“What is it?” she asked, touching her lips to his to banish forever anything that could make him feel like that.
He opened his eyes. They were blacker than any night had ever been. And then he said, “I’m leaving. For England. My…” He ran a furious hand through his hair. “My father’s closing the gallery here.” His voice was incredulous.
Éliane felt herself take a small step back.
“I only found out today.” His awful, unbelievable words continued. “We have to leave tomorrow. The Germans are coming, Ellie. They’ll be here soon, despite what the radio says, despite what the French government says. Everyone who can is leaving Paris. I wish I could take you with me. But…” He faltered, as if trying to make himself believe his next words. “We can still have everything we want. It may just take a little longer.”
Ellie. Nobody in the world called her that, except him. She had, until then, loved the sound of it in his mouth.
Her head shook from side to side, dislodging what she thought she’d heard and trying to re-form the words into something that didn’t make her heart hurl itself against her chest, like childish fists thumping out her incomprehension.
“You’re leaving?” she said, her words the tiniest and thinnest of whispers.
“There’s one last ship from Bordeaux. I have to make sure my father gets to England safely—”
“But…” Éliane broke in, then stepped further away from him, stumbling a little, unbalanced by pain and the sudden rush of understanding. “You knew you were leaving before you came here tonight. You knew. And you didn’t say anything.”
He reached out a hand for her but she was beyond his reach. “If I don’t get my father out now, he’ll be trapped—”
Éliane’s laugh was a knife tearing through the night. “Trapped? Quelle horreur. Like the French people who have no London home to run to.”
Hot tears scalded her eyes. “How dare you? How dare you tell me now, after everything we just did.” She tore the ring off her finger so ferociously that it cut her skin. “How dare you not tell me this first,” she finished, voice small.
“I couldn’t,” he whispered. “I didn’t want to ruin tonight. I didn’t want to ruin everything.”
Tonight was more than ruined now; it was ash.
Perhaps if he’d looked away, stared at the floor, not met her eyes. Then she could have hated him outright. But he kept his gaze upon her, steadfast, so that she could see love shining like starlight in the pools of his eyes. That hurt her more than anything. He loved her, but he was leaving her.
And he hadn’t loved her enough to tell her first. He’d put his body before her heart.
She had never sworn before, nothing more than a zut or a mon Dieu, had certainly never called anyone a bastard, but the word came flying out. “Tu es un salaud! And a coward!” She threw the ring at him.
It hit his shoulder, falling to the floor and clattering against the wood.
Éliane pulled her dress over her head. Then she stormed out, vowing that she would not cry, not ever, not for him; he did not deserve it.
It was almost dawn when she returned to find Luc, her mother, and all her sisters gathered around the table waiting for her. She knew that Luc had told them they had to leave. Nobody asked her why she looked so pale or where she’d been. And as Yolande said, “Éliane must come with us,” Éliane took all of her heart from Xavier and gave it to her sisters.
They were more precious than any Winged Victory or Mona Lisa and if those artworks had to be sent away, then so too did her sisters.
“I’ll send you money enough to buy lots of ice cream,” she said, giving her mother the envelope of Luc’s money, which she’d somehow known to save.
“How will we know what to do if you’re not there?” Angélique said, her lip trembling like Yolande’s.
Éliane pulled them both into her arms. “You’ll know because I’ve taught you everything.” She made herself smile and Angélique bless her, smiled back, pretending she saw the humor. And Yolande was persuaded to believe that they were about to set off on an adventure.
PART THREE
Skye
They knew, if they stopped to think about it, that they were operating at the very limit of what society could tolerate even in war. But they weren’t much interested in society either, or . . . their place in it, and they were so used to being unusual that anything else would have been . . . soul-destroyingly dull.
—Giles Whittell, Spitfire Women of
World War II
Four
PARIS, SEPTEMBER 1939
Lunch in Paris with a melange of British and French pilots turned into dinner in Paris, as well as too much champagne.
“We’ll have to stay the night,” Skye said as the sun hid itself away and the sky became too dark to fly through.
“We will,” Rose agreed, clinking her glass against Skye’s and then against the glasses of the others at the table.
Valentin, a Parisian, offered a toast: “To peace. And may Monsieur Adolf give himself a deadly apoplexy from too much vigorous Nazi saluting.”
Everyone laughed and drank to it so enthusiastically that Rose gestured to the waiter for yet more champagne. And so they drank their fears about Hitler’s ruthless and bloodless purloining of Europe into submission, and Valentin draped his arm over Skye’s shoulders as she entertained them all with stories of the acts she performed in the flying circus in England each summer, acts that helped pay her bills.
“The anticipation of a dreadful accident is what brings people to the circus,” she told them. “I can feel them holding their breath every time I turn the plane over. They want a sensational story to share at the pub: that they were there when the sky let go of the plane and it fell to the ground”—she let her hands fly up into the air, mimicking an explosion—“and the lady inside died a tragic death.” She smote her hand dramatically across her forehead. “I never oblige them, of course.”
Laughter and glasses were raised once more, toasting the crowds Skye had disappointed by living through her aerobatics.
“I hear you can wing-walk,” Valentin said.
“She made a jolly good display of it at last year’s Magyar Pilots’ Picnic,” Rose said, referring to the annual gathering of pilots just outside Budapest which she and Skye regularly attended for more uproarious lunches.
“I couldn’t go to that one,” Valentin said regretfully. “I was doing my military service. You must need extraordinary balance for such a thing.”
“And damn-fool pluck,” Rose added.
“Or an ‘incurable reckless streak’ and ‘a lack of concern for keeping her head attached to her neck.’ That last one’s my favorite,” Skye said, accepting the cigarette Valentin passed her. “The blue bloods at the Civil Air Guard wrote all that and more into a report about my suitability to instruct for them. Luckily there are so few qualified instructors in England, and pilots are needed so desperately to bolster the RAF in case of war, that they employed me anyway in spite of my careless attitude toward my body parts.”