“You all right?” Finn asked. That dark gaze of his didn’t miss much.
“Fine,” I said, slipping out of the car. “Stay here with Eve.” She was dozing in the backseat, the sound of snores rising against the summertime buzz of the cicadas. It had been a long afternoon’s drive after a night in Le Havre at a cheap hotel. First a late start because of course Eve was hungover, and then the hours of jolting along rutted French roads, stopping every hour or so for me to get out and throw up. I made excuses about motion sickness, but really it was the Little Problem. Or maybe it was just the thought of what was coming that made me queasy. I looked at the house again, and the shuttered windows looked like dead eyes.
“Go on, then.” Finn pulled a tattered issue of The Autocar from under his seat, leaning an elbow on the window to read. “When you get back, we’ll head into Rouen and find a hotel.”
“Thank you.” I turned my back on the gleaming blue Lagonda and headed up the drive.
No one answered my knock. I knocked again. It took so long, I was ready to start peering in windows. But at last I heard shuffling footsteps inside, and the door creaked open.
“Tante Jeanne,” I began, before the sight of her froze me. My French aunt had always been slender, scented, blond like Rose. An invalid, but the Greta Garbo kind, all pretty lace bed jackets and a delicate cough. The woman before me was horribly thin, gray haired, dressed in a soiled sweater and a drab skirt. I could have passed her on the street and not recognized her—and from her blank look, she didn’t know me either.
I swallowed. “Tante, it’s Charlotte—your niece. I’ve come to ask you about Rose.”
She didn’t offer me tea or biscuits, just sank into an old divan and regarded me blankly. I perched on the edge of a frayed armchair opposite. She lost everything, I thought, looking at the prematurely aged face in front of me. Widowed . . . two sons dead . . . Rose gone. I didn’t know how Tante Jeanne was even standing. I knew she’d loved my cousin, no matter what childish doubts Rose had carried.
“I’m so sorry, Tante,” I began. “For—for everything.”
She trailed a fingertip over the coffee table, leaving a mark in the dust. Dust lay everywhere like a mantle in the darkened room. “War.”
Such a small, hopeless syllable to cover so much loss. Tears pricked my eyes, and I laced my gloved fingers together. “Tante, there’s nothing to be done about oncle, or Jules or Pierre . . . But there’s Rose. I know it’s a slim chance, but she might be—”
Alive. Eve had mocked me for hoping, but I had to hope. I might be a failure at a lot of things, but I was good at hope.
“What do you think I know? She was in Limoges when I last heard from her,” my aunt stated as though that were the end of it. “She left off writing at least three years ago. Mid ’44, I suppose.”
“Why did she leave here?” I asked, trying to see a spark, a gleam—anything—in my aunt’s eyes. “Why?”
My aunt’s voice was low and bitter. “Because she was a little troublemaker with no morals. No morals at all.”
The bottom fell out of my stomach. “W-what?”
Tante Jeanne shrugged.
“No.” I shook my head. “No, you don’t just say that and then shrug.”
“That girl went wild. Nazis all over Paris, and she wouldn’t keep her head down. First it was sneaking out to listen to God knows what kind of speeches, those clubs where fools talk violence, coming home at all hours of the night. The rows she used to have with her father—the Germans wanted lists of all the socialists and Jews working for his company; what was he supposed to do, refuse? The things Rose shouted at him . . .”
I stared at my aunt, blood thundering in my ears.
She continued in her flat voice. “First she was putting pamphlets on cars, then it was breaking windows. She’d probably have gone on to blowing things up and getting herself shot if it hadn’t been for the boy.”
I remembered Rose’s last letter to me. She was giddy about a boy she was seeing on the sly . . . “What boy?”
“étienne something. Just nineteen, a bookshop clerk. A nobody. She brought him to meet us once. They glowed when they looked at each other, you could tell they were—” A disapproving huff. “Well, that was another row.”
I shook my head, numb to my fingertips. “Why didn’t you tell us any of this? When my father was making inquiries?”
“I did tell him. I suppose he thought it wasn’t suitable for your ears.”
I swallowed. “What happened then?”
“Rose’s boy got caught with the Resistance. They shipped him off, who knows where. Half of Paris was disappearing overnight. Rose probably would have too—she’d already nearly been arrested for kicking a Brownshirt on the Rue de Rivoli, so we brought her back here to Rouen. But . . .”
“What?” I nearly screamed. “What?”
“What do you think?” My aunt’s lips pursed like she’d bitten a lemon. “Rose was pregnant.”
I don’t remember how I got to the beech tree outside the house. I just found myself leaning up against the rough bark, breath coming in hitching gasps. I was terrified to look up at the tree branch above my head, fearing I’d imagine two little girls side by side. This had been our tree, our refuge from our bullying brothers back in the days before James grew older and kinder. Rose and me, sitting on that branch now over my head, feet swinging, like we’d sat in that Proven?al café. Never alone, as long as we had each other.
Rose. Oh, Rose . . .
“I want to do something different.” And she’d had it in her—of course she’d be striding through the Paris nights breaking windows and kicking Brownshirts. I should have known Rose would get involved with the Resistance. But she’d gotten caught in the oldest trap there is, just like me. Rose wasn’t going to write a book or swim the Channel or do anything different—because once you’re pregnant, you’re finished.
I’d wanted to save my cousin, but no one could save her from this. I was stuck in the same trap. Helpless.
I let out a single harsh sob, so loud it startled me. Had she sat out here all alone on our tree branch the night she told her parents? After her mother advised her to take a hot bath and have a stiff gin and then see if she could dance it loose? After her father shouted and shouted, saying she’d brought shame on the family forever? Tante Jeanne had told me all of that as I sat staring.
My father didn’t shout at me when I told him. My mother did all the shouting; he just sat there gazing at me. When I left the room he turned his head away and just said disbelievingly, “Whore.”
I’d forgotten that.
I wondered if they’d called Rose a whore too.