The Secret Alchemy of the Forbidden Red

The scarlet fabric burns against Alouette’s palm: crushed pomegranate, wet cherry heart, forbidden as spilled blood. In the gray hours before dawn, its color is relentless, casting off the shadows. Even the rough walls of their two-room cottage seem to draw closer, as if pulled by its radiance.

She should put it back. A dutiful daughter would return it to her father’s recipe book before he wakes, but she doesn’t move. Something in her refuses to yield—a quiet defiance that has been growing stronger with each passing season. She traces the dye-drenched weave with her fingertips, not just admiring its beauty but determined to unlock its mysteries.

Outside, the village of Saint-Marcel stirs like a beast waking, its soot-blackened houses crouched along the banks of the Bièvre. The river slides past, thick with dye runoff, factory waste, and the slick remnants of tanneries. It’s black as ink, choking the early air with its stench.

The Bièvre isn’t anything like the Seine. It’s not a river for poets or queens. It’s a worker’s river, a whore’s river. But it is also a river of power. Below its poisoned surface lies an alchemy of minerals, the last remnants of the deep past, when all of France lay beneath a warm, shallow sea.

As much as she hates the filth of the Bièvre, Alouette can also see a flicker of possibility. While the guild masters hoard their knowledge behind high walls, the river offers its secrets freely to anyone patient enough to listen. Anyone stubborn enough to resist the rules that bind women like her to numbing lives of labor and service to others. She’s collected those secrets one by one, kept them close like hidden treasures no one can take from her, knowing that no matter what others see, the river can still work surprising magic. Magic powerful enough perhaps—perhaps—to change her life.

THE SCARLET IN Alouette’s hand does not belong to her or to her father, though he is one of the most talented master dyers at the Gobelin dyeworks. By law, and by birth, members of nobility alone own the right to wear such color, the clergy to sanctify it, the Gobelins to control its making. Even her father’s mastery, hard-earned as it is, belongs to the guild, locked away in ledgers and palaces where guild wardens like Monsieur Laferrière decide who may create and who must simply serve.

France enforces its sumptuary laws with precision. Alouette’s own clothes, coarse and dull, mark her station—the colors of toil, of silence. What would it feel like to wear scarlet or gold openly, boldly, she has always wanted to know, for all the world to see? For beauty to be hers, not just made by her hands but claimed by them?

She tucks the fabric into her sleeve. Her father will create another. This one is hers.

THE FIRST BUCKET breaks the river’s surface. Its foul odor attacks her nostrils—rotting vegetation, dye runoff, and something even more rancid that she’d rather not name. Backbreaking for anyone, the work is doubly so for an eighteen-year-old girl, slight as a willow branch. Alouette’s muscles strain as she fixes the sloshing buckets to her wooden yoke, a sharp pain lancing through her lower spine. And yet no one is on hand to help lighten her burden. No one is coming to save her.

Others appear through the morning haze, their own yokes creaking. They give her a wide berth—a madwoman’s daughter. Their whispers trail like smoke: how she has her mother’s quick hands, the same way of singing to herself as she works. What they don’t say is worse. How Henriette, too, began by staring into the river’s depths, searching for something no one else could see, until the searching consumed her.

If Alouette had been born a son, she would be apprenticed to her father, René Voland, encouraged to rise as he has through the ranks of the guild to master dyer. Instead, she hauls water, scours wool. At the river’s edge, she pauses. Through the lingering miasma, the Gobelin estate sits behind a high wall that seals off the family from the wretchedness that surrounds them. Bisque-colored turrets thrust into the sky like a hard, clean slap of fortune and refinement. Two stone lions guard the gate, their empty eyes fixed on their domain.

Later, in the washing room, steam rises in choking clouds as she pours her load into the great vat atop the furnace. Each pound of wool requires ten gallons of water heated to scalding. The coarse skeins are greasy to the touch, matted with dirt and lanolin. She works them with practiced care—too much agitation and they’ll felt. Gray-brown bubbles form on the surface, building to an oily sheen.

And there, in that most unlovely of mirrors, she catches a glimpse of herself and frowns. At eighteen, she has a face that is thin and careworn, her pale gray eyes red-rimmed from the acrid fumes. Only her hair might be considered pretty, she thinks, a deep shade of russet that she wears in thick braids coiled and pinned at the base of her neck. Her mother’s hair—the one thing apart from stigma that she left Alouette before vanishing from the village twelve years ago.

What could her mother have been thinking, Alouette often wonders, to choose a name that means “skylark” while understanding full well how fettered and grueling her daughter’s life would be? Could she be any less like a bird if she lived at the bottom of the sea? With no talent for singing or any reason to try? A lark can travel anywhere. But Alouette has never been free.

“Girl.” Madame Poirier’s voice pricks like a needle. “You’re falling behind.” The overseer stands in the doorway, her silhouette stark through the haze of steam. Even her drab brown dress seems to reprimand, to remind them of their place.

Alouette’s fingers clench beneath the water’s surface. “The wool needs gentling. Unless you’d rather it felted.”

A dangerous silence follows. Then: “Your father may be a master dyer, but you’re nothing but a washerwoman. Remember that.”

The words should sting. Instead, they crystallize something in Alouette’s mind. When Madame Poirier’s footsteps finally recede, Alouette pulls the fabric from her sleeve. The color blooms in the dim steam-lit air, refusing to cower.

In a just world, its brilliance would never be caged and hoarded by the guild or by the Gobelins with their haughty stone lions and high, mocking walls. And her hands—her hands wouldn’t be made solely to scrub, to lift, to serve. But to create.