Just as there are moments of convergence, there are also moments of coming apart. Departure.
Four hours after arriving at Charlie’s hotel, hours of thrashing, uneasy dreams, and waking regrets, we were back in a cab, rushing to the Gare du Nord. I stood on the platform with Charlie, waiting for his train, indifferent to the looks of the other waiting passengers. I was still in my evening gown, that marvelous Schiaparelli creation not quite intended for a train station, now stained with smoke and gin and Schiap’s smeared makeup.
The image of Schiap in flames—well, her costume at least—was haunting me. It seemed a culmination of what had been, and a prophecy of what was to come. It had shaken me fully awake from the emotional semisleep I had been in for two years. Allen hadn’t been the first thing I had thought of when I woke up that morning. It had been Schiap, and Coco.
The train station was crowded, and people jostled us. Charlie bit his lip and kept looking over his shoulder to see if Ania might be coming through a doorway, suitcase in hand. She didn’t. Such hope, bound to end in disappointment, is a terrible thing to witness. A coming apart.
“He changed his mind at the last minute. The husband,” Charlie said. “Bastard. Won’t give her a divorce, won’t let her take the child. At the very last minute. He’s been playing us all along. Ania was supposed to leave with me this morning.”
His hands were trembling with anger and disappointment, so he gripped his suitcase harder, to stop the shaking.
“What now, then? What about you? What will you do?” he asked. “Are you going back to the school?”
“I think I will stay on in Paris a bit longer. I’m not ready to go back.” To go back seemed just that, a backward step, when Schiap had already begun pulling me into the future. I wanted to see her again, to see how she was doing. She had left the ball before I had, quietly and without saying good-bye. Slipped away. Well, being set afire will do that to a person.
“Good idea,” Charlie said. “And as long as you’re here, you can keep an eye on Ania. I’m worried about her.”
Charlie’s train pulled into the station, and the platform bustled with people disembarking, calling for porters and trunks, rushing into embraces. I leaned into Charlie, put my head on his shoulder. Good-bye, good-bye again, my lovely brother. Since Allen’s death I had held myself apart, even from Charlie, for fear of exactly what was happening now. I would be alone again.
“Things are going to heat up over here soon,” he said. “It won’t be safe, Lily.”
“If there is a war, America won’t join it.”
He tried a different tactic. “You know, you could come to Boston with me. We could set up housekeeping together.”
“Oh God, Charlie,” I joked. “The brilliant young doctor with his widowed sister keeping house for him?”
“You wouldn’t be expected to iron the linen and write menus,” he grumbled.
“Even so, no thanks. Don’t worry about me, Charlie.”
Charlie looked absolutely destroyed. His blue eyes seemed pale to the point of colorlessness; his white-blond hair lay limply on his head, revealing the shape of his skull.
Charlie would travel to England, and from there to New York. “The same route the Titanic took,” he pointed out.
“That’s not funny.”
The crowd on the platform was thinning again. People were getting on the train.
“Sure it is.” He forced his mouth into a rictus of a smile, made a noise somewhere between a chuckle and a sigh, and it magically turned into a real laugh.
“I’ll miss you.” He put his arms around me and hugged hard. “Be good.”
“As good as you.”
“Then we are in trouble.” The old jokes, only this time they had significance.
Hiss. Steam. A grinding of metal on metal, women around me crying and waving handkerchiefs, children demanding sweets from the one-legged man who sat at the newspaper kiosk, cooing beady-eyed pigeons, a shrill whistle from the conductor, a last-minute wave out the window, a blown kiss. My brother was gone. I stood there till the train was out of sight and the gray puffs of steam and smoke had melted into the hot, sooty morning.
I went back to my hotel, ignoring the puzzled glance of the concierge, and climbed the dusty, creaky steps to my attic room. I changed into a plain skirt and blouse, splashed water on my face, and looked back at my reflection in the cracked mirror that turned my face into separated cubist planes.
Look at you, I thought. Wide-eyed as a frightened rabbit. I felt hollowed out, like a well that has gone dry and is waiting for the answer to fall into it.
And I was hungry. Very hungry. I checked my purse, the dog-eared copy of Goethe’s Theory of Color, where I had tucked what remained of my savings. I was going to have to find work.
Coco put on her warmest, most charming smile, the one that required her to tip her head down ever so slightly, the way children do when they are being both shy and mischievous.
“And the problem with the dress?” she asked. The salon was almost empty, so she kept her voice very low, almost a whisper, so that she wouldn’t be heard by the few people who were there.
“Madame says the color no longer suits her.” The maid spoke loudly, and heads turned in their direction.
Coco felt her face flare into a warning red blush. Madame had sent a maid for this errand. Madame wouldn’t face Coco Chanel.
“It’s not been worn,” the maid lied, as she had been instructed.
Madame had worn the dress last night, at the Durst ball.
The morning after, Coco called this event, when the “angels” of society began returning worn garments, demanding a full return or a new dress in exchange. She knew by name at least three other Madames who would be returning their gowns, now that the Durst ball was over, all with unabashed lies.
How was a hardworking woman supposed to earn a living?
Or perhaps this time would be different. Maybe the angels would decide to keep their gowns as souvenirs of the night Mademoiselle Chanel made a fool of herself. Coco shivered and forced the memory back into the shadows of her imagination: those flames, Schiaparelli’s evident terror, the laughter of the others, too drunken to see what was actually happening. How had she done such a thing?
“If she wants to return it, of course I’ll take it back,” Coco said. “Vera, take the dress away and mark it for the discount rack . . . since, yes, it has been worn. There’s a stain. Egg, I believe, from the hors d’oeuvres. But we will list a credit on Madame’s account.” Her sales assistant took the dress from the maid with a snort of disdain that would certainly be reported back to Madame, but that was just as well. Mademoiselle was gracious. Her assistant, well. Someone had to be the store watchdog, didn’t she?
The maid turned on her heel and left without a thank-you. They always did, leaving Coco to fume over the angels who rarely paid cash, returned worn clothing, and used her sales assistants as confessor priests and analysts, taking up their time and keeping them from other customers.
Oh, she was tired, and not just from lack of sleep. That stupid stunt last night was going to cost her plenty. Just to keep angels from talking, she’d have to put up with all sorts of rudeness and being taken advantage of.
She hadn’t planned it. Of course she hadn’t. Had she? She knew the different levels at which the mind worked, one layer singing a silly cabaret song, another layer feeling the pinch of the cheap high-heeled shoes that made her toes bleed, the top layer scanning the crowd, looking for a good face, a generous and well-bred face, the kind of face that belonged to the kind of man who could show a girl a good time while also helping her out of that cabaret, out of that cheap costume. Layers upon layers, all working at once.
So had she planned it, without even knowing?
Merde. Of course not. An accident. She hadn’t even seen the candelabra. And that was the lie that made even Coco Chanel blush. Who couldn’t see a flaming candelabra just inches away?
I didn’t. I didn’t see it.
The shop was quiet today, and just as well. There would be the inevitable returns and little else, perhaps a little tourist traffic, out-of-towners wanting to buy a touch of glamour, a souvenir of what their own lives lacked, the sophistication and leisure of a Paris society angel. Perfume. They’d come in and buy the smallest bottle of Chanel No. 5 because that was all they could afford and even then their husbands, bank clerks from London, dairy farmers from the Auvergne, would stand and scowl as they paid out the money. For perfume? For a bottle that small? they’d complain.
“I’ll be in my office. No interruptions,” Coco told the sales assistant.
“Certainly, Mademoiselle.”
Merde again. Was her own clerk smirking at her? Was there anyone in Paris who did not know?
Coco shut the door a little more loudly than she had intended. Behind that closed door, she put on her glasses and leaned back into the desk chair, slouching the way she would not allow herself when someone else, anyone else, was around.
The Durst ball hadn’t been a total failure, though. The baron had put Ania in a taxi and sent her home. And he himself had seen Coco back to Paris in his chauffeured automobile. At the door to her Ritz suite he had kissed her hand and smiled in a way that meant, Soon, soon. But not tonight.
God, he was good-looking. And rich. Money itself did not matter, but oh, what one could do with it, and there was never enough to completely bury those early memories, the breakfast bowl of stale bread and milk, sleeping with all your sisters in the same bed, the wooden clogs always bought several sizes too big so that one could grow into them, and meanwhile your feet spread and spread into things that looked like broken spatulas.
Never enough to make her forget those early years, the dark and hungry years.
And meanwhile, there were the society angels, looking to cheat her, often getting away with it, and her own workers demanding, always demanding, a better salary, a shorter day, a better lunch with meat every day.
As in all the couture houses, Coco ate a communal lunch with her staff, served in a room reserved for the meal and for breaks. They’d had roast chicken today, and a soup made with the last of the season’s asparagus, and they’d complained. The dessert biscuits had been stale; there was no fresh fruit.
She’d show them. Maybe tomorrow she’d let them eat a half-empty bowl of stale bread and milk. See how they liked that. She couldn’t, of course. It would be all over Paris before the bowls had even been washed out. The Bolsheviks would march with protest signs in front of her shop.
Let those complainers put in the hours she had worked, the risks she had taken to get ahead! She’d pulled herself out of nowhere, worse than nowhere, and now they envied her the wealth she had earned. The Germans were all that stood between hard workers like herself and the Bolsheviks.
She picked up a sketch pad and studied the drawing she had been working on, an evening gown of white satin with a striped bodice of red, blue, and white. Like a gypsy dress, she thought. With more than a touch of patriotism adorning it. It wasn’t as subtle as she liked. The sleeves needed to be a little narrower, the striped border on the hem less extravagant. She pushed her glasses higher up her nose, picked up a pencil, and started making corrections.
Work was the answer. Work was always the answer.
Three days after the ball, after Charlie had left, I woke up with both my arms tucked under my head. I hadn’t reached for Allen in my sleep. That made me cry, because it seemed another kind of forgetting, so after I dressed and had a café crème at the corner I went to the Louvre. Mona Lisa was there, waiting for me, it seemed, and I sat for a long while admiring the color and geometry, trying to remember everything Allen had ever said about the painting.
I hadn’t spoken to anyone except café waiters for those three days. Solitude had formed around me like a glass wall, and I missed everyone and everything, even Gerald’s scowls and cutting remarks, the chatter of the little girls in the hall at school, Charlie’s teasing, Ania’s laughter.
When someone stood next to my bench I was so eager for conversation, even with a total stranger, that I had to will myself to keep staring straight ahead, at the painting.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” asked my new neighbor, his German accent clipping his words short.
“Very,” I agreed, and allowed myself a slight turn of the head in his direction. It was von Dincklage’s driver.
“Day off?” I asked, hiding my surprise.
“Just so. The baron has gone out of town. I like to come here, to the museum, when I can.”
“This is my favorite painting. Mine, and my husband’s.”
“I admit to a preference for Botticelli. I am Otto Werner.” He tucked his head in a little bow.
“Lily. Lily Sutter.”
“May I?” he asked.
“You may.” He sat next to me.
He seemed shy, and I had lost the habit of small talk, so we were silent after that. We sat side by side, staring straight ahead, till I had absorbed as much of the color of the painting as I could that day. When I rose to leave, he did, too.
When we were standing, face-to-face, he did something so unexpected it took me off balance, the way a strong wind will do. He picked up my hand and kissed it.
“Why did you do that?” I asked, pulling my hand back.
“You looked so alone. I am sorry about your husband.” He answered the question before I could ask it. “Madame Bouchard has told me this.”
So he and Ania had talked about me? Why? “You are displeased. Please, I am sorry,” he said, looking now at the museum floor. “It was not gossip, I just . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence. “Your friend. Madame Schiaparelli. Is she well? Not harmed?”
“I believe so, though no one would have enjoyed that little prank. What did the baron think of it?”
“What he always thinks when women act crazy. That it was weak-minded, a sign of the less-strong sex, and not important.” Otto blushed a fierce pink. “I am sorry,” he said. “I should not speak of the baron in that manner. It is disloyal and base. He is most respectful to Mademoiselle Chanel. She is strong and hardworking, and she has good politics. And she is very lovely.”
“Is loyalty important?”
“It is everything. Please, tell your friend I asked after her.” A slight bow, a frown to disguise what might have been a smile, and he was gone.
It was hot that day, the first real heat of the summer announcing its arrival like a furnace blast. The sun glittered so brightly that the beams seemed sharp-edged, metallic. People moved in slow motion, sweat dripping into their eyes.
At Place Vendôme, outside Schiap’s boutique, I looked up at the statue of Napoleon atop his column, admiring his swagger, captured for eternity in stone. He was supposed to have been indefatigable; that was why exile to an island had been especially punishing. Better than a cell, certainly, but he circled that island, round and round, trying to spend all that unused energy, searching for the way off he knew he would never find.
That was what grief had felt like to me, a constant circling round and round, all the paths of life twisting into a circle of blame and loss I couldn’t break free of. Why had I been so angry when that young man, Otto, offered sympathy for the death of my husband? Because my grief had changed into something different, into a private wound rather than a public one, something I confronted by myself in those dark hours before dawn. It was mine alone, not to be shared with strangers.
Schiap was upstairs in her office, shouting into the telephone about a bolt of fabric than hadn’t arrived. She looked fine, no remnant pink on her ears or fingertips, nothing to suggest she had been set alight just a few days ago.
“Oh, how I hate having to talk on the telephone!” she complained after she hung up. “He should have come here in person instead of making me shout into an instrument. How are you, Lily? And your brother? He was very kind to me. He will make a fine doctor, I think.”
“He’s gone back to Boston.”
“And you?”
“In a bit of a jam.”
“Like most of the world, I think.”
Maybe this isn’t the right time, I thought. Elsa Schiaparelli wasn’t in a particularly good mood.
“I was just at the Louvre,” I said, thinking some chatter might smooth the tense atmosphere of that crowded, cluttered treasure cave of an office, with its shimmering bolts of fabric leaning against the red-papered walls, the samples of embroidery lying here and there like jewels. “Von Dincklage’s driver was there,” I said. “He asked about you.”
Partially, I was making small talk, to delay the moment of having to ask a favor. But it also seemed significant, that the driver of Coco Chanel’s new lover would ask about her.
She stood and stared out the window, turning her back to me. “Did he? And you and he . . . are you friends?” Her voice had changed from shrill anger to a low, friendly purr. “This jam you are in? Is it marmalade or strawberry?”
“Nothing so tasty. I’m broke, and I need work.”
She sat back down, folded her hands on her desk, and smiled. She wore a black suit that day with a demure white blouse peeking out at the neck, and the costume made her red lipstick seem even redder. The desk ashtray was full of half-smoked cigarettes, their tips tinged with that red.
“And what can you do?” She looked me up and down, assessing, always assessing. It became one of the things I loved about Paris, how everyone looked long and hard at everything, and not just the artists. All of us, assessing, noticing, remarking. Memorizing. As if we anticipated that much we saw, much we enjoyed and admired, would soon disappear.
“Paint,” I said. “Maybe help with the window displays?”
“Perhaps. Bettina does most of it, and of course you must answer to her, but I think she will be glad for an assistant. She will tell me if your work is good or bad, she is in charge of that, and if she accepts you, then I will give you a little cash and a good discount on your clothes. You need new clothes. Let your friend, Madame Bouchard, help you choose them. Bring her often. I will give you both good discounts. Samples, if they don’t require too much alteration.”
I remembered the glint of satisfaction in Schiap’s eyes at the Durst ball as she had counted the women wearing Schiaparelli, not Chanel.
And so, I entered the world of la couture at the invitation of Elsa Schiaparelli herself. Bettina, whom I met the next day, was not particularly pleased to be presented with an assistant.
“Another arpette?” she asked. Arpettes, in the great maisons de couture, were the lowest of the low, girls whose main job was simply to pick up pins from the floor, sweep up scraps.
“She says she is an artist. She can help dress the windows and the fitting rooms,” Schiap said. “If you like her work.” She had been staring fixedly out the window at Napoleon’s column in the middle of the square. Sometime in the evening before, sandbags had been piled around its base. Newspaper headlines that day had glared in large bold type that Mussolini had signed a military covenant with Berlin.
“Schiap,” Bettina said, her voice turning down in a note of complaint. She eyed me the way my aunt once eyed a stray puppy I’d brought home, without sympathy for child or puppy.
Schiap smiled at Bettina. When Schiap smiled, she won every argument. “It will mean less work for you,” she pointed out. “And you will have someone you can boss and yell at. Wouldn’t you like that?”
Bettina lit a cigarette and studied me through the blue smoke.
A tall, slender New Yorker with a cool gaze, Bettina had the face of a Renaissance Madonna but a fierce temper always emphasized by the speed with which she walked and the angry clicking of her heels. Bettina, the vendeuses joked, walked as if the devil were after her. And then a second vendeuse would pipe up: No, she’s after him! Look! He runs for his life in the other direction! This exchange never occurred when Bettina was actually in the boutique or anywhere in hearing range, and she had excellent hearing. It matched the sharpness of her temper.
“What can you do?” Bettina asked me that first day of my employment with Elsa Schiaparelli. “Certainly, you don’t know how to dress.” This was said matter-of-factly, without animosity. The vendeuses, some folding sweaters, others dusting shelves, all tilted in our direction, eavesdropping.
“I can paint the backdrops and scenery for your displays.”
Bettina took a long drag on her cigarette and studied me some more. I met her gaze without flinching, even lowered my chin in a bull-about-to-charge pose to add some ferocity to my face.
This amused her. “Okay.” She laughed. “Paint me a sunrise. A very big sunrise, big enough to fill the window.”
“Seen from which vantage?” I asked.
Bettina dragged again on her cigarette. “It only rises in the east, I thought.”
“But the sunrise is to be seen from which part of Paris?”
“Take your pick. No one will know the difference. It’s only a sky.”
Only a sky? I thought of the illustration for April in de Berry’s Book of Hours, how the sky changes from pearly pale blue to the deepest marine and the blue garments of the lovers in the foreground echo the drama overhead. “The embroidery of the sun,” Allen had quoted the poet d’Orleans to me once; I’d had to look it up.
That was what a sunrise was about. The embroidery of the sun adding coral and gold to a gray skyline. And because beauty requires opposition, the fire of the sunrise would be offset by a cool undertone of blue and green lingering in the west.
That afternoon, I went to Sennelier’s on Quai Voltaire, across from the Louvre, the store where Cézanne and most other artists after him had obtained their art supplies. I stood transfixed in front of the trays of pastels and tubes and brushes, and something moved in me that had been slumbering for two years. Color. So much color. I bought paper and a box of pastel crayons and an extra handful of indigo, cerulean blue, and carmine crayons.
But how, in my tiny hotel room, was I going to paint a sunrise big enough to fill the shop window?
The next morning, at first light, I began painting the sunrise on small pieces of paper that would have to be collaged together. If I was allowed to hang it as I wished, the lines wouldn’t register; the one large sunrise would be a series of smaller ones. A month of sunrises, all seen at once, some stormy, some serene, some all pastel, some gray.
“It works,” Bettina agreed two days later, after I had pieced it together with straight pins instead of tacks. I had made a sunrise that looked somewhat like a dress in progress, pinned together, not yet stitched.
Schiap came in later that morning and stood on the street a long time, staring pensively at the boutique window.
“It is very strange,” she said. “I think it works. Come with me, Lily. We will now select the gown that will be in the window with your many sunrises.”
I thought Bettina would be angry that I had been given this honor, but when I looked over my shoulder she was smiling, a little catlike smile as if she had let the mouse get away so she could play with it again later. Men who persist in the belief that women are soft, sentimental creatures have never worked in the fashion industry.
“When I was a child,” Schiap told me that afternoon as we searched through a rack of gowns for one in particular she wanted to show me, “I used to climb up alone to the attic high atop our villa in Rome—so many stairs!—and play with the clothes in the trunks put away up there. I dressed up in them, Spanish lace mantillas and Chinese brocades, bustles and corsets, boots with two dozen buttons on each. There was one dress that looked like something a medieval princess would wear, like something worn by ladies in the Duc de Berry’s Book of Hours.”
“I was thinking of de Berry’s Book of Hours when I painted the sunrise,” I said, surprised.
“Then you have painted well, because I saw it there, in your collage. My father had a seventeenth-century copy of it in his library, in Rome. He was a scholar, you know. Oh, the books we had. Like this,” she said, pulling a purple gown from a rack that held models of her most recent collection. “This is for a medieval princess.” The gown’s waist dipped low in front and was decorated with a garland of orange and gold musical instruments, trumpets and horns and piano keyboards.
“And these.” Short gloves in the same purple silk crepe, with a cello embroidered on one hand and a tambourine on the other, in gold and silver thread.
“Lesage embroidery,” Schiap said. “The best. Always the best. What do you think?”
“Magnificent. Like walking music,” I said.
“Good. Yes, walking music. A miracle. You know, once I jumped into a vat of quicksilver, when I was very little. I thought it was water and I wanted to walk on the water, like Jesus did. That was how strong my faith was.”
“Your faith in God?” I asked.
She laughed. “No. My faith in myself. I thought I would walk over cool water, the tops of my feet not even getting wet, only the bottom. But quicksilver burns like fire. Instead of walking on water I sank in silver flame. I would have died if a servant hadn’t been following me and saw what had happened and saved me. My mother always had a servant following me. But I’ve been afraid of fire, since then.”
Her black eyes narrowed, and I knew we were both thinking of the Durst ball.
Bettina carefully arranged the dress on the shop dummy, Pascaline, a tall wooden female form with short, classically carved curls and a sphinxlike gaze. I was to be trusted with paper and pencils and ink, but not the clothes themselves. Bettina turned Pascaline sideways, so that she was looking into the distance with those always-calm wood-and-glass eyes. Next to her, on the floor, Bettina placed a child’s drum and pipe and splashed confetti and pastel streamers in drifts of even more color. It looked like the end of a party, and there was a quality of sadness mixed with the gaiety.
“It will do,” Bettina said, and that was the highest praise she ever gave.
Later that day, when I returned to the boutique to again admire my work, a handful of women had gathered in front of the display. I mixed in with them and got my comedown when I heard that the talk and oohing was all about the dress and gloves, not about my sunrise. But that is how it should be, I reprimanded myself. You painted the background. That is all. That was why Schiap’s boutique modeled the clothes on simple straw figures; fashion is about the clothes.
Schiap and Bettina were skulking in a fitting room doorway, staring out at the women in the store, when I went into the boutique.
“Yes. She’s here,” Bettina muttered darkly.
“I see her,” Schiap agreed.
“Who?” I whispered, joining them.
“Mademoiselle Yvette. She works for Chanel,” Schiap said.
“She always comes to inspect the new displays,” Bettina added. “And then she goes back and tells Chanel.”
Bettina hissed a few words in French whose meaning I could only guess, but they definitely were not schoolroom vocabulary. “Chanel hates it when others copy her.” Bettina pulled a silver cigarette case from her pocket. “And here she is, sending a spy to see what we are up to.”
Mademoiselle Coco, I would learn, like the other couturiers, liked to keep a close eye on the competition.
Chanel’s spy, Mademoiselle Yvette, gave the salon floor one last turn before going to a shelf of sweaters, white with blue bows knitted into them. These, she probably had seen before since they were not the most recent items, yet she felt she must carry on her charade of being a woman in for a little casual shopping.
A minute later she waved cheekily in our direction and left. Bettina lit her cigarette. The vendeuses, who had been standing straight and silent during this performance, clicked their tongues in annoyance and went back to their tasks.
“Do you think she was the one in your office last week?” Bettina asked Schiap. “Did she sneak upstairs?” Papers had been gone through, drawers left open, Bettina explained. Such a to-do, but nothing stolen. Even so . . . She and Schiap exchanged covert glances.
“No,” Schiap said. “She would have tried to cover her tracks. Whoever was in the office wanted me to know they had been there. Ah, my dear,” she said, taking my arm. “You look a little frightened. Didn’t you know I’m a wanted woman?”
“Don’t joke,” Bettina said. “This is not a safe time for jokes like that. Yesterday they arrested one of Gaston’s comrades. The police are on the lookout for communists; all they need is a little information.”
“They are ridiculous, these people,” Schiap insisted.
“Who? Who is ridiculous?” I asked.
“Let me count.” Schiap sat on one of her shocking pink chairs and held up her hand. “One. The Americans. I was a communist in my youth, you know, when I lived in New York with . . .” She paused. Schiap never mentioned her ex-husband’s name. “The Americans never forget that. Two. The French communists, because they think I am not communist enough.” Bettina grimaced. Her husband was one of the leading communists in Paris. “The Italians, because I live in France, and the French because I was born in Italy. Five. Coco Chanel and her people, because Time magazine said I was more important than she was.”
“Don’t forget von Dincklage,” Bettina muttered.
“What about von Dincklage?” I asked.
“He came into the salon once with one of his women and Schiap snubbed him.”
“He’s a Nazi. Why should I pretend to be his friend?” Schiap waved her manicured hands as if bothered by a plague of flies.
“Sometimes one must be diplomatic,” Bettina said.
“Sometimes one must stick to one’s beliefs,” Schiap countered. “Don’t you have something you should be doing? Go check the sewing room, make sure those girls are sewing and not just chatting. You, come with me.” Schiap beckoned with her forefinger. There was a determined look on her face, a slight vertical line appearing between her dark brows. “We are going to have a talk. You work for me now.”