The Last Days of Night(70)
“It comes from the dressing room of Miss Endicott. So do the jewels. The girl is about your age—a little younger. It might be a little wide around the bust, but we can take it in.”
“You stole a dress from Mary Endicott?” Agnes was dumbfounded, terrified. The family would discover the loss, and her mother had been polishing their silver for just long enough to be the first likely suspect. The police would be at their door within days.
That’s when her mother explained. They were going to leave Boston and they were going to do it that very night. They would take a coach steamer to Paris, packing the dress in their valise. Agnes would board the steamer in her normal clothes, and she would disembark in green silk. She would leave Boston Harbor as a sweeping girl…and she would arrive in Paris the daughter of new California money.
“Miss Agnes Huntington,” her mother had said. “Doesn’t that sound nice?”
“I don’t know who that is,” Agnes had protested.
“Exactly. No one does. But soon enough, everyone will.”
With only an impossibly expensive dress and a string of gems, the teenage Agnes would be reborn in Paris. There, she could be anyone she wanted. There were enough moneyed Huntingtons roaming the world that no one would be sure from which line she’d descended, and if she worked her manners, no one would be rude enough to ask. Agnes was beautiful, her mother had explained. She was radiant. She was funny. She was both smart and clever, which were never quite the same thing, and she was enormously talented. The only thing holding her back in America was her family.
“But what about you?”
Fannie would be there as well. Waiting in the wings. Silent and unseen, Fannie would be backstage, awaiting her daughter’s triumph.
The police wouldn’t be able to find her in Paris—they’d never look that far afield. But they would most certainly be looking. The Endicotts were not a family to be trifled with. So forever, even if their deceit were to be successful, Fannie would have to stay in her daughter’s shadow.
“I’m afraid.”
“I know,” her mother had answered. “But I love you. And that’s why we’re going to do this.”
Fannie had moved close and kissed Agnes once on her forehead. And then Fannie had packed both of their bags while Agnes puttered and paced, too shocked to argue or do anything but what she’d been asked.
They boarded the Cunard Line steamer bound for Europe that very evening.
And that was the last anyone had ever seen of Agnes or Fannie Gouge.
—
In steerage, Agnes kept the dress hidden for the duration of the trip, clutching her bag even while she slept. Only on that final morning had her mother removed the green cloth from its cover. The other women in their steerage cabin were incredulous. Agnes and Fannie said nothing.
Agnes had heard of a café from some men on the boat, gentlemen from the first-class cabin whom she passed as they smoked on the communal deck. It sounded, from the snatches of description she’d been able to overhear, like a good place for introductions. On her second day in Paris, she left the cheap women’s boardinghouse Fannie had found and asked for directions.
Agnes sat with her café au lait along the Boulevard Saint-Marcel wearing a high-society evening gown and matching necklace at eleven in the morning. But after twenty minutes, she was approached by a tall man with slick black hair and an old wool coat. He was actually quite handsome.
He addressed her in French, which of course she did not speak.
“Pardon,” she said. “Would you like to try that in English?”
“You’re a touch overdressed for the morning.”
She looked him up and down. “I should say you’d be better off with a bit of dressing up yourself.”
The man laughed at her insult and helped himself to the seat opposite.
There was a party the following night. There was always a party, she would learn. He invited her, and when she accepted, he asked where he might claim her on the evening in question.
“Why, right here, of course!” she answered. “Won’t you want a cup before a long night out? Unless,” she added, “you don’t think it’s going to be a very long night.”
He assured her that it was. And when he came to pick her up in his two-horse carriage the next evening, she found that he wasn’t wrong.
If he noticed that she was wearing the same green dress as on the day before, he made no comment about it. She would come to learn that his sort never did.
It took her only three more parties before she found someone to buy her another dress. His name was Coulter, and he was friendly with Monsieur Jacques Doucet himself. Surely she’d appreciate a little something from his shop? Her collection of gowns grew in direct proportion with her collection of gentleman admirers. A silk baron, a minor aristocrat of the old order, a German banker who found himself frequently in Paris at the House of Lazard. None needed any prompting to send her a little something.
Her mother was her only female companion in that first year. The women of Paris society were competitive, and they could smell a rat, even when their brothers and husbands and fathers could not. But what were they to do except to exclude Agnes from their teas? To gossip about her incessantly? To keep her name on their lips in snide and disparaging tones?
She returned nightly to her mother, who’d given her everything and who’d received nothing, yet, in return.