Chapter Text
October, 1906
The graphite snaps. Gustave stares at the broken point, then at the sprawling blueprint pinned to his drafting table. The design for the new municipal bathhouse is sound, the load-bearing calculations precise, and the plumbing annotations clear. It’s good work. It’s what he does. But his hand, the one of flesh and bone, just betrayed him with a sudden, useless clench. He flexes his fingers, then tosses the pencil onto a pile of shavings.
From across the large office of Gustave & Associés, the scratch of another pencil stops. “A problem, Gustave?” Matthieu asks from the adjacent table. He’s a man in his forties with spectacles perched on the end of his nose, and he doesn’t bother looking up from his own drawing of a gearbox.
“The pencil had a structural failure,” Gustave replies flatly.
“You alright, boss?” Jean, his much younger junior, asks from his own corner. “You’ve been staring at that schematic for an hour.”
“Fine." He opens the top drawer of his desk, searching for a fresh pencil, and his fingers brush against a small, velvet box. He freezes, thinking of the significance of it, the specific sheen of the silver filigree on the ring inside, the way the small diamond was meant to catch the light. Sophie’s light.
He shoves the drawer closed with enough force to rattle a jar of iron gall ink. Matthieu finally raises his eyes over the rim of his glasses. “The pencils are conspiring against you today, it seems.”
Gustave forces his shoulders to relax. He pulls a new pencil from a different drawer and gets back to work. For the next hour, there’s only the scraping lead, the rustle of paper, and the distant clatter of Paris filtering through the open window.
But the lines on the page won’t sharpen in his mind. The elegant arch of a proposed footbridge reminds him of the shape of her body. The structural grid looks like the wrought-iron balcony where they’d shared a bottle of wine from the Clos Montmartre last spring. It’s all tainted.
“I’m going out,” he announces, unpinning the blueprint with his prosthetic hand.
“Should we expect you back?” Jean asks, already lost in his work again.
“No. Don’t wait up.”
Outside, the air is crisp with the coming evening, scented with chestnuts and damp, fallen leaves pressed into the cobblestones. The streets of Montmartre are coming alive. Gas lamps are being lit, their yellow glow pushing back the encroaching twilight.
A noisy Panhard-Levassor automobile sputters past, forcing a horse-drawn omnibus to swerve with a clatter of hooves and a curse from the driver. Gustave walks without a destination, his hands shoved into his pockets, the small box in his desk a cold spot in his thoughts.
He finds himself outside the café, Le Consulat. The typical cacophony of passionate debate and clinking glasses spills out whenever the door swings open. He’s not in the mood for company, but he’s even less in the mood for the echoing quiet of his empty apartment. So, he pushes inside.
The place is packed with the usual assortment of painters, poets, and thinkers, all nursing coffees or glasses of absinthe. He finds an unoccupied table in a corner, partly hidden by a potted fern, and orders a coffee from a passing waiter. He just wants to sit. To think about nothing.
“Gustave?”
The voice is soft as brushed velvet. He looks up. Alicia stands beside his table, holding a book to her chest. Her coat is buttoned to her chin, and a simple wool hat is pulled down over her red hair. A faint, silvery scar sweeps up her jaw on the left side, a pale mark he’s so used to he barely registers it anymore.
“Alicia. What are you doing here?” He gestures to the chair opposite him. “Sit. Please.”
She gives him a grateful smile and lowers onto the seat. She doesn’t speak right away, just arranges her book on the table. He notices she’s breathing carefully, a habit she’s had since the fire.
“I was just leaving the library. I saw you come in. You looked… lost.”
Gustave takes a sip of the hot, bitter coffee the waiter just delivered. “Just thinking.”
“About Sophie.”
He doesn’t deny it. He just shrugs, turning his cup in his hands. “It’s done. People move on.”
“Do they? Or do they just find a new place to stand for a while?” She winces, a small cough catching in her throat. She takes a careful sip of water from the carafe on the table.
“You talk like one of the poets at the bar over there,” he attempts a dry, humorless jest.
Alicia ignores it and sighs. “I’m sorry, Gustave. Truly. I know you cared for her.”
“She made her choice.” He looks away, out the window at the people hurrying along the darkening street. “I wanted a family. A home that’s more than just a place to sleep after a long day at the firm.”
Alicia looks down at her hands, sensing the delicacy of the subject. “And she… does not?”
He meets her gaze, and the hurt in his eyes is plain. “Her older sister died in childbirth three years ago. The baby, too. Sophie was there. She sees motherhood as a gamble she refuses to take.” He lets out a bitter, quiet sound. “I spend my life calculating risks, reinforcing structures to make them safe. But this… this is a fear I can’t engineer a solution for.”
They sit in silence for a moment, listening to the café’s chatter. Alicia runs a hand over the cover of her book, Les Fleurs du mal.1 “My brother… he’s still not doing well,” she says, changing the subject so suddenly it takes Gustave a second to adjust.
He’s met Verso only a handful of times, always in passing. He’s like a specter in the grand Dessendre atelier, a flash of a dark coat and a serious face. Gustave knows him more by reputation: the musical genius among painters, the recluse.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says, polite but distant.
“He’s… disconnected,” Alicia continues tentatively. “Ever since that night… last winter… It’s like the smoke from the fire got inside him and never left. He blames himself… for having to choose.” Her voice drops so low he has to lean forward to hear her. “He thinks he failed Clea.”
Gustave feels uneasy. He knows where this is going. “Alicia…”
“He locks himself in his studio for days. The music he makes is beautiful. But so lonely.” Her fingers tighten on her book. “He needs a friend. Someone outside of our family, someone who doesn’t look at him and see a ghost.”
She gauges his reaction. “You’re a good man, Gustave. You don’t get swept up in all the… artistic temperament.” She almost smiles at that. “You see a problem, and you figure out how to build a bridge over it. Or a tunnel through it. My brother is trapped inside a fortress of his own making, and I don’t know how to get him out.”
He thinks of the velvet box in his desk. He’s got his own fortress to deal with. “I’m not sure I’m the right person. I don’t know the first thing about music, or composers.”
“This isn’t about music,” she insists with a small cough, gaining an urgency that makes him look at her properly. “It’s about a man who’s forgotten how to have a simple conversation. Who’s forgotten what it’s like to laugh. Your humor is so terribly dry, it might just take him by surprise.”
The idea is absurd. Him, the pragmatic engineer, playing companion to the city’s most famous melancholic artist. What would they even talk about? Stress coefficients? The tensile strength of steel?
“He won’t even want to see me,” Gustave argues. “From what you say, he doesn’t want to see anyone.”
“He won’t. Not at first. He’s… difficult. But he trusts my judgment, even when he pretends not to. And I trust you.” She takes a shaky breath. “Please, Gustave. Just… meet him. I’ll arrange it. If it’s a disaster, you never have to see him again. But what if it’s not?”
He studies Alicia's face, the earnest set of her mouth, the slight strain around her eyes that has little to do with her scars. He sees the protective affection she feels for her brother. He knows that feeling. He’s spent his life trying to build things strong enough to protect people. Bridges, buildings, a future with Sophie. But one of those has crumbled to dust.
He feels the sharp edges of his own misery soften just a little. Maybe she’s right. Maybe the best way to get out of his head is to get into someone else’s. Even if it’s the last thing he wants to do.
He lets out a long, slow breath. “Fine.”
The relief that smooths her features is immediate. “Truly?”
“Don’t make me say it twice. But Alicia, if he throws me out a window, you’re paying for the damages.”
A real smile appears on her face, small and fleeting, but there. “Oh you’ll probably be fine. Thank you, Gustave. I won’t forget this.”
“Just tell me when and where.” He pushes his chair back, feeling the need to get out of there. He drops a few coins on the table for his coffee. “I need to walk.”
“I’ll send a note to your office in a day or two. Once I’ve… prepared the ground.”
He just nods, gives her a final glance, and threads his way through the crowded cafe. The fresh night air feels good on his face as he steps back onto the street. He turns toward the Seine, a reluctant favor for a friend the only thing pulling his thoughts away from a velvet box in a closed drawer.
Alicia watches him go, feeling anxious even as gratitude warms her. Getting Gustave to agree was the first lock to pick. The next one is made of reinforced steel and guards itself with Brahms.
She pulls her coat tighter and leaves the café, already assembling and discarding plans. A direct approach is useless. Verso would retreat so fast he’d create a vacuum. ‘I’ve invited a friend over, I thought you two might talk.’ The mere suggestion is laughable. He’d lock his door and she wouldn’t see him for a week.
No, the meeting has to be a consequence of something else. A necessity. Something her brother, in his obsessive pursuit of a perfect creative environment, cannot refuse.
Her walk home takes her along the grand boulevards that border Montmartre. The Dessendre Atelier & Galerie is a formidable building, its polished stone facade and large plate-glass windows speaking of generations of artistic success and wealth. The gallery on the ground floor is dark now, the famous Dessendre canvases all sleeping in the shadows.
She lets herself in, then climbs the grand staircase. As she ascends, a sound begins to bleed through the heavy architecture. Faint at first, then clearer with each floor.
It’s a frantic, complicated piece. Full of unresolved chords and a melody that seems to be searching for a place to rest and finding none. It’s the sound of his mind at work; brilliant, restless, and utterly isolated.
She reaches the top floor and stands before the entrance of his studio. The music is loud here, pouring into the hallway through the door. She pauses a moment, taking a few careful breaths before she knocks.
The music stops. The sudden, absolute silence that follows is more jarring than the sound was. She waits, hears the scrape of the piano bench, then the soft tread of shoes on the wood floor.
The door opens a crack and Verso peers out, his dark hair disheveled. His tired eyes, the same light grey as their father’s, are intense and questioning. A pale, thin scar cuts from his forehead down over his left eye, similar to her own on her cheek, but less severe.
“Alicia? Is everything alright?”
“I’m fine,” she says with a small smile. “I’m sorry to disturb you. Your music was very beautiful.”
He dismisses the compliment with a slight shake of his head, then opens the door wider. “You shouldn’t be out so late. Is your throat bothering you?”
“No, nothing like that.” She steps past him into the vast studio.
Canvases are stacked against every wall, turned inward like secrets. Two guitars, one classical and one steel-string, lean against an armchair. The door to his adjoining bedroom is ajar, revealing a rumpled bed and a precarious stack of books on a nightstand. The only things that seem to live in the room are the grand piano at the center and the sheets of music scattered across every surface.
“I was sitting by the northern window earlier today. There’s a draft.”
Verso glances toward the towering wall of glass that overlooks the rooftops of Montmartre. “A draft? I haven’t felt it.”
“It’s subtle.” She approaches the window and touches the casement. “But it’s there. I’m worried it will affect the Pleyel’s2 tuning, especially when the winter comes. This old wood expands and contracts so much.”
Verso crosses the room to join her. He places his own hand against the window frame, his fingers tracing the seam where wood meets glass. He’s thoughtful as he tries to feel what she described. “Perhaps. I hadn’t noticed.”
“We should have someone look at it,” she suggests casually. “To be certain the seal is sound. We can’t risk any damage to the piano.”
His posture stiffens. “You know I don’t like having people up here, Alicia. I can look at it myself. I’ll fill any gaps.”
“With what? Putty?” She lets out a breathy laugh. “Verso, you’re a composer, not a glazier. This requires a professional. Someone who understands atmospheric pressure and how these old buildings settle. It would be quick. An assessment, that’s all. Just to be safe.” She looks from the piano and then back to him. “For the Pleyel.”
He closes his eyes for a second, a quiet battle taking place within. His deep-seated need for solitude is clashing with the practical need to protect his prized instrument. The piano always wins.
He exhales a soft sigh. “Very well. If you truly think it’s necessary.” He opens his eyes, appearing resigned, but not angry. “Arrange it. But ensure they understand the… sanctity of this space. I want them to be careful. And quiet.” He touches her shoulder lightly. “Thank you… for being aware.”
He heads back to his piano, leaving her by the window. A few seconds later, a series of soft, questioning chords drift through the room, the sound of a man trying to solve a problem he can’t see.
Alicia turns to leave, feeling triumphant. The ground is prepared. Now she just has to bring them together and hope the entire structure doesn’t collapse.