Letters from Paris

Juliet Blackwell

PRAISE FOR

THE PARIS KEY

“A charming protagonist and a deep well of family secrets, all gorgeously set in the City of Light. The Paris Key is an absorbing homage to family, friendship, and, of course, the greatest city in the world.”

—Michelle Gable, international bestselling author of I’ll See You in Paris

“A gorgeously plotted novel woven with luminescent charm, The Paris Key gleams as brightly as the city herself.”

—Rachael Herron, author of The Ones Who Matter Most

“[A] witty, warm, winsome novel . . . [Blackwell’s] generation-spanning tale combines intrigue and passion with a flawless ear for language and a gift for sensory detail. If The Paris Key doesn’t make a Francophile of you, nothing will!”

—Sophie Littlefield, bestselling author of The Guilty One

“Through Genevieve’s eyes, we can share and revel in French history and culture, which linger around every corner like magic. . . . This story deserves a place on every bookshelf, not because it is yet another tale of forbidden love and family secrets, though it tells that story well, but because The Paris Key ultimately embodies the enormous power stemming from connection to our fellow humans, the blessing of community. That, Genevieve learns, is the beginning of real happiness.”

—Southern Literary Review

“Blackwell’s novel has all of the components that the best novels are made of: an intriguing and compelling story line, an extremely likable protagonist, a dreamy location, and a small dash of suspense and mystery.”

—RT Book Reviews

“Better than a travel guide because it carries the essence of friendship, food, drink, story, and history that one can only convey through Parisian residents. Delightful and highly recommended!”

—The Best Reviews

Also by Juliet Blackwell

The Paris Key

The Witchcraft Mysteries

Secondhand Spirits

A Cast-off Coven

In a Witch’s Wardrobe

Hexes and Hemlines

Tarnished and Torn

A Vision in Velvet

Spellcasting in Silk

A Toxic Trousseau

The Haunted Home Renovation Mysteries

If Walls Could Talk

Dead Bolt

Murder on the House

Home for the Haunting

Keeper of the Castle

Give Up the Ghost

BERKLEY

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Blackwell, Juliet, author.

Title: Letters from Paris/Juliet Blackwell.

Description: Berkley trade paperback edition. | New York: Berkley Books, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016009294 (print) | LCCN 2016023011 (ebook) | ISBN 9780451473707 (softcover) | ISBN 9780698186040 (ebook)

Classification: LCC PS3602.L32578 L48 2016 (print) | LCC PS3602.L32578 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016009294

Cover art © Georgianna Lane

Cover design by Sandra Chiu

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Version_1

To the Goodson Girls:

Minerva, Betty, Mem, Suzy, and Jane.
Thank you for the joy, the gumbo,
and the gleam of mischief.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Merci beaucoup to my ever-patient, supersmart editor, Kerry Donovan, who encouraged me to follow my heart and write about Paris. To my literary agent, Jim McCarthy, who is the best cheerleader a writer could have. And many thanks to the copy editors and designers and artists who worked on the finished product of Letters from Paris—you make me look good!

Thanks are due my friends and family in Paris, Provence, and the Franche-Comté, especially the Stauffeneggers, the Dartevels, and the LaCroix. Also to Francoise and Hubert Laugner, for the wonderful sojourn in Alsace! And thank you to my Southern family—the extended Goodson clan—for beautiful childhood memories, and for reminding this California girl what life feels like in Louisiana and Texas. Thank you to my father, Robert B. Lawes, for always being there for me and for teaching me more than he realizes. To Susan Lawes, who shared her early appreciation for art and reading with her bratty younger sister. Finally, to Carolyn Lawes, whip-smart and funny as hell, a true friend and writer’s muse in addition to being my sister. Could you please move back to California, already?

As always to my author friends, who truly know that special brand of writer-crazy, especially Sophie Littlefield, Rachael Herron, Victoria Laurie, Nicole Peeler, Adrienne Miller, Gigi Pandian, Martha White, Mysti Berry, Lynn Coddington, and Lisa Hughey. Muchísimas gracias to my assistant extraordinaire and amiga del corazón, Anna Cabrera. And to my ever-patient and supportive friends: Maddee James, Karen Thompson, Bee Enos, Susan Baker, Kendall Moalem, Muffy Srinivasan, Shay Demetrius, Suzanne Chan, Pamela Groves, Jan Strout, Chris Logan, Brian Casey, Wanda Klor, Cathy Romero, and Mary Grae. And to the entire Mira Vista Social Club, especially Oscar’s parents, Sara Paul and Dan Krewson. And to Oscar, of course; I hope you’ll forgive me for naming you Gertrude in this book. It’s a writer thing.

In addition to countless articles and photos found in the shelves of the library and on the Internet, I pored over the pictures in Alex Toledano’s Paris in Photographs, 1890s (Calla Editions, Dover Publications, 2015). I also especially appreciate the photography of Virginia Jones, which I used to remind myself of street scenes in contemporary Paris.

Thank you to Sergio, who drives me crazy, forces me to laugh, and makes me proud every day. Et merci à Eric, for endless dinners, bottomless glasses of wine, and unfailing love and kindness. Also, for correcting my French. One of these days I’ll get the “ou” right. Then we can work on my “r”s.

Finally, thanks to the Lorenzi Moulage d’Art for inspiring me—and so many others—with their beautiful artistry, their death masks, and for keeping the tradition of mold-making and copying alive. If you’re ever near Paris, don’t miss it! It’s well worth the trip, and you might just spy the face of L’Inconnue decorating their walls. And, of course, to the mysterious woman known only as L’Inconnue de la Seine: I enjoyed imagining a different ending for you. I like to think it might have been so.

You find me at work; excuse the dust on my blouse. I sculpt my marble myself.

—Camille Claudel

Praise for The Paris Key

Also by Juliet Blackwell

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Author’s Note

Readers Guide

Excerpt from The Paris Key

About the Author

PROLOGUE

SABINE

February 27, 1898

He sleeps.

Sabine creeps across the dark studio before dawn, beseeching the silent faces not to betray her. They watch her every move, mute witnesses to her crime.

Slipping through the door, she winces at the scraping sound of metal on metal as she pauses to latch it behind her. Fog envelops her, the mist cutting through her threadbare blouse and underthings, wet needles of cold air piercing her skin.

Sabine thinks longingly of the two dresses she left behind in the cupboard. He’d bought them for her. They are the finest garments she has ever worn: one blue, one green. Made of the softest lawn, a material so lush and supple it beckoned to her the first time she donned the garments; often she would caress the skirt, reveling in the sumptuous sensations that tickled her palm. He teased her for that.

Take nothing with you.

She has donned the heavy black skirt and the thin gray blouse she wore when they met in the square in Pigalle. When she thought he was her salvation. Before.

Her feet are clad in her ancient black boots. The dove gray shawl her mother had knit for her sixteenth Christmas is her only defense against the night’s chill. She wears her hair pinned back in the style he likes: an old-fashioned twist on either side of her head.

As though she stepped out of another time.

Also abandoned is a gold armband, still in its nest of fine black velvet, in a blue box upon the nightstand. The tortoiseshell comb for her hair. Her little hand mirror. The candle stubs and pocket-sized book of sonnets, her sketchbook and charcoal. She even leaves behind the pillowcase in which she packed her few belongings when she fled her childhood home in the countryside so long ago.

Before Paris. Before she was an artist’s model. Before Maurice.

Before.

The damp air stings her cheeks with cold kisses. Dim light from the gas streetlamps casts an amber glow on the cobblestones, glinting off puddles from last night’s rain.

They seem to flash a warning: You will never get away with it. You will never get away.

Sabine keeps her head down, walking as quickly as she dares. Listening.

She hears water dripping from a gargoyle at the side of the church. A horse whinnying a block or two away. A dog barking behind a stout wooden door. The tapping of her boots on the paving stones, echoing the pounding of her heart.

Her own harsh breathing is the loudest sound.

And . . . something else?

She freezes. Holds her breath. Listens.

Footsteps.

Sabine runs. Runs for her life.

She makes it as far as the quai du Louvre. To the Pont Neuf.

The bridge that crosses the Seine.

1

This was probably a mistake, Claire thought to herself as she wrestled her luggage cart—why did she always choose the one with a wobbly wheel?—out the exit of the New Orleans airport. The sliding-glass doors whooshed closed behind her, cutting her off from the terminal’s unnatural coolness and leaving her mired in the soupy atmosphere of July, Louisiana-style.

Louisiana. It occurred to Claire that had she been blindfolded and her ears covered, she would still know where she was. She could feel it, smell something achingly familiar in the air. Humid tendrils of heat reached out and wrapped around her, dampness whispering along her skin, greeting her like an old lover.

A lover she’d left many years ago with a mix of regret and relief, an abstract fondness tangled up with the fervent desire to move on.

Claire took a deep breath of the hot, moist air, blew it out slowly, and searched the vehicles vying for curb access outside of baggage claim. When she’d cosigned the loan for her cousin Ty’s new rig, he’d told her it was “huge, black, and shiny.” One good thing about having more cousins in Plaquemines Parish than she could count: there was always someone to give her a ride to or from the airport.

A small group of already inebriated twentysomething tourists, apparently intent on finding Mardi Gras out of season, jostled Claire on their jocular way to the taxi stand; she barely managed to grab her computer case as it was knocked from her shoulder. A drip of sweat rolled down the small of her back. She stood with one hand on her luggage; other than a few boxes of books and souvenirs she had sent through the mail, the two big suitcases, one duffel bag, and huge purse were all she owned in the world. She’d sold or given away the rest before leaving Chicago.

This was probably a mistake, Claire thought again. The phrase had become something of a mantra ever since her cousin Jessica had phoned the week before last to say their grandmother was at death’s door.

“Mammaw needs you, Chance,” Jessica had said. Claire’s relatives knew her as Chance; their grandmother went by Mammaw. “She’s speaking in Cajun; no one can understand her but Uncle Remy. And you know how he is.”

When Claire received the call, she had been sitting in her climate-controlled office in Chicago, wondering what a person wore to the opera. Was her standard black office garb—perhaps dressed up with some chunky ethnic jewelry and a colorful pashmina—enough, or was this more of a sparkles-and-tulle situation? From the vantage point of her desk she could see acres of taupe carpeting and a maze of cubicles, old brick factory walls chicly renovated with skylights, and steel-and-glass dividers for “No-Miss Systems: A Software Company.” She looked out over the muted officescape, imagining Mammaw’s house and thinking: If Jessica’s was a voice from her past, what was her future? A night at the opera? Really?

You’re getting pretty big for your britches, Chance Broussard.

As her newly ex-boyfriend, Sean, would say: in this, as in most things, Claire was just the teensiest bit conflicted.

Claire finally spotted Ty’s truck, looming large and new in a sea of smaller cars and dented pickups. Ignoring the blare of horns, he double-parked, hopped out, gave Claire a bear hug, then tossed her leaden bags in the bed of the truck like so much kindling.

Ty drove toward the small town in Plaquemines Parish where they had been raised. They chatted a little about her life in the “big city,” his new truck, the job situation out on the oil rigs, and the precarious state of Mammaw’s health, but further conversation soon fizzled out. Claire’s relatives worked hard, disdained complainers, saluted the flag, and enjoyed their football. When they started drinking, the young men might get raucous and the old folks were prone to spinning long, involved tales in which layers of fact and fiction, history and fantasy merged and overlapped. But unless they were in storytelling mode, her cousins remained largely silent, their thoughts and hopes and dreams kept locked away under sweat-stained New Orleans Saints or Ragin’ Cajuns ball caps.

So Claire was free to watch the scenery—flat, full of brush and low trees and crisscrossed by creeks and bayous—and to ponder.

After hanging up with Jessica, Claire had finished up the day’s work, talked to her team supervisor, and hurried to meet Sean for a drink at the latest trendy lounge, a former dive bar that had been revamped with an ironically 1950s décor à la Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. They ordered craft cocktails made with locally sourced ingredients that took about ten minutes apiece for the bewhiskered “mixologists” to produce and that cost easily four times as much as the drinks had in the bar’s former incarnation.

After their cocktails arrived, they settled in at a table and Claire told Sean she had given notice at No-Miss and was going home to take care of her grandmother.