Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-One

Heart racing, Genevieve strode out of the Ritz the next morning toward where a group of soldiers gathered around a wheeled vendor’s cart, one of several that had been set up in front of the Vendôme Column. Behind her, the hotel was hopping: the legendary bar was closed until afternoon, but the dining rooms were crowded with high-level German officers breakfasting with the rich and well connected. The smell of coffee and the clink of cutlery on fine china filled the air.

Outside, the day held the promise of warmth to come, but at the moment frost still sparkled on the potted topiaries on either side of the entrance and glimmered on the tops of the ornate black streetlights. Backlit by the morning sun, the towering blue-green obelisk cast a shadow across the cobblestones in the way of a pointer on a sundial. It ended almost at her feet as she moved quickly past the vehicles puffing out malodorous exhaust near the hotel’s front door. Despite the bustle of activity in the square—the pedestrians, the bicycles, the flower and basket and toy vendors—all her attention centered on the woman behind that one particular cart.

Can it be...?

It was not quite 9:00 a.m., not long before Otto would pick her up and take her to La Fleur Rouge, where she was scheduled to rehearse and also hopefully see Max. She’d been up for hours. The curfew lifted at 5:00 a.m. Shortly after that she’d flagged down a bicycle taxi and gone to La Fleur Rouge on her own to find him. He was not there, which left her both frustrated and speculating, not for the first time, about what exactly he did and where exactly he went after she retired to her hotel for the night. Leaving a note—I need to see you NOW—on the table where he couldn’t miss it, she’d returned to the Ritz only to find Berthe up and worried about her whereabouts.

She was alone now as she followed the shadow’s path. Berthe had gone down to the Ritz’s cellar, site of what had to be the most opulent air-raid shelter in Paris, to retrieve some belongings left behind the previous night. They’d been escorted to the cellar by a bellhop bearing gas masks as soon as they’d arrived at the hotel. At the beginning of the war, the roar of bombers overhead and the subsequent explosions as the bombs rained down had sent them scuttling into shelters in whatever city they found themselves like mice hiding from a posse of starving cats. The specter of a deadly cloud of gas being released by the aeroplanes had been terrifying enough that they’d all carried gas masks with them everywhere they went. After years of such fears and attacks, the shrieking sirens and the descent into shelters had become old hat. Last night’s bombers had been Mosquitoes—she could recognize most of the different aeroplanes by sound now—almost certainly targeting something not in Paris’s center, like factories on the outskirts of the city or transportation hubs or railroad lines in the outlying areas. Champagne and caviar had been passed around the shelter by the Ritz’s attentive staff, the gas masks had been used as pillows by the especially sleepy, or inebriated, and the atmosphere in the cellar as they waited for the all clear had been almost that of a party. By the time the sirens had stopped and they were allowed to go to their suite, they’d both been too exhausted (and too loaded on champagne) to account for such items as, say, Berthe’s hat or her own shoes. Then she’d stayed awake as long as she could keep her eyes open hoping Max would show up, which he hadn’t.

Upon her return to the hotel this morning, she’d been headachy and short with Berthe and cross with the absent Max and jittery with anxiety about her mother—until she’d carried her cup of coffee over to the window and looked out.

I think it is...

It was difficult to be certain of details at such a distance, of course, but there was something tantalizingly familiar about the deft movements of the woman behind the cart. Genevieve had spotted her from the window almost at once and felt her breath catch. Snatching up her coat and hat, she’d all but run from the hotel. Now, as she drew close enough to hear her speak, her last doubt vanished.

Emmy.

She hadn’t heard her sister’s voice in seven years, but she recognized it instantly. Though she’d been hoping to find Emmy here, praying to find Emmy here, still the reality of it shook her. Her heart beat faster. A pit yawned in her stomach. For a moment, listening, it felt as if she were being spun back through time.

Come on, bébé: Emmy always on time for dinner, for lessons, for everything, impatient when her junior caused them to be late. Slow down, you: Emmy yanking on her dress to pull her back when she bolted eagerly toward something exciting, like, say, company in the parlor or ice cream. Emmy elbowing her in the ribs when they played duets on the piano and she pounded the keys too fast. Emmy, cantering gracefully, yelling after her when she kicked her pony into a headlong gallop and took the lead as they rode down the precarious path toward the beach. You’re too little, Genny: Emmy doing everything—learning to play the piano, going to dances, falling in love—first.

Although the joke in the family had always been that Emmy might do everything first, but Genny always did it with the most determination.

“—quite sure you won’t regret it.” Emmy spoke gaily to one of the soldiers as she handed over something wrapped in a bit of cloth and accepted some coins in exchange. “My grandmother’s tarts are legendary.”

Emmy had always resembled their father rather than their mother, with a square-jawed, high-cheekboned face that was serenely lovely in repose and blossomed into true beauty when she smiled. Her nose was narrow and straight, her mouth and chin determined, her skin tone tawny, her thick hair a soft caramel shade. She was the taller of the two of them, with larger bones and a fuller figure that had, once upon a time, incited a skinny little sister’s envy.

“Fresh from Grand-mère’s oven this morning,” Emmy promised the next soldier in line, who asked when the tarts had been made.

Today, in a faded floral scarf and a loose brown coat that in no way resembled anything Genevieve had ever seen her always chic sister wear, Emmy looked entirely different from the vibrant girl of her memory. Her skin had lost its sun-kissed golden tone and was now on the waxy side of pale. She was thinner, a great deal thinner, bone thin as a matter of fact, which made her cheek and jaw bones seem more prominent and her nose sharper. She was still, as she had always been, more than merely pretty, but she looked—worn, somehow, underlining that the years since they’d last seen each other had not been good ones. Until she smiled.

That same incandescent smile.

Genevieve felt a twinge somewhere in the region of her heart.

“Molasses or squab?” Emmy asked the next soldier in line. Squab was a fancy word for pigeon. With food so scarce, there were hardly any of the homely birds left in the city. Vendôme Place itself, once home to hundreds of pigeons, was bereft of them. They’d all found their way into the cooking pots of the starving populace, usually to emerge under such noms de guerre as chicken, or duck, or squab.

“Molasses,” the soldier replied. Of course, as a German, he would have access to plenty of meat.

Hovering behind the group of soldiers, Genevieve wasted a moment wondering where Emmy had gotten the tarts. It was almost a certainty that she hadn’t made them. Unless she’d changed out of all recognition, her baking skills were nonexistent. In any case, the ingredients would have required either a sizable investment in black market goods or weeks of accumulated coupons. The scarcity of sweets made the molasses tarts in particular prizes worthy of their price. Only about one-third of Paris’s bakeries were operating now, because there were simply not enough supplies of flour, oil and sugar, or fuel, to enable them to do so. With an unexpected flicker of wry amusement, she pondered the existence of a special SOE bakery turning out treats as props. Maybe baking tarts was what had occupied Max all night.

The soldier stepped back, bit into the tart and made noises indicative of his extreme approval while waving the soldier behind him forward.

“Mademoiselle Dumont!” One of the waiting soldiers became aware of her standing behind them, nudged his companions, murmured to them urgently, “It’s the Black Swan!” Ogling, they all stepped back to clear a path. Discovered, she smiled and greeted them. If she’d thought about it, she would have at least grabbed Berthe’s scarf to conceal her hair and partially hide her face, but upon spotting the woman behind the cart, she’d been so fixated on getting to her that it hadn’t even occurred to her. She looked like Genevieve Dumont in the elegant trench coat she’d snatched out of the closet and thrown on over trousers and a blouse, with only the brim of a jaunty fedora to provide coverage for her face and hair.

Under the soldiers’ close regard there was no more opportunity for clandestine observation. Stepping up to the cart, she found herself meeting her sister’s narrowing eyes.

Like her own, like their mother’s, they were a bright, clear aquamarine.

It instantly felt as if no time at all had gone by. A million scenes from their shared childhood passed between them in that single charged look. And then the final ones, the sequence of events that had led to the shattering of their family, rose up like a whole graveyard’s worth of wraiths and the spontaneous surge of recognition and reunion arcing between them turned into something dark and cold and distant instead.

He’s a terrible person! You can’t go with him, Em! She could still hear the voice of her sixteen-year-old self in her head, shaking with urgency.

They were in a private parlor at the opulent Hôtel du Palais in Biarritz, on the Côte Basque. It was early in the morning, and the three of them, Lillian, Emmy, and her, were alone for the first time in days. Genevra had just burst through the closed French doors, desperate to find her mother and sister in a hotel crammed with guests. As they’d turned to look at her, frowning disapprovingly at her less than decorous entrance, at the clothes she’d hastily pulled on, at her tumbled hair, she’d blurted out what she’d hunted them down to say, afraid to wait even another minute in case she lost her nerve.

There was a moment of surprised silence.

“What are you talking about?” Lillian asked.

“Alain. He’s—he’s—Emmy shouldn’t be with him.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“She can’t—he—”

“Have you lost your mind?” Interrupting, Emmy fixed her sister with a glare. “Wasn’t it just last week that you said he was perfect for me and I was so lucky to have found him? Or was that somebody else talking?”

“That was before. You don’t know what he’s done!” Genevra’s voice shook. She was thin and coltish in loose trousers and a knit top, with an unkempt tangle of black curls and uncharacteristic dark smudges beneath her eyes from a nearly sleepless, life-changing, magic-filled and trauma-roiled night.

The previous evening Emmy had become a married woman, Madame Emmanuelle Giroud. The last few weeks had been hectic with all the excitement and drama of preparing for her wedding. While in better times the celebration of the marriage of the baron and baroness’s elder daughter to Alain Giroud, the twenty-five-year-old only son of the wealthy and well-connected wine broker who sold Rocheford’s award-winning vintages to the world, would have been held at Rocheford, the economic crash and its aftermath had left the house bereft of most of its furniture and all of its staff and the grounds neglected. Lillian had been beside herself as she had tried to contrive a wedding for her eldest daughter that would not shame them nor expose their penury to the bridegroom’s family, their friends or what remained of the fashionable world. A solution had been found: the Hôtel du Palais was owned by an old friend of the family, who had agreed to a much reduced price and to accept future supplies of wine as payment. Everything had gone off beautifully. The guests the hotel was full of had stayed the night, and the celebration had stretched into the early morning hours. This morning even the indefatigable Lillian looked tired. Only Emmy didn’t. Radiant with happiness, Emmy looked beautiful in her aqua traveling dress with her dark gold hair cropped short and curled so it framed her face in shining waves. She was moments away from leaving on her honeymoon with her new husband, who was outside supervising as their bags were loaded into the car. Genevra had seen him, tall and blond and extraordinarily handsome, through an upstairs window as she searched for her mother and sister, and had instantly become both furious on her sister’s behalf and sick to her stomach upon catching sight of him.

“So, then, tell me! What has he done?” Emmy’s question was sharp with challenge.

“Last night—after the wedding—he—he—screwed Madeline Fabron.” Her voice dropped to a mindful-of-the-guests hush as she blurted it out. Madeline Fabron was the twenty-something second wife of the septuagenarian industrialist Georges Fabron, a contemporary and close friend of Alain’s father.

“Genevra. That word! Do you even know what you’re saying?” Regal in her cream lace sheath, Lillian shook her head at her, scandalized.

“He did not!” Emmy’s furious denial came fast. She knew her sister knew exactly what the word meant—and what she was saying.

“He did too! He did.”

“Liar!”

“Girls!”

“I’m not the only one who saw them! Phillippe did, too. We were...” She broke off as a rush of emotions—joy, disbelief, embarrassment, shyness, along with so many others that she couldn’t even put a name to them—threatened to tie her tongue. The thought that Phillippe Cheviot, their longtime friend and neighbor who’d been wild about Emmy for ages, was now, officially, as of last night, wild about her instead, brought a rush of warmth with it. Hugging the knowledge close, she tucked it out of the way for the present and plunged on. “We were walking up from the beach when we saw them. They were together in the gazebo. On your wedding night! You can’t stay married to him, Em—”

“You’re lying.”

“Ask Phillippe if you don’t believe me.”

Emmy made a scornful sound. “Phillippe would say anything to break up Alain and me.”

“He would not!” Although Emmy’s words sent a shiver of disquiet through her. Hours after the wedding, when she’d come across Phillippe on the beach in front of the hotel, he’d been sitting all alone in the dark with his back against a rock, his thin face turned up to the moon, his finely chiseled features distorted as he wept. The tracks of his tears had silvered his cheeks. Heart aching for him, she’d dropped down beside him to comfort him, and...and...

“And you’d say anything to get in good with Phillippe. We all know you’ve been mooning after him for ages. What, did he pretend to see something and tell you so you’d come in here to make trouble? Well, it’s not going to work.”

“Phillippe did not send me. I saw with my own eyes—”

“Liar.”

“Girls, stop this.” Lillian put an arm around Emmy’s shoulders. The two of them stood together, facing her. Emmy’s eyes were bright with anger. Lillian’s were dark with concern. “Genevra, you must be mistaken in what you thought you saw. Surely—”

“I’m not mistaken. He was on top of her, screwing her. I know what that looks like, believe me.”

“Genevra!”

Emmy clenched her fists. “Alain never went downstairs again, never left me for the rest of the night after we went upstairs together. Not for one minute, do you hear? He was never anywhere near that gazebo, never anywhere near Madeline Fabron.”

A car horn honked twice, the muffled bleat jarring. Emmy looked toward it and pulled away from Lillian.

“I’m going now.” She started toward the door. “Goodbye, Maman.” Then she stopped to fix her sister with the nastiest look Genevra had ever seen on her usually smiling face. “And as for you, you vicious little cat, if you ever repeat this to anyone, I’ll make you wish you were never born, do you understand?”

A moment later Emmy was gone. The front door banged behind her. Genevra took a few impulsive steps to follow before stopping, stricken. What more could she do? Confront Alain, who would certainly deny everything and create a nasty scene that anyone might overhear? Through the leaded glass panel in the top of the door, she watched helplessly as Emmy, one hand holding her hat in place, her skirt flying, ran to join a grinning Alain as he waited for her behind the wheel of his car.

She felt sick.

Her mother came to stand beside her, put a hand on her shoulder. “Genevra.”

She heard the trouble in Lillian’s voice, saw the doubt in her face and gave up.

There’s nothing more to be done.

Later, avoiding her mother who was busy seeing to the departing guests, she’d gone in search of Phillippe. He was nowhere to be found.

He’ll come to me.

Even as she waited, she hugged the memory of the previous night close.

“You’re so sweet. I’ll marry you instead. Will you marry me, Genevra?” Phillippe’s words, spoken as the moonlight poured over them, were what she’d dreamed of hearing for years.

Of course she’d thrown herself into his arms, smothered him with kisses, answered, “Yes, Phillippe. Yes, yes, I will.”

Her parents would say she was too young. Her mother would say she could do better. But she would stand her ground; she would marry him.

If only he would come.

At first she hadn’t been too worried. A niggle of doubt arose—had he really meant it? Was he having second thoughts? In the bright light of day, with all the emotion of Emmy’s wedding behind them, had he looked deep into his heart only to discover that she was only Emmy’s little sister after all?

He didn’t come. They’d gone home, she and her parents, back to Rocheford, later that day, without her seeing him.

She was hurt. She was bewildered. She told herself that maybe an emergency had arisen, and he’d had to leave without finding her.

Deep inside, she was afraid, deeply afraid, that he was avoiding her, that he’d had a change of heart, that he regretted it.

It was only when she’d grown so desperate to see him that she’d gone to the farm he shared with his widowed father to seek him out that she discovered that he’d never returned from the wedding.

His father hadn’t been too worried. A boy, his heart freshly broken—because Monsieur Cheviot, like everyone, knew how Phillippe felt, had felt, about Emmy—might not be in too big a hurry to return home.

It was several days before a search was launched. It was several more days before Phillippe was found. Dead, in one of the hotel’s ornamental ponds. It was the judgment of the official who presided over such things that he had fallen in, perhaps hitting his head on one of the rocks with which the pond was edged, and drowned.

Genevra had been inconsolable. She’d attended the funeral, then locked herself away in her room until she’d cried all the tears she’d thought she was ever going to cry in her life.

And that had been the end of it. Her love, dead. Her great love story over almost as soon as it had begun.

Until not quite six months later, when Lillian had walked in on her daughter undressing in her bedroom. Taking one look at the rounded stomach Genevra had been so fervently ignoring, she’d asked, with shock, if she was pregnant.

That’s when Genevra had faced the terrifying truth she’d been doing her best to deny, and, shaking, finally confided in her mother. That night, Emmy’s wedding night, on the beach, she’d been so deep in love, so desperate to console the seemingly inconsolable Phillippe, that she’d succumbed to his embraces and his muttered words of love and given herself to him.

It was no comfort now to remember that he’d asked her to marry him and she’d accepted, that they’d been engaged, that she had considered them as good as wed.

Her mother had listened to her outpouring of words in growing horror.

“Phillippe’s dead,” Lillian said finally, flatly. “Whatever you intended, whatever he promised, there’s no making this right. The shame of it—” She broke off with a shudder. “My God, Paul mustn’t learn of this. It will kill him.”

The thought of her father knowing had done what nothing else could do: it stripped away every last bit of the bravado she’d been hiding behind. Fright and shame and grief for Phillippe and the sudden stark realization of the disgrace she was bringing down on the heads of her beleaguered family overwhelmed her. Crumbling to the floor, she burst into tears, shaking and sobbing as if her heart would break all over again.

Kneeling beside her, Lillian had swallowed her own distress in the face of her daughter’s. Wrapping her arms around her, she’d held her as she cried and promised that she would take care of everything. That she would make everything all right.

Two weeks later Genevra had been sent away, supposedly to stay with friends in Switzerland for a few months so that she wouldn’t be so lonely without Emmy, who had just returned from her extended honeymoon to her new home in Monaco. Actually, Lillian had taken her in great secrecy to Lourmarin, a beautiful small village in Provence, where she’d been hidden away in the house of Clotilde Arsenau, an old and trusted family retainer. The plan was that Genevra, living there under the guise of Madame Arsenau’s widowed-far-too-young niece, would have her baby, put it up for adoption, and return to Rocheford and her old life with no one but herself, Lillian and Madame Arsenau the wiser.

Once in Lourmarin, she’d thought her life was over. Until Vivi was born.

When she held her daughter for the first time, Genevra had experienced such an overwhelming rush of love that she’d known it wasn’t, known that instead she had a whole new life, and that new life was centered on the infant in her arms.

She’d refused to give Vivi up for adoption, begged to bring her home to Rocheford, clashed horribly with Lillian when her mother refused to even consider such a thing.

“Absolutely not. You’ll be ruined,” Lillian told her, in what was only their second meeting since Vivi’s birth. The first had been immediately afterward, when Genevra, weak but furiously determined, had refused to allow her child to be handed over to the nice couple that had been found to take her. Instead of returning home with her mother, as had been the plan, she had stayed on in Lourmarin, defiantly taking a job in the village apothecary, determined to do whatever she had to do to keep her baby. She had continued to live with Madame Arsenau—Tante Clotilde—as her niece, and Lillian, although aghast at Genevra’s unexpected intransigence, had continued to contribute to the household expenses. She had also continued, by phone call and letter, to beg her daughter to reconsider her position. This second meeting had included Emmy, who, although the sisters’ relationship was far from what it had been before Emmy’s marriage, had been recruited by their mother to help make Genevra see sense. In what Emmy and Lillian clearly considered this time of family crisis, past disagreements were set aside.

“I don’t care,” she’d replied.

“You should care. You will care, as you grow older and wish to go about in society again, or marry. You don’t understand the consequences of an illegitimate child to your future. Or to the child’s.” Lillian reached for Genevra’s hand. Genevra pulled it back out of reach. They—Lillian, Emmy and Genevra—stood together in the downstairs sitting room of Madame Arsenau’s modest house. Lillian had been visiting Emmy at her new home in Monaco, and they had taken the train together, in great secrecy, to see Genevra.

“Her name is Vivienne, Maman,” Genevra said. Vivi, all of eleven months old, lay asleep upstairs in her cot. Her mother and sister had looked at the sleeping child, looked at each other and then had asked Genevra to come with them downstairs so that they could talk.

Emmy said, “Genny, consider. Vivienne will be shunned. All her life, people will look down on her. They’ll whisper behind her back. She won’t be invited into people’s homes, or to parties, or anywhere. No one will want to be friends with her. No one will want to marry her. Wouldn’t it be better, for her sake, to let her be adopted, so that she can live a normal life?”

“I can arrange for a family close to Rocheford to take her,” Lillian said, before she could reply. “You could still see her, make sure she’s taken care of. For your sake, and for hers, it’s the best solution, Genevra.”

“I’m not going to give Vivi up for adoption. I won’t.”

“What about the scandal to us?” Emmy said. “What about poor Papa? As hard as things are for him now, do you want to make them even worse? Do you want him to have to hang his head everywhere he goes?”

At the thought of Papa finding out, Genevra shivered inside. Not because she was afraid of what he would do, but because he would be so disappointed in her, and so ashamed.

“You care about the scandal,” she told the two of them. “I don’t.”

“You don’t care about anything except yourself,” Emmy said. “You never did.”

“That’s not true. I care about you, both of you. About the family. I want to be a part of it, but I can’t give up Vivi. I won’t.”

“Then I’m afraid we’re at an impasse,” Lillian said.

They had parted with nothing resolved.

Then the unthinkable had happened: Vivi had died. And the world had stopped turning on its axis, and the foundations of her life had fallen away beneath her feet and her existence had turned into a long, cold, endless night. Haunted by bad dreams, riven by regret, self-condemned to what felt like eternal damnation, she’d descended into a state of shock from which she’d only just begun to emerge.

Everyone had said that what had happened wasn’t anyone’s fault.

She’d known it was hers.

If she could only go back, only change one thing about that afternoon—how often had she wished it? Only every second of every minute of every hour of every day since.

In the chaotic aftermath, as was made abundantly clear to her in the one frantic phone call in which her mother was able to get through to her, she could have gone home to Rocheford again. There was no longer the visible disgrace of an illegitimate child standing in her way, no longer any need to worry about scandal. She could rejoin the family. She could start her life anew.

But how could she go on with her life as it was before, as if Vivi had never been? No, it was impossible. Genevra was forever changed, and she could never accept a future in which Vivi was forever forgotten.

“You didn’t want Vivi, and now I don’t want you. I never want to see you again.” Her voice had been calm, her eyes dry. The worst agony she had ever experienced in her life had turned her insides to ice.

That same day she’d left Lourmarin, and shortly thereafter fled to America by ship, selling the cameo brooch left to her by her paternal grandmother to pay her passage. On board, she’d made the acquaintance of the ship’s entertainers, Ruth and Frank Wilmore and their two sons, Bob and Gene. When Frank Wilmore heard her playing and singing to herself, late one night in the deserted piano lounge, he’d invited her to join their family band. This she’d done and spent the following two years touring America as part of what, as it turned out, had been the Frankie Wilmore Orchestra. Her voice was acclaimed everywhere they went, and she and the band grew increasingly famous. She might still have been in America if Frank hadn’t died and the sons hadn’t gone to war over who would assume their father’s mantle, control of the band and, not incidentally, her. Their fight had ended up with her washing her hands of both of them and hiring a manager, who’d taken her to England. She’d been a minor sensation performing in London at venues ranging from the Monseigneur nightclub to the Palladium. That triumph had led to a European tour, which had taken her to Paris, where she’d been performing at the Moulin Rouge when the Nazis invaded.

During all that time she had lived as Genevieve Dumont. Genevra de Rocheford, having perished with Vivi, had ceased to exist.

Until her father’s death and her mother’s desperate plight had resurrected her.

Now here Genevra was, surfacing like a phoenix.

To find herself once again looking into Emmy’s eyes.

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