The Dress Thief (33 page)

In spite of the beauty around him, Jean-Yves hadn’t enjoyed the drive from Paris. His mistake had been to bring Ninette and Jolyan Ferryman. His daughter, chattering away beside him on the rear seat, and his secretary’s obsequious attentions, intruded on his
thoughts. Ferryman sat up front beside the chauffeur and Jean-Yves was sick of the sight of the back of his head. The boy used so much hair oil, you could see the tracks of his comb and the scalp beneath.

They reached the point where the river plunged into a gorge thick with spruce and mountain ash. Rising from a dark forest was the plateau of Kirchwiller, his castle crowning it. The Panhard’s
windows filled with a panorama of treetops and wheeling hawks. Thinking out loud, Jean-Yves said, ‘The windows of my castle look into France, the arrow slits towards Germany.’ Then, to Ninette, who had stopped talking in order to sulk because he’d refused to let her take Pépin’s place at the wheel and show off her nascent driving skills, ‘Imagine your medieval ancestors riding this final league
and seeing their stronghold before them.’

It was Ferryman who answered. ‘You’re proud of the place, Monsieur?’

‘To love the lands and forests of Kirchwiller is a birthright. My father changed national allegiance for it. I fought a war to get it back.’ Jean-Yves added silently,
And, if I don’t find the answers I’m searching for soon, a blackmailer will take it from me
.

*

That evening, leaving
Ferryman and Ninette playing chess in the drawing room, Jean-Yves went to pay the call that mustn’t be delayed.

Célie Haupmann had been at Kirchwiller all his life and most of her own. She’d arrived as the kitchen dogsbody, rising to become his late mother’s most trusted assistant. On Marie-Christine de Charembourg’s death three years ago, an apartment had been made for Célie in one of the gatehouses.
These days she retained the title ‘housekeeper’, but it was a courtesy.

Jean-Yves knocked at her apartment door and was let in by a nurse, who, from her grey tunic and white coif, had been recruited from a nearby convent. The nurse informed him that Mme Haupmann was expecting him, though she may have nodded off, and that a maid had been in to lay out refreshments. She ushered him to a sitting
room and withdrew.

Jean-Yves took a moment to inspect his surroundings and was glad to see that his steward had provided comfortable accommodation for the old servant. Clearly, Haupmann liked her knick-knacks. His eye fell on candlesticks, clocks, china animals – some he recognised as having belonged to his mother. All very pretty and neat … unlike Haupmann herself.

Once she’d been full-lipped
and comely, her face ringed by butter-blonde plaits. Now she filled her armchair like bloated dough, a yellowed complexion hinting at failing organs. When he coughed politely, she opened her eyes and muttered in her native Alsatian.

Jean-Yves greeted her in French and waited for a gruff reply. She’d liked him as a child but had grown cold as he grew taller and lost his chubby appeal. He suspected
she’d never forgiven him for ‘joining the enemy’ – that is, becoming a man. Or perhaps she’d been jealous of the intensity of his mother’s love for him. Their infrequent meetings were always a bit of a tap dance.

No gruff response today, but a weak attempt at a handshake. She invited him to sit and indicated the refreshment table, the slices of Kugelhopf, a speciality of the region, and a decanter
of Kirsch. Would he kindly pour? Was dear Christine here, had she come?

No, the future duchesse was in Paris with her mother, where her dress and trousseau were being finished.

But of course. What was the wedding dress like?

‘I’ve not been allowed to see, Madame.’

Was the bridegroom handsome? Where was his property … the Haute-Loire? Goodness. She’d never been so far in her life.

Jean-Yves
poured Kirsch and answered her questions. If she wanted gossip, she could have it. He doubted she got much company. Only when a cuckoo popped out on its springs to brandish the hour did he finally ask his question. ‘Madame, has
anybody contacted you in recent months probing the death of the artist Alfred Lutzman?’

Colour flooded Célie Haupmann’s cheeks. The old hostility returned. ‘Why dig that
up? It’s not decent.’

‘While my mother was alive I never referred to it, but you and I can be open. Have you spoken to anybody? Answered a letter? Passed on details of that time?’

Contempt thickened her expression. ‘So much fuss over one stupid Jew. Who cares if there’s one less in Kirchwiller? They take our trade, make themselves rich and never spend their money here. It sits in banks in Germany
while we go hungry.’

Never had anyone looked less hungry. ‘You were my mother’s confidante,’ Jean-Yves continued patiently. ‘She told you things she otherwise kept for her father-confessor. If you revealed the events of that December day in 1903,’ he moved his chair nearer in a gesture of intimacy, ‘be assured I am not angry, but I must know.’

Célie lifted her Kirsch glass unsteadily. ‘She talked
of you all the time, your mother, how she missed you. Her only child – who abandoned her.’

‘So you say every time we meet, though it was she who insisted I leave here. My mother was only at peace when I was out of the country. She feared my past might catch up with me if I stayed.’

‘Bah! She had no peace. Her marriage was misery. I saw new bruises every morning when I went to her for my orders.’

He stood, turning his back, counting down to quell his sudden anger. Célie was referring to the ‘marital battery’ inflicted on his mother, which had only stopped with his father’s death in 1902. Jean-Yves had been victim of his father’s violence too, but he’d learned very young that it was never to be mentioned. He and his mother had shared their experience through glances alone – a touch here,
a quick hug there. ‘You forget your place,’ he said coldly to Célie.

‘I’m dying. It gives me the right. Your father was a brute. His greatest pleasure was beating your mother. I hope you are not the same.’

‘Good God, Madame!’ He couldn’t help adding, ‘You speak as if I should have stopped him. I was a child.’

‘You were not always a child, but it’s over now. She is at peace and he is … roasting
in hell, I hope. Pray your daughters marry good men, mm?’ Célie tilted her head, forcing a last familiarity between them. ‘As for your big question, I told nobody what you did to that Jew. Why should I? We should get rid of them all.’

Flower-figured chiffon over silk satin, six sunray darts from neckline to bust, medieval-style sleaves. Alix tallied the myriad details that made Christine de Charembourg’s wedding gown unique. Yesterday – or the day before; the weary hours were merging – she’d sewn hundreds of lead pellets into the hem so that if the wedding
day turned breezy, Christine’s dress wouldn’t end up over her head.

They were in Javier’s salon, Christine on a low, wooden stage, Alix on her knees arranging the Chantilly cream skirts over the steps. This was the dress’s first public appearance. After today, it would be carefully packed and taken to Alsace for the wedding day scheduled for just over two weeks’ time. A tear slipped from Alix’s
eye and she dashed it away, angry with herself for being silly. The feel of wedding chiffon in her hands brought back Verrian’s voice: ‘
I’m falling for you …
’ At some point in his descent, he’d obviously had second thoughts, because he’d
disappeared. He’d been gone for more than three weeks, and this time even his newspaper office didn’t know where he was. Rosa, in whose home Alix was now a permanent
lodger, insisted he’d be back. ‘I know men, ducks, and he isn’t the runaway type.’

Alix wished she could share Rosa’s certainties.

‘More of a curve, Alix.’ Pauline Frankel stood a distance away, studying the line of the wedding dress. ‘Fan it out a little. The train must look as if it’s painted on to the steps.’

Soon a photographer would arrive to take the traditional picture of the bride-to-be
with her mother and father. The session had already been put back once because the comte had stayed longer than expected in Alsace. He was unwell, it was whispered. A heart complaint.

Alix wished Christine de Charembourg would stand straighter. She seemed locked in a flinch. Worried about her father? Or was it because her mother oppressed her? The comtesse was prowling around the room like a
plantation overseer, searching for reasons to poke and complain. She’d insisted on a dozen changes to the dress already. A square neckline had been designed to show off the family pearls, but a week ago the comtesse had demanded a redesign. ‘Christine will not be wearing the pearls after all.’

This last dictum had pushed Javier towards an emotional earthquake. He was not a corner-dressmaker,
he had shouted.
The girl would look like a camel in a high neck, and he, Javier, had not yet sunk to dressing camels.

Mme Frankel had soothed him. ‘It’s not the girl’s fault that the family pearls have been lost, or discovered to be paste or whatever. You will think your way round this new shape and it will be triumphant.’

And so it was, Javier creating a bodice that slimmed Christine’s shape
and drew the eye away from her square jaw. Alix had been drafted in to help fit and sew after a previous assistant fell foul of the comtesse’s temper. Her escape route from the workbench, and she’d seized it. Worried to the bone about Mémé, who was still unconscious in hospital, heartsick over Verrian and missing the flat at St-Sulpice that she was too scared to return to, she needed to be mindlessly
busy. She could have done without the bride’s mother treading on her fingers though.

Many highbred ladies were sharp, even downright rude. But it turned out that the mere sight of Alix goaded Rhona de Charembourg to fresh heights of malice. Only this morning she’d swung her hand so that her ruby ring caught Alix’s lip. At the sight of the blood, Rhona had shrieked, ‘Get away from my daughter’s
train! Get away or my daughter will not wear this dress!’

Pauline Frankel had sent Alix down to the sanatorium. As she left, Alix heard Christine de Charembourg say, ‘Maman, you hit the girl. I saw you.’

*

At eleven prompt, the photographer arrived, but the Comte de Charembourg did not. The session was rebooked for the following day. As she left, Rhona de Charembourg informed Mme Frankel that
she did not want to see ‘the dark girl, Gower’ in the salon again. She would not have a Jewess working on her daughter’s bridal clothes.

Mme Frankel answered, ‘As that also excludes me, I hope Madame la Comtesse can find another technician.’

The comtesse was momentarily shaken. Then, all smiles, she explained that she had not meant to offend. Indeed, she trusted that her daughter’s trousseau
would be finished by the date agreed, in time for the family to travel to Alsace.

‘The trousseau will be finished as long as you demand no more changes, Madame. And that includes changes to my workforce.’

*

‘Javier says that woman’s face is branded in acid on his heart,’ Pauline Frankel remarked later in an undertone to Alix. ‘I don’t know about that, but she’s keeping me from the autumn–winter
collection. I’m marking off the days until the end of July and there aren’t that many left. It was hard enough persuading Javier to put last month’s cancelled mid-season collection behind him and start designing again.’

Alix nodded. The fashion press had savaged Javier’s caprice in cancelling a collection, having already launched the previous one late. Some suggested he was not quite enough of
a
genius to get away with offending the fashion world twice in one year. A right-wing magazine had gone further, with a caricature implying that Maison Javier was built on Jewish money, not talent. Alix knew what Mme Frankel was implying – the comtesse’s rants might be the thing to tip Javier back into melancholy, and none of them could afford that. She said, ‘At least Oro is finished.’

The next
day, as the photographer assembled his equipment and a minion gave the stage a final polish, Alix prayed they’d seen the last of Christine’s wedding dress, the comtesse and her tantrums. ‘Tears in the car,’ a fitter whispered to Alix as Rhona arrived, clad in a suit of lilac silk, her younger daughter and the bride-to-be trailing behind. ‘Poor girl – we should have made her dress out of blotting
paper.’

Then the comte arrived, giving them all a lesson in gracious sincerity. ‘I have tested your patience, Mesdames. I was taken unwell in Alsace. The doctors there kept me under observation longer than I needed or wanted.’

Alix was determined not to meet his eye, but as they waited for Christine to be dressed he approached, asking in a low murmur, ‘How is your grandmother?’

‘They call it
a coma.’ She spoke brusquely. ‘She blinks but I don’t think she hears anything.’

‘I’m so sorry. Thank you for informing me and for sending the letter to my business offices.’

‘I thought you’d want to know.’

‘I visited your flat the moment I got your letter, but you’d left St-Sulpice and nobody seemed to know where you’d gone.’