She sat quiet for a moment, her hands crossed on the table. Finally she sighed. “Do you think me heartless? Unaffected by what I see in here every day?”
“Of course not, Madame.”
“When I first came to France, before I opened the studio, I went out and toured the hospitals. I needed to see the state of the French soldiers. I even went out closer to the lines—guided, of course—and saw these injuries when they were fresh.”
I held my breath. I couldn’t imagine; when their faces were contorted with more than emotional pain.
“I’d come back here, to the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, which wasn’t yet a studio. It was an empty room. I’d sit here alone and sometimes I was overcome.” Her eyes misted in a quick instant, but she blinked and forced a sunny smile. “We are like the masks. We need to be. Strong metal covering vulnerability. They both exist, mademoiselle.”
“But even the strongest copper can crack.”
She smiled gently. “We don’t let it.”
I went back to my squeeze, feeling too fragile to be made of metal but knowing I had to, for Luc’s sake. For the sake of all the men in the room. So I ignored the scars, the pits, the ridges, and I concentrated on his eyes.
While taking that first cast, a soldier sat with eyes closed, covered over with thin slips of tissue paper. The plasticine squeeze gave us the chance to open those eyes with a burin and a steady hand. It was a necessary step for those soldiers who needed an eye on their mask to replace one lost. Luc didn’t, but I still etched them in. I wanted it to be the Luc I remembered.
I sat, with burin in hand, my own eyes closed against the reality of the room, and tried to remember his. It wasn’t hard. They were the one thing I recognized when he came back to the studio. Brown like almonds, narrow, ringed with thick, dark lashes. Those eyes that startled wide that first morning when I ducked his tennis swing in the front hall, the eyes so intense and watchful as I tasted my first mouthful of ginger preserve, those eyes that shone in the dark the night that Grandfather took me away from Mille Mots. I knew them well.
It was short work to etch them in, but I wasn’t satisfied. Turn up a little more at the corner. No, too much. A few more flecks here, where, in my memory, it was darker brown. A gleam, a strength, a surety. I could do my best, but those last, I couldn’t etch in.
When Mrs. Ladd was ready to lock the studio, I still sat, curls of clay littering the table. She took the burin from my hand. “Miss Ross. Clare. He’s waited this long for a mask. Another day won’t matter much.”
But it wasn’t just “another day.” I spent three days alone working on the squeeze, until Pascalle was glaring and even Mrs. Ladd looked drawn. Then I cast again with plaster of Paris, one negative and one positive. On this last positive, I built Luc’s face.
I worked slowly, carefully, scraping away the plaster grain by grain. I had my sketch right beside me, the sketch that first revealed the battered soldier as my lost childhood love. I worried over every line in the sketch. I doubted my memory.
But I also doubted my doubt. Maybe there was something, some chink in his armor. An honest something to hope for. With each scrape of my knife, with each shower of plaster dust falling onto the table,
At the end of each day, I caught up the dust into my palm. I went to the Square du Vert-Galant and stood with my feet on the point of land. It was the place Luc had mentioned in his letter, the place where he said he always felt the breath of Paris on his face. Now, it was my quiet spot in the city. I let the wind carry away the palmful of dust into the river and I hoped.
That first week, after Luc touched my wrist and asked me to stay, he didn’t come to the studio at all. Then one day he appeared in the doorway, shy, hat in hand like a suitor. I blushed to see it.
But he didn’t talk to me. He just nodded and went to sit with the other
I smoothed out his left cheek, his jaw, the corner of his eye. With my knife, I gave him that angled cheekbone I remembered. That straight jaw that always tightened when he was nervous. That left eye that crinkled at the corner in one of his unexpected laughs. Luc, always so serious. Even as a boy—studying, working, wishing he could do more for the château—he always looked like he carried the world on his shoulders.
