Read Chapter 15: The Understudy

The morning light through the atelier windows carried a grey that Elise had learned to read as rain before noon. She was at the worktable, pins between her lips, coaxing the deputy's wife's jacket into submission when Isabelle appeared in the doorway.

Not the doorway to the salon. The workroom door. The one reserved for hands that touched fabric daily.

Elise removed the pins. “The salon doesn’t open for another hour.”

“I know.” Isabelle stepped inside. She wore a charcoal wool dress—simple, but the cut was wrong. Too much ease in the bodice, pulling at the shoulders. She gripped a folded piece of fabric against her chest. “I’m not here for the salon.”

Elise set the jacket down slowly. “Then why are you here?”

“I want to work.” Isabelle’s chin lifted. “Not as an owner. Not as Vernet’s niece. As your apprentice. I know how to sew.”

“Everyone knows how to sew. It’s the knowing *what* to sew that matters.”

Isabelle crossed the room and laid her bundle on the worktable. It was a simple day dress, unfinished, basted at the seams. Pale blue cotton. She smoothed it flat with a gesture that was almost reverent.

“This is mine,” Isabelle said. “I made it last night.”

Elise ran her fingers along the basting. The stitches were even, confident. But that wasn’t what caught her eye. It was the side seam. Isabelle had taken it in at the waist by a full inch, then released it gradually through the hip so the line fell without pulling.

“Who taught you to shape a seam like that?”

“No one.” Isabelle’s voice was quiet. “I just… looked at the fabric and knew where it wanted to be taken.”

Elise straightened. She studied the younger woman’s face, looking for the slyness she’d come to expect from the Vernet name. But Isabelle’s expression was open, almost hungry.

“Your aunt knows you’re here?”

“My aunt doesn’t know anything about me.” Isabelle’s tone carried a bitterness that surprised Elise. “She thinks I’m a decorative object. Something to be trotted out at parties and married off to a banker.”

“And you think I can offer you something different?”

“I think you know what it means to build something with your own hands.” Isabelle met Elise’s gaze. “I’ve watched you. The way you look at fabric. The way you fight for what you’ve made. I want to learn that.”

Elise should have said no. Odette was hidden in the back room. Julien was already wary of the house’s tenuous position with the Vernet family. Taking Colette’s niece under her wing was a risk she couldn’t afford.

But the basting called to her. The knowledge of where a seam should breathe. That wasn’t taught. It was born, or it wasn’t.

“There’s a bolt of sand-colored wool in the storage room,” Elise said. “Third shelf from the top. I need a skirt pattern drafted from it. Size forty. Take it apart and put it back together, and I’ll watch how you do it.”

Isabelle’s face transformed. For a moment she looked like a girl her age should look, bright and eager. “I won’t disappoint you.”

“It’s not about disappointment,” Elise said. “It’s about whether you can take direction without asking why.”

Isabelle nodded and disappeared toward storage.

Half an hour later she returned with the wool over her arm and a draft already sketched on paper. She laid it beside Elise’s work and stood waiting, hands clasped behind her back.

Elise studied the draft. The proportions were sound. The waist suppression was confident. She pointed to the darts. “Why here?”

“Because that’s where the fabric wants to curve,” Isabelle said. “If you put them too far forward, they pull. If you put them too far back, they gape. They go where the body makes the cloth work.”

Elise looked up. There was no calculation in Isabelle’s eyes. Just certainty.

“You’re wrong about one thing,” Elise said. “You didn’t learn that from watching me.”

A pink flush climbed Isabelle’s cheeks. “I told you. No one taught me.”

“Then you were born with it.” Elise pulled the jacket toward her again. “Which is rarer than you know. Take the dress form in the corner and start the muslin. I’ll check your work at the fitting.”

The deputy’s wife was due at eleven. Madame Auclair was a precise woman, and Elise had learned that precision in her clients usually meant precision in their measurements. She arrived exactly on time, stripping off her gloves with the efficiency of someone who scheduled her life in quarter hours.

“I need it for Thursday,” she said. “The minister’s reception. You understand.”

“The jacket will be ready.” Elise helped her into the fitting muslin, adjusting the closures. “I added a slight pad to the shoulder to balance the waist suppression. It will hold the line without making you look severe.”

Madame Auclair examined herself in the mirror, turning to view her profile. “You’ve changed the sleeve angle.”

“Three degrees.” Elise moved to adjust the cap. “From the original sketch, the fall of the fabric suggested a sharper slope would better complement the silhouette.”

“The sketch was Vasseur’s.”

“Vasseur drew the vision,” Elise said carefully. “I’m adapting the execution to the body that will wear it. The design stays true to his intent.”

Madame Auclair’s reflection met Elise’s eyes. “You speak as if you knew what he intended.”

Before Elise could answer, Isabelle spoke from the corner where she was pinning muslin. “He meant it to move. Fabric that doesn’t move is sculpture, not fashion.”

Madame Auclair turned sharply. “And you are?”

“My apprentice,” Elise said quickly. “Isabelle has an eye for drape.”

“Indeed.” Madame Auclair’s gaze swept over Isabelle with the dismissiveness of the wealthy assessing the irrelevant. Then she turned back to the mirror, and the moment passed.

But Isabelle’s cheeks had gone red again—not from embarrassment, Elise realized, but from anger. She busied herself with the muslin, jaw tight.

“The sleeve needs another adjustment at the forearm,” Elise said, hoping to redirect attention. “Could you bring me the shears?”

Isabelle crossed to the worktable, picked up the shears, and hesitated. She glanced at Madame Auclair, who was studying her own reflection with absorbed vanity, and then leaned toward Elise.

“I saw something,” she murmured. “Yesterday, in the courtyard. Julien was burning a letter.”

Elise’s hand stilled on the jacket. “What?”

“A letter.” Isabelle’s voice was barely a breath. “From Lyon. The return address was crossed out, but I saw the postmark. He threw it into the brazier behind the stable.”

Elise’s stomach dropped. Lyon. The same city where Petain claimed Pierre had been seen. The same city where Marcel Vasseur had worked with those special units. And Julien had burned a letter from that address without telling her.

He had sworn he didn’t know her brother was alive. He had sworn he would help her find the truth.

But he was still hiding something.

“Why would he burn a letter?” Isabelle whispered.

“I don’t know.” Elise’s voice came out flat. “But I intend to find out.”

Madame Auclair cleared her throat. “Excuse me, Mademoiselle Moreau. The forearm adjustment?”

Elise composed her face and returned to the fitting. She went through the motions mechanically—pinning, marking, adjusting—while her mind raced.

When the fitting was done and Madame Auclair had departed with reassurances that the finished jacket would be delivered Thursday morning, Elise removed her own work apron and folded it slowly.

Isabelle watched her. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to Lyon.”

“You can’t just leave. The Madame’s jacket—the archive sale—

“The archive sale is in four days.” Elise pulled her coat from the hook by the door. “What Julien burns in private isn’t something I can ignore. If he knows something about my brother and he’s still keeping it from me, I need to find out what it is before I trust him with anything else.”

“Should I—do you want me to tell him where you went?”

“No.” Elise paused at the door, looking back at Isabelle. “Tell him I’ve gone to see a fabric supplier. I’ll be back by morning. And Isabelle?”

The younger woman looked up.

“Finish the muslin on that dress form. If I don’t trust you with the work, I can’t trust you with the rest.”

Isabelle nodded. “I’ll have it ready.”

Elise slipped out the back door into the grey morning, the letter “L” pressing against her memory like a splinter she couldn’t remove. Somewhere in Lyon was the truth about Pierre, about Vasseur, about the dress that was never made. And if Julien wouldn’t give it to her, she would take it herself.