I’m here. But I have no idea how I can truly be of service to this widowed young mother.
Theo’s child coughs again in his sleep, and it echoes down the hallway. “Tell me about your boy,” I say to Jo.
“His name is Vincent. Named for an uncle who has also passed. He is the sweetest angel I could have asked for. When he stares at me, I see the eyes of an adult and I am certain he will grow up to be a great mind. I feel he is smarter than I am.”
“Then I’m sure he wouldn’t want you to go wandering through the streets of Montmartre at the witching hour,” I say with a gentle smile.
“No. I should not have gone. But that cough…I was not prepared to be doing this alone.”
“I am sorry for your losses.”