The Paris Secret

by Natasha Lester

  Skye leaned over and kissed his cheek.

  “Thanks,” he said, flushing, and trying to refill everyone’s still-full champagne glasses to cover the collapse of his worldly facade.

  “So we’ve established that O’Farrell’s a hero,” Margaux said drily. “What about our wing commander? What was he like as a boy?”

  It was Skye’s turn to inhale smoke before answering. Is this the girl? a mean woman had once asked, as if Skye were worse than the smell of rotting fish skeletons on the pier. This is Skye, Nicholas had replied, not allowing his aunt to demean his new friend.

  “He was loyal,” she said as one memory dissolved into another. Nicholas telling her he couldn’t swim, and then pulling himself hand over hand along the rope bridge even while the skin was ripped from his palms. “And very brave.”

  She dared to look up then and caught Nicholas’s eye. His face was as red as O’Farrell’s had been a moment before, but Nicholas didn’t shield himself by pretending to refill glasses. He let the moment sit, leaving himself unguarded and exposed to the likely ribbing of O’Farrell and Richie. But nobody scoffed or jeered; they nodded instead, as if they knew Skye had told the absolute truth.

  “Then he hasn’t changed,” Margaux said, smiling at him; one of those infrequent lapses into warmth that she seemed occasionally capable of.

  Skye jumped up and began to clear away the plates. As she ran water over them, she felt Nicholas slip in next to her and, under the pretext of passing her the teacups to wash, he murmured, “Thanks.”

  Before she could reply, he said, “Are we going for a swim? And if you still have more swimming costumes than clothes, would you mind lending Margaux one? You and she look as if you’re about the same size.”

  “Of course.” Skye turned off the tap.

  “Swimming?” said O’Farrell. “I thought you were joking. No one’s allowed to swim.”

  “Even if the beaches are all closed, you don’t visit Skye in a house by the sea and not bring your trunks,” Nicholas said. “I know the night she outran the Me 110 it looked as if her natural habitat is the sky, but it’s really the water. And it’s the perfect day for it.”

  It was. It had turned into a beautiful summer’s day, too precious to waste.

  “You go on ahead, Skye,” Rose said as Nicholas left to get changed. “You’re ready; there’s no need for you to wait.”

  Skye looked distractedly around the room. “I just need to find my cover-up.”

  “Cover-up?” Nicholas repeated, reappearing in his trunks. “Skye Penrose doesn’t mess around with cover-ups—unless she’s a completely different person to the girl I used to know. Besides, we’re about ten steps from the water.”

  Quick as a fish, Skye ducked past him and out the door. “What are you waiting for then?” And she ran, laughing, down School Lane to the sand, but he overtook her near the water.

  It took them some time to stride out far enough to be able to swim, but once they had, Skye caught up to him and stroked ahead. She swam on and on, out into the Solent, not even knowing if he was following, swimming away from the sight of Nicholas Crawford in his swimming trunks, legs strong and bare, chest bare too, a line of hair trailing down to his waistband. She stroked harder, swimming away from the treacherous warmth in her body that had nothing whatsoever to do with the sun.

  At last her breath came too fast and she slowed and turned over, lying on her back, certain she’d got hold of herself, that the physical sensations in her body were the result of exercise, nothing more.

  She should return to the shore. But Nicholas was beside her now, floating in the water, a thing they’d done together a million times before.

  “This was just what I needed,” he said quietly.

  “Me too.” She closed her eyes and saw a dream behind her eyelids. “Imagine,” she said, turning the vision into words, “if there was no war and we flew planes every day for fun, to France and Cairo and Cape Town. And every weekend there was the cove in Cornwall . . .”

  Her voice died abruptly as she realized she’d inscribed him into her dream. But his dreams were joined together with Margaux’s.

  “And we’d swim and cook limpets for dinner and fall asleep on the sand.” Nicholas’s voice, which had picked up her unfinished sentence so eagerly, perished as suddenly as hers had.

  Skye couldn’t speak. Her words, and his unexpected continuation of them, had left her throat as scalded as if she’d just drunk an ocean of salt water. She stared upward at the blinding blue of the sky, which, right now, seemed a safer place than the sea. Because she mightn’t be in Cornwall, falling asleep on the sand next to Nicholas, but she was lying beside him in the water, recalling the way his eyes had traced over her body on the doorstep of the cottage. And she needed to stop.

  “What happened to your knees?” she asked, trying to find safe ground.

  “Broken elevator controls.”

  “Ouch.”

  For a long stretch of minutes there was only the gentle plash of waves, the occasional shriek of a gull—until the current moved her sideways and her fingertips brushed against Nicholas’s. It was a whisper, nothing more, over almost before it happened, but she felt the crackle of it everywhere.

  The splash that followed told her plainly that she was the only one who’d felt anything. Nicholas had simply been waiting for the perfect moment to copy one of Skye’s favorite childhood moves, which was to catch him off guard and drag him down into the water. He pulled her under by the arm, but because he’d learned the move from her she knew how to twist away and dive below him. He caught her ankle, not stopping her from getting away as she’d always done to him, but tickling her foot.

  She kicked feebly while at the same time convulsing with laughter, accidentally opening her mouth and swallowing water. She rose to the surface coughing and gasping.

  He grinned. “I’ve been waiting to do that since I was thirteen.”

  She laughed again, having finally caught her breath, but lost it once more as she and Nicholas trod water just inches away from each other. Water droplets caressed his shoulders, and it was impossible to look at anything other than him. Their eyes tangled together, his flaring the fieriest of blues, his mouth opening. Then his smile vanished and he turned his head away in so sudden a movement that it felt as if he had torn her skin.

  “I’m going back in,” he said.

  He swam back to the group: Rose splashing Richie in the shallows; Margaux leaning glamorous and elegant on her elbows on the sand, surrounded by a cloud of smoke; and O’Farrell, his trousers rolled up, his shirt unbuttoned, alternating between kicking the water and looking out toward Skye. And Nicholas, stepping out of the water and dropping down beside Margaux. She offered him a cigarette but he shook his head.

  A group of friends by the seaside. So normal. Nothing at all out of the ordinary. Except that the mist had lifted and Skye could see it now, the large and shining thing: she was wholly and overwhelmingly and undeniably in love with Nicholas Crawford.

  Which was just about the worst thing that had ever happened to her.

  * * *

  Skye made her way back to shore slowly. When she stepped out, it was to hear Nicholas say, “We should go back if we’re going to get any sleep before tonight.”

  “You’re on ops again tonight?” Skye asked O’Farrell as they started back to the cottage.

  He nodded. “While you were being a mermaid, I made a plan. Our flight has leave in June and two days of it coincides with your leave. Rose worked it out. We’ll all go to London. Dance at the Embassy Club. Stay at the Dorchester.”

  She knew what he was asking her. She saw Nicholas glance over at her and O’Farrell, and then turn quickly back to Margaux.

  O’Farrell was holding her hand, Skye realized. She hadn’t noticed the moment he took it in his, hadn’t felt the frisson of skin touching skin, a frisson she felt when Nicholas merely looked at her. But what good was that? What was the best way to forget someone you couldn’t
have?

  “That sounds like fun,” she said, and O’Farrell looked as pleased if he’d invented the airplane all by himself.

  “We’ll take care of the arrangements,” he said, indicating himself, Nicholas and Richie. “You ladies need only turn up at the appointed time and a weekend of fun will await.”

  But Skye was no longer listening. On the steps of the cottage, a woman waited, black Sobranie in hand, smoke forming a halo over her dark hair. Skye stopped still and stared.

  “Liberty,” Nicholas said to Skye.

  Skye’s mouth began to smile but then her body braced as if it recalled that it was best to assume a defensive position when near Liberty. One of Skye’s feet stepped forward but the other wouldn’t move so she remained fixed to the spot.

  “I didn’t think . . .” Nicholas said.

  In his voice, Skye heard both surprise and wariness and she knew he’d believed what he’d told her at Tangmere—that Liberty didn’t want to see Skye. But now here she was and Nicholas was clearly worried about why she’d come.

  The last thing Skye wanted was for everyone to witness a reunion between herself and her sister. Luckily, Nicholas understood. He roused, gave Liberty a brief wave, then shepherded O’Farrell and Margaux into the car, and steered Rose toward it too so she could say goodbye to Richie.

  Skye was left to walk alone toward her sister.

  Her sister. Liberty was here at last. All of a sudden, Skye’s heart hurried her feet along and she opened her arms, ready to embrace her sister for the first time since 1937.

  Liberty raised her arm, bringing her cigarette to her mouth, deflecting Skye.

  “Was that your friend Nicholas?” she said, her words inflected like Skye’s with a rhythmic and husky Parisian accent of soft “t” sounds and an absence of the letter “h.” “My, hasn’t he turned out handsome? Although he’s leaving rather than staying. And with a woman.”

  For Christ’s sake. Liberty might not be hitting out with her fists and feet anymore but her blows were still brutal. And she hadn’t finished.

  “I’m surprised you’ve let him back into your life,” she went on. “It took you ages to get over him leaving the first time.”

  The effort to keep her voice level, her face calm, was immense but Skye managed it. “Some people are always in your life,” she said simply. She offered her sister a smile, hoping she would understand.

  “What if he leaves again?”

  Skye knew then that the worry she’d confessed to Nicholas the night they’d danced had been right. What she had seen as reclaiming her own life when she’d left France for Cornwall, Liberty had seen as abandonment. And after their mother’s death, such departures smoldered deep in Liberty’s psyche. Skye wished so much that she had known better when she was eighteen, wished she’d known everything that war and loss had taught her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know how much I’d hurt you.”

  “You take a lot of credit for my feelings,” Liberty said coolly.

  It was the kind of kick that had used to precede an emotional storm. Skye accepted it and waited, ready, but the storm didn’t come.

  Instead, Liberty said, “I have a new job with the Inter-Services Research Bureau. The man I have to type papers for spends some time at RAF Tangmere. So I will too.”

  She smiled, and all at once looked so much like Skye’s annoying little sister that Skye’s heart contracted with both love and remorse, and the exquisite pain that only Liberty could inflict. She understood that—despite what Liberty had told Nicholas—Liberty had come to warn Skye, rather than letting their first meeting in six years play out on a runway with dozens of people around.

  “Why don’t you come in,” Skye said. “We have a few years to catch up on.”

  “Yes, all those years since you left me in France.”

  That kick made Skye flinch. “I’m not sure we have anything to say to one another about the past, except things that hurt,” she said. “And as war brings with it enough hurt, it might be better to call a truce and stay in the present.”

  This time, Liberty’s smile was the same as the one she’d worn back in Paris when Skye had pointed out the damage to her bicycle tires—a smile that made Skye want to leave all over again, even though they were standing outside her cottage.

  “You wear your emotions too obviously, sister dear,” Liberty said. “That’s why war hurts you.”

  Pain won out over effort at last. “I don’t suppose you’re ever afflicted with anything like hurt,” Skye shot back.

  The words hung in the air like the aftermath of an incendiary. Skye closed her mouth and pressed her lips together so nothing else so cruel could escape.

  Liberty turned her back on her sister, which was what Skye deserved. But it meant that she didn’t hear Liberty’s next words properly. “I can’t afford such afflictions,” was what Skye thought her sister might have said.

  But then Liberty shrugged and said loudly, “Someone’s waiting for me.” She pointed to a car parked farther down the road. A man in an RAF uniform sat in the driver’s seat.

  “But you’ve only been here for ten minutes,” Skye said, and even she could hear the hurt in her voice. She did wear her emotions too obviously.

  Perhaps it was the wind, or Skye’s imagination, but Liberty’s eyes appeared to shine with tears, and Skye couldn’t help reaching out her hand, trying once more to mend the threadbare seams of their sibling bond before it finally unraveled.

  At the same moment, Liberty pushed herself away from the door and clattered down the steps. “See you soon!” she called gaily.

  And Skye knew she’d been mistaken; Liberty hadn’t felt any emotion other than glee at the shock she’d caused. Skye was the only one with tears in her eyes.

  And now Skye had two reasons to dread any flight that took her to Tangmere: the fact that Liberty might be there. And that Nicholas was, sometimes, too.

  PART SIX

  Kat

  Eighteen

  LONDON, JULY 2012

  For her meeting with Celeste, the director of conservation from Dior’s archives, Kat wore another of her grandmother’s dresses: a Marc Bohan design for Dior from 1961—the Green Park dress in scarlet wool.

  “That dress was made for you,” Celeste said, indicating the iconically sixties above-the-knee skirt and its delectable subtle flare. “But what I really want to talk about is your mystery dress—the blue. C’est magnifique. I’m convinced from your photographs that it is a Dior from 1947 or 1948. The covered weights in the back to make the dress hang correctly, the architecture of the internal corsetry, that minute row of hook-and-eye closures along the inside of the skirt tell me it is a Dior. But I know nothing of it.” She finished with a dramatically raised eyebrow that perfectly complemented her striking mustard-toned strapless bodice and black-and-white houndstooth pencil skirt.

  “You can’t find a record of it then?” Kat asked.

  “I have looked through all the archival drawings from that time, the extant photographs, Monsieur Dior’s own notes and I can find nothing. Your dress was a secret. But why?”

  “That’s a very good question.” Kat felt the buzz of finally talking to someone about the astonishing dress animate her. “And why a secret sent to Australia? I know Dior eventually had an excellent relationship with the country and Australians loved his clothes, but in 1947 he was just a rumor of brilliance, a discovery yet to be made.”

  “I want to start with the handwriting on the label that you mentioned,” Celeste said. “Could it be a customer’s name?”

  “But why sew a blank label into a dress? And who writes their name on a couture gown? It’s unlikely that whoever wore the dress was planning to keep it in a public changing room. You’d need a maid to help you undo all the fastenings for a start.”

  Celeste laughed. “Perhaps the words were written on the label at the atelier? I don’t know why that would be . . .” She paused, thinking.

  “The
lady who donated it to the museum said that a friend gave it to her,” Kat went on. “She didn’t buy it from Dior. So I don’t know who the original client was.”

  “I’ll look through the records of Australian customers from that time and see if we can turn the fragments of letters from sixty-five years ago into words.”

  Then Kat confessed. “Actually, there are two dresses exactly the same.”

  “Two?” Celeste’s eyebrows almost arched off her face.

  Kat nodded. “The other one is here in England in a relative’s collection. I’m going to look at it again on the weekend to see if it has a label with writing on it too.”

  “When you say they’re exactly the same . . .”

  “I mean they’re identical.” Kat took out her phone and showed Celeste the hasty pictures she’d snapped of the dress at the Cornwall cottage.

  “Wow.” Celeste couldn’t take her eyes away from the phone and she looked as if she wasn’t sure whether to faint from shock or laugh with delight.

  “You wanted to see the fabric,” Kat continued, trying to be the calm and rational one so that Celeste would shrug off her stupefaction and begin to flick through the exhaustive catalog in her mind of everything to do with Dior and thus help Kat with her quest.

  She withdrew from carefully folded tissue paper a tiny sample of blue fabric snipped from one of the dress’s seams—common practice for conservators when a deeper investigation was required. “I’ll analyze this under the spectroscope. But I doubt it will tell me anything other than what I already know: it’s silk.”

  Celeste reached out her hand for the sample. “I knew, when I saw your pictures, that I had seen this blue, this shocking and extraordinary blue somewhere before,” she said slowly. “But I couldn’t recall where. Seeing it now, in a tiny scrap, I have the same feeling . . . but this time I think I do know where.”

  “Where?” Anticipation filled Kat to the point where she thought she might burst the expertly stitched seams of her dress.