It suited her, a life consumed by work; she’d always been a grave and earnest person, never a true child, as her teachers used to say. Some people, she knew, mistook that seriousness for humorlessness, thought she was dour, but it was just that there was an impossible-to-shift weight pressing on her, one she’d borne ever since she could remember having feelings, one that seemed to push down all the more if she had moments of unoccupied time.
“How’s your mother?” she asked James now, politely.
James looked across at Dan and quirked up an eyebrow.
Dan picked up Victorine’s suitcase. “Let’s find our hotel and then we can sit down and talk about that over a drink,” he said.
Victorine couldn’t help rolling her eyes at the thought of what Amelia might have done now and she thanked God for possibly the thousandth time that her father had finally divorced his wife when James turned sixteen and could look after himself. She followed them to the car and, once they’d driven to the hotel, checked in, unpacked and washed off the journey, they all sat on the terrace and watched the sun take a long and leisurely time to set, while drinking Kir Royales.
“You were right,” Victorine said to Dan as she sipped her drink. “We should have done this years earlier.”
“Do you think we’ll manage to drag ourselves away from here and do any sightseeing?” James asked, glancing up at the majestic autumn sky, tinged pink and gold, at the waiter approaching with fresh Kir Royales, at the ancient but lovely hotel in which they were staying.
“Yes,” Victorine said determinedly. Even on holiday, it was best to keep busy.
“It’s not worth arguing with her,” Dan said lazily. “I’ve lost every fight I’ve ever had with her from the time she could talk. As evidenced by her spending the first years of her life on a battlefield and now having lived in France for longer than she’s lived in America.”
Victorine placed an affectionate hand on Dan’s arm. He hardly ever mentioned the war, or her early years, of which she held memories like fog: opaque but leaden. “You know why I did it though,” she said. “And I don’t love you any the less for mostly not having been in the same country as you.”
“I know. But I do miss you.” He sipped his drink. “You asked about Amelia before. There’s something I probably should have told you a while ago, but…” He sighed. “I guess I’ve become tired of explaining Amelia. Do you want to tell her,” he asked James, “or will I?”
“Let me do it,” James said.
Victorine steeled herself. If it involved Amelia, it wouldn’t be good.
James began to speak. “The day Dad told Amelia he was moving out, on my sixteenth birthday, Amelia shared something with me. She said Dad wasn’t my father; she’d had an affair not long after they were married to make herself feel better about her injuries.”
Dan grimaced and Victorine knew it was because he didn’t believe Amelia’s motivation for one minute; if she’d had an affair, it was for selfish pleasure, not to soothe her soul.
James continued. “I was born early, which Dad had always jokingly said was because I’ve been in a hurry about everything all my life, but it was actually because the date she’d given him wasn’t the right one. Then when Dad told her he was done with her, that I was old enough to be my own person and not be affected by her character, she thought I should be told the truth. I’m sure she told me because she thought I’d hate Dad if he wasn’t my father. But it just made me dislike her all the more.”
Victorine stared at Dan. How a wonderful man like him had ever let himself get mixed up with Amelia…The fog of memory lifted a little and she remembered a woman, Jess, telling her that Dan had to marry somebody else. Some things hidden in the back of a cupboard in a box labeled “War.” A span of time when there was only noise and bandaged men who kissed her cheek and called her Vicki. A woman sobbing beside a tree at night. The weight pressed down like a headache, making her feel both sad and afraid.
She shook her head and the memories retreated and her fists clenched with the effort of keeping them back where they belonged, in the past. “That’s terrible. How must you have felt?” she said to Dan.
Dan shrugged. “James has been my son in every way that’s ever mattered. And when James told me he wanted to live with me after the separation, rather than staying with Amelia, I knew that we were as much father and son as any two people connected by blood. It’s too exhausting to loathe Amelia. She doesn’t deserve for me to expend so much emotion on her, not when there are others…” He stopped.
“So you have two children who aren’t really yours,” Victorine said softly, imagining she and James were the “others” to whom he had referred, and on whom he would prefer to invest his emotions.
“But who I love as if you are,” Dan finished.
Both Victorine and James reached out at the same time to hold their father’s hands.
* * *
They all went for a drive the next day. The hotel manager had marked on a map for Victorine the less touristy places, the ones with more character, he’d said, and told her to visit the region’s several beautiful chateaux before they distracted themselves with the champagne caves. The first chateau was, indeed, lovely and then, opposite a sharp bend, just as the hotel manager had said, lay the entrance into the second.
The long driveway promised nothing, which was why Victorine was so surprised when she saw it. Untamed and unruly gardens that held the bones of something beautiful, tumbling down to a fairytale palace.
“Look!” Victorine cried, as if everyone’s attention wasn’t already drawn to the chateau. “I hope it’s open to the public. Let’s go and see.”
She turned to the others. All the lines on Dan’s face were discomposed and the color had fled from his skin. “Are you all right?” she asked at the same time as she felt the butterfly wings of memory flutter at the edge of her mind. The sensation quickly vanished in her concern for Dan.
“Did you come here during the war?” she asked, knowing that Dan loathed to visit war museums and the like. “You were posted near Reims at one point, weren’t you?” she said slowly, wondering if that was why he’d hesitated when she’d first suggested beginning their holiday in this part of France, cursing herself for not having thought more about it.
“No,” Dan said firmly, cheeks pinking up a little at last. “I don’t know this place at all.”
Victorine threw a puzzled look at James, who shrugged, pulled up near an actual drawbridge and said jokingly, obviously wanting to change the mood in the car, “Do you think there are any princesses inside?”
As he spoke, the door opened. A woman stepped out, a beautiful woman, her hair long and dark, her limbs elegant and lithe beneath a white cotton summer dress, sprigged with embroidered flowers.
“Can I help you?” she called out in French.
“We were hoping to see inside the chateau. It’s breathtaking,” Victorine said. “Monsieur Clement from Chateau du Lac said we should visit.”
The woman smiled and even Victorine felt herself gape at how stunning she was.
“Most people miss the turn-off,” the woman said, “but I think Monsieur Clement is sweet on my mother and he often sends people here so he has something to discuss with her whenever we visit his bar for a drink. I don’t mind showing small groups through at all. We can start inside and then I’ll show you the gardens, such as they are.” She gave a rueful smile. “If you come back in a year or two, I promise they’ll be spectacular. It’s a work in progress.”
“The inside sounds like a good place to start,” James said.
“You’re American. I’m so sorry.” The woman switched to perfect English, with the hint of an American accent herself. “I’m Ellis. But everyone calls me Ellie.”
“That’s an unusual name,” James said, stepping in beside Ellie.
“It’s my godmother’s middle name. Martha Ellis Gellhorn. You might have heard of her?”
Victorine took Dan’s arm—she’d felt him stiffen b
y her side—as James smiled at the idea that they mightn’t have heard of Martha Gellhorn.
“Oh yes, we’ve heard of her,” James said to Ellie. “She’s a wonderful journalist.”
“I used to know Gellhorn,” Dan said, surprising Victorine—but of course, being in the newspaper business, her father would have met someone like Martha Gellhorn. “In fact I knew one of her friends very well. But you wouldn’t have met her. She…she died a long time ago.”
Victorine heard Dan’s voice catch and his face had paled once more. Ellie said something sympathetic as Victorine leaned in closer to Dan. “Are you sure you’re all right?” Victorine whispered. “We can go back to the hotel if you’re not feeling well.”
He shook his head but his face was grim. “No. I suppose I just hadn’t realized how it might feel to be out in the French countryside after all this time.”
James and Ellie moved on ahead, talking earnestly together, Ellie pointing out some of the features of the chateau. Victorine hurried forward to hear, bringing Dan with her.
They wandered through the interior until they reached a stunning room near the back, so grand it must once have been a ballroom. The walls were a soft gray and it appeared that some images painted on the wood of an unearthly forest were being restored. The salon opened out onto a terrace and to gardens that had been tamed a little more than the front. The gardens led down to a canal, which seemed to beckon one to step out onto the lawn and revel in the sun and the scent of flowers and the dappled patches of shade.
“Who takes care of all this?” Victorine asked in wonderment.
“I’m a botanist,” Ellie answered. “This is my, and my mother’s, challenge. Like a naughty child, if you like. She bought the chateau for a song back in the fifties when nobody wanted a chateau ruined by the war. We’d come down here every summer from Paris and camp on the grounds and have a marvelous time. A few years ago, we decided to try to restore some of its splendor—it’s called Lieu de Rêves, after all—while keeping the wildness that we both loved about it. She’s upstairs, but she’s working, so she asked me to look after you.”
“Can we walk down to the canal?” James asked.
“Of course.” Ellie and James set off across the garden but Dan didn’t move.
“I think the jet lag might have got to me,” he said at last. “Perhaps I’ll wait in the car.”
“I’ll come with you,” Victorine said.
They waited near the car for a long time, Victorine wandering off a short way every now and again to inspect a flower or to pick strawberries for Dan or to marvel over the peculiar stunted trees that were dotted about or to listen out for James and Ellie, who finally returned.
On the drive back to the hotel, Victorine watched Dan, who didn’t speak. James was oddly reticent too.
“I hope you don’t mind if I have dinner elsewhere tonight,” James said, once they reached the cool fans in the hotel lobby. “There’s a friend nearby who I’d like to see.”
“Sure,” Victorine said. “It will give me a chance to catch up properly with Dan.”
The next few days were strange. They would all begin the morning together and then James would vanish for large parts of the day. Dan was as skittish as a kitten and Victorine honestly didn’t feel as if he was enjoying himself. Then, one night when she couldn’t sleep, she sat in the lounge of the hotel drinking espresso and she saw James come in through the doors with an expression of such misery on his face that her impulse to call out his name died on her lips. Instead, she watched him walk blindly across to the elevators, not noticing her at all.
The following day, they were to leave the area and drive to the Loire. On their way to the highway, James turned off at Lieu de Rêves, muttering something about having perhaps left his hat there. But the house was closed up, and it looked to have been vacated. He hardly spoke on the way to Amboise, where he dropped off Dan and Victorine and then departed early for Paris, and then New York.
It all became clear nine months later. As Victorine sat in her office in Paris, she received a phone call from Jessica May, a woman she’d never really forgotten, a woman who’d been hiding in her unconscious since the last time she’d seen her, when Victorine was almost six years old.
“Let me explain who I am,” the woman, Jess, said.
“I know who you are,” Victorine whispered, feeling it all now—the love and the joy and yes, the terror.
“I know it’s a lot to ask but I need you to come and see me,” Jess had said.
And she gave Victorine an address: Lieu de Rêves.
Thirty-five
Victorine left work and caught the train to Reims as soon as she hung up the phone from Jess. At the station, a woman she would have recognized anywhere waited for her. Nostalgia and the remnants of childhood love made her throw herself into Jess’s arms. As she did so, the past—everything she’d entombed in her mind’s most secret grotto since the morning Dan had appeared at breakfast with bloodshot eyes and whiskey breath and told her that she would soon have a baby brother or sister and that they should remember Jess inside them but never speak of her again—was finally disinterred.
“It’s so good to see you,” Victorine said at last, wiping her eyes and studying the older woman’s face.
“I hope you still think that when we get to the house and I tell you why I’ve asked you to come,” Jess said in reply.
Which sounded ominous.
To Jess’s credit, she didn’t put it off. As soon as they reached the fairytale castle, Jess took Victorine straight upstairs to a bedroom and pressed a finger to her lips before opening a door. Both women tiptoed in. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, Victorine made out a cot. Inside the cot was a baby, asleep. Victorine’s hand flew to her mouth.
They stepped back outside the room and the pieces began to fit together in Victorine’s mind. “Ellie is your daughter,” she said. “The baby is Ellie’s.”
“Yes. But of course there’s more, otherwise I wouldn’t have dragged you all the way here,” Jess said.
They seated themselves downstairs on the terrace that overlooked the canal. Jess told Victorine that she’d been working upstairs and had seen them all from her balcony when they’d come to the chateau, had watched them step out of the car and had known she couldn’t face them, except through her camera. Because there was the fact of Ellie to explain and that was still, even after almost thirty years, unexplainable.
“That night,” Jess said, “James returned to the chateau and took Ellie out for dinner. The next day, Ellie and I had the worst fight of our lives when I told her she couldn’t see James again. The excuses I used were pathetic. That he was from America and was just having a holiday romance. That he couldn’t possibly be serious. Anything other than tell her the truth.”
“I don’t understand,” Victorine said. “Even if they did go out a few times, why was that such a big deal?”
Instead of answering her directly, Jess said, “Luckily I’m a poor sleeper. I came downstairs one night to make some tea and I found her with her luggage, on her way to meet James. They’d been seeing one another in secret for days, not telling you or your father because Ellie didn’t want it to get back to me. They were in love. They were going to run away and get married. Ellie cried and said she wanted a proper wedding with me by her side but I’d been so unreasonably opposed to James that she hadn’t told me of her plans. Now that I knew, she wondered if I would relent. Would understand that marrying James didn’t mean she was leaving me. She thought that was why I was so upset with her, so against the idea of James. She looked so very hopeful.” Jess’s voice cracked and tears began to drip relentlessly from her eyes, staining her trousers. “I had to tell her the truth. Part of it anyway.”
“Which was?” Victorine was aware that her heart had started to beat faster, as if she knew what the revelation would be somewhere in her subconscious, even though her thinking mind hadn’t yet located the right pictures and arranged them in the proper order.
/> “That she and James were quite possibly half-brother and sister. That I couldn’t be sure. That there were two possibilities as to whom Ellie’s father was. Dan Hallworth or…” She stopped speaking.
The page in Victorine’s head finally turned to the picture she’d forgotten: Jess with her back against a tree. A man holding Jess’s neck so the red flush caused by the pressure of his fingers stained Jess’s skin like blood. The noises the man had made. The look of anguish on Jess’s face. “You were raped,” she whispered.
Jess closed her eyes. Then she nodded.
“How can you ever tell your own daughter that she might be the outcome of rape?” Jess stood up and stared at the gardens. “Instead I told Ellie that I’d been foolish and had slept with another man at the same time so I had no way of knowing if Dan was her father. Regardless, she couldn’t marry James because of the possibility that they were related. She was furious with me. She left the house that night anyway. But not with James.”
A long silence filled the room, then Jess finally spoke again. “I don’t know where Ellie went; she never told me. Somewhere to try to mend her broken heart. She returned here the day before the baby was born, just last week. She was ill and sad and I don’t think she’d been looking after herself. But that wasn’t the problem. She hemorrhaged in labor. Her placenta wasn’t in the right place, but because she hadn’t had proper prenatal care nobody knew.” Jess’s tears were falling freely now, a ceaseless flood.
“Where is Ellie now?” Victorine asked fearfully.
“She died,” Jess said, looking upward into nothing, a Mater Dolorosa asking the world to tell her why this had happened, searching for an explanation for that which was beyond understanding.
Victorine was unable to speak. Because the explanation she could offer wouldn’t fix anything. Ellie, that beautiful woman, heartbroken by something that had happened back in 1945, would still be dead. How could she tell Jess that none of it needed to happen. Because James wasn’t Dan’s son. Which meant James and Ellie could not possibly be half-brother and sister, even if Ellie was Dan’s daughter.
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