The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

  Bershanskaia gave the chop of her hand that silenced all conversation. “Ladies, to your planes,” she usually said. But tonight it was “Nachthexen, to your planes.”

  And they were all sprinting for their lives, sprinting for their planes, laughter crossing the lines in a fierce ripple. Yelena rode the crest in front, and Nina was bursting a lung somewhere in the middle of the pack. Twenty-four hours had turned like a wheel and here they were, back on the conveyor belt. Somewhere up ahead Yelena cried, “Too slow, rabbits! Rusalka first!” A few heartbeats later, Nina caught the wing and went flying into her cockpit.

  And one by one, the Night Witches took to the air.

  Chapter 22

  Jordan

  May 1950

  Boston

  Jesus, Jor.” Garrett laughed as he jumped down from the cockpit of the little biplane. “I thought you were going to try and climb out.”

  “I can’t believe you trained for war in a plane like this. It’s cloth and plywood!” Jordan swung a leg carefully over the edge of her own cockpit. “I wonder if any of my shots will turn out. Trying to focus through goggles and wind shear . . .”

  “I haven’t seen you snapping away like that in a while.” Garrett lifted her down from the wing.

  “I’ve been busy. And it’s not like I’m going to make a career of it.” That used to be a bitter thought, but Jordan supposed all dreams hurt when they finally withered up in the glare of real life. What was the point in toting a camera everywhere, taking classes, sinking hours into photo-essays that no one would buy? She had a shop to work in, a sister to help look after. A wedding to plan.

  “Mom wants to talk to you about flowers for the church,” Garrett said as though reading her mind, chocking the biplane’s wheels. “She wondered what you thought about orchids.”

  “Um.” Jordan didn’t have any opinion about orchids, but as a bride-to-be, she supposed she’d have to acquire one. Last Christmas Garrett had replaced his college ring with the expected diamond—a pear-shaped stone on a gold band, dainty and pretty. The thought of a fall wedding after Garrett graduated had seemed safely distant, but the ring had been the first pebble in a landslide as plans started falling into place with alarming speed: a September ceremony, a honeymoon in New York, Ruth in pale pink gauze as flower girl. Jordan’s little sister was ecstatic. Everyone was ecstatic.

  Jordan pushed off thoughts of orchids and centerpieces and raised the Leica, snapping Garrett beside the plane. “We’d better get back. I’m opening up the shop at one.” The little airfield sat northeast of Boston: a crumbling business that hung on, Garrett said, by renting out its small collection of outdated biplanes for flight instruction, crop-dusting, and joyrides. Jordan returned to the car, and as Garrett squared things away with the mechanic, she tried fluffing her hair in the rearview mirror. When she had turned twenty-one last June, she’d decided it was time to swap the schoolgirl ponytail for something more adult, but now she wasn’t sure the hairdresser had done her any favors. “We’ll take some of the length off,” the woman enthused, “then curl the back. You’ll look just like Rita Hayworth in The Loves of Carmen. Did you see that one, honey?” But the Rita Hayworth effect required a lot of pins and curlers, and however much Jordan twirled and tugged in the morning, a good breeze had the whole dark-blond mess lying limp as a dishrag.

  Whack it all off and top it with a beret like Gerda Taro, the long-smothered voice of J. Bryde whispered—the part of Jordan that still had silly daydreams about trading her pin curls and crinolines for a sleek leather trench and heading for New York with the Leica over one shoulder. But Jordan put that thought back where it belonged, turning to Garrett as he jogged over. “When can we come back? This was fun.”

  “Whenever you want.” He hopped in over the driver’s-side door. “I’ve been working here, every other Saturday. Pat—Mr. Hatterson, he owns the place—he’s on the ropes. I put in a couple days a month, give the weekend joyriders a few loops and spins, and Pat pays me in flying time.” A quick glance. “It doesn’t scare you, me flying? Mom says it gives her the shivers now that I have my license. She keeps saying I already broke one leg flying, and a man who’s going to be married soon needs to think of his family.”

  “Fly all you want when we’re married,” Jordan proclaimed, using the word she usually managed to avoid. “It doesn’t bother me a bit.”

  Garrett leaned over and gave her a good, long kiss. “You’re quite a girl, you know that?”

  “I do know that.” Jordan leaned forward, murmuring into his ear. “Do you still have that blanket in your trunk?”

  She should feel him grin against her cheek. “Yep.”

  “Anywhere around here a girl and her fella could get lost?”

  “Yep.”

  Shortly after the college ring had been traded in for its half-carat cousin, Jordan had decided a different kind of trade-in was in order. You once wanted to travel the world with a string of European lovers in tow, she thought. At the very least, you can graduate from making out in the backseat of a Chevrolet coup.

  It was with a certain amount of snickering now that they drove off in a spin of tires and dust, not back toward Boston but farther past the airfield, down a smaller dead-end road. Garrett got the blanket out of the truck, bowing elaborately toward the trees. “After you, miss.”

  “Do you have—” Jordan tried her best to be a woman of the world, but she wasn’t quite past euphemisms when it came to what her girlfriends in school had always just called those things. “You know.”

  Garrett patted his wallet. “I was a Boy Scout, remember? Be prepared.”

  “I hope this wasn’t in the Scouts’ manual.”

  “If it had been, I would have paid a lot more attention to my Scoutmaster . . .”

  They found a thick stand of trees and brush, well out of sight of the car, then spread out the blanket and tumbled onto it. The first time they’d ever done this (four months ago, in an apartment borrowed from a friend of Garrett’s) Jordan had expended considerable thought on exactly how one got from fully dressed and kissing to naked. Given all the fastenings on everything that the New Look required for a woman to look fashionable, there didn’t seem to be any graceful way to take everything off.

  “Here’s my sister’s copy of Forever Amber,” her friend Ginny had advised, handing over a dog-eared volume. “I took it from under her mattress. Ten descriptions of women undressing in front of men, according to the attorney general of Massachusetts.”

  “He was paying awfully close attention considering he said the book was obscene,” Jordan had observed.

  “He also noted there were seventy references to sexual intercourse. I only found sixty-two, but I was reading in a hurry before my sister missed it.”

  In the end, Forever Amber hadn’t been terribly useful. Undressing hadn’t been problematic, after all; there hadn’t turned out to be any art to it, as long as clothes hit the floor as fast as possible. It had all been awkward, but even if there weren’t any waves of bliss, there had been lots of laughing, enough to ease them both past anything uncomfortable. And it hadn’t hurt horribly, which some of her girlfriends said was the case. Maybe neither books nor girlfriends should be relied on for sex advice, Jordan reflected now, squirming away from a twig poking her back through the blanket as Garrett stripped his shirt off. Girlfriends, if they knew more than you, said completely conflicting things (“Men just like it better than us” or “It’s wonderful when you’re in love!”) and books either said nothing at all (the hero and heroine disappeared into some all-encompassing ellipses) or promised automatic, vaguely worded ecstasy.

  Still, this had to be the seventh or eighth time, and she and Garrett had things nicely worked out. A lot of pleasant rolling about on the blanket, sunlight dappling Garret’s hair as he lowered his head to kiss along her collarbone, then a brief fierce tangle of limbs and gasps and sweat, and they broke apart smiling.

  Jordan sat up, reaching for her blouse. “Garrett,” she said
, laughing as she looked over one shoulder. “Do not fall asleep.”

  “I won’t,” he said, eyes closed, stretched out on the blanket.

  “You are.” She planted a kiss on his ear. “Put some clothes on! I’ve got to open up the shop.”

  He sat up, yawning. “Anything you say, Mrs. Byrne.”

  “Don’t say that till September, it’s bad luck.” Jordan straightened the diamond sitting on her knuckle, watching it sparkle in the tree-filtered sunshine. It looked so dainty, but it was a heavy bit of rock. Who knew a half-carat ring could weigh down a hand like a boulder?

  THE BELL OVER the shop door tinkled not ten minutes after Jordan flipped the sign to Open, ushering in a harried-looking woman blotting her forehead. “Welcome to McBride’s Antiques, ma’am. May I offer you some refreshment?” She poured ice water into a long-stemmed Murano goblet, proffering lemon wafers on an Edwardian calling-card salver. During winter it was peppermint wafers and hot tea in flowered Minton cups. Customers like to feel welcomed, Anneliese had said. One of her quiet notions that had made its way into the shop to good effect, or at least Jordan assumed it was to good effect considering how much more stock her dad had been buying. “There’s no reason you can’t be the most prosperous antiques dealer in Boston,” Jordan’s stepmother often said.

  “We do well enough as it is,” he pointed out, but Anneliese kept quietly making suggestions, and neither Jordan nor her father could deny her instinct for the little things that turned a profit. She never took shifts behind the counter—Jordan’s father was proud that his wife didn’t have to work—but she had her own ways of helping.

  The first customer walked out with a japanned tray and a Georgian table clock, and the bell tinkled again almost before the door closed behind her. Jordan’s welcoming expression became a smile as Ruth raced in, blond plait bouncing on the back of her school jumper. “Hello, cricket.”

  Ruth flung her arms around Jordan in a hug—eight years old now and a little chatterbox, not the silent big-eyed scrap she’d been at four. My sister, Jordan thought with a squeeze of love, and it was true now: Ruth Weber had become Ruth McBride. “Can I look around?” The shop was Ruth’s treasure box, her favorite place in the world.

  “May I look around,” Anneliese’s voice sounded. “And yes, you may.”

  Jordan greeted her stepmother with a smile. The smiles between them had been awkward ones for a while—the Thanksgiving after that first horrible one had not exactly been a tension-free evening, everyone knowing exactly what everyone else was thinking as they chewed on their turkey, but thank goodness that was all in the past. Jordan hugged Anneliese now, inhaling her sweet lilac scent. “How do you always look so cool and collected?” she demanded, taking in the spotless gloves and the crisp cream linen suit that looked like it had come from the pages of Vogue and not Anneliese’s Singer. “I’m as rumpled as an old mop.”

  “A young girl looks all the better for a little dishabille. Middle-aged matrons like me have to settle for being tidy and presentable.” Anneliese fished in her pocketbook, producing a fabric sample. “Look at this lovely yellow cotton. I was thinking a sundress for you—”

  “Better for you, I look like a cheese in yellow.”

  “You do not. When am I ever wrong about clothes?” Anneliese smiled. Three and a half years ago she’d received Jordan’s flame-faced apology only to offer a teary one of her own—they’d cried a little on each other’s shoulders, and never referred to it again. These days whenever Jordan thought about that Thanksgiving, she gave a deep, sincere flinch at her own stupidity and wondered, What was I thinking?

  “What brings you in?” Jordan went on. “You never come to the shop during business hours.”

  “Dan wanted the auction catalog for his trip tomorrow. He marked a set of Hope chairs—”

  “Maybe this will be the last buying trip for a while.” Jordan’s dad seemed to be whisking out the door every other week these days, off to New York or Connecticut in one of the crisp herringbone suits Anneliese had chosen for him. He didn’t put in many hours behind the shop counter anymore, or in the back room where the restoration work was done. Jordan now managed the counter on most days, and in the back room—

  “Is Mr. Kolb working today?” Anneliese tucked the auction catalog into her pocketbook.

  “Here, Frau McBride.” The door to the back room opened and a frail-looking man with puffs of gray hair above his ears popped out—he always came in early, well before Jordan opened up. “I vas expecting you.” Mr. Kolb’s English was so thickly accented, it had taken Jordan weeks to understand him. “The Hepplewhite table, she needs varnish . . .” He launched into technicalities, mixing German and English. He’d come to the shop a year or so ago, another refugee with the waves arriving from Europe after the Displaced Persons Act, badly rumpled in a cheap suit and flinching visibly whenever a stranger addressed him.

  “You won’t find anyone better to help with restoration,” Anneliese had told Jordan’s father when she proposed they sponsor Kolb’s entry to the United States. “Old books, old documents; those are his specialty. He had a shop in Salzburg when I was a child. I’m so glad I had the thought of looking him up.”

  “He can’t take the counter, with his English so poor. And he’s very jumpy.”

  “He had a bad time during the war, Dan. One of the camps . . .” Anneliese’s voice had faded to a discreet murmur, and the little German had been ensconced in the back room ever since, always with a peppermint in his pocket for Ruth and a shy smile for Jordan.

  “English, Mr. Kolb,” Anneliese reminded him as he lapsed into German. “That dealer you told me about, the one who decided to settle in Ames . . . ?”

  “Yes, Frau McBride. Final payment made.”

  “Excellent. Did he pass that letter along for me to Salzburg?”

  “Yes, Frau McBride.”

  “For a woman I used to know there,” Anneliese told Jordan. “I’m hoping she might consider coming to Boston. I was so lucky to get here, make a new life. I’d like to help others like me do the same.” Her English was perfect now, no trace of German accent—if anything, she’d begun to drop her R’s like a real Bostonian. She looked so delighted whenever anyone assumed she was born and raised here, she never corrected them. She’d even lopped the second syllable off Anneliese when she took American citizenship; Anna McBride was how she introduced herself now.

  Jordan’s father came in, looking cross. “New Yorkers,” he muttered. “Clogging up the street, not knowing how to park—”

  “How is it that all tourists who can’t park are automatically New Yorkers?” Jordan teased.

  “I know Yankee fans when I see them.” He dropped his hat on the counter, looking dapper in the suit he’d wear to the train station this afternoon. “Anna, did you tell Jordan about—”

  “I knew you’d want to.” Anneliese smiled. “Ruth, come into the back while I talk to Mr. Kolb.”

  Jordan’s little sister ignored her, standing transfixed by a brooch in the display cabinet—a little wrought-silver violin to be worn on some music-loving woman’s lapel. “Can I have it?” she whispered.

  “Certainly not, Ruth. It’s far too old and valuable.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t be greedy, it’s an unattractive quality in children.” Anneliese bore Ruth off to the back, and Jordan looked back at her father.

  “What is it, Dad?”

  “Just some wedding plans. Anna wanted to take you shopping for a dress.”

  Jordan adjusted the diamond over her finger again. Picking a wedding dress . . . That seemed like a very large step. Very final. She blew out a breath. “I put myself entirely in her hands. We’ll even take pictures at the fitting.”

  “Get a picture of her while you’re at it. You know how she’s always ducking the camera.”

  “Mmm,” Jordan said. Unfortunately, the best picture she’d ever taken of Anneliese was still that first one, the shot in the kitchen with her head half turned an
d her eyes as sharp as razors.

  “I wanted to talk to you about a wedding present.” He fished a little box out of his pocket, turning pink around the ears. “To wear on the big day—‘something old,’ you know . . .”

  “Oh, Dad.” Jordan touched the earrings with a fingertip: gold-feathered art deco wings with big pearls swinging below.

  “Lalique, 1932. Rose gold settings, freshwater pearls.” He shuffled a bit. “Your birthstone. A good smart girl like you, who picked yourself out a good smart man and a good smart future—a daughter like that deserves pearls.”

  Jordan hugged him, throat thick as she inhaled his aftershave. “Thank you.”

  He squeezed her back. “All this wedding talk, flowers and dresses—we haven’t talked about afterward, the important things. If you want to keep house for Garrett, or if you want to keep your hand in here at the shop.”

  Thinking about after the wedding was almost impossible, like the crest of a hill she couldn’t see beyond. She knew Garrett’s father had spoken to Garrett about helping them with an apartment and then a house; she knew her father had probably been part of that discussion too, though no one had talked to her. But exactly how life alongside Garrett was going to continue after the honeymoon was still in many ways a question mark. “I know I want to work,” she said firmly.

  “Well, take some time after the honeymoon. I’ll put up a Help Wanted sign this week, look for another clerk. Some suave fellow or pretty girl to work the counter; Mr. Kolb hasn’t got the English for that.” Jordan’s father hesitated, fingering his suit’s lapel. “Anything ever strike you about Kolb, missy?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. He always looks furtive anytime I come in to check on the restoration work. And with his English so patchy, I can’t ask him anything but the simplest questions. Of course Anna translates anything tricky.” A pause, looking toward the backroom door where Anneliese and Ruth and Mr. Kolb had vanished. “I just wondered what you thought, working around him more than I do.”