The école élementaire was not a big school by city standards, but it was spacious and well laid out, plenty large enough for the children of the commune of Carriveau. Before its life as a school, the building had been stables for a rich landowner, and thus its U-shape design; the central courtyard had been a gathering place for carriages and tradesmen. It boasted gray stone walls, bright blue shutters, and wooden floors. The manor house, to which it had once been aligned, had been bombed in the Great War and never rebuilt. Like so many schools in the small towns in France, it stood on the far edge of town.
Vianne was in her classroom, behind her desk, staring out at the shining children’s faces in front of her, dabbing her upper lip with her wrinkled handkerchief. On the floor by each child’s desk was the obligatory gas mask. Children now carried them everywhere.
The open windows and thick stone walls helped to keep the sun at bay, but still the heat was stifling. Lord knew, it was hard enough to concentrate without the added burden of the heat. The news from Paris was terrible, terrifying. All anyone could talk about was the gloomy future and the shocking present: Germans in Paris. The Maginot Line broken. French soldiers dead in trenches and running from the front. For the last three nights
—since the telephone call from her father—she hadn’t slept. Isabelle was God-knew-where between Paris and Carriveau, and there had been no word from Antoine.
“Who wants to conjugate the verb courir for me?” she asked tiredly.
“Shouldn’t we be learning German?”
Vianne realized what she’d just been asked. The students were interested now, sitting upright, their eyes bright.
“Pardon?” she said, clearing her throat, buying time. “We should be learning German, not French.”
It was young Gilles Fournier, the butcher’s son. His father and all three of his older brothers had gone off to the war, leaving only him and his mother to run the family’s butcher shop.
“And shooting,” François agreed, nodding his head. “My maman says we will need to know how to shoot Germans, too.”
“My grandmère says we should all just leave,” said Claire. “She remembers the last war and she says we are fools for staying.”
“The Germans won’t cross the Loire, will they, Madame Mauriac?”
In the front row, center, Sophie sat forward in her seat, her hands clasped atop the wooden desk, her eyes wide. She had been as upset by the rumors as Vianne. The child had cried herself to sleep two nights in a row, worrying over her father. Now Bébé came to school with her. Sarah sat in the desk beside her best friend, looking equally fearful.
“It is all right to be afraid,” Vianne said, moving toward them. It was what she’d said to Sophie last night and to herself, but the words rang hollow.
“I’m not afraid,” Gilles said. “I got a knife. I’ll kill any dirty Boches who show up in Carriveau.”
Sarah’s eyes widened. “They’re coming here?”
“No,” Vianne said. The denial didn’t come easily; her own fear caught at the word, stretched it out. “The French soldiers—your fathers and uncles and brothers—are the bravest men in the world. I’m sure they are fighting for Paris and Tours and Orléans even as we speak.”
“But Paris is overrun,” Gilles said. “What happened to the French soldiers at the front?”
“In wars, there are battles and skirmishes. Losses along the way. But our men will never let the Germans win. We will never give up.” She moved closer to her students. “But we have a part to play, too; those of us left behind. We have to be brave and strong, too, and not believe the worst. We have to keep on with our lives so our fathers and brothers and … husbands have lives
to come home to, oui?”
“But what about Tante Isabelle?” Sophie asked. “Grandpère said she should have been here by now.”
“My cousin ran from Paris, too,” François said. “He is not arrived here, either.”
“My uncle says it is bad on the roads.”
The bell rang and students popped from their seats like springs. In an instant the war, the aeroplanes, the fear were forgotten. They were eight- and nine-year-olds freed at the end of a summer school day, and they acted like it. Yelling, laughing, talking all at once, pushing one another aside, running for the door.
Vianne was thankful for the bell. She was a teacher, for God’s sake. What did she know to say about dangers such as these? How could she assuage a child’s fear when her own was straining at the leash? She busied herself with ordinary tasks—gathering up the detritus that sixteen children left behind, banging chalk from the soft erasers, putting books away. When everything was as it should be, she put her papers and pencils into her own leather satchel and took her handbag out of the desk’s bottom drawer. Then she put on her straw hat, pinned it in place, and left her classroom.
She walked down the quiet hallways, waving to colleagues who were still in their classrooms. Several of the rooms were closed up now that the male teachers had been mobilized.
At Rachel’s classroom, she paused, watching as Rachel put her son in his pram and wheeled it toward the door. Rachel had been planning to take this term off from teaching to stay home with Ari, but the war had changed all of that. Now, she had no choice but to bring her baby to work with her.
“You look like I feel,” Vianne said as her friend neared. Rachel’s dark hair had responded to the humidity and doubled in size.
“That can’t be a compliment but I’m desperate, so I am taking it as one.
You have chalk on your cheek, by the way.”
Vianne wiped her cheek absently and leaned over the pram. The baby was sleeping soundly. “How’s he doing?”
“For a ten-month-old who is supposed to be at home with his maman and is instead gallivanting around town beneath enemy aeroplanes and listening to
ten-year-old students shriek all day? Fine.” She smiled and pushed a damp ringlet from her face as they headed down the corridor. “Do I sound bitter?”
“No more than the rest of us.”
“Ha! Bitterness would do you good. All that smiling and pretending of yours would give me hives.”
Rachel bumped the pram down the three stone steps and onto the walkway that led to the grassy play area that had once been an exercise arena for horses and a delivery area for tradesmen. A four-hundred-year-old stone fountain gurgled and dripped water in the center of the yard.
“Come on, girls!” Rachel called out to Sophie and Sarah, who were sitting together on a park bench. The girls responded immediately and fell into step ahead of the women, chattering constantly, their heads cocked together, their hands clasped. A second generation of best friends.
They turned into an alleyway and came out on rue Victor Hugo, right in front of a bistro where old men sat on ironwork chairs, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and talking politics. Ahead of them, Vianne saw a haggard trio of women limping along, their clothes tattered, their faces yellow with dust.
“Poor women,” Rachel said with a sigh. “Hélène Ruelle told me this morning that at least a dozen refugees came to town late last night. The stories they bring are not good. But no one embellishes a story like Hélène.”
Ordinarily Vianne would make a comment about what a gossip Hélène was, but she couldn’t be glib. According to Papa, Isabelle had left Paris days ago. She still hadn’t arrived at Le Jardin. “I’m worried about Isabelle,” she said.
Rachel linked her arm through Vianne’s. “Do you remember the first time your sister ran away from that boarding school in Lyon?”
“She was seven years old.”
“She made it all the way to Amboise. Alone. With no money. She spent two nights in the woods and talked her way onto the train.”
Vianne barely remembered anything of that time except for her own grief. When she’d lost the first baby, she’d fallen into despair. The lost year, Antoine called it. That was how she thought of it, too. When Antoine told her he was taking Isabelle to Paris, and to Papa, Vianne had been—God help her
—relieved.
Was it any surprise that Isabelle had run away from the boarding school to which she’d been sent? To this day, Vianne felt an abiding shame at how she had treated her baby sister.
“She was nine the first time she made it to Paris,” Vianne said, trying to find comfort in the familiar story. Isabelle was tough and driven and determined; she always had been.
“If I’m not mistaken, she was expelled two years later for running away from school to see a traveling circus. Or was that when she climbed out of the second-floor dormitory window using a bedsheet?” Rachel smiled. “The point is, Isabelle will make it here if that’s what she wants.”
“God help anyone who tries to stop her.”
“She will arrive any day. I promise. Unless she has met an exiled prince and fallen desperately in love.”
“That is the kind of thing that could happen to her.”
“You see?” Rachel teased. “You feel better already. Now come to my house for lemonade. It’s just the thing on a day this hot.”
* * *
After supper, Vianne got Sophie settled into bed and went downstairs. She was too worried to relax. The silence in her house kept reminding her that no one had come to her door. She could not remain still. Regardless of her conversation with Rachel, she couldn’t dispel her worry—and a terrible sense of foreboding—about Isabelle.
Vianne stood up, sat down, then stood again and walked to the front door, opening it.
Outside, the fields lay beneath a purple and pink evening sky. Her yard was a series of familiar shapes—well-tended apple trees stood protectively between the front door and the rose-and-vine-covered stone wall, beyond which lay the road to town and acres and acres of fields, studded here and there with thickets of narrow-trunked trees. Off to the right was the deeper woods where she and Antoine had often sneaked off to be alone when they were younger.
Antoine.
Isabelle.
Where were they? Was he at the front? Was she walking from Paris?
Don’t think about it.
She needed to do something. Gardening. Keep her mind on something else.
After retrieving her worn gardening gloves and stepping into the boots by the door, she made her way to the garden positioned on a flat patch of land between the shed and the barn. Potatoes, onions, carrots, broccoli, peas, beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, and radishes grew in its carefully tended beds. On the hillside between the garden and the barn were the berries—raspberries and blackberries in carefully contained rows. She knelt down in the rich, black dirt and began pulling weeds.
Early summer was usually a time of promise. Certainly, things could go wrong in this most ardent season, but if one remained steady and calm and didn’t shirk the all-important duties of weeding and thinning, the plants could be guided and tamed. Vianne always made sure that the beds were precisely organized and tended with a firm yet gentle hand. Even more important than what she gave her garden was what it gave her. In it, she found a sense of calm.
She became aware of something wrong slowly, in pieces. First, there was a sound that didn’t belong, a vibration, a thudding, and then a murmur. The odors came next: something wholly at odds with her sweet garden smell, something acrid and sharp that made her think of decay.
Vianne wiped her forehead, aware that she was smearing black dirt across her skin, and stood up. Tucking her dirty gloves in the gaping hip pockets of her pants, she rose to her feet and moved toward her gate. Before she reached it, a trio of women appeared, as if sculpted out of the shadows. They stood clumped together in the road just behind her gate. An old woman, dressed in rags, held the others close to her—a young woman with a babe-in-arms and a teenaged girl who held an empty birdcage in one hand and a shovel in the other. Each looked glassy-eyed and feverish; the young mother was clearly trembling. Their faces were dripping with sweat, their eyes were filled with defeat. The old woman held out dirty, empty hands. “Can you spare some water?” she asked, but even as she asked her the question, she looked
unconvinced. Beaten.
Vianne opened the gate. “Of course. Would you like to come in? Sit down, perhaps?”
The old woman shook her head. “We are ahead of them. There’s nothing for those in the back.”
Vianne didn’t know what the woman meant, but it didn’t matter. She could see that the women were suffering from exhaustion and hunger. “Just a moment.” She went into the house and packed them some bread and raw carrots and a small bit of cheese. All that she had to spare. She filled a wine bottle with water and returned, offering them the provisions. “It’s not much,” she said.
“It is more than we’ve had since Tours,” the young woman said in a toneless voice.
“You were in Tours?” Vianne asked.
“Drink, Sabine,” the old woman said, holding the water to the girl’s lips. Vianne was about to ask about Isabelle when the old woman said sharply,
“They’re here.”
The young mother made a moaning sound and tightened her hold on the baby, who was so quiet—and his tiny fist so blue—that Vianne gasped.
The baby was dead.
Vianne knew about the kind of talon grief that wouldn’t let go; she had fallen into the fathomless gray that warped a mind and made a mother keep holding on long after hope was gone.
“Go inside,” the old woman said to Vianne. “Lock your doors.” “But…”
The ragged trio backed away—lurched, really—as if Vianne’s breath had become noxious.
And then she saw the mass of black shapes moving across the field and coming up the road.
The smell preceded them. Human sweat and filth and body odor. As they neared, the miasma of black separated, peeled into forms. She saw people on the road and in the fields; walking, limping, coming toward her. Some were pushing bicycles or prams or dragging wagons. Dogs barked, babies cried. There was coughing, throat clearing, whining. They came forward, through
the field and up the road, relentlessly moving closer, pushing one another aside, their voices rising.
Vianne couldn’t help so many. She rushed into her house and locked the door behind her. Inside, she went from room to room, locking doors and closing shutters. When she was finished, she stood in the living room, uncertain, her heart pounding.
The house began to shake, just a little. The windows rattled, the shutters thumped against the stone exterior. Dust rained down from the exposed timbers of the ceiling.
Someone pounded on the front door. It went on and on and on, fists landing on the front door in hammer blows that made Vianne flinch.
Sophie came running down the stairs, clutching Bébé to her chest. “Maman!”
Vianne opened her arms and Sophie ran into her embrace. Vianne held her daughter close as the onslaught increased. Someone pounded on the side door. The copper pots and pans hanging in the kitchen clanged together, made a sound like church bells. She heard the high squealing of the outdoor pump. They were getting water.
Vianne said to Sophie, “Wait here one moment. Sit on the divan.” “Don’t leave me!”
Vianne peeled her daughter away and forced her to sit down. Taking an iron poker from the side of the fireplace, she crept cautiously up the stairs. From the safety of her bedroom, she peered out the window, careful to remain hidden.
There were dozens of people in her yard; mostly women and children, moving like a pack of hungry wolves. Their voices melded into a single desperate growl.
Vianne backed away. What if the doors didn’t hold? So many people could break down doors and windows, even walls.
Terrified, she went back downstairs, not breathing until she saw Sophie still safe on the divan. Vianne sat down beside her daughter and took her in her arms, letting Sophie curl up as if she were a much littler girl. She stroked her daughter’s curly hair. A better mother, a stronger mother, would have had a story to tell right now, but Vianne was so afraid that her voice had gone
completely. All she could think was an endless, beginningless prayer. Please.
She pulled Sophie closer and said, “Go to sleep, Sophie. I’m here.” “Maman,” Sophie said, her voice almost lost in the pounding on the door.
“What if Tante Isabelle is out there?”
Vianne stared down at Sophie’s small, earnest face, covered now in a sheen of sweat and dust. “God help her” was all she could think of to say.
* * *
At the sight of the gray stone house, Isabelle felt awash in exhaustion. Her shoulders sagged. The blisters on her feet became unbearable. In front of her, Gaëtan opened the gate. She heard it clatter brokenly and tilt sideways.
Leaning into him, she stumbled up to the front door. She knocked twice, wincing each time her bloodied knuckles hit the wood.
No one answered.
She pounded with both of her fists, trying to call out her sister’s name, but her voice was too hoarse to find any volume.
She staggered back, almost sinking to her knees in defeat.
“Where can you sleep?” Gaëtan said, holding her upright with his hand on her waist.
“In the back. The pergola.”
He led her around the house to the backyard. In the lush, jasmine- perfumed shadows of the arbor, she collapsed to her knees. She hardly noticed that he was gone, and then he was back with some tepid water, which she gulped from his cupped hands. It wasn’t enough. Her stomach gnarled with hunger, sent an ache deep, deep inside of her. Still, when he started to leave again, she reached out for him, mumbled something, a plea not to be left alone, and he sank down beside her, putting out his arm for her to rest her head upon. They lay side by side in the warm dirt, staring up through the black thicket of vines that looped around the timbers and cascaded to the ground. The heady aromas of jasmine and blooming roses and rich earth created a beautiful bower. And yet, even here, in this quiet, it was impossible to forget what they’d just been through … and the changes that were close on their heels.
She had seen a change in Gaëtan, watched anger and impotent rage erase
the compassion in his eyes and the smile from his lips. He had hardly spoken since the bombing, and when he did his voice was clipped and curt. They both knew more about war now, about what was coming.
“You could be safe here, with your sister,” he said.
“I don’t want to be safe. And my sister will not want me.”
She twisted around to look at him. Moonlight came through in lacy patterns, illuminating his eyes, his mouth, leaving his nose and chin in darkness. He looked different again, older already, in just these few days; careworn, angry. He smelled of sweat and blood and mud and death, but she knew she smelled the same.
“Have you heard of Edith Cavell?” she asked. “Do I strike you as an educated man?”
She thought about that for a moment and then said, “Yes.”
He was quiet long enough that she knew she’d surprised him. “I know who she is. She saved the lives of hundreds of Allied airmen in the Great War. She is famous for saying that ‘patriotism is not enough.’ And this is your hero, a woman executed by the enemy.”
“A woman who made a difference,” Isabelle said, studying him. “I am relying on you—a criminal and a communist—to help me make a difference. Perhaps I am as mad and impetuous as they say.”
“Who are ‘they’?”
“Everyone.” She paused, felt her expectation gather close. She had made a point of never trusting anyone, and yet she believed Gaëtan. He looked at her as if she mattered. “You will take me. As you promised.”
“You know how such bargains are sealed?” “How?”
“With a kiss.”
“Quit teasing. This is serious.”
“What’s more serious than a kiss on the brink of war?” He was smiling, but not quite. That banked anger was in his eyes again, and it frightened her, reminded her that she really didn’t know him at all.
“I would kiss a man who was brave enough to take me into battle with him.”
“I think you know nothing of kissing,” he said with a sigh.
“Shows what you know.” She rolled away from him and immediately missed his touch. Trying to be nonchalant, she rolled back to face him and felt his breath on her eyelashes. “You may kiss me then. To seal our deal.”
He reached out slowly, put a hand around the back of her neck, and pulled her toward him.
“Are you sure?” he asked, his lips almost touching hers. She didn’t know if he was asking about going off to war or granting permission for a kiss, but right now, in this moment, it didn’t matter. Isabelle had traded kisses with boys as if they were pennies to be left on park benches and lost in chair cushions—meaningless. Never before, not once, had she really yearned for a kiss.
“Oui,” she whispered, leaning toward him.
At his kiss, something opened up inside the scraped, empty interior of her heart, unfurled. For the first time, her romantic novels made sense; she realized that the landscape of a woman’s soul could change as quickly as a world at war.
“I love you,” she whispered. She hadn’t said these words since she was four years old; then, it had been to her mother. At her declaration, Gaëtan’s expression changed, hardened. The smile he gave her was so tight and false she couldn’t make sense of it. “What? Did I do something wrong?”
“No. Of course not,” he said.
“We are lucky to have found each other,” she said.
“We are not lucky, Isabelle. Trust me on this.” As he said it, he drew her in for another kiss.
She gave herself over to the sensations of the kiss, let it become the whole of her universe, and knew finally how it felt to be enough for someone.
* * *
When Vianne awoke, she noticed the quiet first. Somewhere a bird sang. She lay perfectly still in bed, listening. Beside her Sophie snored and grumbled in her sleep.
Vianne went to the window, lifting the blackout shade.
In her yard, apple branches hung like broken arms from the trees; the gate hung sideways, two of its three hinges ripped out. Across the road, the
hayfield was flattened, the flowers crushed. The refugees who’d come through had left belongings and refuse in their wake—suitcases, buggies, coats too heavy to carry and too hot to wear, pillowcases, and wagons.
Vianne went downstairs and cautiously opened the front door. Listening for noise—hearing none—she unlatched the lock and turned the knob.
They had destroyed her garden, ripping up anything that looked edible, leaving broken stalks and mounds of dirt.
Everything was ruined, gone. Feeling defeated, she walked around the house to the backyard, which had also been ravaged.
She was about to go back inside when she heard a sound. A mewling.
Maybe a baby crying.
There it was again. Had someone left an infant behind?
She moved cautiously across the yard to the wooden pergola draped in roses and jasmine.
Isabelle lay curled up on the ground, her dress ripped to shreds, her face cut up and bruised, her left eye swollen nearly shut, a piece of paper pinned to her bodice.
“Isabelle!”
Her sister’s chin tilted upward slightly; she opened one bloodshot eye. “V,” she said in a cracked, hoarse voice. “Thanks for locking me out.”
Vianne went to her sister and knelt beside her. “Isabelle, you are covered in blood and bruised. Were you…”
Isabelle seemed not to understand for a moment. “Oh. It is not my blood.
Most of it isn’t, anyway.” She looked around. “Where’s Gaët?” “What?”
Isabelle staggered to her feet, almost toppling over. “Did he leave me? He did.” She started to cry. “He left me.”
“Come on,” Vianne said gently. She guided her sister into the cool interior of the house, where Isabelle kicked off her blood-splattered shoes, let them crack into the wall and clatter to the floor. Bloody footprints followed them to the bathroom tucked beneath the stairs.
While Vianne heated water and filled the bath, Isabelle sat on the floor, her legs splayed out, her feet discolored by blood, muttering to herself and wiping tears from her eyes, which turned to mud on her cheeks.
When the bath was ready, Vianne returned to Isabelle, gently undressing her. Isabelle was like a child, pliable, whimpering in pain.
Vianne unbuttoned the back of Isabelle’s once-red dress and peeled it away, afraid that the slightest breath might topple her sister over. Isabelle’s lacy undergarments were stained in places with blood. Vianne unlaced the corseted midsection of the foundation and eased it off.
Isabelle gritted her teeth and stepped into the tub. “Lean back.”
Isabelle did as she was told, and Vianne poured hot water over her sister’s head, keeping the water from her sister’s eyes. All the while, as she washed Isabelle’s dirty hair and bruised body, she kept up a steady, soothing croon of meaningless words, meant to comfort.
She helped Isabelle out of the tub and dried her body with a soft, white towel. Isabelle stared at her, slack-jawed, blank-eyed.
“How about some sleep?” Vianne said.
“Sleep,” Isabelle mumbled, her head lolling to one side.
Vianne brought Isabelle a nightdress that smelled of lavender and rose water and helped her into it. Isabelle could hardly keep her eyes open as Vianne guided her to the upstairs bedroom and settled her beneath a light blanket. Isabelle was asleep before her head hit the pillow.
* * *
Isabelle woke to darkness. She remembered daylight.
Where was she?
She sat up so quickly her head spun. She took a few shallow breaths and then looked around.
The upstairs bedroom at Le Jardin. Her old room. It did not give her a warm feeling. How often had Madame Doom locked her in the bedroom “for her own good”?
“Don’t think about that,” she said aloud.
An even worse memory followed: Gaëtan. He had abandoned her after all; it filled her with the kind of bone-deep disappointment she knew so well.
Had she learned nothing in life? People left. She knew that. They especially left her.
She dressed in the shapeless blue housedress Vianne had left draped across the foot of the bed. Then she went down the narrow, shallow-stepped stairs, holding on to the iron banister. Every pain-filled step felt like a triumph.
Downstairs, the house was quiet except for the crackling, staticky sound of a radio on at a low volume. She was pretty sure Maurice Chevalier was singing a love song. Perfect.
Vianne was in the kitchen, wearing a gingham apron over a pale yellow housedress. A floral scarf covered her hair. She was peeling potatoes with a paring knife. Behind her, a cast-iron pot made a cheery little bubbling sound.
The aromas made Isabelle’s mouth water.
Vianne rushed forward to pull out a chair at the small table in the kitchen’s corner. “Here, sit.”
Isabelle fell onto the seat. Vianne brought her a plate that was already prepared. A hunk of still-warm bread, a triangle of cheese, a smear of quince paste, and a few slices of ham.
Isabelle took the bread in her red, scraped-up hands, lifting it to her face, breathing in the yeasty smell. Her hands were shaking as she picked up a knife and slathered the bread with fruit and cheese. When she set down the knife it clattered. She picked up the bread and bit into it; the single best bite of food of her life. The hard crust of the bread, its pillow-soft interior, the buttery cheese, and the fruit all combined to make her practically swoon. She ate the rest of it like a madwoman, barely noticing the cup of café noir her sister had set down beside her.
“Where’s Sophie?” Isabelle asked, her cheeks bulging with food. It was difficult to stop eating, even to be polite. She reached for a peach, felt its fuzzy ripeness in her hand, and bit into it. Juice dribbled down her chin.
“She’s next door, playing with Sarah. You remember my friend, Rachel?” “I remember her,” Isabelle said.
Vianne poured herself a tiny cup of espresso and brought it to the table, where she sat down.
Isabelle burped and covered her mouth. “Pardon.”
“I think a lapse in manners can be overlooked,” Vianne said with a smile. “You haven’t met Madame Dufour. No doubt she would hit me with a
brick for that transgression.” Isabelle sighed. Her stomach hurt now; she felt like she might vomit. She wiped her moist chin with her sleeve. “What is the news from Paris?”
“The swastika flag flies from the Eiffel Tower.” “And Papa?”
“Fine, he says.”
“Worried about me, I’ll bet,” Isabelle said bitterly. “He shouldn’t have sent me away. But when has he ever done anything else?”
A look passed between them. It was one of the few memories they shared—being abandoned like that—but it was clear Vianne didn’t want to dwell on it. “We hear there were over ten million of you on the roads.”
“The crowds weren’t the worst part,” Isabelle replied. “Most of us were women, children, old men, and boys. And they just… obliterated us.”
“It’s over now, thank God,” Vianne said. “Better to focus on the good. Who is Gaëtan? You mentioned him while you were delirious.”
Isabelle picked at a scrape on the back of her hand, realizing too late that she shouldn’t have touched it. The scab tore, and blood began to well up.
“Maybe he’s connected to this,” Vianne said as the silence stretched on. She pulled a crumpled piece of paper from her apron pocket. It was the note that had been pinned to Isabelle’s bodice, smudged with dirty, bloody fingerprints. The message read: *You are not ready.*
Isabelle felt the ground drop out from under her. It was a foolish, childish reaction—she knew that—but it still struck her hard, cut deep. He’d wanted to take her with him, at least until the kiss. Somehow, he’d sensed what she lacked. “He’s no one,” she said darkly, crumpling the note. “Just a boy with black hair and a sharp face who tells lies. He’s nothing.” Then she turned to Vianne. “I’m going to the war. I don’t care what anyone thinks. I’ll drive an ambulance or roll bandages. Whatever it takes.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Isabelle. Paris is overrun. The Nazis control the city. What is an eighteen-year-old girl to do about all of that?”
“I am not hiding out in the country while the Nazis destroy France. And let’s face it, you have never exactly felt sisterly toward me.” Her aching face
tightened. “I’ll be leaving as soon as I can walk.”
“You will be safe here, Isabelle. That’s what matters. You must stay.” “Safe?” Isabelle spat. “You think that is what matters now, Vianne? Let
me tell you what I saw out there. French troops running from the enemy. Nazis murdering innocents. Maybe you can ignore that, but I won’t.”
“You will stay here and be safe. We will speak of it no more.”
“When have I ever been safe with you, Vianne?” Isabelle said, seeing hurt blossom in her sister’s eyes.
“I was young, Isabelle. I tried to be a mother to you.” “Oh, please. Let’s not start with a lie.”
“After I lost the baby—”
Isabelle turned her back on her sister and limped away before she said something unforgiveable. She clasped her hands to still their trembling. This was why she hadn’t wanted to return to this house and see her sister, why she’d stayed away for years. There was too much pain between them. She turned up the radio to drown out her thoughts.
A voice crackled over the airwaves. “… Maréchal Pétain speaking to you…”
Isabelle frowned. Pétain was a hero of the Great War, a beloved leader of France. She turned up the volume further.
Vianne appeared beside her.
“… I assumed the direction of the government of France…” Static overtook his deep voice, crackled through it.
Isabelle thumped the radio impatiently.
“… our admirable army, which is fighting with a heroism worthy of its long military traditions against an enemy superior in numbers and arms…”
Static. Isabelle hit the radio again, whispering, “Zut.”
“… in these painful hours I think of the unhappy refugees who, in extreme misery, clog our roads. I express to them my compassion and my solicitude. It is with a broken heart that I tell you today it is necessary to stop fighting.”
“We’ve won?” Vianne said. “Shhh,” Isabelle said sharply.
“… addressed myself last night to the adversary to ask him if he is ready to speak with me, as soldier to soldier, after the actual fighting is over, and
with honor, the means of putting an end to hostilities.”
The old man’s words droned on, saying things like “trying days” and “control their anguish” and, worst of all, “destiny of the fatherland.” Then he said the word Isabelle never thought she’d hear in France.
Surrender.
Isabelle hobbled out of the room on her bloody feet and went into the backyard, needing air suddenly, unable to draw a decent breath.
Surrender. France. To Hitler.
“It must be for the best,” her sister said calmly. When had Vianne come out here?
“You’ve heard about Maréchal Pétain. He is a hero unparalleled. If he says we must quit fighting, we must. I’m sure he’ll reason with Hitler.” Vianne reached out.
Isabelle yanked away. The thought of Vianne’s comforting touch made her feel sick. She limped around to face her sister. “You don’t reason with men like Hitler.”
“So you know more than our heroes now?” “I know we shouldn’t give up.”
Vianne made a tsking sound, a little scuff of disappointment. “If Maréchal Pétain thinks surrender is best for France, it is. Period. At least the war will be over and our men will come home.”
“You are a fool.”
Vianne said, “Fine,” and went back into the house.
Isabelle tented a hand over her eyes and stared up into the bright and cloudless sky. How long would it be before all this blue was filled with German aeroplanes?
She didn’t know how long she stood there, imagining the worst— remembering how the Nazis had opened fire on innocent women and children in Tours, obliterating them, turning the grass red with their blood.
“Tante Isabelle?”
Isabelle heard the small, tentative voice as if from far away. She turned slowly.
A beautiful girl stood at Le Jardin’s back door. She had skin like her mother’s, as pale as fine porcelain, and expressive eyes that appeared coal
black from this distance, as dark as her father’s. She could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale—Snow White or Sleeping Beauty.
“You can’t be Sophie,” Isabelle said. “The last time I saw you … you were sucking your thumb.”
“I still do sometimes,” Sophie said with a conspiratorial smile. “You won’t tell?”
“Me? I am the best of secret keepers.” Isabelle moved toward her, thinking, my niece. Family. “Shall I tell you a secret about me, just so that we are fair?”
Sophie nodded earnestly, her eyes widening. “I can make myself invisible.”
“No, you can’t.”
Isabelle saw Vianne appear at the back door. “Ask your maman. I have sneaked onto trains and climbed out of windows and run away from convent dungeons. All of this because I can disappear.”
“Isabelle,” Vianne said sternly.
Sophie stared up at Isabelle, enraptured. “Really?”
Isabelle glanced at Vianne. “It is easy to disappear when no one is looking at you.”
“I am looking at you,” Sophie said. “Will you make yourself invisible now?”
Isabelle laughed. “Of course not. Magic, to be its best, must be unexpected. Don’t you agree? And now, shall we play a game of checkers?”
