Chapter 18 #2
Amélie tied the sash for her. “Much happened last night at Le Repaire, but perhaps that is not the only reason for this. I recognize deep grief,” she added. “If it will lighten your mind to share with me what troubles you, I will gladly listen. But I will not pry from you your secrets.”
She was exhausted. She couldn’t think how to begin ordering what was in her mind into something coherent, but she tried.
Haltingly at first, she told Amélie more about Lucy’s disappearance, of what came before Paris.
Amélie already knew portions of that, of course, but she also talked about Jamie and his loss at Waterloo and what she’d seen afterwards, nursing critically wounded soldiers.
That service had helped in some ways while her grief for Jamie was so fresh, but those months left her with harsh memories as well.
Then there was Maman’s years-long slide towards death from consumption, and Da’s quick passing only a few weeks later.
Amélie listened with great sympathy, asking a question here or there if her words ran dry.
And then, once she’d rambled on about her past, she described Le Repaire straight through from beginning to the salle écarlate to the fiacre ride when agitation seized her.
She did not speak of afterwards in Nathaniel’s rooms, but it was unnecessary.
She bore marks from it. Amélie touched a faint bruise where the robe did not fully cover her forearm.
“You have more than one such mark; these I have seen after your bath.” Amélie gently tipped her chin such that she could search her eyes.
“Has Nathaniel compelled you in any way? If you are in need of shelter, I will provide it. He will not know where.”
She shook her head. “No. It was— I wanted what happened.” Her voice was a whisper, admitting that out loud.
“That is good. I pride myself on my discernment, and so it would have been to me a surprise, but one cannot always know what a man may do. Still, these are from him, oui?”
“Yes.” She managed a ghost of a smile. “I expect he has a few of his own. We were not gentle with one another.”
“So you have become lovers with Nathaniel, oui? Is it for that also, that you wept this morning? Or the manner of it?”
Was it? Certainly it contributed to how wholly overwhelmed she felt, but it was not the largest part. “No. The two of us . . . It was unexpected. Not unwelcome. Although some of it—” She stopped, feeling her color rising. “I did not know,” she said softly. “Not that it could be like that.”
“Have you taken any precautions, ma petite?”
For a moment she did not follow Amélie’s query because in truth she hadn’t thought of it at all, if only because consequences seemed so very remote.
“The change came early for me, after my husband’s death; I’ve not had a monthly since.
Even before that, I was married for more than five years without a child.
” It had caused her fresh grief those first few months, when she had missed the first few cycles and had clung to the hope that she had something of Jamie yet.
But a child had not come, and her cycle had never resumed.
“The difficulty is not always with the woman, regardless of this business with your menses. You are young yet and have known much grief since that time. You are not above five-and-twenty?”
“Nearly twenty-six.”
“And so you may not be finished yet with your childbearing years,” said Amélie. “Something you must consider if you have not. And if Nathaniel has also not.”
She inclined her head, not trusting her voice.
Assuredly she ought to have at least considered it, no matter how remote the consequences, but she hadn’t.
At all. They’d been especially incautious last night; Nathaniel had not withdrawn either time.
He’d done so the first night, but last night . . . No, neither time.
Then again, there’d been very little reason between them last night, at least the first time. She had again the sense that she no longer quite knew who she was.
“I will not further pry into your private affairs unless you wish to share, in which case I shall be a friendly ear.” Amélie’s voice held nothing but kindness. “I would hope also you believe when I tell you that anything you say to me of this affair with him will not go beyond this room.”
She was so weary of having only herself as counsel.
What good had it done her? “I’ve been thinking of nothing beyond each day.
I cannot, or else I would fall apart.” She gave a short laugh.
“I suppose I just have, in fact. I had not . . . cried, not in all those months. I . . . could not. It was as though there was nothing in me at all. Am I so poor a daughter? A wife?”
“You know you are not,” Amélie said gently. “Some griefs are held so deeply one does not allow oneself to acknowledge them for many weeks. Months, even, or years. We cannot or else we could not go on functioning.”
“Yes. I suppose so.” She released the fold of robe pinched between thumb and two fingers. The fabric was woollen flannel, finely napped. It was a robe intended purely for the comfort of its wearer rather than something intended to be seen by others. Was it Amélie’s?
Amélie had sat back in her own chair, but her posture and expression still invited confidences should she desire further conversation.
She did. “Is it possible that Lucy may not be with Cuvelier . . . unwillingly? If it is indeed Lucy?” She was not entirely sure how to ask about what it was she hoped, for Lucy’s sake, but also feared.
Given Amélie’s profession—or one of them; Amélie clearly was not only the owner of an exclusive brothel—she had no wish to give offense or seem judgmental.
Truly, she wasn’t judging, although she might have done, back in that earlier life that was once hers.
Amélie was a remarkable woman whose strength she was coming to greatly admire.
But this was Lucy of whom she thought. She couldn’t be dispassionate.
Amélie considered her answer before speaking.
“I do not know your sister. What I mean by this is that I do not know her motivations or her character as she was when last you saw her. Or as she is now. But this I can say, that whether she was taken willingly into Compton’s company or now is with Cuvelier of her own volition, she has survived, whatever are her circumstances.
There are those who would have made the decision not to go on. ”
She had never considered it in those terms; the idea shortened her breath. “Do you mean . . .?” She couldn’t finish the question.
“Oui. It becomes the first choice one makes: if one will by submitting survive, or if one will choose to end one’s life.” Amélie’s gaze was slightly abstracted, no longer as shrewd as it had been. Looking down memories of her own?
What was Amélie’s story? She knew none of it. “Was that the choice you had to make?”
“Oui,” Amélie said again, looking directly at her once more.
“Why I have said this is that once the choice is made to survive, there open up more choices. I do not say Lucy’s history is anything like my own story, but I know something of what I speak.
I will share part of it with you if you would like. ”
She nodded, throat too constricted for speech.
“I was born into a famille aristocratique. I have, as you see, become something very different, like so many who have survived La Terreur. My parents were sent the summer of my fourteenth year to the guillotine, betrayed by a family friend who accused them of antirevolutionary sentiment at a time when the truth had ceased to matter. As I was not yet grown, I was not given their fate to share. That false friend was enamored of my beauty, offering me protection for the price of my virtue. This became my first choice. Would I deny him and follow my parents into death, which some might argue was the only godly choice, or would I choose my life?”
The answer was self-evident.
“I nearly chose the first, but had I, who then would have remembered the lives of my parents? I could have found no way to avenge them if I too did not live. And so I became to this man his mistress, although I had for him no fondness at all. Followed, in fact, by hatred once I learned of his betrayal, but that I kept concealed while I remained under his control. When he tired of me, I made then of myself a courtesan to other powerful men. I became a woman who could not be broken by any man. During the consulship of Napoléon, I became owner of L’Orchidée and so was of my own fate truly in command.
My clientele has among its customers men in the upper tiers of many governments and the nobility of many countries.
Men who are—sometimes—softened by drink and by les rapports sexueles. Of this a wise woman can make use.”
Clearly Amélie had forged herself into a grand player in the same world occupied by men like Nathaniel. It took her years, as she described it, some of those almost certainly bitter, to rise to the position she now commanded. But she had done so, first by surviving.
It was terrifying, put alongside Lucy’s story, yet it offered Isobel a modicum of hope. “Thank you. For telling me your story.”
“I do not say this is like Lucy’s story,” Amélie reiterated. “But some of the small choices which then become the big choices, they may be similar.” She leaned forward slightly. “You have chosen also to survive, although your situation is most different.”
What else was there for her to have done? She said as much: “I had no other choice.”
Amélie smiled. “Non, ma chère, you very much had a choice. You chose to continue when grief might have crippled you. And you have chosen to act, which decisions have brought you here to France, bravely to search for your sister, when you might have remained at home safely. And now, perhaps, you are choosing again to live for yourself in some small ways. Unexpected ones.” Lightly Amélie touched beside the faint bruise on her arm.