The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab Page 0,43
way to the broken chairs and the cooler wedged between them. She finds a single beer floating amid the half-frozen melt and twists off the cap, sinking onto the least-damaged lawn chair.
It is not so cold tonight, and she is too tired to go looking for another bed.
The glow of the fairy lights is just enough to see by, and Addie stretches out in the lawn chair, and opens The Odyssey, and reads of strange lands, and monsters, and men who can’t ever go home, until the cold lulls her to sleep.
Paris, France
August 9, 1714
III
Heat hangs like a low roof over Paris.
The August air is heavy, made heavier still by the sprawl of stone buildings, the reek of rotting food and human refuse, the sheer number of bodies living shoulder to shoulder.
In a hundred and fifty years, Haussman will set his mark upon the city, raise a uniform facade and paint the buildings in the same pale palette, creating a testament to art, and evenness, and beauty.
That is the kind of Paris Addie dreamed of, and one she will certainly live to see.
But right now, the poor pile themselves in ragged heaps while silk-finished nobles stroll through gardens. The streets are crowded with horse-drawn carts, the squares thick with people, and here and there spires thrust up through the woolen fabric of the city. Wealth parades down avenues, and rises with the peaks of each palace and estate, while hovels cluster in narrow roads, the stones stained dark with grime and smoke.
Addie is too overwhelmed to notice any of it.
She skirts the edge of a square, watching as men dismantle market stalls, and kick out at the ragged children who duck and weave between them, searching for scraps. As she walks, her hand slips into the hem pocket of her skirts, past the little wooden bird to the four copper sols she found in the lining of the stolen coat. Four sols, to make a life.
It is getting late, and threatening to rain, and she must find a place to sleep. It should be easy enough—there is, it seems, a lodging house on every street—but she is hardly across the threshold of the first when she is turned away.
“This is no brothel,” chides the owner, glaring down his nose.
“And I’m no whore,” she answers, but he only sneers, and flicks his fingers as if casting off some unwanted residue.
The second house is full, the third too costly, the fourth harbors only men. By the time she steps through the doors of the fifth the sun has set, and her spirits with it, and she is already braced for the rebuke, some excuse as to why she is unfit to stay beneath the roof.
But she isn’t turned away.
An older woman meets her in the entry, thin, and stiff, with a long nose and the small, sharp eyes of a hawk. She takes one look at Addie and leads her down the hall. The rooms are small, and dingy, but they have walls and doors, a window and a bed.
“A week’s pay,” demands the woman, “in advance.”
Addie’s heart sinks. A week seems an impossible stretch when memories only seem to last a moment, an hour, a day.
“Well?” snaps the woman.
Addie’s hand closes around the copper coins. She is careful to draw out only three, and the woman snatches them as fast as a crow stealing crusts of bread. They vanish into the pouch at her waist.
“Can you give me a bill?” asks Addie. “Some proof, to show I’ve paid?”
The woman scowls, clearly insulted. “I run an honest house.”
“I’m sure you do,” fumbles Addie, “but you have so many rooms to keep. It would be easy to forget which ones have—”
“Thirty-four years I’ve run this lodge,” she cuts in, “and never yet forgotten a face.”
It is a cruel joke, thinks Addie, as the woman turns and shuffles away, leaving her to her rented room.
A week she paid for, but she knows that she will be lucky to have a day. Knows that in the morning she will be evicted, the matron three crowns richer, while she herself will be out on the street.
A little bronze key rests in the lock, and Addie turns it, relishes the solid sound, like a stone dropped into a stream. She has nothing to unpack, no change of clothes; she casts off the traveling coat, draws the little wooden bird from her skirts and sets it on the windowsill. A talisman against the dark.