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The crickets’ song chirped in the air. A gust of wind blew in the overgrown garden of the number 55 on the rue Plumet, making the hem of Cosette’s chemise dance a little, but it was not enough to bring her solace from the summer heat. She probably should not have laid like that in the garden, stripped down to her chemise and stays, but her father was away on one of his mysterious trips only God knew where and Toussaint was busy inside the house. She would start looking for her in a moment, but for now Cosette stayed in the garden, enjoying the stillness and the taste of doing something forbidden. In a moment, she would have been back in her proper, ladylike clothes, but for now she would just enjoy the breeze on her skin.
From the stone bench where she laid, she could see the skin a snake had shed, half hidden in the tall grass. Sometimes she wished she could shed her skin too, and be born a completely new creature, a normal girl with a simple and clean past, not with her father’s half-said truths and the myriad of lies and unsaid words that Cosette always felt between them.
Cosette could feel her Papa’s immense love for her, and he always made sure she had everything she needed and wanted, but there was a melancholic sadness behind her eyes whenever she had dared to ask him about her mother, or who they were before the convent. The sadness in his eyes also appeared sometimes when they were not talking, and then he would just caress her cheek or pat her head. Cosette thought those were the moments in which she reminded him of her mother, but she couldn’t be sure.
One minute, just a minute before everything started again.
She almost could predict when Toussaint would start calling her name, and she would have to abandon her bench. A stone bench that was not comfortable at all, but, in that moment, was hers nonetheless.
5...
A crick in her back, this stone bench was really uncomfortable.
...4...
Leaves crinkling lightly in the breeze.
...3...
Someone chatting lightly in the street, their words muffled and confused by the greenery.
...2...
One of the windows opening and creaking slightly.
...1
“Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle Cosette! Where are you?”
“I’m here, Toussaint, I’m coming”.
Breakfast was a simple affair: tea, toast, butter, the fruit preserves she had helped Toussaint make the year before, Toussaint’s complaints about her grass-stained chemise.
It wasn’t the first time and it surely would not be the last time she had come home with grass-stained, rain-drenched or mud-soaked clothes.
Toussaint would fuss over her (less, if she had been outside with Papa), but then she wouldn’t chastise her too much, and then the next day, simple dress and boots in hand, she would be outside again, no matter the weather.
It was liberating, and one of the rare moments she felt really free.
Sometimes Papa would wake her early in the morning, and they would walk and walk on the outskirts of Paris, talk about nonsense or in comfortable silence, and then they would sit in a field and watch the sunrise.
When Papa was away on his mysterious trips, she would sneak out of her window, and watch dawn unfold on her own, or she would just lay in the garden, listening to the hundreds of sounds that nature made, like she had done that morning.
There, she wasn’t a proper young lady, but just legs for running and condensing breath and eyes to see the sun rise and set the sky on fire.
After breakfast, she was left to roam the hallways of the Rue Plumet house alone, while Toussaint tended at the house (and won’t listen if she offered her her help).
Today, it was one of those days in which nothing could satisfy Cosette’s need of excitement: everything she tried to play at the piano sounded dull, she found she did not have patience for embroidery, and the words she tried to write down in a letter for a friend were boring, soulless and uninspiring.
She had tried, after much coaxing of her father, to attend an afternoon tea at one of her ancient classmates’, but the conversation felt stiff and hollow, and she had never felt more distant from those girls than in that moment.
They had simple pasts, clear family histories, and they had never known hunger or soul-shattering fear. Their most scandalous family secret was some relative who had taken a lover or fled the continent, not a father – who you knew, deep in your soul, that wasn’t actually your father, but just an old man who had shown up like some Christmas miracle – with a dark and unspoken past, that sometimes vanished for days. Cosette felt she couldn’t talk about those things to other girls she had known at the convent, even if they were perfectly nice, and welcoming, and they had played and learnt and slept and ate together for many years.
Something had broken inside Cosette, and she had no idea what it was. So she had kept smiling at her old companions and nodding at the talk of dashing young men while sipping her tea.
Dashing young men were another subject she feared to breach, with Papa, with her convent-school acquaintances, or even with herself.
Papa wouldn’t even touch the subject from afar with a stick, and Cosette had the feeling he might straight up cover his ears if she started talking about embroidering her trousseau, or – God forbid! – about a hypothetical dashing young man she might have met. (She haven’t had the pleasure yet).
Her old schoolmates whispered excitedly about boys when the Sisters were not listening, and, when asked if she fancied anyone, she invented a nebulous neighbour to not feel left out.
But, if she had to be honest with herself, she cared more for Marie’s cheeks when they reddened in the sun or her freckles or the curve of her neck, or reading about Ruth and Naomi late at night, paying attention to those passages that the Sisters had skipped.
Later, when she and Papa had moved out in the world to the big house in Rue Plumet, in her lonely wanderings in the overgrown garden, she imagined it inhabited by fairies, elves and princesses. She saw them in the moss, in the woodbark, in the flights of the fireflies in the warm summer nights, in the countless different insects that populated the undergrowth, and that she spent hours and hours observing crouched on the ground. Papa had taught her some of their names while at the convent, and the ones she didn’t know, she did invent; she was never scared of them.
In her musings, she walked and skipped and ran through the garden, climbed the trees, hid between the branches; the moss-covered statues of the yesteryears were cursed princesses who thanked her for saving them from the curse that had befallen them, and admired her shining armour and how skilled she was with a sword.
Of course, they didn’t know the armour was a stained house dress, her magnificent cloak an old bedsheet, and her noble sword a dried branch.
The distant rumble of thunder shook her out of her thoughts: the weather had been so nice this morning, and yet a storm was approaching. Cosette decided it matched her humour better than the scorching sun from a while ago, and was glad that the plants would have something to drink after the summer drought.
She had been sitting at the piano, trying to play something thrilling and lively like the childhood memories she had conjured up in her mind, but her fingers kept going back to one monotonous note, a mirror of her boredom.
Maybe, if the rain came, she would have gotten out and watched it fall down and smell the earth and hear it plic-plocking down the leaves and listen to the birds flying home, their feathers ruffled...
When the first raindrops started to pour – big, fat droplets that made so much noise when they hit the ground – Cosette ran outside, laughing breathlessly, her surprised laugh, because she didn’t expect this reaction from just a drizzle of rain.
She thought herself calm, and collected, and pretty, and ladylike, and yet there she was standing, in the rain, in the dust that was slowly becoming mud, not caring about getting her hair or her dress wet, smiling and laughing, just happy to be alive.
The rain whispered in her ear that every moment of stasis could change, that the unexpected was just behind the corner, and that her boredom wasn’t meant to last forever.
There she was, in a new skin, polished by the rain, dancing and laughing and uncaring.
A ray of sunshine peeped through the clouds, making the rainfall look golden. And it was in that moment that Cosette noticed her , standing by the rusty garden gate, her hat low on her brow, her coat soaked through, watching bewildered this wild, weird girl that was dancing and laughing in that garden as she had gone mad.
Cosette had seen her sometimes, walking with that boy that looked at Cosette intensely. They didn’t look like well-assorted friends, but she supposed that she didn’t know enough about friendships of young waifish, hardened girls and romantic boys.
Now she was watching her at the gate, like a premonition, an unwilling prophet of joy and renewal.
Cosette hadn’t been so happy to see someone in a long time.
“Hello!”, she said, approaching the gate, her smile beaming. “It’s finally raining, isn’t it? Do you want to come in?”