When M. Madeleine came home, he was loathe to find his young housekeeper sobbing in despair on a little kitchen stool, which she had dragged beneath the elm in the walled patio. A bowl of half shucked peas was set at her feet, forgotten in the grief that had overtaken her.

In the year that he had employed young Fantine in his home - perhaps not so young, if one weren't charitable, though Madeleine always had thought generously upon her - she'd never appeared lost. She'd proven a hearty, indefatigable worker, unafraid of the countless tasks the nuns who also lodged in his home put to her, often going about her chores with a quiet song buzzing about her like the woodlarks that roosted outside his study window.

As Madeleine approached the woman weeping in the kitchen garden, he hesitated, thinking he ought to give her privacy. But she looked up, and he could not turn away from her grief-contorted face. Wretchedly, she said to him,

"Oh! M. Madeleine, are you home from your business so soon? I haven't finished the silverware - Sister Perpetue asked me to polish it - but no matter, I'll go to it now. Please excuse me. The sun has set too quickly, has it not?"

And as she went inside and to the cupboard, some strange thought compelled Madeleine to follow her inside, and it was in the narrow pantry that he discovered the horrible concerns that had been plaguing the woman for the entire year of her employ.

Her child, Cosette, had been lodged with a couple in Montfermeil for four years. Four years! A travesty against nature to keep a mother separated from her child for twice over the child's lifetime. At his exclamation, Fantine dropped her head in shame, and Madeleine restrained his reaction.

Stirring the stove, Fantine assured him that she was grateful to God that Monsieur Madeleine happened to be in the factory the day another worker made voice the acts she held against Fantine's character - that M. Madeleine was good enough to take her as a servant in his own home, despite the implications - but he waved a hand, quieting her recitation of the past. In Montreuil-sur-Mer he was M. Madeleine; she didn't know he'd long abandoned Jean Valjean.

"But Monsieur," she said, "it was all true. I have no husband, no one cares for dear Cosette except her mother. I cannot go back to my father's house, they think I've married a fur trader and gone to Canada - I cannot tell them the truth."

"Why don't you bring the child here?" he said. "This house has room enough for her. I shall instruct the nuns that an innocent child does not bear the sins of the mother, and has every right to be educated and brought up under God's loving gaze."

Astonished, in assent to his generosity, Fantine began to weep again, and Madeleine left her to her dishes. To leave her child behind was a terrible loss, certainly; to wait a year, protracted agony. Fantine wrote letters, he knew, because the nuns wrote them for her and read her the replies. He hadn't questioned female affairs, reasoning that if Fantine had a need, the nuns would present it to him. The gap in communication, now, pierced his heart with a stab a bit like ice and a bit like fear. He recalled an ache he had thought had long turned to stone. Memories swelled of the love and protection he once doled like sous upon his sister and her children.

It was not lack of transportation that kept Fantine from collecting her child, but the content of the letters. They claimed Cosette was often sick - of what illness? Fantine didn't know. They needed money for medicine - Fantine didn't know what type. The biggest stone they'd placed around her neck was the 400 franc ransom, a claim for a bill totted up over two years' wasting. Quite a lucky child to hover so close to death, growing increasingly ill, for two years solid, and so caring a country doctor to always procure the best and most expensive medicines to save her.

"Oh, Monsieur," she said desperately as she showed him the greasy, blotted papers. "Since I've come to live with you, I've had enough money to cover her bills, but not enough to pay back what I owe. I try to save - I buy nothing for myself, nothing. I live on kitchen scraps and bread heels."

Madeleine saw with cleared eyes that the fabric of her dress was thin at the elbows, that the tie of her little, white cap was frayed despite its mending. The blue of her eyes was too bright, her cheekbones too high, and her hands shook in her work.

"I shall pay it," Madeleine said. "I shall go to Montfermeil and collect your daughter, and put these innkeepers to satisfaction."

"But Monsieur," she warned, "I think nothing shall satisfy them."

They would. Fantine would be free of the cancer of these innkeepers, and Cosette would come home, in whatever state he found her.

Jean Valjean wrapped the sleeping Cosette in a blanket as they rode in the back of his rented carriage, and he thought how she resembled a smaller, softer, but no more innocent version of her mother. Both mother and child had seen the worst of human avarice, had been used as stock.

No more.

The girl's narrow shoulder was birdlike under his arm, her elbow a knob no more significant than a walnut in his palm, but her warm breath as she sighed into his chest ensured she was healthy and alive. Not a sick or weak child at all. He held the doll he had bought her on his knee, and in her sleep, she wound her fingers into the doll's horsehair golden ringlets. If Madeleine had had any legal right to it, he'd have taken the other wretched creatures trying to survive in the Thénardier household, as well.

But for now, some soft warmth beat inside him, a comfort and tranquility. A kind of care for something small and vulnerable, who trusted him immediately, unquestioned. He realized, with a start of fear, that it was his heart.

One's work honors God, he thought, by bringing others to honor. For eight years after leaving prison, his life began anew; he devoted his work and his fortune to elevating every life he could touch to the kind of employ the leads to independence and dignity. With every soul saved from desperation, from ignorance, fear, poverty, unemployment, he felt his own darkness of soul lightened just a bit. He wasn't happy, but he sought salvation.

He realized now, he hadn't had an impassioned feeling since the day he'd been sent, screaming, into prison.

Fantine's child slept beside him, her fingers coming to grasp his thumb as if to ensure he held her through her dreams, and Valjean was warm.

Fantine thrived with her daughter by her side. The little girl was sweet and smart, eager to help, and gentle in her play.

One mild evening, after supper, Valjean was stirred from his novel when the sound of high, cheery cries in the dewy garden reached his window. He parted the curtain and lifted the sash to watch Fantine and Cosette knee-deep in the bushy lavender that grew half wild in the walled garden. Fantine sat on a white, iron bench with a bit of darning in her lap, watching Cosette chase the darting, green dots of light that were the fireflies. Valjean watched them, smelling the spring twilight, listening to the chirr of the cicadas, watching Cosette's fair head bob and weave among the white and blue blossoms. Fantine's high, light voice carried to his window.

"Yes, almost - no, it's gone over there! Quickly, Cosette! Oh, my darling, you've nearly caught it! What a dear you are! My swift and beautiful girl."

He lost time untold watching them. After they went inside, he stared past the garden wall, until the diamond dot of Venus had risen above the trees.

For her part, Fantine felt a similar growing affection for M. Madeleine, which is to say, she couldn't define her affection for him any more clearly than he could his own.

She was no longer a maid, or a girl, so he being no longer young was a point in his favor. She had learned not to dare dream for her childish expectations; she had come to admire aspects of male character that were deeper and more stalwart than a fair face and poet's word's. M. Madeleine was good, caring, and generous, while the man who led to Cosette's existence had done what he had done through selfishness and carelessness.

Most pointedly, M. Madeleine was her employer, which ended any consideration she thought right to give him. Fantine was illiterate, and she was ignorant, but she was not stupid; above all, she felt great gratitude at the serendipity that had brought Monsieur the Mayor into her former employment at just the moment when she was being dismissed.

And now he had brought her Cosette.

That evening, when she laid his supper at the table, he asked her to stay and eat with him. Fantine was confused, and a bit frightened. M. Madeleine asked she sit at the spot to his right, and served her the food she had just prepared on the platters she had just carried from the kitchen. She wondered if she was being dismissed, if she could ask a good reference from the nuns. She sat, trembling, sending her own, private wish heavenward during the blessing.

M. Madeleine wasn't dismissing her, nor was he requesting an audience to speak about the household, or some trouble Cosette's play had caused. He wasn't requesting she perform some new job in or out of the house, but of course he wouldn't - the nuns gave Fantine her orders and managed her pay.

With a catch of hesitation in his throat, M. Madeleine asked after her history - where she had been born, how she had come to live in Montreuil-sur-Mer.

Fantine recognized a man unsure of himself. She answered his questions as a minstrel spun a story, making an adventure of her teenaged journey from Montreuil-sur-Mer to Paris and back again, talking lightly of her foolish past. She said nothing of the years between losing Cosette and going to work at the factory. It wasn't difficult to keep up conversation; she felt the old parlor skill return as if she'd only just returned from the season.

The dinner ended. Fantine hadn't noticed the ink filling the sky, the dark encroaching the corners of the room, had only felt the warm circle of candlelight humming out from their table.

M. Madeleine begged his pardon to work alone in his study, and left her with the memory of a gentle smile. Fantine left the dishes to Sister Perpetue, claiming Cosette needed her. Cosette was in her little bed when Fantine returned to their quarter of the house, M. Madeleine's doll clutched beneath her arm. Fantine sat on her bed, and sang a faint, trilling song, as she caressed her daughter's golden hair.