The Paris Orphan

by Natasha Lester

  Dan saw it at the last minute, had yelled out to duck, which anyone else would have done without question but Amelia didn’t know that when a Lieutenant Colonel yelled duck, you ducked. He’d swerved, with his head down, meaning his neck had avoided the wire. But the jeep had hit a tree. He didn’t know how badly Amelia was hurt, but suspected it wasn’t a matter of cuts and scrapes. That the wire, the God-awful wire might have…

  “It’s not your fault,” Jess said, squeezing his hand, trying not to think about the stories of guillotined bodies left by the Germans’ infernal wires. “She shouldn’t have been out there in the first place, let alone without a helmet. The Major General shouldn’t have left her behind. And you would never have taken a road that you thought was unsafe.”

  “But I did,” he said, his face stricken and she led him to a chair and sat him down and kept her arms around him while they waited to find out what had happened to Amelia.

  * * *

  Hours later, Anne called them over. “She’s resting now. They had to…” She paused.

  “Tell me,” Dan said grimly.

  “They had to amputate her arm. It was crushed when the jeep crashed.” Anne paused and Jess knew there was more, that the amputation was the best news. Her heart skidded and she felt like cramming her hands over her ears but she kept her arms around Dan.

  “Tell us,” she said to Anne.

  “The wire sliced into her face,” Anne said. “She’ll have scars, bad ones, for the rest of her life. I’m sorry.” Anne gave Dan a sympathetic look and moved away.

  “What have I done?” Dan said, face dropping into his hands.

  “You’ve done nothing,” Jess insisted. “Let’s go see her. She’ll say the same.”

  But Amelia didn’t say anything; she was sleeping. It was impossible to see how badly hurt she was but, judging by the size of the bandages swathed over her face, it was perhaps worse than they could imagine.

  Jess stayed with Dan that night in his room in Hitler’s apartment. If they were caught, there’d be trouble, but Jennings helped as usual; one look at Dan’s face told him that Jess needed to be there for his CO.

  Before dawn, she woke to find that Dan was already up and dressed and about to go back to the hospital to see Amelia.

  “I’ll come with you,” she said.

  But he shook his head. “I need to do this on my own. I need to make it right.”

  So she let him go and, later, when Jennings asked her, “Is he all right?” she shook her head too and said, “I don’t know.”

  * * *

  It was late afternoon when Dan came to find Jess in the clack and buzz of the press camp.

  “She said I had to marry her,” Dan said faintly.

  “What?” The word exploded from Jess’s mouth.

  “I’ve made her unmarriageable. The doctors say her face will be scarred for life. Horribly scarred. Impossible to hide. She only has one arm. Nobody will want her now, she says. It’s the only way I can make amends.”

  “What did you say?” Jess asked, incredulous that Amelia would propose something so preposterous.

  “I told her I was engaged to you,” he said simply. “That I’d do anything I could for her but I was marrying you and nobody else.”

  “Dan…” Jess reached across the table and took his hand and the oafs at the other end whistled as if they’d never seen a man and a woman hold hands before. “Let’s go outside,” she said.

  And there, beneath an optimistic blue sky, with Warren Stone—goddamn it, why was he always there?—watching on, Dan kissed her.

  “I’ll go and see Amelia tomorrow,” Jess said. “I’m sure I can change her mind.”

  * * *

  But Amelia wasn’t to be talked around.

  “I have one arm, Jessica,” she spat. “And scars where I once had a face. Part of my nose is gone.”

  Jess flinched.

  “If you’re wincing at the mere thought of it, the sight of it will be a million times worse,” Amelia continued relentlessly. “If I know one thing it’s that there aren’t enough men to go around, not now half of them are dead. Nobody will choose me over a smooth-skinned debutante with full use of her limbs. I came over here to find a husband—because God knows there are no men left in England—and Dan has made that impossible.”

  “Love isn’t about what you look like,” Jess said.

  “Isn’t it? So you weren’t attracted to Dan’s face? Or his body?”

  “I was his friend for a long time before I was his lover, Amelia. I didn’t think about his body or his face when I was his friend.”

  “And you don’t think about it now? Don’t revel in running your hands over his naked flesh? Don’t glance at him and catch your breath because he’s so handsome? You were a model. You’ve traded on your looks and your body for years. Don’t pretend it doesn’t matter. Don’t try to make out like I’m the unprincipled one. All’s fair in love and war, didn’t you know?” Amelia’s eyes, between the bandages on her face, glared at Jess, a frosty, implacable blue.

  Jess sat down. “Wouldn’t you rather marry someone you loved?” she asked gently. “Someone who loved you?”

  Amelia cut her off. “Under the bandages, I now have a face only a mother could love. And you know as well as I do how much my mother loved me. Which means I have no one. So don’t you sit there, secure in the knowledge that you’ve landed a handsome and wealthy man, and tell me to wait for love. I don’t care about love. I never have. My parents cured me of that. I want my freedom.”

  Amelia’s voice lowered but it struck Jess harder than the forceful tone of a moment before. “Marriage to the admiral gave me that freedom,” Amelia went on. “He was away at sea and I had a house, parties, friends, fun. All for the bargain price of sex once in a blue moon and escort services at occasional dinners. As a single woman, I have no freedom. Nowhere to live, no money. Because I was childless, my husband’s home and belongings have passed to his brother. But I also know that I won’t have any freedom by marrying a man besotted with me.”

  So Jess said it, hoping that because she wasn’t saying it directly to Dan, it wouldn’t have the consequences they’d feared. “I love Dan. He loves me. What he and I have isn’t a fleeing wartime romance. It’s forever.”

  “Hasn’t everything you’ve seen over the past two years shown you that there is no forever? I learned that in boarding school—that even a daughter isn’t forever. That’s why there are boarding schools and husbands.”

  For the first time, Jess felt how deeply Amelia’s parents’ abandonment of her at a Parisian boarding school in order to avoid the heavy lifting of caring for a child had hurt her. When they were fifteen, Jess and Amelia had turned the fact that their parents weren’t concerned about them in the same way that most other parents seemed to be for their children into an amusing game: a competition to see whose parents would do the most neglectful thing that month. Amelia usually won.

  “I don’t believe in love,” Amelia reiterated. “I’ve made my choice. Dan owes me.”

  Jess stood up and whirled around, needing to leave. She crashed into a nurse, who said “Pardon me” in German.

  The last thing Jess heard was Amelia shouting at the nurse, “I don’t speak your filthy goddamn language so don’t use it in front of me!”

  * * *

  Jess drove straight to find Dan. “I’ve made everything worse. I didn’t mean to, and I know I can’t possibly really know how you feel but, talking to her, I felt so guilty and you must feel a thousand times worse and I just wanted to help—”

  “Jess.” He put his hands on her shoulders and made her stop. The light was back in his eyes and he looked determined, almost back to the Dan she knew. “I can fix this. I feel better this morning. Plenty of jeeps use the road I took. I asked around. What happened was bad luck. So maybe I wouldn’t have taken you that way but I’ve been down that road before. And yes, I was in a hurry to see you but I was concentrating on the road and I was being vigilant, like a
lways. I owe her, that’s for sure, but I don’t owe her marriage.”

  Relief coursed through Jess. She didn’t know what she’d been thinking but Amelia’s arguments had seemed unassailable, as if there really was no option other than Amelia being alone for the rest of her life. Jess knew Amelia well enough to know that was not something Amelia would tolerate and nor, she supposed, did Amelia deserve that. Still, Dan’s last words haunted her. I owe her. They were so much like Amelia’s words.

  But maybe it wasn’t true, Jess thought now. Maybe Amelia being out there wasn’t an accident. I don’t speak your filthy goddamn language, Amelia had screeched at the nurse.

  Back at the press camp, she searched until she found Meg.

  “Meg, you know you said a woman rang looking for Dan the other day?”

  Meg looked momentarily puzzled, then nodded. “Yes.”

  “Was she American?”

  Meg snorted. “Hell no. She was as English as Henry the Eighth and just as snooty. Why?”

  “No reason,” Jess said before she walked slowly away. Amelia had called the morning of the accident wanting to know where Dan would be that day. And lo and behold she’d turned up to the very same spot to translate German even though she didn’t speak the language.

  If Amelia hadn’t lied to get herself to where Dan had been, none of this would have happened.

  * * *

  The whole next day ambled past without a word from Dan. When Jess found herself snapping at Martha, she took herself off in her jeep to Hitler’s apartment, thinking Dan would be in the command room. But Jennings said, concern smudging his freckles together, that Dan was ill and had been in his room all afternoon. Jennings was happy to smuggle her upstairs when she said she had something important to tell Dan, something that might help.

  Dan didn’t answer her knock so she pushed the door open and found him sitting on the floor, back against the wall, eyes impossibly damp.

  “What is it?” she cried, sinking to the floor, wrapping her arms around him and holding him to her.

  He didn’t speak for a long time. Then he said, “Amelia’s father is Lieutenant General Miles Gordon-Dempsey of the British Second Army.”

  The words were enunciated slowly and clearly as if he was trying to understand them even as he spoke.

  Jess shook her head, confused. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “He was at the hospital when I went to see Amelia this morning. He’s furious about what’s happened to his daughter. He wants someone hung out to dry and he more than outranks me.”

  “But Amelia shouldn’t even have been there,” Jess began. “She—”

  Dan kept talking. “Her father can make anything happen that he chooses.”

  It was a bit late for parental concern now, Jess thought. Where had Amelia’s father been all through boarding school? But amputation and severe facial scarring were probably traumatic enough to warm anyone’s relationship.

  “They’ll court-martial me tomorrow unless I agree to what Amelia wants,” Dan said. “A new CO will step in now, right at the end, not giving a shit about any of the men in my battalion. I’ve been with these men for two years and right now is the hardest time to keep them focused and motivated and unafraid because we all know the end is so goddamn near and nobody wants to be the one to die the day the Germans surrender like those unlucky bastards in the Great War. And even if it’s over in Europe, they’re still fighting in the Pacific. Right now, they’re working out which divisions to send over there. It could easily be mine. And…” He clenched his fists and the look on his face was one of disbelief, as if he couldn’t comprehend he was even saying these words.

  “Major Thompson would be their new CO,” he finished.

  “Oh no.” Jess’s words were a moan. There was no way Dan would, or should, let a man like Major Thompson lead his men.

  “I’m in charge of seven hundred and fifty men. I know almost all their names. I know that you can’t put Grayson in the rear because he freezes if he sees what happens to everyone in front. I know that I have to let Kohn say all his prayers right before I give the order to move in otherwise Kohn won’t shift until he’s done and he’ll be out in the open for anyone to shoot. Major Thompson won’t know. He won’t know that Jennings’ mother still writes to me and asks me to keep her son safe. He won’t know that, tomorrow, I’m supposed to get one of my platoons to clear the woods where there’s a rogue Panzer and that nobody wants to go and I’m the only person who can get them to do it without force. As if all of that isn’t bad enough, you and I both know what kind of man Thompson is.”

  “So you told Amelia you’d marry her?” Jess’s voice wobbled.

  “No.” Dan shook his head hard. “I told Amelia that the only woman I’d marry was you.”

  Jess’s choked-back sob was so loud it ricocheted off the walls like the crack of gunfire. Dan was here mourning his men, eyes soaked with tears because he wouldn’t be able to see them safely through to the end of the war when she’d thought he was crying because he was about to tell her he couldn’t marry her. He would sacrifice his honor, give up his good name, for her and their love. She was so goddamn selfish and he was so goddamn unselfish and the whole thing was so goddamn unfair.

  She leaned into him, fingertips wiping his tears, one for Grayson, one for Kohn, one for Jennings, and one for every other man in his battalion who he’d trained and cajoled and protected and lead for two long years. He slid a hand along her jaw and drew her lips to his, kissing her in a haze of smothered sobs and falling tears.

  “I love you, Jess,” he said, and it wasn’t until after she’d left, after Jennings had smuggled her back out, that she realized he’d broken their promise.

  PART EIGHT

  D’Arcy

  Twenty-seven

  D’Arcy woke on the sofa the morning after Josh had walked away from her, not even remembering falling asleep, wishing she could forget Josh’s kiss, Josh’s hands on her, the way he made her feel—cherished—and the way she’d made herself feel at the end. She stood and climbed the stairs slowly, quietly, but still a door opened and Jess appeared.

  “Will you walk with me?” Jess asked and D’Arcy nodded; anything to avoid facing Josh.

  D’Arcy slipped her arm into the older woman’s, returning downstairs and then outside, breathing in deeply because it was magical, a place apart from the world, except here, in this beautiful, deceptive oasis, she’d learned more about herself than she cared to know.

  They walked down to the canal, to the very spot D’Arcy and Josh had picnicked at days before, as Jess continued her tale, telling D’Arcy about Dan’s proposal, how she’d accepted, how her friend Amelia had used ruthless blackmail to try to force Dan to marry her instead. And that Dan had decided to give up everything—his honor, his men, his reputation—because his love for Jess was stronger than anything else.

  “Could you help me to sit down?” Jess asked, breaking the flow of terrible words. “I keep in reasonable working order by walking but getting up and down is much harder than it used to be. Beneath that tree would be perfect.”

  D’Arcy hesitated. The tree Jess had indicated was one of Les Faux, the very one D’Arcy had thought might have secrets hoarded within its shadows. But of course it was the perfect place to sit; the drapery of the branches, falling like an elegant silk gown to the lawn beneath, would shelter them from the sun.

  “It doesn’t bite,” Jess said, indicating the tree. “I once thought it was a sorceress but the only person who can change your future is yourself. Not a tree in the guise of an enchantress.”

  So D’Arcy levered Jess down onto the bank of the canal under the trees. The older woman slipped off her shoes and dangled her feet in the water. It looked like such a good idea that D’Arcy did it too. For a moment, she could see them there as if through a camera: a younger woman and an older one, backdropped by a striking tree, in paradise, but neither of them truly happy. The weight of secrets and the past lay around them lik
e the shell-torn debris of war, secrets and a past that were now being handed on to D’Arcy.

  D’Arcy stared at the water. As far as she knew, it hadn’t mattered how much Dan had loved Jess; the marriage had never taken place. And D’Arcy wasn’t sure that, right now, she could face the end of this particular story if they were indeed marching straight on into heartbreak. “Do you want to see the film?” she asked Jess suddenly.

  Jess hesitated and D’Arcy felt her cheeks flush. Why would Jess want to see D’Arcy’s efforts? Jess had photographed wars. Been published in Vogue. Had left a legacy. D’Arcy had made crates for artworks and had fashioned for herself a barren kind of life. Like Victorine’s.

  “Anyone else’s film of me I could look at,” Jess said at last. “But yours will be too honest for me, I fear.”

  Jess began to stand and, somehow, as if he had a telepathic connection to Jess’s needs, Josh appeared, ready to help her back to the house.

  D’Arcy couldn’t look at him. Instead, she stayed by the canal, feet wet, turning Jess’s words over in her mind. Had she meant it as a compliment? And how did she know that, in choosing the cinéma vérité style, what D’Arcy had been searching for was honesty. Honesty of a kind Victorine had never seen fit to grant her. D’Arcy felt the boughs of the tree brush lightly against her back and she felt the untold stories, stories of which Jess, and perhaps now D’Arcy, were the custodians, begin to stir.

  Inexplicably, Josh returned to the canal.

  “I wanted to apologize,” he said, standing beside another of the crazy beech trees, the one that looked like a girl holding out her skirt of leaves, just as D’Arcy had done when she crossed the drawbridge that very first day, ready to dance away, laughing, before anybody could catch her.

  “What for?” she asked warily. An apology from Josh was the last thing she expected.

  “I promised you a chaste massage and it ended up being anything but. So I’m sorry. I know you have a lot on your mind and that you don’t want to tell me about it and the last thing you need is me pushing myself on you. So I want you to know that I’ll leave you in peace from now on.”