Ten weeks.
She could do it. She would find the time and the lies and the excuses to tell her mother for being out of the house all day.
“For your first task, I want you to start with something simple. Something you already know.” Monsieur Baudelaire gestured to the stack of application forms in Gabriel’s hands. “I want you to stitch the designs you submitted. Mademoiselle LeBeau, you will have to modify yours to fit your model.”
Everyone’s eyes fell on her and Bastien. A few murmurs rose in the air. Celine tried not to grind her teeth to dust as she forced her jaw open to utter a quick, “O-of course.”
“The House will be open to anyone, so will the fabrics room,” Gabriel said, taking over. “I will be handing you a pass key that you can use for the rest of the competition, assuming you will still be on the run. Form a single file please.”
Celine cast one final glance at Monsieur Baudelaire who was ascending the stairs to his office on the second floor.
“One question,” said Bastien abruptly. He was twirling her necklace around his finger. At this point, Celine had given up batting his hands away from her person and let him fidget withthe beads. “Do you have a studio? I hate to speculate, but if your mother frowns upon you entering this competition, she won’t be too happy if I turned up at your house as your new, life-size doll.”
“Not too happy is a mild way to put it,” Celine said earnestly. “But yes. I have already found a solution. Is your car close by?”
Chapter 6
The Studio
They arrived at her grandmother’s residence shortly after noon. The old building was currently standing as an abandoned town house at Quartier Latin, with wooden planks barring the windows, and a rusted iron door framing the main entrance. Some ancestor of Celine’s had purchased the building before Haussmann’s renovations, so the structure had remained as it had been, only refurbished every once in a decade.
“So, this thing about your mother,” Bastien inquired, looming over Celine’s shoulder while she tried to work an ancient key into the door. “Aren’t we allowed to fraternise in broad daylight?”
“Well…” Celine trailed off, unsure how much Bastien’s vanity would bruise if she spoke the truth. Then again, she didn’t particularly care for chaffing a man’s ego a little bit. “My mother hates you,” she admitted matter-of-factly, softly grunting when the lock wasn’t giving way.
“Sounds about right,” Bastien mused. “It wouldn’t be a first though. Marie, Juliette, another Celine, Charlotte—oh, I miss Charlotte,” he sighed with mock melancholy as he counted the names off on his fingers. “There was also Emilia, ah, and Liana too.”
“Victims of your heartlessness, I presume?”
“No,” he replied earnestly. “Just a few of the girls whose mothers pulled out a vial of holy water when they found out who their daughter was seeing.”
“My second guess,” Celine muttered. She suspected that holy water—or any other sanctified object for that matter—would do very little to wash away his debauchery.
Though she blamed none of the girls. Bastien had the ability to be the perfect gentleman when it suited his interests. Sometimes he acted a little too good that even Celine would look at him in a different light, close to the chubby cherubs of Renaissance paintings. Then he would proceed by saying the foulest things a man could produce from his lips and she would be reminded once again of what a devil he was.
“Though I have to admit,” she grunted, “I had imagined the number to have been higher.”
“Oh, it is. These are only the ones who live in Charonne.”
Celine stilled. Then pivoted, cutting him a scathing glance. “You categorise them by neighbourhood?”
Bastien shrugged. “How else am I supposed to keep track?”
“You’re a pig, you know that?”
“Save some sweet flattery for your boyfriend, darling. I am sure my brother would grovel at your feet if he heard you speak like that.”
Losing his patience, Bastien pushed her out of the way and slammed the heel of his palm against the door handle. The gate rattled violently, then creaked open inwards.
“Ladies first.”
Celine tossed a final look over her shoulder, just in case, and scurried inside.
“What is this place anyway?” Bastien asked dubiously, following suit. “It smells like no one has lived here in years.”
No one had. The last time Celine had been inside was when she was eleven; the last time all the lights had fully illuminatedthe foyer, the ballroom, the kitchen, and the house had smelled of cranberries and cake instead of damp dust motes. Now the staircase creaked, spiders decorated the chandeliers with web doilies, and the stink of mould was making it impossible to breathe.
“It was my grandmother’s,” she answered. “No one bothered with its upkeep anymore after she passed away.”
