Corrine sat beside her and patted her shoulder. "Let's have some tea, then," she said. "And you can tell us all about it."

Talk about her disastrous trip? What could it hurt? Maddy couldn't feel worse. "Very well.Faisons du thé . Lots of tea."

While the water boiled and her friends began unpacking all the dazzling gowns she'd soon have to sell, Maddy drew back her scarlet baize curtains to open the casement windows to her balcony.

She was secretly proud of her home, pleased with what she'd been able to do to it with such limited resources. To conceal the crumbling plaster, she'd pasted a collage of bright playbills and opera posters on the wall. The entire room was awash with sumptuous fabrics, thanks to a friend atle théâtre who alerted Maddy whenever a company discarded props and materials. Maddy always got there before the ragpickers.

On her diminuitive balcony, ivy flourished in tin cans and petunias still bloomed. Chat Noir, a fickle rooftop cat owned by no one, was patronizing her balcony to laze in the sun, and a late summer breeze blew, fluttering her wooden wind chimes. Maddy wasn'tau sixième solely because she was poor. The sour smell permeating the street didn't reach this high, and from her vantage, she could see all the way up to Montmartre over a sea of roofs and a forest of clay chimneys.

When she turned back to the room, the sun caught Bea's face. "Maurice or a client?" Maddy asked, pointing at Bea's puffy eye.

Bea sighed. "Maurice. He gets so angry." Her tone forlorn, she said, "If only I didn't anger him so much."

Corrine and Maddy made disgusted noises, and Maddy bent down to toss pumps at her. There was no convincing Bea that she deserved more, no matter how hard they tried. Though she was lovely and kind, Bea wouldn't believe that anything better than Maurice awaited her.

La Marais had a way of doing that to its inhabitants. Their unofficial motto wasde mal en pire— "from bad to worse." Their reasoning was that one's situation, no matter how unbearable, could always deteriorate. Especially if one dared aspire to more.

"Best to accept one's lot," they said. To which Maddy inwardly answered, "Fortune favors the bold."

But it hadn't this time for Maddy….

When the tea was ready, they adjourned to her balcony, sitting on milk crates and drinking from mismatched cups. Chat Noir deigned to allow Maddy to pick him up and settle him in her lap. She couldn't help but grin at how hot his fur was as she petted him.

"I thought he was cross with you," Bea said, with a nod at the big tomcat.

"He was. Forsook me for weeks." All she'd done was explain to him that he didn't wanther for his keeper. He could do better—perhaps even find someone who could afford to feed him more than apple cores.

She stretched her legs out to her iron railing, musing over how much she'd missed this—the easy camaraderie the three of them shared.

Maddy did enjoy being around Claudia and the Weyland women, but she had so little in common with them now. Bea, Corrine, and Maddy were of a kind—each with her secret sorrows and tragic past.

Like Maddy, Bea had come to La Marais young. Her mother had been married to a poor soldier, and she'd followed his regiment around the world with Bea in tow. To this day, Bea always woke at dawn, and the sound of drums still depressed her spirits. Her own and her mother's food and safety had depended on keeping that soldier alive. They'd managed to until Bea was twelve; then they'd lost everything.

At sixteen, Corrine, an educated English parson's daughter, had married a fancy French tailor traveling through her hometown. "I'm a tailor. I own a shop," he'd said, which—more literally translated—had actually meant, "I live four floors above a shop, I stitch sailcloth for a living, and I spend every centime I earn on gin."

Corrine had had two more husbands since then, each raising the bar for indifference and laziness. She might have tolerated the former but couldn't stand the latter—her work ethic was remarkable. Though she only received rent forau sixième and a small pension, she considered the building her personal charge and slaved herself to the bone to fight the decay. Yet she waged a losing battle. Her broom, washrag, and near ceaseless labor were no match against time and neglect.

"Are you awake enough yet, Maddée?" Bea asked. "Won't you tell us what happened with your Englishman?"

Maddy was only halfway through her cup, so she opted for a brief summary. "I went to London, I flirted and cajoled, but he simply didn't want to marry—much less marry me. As I suspected," she added a bit pointedly, since they'd browbeaten her to go. Maddy had known better—but not because of the law ofde mal en pire , she hastily assured herself. No, simple reasoning said that if Quin was rich and cultured, and she was uneducated and lived in a gutter, then there was no future between them. "He told me just two nights ago that he wasn't the marrying kind."

"I hate it when they say that," Bea murmured, and Corrine raised her cup in agreement.

Though Maddy had thought the memory of the Scot would be too fresh, too raw, she found herself saying, "But there was another man…."

"And?" Corrine prompted.

"He was a tall, strapping Highlander whom I met at a masquerade ball. We had this…thisje ne sais quoi , a connection—a strong one, I believed." Since that night, she'd thought about him at every hour, no matter how hard she tried to put that man from her mind. "And I don't even know his name."

"Le coup de foudre," Bea said, nodding enthusiastically.

"Love at first sight?" Maddy gave a humorless laugh. "I thought so. I'dknown so after strong punch and his sinful kisses."

Bea's eyes lit up. "Oh, Maddée, you finally took a lover,non ?"

Maddy sighed, then explained everything that had happened, before finishing, "…and after that, he tossed money at me like I was a pesky problem to be resolved and abandoned me in the cab."

"It won't be painful like that again," Bea assured her. "The first time is always the worst, and if he wastrès viril…"

Maddy knew that had to be true, but she still feared what her next experience might be like—though she could say with certainty it wouldn't be with anyonetrès viril. "On my trip back here, I decided if I'm never with another man again, it will be too soon." Affecting indifference, Maddy briefly raised her face to the sun, courting freckles on her nose, but she didn't care. "He turned out to be an ass, anyway. I wouldn't want him if he begged me to marry him."

"What about your instincts?" Corrine asked. "Surely you were warned away if he was so terrible?"

"My instincts told me he was…good." She didn't miss that Bea and Corrine shared a look. Corrine never rented a room to a male unless Maddy gave approval.

"Why didn't you tell your London friends of your plight?" Corrine asked.

"I thought about it. I imagined revealing all over tea and scones. I would begin with the setup: 'Well, the thing of it is…after Papa died, my mother and I didn't move to Paris because she'd missed her birthplace—we fled creditors in the middle of the night. After a year in a slum, she did marry a rich man, named Guillaume, and for a while we lived in the wealthy part of Paris—what you believe is my current address and my present situation. But it's not now! I pay the maid there to save my mail for me and tell visitors I'm away.'

"Then would come the denouement: 'Sylvie died years ago, and my miserlyoncle Guillaume tossed me out on my ear. Actually, I live in a slum teeming with danger and filth. I'm really an orphan, and not in the exciting sense of an heiress orphan but in the penniless pitiful sense. Because I couldn'tsteal enough to pay for the dresses and paste jewels necessary for my plot to ensnare Quin, I borrowed money from a lender who will happily break my arms over a late payment.'"