The Nightingale(10)

Isabelle got to her feet. “Shall I return to the orange lesson?”

“You misunderstand. I mean you should leave the school, Isabelle. It is clear that you are not interested in learning what we have to teach you.”

“How to eat an orange and when you can spread cheese and who is more important—the second son of a duke or a daughter who won’t inherit or an ambassador to an unimportant country? Madame, do you not know what is going on in the world?”

Isabelle might have been secreted deep in the countryside, but still she knew. Even here, barricaded behind hedges and bludgeoned by politeness, she knew what was happening in France. At night in her monastic cell, while her classmates were in bed, she sat up, long into the night, listening to the BBC on her contraband radio. France had joined Britain in declaring war on Germany, and Hitler was on the move. All across France people had stockpiled food and put up blackout shades and learned to live like moles in the dark.

They had prepared and worried and then … nothing.

Month after month, nothing happened.

At first all anyone could talk about was the Great War and the losses that had touched so many families, but as the months went on, and there was only talk of war, Isabelle heard her teachers calling it the dr?le de guerre, the phony war. The real horror was happening elsewhere in Europe; in Belgium and Holland and Poland.

“Will manners not matter in war, Isabelle?”

“They don’t matter now,” Isabelle said impulsively, wishing a moment later that she’d said nothing.

Madame stood. “We were never the right place for you, but…”

“My father would put me anywhere to be rid of me,” she said. Isabelle would rather blurt out the truth than hear another lie. She had learned many lessons in the parade of schools and convents that had housed her for more than a decade—most of all, she’d learned that she had to rely on herself. Certainly her father and her sister couldn’t be counted on.

Madame looked at Isabelle. Her nose flared ever so slightly, an indication of polite but pained disapproval. “It is hard for a man to lose his wife.”

“It is hard for a girl to lose her mother.” She smiled defiantly. “I lost both parents though, didn’t I? One died, and the other turned his back on me. I can’t say which hurt more.”

“Mon Dieu, Isabelle, must you always speak whatever is on your mind?”

Isabelle had heard this criticism all her life, but why should she hold her tongue? No one listened to her either way.

“So you will leave today. I will telegram your father. Tómas will take you to the train.”

“Tonight?” Isabelle blinked. “But … Papa won’t want me.”

“Ah. Consequences,” Madame said. “Perhaps now you will see that they should be considered.”

*

Isabelle was alone on a train again, heading toward an unknown reception.

She stared out the dirty, mottled window at the flashing green landscape: fields of hay, red roofs, stone cottages, gray bridges, horses.

Everything looked exactly as it always had and that surprised her. War was coming, and she’d imagined it would leave a mark on the countryside somehow, changing the grass color or killing the trees or scaring away the birds, but now, as she sat on this train chugging into Paris, she saw that everything looked completely ordinary.

At the sprawling Gare de Lyon, the train came to a wheezing, belching stop. Isabelle reached down for the small valise at her feet and pulled it onto her lap. As she watched the passengers shuffle past her, exiting the train carriage, the question she’d avoided came back to her.

Papa.

She wanted to believe he would welcome her home, that finally, he would hold out his hands and say her name in a loving way, the way he had Before, when Maman had been the glue that held them together.

She stared down at her scuffed suitcase.

So small.

Most of the girls in the schools she’d attended had arrived with a collection of trunks bound in leather straps and studded with brass tacks. They had pictures on their desks and mementos on their nightstands and photograph albums in their drawers.

Isabelle had a single framed photograph of a woman she wanted to remember and couldn’t. When she tried, all that came to her were blurry images of people crying and the physician shaking his head and her mother saying something about holding tightly to her sister’s hand.

As if that would help. Vianne had been as quick to abandon Isabelle as Papa had been.