A car horn honked twice, the muffled bleat jarring. Emmy looked toward it and pulled away from Lillian.
“I’m going now.” She started toward the door. “Goodbye, Maman.” Then she stopped to fix her sister with the nastiest look Genevra had ever seen on her usually smiling face. “And as for you, you vicious little cat, if you ever repeat this to anyone, I’ll make you wish you were never born, do you understand?”
A moment later Emmy was gone. The front door banged behind her. Genevra took a few impulsive steps to follow before stopping, stricken. What more could she do? Confront Alain, who would certainly deny everything and create a nasty scene that anyone might overhear? Through the leaded glass panel in the top of the door, she watched helplessly as Emmy, one hand holding her hat in place, her skirt flying, ran to join a grinning Alain as he waited for her behind the wheel of his car.
She felt sick.
Her mother came to stand beside her, put a hand on her shoulder. “Genevra.”
She heard the trouble in Lillian’s voice, saw the doubt in her face and gave up.
There’s nothing more to be done.
Later, avoiding her mother who was busy seeing to the departing guests, she’d gone in search of Phillippe. He was nowhere to be found.
He’ll come to me.
Even as she waited, she hugged the memory of the previous night close.
“You’re so sweet. I’ll marry you instead. Will you marry me, Genevra?” Phillippe’s words, spoken as the moonlight poured over them, were what she’d dreamed of hearing for years.
Of course she’d thrown herself into his arms, smothered him with kisses, answered, “Yes, Phillippe. Yes, yes, I will.”
Her parents would say she was too young. Her mother would say she could do better. But she would stand her ground; she would marry him.
If only he would come.
At first she hadn’t been too worried. A niggle of doubt arose—had he really meant it? Was he having second thoughts? In the bright light of day, with all the emotion of Emmy’s wedding behind them, had he looked deep into his heart only to discover that she was only Emmy’s little sister after all?
He didn’t come. They’d gone home, she and her parents, back to Rocheford, later that day, without her seeing him.
She was hurt. She was bewildered. She told herself that maybe an emergency had arisen, and he’d had to leave without finding her.
Deep inside, she was afraid, deeply afraid, that he was avoiding her, that he’d had a change of heart, that he regretted it.
It was only when she’d grown so desperate to see him that she’d gone to the farm he shared with his widowed father to seek him out that she discovered that he’d never returned from the wedding.
His father hadn’t been too worried. A boy, his heart freshly broken—because Monsieur Cheviot, like everyone, knew how Phillippe felt, had felt, about Emmy—might not be in too big a hurry to return home.
It was several days before a search was launched. It was several more days before Phillippe was found. Dead, in one of the hotel’s ornamental ponds. It was the judgment of the official who presided over such things that he had fallen in, perhaps hitting his head on one of the rocks with which the pond was edged, and drowned.
Genevra had been inconsolable. She’d attended the funeral, then locked herself away in her room until she’d cried all the tears she’d thought she was ever going to cry in her life.
And that had been the end of it. Her love, dead. Her great love story over almost as soon as it had begun.
Until not quite six months later, when Lillian had walked in on her daughter undressing in her bedroom. Taking one look at the rounded stomach Genevra had been so fervently ignoring, she’d asked, with shock, if she was pregnant.
That’s when Genevra had faced the terrifying truth she’d been doing her best to deny, and, shaking, finally confided in her mother. That night, Emmy’s wedding night, on the beach, she’d been so deep in love, so desperate to console the seemingly inconsolable Phillippe, that she’d succumbed to his embraces and his muttered words of love and given herself to him.
It was no comfort now to remember that he’d asked her to marry him and she’d accepted, that they’d been engaged, that she had considered them as good as wed.
Her mother had listened to her outpouring of words in growing horror.
“Phillippe’s dead,” Lillian said finally, flatly. “Whatever you intended, whatever he promised, there’s no making this right. The shame of it—” She broke off with a shudder. “My God, Paul mustn’t learn of this. It will kill him.”
The thought of her father knowing had done what nothing else could do: it stripped away every last bit of the bravado she’d been hiding behind. Fright and shame and grief for Phillippe and the sudden stark realization of the disgrace she was bringing down on the heads of her beleaguered family overwhelmed her. Crumbling to the floor, she burst into tears, shaking and sobbing as if her heart would break all over again.
Kneeling beside her, Lillian had swallowed her own distress in the face of her daughter’s. Wrapping her arms around her, she’d held her as she cried and promised that she would take care of everything. That she would make everything all right.
Two weeks later Genevra had been sent away, supposedly to stay with friends in Switzerland for a few months so that she wouldn’t be so lonely without Emmy, who had just returned from her extended honeymoon to her new home in Monaco. Actually, Lillian had taken her in great secrecy to Lourmarin, a beautiful small village in Provence, where she’d been hidden away in the house of Clotilde Arsenau, an old and trusted family retainer. The plan was that Genevra, living there under the guise of Madame Arsenau’s widowed-far-too-young niece, would have her baby, put it up for adoption, and return to Rocheford and her old life with no one but herself, Lillian and Madame Arsenau the wiser.
Once in Lourmarin, she’d thought her life was over. Until Vivi was born.
When she held her daughter for the first time, Genevra had experienced such an overwhelming rush of love that she’d known it wasn’t, known that instead she had a whole new life, and that new life was centered on the infant in her arms.
She’d refused to give Vivi up for adoption, begged to bring her home to Rocheford, clashed horribly with Lillian when her mother refused to even consider such a thing.
“Absolutely not. You’ll be ruined,” Lillian told her, in what was only their second meeting since Vivi’s birth. The first had been immediately afterward, when Genevra, weak but furiously determined, had refused to allow her child to be handed over to the nice couple that had been found to take her. Instead of returning home with her mother, as had been the plan, she had stayed on in Lourmarin, defiantly taking a job in the village apothecary, determined to do whatever she had to do to keep her baby. She had continued to live with Madame Arsenau—Tante Clotilde—as her niece, and Lillian, although aghast at Genevra’s unexpected intransigence, had continued to contribute to the household expenses. She had also continued, by phone call and letter, to beg her daughter to reconsider her position. This second meeting had included Emmy, who, although the sisters’ relationship was far from what it had been before Emmy’s marriage, had been recruited by their mother to help make Genevra see sense. In what Emmy and Lillian clearly considered this time of family crisis, past disagreements were set aside.
“I don’t care,” she’d replied.
“You should care. You will care, as you grow older and wish to go about in society again, or marry. You don’t understand the consequences of an illegitimate child to your future. Or to the child’s.” Lillian reached for Genevra’s hand. Genevra pulled it back out of reach. They—Lillian, Emmy and Genevra—stood together in the downstairs sitting room of Madame Arsenau’s modest house. Lillian had been visiting Emmy at her new home in Monaco, and they had taken the train together, in great secrecy, to see Genevra.
Emmy said, “Genny, consider. Vivienne will be shunned. All her life, people will look down on her. They’ll whisper behind her back. She won’t be invited into people’s homes, or to parties, or anywhere. No one will want to be friends with her. No one will want to marry her. Wouldn’t it be better, for her sake, to let her be adopted, so that she can live a normal life?”
“I can arrange for a family close to Rocheford to take her,” Lillian said, before she could reply. “You could still see her, make sure she’s taken care of. For your sake, and for hers, it’s the best solution, Genevra.”
“I’m not going to give Vivi up for adoption. I won’t.”
“What about the scandal to us?” Emmy said. “What about poor Papa? As hard as things are for him now, do you want to make them even worse? Do you want him to have to hang his head everywhere he goes?”
At the thought of Papa finding out, Genevra shivered inside. Not because she was afraid of what he would do, but because he would be so disappointed in her, and so ashamed.
“You care about the scandal,” she told the two of them. “I don’t.”
“You don’t care about anything except yourself,” Emmy said. “You never did.”
“That’s not true. I care about you, both of you. About the family. I want to be a part of it, but I can’t give up Vivi. I won’t.”
“Then I’m afraid we’re at an impasse,” Lillian said.
They had parted with nothing resolved.
Then the unthinkable had happened: Vivi had died. And the world had stopped turning on its axis, and the foundations of her life had fallen away beneath her feet and her existence had turned into a long, cold, endless night. Haunted by bad dreams, riven by regret, self-condemned to what felt like eternal damnation, she’d descended into a state of shock from which she’d only just begun to emerge.
Everyone had said that what had happened wasn’t anyone’s fault.
She’d known it was hers.
If she could only go back, only change one thing about that afternoon—how often had she wished it? Only every second of every minute of every hour of every day since.
In the chaotic aftermath, as was made abundantly clear to her in the one frantic phone call in which her mother was able to get through to her, she could have gone home to Rocheford again. There was no longer the visible disgrace of an illegitimate child standing in her way, no longer any need to worry about scandal. She could rejoin the family. She could start her life anew.
But how could she go on with her life as it was before, as if Vivi had never been? No, it was impossible. Genevra was forever changed, and she could never accept a future in which Vivi was forever forgotten.
“You didn’t want Vivi, and now I don’t want you. I never want to see you again.” Her voice had been calm, her eyes dry. The worst agony she had ever experienced in her life had turned her insides to ice.
That same day she’d left Lourmarin, and shortly thereafter fled to America by ship, selling the cameo brooch left to her by her paternal grandmother to pay her passage. On board, she’d made the acquaintance of the ship’s entertainers, Ruth and Frank Wilmore and their two sons, Bob and Gene. When Frank Wilmore heard her playing and singing to herself, late one night in the deserted piano lounge, he’d invited her to join their family band. This she’d done and spent the following two years touring America as part of what, as it turned out, had been the Frankie Wilmore Orchestra. Her voice was acclaimed everywhere they went, and she and the band grew increasingly famous. She might still have been in America if Frank hadn’t died and the sons hadn’t gone to war over who would assume their father’s mantle, control of the band and, not incidentally, her. Their fight had ended up with her washing her hands of both of them and hiring a manager, who’d taken her to England. She’d been a minor sensation performing in London at venues ranging from the Monseigneur nightclub to the Palladium. That triumph had led to a European tour, which had taken her to Paris, where she’d been performing at the Moulin Rouge when the Nazis invaded.
During all that time she had lived as Genevieve Dumont. Genevra de Rocheford, having perished with Vivi, had ceased to exist.
Until her father’s death and her mother’s desperate plight had resurrected her.
Now here Genevra was, surfacing like a phoenix.
To find herself once again looking into Emmy’s eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The way in which they’d parted hung in the air between them.
They’d been angry with each other. Since then so much had happened. They were no longer the same people.
As it turned out, though, the differences didn’t matter. Their entire history as sisters passed between them in that single look, along with a silent acknowledgment that whoever they were now, whatever life had done to them, they had come together with a mutual purpose: saving the life of their mother.
“It’s such an honor to meet the famous Black Swan,” Emmy said. It was imperative to give no sign to anyone who might be watching that they were anything other than chance-met strangers, and it was clear Emmy was conscious of that. Her face was bland. Her tone verged on gushing. But Genevieve could see that she wasn’t astonished to learn of her other identity, and her sense that her sister had already been aware of her star persona was reinforced when Emmy continued, “I must tell you, I’m quite a fan.”
All too conscious of the gawking, listening soldiers, Genevieve smiled. “Are you? That’s very nice. May I have a tart?”
“Molasses or squab?”
“Molasses.” Either would choke her, Genevieve was sure. She was having a hard time reconciling the knowledge that Emmy was an SOE agent with her memories of her always proper older sister, but so it apparently was. She cast about for a way to convey her vital message to her sister under the avid eyes and ears of their audience but could come up with nothing. From Emmy’s presence, it was safe to assume Vartan had delivered the note she’d given him. She had no doubt he’d added his own bit to it, including the key facts of Lillian’s arrest and removal to, presumably, Paris. With Emmy aware of their mother’s desperate situation, finding a way to save Lillian no longer rested solely on her own woefully inadequate shoulders, thank God. She would have felt a profound sense of relief except for the dire necessity of acquainting Emmy with the order Max had been given, coupled with the difficulty of conveying such information there, with so many eyes on them.
“That will be forty francs,” Emmy said.
Genevieve handed over the appropriate coins. Dropping them, Emmy gave a frustrated exclamation and ducked behind the cart to retrieve what she could, while Genevieve swooped down on a coin that rolled across the cobblestones near her feet and the soldiers gave chase to a few more.
“How clumsy of me! Thank you,” Emmy said to the soldiers as she straightened with a smile to receive the coins they returned to her. The soldiers, to a man, were dazzled and murmured incoherently. To Genevieve, who handed her the errant coin she’d captured, she said, “Thank you,” as well.
“Here you are. I hope you enjoy it.” A moment later Emmy passed over a cloth-wrapped tart accompanied by a quick but speaking look before turning to her next customer.
Clutching the tart, effectively dismissed, Genevieve did what she would have done if she had, indeed, just bought a random treat from a random vendor: she walked away with a smile and a wave for the soldiers whose eyes still followed her. Even after so much time had passed, she knew her sister well enough to know the look she’d been given meant something. And Emmy was never clumsy—the coin drop had been done on purpose.
She made sure to put the line of vehicles in front of
the Ritz between herself and any onlookers—the hotel’s outer wall was on her other side, with curtains drawn over the windows—then carefully unwrapped the tart. She saw the key at once. Emmy had stuck it in the tart so that the top part protruded through the crust. After a quick check of her surroundings to make doubly sure no one was watching, she pulled the key out. The caramelly scent of the molasses filling blended with the stench of exhaust from the cars as she used the cloth the tart came wrapped in to carefully wipe the key clean. From the look of it, it was a door key. Closer examination revealed that its shank had been engraved with an address: 2 rue Duphot.
She knew that street. It was nearby.
Pocketing the key, rewrapping the now slightly mutilated tart, she looked around to discover that Emmy, having apparently sold out of her inventory, was pushing the cart out of the square.
“Would you care for this?” she asked the young boy who was assiduously polishing the windshields of the parked cars in hopes of earning a few coins as payment, as she pulled an edge of the cloth back to show him the tart. With food now such a precious commodity, to throw such a thing away would have been nothing short of criminal, and her stomach was in such knots she wasn’t even going to make the attempt. “I find I can’t eat it after all.”
“Would I? Thank you!” The boy—he couldn’t have been more than eight—took the sweet with a look almost of reverence and devoured it in three bites.
Smiling at him, Genevieve walked back inside the Ritz. She penned a note for Otto—Don’t wait for me, I’ll find my own way to rehearsal—and left it with the receptionist with instructions that it be given to Otto upon his arrival. Then she headed on foot for 2 rue Duphot.
It was only a few blocks away.
The narrow, curving street was mixed residential and commercial. Buildings on either side abutted one another, forming canyon-like walls with just a narrow strip of blue sky visible above to keep her from feeling totally claustrophobic. Only a few people were about. A woman swept her steps. Another walked a dog along the street. A young girl on a bicycle pedaled toward her. A man, walking in the opposite direction, disappeared around a curve. Colorful awnings above doors and small signs hanging beside entrances denoted shops. The appearance of the houses was more varied.
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