“Thank you for all you’re doing,” Nanée said, changing her own clothes now so the woman could take the case, wanting to ask the woman’s name, to thank her properly, but it was safer, always, to leave names unknown.
As the woman slipped quietly out, leaving Nanée and Luki in the little room with the single window that looked over a huge formal garden seeming to float on the water, about to break free and drift away, Luki pointed to the orange still in her hand. Nanée hesitated. Would the smell of an orange give them away to some less sympathetic porter or maid? But the whole chateau smelled of flowers, and of the river out the window. She took the orange and dug her nails in to peel it, releasing the crisp citrus scent.
LUKI WAS FAST asleep when a woman’s voice startled Nanée.
“This new German patrol seems to have set up on the river for the night, so we’re going to move you to a proper room,” the woman, who introduced herself as Simone Menier, said. She’d brought no light with her. “I don’t generally ask for names, Nanée, but I suppose you will know who I am, and the fact is, I know your mother.”
Nanée lifted Luki over her shoulder and followed Simone Menier down the stairs, past the gallery, which was lit now only by moonlight, and through a windowless entry hall with a vaulted ceiling carved with roses and cherubs and cornucopia, where Nanée could see in the electric light that Simone Menier was as elegantly beautiful as her home. As they ducked up a stunning staircase, the pitched ceiling here too carved with keys and faces, flowers and fruit, it occurred to Nanée to wonder how this lady of the chateau knew who she was.
Simone Menier hurried past the windows at the turn in the staircase, overlooking the river. They were backlit. Anyone out there could see them. She showed them into a bedroom with an elaborately painted joist ceiling, a cold fireplace, and an inviting four-poster bed. The drapes were closed, the room lit only by the spill of light from the hallway.
“We’re reluctant to light the fire, as both the light and the chimney smoke might alert the Germans to a fuller house,” she explained, already pulling back the bedcovers so Nanée could lay Luki down.
The kangaroo was not in the girl’s arms. They must have dropped her.
Simone Menier was off to fetch Pemmy before Nanée could say another word, only pausing at the door to insist that Nanée call her Simone and to offer her cognac. Nanée hesitated, torn between the recollection of drinking cognac with the commandant at Camp des Milles and the opportunity to sit and chat with this brave, generous woman.
“The only staff in the house now are my housekeeper and her son,” Simone said. “They’ll both go to the gallows with me should it come to that. If you don’t prefer cognac, perhaps champagne? I’m sorry not to be able to send you on your way to the free zone this very moment, but selfishly . . . good female companionship is such a rare thing in this time.”
Nanée thought of T giving Peterkin his nightly milk back at Villa Air-Bel. “The chateau,” they called that old place, but it was nothing like this one. She thought of Miriam, now gone off to Yugoslavia and her fiancé.
“Good female companionship is a rare thing in any time,” she said.
Simone returned with a tray of champagne and chocolates, Pemmy, and a book. She set down the tray and tucked the kangaroo in with Luki, and they settled into chairs.
“Bibliothèque Rose!” Nanée exclaimed as Simone handed her the book. The Pink Library. “I read the whole series again and again with my French governesses when I was a child. Les malheurs de Sophie. Dans la bonne voie. And this, of course.” Thérèse à Sainte-Domingue, about a little girl who helps free slaves. “These books may have been my first step toward moving to Paris.” Stories of girls who were as brave as she’d once believed her father imagined her, only to see in retrospect that his words that night at the bonfire at Marigold Lodge were nothing more than an offhand remark meant to soothe an injured child. “These heroic French girls were a grand improvement on the pigs and rats and horses offered in English books,” she said.
Simone laughed gently as she poured the champagne into ordinary wine goblets. “I hate to disappoint you, but I’m afraid these ‘classic French tales’ were written by a Russian—Sophie Rostopchine, writing as ‘the Countess de Ségur.’” She smiled warmly. “You’ve a long journey ahead. The girl isn’t your daughter, I gather?” Said not in the way André Breton might, not prying, but only trying to understand.
“She’s the daughter of a friend,” Nanée answered, remembering Luki setting off toward the door to the chateau with that gun pointed at her, as brave as any of the girls in these books. Thinking of the child in her father’s arms back in Paris too, thinking Nanée was the mother she had lost. Mutti, will you sing to me?
The champagne and chocolate combination was surprisingly delicious, the peachy, orangey, slightly sweet champagne complementing the edge of citrus she tasted in the rich chocolate, although that might be the orange peel under her nails.
She thanked Simone for all she was doing.
“This is nothing,” Simone demurred. “During the Great War, we treated well over two thousand men in a makeshift military hospital in the gallery. Of course, everything was easier with my father-in-law. They’re both gone now, my father-in-law and my husband. Like your father. I sometimes wonder if all the good men in the world are gone.”
“How do you even know who I am?” Nanée asked, the question ruder than she’d intended.
“I saw you as my housekeeper brought you up from the kitchens. You won’t remember, but we met briefly in Paris some years ago. I happened to be at a restaurant where you and your mother and a gentleman friend were dining.”
Misha, Nanée thought. Misha and her mother drunk and making a scene, as they were wont to do.
Simone looked to the bed, where Luki remained fast asleep. “Will you take the child and her father back to the United States with you?”
“Her father and I aren’t . . .” But she was in love with Edouard even if he wasn’t in love with her. Perhaps she had been since that first night in Paris. “I . . . Maybe. I don’t know.”
Friday, November 29, 1940
CHTEAU DE CHENONCEAU
Nanée startled awake to Simone Menier whispering, “It’s time. We have to hurry before the morning traffic on the river begins and the staff arrive.”
Nanée was immediately alert, climbing from the bed still in her traveling clothes, pulling on her shoes. “Luki,” she whispered, nuzzling the kangaroo into the child’s cheek. “It’s time to go to your papa.”
Luki, with the softest sound of half-asleep contentment, pulled the mohair kangaroo close to her. “Pemmy, the angel is taking us to Papa.”