“Just look at the horizon and—”
“Too late,” I groaned, and leaned over the railing. I had nothing left to bring up, but my stomach turned itself inside out anyway. Out of the corner of my eye I could see a pair of Frenchmen in dapper suits wrinkling their noses and edging farther down the deck. A stiff gust of wind whipped across the deck, and my dark green hat with its horrid rolled brim went cartwheeling away. “Let it go,” I gasped between heaves as Finn made a swipe over the rail. “I hate that hat!”
He smiled, reaching to gather my whipping hair and hold it out of my face as I retched one final time. I’d been hideously embarrassed the first time I vomited in front of him, but now I was too ill for humiliation. “That’s a delicate stomach you’ve got for a Yank,” he observed. “Judging from their hot dogs and their coffee, I thought Americans didn’t get sick at anything.”
I straightened, probably looking as green as an old can of peas. “Please don’t say hot dogs.”
He dropped my hair. “As you wish.”
We were standing at the opposite end of the boat from Eve, because she’d found my misery enormously amusing, and I’d had to retreat before I killed her. Eventually Finn had joined me. He must have gotten tired of her swearing and her smoke fumes, though it was hard to imagine they were worse than my endless nausea.
He leaned back on his elbows against the rail, tipping his head back to look at the boat’s squat upper deck. “Where do we go once we get to Le Havre, miss?”
“Eve says the woman we need to talk to is in Roubaix, so we may as well go there before Limoges. But I was thinking . . .” I trailed off.
“Thinking what?”
“Rouen first?” It came out as too much of a question, and I kicked myself for that. I didn’t have to ask permission for where we went next; this was my quest, though that was far too grandiose a word. My mission? My obsession? Well, whatever you called it, my money was funding everything so I was the one in charge. Finn and Eve seemed to take that for granted, something I couldn’t help but enjoy after so many weeks of feeling like a leaf on the surface of a whirlpool. “We’ll go to Rouen,” I said firmly. “My aunt left Paris and moved to the summer house for good after the war. Rose’s mother. She wasn’t very forthcoming in her letters, but if I turn up on her doorstep surely she’ll talk to me.”
I thought of my French aunt with her endless rattling handbag full of pill boxes for all the illnesses she was convinced she was dying of, and I wanted to seize hold of her bony arms and shake her till she coughed up the answers I wanted. Why did Rose leave home in ’43? What happened to your daughter?
I looked across the deck and saw the eight-year-old Rose, wiry and freckled, skipping along the rail. She smiled at me, and then I saw she wasn’t Rose at all. She didn’t even have Rose’s blond hair. I watched the child run back to her mother at the bow, and still my imagination tried to tell me it was Rose’s fair plaits bouncing against that narrow back, not a stranger’s brown ones.
“Rouen,” I repeated. “We’ll stay the night in Le Havre, then drive in the morning. We could get there tonight if we could take the train . . .” Eve had flatly refused to consider anything but car travel, and so I’d had to fork over a good sum to have Finn’s Lagonda lifted ponderously up into the boat by crane. Like we were British lords off for a Continental motoring jaunt with a champagne picnic. For what it cost to bring the car—and because of the car, we had to take the slower boat to Le Havre rather than Boulogne—I could have ferried six people to France and back. “Couldn’t that cow buck up and suffer a train ride?” I grumbled.
“I don’t ken she could,” Finn said.
I glanced at my unpredictable ally at the other end of the deck. On the car journey she’d been by turns insulting or silent, refusing to get out of the car when we reached Folkestone, and Finn had to escort me out to buy tickets for the Channel crossing. When we came back to the Lagonda she’d disappeared, and after going up and down in the car we found her standing outside a shabby row house marked number 8 on the Parade—just standing there, scowling. “Still wonder where that skinny English boy went,” she’d said apropos of nothing. “The one b-booted out of the course. Did he join the boys in the trenches, get himself blown up? Lucky bastard.”
“What course?” I’d asked, exasperated, but she just gave her harsh bark of a laugh and said, “Haven’t we got a boat to catch?”
And now she was sitting at the far corner of the deck in a shabby coat, hatless, smoking an unending chain of cigarettes and looking unexpectedly fragile. “My brother always sat like that,” I said. “With his back in a corner. When he came back from Tarawa, anyway. He got drunk one night and told me he wasn’t comfortable anymore unless he could see all the lines of fire.” A lump rose in my throat as I remembered James’s broad handsome face, not really handsome anymore under the blur of drink and the pasted-on smile, because his eyes were so empty . . .
“A lot of soldiers do that,” Finn said, neutral.
“I know.” Swallowing down the lump. “It wasn’t just my brother—I used to see it when the soldiers came into the coffee shop where I worked.” I caught Finn’s look of surprise. “What, you think the rich little American’s never had a job?”
That was clearly exactly what he’d thought.
“My father thought his children should know the value of a dollar. I started working at his office when I was fourteen.” A law firm specializing in international law, French and German heard on the telephone lines as much as English. I’d started out watering the plants and making the coffee, but soon I was filing papers, organizing my father’s notes, even balancing his account books once it became clear I could do it faster and more neatly than his secretary. “And then when I went to Bennington,” I continued, “and my mother wasn’t there to forbid me, I got a job at a coffee shop. That’s where I’d see the soldiers come in.”
Finn looked bemused. “Why work if you didn’t have to?”
“I like being useful. Anything to get me out of white gloves and cotillion. You can watch people in a café, make up stories about them. That one over there is a Nazi spy, that one over there is an actress on her way to a Broadway audition. Besides, I’m good with numbers, so I’m useful in a shop—making change in my head, keeping the register. I was a math major in school.”