FOUR MONTHS LATER, a print of the family photograph arrived in a stiff cardboard envelope with a Los Angeles postmark. The next letter from Lilly would come the following March, postmarked London, and then another from Paris in May, a month before the Germans took the city. Then the letters ceased, and Rosemary did not know that Lilly fled Paris, or that she was arrested on the train to Marseille and sent with other foreign-born Jews to a camp near the Spanish border. Nor could Lilly write to her American friend about the night that she and two of her fellow inmates escaped in the bin of a truck used to transport rubbish. She could not write about how she fell in with the Resistance, and used her camera for reconnaissance and her abilities in the darkroom to create identification documents. She could not write of the countless times she was stopped by Vichy policemen demanding to see her papers, and how she would raise that great Gallic-seeming nose of hers and heave a sigh as only a long-suffering Frenchwoman could—a sigh she had learned from her mother as she cast aside the first price offered by the Parisian gallery owners.
Rosemary knew only that Lilly had disappeared. Then, shortly after V-E Day, five years after Lilly’s last letter, Rosemary flipped through Life magazine and came upon a picture of a Frenchwoman, her head shaved, being paraded through town for having had an affair with a German soldier. The picture shocked her: the stoic set of the woman’s face, the sneering rage of the crowd. She studied the photograph, poring over every detail, and when at last she glanced at the credit line and saw LILLY BLOCH, she was overcome with tears. So many had been lost during those years, but here was proof that Lilly, her fast friend of two days’ acquaintance, had survived. Rosemary wrote a letter to Lilly in care of the magazine and three months later she received a reply posted from the American zone in Germany. Lilly was returning to Paris, she wrote, after having seen for herself the death camps that had consumed Josef and so much of the world she had once known. Her correspondence with Rosemary would continue for the rest of their lives.
EVEN AS THEY posed for the photograph, Francis knew that he must leave. Gavigan was gone but he was not the only one who could connect Francis to what had happened at the house outside Cork. Someone had passed his name to Gavigan in the first place and could pass it to someone else just as easily. As long as he stayed, he put all those around him in jeopardy. It was not a lesson he needed to learn twice. He told Martin that same night that he would go, and Martin, despite his anguish, agreed it was for the best.
“What about your heiress?” he said, but Francis had accepted that he could not take the risk, for her sake or for his. There was no way to ensure Anisette’s safety, and sooner or later he would have to produce an actual castle and a family of kilt-wearing lairds. Francis considered writing a letter to explain his disappearance—some secret mission on behalf of the king—but he couldn’t bring himself to lie again to Anisette. As for the truth, he could never find the right words to explain himself, and how he felt.
In the end, Félicité saw his disappearance from the fair and from their lives as proof that her run-in with Angus—or whoever he was—in the lobby of the Plaza had served its purpose. He had been gallant enough to accompany Anisette to the fair, yes, but not so gallant that he was ready to make a match with such a delicate, notorious girl. Mrs. Bingham let it be known around town that the dashing young Scotsman who had made such a splash at the fair had been summoned home on urgent business, and with the outbreak of the war she scripted a rotating series of suitably noble endings for him: on the road to Dunkirk, in the skies above the Channel, in the sands at Tobruk. He always died so valiantly. Anisette did not abandon his memory so easily. She pressed her parents to hire private investigators, Pinkertons, anyone who could locate Sir Angus, but his trail had gone cold almost from the moment he left Perylon Hall. In the years that followed, she often retraced their walk from the carousel to the museum, wondering what he hadn’t told her, and what he really wanted from life. Her walks always ended in the same gallery, with the dour, shadowy faces of the old masters the only witness to her grief.
THE MONEY FROM the satchel allowed Martin and Rosemary to rent a small house with a piano and room enough for Uncle Michael. While Martin had missed his chance with Hammond, there were others who had listened: Artie Gold had grown tired of the in-and-out bookings at the Dime and reached out to Martin to form a house band. A bandleader at the Dime made little more than a clarinet player for Chester Kingsley but more than an out-of-work musician or an entry-level clerk at the Department of Sanitation, and Martin said yes before Artie could even finish making his pitch. For the next two and a half years, the gig let him sharpen his chops as an arranger and add an occasional original into the band’s repertoire, and while the Dime never drew the hordes that flocked to the Famous Door or the Hickory House, Martin’s eye for talent made his band a proving ground for young musicians new to the city and on the rise. His run at the Dime ended in early 1942, when he was drafted into the navy and posted to New Jersey, then Corpus Christi, and finally to a naval base in San Diego, rigging parachutes for carrier pilots. In his letters home, he ached to see his “Rose of my heart”; he wrote of wading in the Pacific surf and promised a trip to California when the trains were no longer full of soldiers. When the war ended, he worked out a deal to buy the Dime from Artie. Big-band music was on the wane, but in the decades after the war, the Dime became one of the spots where a new generation of musicians took part in the remaking of jazz. Fess Hooper’s contribution to the Live at the Dime series, recorded in 1959, long remained one of the era’s most coveted live albums—not least for Lorena’s rendition of “Darn That Dream.”