“May I leave this for her?” The dancer slipped the weighty bag from her shoulder, placing it on the marble countertop while keeping one hand on it possessively.
“Of course, madame.” He wrote out a label—Pour Mademoiselle P. Kelly—then affixed it with a ribbon. “Would you like to leave a note to go with it?”
“No,” Sarah replied. “No, thank you—she’ll know what it is.”
“Should I add your name to the label, madame? So she’ll know who it’s from?”
Sarah didn’t want to leave anything incriminating with the bag. It was far too dangerous. “No, thank you. She’ll know.” She swayed, feeling a wave of nausea pass over her.
“Is something wrong, madame? You look distressed.”
“I’m fine.” Sarah straightened her spine, pressed her shoulders down, and lifted her chin, as if onstage. “Please make sure she receives it.”
“Yes, madame—I’ll keep an eye out for Mademoiselle Kelly.” The man lifted the bag. “It’s heavy,” he remarked, smiling. “What do you have in there? Diamond tiaras? Ruby necklaces? Gold bars, perhaps?”
“Something like that.”
—
High on an exposed hilltop stood the ancient stone convent of the Filles de la Charité, an order of nuns devoted to caring for the mentally retarded, epileptic, and incurably ill. Besides the sixteen sisters, there were forty female patients in an adjoining infirmary.
The convent was outside Paris; in fact, the nearest farm was a half-hour walk, the village and the train station another hour’s walk on top of that. It seemed a world away from the Occupation.
The convent was the place Elise Hess had immediately thought of as a place of sanctuary when she’d been brought from Berlin to Paris against her will by SOE. They’d intended to take her back to England. But she’d both outwitted and outrun the British agents, and had ended up, miraculously, on this hilltop with the sisters.
It had been three months since she’d arrived at the convent, and Elise was fitting in as the novice Mademoiselle Eleanor—a young woman contemplating taking the vows of a nun. She dressed simply, not in a habit, as the sisters and the Mother Superior did, but in a plain dark blue dress with an apron. She wore the same thick-soled black shoes and baggy cotton stockings as the nuns, and a white linen veil covered her head, disguising her short hair, which had been shaved at Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.
Before the war, Elise had aspired to become a nun. She’d never taken the actual vows, though: she’d liked men too much. She’d been a pediatric nurse at Charité Hospital in Mitte, Berlin, working with St. Hedwig’s Father Licht in the fight against the Reich’s murder of the sick, and the physically and mentally disabled.
But that seemed centuries ago, although the women she and the sisters cared for so lovingly had the same diseases and issues that would have them exterminated in Nazi Germany. Here, the women were treated with love and respect. At least for now; with the Occupation, Elise had a feeling that it was only a matter of time before the “undesirables” here were rounded up and taken away to be gassed, just as they had been in Berlin.
Before she went into the convent’s dining hall for lunch, Elise perched on the low stone wall of the courtyard, swinging her feet and enjoying a few minutes of privacy and silence after a long shift at the infirmary. As the warm sun peeked from behind a heavy cloud and a goldfinch’s song pierced the sweet-smelling air, she prayed, thanking God for allowing her to be useful in such a peaceful place.
One by one, the sisters arrived, walking past the walls of the courtyard. They were women from eighteen to eighty-nine, all dressed in bluish gray habits with white wimples. “Mademoiselle Eleanor!” she heard Sister St. Felix call. “We missed you at Mass this morning!”
“I know, I know!” Elise hopped down from the wall and brushed off her skirt, falling into step with her friend. Sister St. Felix was only a few years older than Elise, twenty-five and plump, with daffodil-yellow hair that occasionally sprang free in tendrils from underneath her veil.
“Wish I could skip early morning Mass some days,” grumbled Sister Marthe, behind them. Just past forty, Marthe was lanky and gaunt, with large eyes, large nose, and a pronounced jaw that some might call handsome.
“Hush,” Sister St. Felix warned. “Mother Superior said, ‘Let her rest as much as possible, after everything she’s been through.’?”
Marthe had seniority at the convent and wasn’t pleased to be told what to do. “And what exactly has she been through?” She narrowed her eyes at Elise. “No one will say!” When Sister St. Felix glared, she grumpily amended, “Ah, never mind, I know—don’t ask.”
Sister St. Felix pulled open the heavy, creaky door. Inside was a large room with a cool stone floor and whitewashed walls hung with paintings of saints and wooden crucifixes.
In the dining room, the women all sat at a long, low wooden table, as the Mother Superior, Mère St. Antoine, pressed her palms together and recited the prayer, her rosy eighty-something countenance and deep brown eyes framed by her veil. When she finished and they had bowed their heads and crossed themselves, Sister de l’Annonciation and Sister Marie-Bernard began to serve lunch.
Fresh food was far more plentiful in the countryside than in Paris, so lunch consisted of slices of thick brown bread with sweet butter and fresh cheese, and steaming bowls of ersatz coffee made from chicory. After weeks on such fare, Elise was looking much healthier, and feeling stronger. Her angles were smoothing out, her collarbones not as sharp, and her face more pink than pale.
When Elise had first arrived at the convent, Mère St. Antoine had welcomed her and listened to her story with tears in her eyes. Then she showed the younger woman to what would be her new home: a whitewashed room with a crucifix and a palm frond tucked behind it, and a narrow bed covered with lavender-scented linens. For the first time in what seemed like forever, Elise began to feel like a human, not a hunted animal. While she was still not out of danger, here she had miraculously found a reprieve.
The next day, Mère St. Antoine had presented, without comment, false papers, giving her a French identity—Eleanor Blanc, twenty-four, from Paris. Elise received them, also without comment, knowing whoever had provided them did so at terrible personal risk. “In my past life, I really did want to become a nun,” she’d told the Mother Superior.
“This is a great blessing, my child,” the older woman had replied. “To see what life as a sister is really like. And now, especially since you have medical training, I would like you to meet our enfants.”
The infirmary was adjacent to the convent. In actuality, the afflicted weren’t necessarily children but rather females from five to ninety-three, brought to the convent by Assistance Publique, and all called enfants by the nuns with affection. And Elise went to work, thankful for the opportunity to be useful.
One of her favorite patients grew to be Thérèse, a woman in her seventies with high cheekbones and a brusque manner, who’d once been a telephone operator. Her days were spent in animated conversation on an imaginary telephone, with imaginary friends. When Elise came into her room with her pills and a glass of water, she would say into the pretend receiver, “Excuse me, I must ring off now.”
Today, Thérèse eyed Elise warily. “Yes, but Mademoiselle Eleanor is here now,” she whispered into her hand. “And what we’re talking about does not concern her. I shall ring you back when I can.”
As Thérèse swallowed her pills obediently, Mère St. Antoine found Elise. “When you’re finished, I’d like to speak with you, child. I’ll wait in the hall.”
“Yes, Mère.”