“It is my home,” Madame Rouffanche said. “It is still my home, and I am its living witness. You are not the first people to come here, looking . . . It is easier to find me than nothing at all. So tell me who you are seeking. I will tell you if they lived.” Her eyes were pitying, bottomless. “And I will tell you if they died.”
For a long moment no one spoke. We stood like a trinity in that terrible place, a soft breeze ruffling Finn’s hair and rippling the hem of Madame Rouffanche’s coat. Then I reached into my pocketbook and took out the worn photograph of Rose. I put it into Madame Rouffanche’s lined hands.
I prayed then. I prayed so hard.
She peered at the photograph, holding it closer to her old eyes. “Ahhhh . . . ,” she said quietly, recognition flowering in her eyes. “Hélène.”
“Hélène?” Finn said it sharply, before I could.
“Hélène Joubert, she said her name was when she came here to have her baby. A widow, very young. I think we all guessed, but . . .” A shrug. “A lovely girl. No one cared. She left her baby with the Hyvernaud family while she went to work in Limoges. She was back every weekend on the tram, Madame Hyvernaud said.” A smile. “Hélène. A pretty name, but we never called her that. She said she’d been Rose as a child, for her pink cheeks, so we called her that. La belle Rose.”
Something in me started to shriek.
“Please,” I begged, and my voice cracked. “Tell me she wasn’t here. Tell me she was in Limoges. Tell me she wasn’t here.”
A long silence from Madame Rouffanche. She looked at the photograph, Rose’s laughing face, and I saw her sinking again—back down to the endless loop of JunetenthJunetenthJunetenth. “Inside the church,” she said, “there were three windows high in the wall—I went to the middle one, the biggest, and pulled up the stool the priest used to light the candles. I heaved myself up, and flung myself out. I fell about ten feet.”
Almost exactly the same words she had used telling it the first time, I realized in my daze of horror. How many times had she told this story to people like me, people looking for loved ones, that her tale had hardened into such a rigid sequence, the same words in the same order? Was that how she kept herself sane while she raked over her memories every day for our benefit? “Madame, please—”
She was walking again, back the way we’d come, her steps uneven and mindless. I ran to keep up. “A woman tried to follow me out the window.” Pause. Blink. Then the tale changed, as we came back to the dark broken window where Madame Rouffanche had jumped three years ago. “When I looked up—” She looked up now, and my eyes flew to follow hers. I saw what she described. I saw what she’d seen. “I’d been followed by a woman, who was holding out her baby to me from the window.”
I saw a blond head, pale arms reaching down from that window. Here.
“I took the child—it was screaming in fear.”
I saw the wailing bundle, the waving fists.
“The woman jumped, falling down next to me. She seized her baby from me and turned to run.”
I saw the slim figure jump, graceful even in terror. I saw her white dress against the grass as she gathered herself up, grass stained and bloodstained, snatching the screaming bundle in her arms and darting toward safety—
“But the Germans fired at us, dozens of shots. We fell.”
I saw the fusillade of bullets, the hazy drift of gunsmoke. The chips of stone flying as the church wall was hit. The drops of blood on blond hair.
“I was hit five times. I was able to crawl away.” Madame Rouffanche put the photograph gently back into my shaking hand. “But your friend—la belle Rose, and baby Charlotte—they were killed.”
I heard a rustle then, and I closed my eyes. It was the rustle of a summer dress rippled by warm wind. Rose was standing right behind me—if I turned, I would see her. I’d see her white dress stained red, I’d see the bullets that had gone through her soft throat and her sparkling eyes. I’d see her lying crumpled, legs twitching as she still tried with all her brave heart to flee. I’d see her child in her arms, the baby I’d never meet, the baby who would never grow up to be a big sister to mine. The baby she had named Charlotte.
Rose stood behind me, breathing. Only she wasn’t breathing. She’d been dead three years. She was gone, and all my hopes were lies.
CHAPTER 24
EVE
October 1915
She died in a hail of bullets. The details blared from smuggled newspapers, and everyone read them, sickened and fascinated. She was executed by firing squad in Belgium: a Red Cross nurse and English spy, instantly famous, heroine and martyr to all. Her name was everywhere.
Edith Cavell.
Not Violette Lameron. Edith Cavell was dead, but Violette, from what the Alice Network could glean, was still alive.
“Cavell looks like Violette,” Eve said, devouring the forbidden newspaper in private. Cavell had been arrested in August, but only now had the execution marched to its brutal conclusion. “It’s the eyes.” Most of the pictures of Edith Cavell were romanticized; she was drawn swooning before the row of guns, her photographs touched up to make her look fragile and feminine. But Eve thought the eyes were anything but fragile. Edith Cavell had helped smuggle hundreds of soldiers from Belgium—it was no job for the fragile. She had hard matter-of-fact eyes like Violette, like Lili, like Eve herself. Another fleur du mal, Eve thought.
“This is good. Not to be brutal, but Cavell’s death is nothing but good for Violette.” Lili was pacing the room—since Violette’s arrest nearly three weeks ago she’d been lying low, hiding out with Eve. Hiding didn’t suit her. She paced like a caged tigress, her small face tense. “The Germans are being so condemned for Cavell’s execution, they won’t dare march another female out before a firing squad.”
What are they doing to her instead? Eve wondered, full of dread. Torture wasn’t common among the Germans and their prisoners, even for spies. Interrogation, beatings, imprisonment, yes—and of course there was the looming fear of execution. But though you might be shot, you wouldn’t have your fingernails pulled out first; everyone in the network knew that.
Yet what if they had made an exception for Violette?
Eve didn’t voice that thought, knowing Lili was already in agony. So was Eve whenever she remembered Violette’s hands tending to her so gently, trying to warm the steel instruments. Without Violette, Eve would be stuck right now with René’s seed consuming her. Or she would be dead, because without Violette’s expertise she’d have been mad enough to try any potion, any poison that would do the job. Eve owed Violette so much.
“They’ll be questioning her.” Lili’s shoulders sagged as she paced. “Antoine says they have nothing definite. She wasn’t caught with papers. Her name was given up when a Brussels boy in the network got taken; all he knew was her name. So the Huns will question her, but if they dig for a weak spot on Violette, all they’ll find is bedrock.”