Where The Seine Forgets

CHAPTER EIGHT:What The Saw

PART THREE

The Reckoning

Chapter Eight — What the Maid Saw

Céleste Beaumont had worked for the Moreau family for eleven years. She was forty-one, quiet, and had survived the household through a combination of genuine discretion and careful invisibility. She knew which information to hold and which to pretend she had not gathered. She had, over the years, held a great deal.

But she liked Élise. Had always liked Élise, in the way servants sometimes love the members of a household they have watched grow up — with a protective, helpless affection that has nowhere to go.

It was Céleste who had noticed the hours. The Tuesday afternoon when Élise returned with a theater program for a show that hadn't run in two weeks. The Thursday when her shoes were wet from a route that didn't pass near any puddles a young woman of her position would encounter. The particular quality of her face when she thought no one was looking — alive in a way that Céleste recognized and feared, because she had been alive that way once herself, briefly, a long time ago, and she knew what it cost.

Marguerite Moreau called her in on a Wednesday morning, while Élise was still asleep.

"Céleste." Her mistress was at her writing desk, a letter half-composed before her. "I want you to tell me honestly. Is there anything I should know about my daughter's movements?"

A silence of perhaps four seconds, which Céleste used to choose, in full, the kind of woman she was.

"She has been attending concerts, Madame," Céleste said. "Classical music. She seems to find it soothing."

Marguerite looked at her for a long moment. "And that is all?"

"That is all I have observed, Madame."

Later, Céleste would tell herself she had not lied. She had not said what she knew. There was a difference, she thought, between a lie and a mercy. Though she was aware that this distinction was easier to maintain before the consequences arrived.

She left a small note under Élise's door that afternoon: Be more careful, mademoiselle. Paris has eyes everywhere. C.

Élise read it three times and burned it in the fireplace.