A Little in Love Read online

  CONTENTS

  HALF TITLE

  TITLE PAGE

  EPIGRAPH

  RUE DE LA CHANVRERIE, 5 JUNE 1832

  BOOK ONE

  MONTFERMEIL

  A MONTH OF RAIN

  A DAUGHTER’S TASK

  A DAY OF SUN

  COSETTE

  A DRAFTY SLEEPING PLACE

  SACKCLOTH AND SILK

  A LITTLE KINDNESS

  BEING CRUEL

  GAVROCHE

  CHRISTMAS EVE, 1823

  THE MAN IN THE YELLOW COAT

  THEIR SHAPE ON THE HORIZON

  BOOK TWO

  COSETTE IS GONE

  A HOUSE OF QUIET

  THE FLOWERS AND THE MENDED DOOR

  THE BONE-HANDLED KNIFE

  BOOK THREE

  THE RUNNING LIFE

  THE UPTURNED BOAT

  BOOK FOUR

  THE ARRIVAL

  THE CITY OF HER DREAMS

  THE PATRON MINETTE

  THE KEY

  THE GORBEAU TENEMENT

  THE CHESTNUT SELLER

  WRITTEN WORDS AND SPOKEN WORDS

  ROOM FOUR

  MARIUS

  THE VISIT

  A WALK AT SUNSET

  THE ROSE AMONG THE ROSES

  HIS LOVE

  THE PLAN

  EPONINE WISHES

  THE LETTER IS DELIVERED

  THE FIRE IS PUT OUT

  BENEATH THE DEAD WHITE TREE

  THE GENDARME

  BOOK FIVE

  MADELONNETTES

  AN END AND A BEGINNING

  LOOKING FOR MARIUS

  AN UNEXPECTED FIND

  THE HOUSE ON THE RUE PLUMET

  THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN

  THE BLOWING FIELD

  ONE LAST WALK

  THE DAYS AND THE NIGHTS

  BEAUTIFUL EPONINE

  BOOK SIX

  AZELMA

  TWO GOOD HEARTS

  THE NOTE

  A GIRL AS A BOY

  THE BARRICADE

  THE QUIET HOURS

  A HOLE IN THE HEART AND HAND

  RUE DE LA CHANVRERIE, JUNE 5, 1832

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  I’m dying. There’s no use hoping I’ll live or telling myself, Keep going, it’s only a small wound. There’s too much blood on the ground.

  I’m going to die in this street.

  I can hardly breathe. My hand, my arm, and my body are so full of pain. I’m whimpering, trembling. And I’m cold too—lying on my back with the cobblestones pressing into me. In the distance are horses’ hooves, and someone is shouting, “Is anyone alive out there?” I want to call, “Yes, over here!” But I can’t. It hurts too much to speak or move.

  I can smell gunpowder. And burning wood. The barricade’s still alight, filling the air with thick black smoke. It protected us for a while, this wall, but not now. The soldiers broke through it, set it on fire with their musket shots. It’s crackling near me, turning to ash, and like all the people who are dying on this street it will be cold by morning.

  I will be cold by morning.

  I blink. I can see stars through the smoke—too many to ever count, millions and millions. What are they thinking as they look down? Perhaps they’re sad because Paris is burning. Because so many good people are dead.

  The stars … They’ve always felt like my friends. They’re like tiny, shining faces I’ve known all my life. When I’ve been scared or can’t sleep, they’ve been there to keep me company. I’ve done so many bad things in my life but the stars always forgave me.

  I whisper to them now: “Can you hear me? I’m so scared. Please don’t let it hurt so much …” But how can they stop me bleeding? No one can.

  Please … My eyes fill with tears.

  What will stop the pain? And how can I stop being afraid? I don’t want to die. Not tonight, and not like this.

  Maybe it’ll help to think of happy times and the beautiful things in my life? I close my eyes very tightly. Yes, that’s better … I can see a bird singing. A peach tree. A full moon over the rooftops of Paris. A rainbow. My brother’s freckled face. Flowers in hedgerows that made the lane smell lovely.

  And him.

  I open my eyes.

  Him. Marius. Yes, I’ll think of Marius because he makes me happy. He always has, from the first time I saw him in the Gorbeau tenement. He’s kind and shy, and he hums without knowing it and once he held my hand on a sunlit street …

  * * *

  Is he near me? Is that him, shouting, “Is anyone alive?” I try to sit up, to call out, but I can’t, for the pain is like a fire, shooting through me.

  Instead I whisper, “Stars? Bring him to me?” He’d make this hurt less, I know. He’d smile very gently. He’d crouch down and say, “Shh, Eponine … I’m here, see?” I don’t think I’d be frightened of dying if he was by my side.

  The nearby church clock is chiming—eleven times. My teeth are chattering. I’m so tired, so cold.

  I close my eyes again. For a moment I see Cosette.

  Then I see rain. It’s rain through a window. There are ditches full of water. I can see a horse too and she’s so wet she’s turned from gray to black.

  Where’s my mother? Downstairs …

  My body lies in a Paris street, surrounded by corpses and my own blood and a burning barricade, but my head and its thoughts are in Montfermeil. How old am I, in Montfermeil? I’m three. And I’m in a blue pinafore, watching the rain.

  What did I know back then? Some things. But I didn’t know, couldn’t even imagine, the life that lay ahead for me or that I’d ever fall in love. Or that I’d put my hand in front of a soldier’s gun to save that boy’s life, and bleed to death for him.

  I was born in the year of 1815. That was a hard year. In the summer they had a battle called Waterloo and all the village’s men fought in it, far away. There weren’t many left in Montfermeil to cut the hay or bale it, to wring the necks of chickens or shoe horses or chop wood.

  “I was walking,” Maman told me. “Then I felt you coming. The grass was waist-high so I just squatted down in it …”

  That was my arrival. While Papa was fighting in a muddy field, my mother was cursing. She pushed me out into thistles and hay.

  “You were a girl—so of course I kept you,” she said.

  She never liked boys.

  * * *

  After the battle, Papa came back. Many men didn’t return but he did. He didn’t have a scratch on him and he clinked with coins that he’d stolen from the pockets of dying men. Once, he told me about it: picking his teeth, he said, “I pretended I was helping them but I wasn’t! Ha! I was taking their pennies and silver crosses … Well, the dead don’t need money, do they?”

  That was my father. Luc Thenardier. Thin with a graying, bristled chin. His eyes were quick like a rat’s—quick and cunning and black. He smoked a pipe. It yellowed the ends of his fingers and left a dent in his lip.

  The Battle of Waterloo made him rich. With dead men’s money he bought himself a new hat and a pocket watch. For Maman he bought a cape edged with fur. I’m not sure what he thought of me, his new baby daughter—but I know what he thought of the empty inn in Montfermeil. It sat at the end of the ruelle du Boulanger. Maman told me how they walked there one summer’s evening, arm in arm, to look at it. It was damp and crooked. Its windows were greenish with moss; birds and spiders nested in its eaves.

  Papa rubbed his chin and said, “Why don’t we buy it, ma chère?”

  She scowled. “Buy it? Why? It’s falling down!”

  “It is. But there aren’t any other inns for miles and miles! People would come! And there’s money to be made from drunken men …�
�

  So they picked the moss from its glass with their fingernails and swept the bigger spiders out into the yard.

  My father called the inn the Sergeant of Waterloo. “Named,” he told his customers, “after myself, and my own brave role in the battle …” Papa told lies all the time and Maman would listen to them, polishing glasses and admiring him—this man who’d plucked buttons from dying soldiers’ coats and then left those men to die in the rain.

  My parents.

  This inn was my home. I was born in a bright hayfield but I grew up in a dark, stone tavern with nettles by its door. Its sign creaked back and forth. Mice scurried behind my bedroom wall at night.

  * * *

  I think I remember my sister being born; it was October when the leaves were crispy brown. But my first proper memory came when I was three. It’s clear and real, like cupped water.

  It begins with water too—weeks and weeks of it.

  “It always rains in March,” said Maman. “Don’t sulk. It’ll stop soon enough.”

  But it didn’t. For weeks, it drummed on the windows and turned the ditches to mud. The old nag’s drinking trough was filled to the brim. “Poor horse,” I whispered to myself because she was so wet she’d changed color. She shivered, ears back.

  All the fields flooded. From my bedroom window, I saw the drooping apple trees and Monsieur Fournier’s cows huddling on higher ground. The farmers couldn’t grow their barley or corn in such wet earth: it ran, like wormy soup, through their hands. They’d shake their heads, very sadly. Then they’d trudge into our inn and stare into their drinks with a sigh.

  Fires hissed with soggy wood. Water dripped off the brims of hats.

  “A dry village? Ha!” Papa sucked on his pipe. “But still, the rain has advantages. They leave their wet coats by the fire to dry so it’s much easier to pick their pockets …” He gave a soft cackle. “Always a penny or two.”

  * * *

  Montfermeil was a small woodland village, seventeen miles east of Paris. It had a few grand houses with balconies but mostly it was made of little huts where the poorer people lived. Like Madame Cou, who talked to herself, and Blind Roland with his milky eyes. At the cottage with two chimneys lived Monsieur and Madame Lefevre, who were always side by side, just like their chimneys. They held hands and sang to each other.

  “Disgusting,” Papa called them. “Lovesick idiots …”

  There was also a butcher’s shop and a blacksmith’s shed and a church with a graveyard where the Widow Amandine knelt every day. At the edge of the village was Old Auguste’s house and he had a tree with sweet, juicy peaches. The bees loved that fruit as much as I did. In the summer, his tree hummed.

  Montfermeil sat on the top of a hill. A road ran through it—the road between Livry and Chelles. But no river or stream could reach all the way up to us so we didn’t have any choice except to walk with our buckets to get water. Deep in the tangled woods, there was a spring. Mostly, we paid old Père Six-Fours to fetch the water for us but he was crooked and spilled more than he carried. He stumbled over tree roots and wouldn’t work at night.

  Maman didn’t like him. “He’s useless,” she said. “You’ll be fetching the water yourself, when you’re older, Eponine. Understand?”

  I nodded but felt frightened. They said the woods were haunted, and there were stories of witches too.

  So these weeks and weeks of rain were unexpected. When had there ever been a puddle on each gravestone? A drip-drip-drip from each leaf?

  Perhaps there’ll be fish in the potholes and we can eat them, I thought. Maybe we should build a boat? I knew that Bible tale.

  I was sitting by my bedroom window. There was a seat there—a small, padded shelf—and I sat with my knees pressed to my chest, resting my chin on them. My pinafore was corduroy, blackish-blue.

  From here, I watched the rain. I watched the people hurrying through it—Claude the blacksmith, splashing, and Marie-Belle with her hunched back. The road-mender called Boulatruelle stalked by in a long black coat and I shuddered when I saw him because they said he’d been in prison for killing a man. Walk past, I thought, don’t come in here, because I never liked it when he drank in our inn. He’d whisper with Papa, in corners. Once I heard him say, “There are candlesticks in the church at Gagny …”

  “Silver?” Papa replied.

  “Silver. The door’s locked but it isn’t strong … We could break it.”

  I knew many things. Where the blackberries grew in the autumn, and where raspberries grew in July. How my mother’s face glowed when she found any shiny thing—a ring or gold or glass beads. She’d cry, “Look how they sparkle! Oh! Oh! Look!” I knew too that after Waterloo a man called Napoleon had been sent away—and that some people missed him, and wanted him back. Not everyone liked the French king. I heard Père Six-Fours mutter, “Was the revolution for nothing? All those people died—and what for? We’re all still so poor.”

  Eponine. I was named after a girl in my mother’s favorite book. Maman was broad and sly and her voice boomed like a cannon—but she liked romance novels with names like The Beautiful Maid of Nanterre or The Queen’s Lover or Secrets in Montmartre. She’d tuck herself up and sigh as she read them. Her stories of beauty and love.

  But as I sat on the window seat that evening I didn’t know—how could I?—who was walking toward Montfermeil at that very moment, who was trudging through the rainy fields and lanes.

  “Eponine! Eponine, where are you?”

  Maman’s voice. Loud and demanding. It grew louder as she climbed the stairs toward me. Then she threw open the door.

  “So! There you are …”

  She filled the doorway. She was tall as a man—much taller than Papa—with fleshy arms and legs. She stood with her hands on her hips and looked about her. In the stairwell behind her, a candle was glowing; it lit up the sides of her coppery hair.

  There was the single, impatient tap of her foot.

  “What’s this? Sitting? Watching the rain as if there is nothing else to do?” She clicked her tongue. “You’ve got work tonight, my darling.” She walked over and took my hand.

  I stumbled off the window seat. With my hand in hers, I was pulled from the room. We went down the creaking stairs, past the dusty corners and the black speckles that the mice had left behind. Past the cracked window—I felt its chilly draft.

  “Keep up!”

  Downstairs, the inn had only two rooms. One was the kitchen. It brimmed with frothing pots and pans; the sink was half-full of brown water and vegetable peelings and lumps of fat. Meat—hams, rabbits, pheasants—hung from hooks above my head. I didn’t like this room. I never had. I hated its greasy walls and sticky floors, and I hated the cook who helped my mother sometimes—a sour-faced man who tugged the necks of hens and smiled when he heard the bones crack. I hurried through it. Above me, the rabbits swayed with their dead, glassy eyes.

  We came to the heavy oak door.

  Maman crouched. “Now, listen. The inn,” she said, “is full tonight. Full! We have the rain to thank for that: The road to Chelles is flooded so carts can’t get through it and even those traveling on foot would soak themselves to the knee! So here they all are, our traveling folk, unable to reach Paris and wanting a hot meal and bed …” She took my chin between her thumb and forefinger. “You know what this means, don’t you?”

  “Yes. There are lots of people.”

  “Which means … ?”

  “More pockets to steal from.”

  “Yes! And what will you look for?”

  “Coins, Maman.”

  “Of course, coins! And jewelry! Pocket watches, eyeglasses! Any fine leather! And I’m fond of embroidery, aren’t I?” She spat on her finger, rubbed my cheek with it. “Be sweet. Be heartless. And what should you do, if they see you?”

  “Smile very prettily.”

  “Or?”

  “Cry as if they’ve hurt me.”

  “Exactly! Très bon …” She narrowed her eyes, leaned clo
ser. “Now—go and find riches! Make me happy, Eponine!”

  I walked into a room of roaring noise. There was shouting, singing, laughing; men spilling their ale and tearing meat from a bone; the chink of glass against glass, of metal against metal. A bowl was dropped and it broke and a cheer followed and a dog started barking and someone was coughing so loudly in the corner I thought he might be choking but then he paused, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and drank some more. The hearth blazed and the pipe smoke pricked my eyes.

  I tried to breathe through my mouth. I did this so I wouldn’t smell the wet wool or the armpits. I tried to be careful where I walked: my heels went suck-suck-suck on the floor.

  I thought, Pockets. Look for pockets.

  Be heartless. You know what to do. And I did.

  Before I could even talk, my mother taught me. When I was still a baby she showed me how to grasp a lady’s collar and, like this, steal her diamond brooch. She told me to smile so that passersby paused to say, “What a pretty baby!” And as they did this, Maman hid their purse inside her skirts.

  So yes, I knew what to do.

  My first one was easy enough. I chose the miller from Chelles. He was already wobbling on his feet. He wore his apron; there was the chalky hue of flour on his beard. “I tell you,” he said, “the Breton grain is bad grain … Seeds in it! Vetch, hempseed … How can I make good flour when there are”—he burped—“seeds in it?” He didn’t have any shiny buttons but as he turned, I pushed my fingers inside his apron pocket. I felt the cool shape of a one-sou coin.

  Next, I chose an old soldier. He was dozing by the fire with drool on his chin. He wore fine silver buckles on his shoes and I bent down and plucked the buckles off, very quickly—one-two!

  From a portly man in a waistcoat I took a pocket watch.

  From the cowherd I lifted three sous.

  There was a gentleman standing at the bar who wore a ruby ring. I saw its prettiness and I thought, Maman would be very happy with that; she’d smile and stroke my hair … How could I take it? In the end, I tiptoed up to him and shook his right hand. “Monsieur? Excuse me? Have you seen my doll?”

  He looked down, blinked at what he saw—a tiny child with big, sad eyes. “Your doll? I’ve seen no doll. Little girl, this room is surely no place for you? And not at this late hour?”