Liberty’s voice hardened and she repeated her last, wretched sentence. ‘It’s the way of the world. You can’t always do the right thing, Nicholas.’
Madame came back that afternoon with the priest and Adèle.
‘I really am sorry,’ Nicholas said to Adèle. ‘Like I said, go ahead and use my name. Say we’re married. I don’t mind.’
Liberty frowned at him: her earlier foray into empathy was evidently over but damned if Nicholas wasn’t going to at least apologise to Adèle for not being able to give her what she wanted.
Madame told Liberty that all the curtains were closed and she could take a bath upstairs, perhaps believing it would be best for Nicholas and the priest to be alone, without Liberty’s influence.
It didn’t matter to Nicholas. Whether Liberty was in the room or not, he was still going to refuse.
The priest talked for a long time about mercy and charity. Nicholas was polite but steadfast. Liberty’s bath went on forever.
Just after dusk, Madame Beaufort and Adèle appeared, both of them with frightened eyes.
‘She’s gone,’ Adèle said shakily.
‘What?’ Nicholas’s voice was a crack of gunfire in the silent cellar.
Madame Beaufort told him that Liberty had crept out of the bathroom while Adèle and Madame were in the kitchen, had stolen some of Adèle’s clothes, and had taken off into still-occupied France.
Fuck. Why the hell would she take off like that?
But the instant he asked the question, he knew the answer.
Don’t leave me alone. It had been Liberty’s refrain as a child. It was the same in adulthood, but unspoken and all the more heartfelt after being left alone by her dead mother, and after being, as Liberty had viewed it, abandoned by Skye in Paris.
You can’t always do the right thing, Liberty had said to him – as if it were his especial character flaw – right before she’d gone upstairs to the bath, no doubt thinking the priest would talk Nicholas into doing that right thing and marrying Adèle and then Nicholas would abandon Liberty too. So she had left first.
He should never have told her that he wished he could help Adèle. She had completely misunderstood him. And he’d known from the time they’d stepped onto the plane together last month that Liberty was at her edge. Being stuck in a cellar with too much time to think was the last thing she’d needed and now she’d made the worst goddamn decision of all.
Nicholas hit the wall with his hand, but it was a futile gesture, like standing with a placard at Hyde Park Corner and denouncing Adolf Hitler.
‘I have to go after her,’ he said. ‘Right now.’
‘Wait,’ Adèle said pleadingly. ‘I know you can’t marry me. But you can come back here after you’ve won and take my child to England with you. Not me. Just the child.’
‘No, I can’t,’ he said, shocked.
‘I can give the child nothing. France has nothing now. I want my child to grow up in England where war hasn’t destroyed everything.’ Her voice was anguished, pleading, urgent.
This was what war did to people.
Nicholas shook his head. ‘You’ll change your mind when the baby comes,’ he said gently.
‘If you leave the baby here, you’re refusing it the chance to have a good life.’ She told him it would be years before France was anything more than a desecration. The fields were ravaged and empty, there was no food, thousands of people no longer had a home.
Even the priest nodded in agreement.
And Nicholas understood that Adèle had lived crushed in the fist of the Germans for years, and it had taught her to do whatever she had to. Who was to say that if their positions were reversed he wouldn’t do something desperate too if it meant keeping Skye safe?
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll come back. I promise.’
He truly believed the promise would amount to nothing; that she would keep her child once she had seen it and held it and loved it.
Then she said, ‘The English and the Americans are here. They’ve been in France for a few days, I think. Go north and west. You should find someone who’ll help you.’
He almost cried with relief. The invasion had happened!
‘Thank you,’ he said, kissing her cheeks. ‘I’ll see you soon.’ He said it because he thought he would find Liberty and they would get out of France and the war would be over in just a few weeks. The Germans couldn’t possibly hold out for very long.
But then Adèle added, her face white, ‘My mother and I didn’t come to tell you straightaway when we discovered your friend had gone. We thought …’ She pressed her lips together and backed a little away. ‘We thought you might be angry.’
He flinched at the realisation that Adèle now thought all men, even him, were prone to violence and anger.
Her voice dropped to the faintest whisper. ‘I think they caught her. Someone from the village came around and told us that a woman had been found in the woods and taken away by the Germans.’
Nicholas almost gave in to fury. Why hadn’t Adèle told him at the outset? Because she’d had her own business to transact. That was how war worked. Damn the whole world to hell.
Adrenaline took over. ‘I’m going,’ he said. He made the priest give him his clothes.
He spent the night making slow and careful progress through the woods. At dawn in the nearest town, he saw a poster printed with Liberty’s face. It boasted of the spy who’d been caught, and asserted that resistance was useless, that Hitler’s people were always and forever victorious.
It didn’t take long for Nicholas to be picked up by the Resistance. He cursed himself for having waited so long at Madame Beaufort’s, but he hadn’t known the Allies were in France. Things had changed so much in the time he’d been hiding in the cellar. Now, everybody wanted to help someone they hoped would be on the winning side.
It was still a dangerous journey back to the Allied lines; the Germans occupied most of the country. But he made it to Normandy, and then England.
As soon as he landed, he passed on the information about Liberty: that she’d been taken; that she must be sought and found.
They told him that Skye and Margaux were missing too. That O’Farrell was dead. That he was the only one left.
He found himself in a chair, unable to recall having sat, lungs not functioning properly, face soaked with tears. He remembered what he’d thought in the cellar at the Beauforts’ house about Skye’s vulnerability and his heart cracked violently inside his chest.
Vera Atkins, who was in charge of SOE’s female agents, and Air Marshal Wylde stayed in the room with him, and all he could say, over and over, was, ‘You don’t know where Skye is?’
Vera and Wylde just shook their heads.
For the first hour after hearing the news, he wanted to die. But then he wanted, more than anything, to live. To finish the war. To find her.
‘Take leave,’ Wylde told him.
‘Go to hell,’ Nicholas fired back. ‘Send me to France. Now.’
Wylde acquiesced, saying only, ‘Find her.’ His eyes were damp too.
So Nicholas got himself posted to France, commanding a fighter squadron. He shot German planes out of the sky every day. And every minute that he wasn’t flying, he spoke to the dozens of people he’d met on the Resistance circuits since he’d joined 161 Squadron and tried to discover what had happened to the woman he loved. And to Margaux. And to Liberty.
Some spoke of cattle trains filled with people that vanished into Germany. After he heard that, he spent the entire night so sick that he couldn’t even cry.
With every day that passed, he grew more frantic. Sleep was something he barely remembered. He followed clues and gossip and rumour, and he checked in with Vera and Wylde each week, but he found nothing except exhaustion, and incredulity that this could have happened. Skye wasn’t dead. He would know if she were.
Then, after almost a year, the war was over. But not the missing.
He went back to London to look through al
l the information Vera had. Somebody had to know something.
Before he left, he visited Adèle. She hadn’t changed her mind. And he knew she was right. France was desecrated. It was no place for a child to flourish. So he took the child, a girl, with him. Her name was Aimée. She gripped his finger for the entirety of the plane ride to England, as if she needed to know he was there, keeping her safe. He stroked her cheek in reply.
In London, Vera told him she’d heard rumours of a camp full of women. Soon after, the first of the Ravensbrück prisoners arrived in Paris. Nicholas flew there and tried to speak to some of the women. He lost the contents of his stomach when he saw them; couldn’t bear to think that Skye might be one of those unhuman-looking beings. But nobody knew of a woman called Skye Penrose. Nobody would even speak to him. Perhaps they were no longer able to speak.
Eventually, Vera crisscrossed Europe seeking her lost women. Thirteen of the thirty-nine women sent by SOE into France were confirmed dead. Almost half of them. As for Skye and Liberty and Margaux, Vera told him they had all disappeared, that they were missing presumed dead.
Nicholas didn’t return to New York. Skye would never find him there. He stayed in London, waiting for her.
After another year, Wylde told him he wanted to hold a memorial service for Skye and Liberty, but Nicholas refused.
He didn’t need a service; it was impossible to do anything other than remember Skye Penrose. She was the sea and the sky and the entire universe as well.
PART FOURTEEN
Kat
Thirty-Six
CORNWALL, 2012
It was four in the morning when Kat finished reading. She put down the book, her cheeks wet. She’d been crying throughout – for people she didn’t even know; for people she did perhaps know because one of them was her grandmother.
She understood now what Elliott had meant when he said that Nicholas wasn’t really his grandfather. Elliott was the grandchild of the Frenchwoman Adèle and a nameless German. And Elliott’s mother was the child Nicholas had brought back to England: Aimée.
Kat made herself a coffee and stood gazing at the sun rise over London, seeing something else. Because she also understood, after reading Nicholas’s diary, why Elliott had wanted to forge a reunion between Skye and Nicholas. Their love was the real showstopper – the kind of thing all heads would turn to see, to sigh over, to wish for. The kind of love that was too magnificent for the terrible world that shaped it.
A buzz from her phone made her start. She glanced down to find a message from Annabel.
We looked at the writing on the label under the spectroscope, as you asked. The ink matches that from Catherine Dior’s pen. She must have written on it. And I know you thought the letters on the label were ‘g’ and ‘a’. I’m pretty sure they’re ‘y’ and ‘e’.
It took Kat a moment to recall what label Annabel was referring to. Then she remembered. The lapis blue dress. Catherine Dior had written something on the label. A word with a ‘y’ and an ‘e’. Kat shivered.
The first call she made was the easier one. Her daughters pulled faces at themselves on FaceTime, always more fascinated with their own moving image than with her. Until she said, ‘Let’s have a holiday in Cornwall in England in September. All three of us.’
‘England!’ Lisbet shouted, and Daisy, uncomprehending, repeated the word.
‘Will we see Big Ben?’ Lisbet asked.
Kat laughed. ‘We will.’
Paul’s face appeared on the screen too. Ordinarily, she would wince and expect the worst. This time, she didn’t ask permission or apologise for having ambitions and aspirations of her own, and a career she loved. She just said, ‘I’ve been asked to work in Paris for six months. I think it would be great for the girls. And for me.’
He studied her face and perhaps he saw that something had changed. His own expression was complicated and Kat, for the first time since their acrimonious parting, felt sorry for him. A busy emergency doctor, remarried to another doctor whose life must be equally frantic; a too-brief honeymoon before his new wife had fallen pregnant.
‘I think it’s a great idea,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ she said; and her emotions were still too over-wrought because her eyes filled, and she thought perhaps his did too.
Next, she dialled her grandmother’s number. ‘Bonjour,’ she said, as cheerfully as she could manage. Then she told her grandmother a half truth. That a dress exactly matching one in the Cornwall cottage had been gifted to the museum. Given that she owned its double, Kat wondered if her grandmother knew anything about the Australian version. Kat told her to check the photograph she’d just sent to her mobile.
Her grandmother was slow to answer.
‘I do know this dress,’ she said very carefully. ‘The one in Cornwall was left to me by Catherine Dior. But the other … it was mine. I sold it after your mother died and I knew I was to care for you. It was my nest egg: money for school fees. Or in case anything happened to me and I could no longer look after you.’
‘It must have been difficult to sell such a beautiful dress,’ Kat whispered.
‘It was,’ her grandmother replied, words cracking on a sob, and Kat wept too.
‘I love you,’ Kat said eventually.
‘You are everything to me,’ was her grandmother’s response.
And Kat knew what she must do for the woman who was, also, everything to her.
She hired a car and drove south. She needed to speak to the Penrose woman still living in Cornwall.
When Kat pulled into the sweeping driveway, the woman – Margaux, she wanted to be called – seemed to be waiting for her, leaning against a pillar on the porch, smoking a cigarette in her left hand.
Kat climbed out of the car. In honour of her grandmother – whoever she was – she wore one of the Dior dresses: strapless silk, knee-length, with Liberty blue roses printed on a deep sapphire background.
‘You came back,’ Margaux said coolly. ‘I should have known you’d be stubborn.’
‘Why?’ Kat asked. ‘Why should you have known that about me?’
‘Let’s go for a walk.’ Margaux set off, almost spryly, not waiting to see if Kat was following.
They walked to the lake, over which a rope bridge was strung like an upside-down rainbow.
‘I met Nicholas Crawford,’ Kat said as they stared at the water.
She waited for the woman beside her to flinch, as she surely must if she were Skye Penrose. But perhaps she was made of tempered steel because neither her body nor her face moved in response to Kat’s words. Or perhaps there was another reason for her self-control.
‘I read his journal about the war,’ Kat pushed on. ‘It was heartbreaking. He had so much love for a woman named Skye Penrose. I’m rather envious because I don’t think …’
Kat paused as, before her, she saw the transparent outline of two children in the lake, a boy holding on to a rope above him, and a girl in the water giving him courage. ‘No,’ she corrected herself. ‘I know that, until now, I’ve never loved anyone the way he loved Skye. Wholly. Overwhelmingly. As if his life depended on it. Which it didn’t, in the end – because he lived on without her. But did she live on without him?’
Kat looked at Margaux. The other woman started walking again, so fast that Kat worried she might fall on the uneven ground.
She fired the question at her anyway. ‘Are you Skye Penrose? And if you are, does that mean my grandmother is your sister? Or is it the other way around?’
At last Margaux halted and turned slowly to Kat. ‘Bring your grandmother here to see me. Then I’ll tell you who I am. And so will she.’
When she returned to the driveway, Kat saw another car pull up.
Elliott climbed out. ‘I had a feeling you’d be here,’ he said.
Of course he did, Kat thought, because he understood everything about her that mattered.
He took off his sunglasses. He looked as if he hadn’t slept, as if the rift between them were as
devastating to him as it was to her.
‘I wish I’d never lied to you,’ he said, face serious, intent on her and nothing else. ‘When I first met you at the Savoy, I never imagined you’d be the kind of person I’d lie awake next to all night long because you were sleeping on my chest and you looked so lovely that I didn’t want to miss a moment. If I didn’t care about you as much as I do, Kat, I wouldn’t have told you I’d lied. I would have just let it go on, because it would have been easier.’
Kat was transported back to that morning in bed with Elliott. She’d been happy in a way she’d never been before and had known, in the same way her body knew how to breathe – essentially, innately – that Elliott was happy too. Yes, he could have let the lie continue. It would have been easier. Perhaps then she would have continued to sleep with him until she returned to Australia, where she would have put their relationship down to a once-in-a-lifetime fling that had revived her and restored her but wasn’t meant for the real world.
Paul had never confessed anything to her until after she’d found out something was wrong. Whereas Elliott had admitted his lie before she’d found out what he’d done, and while understanding the possible consequences. He had just told her that watching her sleep was precious to him.
The real world was both imperfect and wonderful. And Elliott was part of the real world: imperfect and wonderful too.
She walked over to him, ran her hand along the stubble of his jaw, and kissed him.
PART FIFTEEN
Margaux
Was it possible? We were returning from the other world. It was true. We were still alive. We were free.
– Jacqueline Péry d’Alincourt, Forgive, Don’t Forget: Surviving Ravensbrück
Thirty-Seven
GRANVILLE, 1946
It takes time for Margaux’s body to learn how to eat without purging the food; time for her hair to grow back; time to resume her body’s ordinary monthly cycles. When her monthlies restart, she stares at the blood in horror, wondering what now is the matter with her. But then she remembers that this blood is normal.
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