“No. I’ve never heard of her. I swear.”
He grabbed her chin again and held it firmly as he looked into her eyes. She refused to blink, to show him any weakness.
“Very well,” he said at last. He turned and barked something at the other Germans, and then he turned back to her. “If I find that you are lying, I will happily shoot you in the head myself.”
And then he turned sharply on his heel, followed by the other three. They got into a car a half block away, and then they were gone. Ruby collapsed to the sidewalk, breathing hard. Only one of the other women in line, a woman old enough to be Ruby’s mother, came to her aid.
“Perhaps if you know this Adèle Beauvais, you should tell her to get out while she still can,” the woman said as she helped Ruby up.
“But I’ve never heard of her.”
“Dear,” the woman said gently, “I can read on your face that you are not as innocent as you would have the Germans believe.”
Ruby opened her mouth to deny it, but then the woman pressed a package into her hand. “Here. My eggs and meat. Go home now before the day gets any worse for you. That was a narrow escape.”
“But—”
“Take it. And if you’re doing something to undermine the Germans,” she added in a whisper, “then thank you. Vive la France.” She turned her back on Ruby, pulling her wool coat more tightly around her. Finally, Ruby stepped out of line and began the walk back to her apartment, haunted by the fate that could have found her by accident.
“PERHAPS WE SHOULD STOP,” RUBY said that night as she and Charlotte ate dinner alone in the kitchen. They were between pilots, and Lucien was out at a meeting, so it was just the two of them. Ruby had told her what had happened that day and how much it had shaken her. “Things are getting more dangerous.”
“But if we stop fighting, we’ve already begun to lose. We have to keep at it until the very end.”
“Yes, I know. But today terrified me, Charlotte. The next time the Germans come, it could be for us. Your parents didn’t leave you with me thinking that I would insert you into the fight for France.”
“You didn’t insert me anywhere. With or without you, I would have found my way into the Resistance. Anyhow, my parents couldn’t have imagined how the world would change. My father left our apartment a year and a half ago thinking that the police would let him go because it was the right thing to do. He didn’t get to stay here long enough to change his mind. But he would have, Ruby. He would have seen the need to fight back. He just didn’t realize yet what would happen to the city he loved.”
“But the risk—” Ruby began.
“The risk is part of it,” Charlotte said firmly. “Nothing great happens without risk.”
“I know. I just can’t help feeling as if our luck is running out.”
Over the next several weeks, the arrivals and departures of pilots flowed like a steady tide. There were Refilwe and Poloko, two pilots from South Africa who arrived together, conspicuous in both their accents and their appearances. They were two of the most polite pilots Ruby took in, but she was glad when they departed after only two days, for they would have been harder to pass off as Frenchmen if the authorities came looking. There was a pilot named Travis from New Zealand, whose charming accent made Charlotte giggle, and there was a pilot named Raymond from Worthington, Ohio, whose sister had gone to university in New York at the same time Ruby had. Howie from Topeka was with them for almost a week, and he spent evenings patiently helping Charlotte practice her English verb conjugations and mornings sipping watery ersatz coffee with Ruby in companionable silence. Terence from Liverpool was worried about whether his fiancée, Elizabeth, would stay faithful to him when he was gone. “She has legs that go on for miles,” he said more than once, “and don’t think that the other men don’t notice. She’s always flirting, but she swears she loves me. Do you think she’s telling the truth?”
Marcus from Arlington, Texas, was disturbed that Ruby and Charlotte were involved in the escape line. “But you’re women,” he said, looking baffled. “This is dangerous work, which means it should be done by men.” Still, he thanked them profusely for their hospitality and was never rude, but Ruby was happy to see him go when Laure—whom they had recruited for the new escape line—came to pick him up. Ernest from Spring Gully, South Carolina, had such a thick southern accent that Ruby could hardly understand him, and Joseph from Brockton, Massachusetts, came down with a fever and murmured for two days straight about someone named Catherine, whom he called the love of his life. Fortunately, he came out of the fog on the third day and was in traveling shape by the fourth, having sweated out the illness under Ruby’s concerned supervision.
All the pilots brought welcome news of Allied victories and spoke of the hope that the war would be over soon. The Germans were being pushed back on every front. “France will be liberated any day now,” a pilot from St. Louis named Tom Trouba told Ruby confidently in late February. “You wait and see. The war’ll be over by the end of ?’forty-four.”
He departed with Laure the next day, leaving Charlotte and Ruby alone once again. Charlotte went out in the late morning to meet Lucien, and after Ruby returned from exchanging the day’s ration tickets, she sat down in the living room, basking in the rare silence. She hadn’t been feeling well for the past few weeks, which she attributed to the doldrums of winter and the constant pit of worry in her stomach over Thomas’s safety. But today, alone for the first time in weeks, she had time to truly think about how she’d been feeling and when the symptoms had first appeared. As she sat on the couch in silence, her stomach swimming, something suddenly occurred to her: she hadn’t had her time of the month since December. More than two months ago. “Oh my God,” she said aloud.
And all at once, she knew. The pit in her stomach. The lack of appetite even when she should have been starving. The swelling in her breasts even as her belly grew flatter. It was exactly what had happened last time.
She was pregnant. The realization hit her like a lightning bolt, and she didn’t know whether to be ecstatic or terrified. It was what she and Thomas had spoken of, the life they had planned together, but she wasn’t ready for the future to come yet. At the same time, though, what if the pilots were right and the war would be over soon?
She was carrying Thomas’s baby. The thought echoed in her head again and again like a favorite song, soothing and thrilling her. This meant that a piece of him was still here. But she’d lost the first baby—what if she was fated to miscarry again? Losing this baby too might just destroy her. She felt a sudden, desperate need to protect the life in her womb at any cost. But how could she bring a healthy child into the world when she could scarcely survive herself?
She sat with her hands on her belly for the next few hours, imagining a future with Thomas and the child they now shared. She knew—with the same certainty that she’d known her first baby would be a boy—that this child would be a little girl. She could see Thomas laughing and chasing a pigtailed daughter through the poppy fields with the sky clear and blue and perfect above them. Ruby would watch from the porch, her heart filled with joy, as she thought about how far they’d come. The war would be over, the world would be right again, and everyone she loved would be safe. Charlotte would be there too, sitting beside her on a rocking chair, finally protected from all the forces that could hurt her.
“Are you okay?” Charlotte’s voice jarred Ruby awake sometime later. Ruby didn’t remember falling asleep, but darkness had fallen.
“Oh, yes,” Ruby said, struggling upright. “I must have been more tired than I realized.”
Charlotte frowned. “You’re feeling all right?”