Angel Hands

Of Spinsters and Spiders

Mireille Dubienne was a spinster.

A pushy, sour-faced, and unfortunately educated spinster of twenty-seven. There was really nothing her father could do with her except to keep her busy, working for him as a kind of private secretary. It was a job she was well-suited to, being pragmatic, detail-oriented and persistent. It was the only job she could do even in this enlightened year of 1888, as keeping house and making babies seemed well out of the running for her.

Mireille adjusted the thin spectacles up the bridge of her nose as she stirred a precise amount of sugar – one and a half spoons – into her demitasse of café. Her father glanced at her across the breakfast table and held in a small sigh of disappointment.

It wasn't that she was unmarried that bothered him. It was that she seemed unhappy, and that the smiling, laughing girl that had been his joy and light had drowned in a darkness that had seemingly come out of nowhere.

It also wasn't that she was unattractive – for a spinster. She had soft coils of honey-colored hair and hazel eyes that tended more toward green than brown. Her features were small, and though not remarkable, perfectly nice-looking. She was slender and not at all awkward when she moved.

Pierre Dubienne released his sigh as he sipped his café. His happy little Mireille had seemed to dissolve into the impenetrable mists of some dark, quiet woman who had forsworn love and all the coquetteries and courting that accompanied it. At times, he caught himself thinking of her in the way he would have thought of a son – a man of affairs with a keen mind and an unshakable sense of honor.

Well, there would be no son to inherit the Dubienne fortune, but Mireille would be an admirable guardian of it. But Pierre Dubienne would have traded every last sou if he could only have seen his daughter smile with the light of love in her eyes.

"Eh bien, ma cherie, you really think that this is a good idea?" Pierre asked, tackling a piece of bread with a knife loaded with butter.

"It's a sound investment," Mireille replied, taking small, careful bites of her croissant. "It will all depend on the way we promote the reopening, but that is not hard to do well. And, I have an idea that will not fail to fill every seat on opening night, or for many nights after that."

"Oh dear, Mireille," Pierre laughed. "You know how I worry when you begin to talk like that. You are so frightfully…"

"Competent?"

"Exactly!" the older man chuckled. "So, shall I go ahead and sign the papers tomorrow?"

"Please do," Mireille replied evenly. "And by the end of the week, I hope to present you with my plan, complete with budget, for the restoration and reopening of the Opera Garnier.”

"So frightfully…"

"Competent?"

"Frightfully competent, my dear," Pierre said with a smile that was tinged with sadness. "Have you ever thought of being a little less…"

"No."

Pierre sighed. "I didn't think so."

***

The quest for redemption and a normal life had lasted all of three months. It wasn't that Christine's kiss had dimmed in his memory or that its effect had diminished. The holy fervor he felt when he recalled her touch still made him weak in the knees and clutch at his throat in an agony of ecstatic adoration and pain.

It was simply that there were certain practicalities of life that had not changed, even if he had. And one of those practicalities, unfortunately, was the fact that half of Paris' gendarmerie was out for his blood.