The Nightingale(21)

At Rachel’s classroom, she paused, watching as Rachel put her son in his pram and wheeled it toward the door. Rachel had been planning to take this term off from teaching to stay home with Ari, but the war had changed all of that. Now, she had no choice but to bring her baby to work with her.

“You look like I feel,” Vianne said as her friend neared. Rachel’s dark hair had responded to the humidity and doubled in size.

“That can’t be a compliment but I’m desperate, so I am taking it as one. You have chalk on your cheek, by the way.”

Vianne wiped her cheek absently and leaned over the pram. The baby was sleeping soundly. “How’s he doing?”

“For a ten-month-old who is supposed to be at home with his maman and is instead gallivanting around town beneath enemy aeroplanes and listening to ten-year-old students shriek all day? Fine.” She smiled and pushed a damp ringlet from her face as they headed down the corridor. “Do I sound bitter?”

“No more than the rest of us.”

“Ha! Bitterness would do you good. All that smiling and pretending of yours would give me hives.”

Rachel bumped the pram down the three stone steps and onto the walkway that led to the grassy play area that had once been an exercise arena for horses and a delivery area for tradesmen. A four-hundred-year-old stone fountain gurgled and dripped water in the center of the yard.

“Come on, girls!” Rachel called out to Sophie and Sarah, who were sitting together on a park bench. The girls responded immediately and fell into step ahead of the women, chattering constantly, their heads cocked together, their hands clasped. A second generation of best friends.

They turned into an alleyway and came out on rue Victor Hugo, right in front of a bistro where old men sat on ironwork chairs, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and talking politics. Ahead of them, Vianne saw a haggard trio of women limping along, their clothes tattered, their faces yellow with dust.

“Poor women,” Rachel said with a sigh. “Hélène Ruelle told me this morning that at least a dozen refugees came to town late last night. The stories they bring are not good. But no one embellishes a story like Hélène.”

Ordinarily Vianne would make a comment about what a gossip Hélène was, but she couldn’t be glib. According to Papa, Isabelle had left Paris days ago. She still hadn’t arrived at Le Jardin. “I’m worried about Isabelle,” she said.

Rachel linked her arm through Vianne’s. “Do you remember the first time your sister ran away from that boarding school in Lyon?”

“She was seven years old.”

“She made it all the way to Amboise. Alone. With no money. She spent two nights in the woods and talked her way onto the train.”

Vianne barely remembered anything of that time except for her own grief. When she’d lost the first baby, she’d fallen into despair. The lost year, Antoine called it. That was how she thought of it, too. When Antoine told her he was taking Isabelle to Paris, and to Papa, Vianne had been—God help her—relieved.

Was it any surprise that Isabelle had run away from the boarding school to which she’d been sent? To this day, Vianne felt an abiding shame at how she had treated her baby sister.

“She was nine the first time she made it to Paris,” Vianne said, trying to find comfort in the familiar story. Isabelle was tough and driven and determined; she always had been.

“If I’m not mistaken, she was expelled two years later for running away from school to see a traveling circus. Or was that when she climbed out of the second-floor dormitory window using a bedsheet?” Rachel smiled. “The point is, Isabelle will make it here if that’s what she wants.”

“God help anyone who tries to stop her.”

“She will arrive any day. I promise. Unless she has met an exiled prince and fallen desperately in love.”

“That is the kind of thing that could happen to her.”

“You see?” Rachel teased. “You feel better already. Now come to my house for lemonade. It’s just the thing on a day this hot.”

*

After supper, Vianne got Sophie settled into bed and went downstairs. She was too worried to relax. The silence in her house kept reminding her that no one had come to her door. She could not remain still. Regardless of her conversation with Rachel, she couldn’t dispel her worry—and a terrible sense of foreboding—about Isabelle.

Vianne stood up, sat down, then stood again and walked to the front door, opening it.