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I’ve lost myself in a quest that no one asked me to embark on, but you have set a trail for me to find my way back. Back to a life with you. I will come to you wherever you decide to go, but I hope that you stay here in this place that I think will allow you to spread those magnificent wings of yours. I pray that I get to see it, my love.
A sob escaped as she read the few lines again and again. When she finished, she folded the tear-stained paper and put it back in her pocket. When she finally looked up, four expectant faces were staring back at her, their eyes bright with questions.
“You are staying in Paris, non?” Claudine asked, eagerly.
Was she staying here? Life would be very different than when she’d arrived. Except that was not quite true. She was still an artist, she still had her friends, friends that today had been more than family to her. More than her own family had ever been, other than her abuela.
The Manuela who made the deal with Cora was so desperate to have one last taste of freedom that she had been willing to exchange the last thing she owned to get it. That Manuela didn’t believe she was strong enough to stand on her own. This Manuela knew she could.
“Yes,” she told her friends, her oldest one, and the new ones who had come here to hold her up. “I’m staying in Paris.”
“Magnifique!” exclaimed Claudine, before immediately launching into making plans. “I have a small apartment in my building that you can take.” To Manuela’s surprise it was Aurora’s eyes who welled with tears, the expression on her face one that saidI told you, you are not alone.
“I need to find work first.” She turned to Cassandra, who was smiling wide across from her. “I’d also like for us to formally begin working on the collective. I believe that we could create something lasting and powerful if we work as a unit.”
“The exiled artists of Paris collective,” Cassandra declared, her eyes focused on something far away.
“Theworkingexiled artists of Paris collective,” Manuela amended, then laughed when Aurora made a face. “We can work on the name,” she appeased her friend.
“You already have a job,” Pasquale reminded her of the invitation he’d made her to be one of his instructors. “I also know there was an offer for your pieces at the exposition.” Manuela frowned at that piece of news.
“What?”
“Yes. I heard yours was one of about ten which were of interest to a few heads of state.”
Heads of state?“Please don’t toy with me, Pasquale,” she began, and her friend grinned.
“I promise, I am not joking. I know because four of the pieces are from artists at the academy. I told the broker that you were also one of my instructors. I hope I was not being presumptuous.” Again Manuela found herself laughing on what should’ve been the worst day of her life. Bruised as she was, she knew that someday she would look back on this moment and think of it as one of the greatest in her story. She was full to the brim with gratitude that she was fortunate enough to have choices. She silently vowed to do everything she could to pass forward that blessing to others.
“Thank you,” she said to no one in particular, to everyone there. Even to Cora, who had shattered everything but left her enough pieces to build something new.
“We’re in Paris, and we drink champagne when we laugh and when we cry,” announced Claudine, pulling another bottle from her very large handbag, and soon they were toasting once again. Not exactly the kind of toast she’d envisioned on her wedding night, but it was a fitting way to walk away from a life that had always felt like a cage.
With a trembling hand Manuela lifted her own glass and let the tears for what she’d lost and what she’d gained roll down her face, unashamed. “Tonight we grieve,” she told the new friends she’d made and her sister, her Leona, who was by her side. “Tomorrow, I start building a life that is all my own.”
Twenty-Six
It took two months. One in which she had decided, among other things, to regretfully retract her decision to donate the funds from Baluarte’s sale to the collective and instead use it to settle matters with her parents and Felix. In typical Duchess of Sundridge fashion, Cora sent a message via Cassandra, offering to help with those obligations. Manuela, using her newfound skills in asserting herself, refused, and Cora, in turn, reciprocated by exhibiting her nascent restraint in high-handedness and accepted Manuela’s wishes.
The news of the disastrous end to her engagement had quickly spread to nearly every South American family in Paris and the rest of the continent, but in the world where she now lived, that kind of notoriety was not exactly unheard of. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Cora stopping her wedding in such dramatic fashion had been quite a scandal—it still was. But her friends had not abandoned her, and she no longer had any use for the opinions of the Doña Amaditas of the world.
The meeting with her parents had been excruciating. Her mother could not forgive her, and her father refused to even see her. Still she felt obliged to at least see them settled. The exorbitant payment she’d extracted from Cora at that fateful luncheon had been enough to repay Felix for the debts he’d settled for her father—not the clothes or the trips, he could swallow that loss—and to set them up with an allowance. They’d been back in Venezuela for over a month, and in that time Manuela had gone about constructing a small but gloriously full existence for herself in Paris.
She’d refused any offers from Cora to assist her financially—even the tertiary ones like when Pasquale suddenly suggested giving her a raise after only working for him a week—and in the end she hadn’t needed it. She’d returned most of the trousseau and whatever else she’d purchased for her marriage and sent every cent back to Felix, who the day after the fiasco had boarded a train to London and, from what she heard, took his mistress back with him to Caracas. The dresses she could not return she’d given to Bernadette to sell for her. In the end, between the sale of her paintings—to an American banker, of all people—and the money she got from the sale of the gowns, she’d had enough to set herself up in a small apartment in Cassandra and Frede’s neighborhood. Luz Alana and Aurora, despite her protests, had insisted on gifting her the furnishings and all the necessary implements one needed to set up a house.
But it had been not only her Leonas who’d come to her aid. It turned out she’d found a mighty pride in Paris too, and they had shown her again and again she was exactly where she belonged.
“There you are!” Pasquale’s happy tenor alerted Manuela to the fact that she was not the last person in the academy.
“Bonsoir,” Manuela said happily, as she greeted her employer. “I was just tidying up the studio,” she told him, pointing to the couple dozen brushes soaking in a mix of water and vinegar.
“How is the botanical class going?” he asked, taking a seat on one of the artists’ stools.
“It’s been wonderful,” she told him, sincerely. “We’re working on creating some samples they can show to book publishers or periodicals. It’s very exciting.” From that first conversation about implementing classes for artists looking to do commercial work, they’d launched an exciting variety of classes led by Cassandra and Manuela. They now offered four different courses, in botanical, fashion, medical and architectural illustration, but the interest had been so great they planned to open four more for the coming term.
“I knew you’d be a wonderful teacher,” he told her, and she felt her face warm. Pasquale had become not only her boss but her mentor. The father figure she’d never had. He was protective—generous with his time and advice. In the moments when she’d felt the weight of her decisions bearing down on her, he reminded her gently, but firmly, that the path to freedom was never easy, but always worth it.
“I received the advance for that commission,” she told him, feeling the now familiar flush of pride.
