Free A Heart Most Worthy by Siri Mitchell Page A

of July.
    Mrs. Quinn.
    A painful, insistent thumping began in Madame’s head. And heart.
    She had known this day was coming; she just wished it hadn’t come so soon.
    Mrs. Quinn.
    What days and weeks and years had gone by that Madame hadn’t wished for, hadn’t hoped to hear, the glad tidings of that woman’s death? But then, what days and weeks and years had gone by that she hadn’t looked forward, with anticipation, to the client’s next visit?
    The woman was a witch. A strega .
    A real, true witch, born at midnight on Christmas Eve, an occasion which an annual birthday ball had been conceived to commemorate. Who but a strega would think of celebrating something like that? Mrs. Quinn’s Birthday Ball had been the event of the season before the war. It used to be that Madame Fortier had worked for months on Mrs. Quinn’s gown for that gala occasion. These days, with the concussion of guns resounding from Europe and extravagant expenses abandoned for the cause of patriotism, the ball had been converted into a small dinner party with an influential guest list. And for it she would need a simpler, but no less brilliantly fashioned, gown.
    Which in no way made up for Madame’s loss of income from events like the Ace of Clubs Ball or the Junior League’s Gala, which had been indefinitely postponed until the end of the war; until victory had been won and freedom wrested from the cruel, warmongering Boche.
    Madame put a hand to her aching head and sighed.
    A strega she was and a strega she would always be. Ever since Mrs. Quinn, née Howell, had chosen Madame Fortier to make her wedding gown, the woman had been a constant and abiding thorn in the gown maker’s flesh.
    Madame opened a drawer in her desk and pulled a flask from it. Reached further back to retrieve a glass. Poured herself two fingers’ worth of clear, strong grappa.
    Perhaps you might have been inclined, until that moment, to sympathize with Madame Fortier. To, at the very least, tolerate Madame Fortier. She was not an easy woman to like; she did not, in fact, even like herself very much. Though that last bit, of course, is a secret, and we must do her the courtesy not to mention it, not even to think of it too often before she can realize it for herself. But before you convict her for fortifying herself with liquor, consider for one moment that you have not yet met the woman she was fortifying herself against. And consider for a second moment that if you had to work for Mrs. Quinn, if you had to satisfy that voracious and unslakeable thirst for the highest, most distinctive of fashions, if you had to hear her speak of her husband, the congressman, over and over and over again, you also might feel a great and sudden thirst for grappa.
    Or something very much like it.
    You see, it’s all very well and good to judge and moralize, but there are some whose morale has been broken. And for these, sometimes, we just have to let them survive, in hopes that one day they will decide to do more than survive. That they will decide, in fact, to live, in which case they can cast off their own crutches and endeavor for themselves to face their problems directly.
    But Madame Fortier had not yet reached that point, and we must not run ahead of her to the place where we would like her to be. And so, we will let her drink her grappa in private, and brood on the appointments of the day.

    It was some time later that she climbed the stairs to the third-floor workshop, supporting her steps by placing a heavy, discreetly jeweled hand to the wall. Once she’d reached the top of the stairs, she paused a moment, hand against her chest, to catch her breath and to buttress the last of the quickly waning courage that still resided there.
    Once she had collected herself, she walked across the landing to the workshop. “Luciana.”
    The girls looked up from their work in surprise. It was not often that Madame paid them the favor of a visit. Least not midmornings.
    “Sì?” There