The Nightingale

“Sophie!” Vianne said sharply, but her admonishment fell on deaf ears. Manners were unnecessary at one’s best friend’s house, and Rachel de Champlain had been Vianne’s best friend for fifteen years. They’d met only a month after Papa had so ignominiously dropped his children off at Le Jardin.

They’d been a pair back then: Vianne, slight and pale and nervous, and Rachel, as tall as the boys, with eyebrows that grew faster than a lie and a voice like a foghorn. Outsiders, both of them, until they met. They’d become inseparable in school and stayed friends in all the years since. They’d gone to university together and both had become schoolteachers. They’d even been pregnant at the same time. Now they taught in side-by-side classrooms at the local school.

Rachel appeared in the open doorway, holding her newborn son, Ariel.

A look passed between the women. In it was everything they felt and feared.

Vianne followed her friend into a small, brightly lit interior that was as neat as a pin. A vase full of wildflowers graced the rough wooden trestle table flanked by mismatched chairs. In the corner of the dining room was a leather valise, and sitting on top of it was the brown felt fedora that Rachel’s husband, Marc, favored. Rachel went into the kitchen for a small crockery plate full of canelés. Then the women headed outside.

In the small backyard, roses grew along a privet hedge. A table and four chairs sat unevenly on a stone patio. Antique lanterns hung from the branches of a chestnut tree.

Vianne picked up a canelé and took a bite, savoring the vanilla-rich cream center and crispy, slightly burned-tasting exterior. She sat down.

Rachel sat down across from her, with the baby asleep in her arms. Silence seemed to expand between them and fill with their fears and misgivings.

“I wonder if he’ll know his father,” Rachel said as she looked down at her baby.

“They’ll be changed,” Vianne said, remembering. Her father had been in the Battle of the Somme, in which more than three-quarters of a million men had lost their lives. Rumors of German atrocities had come home with the few who survived.

Rachel moved the infant to her shoulder, patted his back soothingly. “Marc is no good at changing diapers. And Ari loves to sleep in our bed. I guess that’ll be all right now.”

Vianne felt a smile start. It was a little thing, this joke, but it helped. “Antoine’s snoring is a pain in the backside. I should get some good sleep.”

“And we can have poached eggs for supper.”

“Only half the laundry,” she said, but then her voice broke. “I’m not strong enough for this, Rachel.”

“Of course you are. We’ll get through it together.”

“Before I met Antoine…”

Rachel waved a hand dismissively. “I know. I know. You were as skinny as a branch, you stuttered when you got nervous, and you were allergic to everything. I know. I was there. But that’s all over now. You’ll be strong. You know why?”

“Why?”

Rachel’s smile faded. “I know I’m big—statuesque, as they like to say when they’re selling me brassieres and stockings—but I feel … undone by this, V. I am going to need to lean on you sometimes, too. Not with all my weight, of course.”

“So we can’t both fall apart at the same time.”

“Voilà,” Rachel said. “Our plan. Should we open a bottle of cognac now, or gin?”

“It’s ten o’clock in the morning.”

“You’re right. Of course. A French 75.”

*

On Tuesday morning when Vianne awoke, sunlight poured through the window, glazing the exposed timbers.

Antoine sat in the chair by the window, a walnut rocker he’d made during Vianne’s second pregnancy. For years that empty rocker had mocked them. The miscarriage years, as she thought of them now. Desolation in a land of plenty. Three lost lives in four years; tiny thready heartbeats, blue hands. And then, miraculously: a baby who survived. Sophie. There were sad little ghosts caught in the wood grain of that chair, but there were good memories, too.

“Maybe you should take Sophie to Paris,” he said as she sat up. “Julien would look out for you.”

“My father has made his opinion on living with his daughters quite clear. I cannot expect a welcome from him.” Vianne pushed the matelasse coverlet aside and rose, putting her bare feet on the worn rug.

“Will you be all right?”

“Sophie and I will be fine. You’ll be home in no time anyway. The Maginot Line will hold. And Lord knows the Germans are no match for us.”

“Too bad their weapons are. I took all of our money out of the bank. There are sixty-five thousand francs in the mattress. Use it wisely, Vianne. Along with your teaching salary, it should last you a good long time.”

She felt a flutter of panic. She knew too little about their finances. Antoine handled them.

He stood up slowly and took her in his arms. She wanted to bottle how safe she felt in this moment, so she could drink of it later when loneliness and fear left her parched.

Remember this, she thought. The way the light caught in his unruly hair, the love in his brown eyes, the chapped lips that had kissed her only an hour ago, in the darkness.