The Nightingale

“No. It’s just … unexpected.”

“You should be scared,” he said, pushing the stringy hair out of his eyes. “Anyway, you are safe enough with me. I have other things on my mind. I am going to check on my maman and sister and then find a regiment to join. I’ll kill as many of those bastards as I can.”

“You’re lucky,” she said with a sigh. Why was it so easy for men in the world to do as they wanted and so difficult for women?

“Come with me.”

Isabelle knew better than to believe him. “You only ask because I’m pretty and you think I’ll end up in your bed if I stay,” she said.

He stared across the fire at her. It cracked and hissed as fat dripped onto the flames. He took a long drink of wine and handed the bottle back to her. Near the flames, their hands touched, the barest brushing of skin on skin. “I could have you in my bed right now if that’s what I wanted.”

“Not willingly,” she said, swallowing hard, unable to look away.

“Willingly,” he said in a way that made her skin prickle and made breathing difficult. “But that’s not what I meant. Or what I said. I asked you to come with me to fight.”

Isabelle felt something so new she couldn’t quite grasp it. She knew she was beautiful. It was simply a fact to her. People said it whenever they met her. She saw how men gazed at her with unabashed desire, remarking on her hair or green eyes or plump lips; how they looked at her breasts. She saw her beauty reflected in women’s eyes, too, girls at school who didn’t want her to stand too near the boys they liked and judged her to be arrogant before she’d even spoken a word.

Beauty was just another way to discount her, to not see her. She had grown used to getting attention in other ways. And she wasn’t a complete innocent when it came to passion, either. Hadn’t the good Sisters of St. Francis expelled her for kissing a boy during mass?

But this felt different.

He saw her beauty, even in the half-light, she could tell, but he looked past it. Either that, or he was smart enough to see that she wanted to offer more to the world than a pretty face.

“I could do something that matters,” she said quietly.

“Of course you could. I could teach you to use a gun and a knife.”

“I need to go to Carriveau and make sure my sister is well. Her husband is at the front.”

He gazed at her across the fire, his expression intent. “We will see your sister in Carriveau and my mother in Poitiers, and then we will be off to join the war.”

He made it sound like such an adventure, no different from running off to join the circus, as if they would see men who swallowed swords and fat women with beards along the way.

It was what she’d been looking for all of her life. “A plan, then,” she said, unable to hide her smile.





SIX

The next morning Isabelle blinked awake to see sunlight gilding the leaves rustling overhead.

She sat up, resmoothing the skirt that had hiked up in her sleep, revealing lacy white garters and ruined silk stockings.

“Don’t do that on my account.”

Isabelle glanced to her left and saw Ga?tan coming toward her. For the first time, she saw him clearly. He was lanky, wiry as an apostrophe mark, and dressed in clothes that appeared to have come from a beggar’s bin. Beneath a fraying cap, his face was scruffy and sharp, unshaven. He had a wide brow and a pronounced chin and deep-set gray eyes that were heavily lashed. The look in those eyes was as sharp as the point of his chin, and revealed a kind of clarified hunger. Last night she’d thought it was how he’d looked at her. Now she saw that it was how he looked at the world.

He didn’t scare her, not at all. Isabelle was not like her sister, Vianne, who was given to fear and anxiety. But neither was Isabelle a fool. If she was going to travel with this man, she had better get a few things straight.

“So,” she said. “Prison.”

He stared at her, raised a black eyebrow, as if to say, Scared yet? “A girl like you wouldn’t know anything about it. I could tell you it was a Jean Valjean sort of stay and you would think it was romantic.”

It was the kind of thing she heard all the time. It circled back to her looks, as most snide comments did. Surely a pretty blond girl had to be shallow and dim-witted. “Were you stealing food to feed your family?”

He grinned crookedly. It gave him a lopsided look, with one side of his smile hiking up farther than the other. “No.”

“Are you dangerous?”

“It depends. What do you think of communists?”

“Ah. So you were a political prisoner.”

“Something like that. But like I said, a nice girl like you wouldn’t know anything about survival.”

“You’d be surprised the things I know, Ga?tan. There is more than one kind of prison.”

“Is there, pretty girl? What do you know about it?”

“What was your crime?”

“I took things that didn’t belong to me. Is that enough of an answer?”

Thief.

“And you got caught.”

“Obviously.”

“That isn’t exactly comforting, Ga?tan. Were you careless?”