Estella Bissette unrolled a bolt of gold silk, watching it kick up its heels and cancan across the worktable. She ran her hand over it, feeling both softness and sensuality, like rose petals and naked skin. "What's your story morning glory," she murmured in English.
She heard her mother laugh. "Estella, you sound more American than the Americans do."
Estella smiled. Her English-language tutor had said the same thing to her when he ended her lessons the year before and joined the exodus out of Europe; that she had a better American accent than he did. She tucked the roll under one arm and draped the silk across her shoulder. Then she swung into a tango, heedless of the women’s cries of, “Attention!,” cries which only goaded her to add a song to her dance: Josephine Baker’s fast and frothy “I Love Dancing” bubbling from her mouth between gasps of laughter.
She dipped backward, before soaring upright too fast. The roll of silk skimmed over the midinette’s worktable, just missing Nannette’s head but slapping Marie on the shoulder.
“Estella! Mon Dieu,” Marie scolded, holding her shoulder with overplayed anguish.
Estella kissed Marie’s cheek. “But it deserves a tango at the very least.” She gestured to the fabric, glowing like a summer moon amid the quotidian surroundings of the atelier, surely destined for a dress that wouldn’t just turn heads; it would spin them faster than Cole Porter’s fingers on the piano at the infamous Bricktop’s jazz club in Montmartre.
“It deserves for you to sit down with it and start work,” Marie grumbled.
Monsieur Aumont appeared in the doorway, drawn by the noise. He took one look at Estella draped in silk, smiled and said, “What is ma petite étoile up to now?”
“Injuring me,” Marie complained.
“It’s lucky you have enough flesh to withstand Estella’s antics,” Monsieur Aumont said teasingly and Marie muttered something under her breath.
“What are we making with it?” Estella asked, lovingly stroking the folds of gold.
“This,” Monsieur Aumont replied, handing over a sketch with a flourish.
It was a Lanvin, a reworking of the 1920s La Cavallini dress, but instead of an oversized bow adorned with thousands of pearls and crystals, the bow was decorated with hundreds of petite gold silk rosebuds.
“Oh!” she breathed, reaching out to touch the sketch. She knew the delicate rows of flowers would look like a brilliant swirl of gold from afar and that their true composition—an undulating ribbon of roses—would only become apparent if one was close enough to the wearer to see it properly. There wasn’t a military epaulet in sight, nor a gas mask case slung across the shoulder, nor was the dress colored one of the many variations of blue—Maginot blue, Royal Air Force blue, tempered steel blue—which Estella had grown to loathe. “If one day my sketches look like this,” she said, admiring Lanvin’s exquisite illustration, “I’ll be so happy I’ll never need a lover.”
“Estella!” Marie reprimanded, as if no twenty-two-year-old should even know the meaning of the word, let alone speak it aloud.
Estella looked across at Jeanne, her mother, and grinned.