Adrienne shook her head. “I have hiding places. There’s always a loose floorboard somewhere. And now you’ll have to find one too. Here. Take it back to Aubazine with you, Ninette. I’m done with it. And maybe between the three of us—you, me, and Monsieur Decourcelle—we can convince Gabrielle that a convent girl really can marry a count.”
That night, my dreams weren’t haunted by ghosts, by my mother, cold and gray on a cot. Instead, I was back at the park, wrapped in layers of the finest lace as if I were something to be cared for, something to be treasured. A miniature garden sat regally on my head as I swayed and sashayed, handsome gentilhommes carrying useless canes by my side. I was an élégante. I was a heroine in a Decourcelle mélo. I was Something Better.
It was so much easier to dream when you knew what to dream of.
SIX
“What are you doing?” I glared at Gabrielle in the dim light and swirling dust motes of the convent attic, my voice a screech. We’d hidden The Dancing Girl of the Convent under a floorboard like Adrienne suggested, and here Gabrielle was, pulling out the stitching, taking the book apart.
“Shhhh,” she said, glancing back at the door. “All of the Massif Central can hear you. Relax. I’m doing this for us. This way we can read whenever we want.” She took a few pages and folded them into her pocket. “We’ll bring them with us to class, to the courtyard, wherever we go. We’ll hide them in our composition books and history books. The nuns will never know. Don’t you see, Ninette?” she said, a mischievous smile spreading across her face. “We can read Decourcelle all day long.”
We. It hadn’t taken long for Gabrielle to fall under Decourcelle’s spell.
Now we covered the tales of devotion and persecution in Lives of the Saints with Decourcelle’s more earthly passions, switching out the pages when we were finished. He was our teacher, not the saints or the nuns. We read during recreation. We read during rest time. We read whenever we could, so much so we were held out by the nuns as examples to the other girls.
“Margueritte, stop staring into space,” the Mother Superior would say. “Look at Gabrielle, how intently she’s reading.”
Or, “Pierrette, wake up! Your book has fallen over in your lap! Why can’t you be more like Antoinette?”
We didn’t tell Julia-Berthe our secret. Julia-Berthe, the rule follower, wouldn’t have been able to keep it, confessing all in a burst of overwhelming guilt. But at night, before I fell asleep, I’d crawl into her bed and recount stories from The Dancing Girl of the Convent and pray that rather than those dreams of our mother, she was dreaming, like me, of ballerinas and handsome counts and love at first sight.
* * *
Just as Adrienne had promised, after le quatorze juillet, we were invited back to Clermont-Ferrand for Assumption Day in August, then All Saints’ Day in November, Noel in December and Candlemas in February. Each time, we bought more magazines, keeping up with the latest styles. We cut out more pictures and brought new mélos back to Aubazine. The Chamber of Love. The Woman Who Swallows Her Tears. Brunette and Blonde. As our secret library grew, possibilities broadened, our world expanded.
When we were there for Easter the following April, it rained like les vaches qui pissant, as Pépère liked to say, keeping us indoors. He gave us each a coin, then headed to the café. Mémère was away, and we girls had the house to ourselves.
“We’ll have a tea party,” Adrienne said. “All the élégantes take tea in the afternoons. We need to practice.”
We ran out in the downpour to buy the tea. Adrienne and Gabrielle spent the rest of their money on ribbons and lemons, the juice of which was said to even the complexion. Julia-Berthe spent her remaining amount on tins of sardines for the feral cats that prowled around our grandparents’ house. I decided to save mine.
“But there’s nothing to buy in Aubazine,” Gabrielle said.
“It’s not for Aubazine,” I said. “It’s for after.”
Gabrielle laughed. “After? That’s too far off. I want something sweet now, before we go back to the convent where the nuns say anything less bland than the Communion wafer is gluttony. Besides, what will a few centimes get you anyway?”
I ignored her, enjoying the solid weightiness of the coins as if I were holding a piece of the future in my pocket.
SEVEN
On Sunday afternoons, we were made to follow Sister Xavier up and down the hills of the Massif Central to “fortify our constitutions,” which, according to the nuns, were weak from the poverty of our early days. During one of these winter treks, as I tried to imagine it was spring, that I was in the Bois de Boulogne like the élégantes in the magazines, strolling at a leisurely pace in the shade of a ruffled silk parasol, I heard Gabrielle say to Hélène, “Our father is in America. He made his fortune and is coming back soon to get us.”
I nearly tripped over a jutted wedge of volcanic rock, catching myself just in time to avoid tumbling to the ground. Hélène snorted. “If he’s made his fortune, then why are you and your sisters here?”
Gabrielle’s chin was high. “To be educated. I wrote him and asked him to bring me a white dress made of chiffon. He promised he would.”
“You’re lying,” Hélène said.
“You’re jealous,” Gabrielle said.
Hélène crossed her arms in front of her. “You’re just like the rest of us. An orphan nobody wants. Stop claiming to be better.”
“I am better. Anyone’s better than you.”
“Actually, you’re worse. My parents died. But your father is still alive. And he doesn’t want you. He probably never did.”
It was all I could do not to kick Hélène as hard as I could. I wanted to shove her off a cliff and listen to her scream the whole way down.
I pushed myself between Gabrielle and Hélène and reached into my pocket. Sometimes I carried the coins I’d saved from Pépère with me. “He is coming back for us,” I said to Hélène. “And he sends us money too. Look.”
I held out my hand, the coins reflecting in the sun for a split second before I put them back quickly. Hélène’s face was bright red.
“You see,” Gabrielle said to her. “I told you so.”
“Hmph,” Hélène said. She moved closer to Pierrette, the two of them veering sharply away.
Gabrielle and I walked on in an uneasy silence, her words echoing in my head. Our father was coming back? She’d written to him?