Read Chapter 18: A Secret Twin

Marie did not speak again until the corridor guards had passed. The lantern light swung away, leaving them in a dimness thick with the smell of damp stone and boiled cabbage. Célie pressed her back against the wall of the cell, her heart still kicking from the near miss, and studied the woman before her.

Marie was not young. Her face was a map of hard years—lines around her mouth, a scar across one knuckle, hair gone gray at the temples where it escaped her cap. But her eyes were sharp, and they had not left Célie’s face since the moment of revelation.

“You have her mouth,” Marie said finally, her voice low and rough as dry bread. “The marquise. I saw it the moment they brought you in, but I told myself I was seeing ghosts. Laundresses see a great many ghosts, if they live long enough.”

Célie’s throat tightened. “You knew my mother.”

“Knew her?” Marie let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “I washed her linen for fifteen years, mademoiselle. I knew the smell of her soap, the way she liked her cuffs starched, and that she cried into her pillow at night when she thought no one could hear. I knew her better than her own husband did, God rest them both.”

The cell was cold. Célie pulled her thin blanket tighter around her shoulders, though the chill had less to do with the stone than with the sudden presence of a past she had been told to forget. Her mother had died when Célie was twelve. She had been raised by a succession of governesses and a father who preferred hunting to conversation. No one had ever spoken of a laundress named Marie.

“You said the marquise raised an orphan girl,” Célie said. “She gave her a twin seal. The same seal I carry.”

Marie nodded slowly. She settled herself on the low stool that was the cell’s only furniture, gesturing for Célie to sit on the straw pallet opposite. The gesture was almost maternal, and that alone made Célie’s throat ache.

“Nineteen years ago,” Marie began, “your mother went to visit a cousin in the country. A poor cousin, come to that, married to a penniless officer. The cousin died in childbirth. The child lived—barely. Your mother arrived the day of the funeral.”

“And took the child in?”

“She took her in. Brought her back to Paris in a carriage, wrapped in her own shawl, with a wet nurse hired before the week was out. She named her Amélie.” Marie hesitated. “She told her husband the child was the daughter of a distant relation who had perished. Your father did not ask questions he did not wish to hear the answers to.”

Célie’s mind raced. A sister. A twin of sorts, carrying the same seal. She had grown up alone, the only child of the de Vernet house, and all the while—

“Why?” The word came out rough. “Why did she never tell me?”

Marie’s eyes softened. “Because you were her jewel, mademoiselle. The only child of her body. And Amélie was a reminder of everything she had lost—her cousin, her youth, the life she might have led if she had not married for position.” She paused. “But she loved that girl too, in her way. She gave her the seal so that Amélie would always carry proof of the family’s protection. If anything happened to your mother, the seal would identify her as a de Vernet by grace, if not by blood.”

“But nothing happened to my mother until she died of fever,” Célie said. “And then ... what happened to Amélie?”

Marie looked down at her hands. “The marquise died without a will that mentioned the girl. Your father, may he burn, wanted no reminders of his wife’s charity. He turned Amélie out when she was six years old.”

“He turned a child onto the streets?”

“He paid a convent to take her. A cheap one, outside the city walls.” Marie’s jaw tightened. “I went there myself, after, to check on her. I brought her bread when I could, and cloth for her doll. I watched her grow from a frightened little thing into a girl with fire in her spine. She had your mother’s stubbornness, if not her name.”

Célie felt tears prick at her eyes and blinked them back. She had spent years resenting her father’s coldness, years aching for a mother she barely remembered. And all the while, somewhere in Paris, there was a woman who had known her mother’s love—perhaps even more fully than Célie herself had.

“Where is she now?” Célie asked, her voice barely above a whisper. “Is she alive?”

“Alive and married.” A strange smile flickered across Marie’s lips. “She attached herself to a young revolutionary before the Bastille fell. A printer’s apprentice by the name of Lefèvre. He has risen since—sits on some committee now, the sans-culottes adore him. They live in a house near the Temple, in a street off the rue des Filles-Dieu.”

“A revolutionary.” Célie’s mind turned. Her own world was built on titles and bloodlines, on the weight of a name stamped into wax. The world that had put her in this cell was built on tearing such things down. “Does she know who she is? Who she was?”

“She knows she was raised by the de Vernets,” Marie said slowly. “She knows the seal is hers by right of her adoption. But she has never used it. She has made her life in the new order, mademoiselle. She does not speak of the old one.”

“But she would speak to a sister.” It was not a question. Célie leaned forward, her hands gripping the edge of the pallet. “If I went to her, if I showed her my seal and told her who I am—she would help me. Wouldn’t she?”

Marie was silent a long moment. Then she shook her head slowly. “I cannot say, mademoiselle. The girl I knew was brave and loyal. But the woman she has become—I have not seen her in three years. Revolution changes people. It makes them forget what they were, sometimes because they want to forget.”

“I have to try.” Célie’s voice hardened. “I have nothing else. The tribunal gave me a week, and that week is nearly gone. If I do not escape, I will die. And I will not die in this cell for a lie I told to buy time.”

Marie studied her for a long moment. Then she reached into the fold of her skirt, where the fabric was doubled and stitched. Her fingers worked at a hidden seam, and after a moment she drew out a key—old iron, blackened with age, its teeth worn smooth in places.

“The courtyard gate,” she said. “The one the guards use when they bring in the night delivery of bread. I have worked here three months, and I have watched them every night. The key is taken from the guardroom at seven, and returned at dawn. But the gate has a second lock—a small one, on the inside, that they never check because they believe it cannot be opened from within.”

Célie’s eyes widened. “How do you know that?”

“Because I am a laundress.” Marie smiled grimly. “We see everything, and no one sees us. The lock is old, mademoiselle. Older than the revolution. It is the kind of lock my husband used to make, before he died of the fever. I know its workings by heart.”

She held out the key. Célie reached for it, and their fingers brushed—Marie’s rough and calloused, Célie’s chapped from the prison’s cold water.

“We will go tomorrow night,” Marie said. “I have arranged a distraction among the other laundresses—a quarrel over a stolen shift that will draw the guards away from the gate corridor. You will wear my spare clothes, and we will walk out together as two washerwomen returning to their lodgings. If anyone questions us, I will do the talking. You will keep your head down and your mouth shut.”

Célie closed her fingers around the key. It was cold and heavy, and it felt like hope.

“And then?” she asked.

“And then we find your sister,” Marie said. “And pray that the revolution has not stolen her heart from her.”

Célie looked down at the key in her palm. A sister. A twin seal around an unknown woman’s neck. A family she had never known she had, reaching across the divide of death and politics and seventeen years of silence.

“She will help,” Célie said, more to herself than to Marie. “She has to. We are bound by more than blood.”

Marie said nothing. But the look in her eyes was not quite certainty, and that was enough to make Célie’s stomach clench with doubt.