The dull clop clop of the horse's hooves as they pounded the packed dirt road underfoot echoed in the young Miss Jules' ears as she made her way slowly towards the city. An evening spent in rest with her family in the country had turned out, once again, to be far too short, and as she considered the long winter months ahead, the prospect of returning to the Opera became increasingly less desirable. But then, the thought of turning back to join her ailing cluster of brothers and sisters hardly seemed like a holiday, either.
Leaning her forehead against the frosted glass window, the petite dancer watched as a light dusting of snow covered the treetops that hemmed in on all sides. In the distance, a pillar of ashes and smoke polluted the sky and turned the pristine white of the winter sky overhead a dreary shade of gray. Traveling alone had ever been a bore for Miss Jules, and anything to while away the hours between St. Denis and Paris would have been a welcome interlude.
As she leaned back into the dull, aged velvet of the public carriage's ancient seats Miss Jules caught, out of the corner of her eye, an unexpected sight. Far from the monotone pattern of scenery that had been shifting from spruce to pine, pine to spruce for the first leg of the journey, the land outside of the carriage window had suddenly opened up to reveal a small, sparse clearing. Descending at a decline from the road above, the grass seemed more heavily coated in a blanket of frozen precipitation than the surrounding forest, making the heavy contrast of a red woolen scarf all the more noticeable.
With a gasp of surprise, Miss Jules pounded on the carriage roof and braced herself as the driver reigned the horses into an abrupt stand-still. Monsieur Bevierre, the coach master, was grumbling loudly in his deep, northern accent, and as she climbed cautiously down the steep metal steps outside the doorway, demanded to know "what the trouble was".
Announcing a stiff foot and the need to stretch for a moment's time, Bevierre rattled the harnesses in silent frustration and turned to survey the opposite roadside with feigned interest. Taking advantage of the moment's solitude, Miss Jules scampered down the decline and fell to her knees at the spot where she had first seen the stray garment. Searching further, her breath caught in her throat to find that the scarf was not, in fact, a misplaced item but was attached to the neck of a young woman laying sprawled atop the frigid earth. Placing a hand before the girl's cracked lips, Miss Jules assured herself that she did not behold a corpse and, without a second's thought, hoisted the slight frame onto her shoulder.
Despite a groan (of pain or surprise, Miss Jules could not discern), her ward made no resistance to her rescuer's best efforts to hoist her up onto the road. Opening her mouth to call out to Bevierre, Jules was silenced by a fleeting glimpse of the wrist beneath the stranger's damp coat. Torn between the desire to do right and the human instinct that urged her to leave the girl for dead (she was, after all, only barely alive), Jules avoided the inquiries of the carriage master and lifted the surprisingly light body into the carriage before climbing in herself. Before shutting the carriage door, she called out to Bevierre, her voice all but lost in the brisk November wind, "All set here!"
Unable to draw her gaze away from the still form of the young woman lying curled on the seat opposite her, Miss Jules wondered after her own soundness of mind and, heaving a sigh of exhaustion after the night's surprising adventure, set to work deciding what to do with her odd, new traveling companion.
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With the carriage parked neatly against the curb of the Place de la Bastille, Monsieur Bevierre leaned over the edge of his raised driver's bench, extending his gloved palm to Miss Jules as she retrieved her luggage and hurried off into the night. Beside her, Bevierre noticed the slouched form of a second young woman, and had to remind himself again that surely he had picked up the final passenger along the way to Paris. It had been a long journey, after all.