Two days later, when Adeline’s father returns, he comes bearing a fresh pad of parchment, and a bundle of black lead pencils, bound with string, and the first thing she does is pick the best one, and sink it down into the ground behind their garden, and pray that next time her father leaves, she will be with him.

  But if the gods hear, they do not answer.

  She never goes to market again.

  Villon-sur-Sarthe, France

  Spring 1707

  V

  Blink, and the years fall away like leaves.

  Adeline is sixteen now, and everyone speaks of her as if she is a summer bloom, something to be plucked, and propped within a vase, intended only to flower and then to rot. Like Isabelle, who dreams of family instead of freedom, and seems content to briefly blossom and then wither.

  No, Adeline has decided she would rather be a tree, like Estele. If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.

  She hefts the laundry on her hip and crests the rise, making her way down the weedy slope to the river. When she reaches the banks, she turns the basket out, dumping the soiled clothes into the grass, and there, tucked like a secret between the skirts and aprons and undergarments, is the sketchbook. Not the first—she has gathered them year after year, careful to fill every inch of space, to make the most of each blank page.

  But every one is like a taper burning on a moonless night, always running out too fast.

  It does not help that she keeps giving bits away.

  She kicks off her shoes and slumps back against the slope, her skirts pooling beneath her. She runs her fingers through the weedy grass and finds the fraying edge of the paper, one of her favorite drawings, folded into a square and driven down into the bank last week, just after dawn. A token, buried like a seed, or a promise. An offering.

  Adeline still prays to the new God, when she must, but when her parents are not looking she prays to the old ones, too. She can do both: keep one tucked in her cheek like a cherry pit while she whispers to the other.

  So far, none of them have answered.

  And yet, Adeline is sure that they are listening.

  When George Caron began to look at her a certain way last spring, she prayed for him to turn his gaze, and he began to notice Isabelle instead. Isabelle has since become his wife, and is now ripe with her first child, and worn with all the torments that come with it.

  When Arnaud Tulle made his intentions clear last fall, Adeline prayed that he would find another girl. He did not, but that winter he took ill and died, and Adeline felt terrible for her relief, even as she fed more trinkets to the stream.

  She has prayed, and someone must have heard, for she is still free. Free from courtship, free from marriage, free from everything except Villon. Left alone to grow.

  And dream.

  Adeline sits back on the slope, the sketchpad balanced on her knees. She pulls the drawstring pouch from her pocket, bits of charcoal and a few worn-down precious pencils rattling like coins on market day.

  She used to bind a bit of cloth around the stems to keep her fingers clean, until her father fashioned narrow bands of wood around the blackened sticks, and showed her how to hold the little knife, how to shave away the edges, and trim the casing into points. And now the images are sharper, the edges contoured, the details fine. The pictures bloom like stains across the paper, landscapes of Villon, and everyone in it, too—the lines of her mother’s hair and her father’s eyes and Estele’s hands, and then there, tucked into the seams and edges of each page—

  Adeline’s secret.

  Her stranger.

  Every bit of unused space she fills with him, a face drawn so often that the gestures now feel effortless, the lines unfurling on their own. She can conjure him from memory, even though they have never met.

  He is, after all, only a figment of her mind. A companion crafted first from boredom, and then from longing.

  A dream, to keep her company.

  She doesn’t remember when it started, only that one day she cast her gaze about the village and found every prospect wanting.

  Arnaud’s eyes were pleasant, but he had no chin.

  Jacques was tall, but dull as dirt.

  George was strong, but his hands were rough, his moods rougher still.

  And so she stole the pieces she found pleasant, and assembled someone new.

  A stranger.

  It began as a game—but the more Adeline draws him, the stronger the lines, the more confident the press of her charcoal.

  Black curls. Pale eyes. Strong jaw. Sloping shoulders and a cupid’s bow mouth. A man she’d never meet, a life she’d never know, a world she could only dream of.

  When she is restless, she returns to the drawings, tracing over the now familiar lines. And when she cannot sleep, she thinks of him. Not the angle of his cheek, or the shade of green she has conjured for his eyes, but his voice, his touch. She lies awake and imagines him beside her, his long fingers tracing absent patterns on her skin. As he does, he tells her stories.

  Not the kind her father used to tell, of knights and kingdoms, princesses and thieves. Not fairy tales and warnings of venturing outside the lines, but stories that feel like truths, renditions of the road, cities that sparkle, of the world beyond Villon. And even though the words she puts in his mouth are surely full of errors and lies, her stranger’s conjured voice makes them sound so wonderful, so real.

  If only you could see it, he says.

  I would give anything, she answers.

  One day, he promises. One day, I’ll show you. You’ll see it all.

  The words ache, even as she thinks them, the game giving way to want, a thing too genuine, too dangerous. And so, even in her imagination, she guides the conversation back to safer roads.

  Tell me about tigers, Adeline says, having heard of the massive cats from Estele, who heard of them from the mason, who was part of a caravan that included a woman who claimed to have seen one.

  Her stranger smiles, and gestures with his tapered fingers, and tells her of their silken fur, their teeth, their furious roars.

  On the slope, the laundry forgotten beside her, Adeline turns her wooden ring absently with one hand as she draws with the other, sketching out his eyes, his mouth, the line of his bare shoulders. She breathes life into him with every line. And with every stroke, coaxes out another story.

  Tell me about dancing in Paris.

  Tell me about sailing across the sea.

  Tell me everything.

  There was no danger in it, no reproach, not when she was young. All girls are prone to dreaming. She will grow out of it, her parents say—but instead, Adeline feels herself growing in, holding tighter to the stubborn hope of something more.

  The world should be getting larger. Instead, she feels it shrinking, tightening like chains around her limbs as the flat lines of her own body begin to curve out against it, and suddenly the charcoal beneath her nails is unbecoming, as is the idea that she would choose her own company over Arnaud’s or George’s, or any man who might have her.

  She is at odds with everything, she does not fit, an insult to her sex, a stubborn child in a woman’s form, her head bowed and arms wrapped tight around her drawing pad as if it were a door.

  And when she does look up, her gaze always goes to the edge of town.

  “A dreamer,” scorns her mother.

  “A dreamer,” mourns her father.

  “A dreamer,” warns Estele.

  Still, it does not seem such a bad word.

  Until Adeline wakes up.

  New York City

  March 10, 2014

  VI

  There is a rhythm to moving through the world alone.

  You discover what you can and cannot live without, the simple necessities and small joys that define a life. Not food, not shelter, not the basic things a body needs—those are, for her, a luxury—but the things that keep you sane. That bring you joy. That make life bearable.

  Addie thinks of her father and his carvings, the way he peeled away the bark, whittled down the wood beneath to find the shapes that lived inside. Michelangelo called it the angel in the marble—though she’d not known that as a child. Her father had called it the secret in the wood. He knew how to reduce a thing, sliver by sliver, piece by piece, until he found its essence; knew, too, when he’d gone too far. One stroke too many, and the wood went from delicate to brittle in his hands.

  Addie has had three hundred years to practice her father’s art, to whittle herself down to a few essential truths, to learn the things she cannot do without.

  And this is what she’s settled on: she can go without food (she will not wither). She can go without heat (the cold will not kill her). But a life without art, without wonder, without beautiful things—she would go mad. She has gone mad.

  What she needs are stories.

  Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget.

  Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books.

  Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.

  Two blocks up Flatbush, she sees the familiar green folding table on the sidewalk, covered in paperbacks, and Fred hunched in his rickety chair behind it, red nose buried in M is for Malice. The old man explained to her once, back when he was on K is for Killer, how he was determined to get through Grafton’s entire alphabet series before he dies. She hopes he makes it. He has a nagging cough, and sitting out here in the cold doesn’t help, but here he is, whenever Addie comes by.

  Fred doesn’t smile, or make small talk. What Addie knows of him she has pried out word by word over the last two years, the progress slow and halting. She knows he is a widower who lives upstairs, knows the books belonged to his wife, Candace, knows that when she died, he packed up all her books and brought them down to sell, and it’s like letting her go in pieces. Selling off his grief. Addie knows that he sits down here because he’s afraid of dying in his apartment, of not being found—not being missed.

  “I keel over out here,” he says, “at least someone will notice.”

  He is a gruff old man, but Addie likes him. Sees the sadness in his anger, the guardedness of grief.

  Addie suspects he doesn’t really want the books to sell.

  He doesn’t price them, hasn’t read more than a few, and sometimes his mood is so coarse, his tone so cold, he actually scares the customers away. Still, they come, and still, they buy, but every time the selection seems to thin a new box appears, the contents are unpacked to fill the gaps, and in the last few weeks, Addie has once more begun to spot new releases among the old, fresh covers and unbroken spines in with the battered paperbacks. She wonders if he is buying them, or if other people have begun donating to his strange collection.

  Addie slows, now, her fingers dancing over the spines.

  The selection is always a medley of discordant notes. Thrillers, biographies, romance, battered mass markets, mostly, interrupted by a few glossy hardcovers. She has stopped to study them a hundred times, but today she simply tips the book on the end into her hand, the gesture light and swift as a magician’s. A piece of legerdemain. Practice long given way to perfect. Addie tucks the book under her arm and keeps walking.

  The old man never looks up.

  New York City

  March 10, 2014

  VII

  The market sits like a cluster of old wives at the edge of the park.

  Long thin from winter, the number of white-capped stalls is finally beginning to swell again, drops of color dotting the square where new produce springs up between the root vegetables, meat and bread, and other staples resistant to the cold.

  Addie weaves between the people, heading to the little white tent nestled by the front gates of Prospect. Rise and Shine is a coffee and pastry stall run by a pair of sisters that remind Addie of Estele, if the old woman had been two instead of one, divided along the lines of temper. If she had been kinder, softer, or perhaps if she had simply lived another life, another time.

  The sisters are here year-round, come snow or sun, a small constant in an ever-changing city.

  “Hey, sugar,” says Mel, all broad shoulders, and wild curls, and the kind of sweetness that makes strangers feel like family. Addie loves that, the easy warmth, wants to nestle into it like a well-worn sweater.

  “What can we get for you?” asks Maggie, older, leaner, laugh lines around her eyes belying the idea she rarely smiles.

  Addie orders a large coffee and two muffins, one blueberry and the other chocolate chip, and then hands over a crumpled ten that she’d found on Toby’s coffee table. She could steal something from the market, of course, but she likes this little stand, and the two women who run it.

  “Got a dime?” asks Maggie.

  Addie digs the change from her pocket, coming up with a few quarters, a nickel—and there it is again, warm among the cold metal coins. Her fingers graze the wooden ring and she clenches her teeth at the feel of it. Like a nagging thought, impossible to shed. Sifting through the coins, Addie is careful not to touch the wooden band again as she searches her change, resists the urge to fling the ring into the weeds, knows it will not make a difference if she does. It will always find its way back.

  The darkness whispers in her ear, arms wrapped like a scarf around her throat.

  I am always with you.

  Addie plucks out a dime and pockets the rest.

  Maggie hands back four dollars.

  “Where you from, doll?” asks Mel, noticing the faintest edge of an accent in the corners of Addie’s voice, reduced these days to the vanishing end of an s, the slight softening of a t. It has been so long, and yet, she cannot seem to let it go.

  “Here and there,” she says, “but I was born in France.”

  “Oh la la,” says Mel in her flat Brooklyn drawl.

  “Here you go, sunshine,” says Maggie, passing her a bag of pastries and a tall cup. Addie curls her fingers around the paper, relishing the heat on her cold palms. The coffee is strong, and dark, and when she takes a sip, she feels the warmth all the way down, and she is back in Paris again, in Istanbul, in Naples.

  A mouthful of memory.

  She starts toward the park gates.

  “Au revoir!” calls Mel, landing hard on every letter, and Addie smiles into the steam.

  The air is crisp inside the park. The sun is out, fighting for warmth, but the shade still belongs to winter, so Addie follows the light, sinking onto a grassy slope beneath the cloudless sky.

  She sits the blueberry muffin on top of the paper bag, and sips her coffee, examining the book she borrowed from Fred’s table. She hadn’t bothered to look at what she was taking, but now her heart sinks a little at the sight of the paperback, the cover soft with wear, the title in German.

  Kinder und Hausmärchen it reads, by Brüder Grimm.

  Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

  Her German is rusty, kept in the back of her mind, in a corner she hasn’t used much since the war. Now she dusts it off, knows that beneath the layer of grime she will find the space intact, undisturbed. The boon of memory. She turns through the fragile old pages, eyes tripping over the words.

  Once upon a time, she loved this kind of story.

  When she was still a child, and the world was small, and she dreamed of open doors.

  But Addie knows too well now, knows that these stories are full of foolish humans doing foolish things, warning tales of gods and monsters and greedy mortals who want too much, and then fail to understand what they’ve lost. Until the price is paid, and it’s too late to claim it back.

  A voice rises like smoke inside her chest.

  Never pray to the gods who answer after dark.

  Addie tosses the book aside and slumps back into the grass, closing her eyes as she tries to savor the sun.

  Villon-sur-Sarthe, France

  July 29, 1714

  VIII

  Adeline had wanted to be a tree.

  To grow wild and deep, belong to no one but the ground beneath her feet, and the sky above, just like Estele. It would be an unconventional life, and perhaps a little lonely, but at least it would be hers. She would belong to no one but herself.

  But here is the danger of a place like Villon.

  Blink—and a year is gone.

  Blink—and five more follow.

  It is like a gap between stones, this village, just wide enough for things to get lost. The kind of place where time slips and blurs, where a month, a year, a life can go missing. Where everyone is born and buried in the same ten-meter plot.

  Adeline was going to be a tree.

  But then came Roger, and his wife, Pauline. Grown up together, and then married, and then gone, in the time it took for her to lace up a pair of boots.

  A hard pregnancy, a ruinous birth, two deaths instead of one new life.

  Three small children left behind, where there should have been four. The earth still fresh over a grave, and Roger looking for another wife, a mother for his children, a second life at the cost of Adeline’s one and only.

  Of course, she said no.

  Adeline is three and twenty, already too old to wed.

  Three and twenty, a third of a life already buried.

  Three and twenty—and then gifted like a prize sow to a man she does not love, or want, or even know.

  She said no, and learned how much the word was worth. Learned that, like Estele, she had promised herself to the village, and the village had a need.

  Her mother said it was duty.

  Her father said it was mercy, though Adeline doesn’t know for whom.