The Nightingale

Only a few days after her arrival in San Sebastián, and after endless meetings and debriefings, Isabelle was on the train bound for Paris again, sitting in one of the wooden banquettes in the third-class carriage—the only seat available on such short notice—watching the Loire Valley pass by. The carriage was freezing cold and packed with loquacious German soldiers and cowed French men and women who kept their heads down and their hands in their laps. She had a piece of hard cheese and an apple in her handbag, but even though she was hungry—starving, really—she didn’t open her bag.

She felt conspicuous in her ragged, snagged brown pants and woolen coat. Her cheeks were windburned and scratched and her lips were chapped and dry. But the real changes were within. The pride of what she’d accomplished in the Pyrenees had changed her, matured her. For the first time in her life, she knew exactly what she wanted to do.

She had met with an agent from MI9 and formally set up the escape route. She was their primary contact—they called her the Nightingale. In her handbag, hidden in the lining, were one hundred forty thousand francs. Enough to set up safe houses and buy food and clothing for the airmen and the people who dared to house them along the way. She’d given her word to her contact Ian (code name Tuesday) that other airmen would follow. Sending word to Paul—“The Nightingale has sung”—was perhaps the proudest moment of her life.

It was nearing curfew when she disembarked in Paris. The autumnal city shivered beneath a cold, dark sky. Wind tumbled through the bare trees, clattering the empty flower baskets, ruffling and flapping the awnings.

She went out of her way to walk past her old apartment on Avenue de La Bourdonnais and as she passed it, she felt a wave of … longing she supposed. It was as close to a home as she could remember, and she hadn’t stepped inside—or seen her father—in months. Not since the inception of the escape route. It wasn’t safe for them to be together. Instead, she went to the small, dingy apartment that was her most recent home. A mismatched table and chairs, a mattress on the floor, and a broken stove. The rug smelled of the last tenant’s tobacco and the walls were water-stained.

At her front door, she paused, glanced around. The street was quiet, dark. She fitted the skeleton key in the lock and gave a little twist. At the click of sound, she sensed danger. Something was wrong, out of place—a shadow where it shouldn’t be, a clanking of metal from the bistro next door, abandoned by its owner months ago.

She turned around slowly, peered out into the dark, quiet street. Unseen lorries were parked here and there and a few sad little cafés cast triangles of light onto the sidewalk; within the glow, soldiers were thin silhouettes, moving back and forth. An air of desertion hung over the once lively neighborhood.

Across the street, a lamp stood unlit, a barely darker slash against the night air around it.

He was there. She knew it, even though she couldn’t see him.

She moved down the steps, slowly, her senses alert, taking one cautious step at a time. She was sure she could hear him breathing, not far away. Watching her. She knew instinctively that he’d been waiting for her to return, worrying.

“Ga?tan,” she said softly, letting her voice be a lure, casting out, trying to catch him. “You’ve been following me for months. Why?”

Nothing. Silence blew in the wind around her, biting and cold.

“Come here,” she pleaded, tilting her chin.

Still, nothing.

“Now who isn’t ready?” she said. It hurt, that silence, but she understood it, too. With all the risks they were taking, love was probably the most dangerous choice of all.

Or maybe she was wrong, and he wasn’t here, had never been here, watching her, waiting for her. Maybe she was just a silly girl longing for a man who didn’t want her, standing alone in an empty street.

No.

He was there.

*

That winter was even worse than the year before. An angry God smote Europe with leaden skies and falling snow, day after day after day. The cold was a cruel addendum to a world already bleak and ugly.

Carriveau, like so many small towns in the Occupied Zone, became an island of despair, cut off from its surroundings. The villagers had limited information about what was going on in the world around them, and no one had time to burrow through propagandist papers looking for truth when surviving took so much effort. All they really knew was that the Nazis had become angrier, meaner, since the Americans had joined the war.

On a bleak and freezing predawn morning in early February 1942, when tree limbs snapped and windowpanes looked like cracked pond ice, Vianne woke early and stared at the deeply pitched ceiling of her bedroom. A headache pounded behind her eyes. She felt sweaty and achy. When she drew in a breath, it burned in her lungs and made her cough.