Tweaked my timeline a little bit. Shh, don't tell. Also I realized where this was going and bumped up the rating. I'll probably have to bump it up again later.

In 1806, Monsieur Gagnier fell in his orchard, and, having less luck than I had had several years before, died of his wounds. Because he and his wife had often provided food for the inn, Servane sent me to the Gagnier farm to help. I heard her tell the farmer's widow that I was ten years old.

Madame Gagnier was a surly woman with broad shoulders and a serious set to her mouth who took on her husband's outdoor jobs with ease while her elderly sister oversaw the household. When I first arrived, I only ran between them with meals in baskets, but then I learned to help Mademoiselle Duchamps with the sewing, for her eyesight did not allow it, and branched out to other household chores as the old woman's faculties eroded away. The widow Gagnier only took slightly more notice of me than she did the horses, but I was given my own pallet in the attic and a permanent place at the table. As I stared up at the dusty beams each night from my place on the floor, I thanked the God to whom I had heard strangers pray for my good fortune.

As Mademoiselle Duchamps's age advanced, she began to lose some of her wits and mistake me for a daughter - whether to herself or her sister, I could not say. She would hobble along the house a step behind me, pushing herself forward with a tall wooden cane as gnarled as her thin fingers, and good-naturedly rap the stick against my shins if I erred in any of our shared duties.

It was old Mademoiselle Duchamps who taught me that I needed to mind my appearance. She bundled me in her own dresses until I realized for the first time that I needed to protect my bare flesh from something more ominous than the cold breeze off the sea. In the evenings she would sit before the fire, swaddled in quilts, and I would work on taking in the seams of her dresses to fit her withering body as she spun horrible tales of the dangers of handsome young men. Even now, the weight of a young man's gaze on my back evokes the sound of a rustling fire and the rasping voice of Mademoiselle Duchamps. Beauty, she would tell me, attracts handsome young men the way a henhouse attracts foxes: all good women must protect themselves from attack, for a young man, like a fox, will find a way in if there is but the slightest gap in the fence, and he will destroy everything inside.

I was bringing a basket of goods to Servane at the inn one day when she commented on the state of my dress. I was wearing a simple white frock with long sleeves and an ankle-length skirt, a yellowing fichu tied around my neck like a shawl. It was normal to wear dresses with high collars in Mademoiselle Duchamps's presence, so I had never before considered how drastic a change these formalities must make from the half-wild creature with the tangled hair who had drifted around this very room on chubby bare legs. When I explained that the garments had been a gift from Madame Gagnier's spinster sister, Servane had rolled her eyes and nodded as though that information answered a question she had not asked. It wasn't until months later that she told me that Mademoiselle Duchamps had been engaged once in her youth, but had fallen pregnant some time before the wedding was arranged. The suitor had disappeared at the news, and the unwanted baby was never born.

This knowledge did not change the effect her preaching had on my views of the world; in fact, it proved her right.

After four peaceful years in the service of the sisters, Mademoiselle Duchamps died and Madame Gagnier sold the farm and remarried an aging politician who lived near the city center. I hung about until the last of the livestock were gone, but the new family had three strong young sons; even if they had needed my hands, I dared not linger in their presence after what I had been taught. I took up a suitcase full of Mademoiselle Duchamps's old clothes and moved back to the inn.

I had grown. At the age of fourteen it was no longer suitable for me to curl up at the hearth that had been my childhood home, and I had grown unused to sleeping on the ground. As Servane had no extra bed for me, I took to sleeping in the loft above the stables, plucking straw from my long hair each morning before I arranged it atop my head in the same simple knot I had done daily for Mademoiselle Duchamps after her fingers were too twisted to do it herself.

I was very nearly a young woman by then, and life at the inn chafed. I took long trips on foot to neighboring farms, but no one had need of a girl's help and none would take me on. For the first time in my life, a knot of dread haunted my thoughts as I began to realize that Montreuil-sur-Mer would no longer support me. I did not know where to go next. I could not imagine a life that was not shadowed by the city's walls.

I was fifteen when the strange girl came to the inn with the answer.

The night I met the stranger who would change my life, I was seated on a stool before the fire, my pale green dress tucked carefully around my ankles lest a fragment of my stockings peek out, with a basket full of mending at my side. Servane had let it be known that I was skilled with a needle, and patrons of the inn often slipped me a few coins in exchange for a quick patch job on this or that travel-weary garment. I was repinning the ragged hem on a quilted petticoat when I heard a sharp, wry voice say, "Well, there's a curious face for a spinster!"

I looked up and immediately felt a blush spread across my cheeks when I caught the speaker's eye.

She seemed a woman grown, though I know now that she was only three years older than me. She had dark olive skin and long, black hair that was only partially done up atop her head, most of it falling loose to her waist. If this was indecent, she was heedless of it. The neck of her dress was not quite low enough to be daring, but it was enough to make me avert my eyes to her knee, where she bounced a babe with curly black hair who could only have been hers. The child gurgled happily at me, its black eyes winking, and I could not help but smile at it.

"His name is Djemz," the mother seemed to say; it took me a moment to realize that she had said the English name "James." My expression must have been quizzical, for a corner of her mouth tucked up into a smirk and she explained, "The name was a gift from his father. I have been in England, you know."

Something in her laughing gaze scoured the bare flesh of my face. I nodded, flustered, and tucked my chin against my collar, trying hard to focus on my sewing despite the weight of her presence.

But the black-haired stranger had not finished with me. "And where are you from?" she asked. I felt like her voice cut smoothly through the chatter of the other guests, though in fact she was sitting at the table nearest my stool and it is doubtful that the others even heard.

I shook my head without lifting my eyes. "Here."

"That very hearth?" the girl asked sarcastically. "What, were you born in front of that fire?"

I nodded.

"Oh," said the girl, letting the acidity seep out of her voice. "Really?"

I nodded again, jabbing my finger with the needle and watching with chagrin as a spot of blood stained the tattered petticoat.

"Would you at least look at me?" snapped the stranger. "You're being very rude. I'm trying to converse with you"

Embarrassed, I slid my needle into the damaged petticoat and folded it carefully, returning it to the basket. "I'm sorry. I'm unused to conversation."

"Oh, speak up," she huffed.

I lifted my head then, and folded my hands in my lap as I returned her gaze. I had hoped to keep my expression empty, but I felt the heat of my cheeks and knew that she could tell she had flustered me.

To my surprise, her smile was genuine now. "Is that little innkeeper your mother?" she asked, jerking her chin toward the kitchen. I could hear Servane on the other side of the door, grumbling into a pot of stew.

"My mother died when I was born," I answered, unable to keep eye contact with the stranger and looking instead at the child in her lap. A long string of spittle had slipped from his gap-toothed mouth and was threatening to drop from his chin to his dress.

The girl nodded sympathetically. "It's not an easy passage." She ruffled a hand through her infant's black curls. "Is it, James?" she asked, her voice going falsetto. The child smiled widely, and the string of spittle snapped, leaving a dark spatter on the rose-colored gown. He burbled happily in reply.

I returned the child's smile, and he let out a shriek of laughter that his mother shushed under a few idle glares from the other patrons.

"So you're an orphan who was born in this inn and never left, is that it?" the girl asked me. "What do they call you, then?"

"Fantine."

She snorted. "Aimée. I'm going back to Paris, where I was born. My husband was studying at the university there when we met, and he took me back to Surrey to marry me."

"My congratulations," I said humbly, noting how pale the child's skin was compared to his mother's. I cast a subtle glance around the inn, but saw no one who might have been his father.

"Oh, enough of that," she grumbled. Her dark eyes traveled up and down my body then, a probing cunning in them that made me cross my arms across my stomach. "I suppose, dressed like that, you haven't got a sweetheart?"

Wordless again, I could only shrug, feeling the heat blossom over my cheeks again. I was not blind to the way women allowed young men to court them, but that whole sphere of life seemed foreign and stressful. I had no idea how to enter it, and once I walked among them I would have no idea how to conduct myself. The best option was to remain where I was comfortable, walking the familiar floors of Servane's inn.

"You needn't put on such airs, Fantine," the stranger said, impatient. "We're all women here, lest you fear my James."

The infant shrieked giddily at the sound of his name, prompting a giggle from his mother Aimée and a few hisses from others around the room.

"Have you any pressing business this evening, little Fantine?" Aimée asked conspiratorially. When I shook my head, she shifted the child to her hip and stood in a swift, easy motion. "Then would you be so good as to accompany me to my room as I put my child to bed? I admit I'm starved for female company. Since I left Paris I've had naught but my husband and his awful scholar friends to amuse me."

I agreed, and followed her up the stairs, the infant grinning at me over her shoulder the entire time.

It was true that I was not accustomed to conversation at that age: Servane was terse at best, Madame Gagnier had barely spared a grunt for me in the space of four years, and Mademoiselle Duchamps liked nothing more than to launch into fragmented speeches punctuated by half-remembered anecdotes that required little participation from the listener. I had always preferred to reflect rather than project, content to simply absorb others' words and opinions instead of forming my own. I was a blissful shadow of a creature then, accepting the ideas that were passed along to me as unquestioningly as I accepted scraps of food. I have never been one to argue or protest my fate. When Aimée told me to come with her, I followed obediently.

Servane's inn was not large; most of the travelers who passed through Montreuil-sur-Mer on their way to England preferred to continue on to Calais before nightfall, so she never had more than a handful of guests sleeping under her roof on a given night. Aimée led me up the second flight of stairs to the upper floor, where a long row of tiny garret rooms were meant to be reserved for a few servants, and which Servane sometimes rented to guests with smaller purses as a courtesy.

Aimée was staying in the chamber nearest the stairs. It was a cramped room with cracked plaster walls and a wide bed covering most of the floor. Atop a chest of drawers that had been backed into a corner was a battered basket filled with blankets; this was where Aimée put her baby James. I caught sight of a heavy suitcase pushed beneath the bed, part of a trouser leg emerging where it had been improperly closed. It must have been the property of her Englishman.

Aimée gestured toward the bed, so I obediently sat at the edge and watched as she fussed with the baby, scraping the dried spittle from his face and congratulating him on the cleanliness of his dress. I waited for her to take notice of me again, watching as her dark hair caught the last of the day's light from the tiny window above the bed. I didn't quite dare sink into the straw mattress, so I braced myself at its edge, forcing my spine to remain straight lest I looked like I was taking advantage of her hospitality.

It did not take long for the infant to settle into his basket, his shouts of laughter winding down to occasional sighs. Aimée waited until he was quiet before she turned away and slumped her shoulders with a histrionic groan of relief. "I'm afraid I can't recommend motherhood," she said good-naturedly, "unless you've a household full of nursemaids and servants to keep you afloat. I don't know how anyone does this, especially with more than one child!" She threw herself onto the mattress next to me, kicking off her shoes. "But you're in no danger of motherhood, are you, Enfantine?" she laughed. "You're still a child yourself! Tell me, has no one ever tried courting the spinster urchin of Montreuil-sur-Mer?"

I couldn't help but smile at the epithet. "I'm afraid I don't travel in the right circles for such things."

She groaned and seized me by the sleeve, tugging me backwards until I gave up on respecting her space and let her pull me down next to her. I turned onto my stomach, propping my chin in my hands, while Aimée remained on her back. She was watching me with a warm smile; her teeth seemed very white against her dark skin. "You're beautiful, little one," she said. "Haven't men been telling you as much for years?"

I shook my head; my cheeks were growing warm again.

"They will. It won't be long until you'll have to shove through a crowd of suitors every time you leave the door!" Aimée proclaimed.

After Mademoiselle Duchamps's stories, the image her words evoked was horrific. A shiver worked its way up my spine like the touch of unwelcome fingers.

Aimée noticed. "Someone has thoroughly poisoned your thoughts, little spinster! You should bask in the adoration of men!" she laughed, stretching languidly across the mattress. "After all, it can really pay off, if you know how to use it. Especially with a pale little creature like you as bait. They'd try to pass you off as a proper lady. You'd be feted and pampered and wrapped in the finest clothes if you let the right man claim you."

I shook my head again, opening my hands so that I was peering at her through my fingers.

"In time, then," she ceded. "Who taught you to be so afraid, little Enfantine?"

"A woman who is dead." I went into no further detail; it didn't seem right to evoke the ghosts that had haunted Mademoiselle Duchamps when she herself had been laid to rest.

"Seems like she meant bring you into the grave with her!"

I glanced toward the door as I wondered why she had brought me here; Aimée noticed this too. She rolled onto her side and threw an arm around my shoulders. "Forgive me, sweet Fantine! I am as unused to conversation as you! I never left the house in Surrey, you know. And I speak very little English, so I had no one but my husband for company - and my James, when he was born."

"Perhaps I should let you rest until morning," I ventured. "We can speak again after we've had some sleep."

But when I started to pull away, she tightened her grip on my shoulders and all the bravado dropped from her expression.

"Madame?"

"Please, Fantine," she murmured, her voice grave. "Could you stay here for the night?"

I searched her face, but there was no hint of insincerity in her round black eyes: I could have sworn I even saw a shadow of something darker than worry lingering there. "Madame?" I said again.

"Please," she repeated. "My husband- my husband went out and hasn't returned. I don't like- I'm afraid of staying here alone. Please."

What else could I do?

When Aimée saw that I would agree, everything about her relaxed; as she stripped down to her shift and crawled beneath the blankets she chattered away about her friends in Paris who would be delighted at her return. I wasn't listening, focused instead on what I should do if her husband were to return in the middle of the night and find me in his place, and whether I should take off my dress in front of this stranger or sleep fully clothed.

In the end it made no difference. I kept the green dress and laid rigidly beneath the sheets, forcing myself to occupy as little space as possible while I stared up at the sloped ceiling; Aimée, meanwhile, hugged the pillow beneath her head and continued to prattle blithely until she drifted off to sleep mid-sentence.

It was the first night I had ever spent in a bed, and despite the comfort of it, I could not sleep.