“What’s that?” she whispered. “I can’t hear you.”
So he said it louder, just enough that she could hear him before the cold air swallowed the words.
“Swans, you know, they mate for life.”
Some hours later, a hand grasped Daisy’s shoulder and shook her awake.
“It’s time,” said Grandmère.
They dressed quickly, without sound. Max was downstairs, helping the children button their coats. Daisy’s fingers were so cold, she couldn’t fasten her blouse, so Grandmère did it for her while Kit splashed water on his face from the basin in the corner.
“Our contact is waiting at the safe house on rue Rossini, near the Opéra,” said Grandmère. “Monsieur Legrand, you will proceed ahead as we agreed, to ensure the security of the location. Daisy, you will follow in half an hour. Von Sternburg has offered to drive me and the children to the rendezvous at—”
From the corner, Kit swore.
“Enough,” said Grandmère. “I assure you, he would rather die than see any harm come to them.”
“I don’t doubt it. He’s got some strange fascination with Daisy.”
“Don’t trouble yourself about it, young man. Only thank God that he does. Now put on your jacket and get out of here, do you hear me? There isn’t a moment to lose. Everyone’s on edge.”
Kit grabbed his jacket from the floor and put it on. Before going down the stairs, he turned to Daisy, took her by the arms, and kissed her deeply, right there in front of Grandmère.
“Remember what I said,” he told her, staring straight into her eyes.
“I’ll remember.”
Down he went, swinging through the hatchway instead of bothering with the stairs, as if the floor had swallowed him up. The last hair of him disappeared from view, and Daisy thought she couldn’t breathe. She sat on the bed. A wave of nausea overtook her.
“What’s the matter?” said Grandmère. “Is it the sickness?”
“A little. It passes quickly.”
“Not for long. It’s good we’re getting you out of Paris. Your mother had a terrible time with you.”
“The invincible demoiselle? Troubled by morning sickness?”
“My God, it was awful.”
They listened to the gruff voices downstairs, Kit saying goodbye to the children, the door moving softly. Daisy pressed the ring into the flesh of her finger. It was too big, of course. She would have to wear it around her neck or something. The walls shuddered a little, as Kit slipped out through the front door and closed it behind him and was gone.
There wasn’t much to pack. Grandmère had managed to bring out a few clothes from the apartment, before the police came; enough to provide them with a change or two, but not to arouse immediate suspicion. Everything fit inside a single carpetbag. Madeleine and Olivier sat sleepily on the chairs. Max checked his watch.
“How much longer?” asked Daisy. The talisman sat inside the inner pocket of her jacket, heavy and enormous in its silk cloth. It bumped against her ribs whenever she moved. She hated it; she wanted it gone. She wanted to be outside Paris, fleeing Paris with Kit, but that was impossible. She must go to Switzerland first. She would go to Switzerland with the children and Grandmère, she would have the baby there, Kit’s baby, safe and sound, and then . . . and then . . . what?
She still felt unwell. She leaned against the table and stared at the floor and tried to breathe. Max frowned at her.
“Everything is well?” he asked, and before Daisy could say anything, Grandmère replied in her usual curt way.
“She’s going to have a baby, that’s all.”
The children were so sleepy, they didn’t hear. But Max did.
“She’s what?”
“Shh! The children,” said Daisy.
Max looked at Grandmère, and Grandmère made some motion with her hand to her stomach. Max said something in German, under his breath, and tore a hand through his hair.
“This is madness,” he said. “She’s in grave danger already, and now this.”
Grandmère shrugged. “It can’t be helped. We all have a burden to bear, lieutenant colonel, and we women have borne ours throughout history, without the men taking much notice of it.”
“But she’s not well.”
“I am quite well,” said Daisy. “It’s passed already.”
“You’re pale.”
“I’m not—”
All three of them heard the noise at the same time, the clap of wood, the shudder of the walls as the front door burst open. No one needed to tell them to be still. They froze like actors in a tableau, staring at one another, willing the sound to go away. The world to go back to what it was.
Now footsteps, moving quickly across the bookshop floor.
Something had come over Max, in those few seconds, some invisible air of command. He was no longer the concerned civilian, the avuncular friend; he was a career officer in the German army, accustomed to swift decision and maneuver. He slid one hand into his pocket and drew out his pistol; with his other hand, he motioned the children up the hatchway stairs, all the while staring at the doorway. Daisy hustled them up, urging silence, and when they had disappeared into the attic she grasped the handle and swung the stairs back into place.
Max glanced at her and Grandmère and motioned to them furiously, mouthed the words Up, up, but it was already too late. A soft knock sounded on the door.
“La Fleur!” said a voice, a woman’s voice, not a Frenchwoman. English? “Open, open! It’s urgent!”
Daisy looked at Grandmère. Grandmère looked at Max, who shook his head.
Again, the knock. “La Fleur! The Rat sent me! You must open! Please!”
A terrible fear took hold of Daisy’s chest. She stepped forward. “Black cat?” she whispered loudly, to the crack in the door.
“Black cat? Black—oh! Black cat, white mouse. Open, please!”
“That’s the password,” Daisy said to Max, and she unlocked the door and pulled it open. A woman stood before her, tall, young, startlingly beautiful, and clearly anxious. Daisy had never seen her before. Her accent was most certainly not German.
“Thank God,” the woman said.
“Who are you?”
“Code name Opossum. You’ve got to come with me. It’s the drop, it’s been compromised. There are Gestapo agents in all the streets nearby, waiting to pounce. It’s a trap.”
“Kit!” gasped Daisy.
“You can’t go, it’s too late.”
“I have to go! I have to warn him!”
“They’ll get you, too! I’ve got orders to take these jewels of yours and . . .” Opossum stopped and looked around the room. “Who’s he?”
“He’s a contact. He’s . . .” Then Daisy whirled to face Max. “My God!” she cried.
It took him a second or two to understand her meaning. He looked stricken. “Don’t be ridiculous! You know I would never—”
“You! Was it you all along? Did you get Pierre arrested? Did you—”
Max took her by the arms. “Listen to me! There’s no time. You’ve got it all wrong. You’re in danger, you and the children. Take the car, get out of Paris. Give me the damned talisman, I’ll go myself.”
“The devil you will!”
“Listen, I’m a German officer! I’ll outrank any Gestapo agent there. I’ll take Legrand into custody myself and then spirit him out. I’ll deliver the talisman into safe hands. Daisy, you must trust me. You must.”
She pulled his hands away. “Why? Why should I trust you? Because you had some stupid fascination for my mother, and now you’ve transferred it to me?”
“No! Not that. My God.”
He stepped back and stared at her, and in the instant before he spoke, Daisy knew what he was going to say. Hadn’t he already told her, just that afternoon? We were very much in love. And I have never forgiven myself for losing her. Hadn’t he been showing her this, all along?
She thought, Don’t say it.
Then Max’s
lips moved, and he said the words.
“Because you’re my daughter.”
There was an instant of silence, in which the room, the whole world, lurched around Daisy. She tried to speak, but her throat would not move. She looked at the scar on Max’s face, the pink, shining, ruthless scar that disfigured his left cheek, from his temple to his jaw and right over his ear. She heard his voice that continued in agonized words.
“I never knew—I didn’t realize. I thought you belonged to d’Aubigny. I thought Aurélie—your mother—I thought she had forgotten me. That she had used me and betrayed me. She died before the war ended; there was no chance to learn the truth, no hint at all that her daughter belonged to me. I never suspected you might be mine. Perhaps I should have, but I simply assumed that . . . I thought surely she would have sent word somehow . . . if she loved me as she said—”
“Mon Dieu,” Daisy whispered.
“And then I saw you in the Ritz that day and it was as if—as if the earth fell away beneath me. Your face, it struck me senseless.” He pulled his watch from his pocket and opened the face. “It’s uncanny. You look like my sister. You see? There’s her portrait. Your eyebrows are your mother’s, and the rest is her.”
Daisy looked helplessly at him. The room kept spinning. She was going to vomit. “It’s impossible,” she whispered. She put out her arm, and somebody took it. Grandmère, holding her upright.
“It’s true, my dear,” Grandmère said. “I realized it right away. He made me promise I wouldn’t tell.”
“I thought you would hate me,” said Max. “You should hate me.”
The woman called Opossum stood dumbstruck in the doorway, looking back and forth between the two of them. “Bloody hell,” she said in English. “He’s telling the truth.”
Daisy looked back up at Max, at his warm blue eyes that stared at her beseechingly. His terrible scar. He still held the watch with its open case. She couldn’t look at that; she didn’t need to, didn’t want to. Some woman she would never know. A family she would never know. A father who had never known her, never raised her, never been there when she needed him; when she had wanted a father’s love so terribly, she had married Pierre. Her life, her history, transformed in a flash. She pulled her arm away from Grandmère and covered her mouth. It was the hand that bore Kit’s ring. The two swans dug into her lips.
“Give me the talisman,” he said again, more gently. “Go, get out of Paris. Take care of the children. It’s my turn. I failed your mother. I’ve failed you, my darling girl, but I swear before God, I won’t fail you again.”
Opossum broke in. “For God’s sake. Just go, one of you, before it’s too late! Or I’ll take the damned thing myself!”
Daisy reached inside her pocket, pulled out the talisman, and handed it to Max.
“If you do fail me,” she whispered, “I’ll kill you with my own hands.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Babs
Paris, France
April 1964
If the cancer didn’t kill Margot, the medicinal stink mixed with antiseptic that pervaded the halls of the Hôtel-Dieu certainly would. I pressed my nose against Drew’s shoulder as we walked quickly down the long corridor toward Margot’s room, my emotions—anger, guilt, pity—all roly-poly and unable to separate. It was as if a red sock had been tossed in the wash along with the white ones, staining everything.
Drew remained outside the door of the private room, squeezing my shoulder for encouragement as if I were a fellow football player ready to run onto the playing field. And, I thought, perhaps I was.
The woman lying against the white pillow bore little resemblance to the woman whom I had met at the Ritz. But as I stood by the side of her bed and looked down at her, I saw that her light still existed in her eyes, and as long as that wasn’t extinguished, the essence of the woman remained.
“Daisy?” The simple word felt heavy on my tongue.
Her fingers opened, and she smiled. Without hesitation she reached for my hand.
My entire prepared speech evaporated, my thoughts and feelings suddenly unimportant. All that remained of all that was past was two women who’d loved the same man with all of their hearts.
I slid Kit’s ring from my finger and placed it into her open palm, a token of all the guilt I’d been carrying around like a valise for so long. “I’m sorry.” All of my rehearsed words were condensed into just those inadequate two.
“Sorry?” Her voice had faded, too, like the rest of her body. But not those eyes.
“The letter you sent to Kit. I never showed it to him. I don’t . . .” I stopped, knowing we didn’t have enough time for me to try to explain. I wasn’t even sure that I could explain it to myself. Instead, I simply said, “Forgive me.”
She closed her eyes and smiled. “You loved him. You . . . gave him children. Made him happy. Nothing to . . . forgive.”
“He loved you,” I said, the words not hurting as much as I’d thought they would. “He never stopped. Until the day he died, he never stopped loving you.”
She took my hand, the bones of her hand as brittle as a bird’s. “Shh,” she whispered. “He loved us both.” Something warm and hard pressed against my palm as she closed her hand around mine. The indentation of the two swans pressed against my skin. Two swans, meant to mate for life. It made me oddly happy that Kit’s ring had belonged to Daisy for all of these years. It was somehow fitting. “For Kit’s son, yes?”
Tears fell on our linked hands and I was surprised to find that they were mine. “Thank you.” There was so much more I wanted to say, but the words were thick and stale in my throat, words of apology and explanation for which this remarkable woman had already forgiven me.
The sound of approaching footsteps came from the hallway outside. I looked up, recognizing an older Madeleine and Olivier as they rushed into the room. I leaned down and kissed Daisy’s forehead, her skin cold against my lips. “Goodbye, Daisy.”
Then I let go of her hand, taking the ring with me, and left the room. Drew put his arm around me as he led me down the corridor, pulling me out of the way as a young woman of about twenty rushed by us. She was tall and slender, and wearing chic Parisian clothes. Her golden-brown hair, much lighter than her straight, dark brows, flew about her head in wild disarray. I knew I’d never seen her before, yet there was something so familiar. If I could only see her eyes . . .
“Maman!” she called out as she entered Daisy’s room.
Drew pulled me away, leaving me no time to brood or to mourn a woman I’d barely known yet who had been a part of my life for so many years.
The ride in the taxi on the way back was subdued, which was curious considering how much needed to be said. There was Daisy, of course, but I couldn’t as yet wrap my mind around all of those implications. But there was also the matter of La Fleur, and whether or not she’d been a traitor. And the talisman. But mostly, the one thing that weighed heaviest in my heart, was that Drew was leaving. It was awful, really. I was a grown woman, a widow. I’d survived privations during wartime. I’d even discovered that my husband had loved another woman. But this, this hollowness felt alien to me. It was like a nightmare from which I couldn’t awaken, a nightmare where everything I’d ever learned, everything I’d ever loved and cherished, had been declared null and void.
We walked silently into the Ritz, the constant clacking of Prunella’s typewriter making me want to screech at her to stop. That nobody cared about her stupid memoirs, that a woman was dying—if not already dead—and my heart was being broken for the second time and I wasn’t sure how I was to survive it.
As if sensing my mood, Drew took my hand, stopping me as I headed in the elderly woman’s direction, intent on committing violence against a typewriter. “Babs, I’m sorry. I wish . . .”
“Is she gone?”
We both turned to see Precious Dubose, returned to her immaculate self, standing oddly composed and holding something in her hands.
“I assume so,�
�� I said. “Her children arrived, and we didn’t want to intrude. Did you . . . ”
She shook her head. “After I’d had my little nap, I realized that we’d already said everything we needed to say to each other, and our goodbyes. I’m glad the children made it in time. They have always been her world.”
“Next to Kit,” I said, and I could tell that she already knew.
“Come on,” she said. “These are sitting down shoes, and I’ve got lots to tell you.” We followed her to a banquette in the long, carpeted hall and sat down. A waiter approached, and she immediately dismissed him. Without a word, she opened up her hands and what appeared to be a bundle of rags slipped onto the table.
I didn’t understand until Precious began pushing aside the soiled and torn cloth, exposing a scratched gold medallion with a cracked crystal window in the center, a gold ring around it where the prongs of missing jewels still clung. I knew if I flipped it over, we’d see an engraving of a wolf with a cross.
“It’s the talisman,” Drew and I said in unison, our gazes moving from the table to Precious and then back again.
“Congratulations,” she said. “You’ve found La Fleur.”
We were both stunned into silence, even the sounds of the bustling hotel muted somehow. “But . . .” My brain felt waterlogged, swishing from one side of my head to the other, unable to settle on any one thought. “But what about Daisy?”
“She was La Fleur, too. She started the name, but I took over as La Fleur when her identity was compromised and she fled with her children and grandmama to Canada. I’d been working with the Resistance since I’d arrived from London, so I was already familiar with our other operatives. It made sense, and so I slipped from one persona to another.” Her smile became secretive. “Reinvention is my best talent, you know.”
“So you knew Kit,” I said, my head beginning to hurt with all of the implications.
“I certainly did. He was a very fine man—one of the best. He reminded me very much of someone I had known in London, someone with an equally good heart and strong sense of purpose.” She paused, swallowed, then allowed a small smile to tease her lips. “I knew you were his wife the moment we met and you said your last name was Langford. I had to assume you were here to find La Fleur.”
All the Ways We Said Goodbye Page 38