I twisted my bloomers in my fists, cleared my throat to get her attention. She opened one small, roving eye.

‘What could be so important? Can you not see that I’m suffering?’

‘Something happened.’

Tante Huguette opened her other eye and glanced at the fabric in my hands. I untwisted the bloomers and the stain in the gusset appeared, like a rusted flower unfolding.

She leaned forward to examine it. ‘Ah,’ she said, and settled back into her chair. Closed her eyes once more, slowly, as if even that tiny movement exacerbated her headache. ‘I’ve been waiting for this.’

‘Is there something wrong with me?’

‘It’s your womanhood. The blood will flow monthly, or thereabouts. You can now bear children. Congratulations.’

I stood, swaying on my feet, no less confused than when I entered the room.

‘A man, hopefully one you are wed to, will plant a seed in your field whether you like it or not,’ she said. ‘Or two. Or three or four.’ She opened her eyes and turned her head towards me. She smiled. ‘I feel it would be remiss of me not to tell you that you do have a choice in these matters. There is the medicinal douche. There is arsenic. There is pennyroyal. Your mother attempted pennyroyal when she was carrying you. Your father had just begun his apprenticeship in another town and she had an intuition he was never coming back. Anyway.’ She took a careful sip of brandy and, with one hand straddling her forehead, she rubbed both temples, her smallest finger jutting out like a dirty word. ‘Evidently she did not take enough.’

31

L’Inconnue

Paris, 1899

‘We could move away,’ Madame Debord said one evening in the salon. Expenses ledger balanced, liqueur poured. ‘We could go to some other city where nobody knows us. Toulouse or Nîmes or Nice. Why not live by the sea? I ought to be living by the sea, it’s in my blood, and the further one moves from Paris, the cheaper the rent. Our story is simple: I am your grandmother. Your husband, the child’s father, died. In a fight. No, no. That’s sordid. He died of consumption or a weakness of the heart or some other fault with an organ. People will be suspicious – people love to believe the worst – but there will be no way to determine the truth.’ She touched the side of my face then, gently, with the backs of her fingers. ‘You may even find someone else willing to marry you. You’re thin but you’re pretty enough.’

I listened and tried very hard not to scream. To live the rest of my life behind a fiction that was as badly constructed as those old kitchen cabinets. As shabby a lie as teaching a friend to sew.

But then one morning in April there were swallows. Queeping and trilling in wide arcs outside my bedroom window. I woke and, without my commanding it, both my hands found my stomach, round and tight and with an odd, dark line running from its centre down to the pubis. Somewhere deep inside, the shock-jab of a knee, or elbow or foot. That was you. That was your knee. Your elbow. Your foot.