“The money from the orchestra, for the relief fund. I know you have it. What did you do with it?”
She had known the moment Mr. Rees came bursting in and told them what had happened. Never for a moment had a question entered her mind, and seeing his eyes go wide certainly didn’t convince her to doubt it now.
“My friend. You are certainly not accusing me of such a theft? Why, I am but a novice at our mutual craft. With not even a decent set of picks.”
She hissed out a breath. “You’re not amusing.”
“All right, all right.” He sprang up on the far side of the bed and produced a black bag from somewhere on the floor. Tossed it onto the mattress.
She stared at it. At the way the fabric molded to what were obviously stacks of something rectangular within. Pound notes, she would bet. But then . . . “What are you doing with it here?”
All pretense of playfulness fell away. Her violin still in one hand, he leaned against the wall. “My . . . entrance fee, let us call it. Into your gang.”
Words buzzed around her head like out-of-tune strings, but it took her a long moment to sort through the fury enough to grasp hold of them. “I do not have a gang. I have a family.”
He snorted. “You do not share a drop of blood with any of those people, and I will not believe you do.”
“You don’t need blood to be a family.”
His gaze went patronizing. “Yes. You do. But whatever you call it.” He motioned to the bag. “I want in. That should be enough to prove myself, ja? Three thousand two hundred pounds. My donation to the . . . family.”
She didn’t even look at it again. Couldn’t, or it might make her ill. “We don’t want that money.”
He pushed off the wall, fingers tight around the neck of the violin. “I beg your pardon? Perhaps my English is worse than I thought. I thought, for a moment there, you said you did not want money.”
“Not that money. And the fact that you think we would just proves that you are not—could never be—one of us.”
He growled. Or huffed. Or some combination of the two that made a chill skitter over the back of her neck where the German’s pistol had rested. He advanced to the foot of the bed. “You will pretend you are better than me, is that it? You are a thief, Willa Forsythe, as I am.”
“I am a thief. But I have a code. I do not ever take from those worse off than I am. I don’t take food from children’s mouths—and that’s what this money is for.” She pulled off her gloves and tossed them onto the dressing table. “What kind of monster are you, to even consider such a thing? You’re stealing from your own neighbors.”
He regarded her with pure resentful incredulity. “And now you will try to tell me you have never stolen from another Englishman?”
“Not starving ones! And it’s different now. We’re at war—there’s a greater enemy. You of all people—a refugee—should know that.”
Cor snorted. Or perhaps laughed. Either way, it was an ugly sound. “You will refuse me—refuse thousands of pounds—for some stupid code? While you are here trying to steal from your boyfriend? And yet will lecture me on right and wrong?”
She pointed to the window, where he must have come in. “Get out of my room. Out of my life. I never want to see you again, and you’d be wise to respect that.”
Jaw set, he shrugged—and reached for the bag.
She lunged and snatched it up half a wink before he grabbed it. “Oh no. This is going back where it came from.”
“Give me the money, Willa.” No charm remained in his tone now—it was all danger and darkness and warning. “I took it. It is mine.”
“You called it your entrance fee? I call it the only thing that will stop me from having the police on your tail within ten seconds. Get out now, or I call them up here.”
Fury crouched low and menacing on his shoulders. “You turn me in, I take you down with me. I will tell your darling De Wilde who—what—you really are.”
“So then. We go down together, or we go our separate ways.” She gestured to the window with a flourish. “Go.”
His only warning was a low sound in his throat, somewhere between a cello and a bass. Then in the next second the world exploded. Or her heart.
He’d brought his arm back with force she couldn’t have expected. And smashed her violin—her violin!—into the corner of the armoire. It cracked, splintered, wept. Fell to the floor. The sound of its cry rang in her ears.
He pointed at her, but she didn’t see it. Not really. Her eyes were locked on the ruins of her soul.
“You will regret this, Willa Forsythe. Mark my words.” He ducked through the window, left the room empty.
Empty. Her knees buckled and then smacked the floor. Something balled up in her throat, punched. Money bag abandoned, she crawled through the lamplight to that puddle of dreams on the floor. Something poked at her palms. She gathered the pieces, fingers convulsing. Broken wood held together by lax strings. Agony.
Something hot and wet scalded her cheeks.
She couldn’t breathe. Didn’t know if she would ever be able to again, much as she gasped. The jagged edges of wood pierced her hands, her heart.
There was no repairing it. Had it just been the neck that had snapped—but it wasn’t just that. The back of the body had shattered, making a gaping hole that exposed the hollow meant to be there. And it wept and it keened and it screamed Why? into the room.
Or perhaps she did. It had been so long since she’d cried that she realized only gradually that she was. That the salty sting was from her tears, that the heaving was her own chest, that the gasps were from the sobs ripping her apart.
“Willa?” Her name joined a knock.
She couldn’t answer. Wasn’t entirely sure she heard it.
“Willa?” The door cracked open, then a gasp preceded rushed steps. “You’re bleeding! What happened? Oh—your violin. Willa, your violin.”
Gwen. Willa squeezed her eyes shut. “He . . .” She could get out nothing more. What did words matter? They were just lies anyway.
Only music ever told the truth. And he’d destroyed it. Destroyed the one thing in the world that had made her more than just a street rat.
Gwen pried the broken wood from her hands and plucked a long, thick splinter from one of the bleeding places. “Sit up. On the bed. I’ll go and fetch the bandages. Who did this, Willa?”
Cor Akkerman. She would hate that name forever. But couldn’t speak it now. She shook her head, even as Gwen somehow convinced her legs to hold her until she reached the mattress. “No one who matters. But he . . .” She nodded, hollow, empty, to the black bag behind the door. “I’m sorry. I didn’t take it—but he followed me here. It was my fault he did.”
Only the little breath that slipped from Gwen’s lips said she saw and grasped what the bag must hold. Otherwise she made no move toward it. Just muttered something about bandages and vanished into the hall. Returned before she seemed even to have cleared the doorway, with bandages and a small brown bottle in hand.
“Iodine tincture,” she said as she set it on the bedside table. “After we get you cleaned up. What did you do, stab yourself with it?”
Willa stared at her hands. They were empty but for the streaks of red. No magic violin, ready to come to life in them. “I don’t know. I . . .”
“Never mind. We’ll get you right as rain in no time.” She dabbed at the wounds with a wet cloth. Applied a smelly brown liquid to them from that little glass bottle. Wrapped them in crisp white bandages. “There now. All better.”
“Thank you.” But it would never be all better. Never. She wasn’t even sure what the phrase was supposed to mean. “I didn’t open the bag. You should. Make sure it’s all there. Three thousand two hundred, he said. But I didn’t count it. Didn’t even look.”
Gwen’s warm hand touched her cheek. Did it hurt her fingers to do so? “Thank you, Willa. But it’s just money. We could have replaced what was stolen. You can never replace your first violin, and if th
is happened because of it . . .”
It happened because she lived in a world with ugly people who did ugly things. She’d never get away from that. Should never have expected otherwise.
She shook her head.
Gwen sighed and stood, gathered her bandages and bottle full of smelly stuff. Then reached down and scooped up the bag. She didn’t look inside either. “I’ll tell them I found it outside. That someone must have felt badly and brought it back. You should . . . rest, I suppose.”
It wouldn’t help. She’d still wake up in the morning to a broken violin.
She ought to have known it would happen eventually—after all, the instrument was so very much like her.
Twenty-One
The sun, she was sure, had never shone so brightly, despite the fact that it produced the same number of lumens as it had the day before. Margot bent over into the square of it spilling through her window and laughed into the rug.
He was alive. She’d known it! Alive and in Wales and ready to bring them there too, as soon as he knew how to find them.
She wanted to shout it, to run and find her mother and squeal it into her ear. But Maman was in the bread line. Madame Dumont was at the church, praying. Claudette had scurried away as soon as she had delivered this fresh batch of papers and collected the old ones to pass along to another neighbor.
There was no one to rejoice with her. No one but the sunshine and the Lord who sent it. “Thank you, God. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
The rug ate up her words, but she knew He heard her. And imagined Him chuckling along with her half-mad laughter.
Lukas was alive. And coming for them.
Or would be. She sat up straight again, eyes following one of the dust motes that danced through the light. How long had it taken the papers to reach her? She spun back to where she’d spread the newsprint out on her floor and flipped L’Indépendance Belge back to the front page. Two weeks old. Not as slow as she had feared—Lukas should still be where he had been when it was printed. He would not be too distressed yet over a lack of response.
“Oh.” A response. How was she going to get one to him? When she’d devised this key, it had seemed so simple. Fun, even. A private code between them, meant partially to give her a means of communicating family business without Maman knowing.
Not that Maman had sunk as deep into despair as Margot had feared she might. There had been no need to summon Lukas covertly home.
But had she needed to, she simply would have gone to one of Papa’s newspaper friends.
Now, though. They were all shut down. That was one of the first things the Germans had seen to. A few were still being produced in secret, yes—the stack on her floor was evidence of that. But in other countries, outside the border. Not in Brussels, so far as she could tell.
Still. Someone could help her. Someone must.
She went through the list of all of Papa’s friends while she folded the newspapers again. There was Georges Béranger. But he was in Louvain. Or had been. Monsieur Émile had been here though, hadn’t he? And Jacque Allard. She was all but certain he was the one putting out L’Indépendance Belge in London. She recognized his editorial hand.
Allard had run the paper here in Brussels with his brother. Jerome. Where was he?
She couldn’t just go out looking for him. After sliding the papers into their temporary hiding place, she left her chamber, needing more room than it offered to pace. Only certain kinds of thinking required movement, but the logistics of finding missing persons was one of them. It wasn’t just mathematics. It was geography and social skills and other factors she couldn’t readily think of names for.
Maman could help when she got home. Margot would tell her about the key she had created and given to Lukas—without mentioning why she had made it. She and Papa had long spoken of creating such a thing just for the family, and he had so loved the idea he had even told all his friends about it. But they never had done so. Not until this one, and then he had died so suddenly afterward, Maman had never even known. There’d been no time to tell her.
But she would tell her now. She would write down careful instructions on what to give to one of Papa’s editor friends, if she could work out how to find them.
Except Maman could not go wandering the city, especially not the parts of it where their old friends lived. She could too easily be recognized. And then someone would shout a greeting, word of it would reach German ears, and their ruse would be over.
Madame Dumont, perhaps? But the old woman had scarcely recovered from the grueling trek from Louvain. She never walked farther than the block to church for Mass.
Claudette. It would have to be Claudette. The next time she came over, Margot would have the message ready. Claudette was already taking a risk by running papers around the city—she would not blink at a bit more. And probably knew better than the rest of them how to find Monsieur Allard.
Her feet had taken her through the upstairs parlor and then down the stairs. She stood now in front of the thick front door, staring at it.
She wanted to go. She wouldn’t, but she wanted to. She hadn’t stepped foot outside the door since she came through it two months ago, other than for Mass and that one trip to the bread line last week. After which Maman had forbidden her to go, apparently convinced by Gottlieb’s claim that it wasn’t safe. They had reasoned at first that it was safer for her to go—she wouldn’t be recognized as quickly as beautiful, memorable Maman.
But after that, her mother wouldn’t hear of it.
A sigh built, released, and Margot turned.
She meant to turn all the way around, back to the stairs. But her feet halted her at ninety-two degrees, when her eyes caught sight of something unprecedented.
Gottlieb’s room. Open. Usually he not only shut the door but locked it behind him. Today, however, he must have turned the lock without properly latching the door first. It had swung open just an inch, the bolt out so it couldn’t shut all the way.
Interesting.
She shouldn’t. She knew she shouldn’t. Or at least, she knew Maman would say she shouldn’t. But something pulled on her. Usually if she felt such a tug she would think it the Lord telling her something. Though she wasn’t altogether certain the Lord would instruct her to search Gottlieb’s room either—He often sided with Maman on things like this.
“God? May I?”
Lukas always rolled his eyes at her when she asked Him a question like that, saying the Almighty had better things to do than answer a too-inquisitive girl, and that she wouldn’t know an answer from Him if she got one.
But she did. When He didn’t want her to proceed, her mind always filled with an impossible, ugly proof that she’d been laboring for years to make work. When His answer was in the affirmative though . . .
Beautiful, elegant numbers ticked along now in her mind. The Pythagorean Theorem. The proof of infinite prime numbers. That the square root of two is irrational.
She stepped toward the door without another moment’s hesitation and into the generalleutnant’s sanctum.
She had expected shadows, despite the fact that his room was directly below hers and hence also facing the sunny street just now. Golden light touched all the surfaces.
Most of them were bare. Any decorations that had belonged to the Dumont house had been removed to other rooms, and he’d not replaced them with anything of his own. Not unexpected, she supposed, of a military man. Dress regalia peeked out from a small closet. A shaving kit resided on the bureau top. A book sprawled open on the bedside table. Otherwise, it might have been unoccupied.
Why did he even bother locking it?
And why had all those lovely theorems told her to come inside? Frowning, she spun in a slow circle in the middle of the room.
The bed. It was positioned in the same place hers was. She crouched down and looked underneath it.
A box. Similar in size to the one she kept in the exact same place. Margot stretched until her fingers closed around the
card-paper edges and she could pull it out.
It was plain and brown and utilitarian, which she could appreciate. She lifted the lid. And sucked in a breath that hurt.
Maman stared up at her. Maman and Papa and . . . Lukas.
No.
She knew the clipping. They’d had one too, once, in Louvain. It had been an article about Lukas’s career, and she’d read it so many times Papa had told her to stop before she ruined the paper.
This one hadn’t the attached article. Just the photograph in grainy blacks and greys. And the caption under it. Renowned violinist Lukas De Wilde, with his parents in Louvain.
Her eyes slid shut.
He knew. He knew who they were. Had he known all along? No, she couldn’t think so.
That day last week when he had been acting so odd. That must have been when he’d learned it. Why hadn’t he turned them in immediately? For what was he waiting?
Fire danced over her nerves. Itching. Aching. She put the photograph back in its place, slid the box back under the bed exactly three feet and four inches, turned it to a degree eighteen off parallel with the wall.
Then she fled the room. Back up to her own long enough to grab her coat, her scarf, her hat.
Out the door. She didn’t care if it wasn’t safe. If Maman would cluck her tongue and scold her. If anyone recognized her. She had to find Jerome Allard now. Today. They had no time to waste. Gottlieb could decide any day to turn them in. They would arrest Maman. Probably Margot too. Because of Lukas and because of Papa and because of her and the work she’d done.
It took all her restraint to keep herself from breaking into a run out on the sidewalk. It would look strange if she did, and attention was bad.
“Spatz? What are you doing out here? Does your mother know you have left the house?”
She wished she knew a few curses so she could think them. Reciting the nines tables didn’t exactly express the frustration and fear that filled her at Gottlieb’s voice.
She turned to face him. And realized with a start that it was October 29. Which meant . . . She sighed. “Don’t tell her, you’ll ruin the surprise.”
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