The Nightingale

“I’ll be brave,” she said. “You just tell my sister that she needs to start being afraid.”

For the first time, Ga?tan smiled and Vianne understood how this scrawny, sharp-featured man in his beggar’s clothes had swept Isabelle off her feet. He had the kind of smile that inhabited every part of his face—his eyes, his cheeks; there was even a dimple. I wear my heart on my sleeve, that smile said, and no woman could be unmoved by such transparency. “Oui,” he said. “Because it is so easy to tell your sister anything.”

*

Fire.

It’s all around her, leaping, dancing. A bonfire. She can see it in quivering strands of red that come and go. A flame licks her face, burns deep.

It’s everywhere and then … it’s gone.

The world is icy, white, sheer and cracked. She shivers with the cold, watches her fingers turn blue and crackle and break apart. They fall away like chalk, dusting her frozen feet.

“Isabelle.”

Birdsong. A nightingale. She hears it singing a sad song. Nightingales mean loss, don’t they? Love that leaves or doesn’t last or never existed in the first place. There’s a poem about that, she thinks. An ode.

No, not a bird.

A man. The king of the fire maybe. A prince in hiding in the frozen woods. A wolf.

She looks for footprints in the snow.

“Isabelle. Wake up.”

She heard his voice in her imagination. Ga?tan.

He wasn’t really here. She was alone—she was always alone—and this was too strange to be anything but a dream. She was hot and cold and achy and worn out.

She remembered something—a loud noise. Vianne’s voice: Don’t come back.

“I’m here.”

She felt him sit beside her. The mattress shifted to accommodate his imaginary weight.

Something cool and damp pressed to her forehead and it felt so good that she was momentarily distracted. And then she felt his lips graze hers and linger there; he said something she couldn’t quite hear and then he drew back. She felt the end of the kiss as deeply as she’d felt the start of it.

It felt so … real.

She wanted to say “Don’t leave me,” but she couldn’t do it, not again. She was so tired of begging people to love her.

Besides, he wasn’t really here, so what would be the point of saying anything?

She closed her eyes and rolled away from the man who wasn’t there.

*

Vianne sat on Beck’s bed.

Ridiculous that she thought of it that way, but there it was. She sat in this room that had become his, hoping that it wouldn’t always be his in her mind. In her hand was the small portrait of his family.

You would love Hilda. Here, she sent you this strudel, Madame. For putting up with a lout such as myself.

Vianne swallowed hard. She didn’t cry for him again. She refused to, but God, she wanted to cry for herself, for what she had done, for who she had become. She wanted to cry for the man she’d killed and the sister who might not live. It had been an easy choice, killing Beck to save Isabelle. So why had Vianne been so quick to turn on Isabelle before? You are not welcome here. How could she have said that to her own sister? What if those were among the last words ever spoken between them?

As she sat, staring at the portrait (tell my family), she waited for a knock at the door. It had been forty-eight hours since Beck’s murder. The Nazis should be here any minute.

It wasn’t a question of if, but when. They would bang on her door and push their way inside. She had spent hours trying to figure out what to do. Should she go to the Kommandant’s office and report Beck missing?

(No, foolish. What French person would report such a thing?)

Or should she wait until they came to her?

(Never a good thing.)

Or should she try to run?

That only made her remember Sarah and the moonlit night that would forever make her think of bloody streaks on a child’s face and brought her right back to the beginning again.

“Maman?” Sophie said, standing in the open doorway, the toddler on her hip.

“You need to eat something,” Sophie said. She was taller, almost Vianne’s height. When had that happened? And she was thin. Vianne remembered when her daughter had had apple-like cheeks and eyes that sparkled with mischief. Now she was like all of them, stretched as thin as jerky and aged beyond her years.

“They’re going to come to the door soon,” Vianne said. She’d said it so often in the past two days that her words surprised no one. “You remember what to do?”

Sophie nodded solemnly. She knew how important this was, even if she didn’t know what had become of the captain. Interestingly, she hadn’t asked.

Vianne said, “If they take me away—”

“They won’t,” Sophie said.

“And if they do?” Vianne said.

“We wait for you to return for three days and then we go to Mother Marie-Therese at the convent.”