A Song Unheard

by Roseanna M. White

Did he know how ugly he looked when he wore that expression? How red his face grew under his white-blond hair? The way his eyes bulged? Even if Maman weren’t in mourning, even if there were room in her heart for anyone other than Papa, she would have run away from a face like that.

  Not that Maman ever ran away. She planted a hand on her hip and snarled back. Though her snarl, like everything else about her, was somehow beautiful. “Do you honestly believe every record of every birth is to be found in one archive? My husband was born to his mother in Louvain—go and find the records there, if you require them. No, wait . . . you cannot. Because your men destroyed everything of value in our hometown.”

  Gottlieb’s eye twitched. A vein pulsed at his temple. One more pascal of pressure and his head might just explode.

  What a shame that would be.

  “You speak as if there is blame to be cast upon the German army for our behavior in Louvain. But I assure you, the city was filled with franc-tireurs. We destroyed exactly what had to be destroyed for our own protection.”

  “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” The words tumbled out before Margot could think to bite her tongue.

  Maman sent her The Look. The one that begged and pleaded with her to just be quiet. It was a look she knew well. Ripe with temper but tempered with love. Margot was fairly certain she’d been receiving that look since she was a year old and starting to string words together.

  Gottlieb turned on her. For most of the ten days he had been living here, he’d simply ignored her presence entirely. Too late to go back to that, she supposed.

  “And why is that, fräulein? Enlighten me.”

  She put on the sweet smile Maman had made her practice in front of a mirror and batted her eyes like Claudette used to do when trying to sweet-talk her father into buying her something. “I daresay I haven’t time to truly enlighten you, sir. But I can correct you rather quickly about this.”

  Gottlieb folded his arms over his chest. He was about the height Papa had been, but far too narrow. Too thin. With none of the softness that had made Papa’s side such a welcoming place to be. And his hair was too light and his eyes were too blue and—

  “By all means.”

  “You have obviously not seen Louvain for yourself. You would have seen the number of houses ruined and know it was simply not possible that so many—ours included—housed hidden snipers. And the library! Do you really think it was being used in such a way?” She shook her head. “Many mistakes were made that day.”

  His too-chiseled chin tilted up. “The German army does not make mistakes.”

  A snort slipped out. Usually Maman would have chided her for it, but just now she was too busy loosing a snort of her own. Margot slipped another red loop onto her needle. Probably twisted the wrong way, but she didn’t much care. “You will really claim that not one of the thousands of soldiers, many of whom had never seen combat before they marched into Belgium, could have made a mistake? Have you any idea the odds of that?”

  “Margot.” Maman’s invective was not, she knew, over challenging Gottlieb this time. It was over talking of mathematics. However vaguely.

  Gottlieb’s nostrils flared. “The German army is a machine, fräulein. Each part performs exactly as it was trained to do.”

  “Then you admit it was the aim of the German army to destroy Louvain? Since they never make mistakes, it must have been purposeful.” Though so far as she had seen, the German High Command denied any responsibility for it. Not that many papers had made their way to her.

  She missed the papers. Missed them as much as she hated knitting. The two may, in fact, be directly proportional.

  “Louvain was filled with enemy combatants.”

  “Louvain was filled with merchants and scholars, nothing more.”

  He lowered his arms. “Shots were reported.”

  “Your men’s shots.” And even if a few old men had tried to defend their homes, since when was that a crime? Belgium was obligated to protect its borders. Legally required to do so by the very terms of its neutrality, of its existence.

  Gottlieb knocked his knuckles against the tabletop. “Weapons arsenals were found at churches.”

  It was so ridiculous it hurt. “Where people had taken their hunting pieces when they heard the army was coming so that they would not be found in their homes, so that they could not be accused of being a combatant!”

  Was that a twitch at the corner of his eye? It was, though she didn’t know him well enough to say whether it was from frustration or if, perhaps, he saw her point. “Your homes had loopholes for gunmen to shoot from.”

  It didn’t just hurt, it itched. Her shoulder twitched. She switched her words to Flemish so that he wouldn’t understand more than one word in six. “Maman, he’s too stupid. I can’t stand it.”

  “Margot.” But a smile hid in the corners of her mother’s mouth. She kept her words in French. “Generalleutnant, the holes in our walls—in the walls of nearly every building you’ll find in Belgium—are not loopholes. They are merely holes for the scaffolding. For house painters. Surely you have such things in Germany? They do not even go in more than a few inches. This is something any soldier could have discovered had he bothered to pick up a stick.”

  Gottlieb tugged on his jacket. “We are at war, madame. We haven’t time to plunge sticks into every random hole in a wall to see if it’s hiding a sniper.”

  “No, far quicker to assume. And then claim an inability to have possibly misjudged.” Margot gave up on the stupid knitting and tossed it back into the basket between their chairs. Then she stood. If she spent another moment in the room with this man, she might say something she regretted.

  She would go to her room. She would find a book or a newspaper—one of the issues Madame Dumont had given her, or one of the few she had carried all the way from Louvain. She would read until the itch died away. Perhaps work some more on her theorem, if she dared with this monster under the same roof.

  But Gottlieb made no attempt to remove himself from her path. Instead, he blocked the doorway more fully and narrowed his eyes at her. “You have a sharp tongue for such a young girl.”

  She was fourteen. Hardly an infant, if still a year or two away from lengthening her hem. And oh so tired of being judged for her braids and pinafores when she could out-think every single adult she’d ever met. Except, perhaps, Papa. She lifted her chin. “You’ll find that in Belgium, even the children have brains. We’re not, you see, just part of a machine.”

  Something glinted in his eyes. Were she to see such light in Papa’s or Lukas’s, she would have assumed it amusement. But in Gottlieb, it was probably a dark joy at the thought of tormenting her. He nodded toward the chair she’d just vacated. “For whom are you knitting the muffler, fräulein? It looks masculine.”

  Did it? Perhaps her pattern wasn’t as terrible as she’d thought, then.

  Maman stepped closer. “It is for—”

  “I was asking the girl.” For once, he didn’t even glance at beautiful Maman. No, he kept his gaze on Margot. As if the stare of a self-important lieutenant general could unnerve her.

  Don’t ever mention Lukas. Maman’s whispered words from two weeks ago still filled her ears. They’d been huddled together, just two among the thousands trudging their way from the burned-out shell of Louvain. The priest at the head of their column had been accosted by a German soldier, tied up, and forced away somewhere or another, just for being Catholic.

  That was when it had really hit them—the ferocity of these people who had bludgeoned their way into Belgium. That was when they realized that their invaders would show no mercy based on such trivial things as age or gender. If they would dishonor men of God, then . . .

  That was when Maman had insisted that Margot never breathe a word about her work with Papa. When she insisted that they must do all they could to appear to be like every other Belgian family, nothing special. When they had agreed to pretend to be Madame Dumont’s daughter-in-law and
granddaughter, to deny who Papa had been and what he had been working on. To deny that Lukas, whose face and name and parentage was known everywhere in Europe, was anything to them.

  They had prayed with every footstep that he would stay safely in Paris. But he hadn’t, of course. He had rushed home to try to save them. And now there was some pompous German soldier parading about Brussels, claiming to have shot and killed the famous violinist.

  But he was still alive. He had to be alive. She would know it if he weren’t, wouldn’t she? She would have felt that tug of emptiness again, like she had when Papa had breathed his last.

  He was alive, and he was outside of Belgium, and he would come back for them. He would find them somehow, even though they were staying in this house they’d never seen before their arrival, with a woman they hadn’t even known until that horrible two-week trudge through the countryside. He would find them. They had only to survive until he could manage it.

  Margot produced another sweet smile. “The scarf is for my grandfather—on Maman’s side. His always end up with burn marks from his cigars. I thought if I make him something, it will be ugly enough that no one will mind if he ruins it.”

  Gottlieb studied her, probably watching for a flinch or a tic or some other sign that she lied.

  But a lie was just a matter of mathematics—the correct proportion of truth and falsehood, delivered at the correct rate, with breaths and blinks interspersed at correct intervals. Lies were easy.

  Until one had to confess them to one’s priest. But surely it wasn’t a sin to protect one’s brother from the Germans. She was ninety-eight percent certain that God approved.

  Gottlieb nodded and eased to the side. Not enough that she could pass comfortably, but enough that she could pass.

  She made it only to his side before he halted her with a hand on her shoulder. “You would do well to mind your tongue, young fräulein. It could land you in hot water indeed with a less measured man than I.”

  She shrugged away from his touch. “Your warning is noted.” And he was probably right. But it was rather like asking a cat not to meow.

  The hallway felt like freedom as she stepped past him and followed its lines to her room. She had spent the first week in this house getting to know it. How many rungs of banister her fingers could brush between the stairs and her room, which boards creaked, how many steps it would take to reach her chamber if she measured her steps just so. She had learned how far she could go and still be able to hear the conversation in the parlor clearly.

  But there was nothing to hear today. Gottlieb said, “Fräu Dumont—” That was all he got out. Maman must have raised a hand to stop him. And then sent him a glower that said she wouldn’t speak to him. Maman could keep a whole town silent with one of those looks.

  Except they weren’t quite strong enough to overcome Margot’s need to speak when that need arose. Because sometimes things needed to be said. No matter who told her she shouldn’t say them.

  Her room was dim and warm and stuffy. She hadn’t wanted to open a window—not when it meant hearing the shouts of German officers wafting up on the breeze. But comfort won out now, so she pushed up the frame and breathed in the breeze that pushed its way in.

  The itch had moved to her fingers. She needed a pencil. Paper. Newsprint. She needed something to read. Something to solve.

  After closing and locking her door, she pulled the box from under her bed. So little. So little left of their life with Papa. The only things she had been able to save. The rest had burned. This was all she had left, these few books and newspapers and treatises from last summer, before he died.

  At least it contained her favorite cypher. She pulled out the newspaper, which had been folded and unfolded so carefully but still was getting ragged at the edges. Almost afraid to touch it, she nevertheless unfolded the sheets. She had to. She had to see proof of him, that he had been. That she had been something more than she could be now.

  He had never told her when he’d planted a cypher for her. She had to read every newspaper, every day. Every page. And if she missed something, he wouldn’t tell her until the next day, with a raised brow and a chortle that shook his middle. He’d ask her if she had enjoyed such-and-such an article. He would say that his friend so-and-so had done the typesetting, and she would know. She would know she hadn’t paid enough attention.

  This one she had nearly missed. Usually she knew to look for a message in an article because Papa would leave a key for her somewhere on the front page, within one of the headlines. Or more than one, to keep her on her toes. He hadn’t this time. He had been trying to trip her up. Testing her. Because, he had said, knowing how to break a cypher when one knew the key was child’s play. Being able to break a cypher without the key . . . that was what they dealt with in the real world.

  She was still not certain who they were. Governments, she suspected. Those whose purpose was in figuring out what other governments were saying. Telegrams, for instance, were easy to intercept—but how to translate coded messages within them if one didn’t know the key?

  Margot’s gaze ran over the article for the seventy-third time since this newspaper had appeared at her place at the table. It looked like a normal article—nothing to tip her off that secrets lay within. None of the words within it lacked sense or meaning. There were no characters a bit bolder than the rest.

  She had nearly turned the page that first day. But then . . . something had stopped her. A pattern had caught her eye.

  Intuition—that was where it started. But intuition, as Papa had said, was only the first step. The second, always, was mathematics. It wasn’t enough to know that, not when it came to cryptography. One had to know how.

  She had spent two full days working it out, to the exclusion of all else. Maman had begun to fret and fuss at her and to chide Papa for his game. Lukas had tried to tell her she was chasing a shadow, that nothing was even there.

  But Papa had said nothing. So she had kept working.

  Now she could see it so clearly. When she looked at the print covering the page, the encoded letters leapt off and flipped in her mind’s eye to their counterparts, their hidden meanings. She could read the real message trapped within the false one.

  When you can read this, you are ready to help me.

  Her lips couldn’t decide whether to smile or to quiver. How many times had he put this message in a paper and it had slipped by her? Too many, she suspected. She had too long missed it. If she had noticed it at ten, at twelve, then she would have had years to work by Papa’s side. If she had just grown up a bit faster, or not been distracted by regular schoolwork or the stories Claudette told her to make her laugh . . .

  She would have had more than six months, then, working alongside him. And everything would be different now.

  Four

  Willa had spent almost the entirety of her twenty-three years in London. She knew every street and alleyway and tube tunnel and could navigate with all the skill of a cabby. Not knowing her way around wasn’t an option, not when one was in a line of work that required quick getaways.

  So her first order of her first full day in Aberystwyth was to explore. To get lost. To wander around until all the strangely spelled street names were stuck in her mind. Until she was fairly certain she could find her way around the city—which, really, was so small it hardly deserved the name, regardless of the cathedral that meant it was one, technically. She could navigate easily to the house the Davies family had let for the autumn. Where the orchestra met. Where they would perform a few times before the tour began in November.

  Hopefully, Willa would be done with her job long before then, before she had to learn another city and more odd names.

  Uneasiness still stalked her when she finally stepped back inside her borrowed home. Usually learning her way about would assuage that feeling, but not today. Not given the certainty that someone had been following her.

  Eight different times she had turned quickly to try to glimpse whoever
it was, and seven times she’d seen absolutely nothing. Once, she’d caught the flash of a brown jacket as someone ducked into an alley. The back of her neck still tingled from that being-watched feeling.

  It couldn’t be a bobby, or any kind of inspector. If it were, she’d have seen him—they liked to hide in the open, not in alleyways. It certainly wasn’t Mr. V—she wouldn’t have spotted him at all.

  Who, then? Who else knew she was here? Or if it was an Aberystwyth local following her, why? She certainly didn’t look wealthy enough to warrant such attention, despite the lovely gown Rosemary had made for her.

  It was the job. It must be the job. She had rather thought it little more than a lark: come, hear the orchestra, steal the cypher—and some original music—and then be gone. But if someone was following her, it meant this was more than a well-paid holiday. It could mean rival thieves, or enemies.

  Danger, either way. She’d have to be on her guard. If she made a mess of this simple job, Mr. V might never bring their family more work, and then they’d have to rely on the charity of Rosemary and her new husband, or go back to subsisting on what they could fence.

  Neither was an option she much fancied.

  “Oh, there you are, Willa. I was beginning to think you’d got lost.”

  She pasted on a smile and closed the front door behind her. Margaret Davies—who went by Daisy—stood just inside the drawing room door with a pleasant smile of her own and waved Willa in to join her.

  She still couldn’t fathom why these two sisters had agreed to host her as they’d done. Mr. V had called them family friends . . . but that didn’t fit either. What cause would he have to be friends with two ladies surely young enough to be his daughters?

  Always questions. Never answers. And Willa detested unanswered questions.

  But she couldn’t dislike Daisy or Gwen. They may have buckets of money, but they were so blasted sweet that it was hard to resent them for it. She obeyed the wave of Daisy’s hand and slid into the drawing room.

  Given that it was a let house, the somewhat ostentatious appointments didn’t reflect the sisters. Both women had fair brown hair, and neither was particularly remarkable. Their dresses, though of good quality, weren’t as prettily made as this one Rosemary had stitched for Willa. Daisy settled into a chair with a little cough, and Gwen was rubbing at her fingers.