The Nightingale(127)

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Isabelle seems unbreakable. She has a steel exterior, but it protects a candyfloss heart. Don’t hurt her, that’s what I’m saying. If you don’t love her—”

“I do.”

Vianne studied him. “Does she know?”

“I hope not.”

Vianne would not have understood that answer a year ago. She wouldn’t have understood how dark a side love could have, how hiding it was the kindest thing you could do sometimes. “I don’t know why it’s so easy for me to forget how much I love her. We start fighting, and…”

“Sisters.”

Vianne sighed. “I suppose, although I haven’t been much of one to her.”

“You’ll get another chance.”

“Do you believe that?”

His silence was answer enough. At last, he said, “Take care of yourself, Vianne. She’ll need a place to come home to when all of this is over.”

“If it’s ever over.”

“Oui.”

Vianne got down from the wagon; her boots sunk deep into wet, muddy grass. “I’m not sure she thinks of me as a safe place to come home to,” she said.

“You’ll need to be brave,” Ga?tan said. “When the Nazis come looking for their man. You know our real names. That’s dangerous for all of us. You included.”

“I’ll be brave,” she said. “You just tell my sister that she needs to start being afraid.”

For the first time, Ga?tan smiled and Vianne understood how this scrawny, sharp-featured man in his beggar’s clothes had swept Isabelle off her feet. He had the kind of smile that inhabited every part of his face—his eyes, his cheeks; there was even a dimple. I wear my heart on my sleeve, that smile said, and no woman could be unmoved by such transparency. “Oui,” he said. “Because it is so easy to tell your sister anything.”

*

Fire.

It’s all around her, leaping, dancing. A bonfire. She can see it in quivering strands of red that come and go. A flame licks her face, burns deep.

It’s everywhere and then … it’s gone.

The world is icy, white, sheer and cracked. She shivers with the cold, watches her fingers turn blue and crackle and break apart. They fall away like chalk, dusting her frozen feet.

“Isabelle.”

Birdsong. A nightingale. She hears it singing a sad song. Nightingales mean loss, don’t they? Love that leaves or doesn’t last or never existed in the first place. There’s a poem about that, she thinks. An ode.

No, not a bird.

A man. The king of the fire maybe. A prince in hiding in the frozen woods. A wolf.

She looks for footprints in the snow.

“Isabelle. Wake up.”

She heard his voice in her imagination. Ga?tan.

He wasn’t really here. She was alone—she was always alone—and this was too strange to be anything but a dream. She was hot and cold and achy and worn out.

She remembered something—a loud noise. Vianne’s voice: Don’t come back.

“I’m here.”

She felt him sit beside her. The mattress shifted to accommodate his imaginary weight.

Something cool and damp pressed to her forehead and it felt so good that she was momentarily distracted. And then she felt his lips graze hers and linger there; he said something she couldn’t quite hear and then he drew back. She felt the end of the kiss as deeply as she’d felt the start of it.

It felt so … real.

She wanted to say “Don’t leave me,” but she couldn’t do it, not again. She was so tired of begging people to love her.

Besides, he wasn’t really here, so what would be the point of saying anything?

She closed her eyes and rolled away from the man who wasn’t there.

*

Vianne sat on Beck’s bed.

Ridiculous that she thought of it that way, but there it was. She sat in this room that had become his, hoping that it wouldn’t always be his in her mind. In her hand was the small portrait of his family.

You would love Hilda. Here, she sent you this strudel, Madame. For putting up with a lout such as myself.

Vianne swallowed hard. She didn’t cry for him again. She refused to, but God, she wanted to cry for herself, for what she had done, for who she had become. She wanted to cry for the man she’d killed and the sister who might not live. It had been an easy choice, killing Beck to save Isabelle. So why had Vianne been so quick to turn on Isabelle before? You are not welcome here. How could she have said that to her own sister? What if those were among the last words ever spoken between them?