Begin Again, a the way we live now fanfic

Begin Again

By Laura Schiller

Based on: The Way We Live Now

"I've been spending the last eight months
thinking all love ever does
is break, and burn, and end …
but on a Wednesday, in a café,
I watched it begin again."
- Taylor Swift, "Begin Again"

A coffee-house in Paris was the last place Marie Melmotte had expected to meet a colleague of her late father's, but she found herself surprisingly glad to see him. In a city she barely recognized, riding in a hired carriage down the same streets where she had once run barefoot, seeing Mr. Breghert again felt like a touch of home. There he was, dressed in black as usual, large and quiet and comfortable-looking. Like an old armchair, she had once thought, pitying Georgiana Longestaffe from her heart. But I've forgotten what a kindly smile he has.

Forgetting every rule of etiquette, she jumped up from her seat and waved.

"Miss Melmotte." Mr. Breghert's smile widened as he came to stand in front of her table. He took her hand and bowed over it, a gentleman greeting a lady. Even after several years of wealth, she wondered if she would ever get used to that.

"How do you do, Mr. Breghert?"

"Quite well, thank you."

"Please, sit down. So I take it this is your honeymoon?" she asked cheerfully. "How is Georgiana? Is she coming … here … ?"

The sudden shadow passing over his face, and the way he lowered his eyes, made her falter. Merde, she cursed internally. Now you've put your foot in it.

"Then … you haven't heard?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Heard what?"

"I am travelling on business. My engagement to Miss Longestaffe is at an end." He spoke in the same measured, formal manner she remembered, as if he were discussing the weather or a fluctuation in the stock market, but the look in his eyes was one she had seen often enough: in her own mirror, the day after she had learned that Felix did not love her.

"Oh. Oh, Mr. Breghert, I'm so sorry."

"It was for the best," he assured her, warding off her pity with a stern look. "Better for us both to realize it now instead of later."

"But – how? I mean, why – a gentleman like you, she would have been lucky - " Inarticulate with sympathy and anger, she blushed tomato-red as she realized the fauxpas into which she had stumbled. She raked her hands through her curly hair and shook her head.

"Oh, Lord. Forgive me. I know it's none of my business. I'm as bad as Maman."

To her surprise, Mr. Breghert actually laughed: a low, pleasant rumble that shook the table between them.

"As a matter of fact, Miss Melmotte, I find your forthrightness refreshing," he said. "It's a quality rarely found in the world of finance, unfortunately."

If you work with many men like Papa, I imagine so, she thought wryly, but even the eight-month-old memories of her father's death could not prevent her from smiling back. No one had ever paid her such a compliment since … since Felix. By Jove, he'd said, beaming at her idea of running away together. There's more to you than meets the eye!

How she had treasured those words then. How dull, how commonplace they sounded now.

"As for Miss Longestaffe … " Mr. Breghert leaned back in his chair, then forward again, as if the memory made him uneasy in his buttoned-up suit. "It turns out that her expectations of a marriage were rather unlike mine. When I suggested that she meet my first wife's children, her reaction was … it made our differences very clear."

Marie's bright, peculiar mind filled in the silence as clearly as if he had said it himself. She heard Georgiana's horrified whisper all over again: Mr. Breghert is Jewish! He speaks of it openly, without shame!

"I always knew Georgiana was a fool," she snarled, forcing her high-pitched voice as low as it could go to express her contempt. "If you ask me, you're well rid of her."

Mr. Breghert looked as if he were about to protest, but a waitress interrupted them both by delivering Marie's bowl of café au lait. Marie jumped. Absorbed in the conversation, she hadn't even heard the woman approach.

"Bonjour, monsieur!" chirped the waitress, dropping a curtsy in Mr. Breghert's direction. "May I bring you something as well?"

Marie translated this into English, pushed her menu across the table, and was startled yet again when Mr. Breghert replied in accented, but very clear French: "Un café noir, s'il vous plait."

"Très bien," said the waitress, then moved on to the next table.

With her gone, the tension that had momentarily faded came rushing back. Marie swirled her bowl, watching the milk dissolve inside the coffee like clouds after a storm. It was a morning drink she had ordered in the late afternoon, but like so many polite conventions she had never been taught, the rule had little meaning for her. One of the few rules she did try to follow, however – unlike her father – was never to hurt anybody's feelings if she could help it. She could have kicked herself for insulting Mr. Breghert's former betrothed, no matter how true her words and how honest her anger on the disappointed banker's behalf. When Hetta Carbury had said the same things about Felix, she hadn't listened either.

"Well, enough about me," said her companion, sweeping his hand across the table as if to sweep away the subject. "How are you, Miss Melmotte? It was a sad situation you were in when last we met."

Her thoughts flashed back to Augustus Melmotte's funeral, to the gleaming black coffin and elaborate marble tomb she had paid for herself, showing more filial respect for the old scoundrel in death than in life. To the charged silence after the ceremony, all those men bottling up their rage about their wasted investments, broken only by a shrill wail from her stepmother. Lord Nidderdale's round face sagging with pity and regret. Mr. Breghert's warm handshake. Those awkward moments at his office, followed by relief when she realized that at least one of her father's creditors had no interest in squeezing any more blood from the Melmotte stone. No one can touch your money, Miss Melmotte. You will still be a rich young lady.

"Well enough," she answered with a shrug. "I've been lucky, I suppose. The only thing worse than landing back in the gutter would have been landing there alone."

"True." He nodded. "Your income is sufficient, is it not? And you still have your mother to look after you."

"Stepmother," she corrected, no longer as annoyed by his assumption as she might have been a year ago. "And mostly I look after her. She has been so very poor most of her life, being a lady disagrees with her. And then when Papa died … she was very fond of him, you see."

"Where is she now?"

"Taking a nap at our hotel, just across the street. I left a note to tell her where I am."

Of all the strange developments after Augustus Melmotte's death, this new alliance with her stepmother was one of the strangest. Ever since a six-year-old Marie, heartbroken over her mother's disappearance and bitterly resentful of her Papa's replacement wife, had slipped a dead rat into Jeanne Melmotte's right shoe, they had been locked into an on-and-off domestic feud which only Augustus' heavy hand could keep in check. It had taken Marie years to realize that Jeanne, raised out of a Parisian brothel into the shark-infested waters of the Austrian and English elite, might be just as lost and miserable as her stepdaughter. She was glad to have ended it now, if only because they had no one but each other.

Still – Jeanne was hardly what Marie would call good company. When was the last time she had felt so contented, just to sit and drink coffee and talk to someone? It must have been with Felix, she thought, with the echo of old pain. But what did we talk about? How did we spend time together, really, besides kissing and plotting our elopement?

For the first time, it occurred to her (with an uncomfortable blush) that she really had been lucky to escape.

She grinned at Mr. Breghert, giddy with a sudden sense of freedom. The ancient platitude was right: there were many more fish in the sea than Sir Felix Carbury. An entire ocean of possibilities was open to her now. And Hetta was right, too: not all men were like her brother. One of them was sitting right across from her.

"Does something amuse you, Miss Melmotte?"

"No." She giggled. "But I've had an idea. Maman and I will go and see Mozart's Figaro on Saturday. Would you like to join us? If your work allows it, of course."

"Unfortunately, I have a previous engagement."

Marie sighed noiselessly into her coffee.

"A friend of mine is hosting a Sabbath meal that night," he explained, with the same matter-of-factness about his heritage that had made Georgiana so uneasy. "He did tell me I was welcome to bring guests. Perhaps you would care to join me? You and your stepmother, that is."

Was there a spark of a challenge in his steady dark eyes? Was he waiting to see if she would recoil? A fine hypocrite I'd be if I did that, she grumbled to herself. If Papa had a sou for every time our birth was sneered at, he could have made his fortune without fraud.

Growing up with Augustus Melmotte, who would knock her to the ground as soon as embrace her, she had never fully grapsed the concept of personal space. Therefore when she reached across the table to squeeze Mr. Breghert's hand, it felt like quite a natural thing to do.

"Thank you," she told him firmly. "I – we'd be glad to come."