The Paris Secret

by Natasha Lester

  “All I want is this,” he said vehemently, needing her to understand. “The dreams I had before the war, which seemed so large and important, are nothing now. All I want is you, here. Alive.”

  “That’s all I want too,” she said.

  He shut his eyes. It was almost April 1944. War had been declared four and a half years ago. Surely it must end soon?

  He opened his eyes and kissed her, using his lips to study the terrain that was Skye Penrose. He began with her back, so tiny now, rations and hard work making her almost too thin. He followed each ridge of her spine with his lips then he turned her onto her back and moved his mouth to her breasts.

  “Nicholas,” he heard her say, and he kissed her mouth quickly, one of his hands clenched in hers, his other hand drifting down to the flat expanse of her stomach, then down lower to her thighs.

  He felt her hips arch toward him and as much as it was almost torturous to delay, he wanted to, because to watch her like this—naked, body crying out for his touch—was the most sensual thing of all.

  He let one hand graze lightly between her legs, and she whispered, shakily, his name once more. Then he kissed one thigh softly before moving slowly upward, his hands a little ahead of his mouth. He glanced up and saw that her eyes were closed, her head tipped backward, her legs open, and he finally let himself do what he’d been wanting to do since the moment they’d lain together naked on a blanket in the folly. He placed his mouth where his hand had been and heard the sharp and sudden intake of her breath, felt her body move urgently toward him, and then he saw her tremble, heard her cry out once, twice, three times—and it was the most perfect moment of his whole life.

  When she’d recovered enough to open her eyes, she stared at him, then grinned. Her hair was spread across the pillow like the dark strands of evening, her cheeks were flushed, and she looked as wild and beautiful and utterly Skye as she ever had before.

  “Your turn,” she said, drawing his hips toward hers, legs circling his waist.

  “Maybe yours again too,” he said.

  “Twice in five minutes,” she said incredulously.

  He smiled and nodded. “Maybe.”

  “Well,” she said, drawing his mouth down to meet hers, “you’ve never once broken a promise.”

  The way she said it made his heart squeeze. “You have no idea how much I love you,” he said.

  “But I do,” she said. “Because it’s as much as I love you.”

  He slid inside her, making sure to lift her hips again as he’d done the night before, and it wasn’t long before he saw an expression traverse her face that he was coming to understand and to adore, an expression that told him she was on the threshold of a pleasure so intense it had to be taken with their hands threaded together, their mouths too, him breaking away for just one quick moment to say, “God, Skye,” before they fell together into the only place he ever wanted to be.

  As their breathing gradually settled, she bestowed on him again that brilliant smile. “Luckily for you, you still haven’t ever broken a promise.”

  He could do nothing other than laugh.

  * * *

  Nicholas was soundly sleeping when Skye woke the next morning. She lay for a long time watching him, seeing all the new things. The stubble along his jaw, the long curve of his beautiful eyelashes, the faded freckles just discernible in a patch on his nose. The breadth of his back, the sound of his voice when he’d said her name the fourth or possibly fifth time they’d been together—she’d lost count. Every moment of their lovemaking rolled into the next, making her feel like a hedonist, addicted to this bed and to Nicholas naked within it.

  A sudden howl of wind made her look across to the windows. She edged out of bed, slipped on Nicholas’s shirt, and was greeted by a day born disconsolate, the sky smudged a sunless gray. She shivered, picked up the blanket from the end of the bed, wrapped it around her shoulders and walked out of the house and down to the sand. Once at the cove she was sure she would see it: a flicker of blue, a ribbon of optimism hiding somewhere in the sky. But the wind tore brutishly at her blanket, the sea tossed itself recklessly at the rocks, and the rocks pushed back so hard that each wave disintegrated into tear-sized droplets that drowned in the mass of ocean.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head, refusing to allow this grim and fateful morning to have any power over her. But she knew, because she carried it in her bones like the fossil of a shell caught in a rock, that this was the kind of day on which her mother had died.

  As on that day, a dreadful presentiment tumbled down upon her, and she wondered suddenly if the reason her mother had never told Skye her future was because it was too sad to speak of.

  “Skye.”

  She heard Nicholas’s voice behind her and she fell into his arms. She almost wished that this love hadn’t happened, because then the loss, if it came to pass, wouldn’t be so catastrophic. But she would never give back last night and yesterday, not for anything.

  “You’re crying,” he said. “What is it? Tell me.”

  He held her so close it was as if he were part of her, inseparable. But she knew it was only his soul—that flimsy, insubstantial thing, unable to be held on to or spoken to or seen—that was inseparable from her. His physical body, the self her hands clutched at now, was subject to the whims and ways of war, as was hers.

  “I love you,” she managed at last.

  He bent to gather up a strand of seaweed, which he twisted and wrapped to form a circle. He picked up her left hand and slid the band onto her finger.

  “It’s impossible for us to be officially married in only two days of leave, but I am yours for the rest of your life, Skye. I hope you’ll be mine for the rest of my life.”

  “Of course I will,” she cried, and she kissed him vehemently, her passion outdoing the gale around them. “Do you think it’s strong enough?” she asked, drawing back to study her wedding ring. “Strong enough to beat everything we have no control over?”

  “Yes,” he said, kissing her finger and then her lips. “We will live here, Skye. You and I and our brood of fearless girls. We’ll teach them to swim and to fly and to know that the world has no real limits except the ones we make. And we are boundless.”

  “We are boundless,” she repeated, as if they were in a church and he had said a prayer and she had given the response.

  And they were, in a way, in the only holy place she believed in: en plein air, with everything she needed surrounding her. Wind and water and sand and rock and air and Nicholas.

  PART ELEVEN

  Kat

  Thirty-One

  LONDON, 2012

  Back at the hotel, Kat lay in bed unable to sleep and stared at the ceiling. That morning, she had woken up with her head on Elliott’s chest. That afternoon, she had started to believe that her grandmother was a woman named Liberty Penrose whose sister, Skye, lived at the property adjoining the Cornwall cottage. That evening, Elliott had admitted to deceiving her and he had become, in that instant, someone she could no longer trust.

  And Kat’s grandmother had obviously been untruthful too.

  When Paul had lied to her, Kat had wanted to scream, to tear her outrage from her chest, hurl it at the wall and watch it shatter in a grotesque splendor of red. But now she lay perfectly still, hardly even blinking, not angry at all, but sadder than she’d ever been in her life.

  Because she adored her grandmother, who had suffered a pain so great she’d never been able to tell her granddaughter about it. A pain so great that her grandmother had perhaps decided to become someone else, for decades wearing a mask as her life became a lie that she lived, in order to forget.

  And Elliott . . . How had Kat felt about him? She blinked now as tears trickled over her cheeks. She had made herself vulnerable to him and he had hurt her. She had given him her trust and he had not respected it, nor understood how significant a thing it was to her.

  Perhaps it wasn’t his fault; perhaps it was hers for giving him a heart
as delicate as Venetian lace. It was bound, at some point, to tear. She swiped her cheeks but the ache inside didn’t lessen.

  She wished she could stay in bed, but that was the thing about being a mother. You got up even if it was one in the morning and you were so tired you could hardly walk. Your body was more attuned to obligation than to self-comfort. So at five, Kat rose and went for a pounding, punishing run. This was physical pain she could enjoy because its source wasn’t someone she had trusted too much.

  Back in her room, she put on the black New York afternoon dress that Yves Saint Laurent had designed during his tenure at Dior. She hoped the unusual silhouette that billowed like whimsy over a slim pencil skirt might elevate her mood from listless to functional. Then, with a carefully packed box in hand, she caught a cab to the V&A Museum, hoping that Celeste would be able to distract her with information about the mysterious blue gown. On the way her phone buzzed. Elliott. She ignored it.

  She arrived early, made herself a coffee, opened the box and laid the dress colored a shocking and extraordinary blue on the worktable.

  When Celeste hurried in only ten minutes later, she halted by the dress and said, “Mon Dieu!”

  “It’s incredible, isn’t it?” Kat said.

  “Even for Monsieur Dior, it is incredible,” Celeste agreed. “And I have good news.”

  For the first time since she’d left Elliott, Kat felt something like interest ripple through her. “Good news would be marvelous,” she said, managing a smile.

  “Oh no!” Celeste said. “You are sad. Trouble with a lover?”

  Was Elliott her lover? The term, used casually nowadays to signify a person you had a physical relationship with, actually implied so much more. It held within it the word love.

  Kat willed fresh tears away. “No,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

  “Well, this isn’t nothing,” Celeste said. She laid a photograph of a woman on the desk. “This,” she said, “is Catherine Dior, Christian’s beloved sister, in 1948. As you can see, the photograph is, unfortunately, black-and-white. But this one,” Celeste produced a color image now, “taken fifteen years later isn’t. It’s from the Dior-Charbonneries archive, which is why I couldn’t find anything about the dress at first. That archive holds items from Catherine’s life with her late partner, Hervé.”

  Kat stared at the photograph. The gown Catherine wore in the photograph was a brilliant azure blue, of a color and style that was epoch-making, almost too magnificent for a princess.

  Celeste continued to speak. “We’ve always had the black-and-white image in the archives. The dress Catherine wears in it has proved something of a mystery until now. It was never made for production. Our hypothesis was that it was a trial, and Dior did not like it so he did not include it in the Envol line in 1948.”

  Envol.

  Flight.

  Kat’s mind grasped onto the word.

  Celeste sighed. “Poor Catherine—or Caro, as Christian called her. Do you know her story? Almost nobody does. She worked for the Resistance during the war and was imprisoned at a concentration camp called Ravensbrück, from which she emerged barely alive. She was awarded the Croix de guerre and the Légion d’honneur for her work with the Resistance.”

  Which meant Elliott had seen Catherine Dior’s name on a list of Ravensbrück prisoners. The connections were all there at Kat’s fingertips but she was missing the thing that made them fit perfectly together, that gave her the answer to who her grandmother really was.

  Celeste was still talking. “So Christian Dior made two dresses in exquisite blue: one for his beloved sister and one for another woman. But who? Someone in Australia? And one of those dresses found its way to your museum and the other to a collection owned by one of your relatives. It is incredible.”

  “Incredible,” Kat murmured, unable to enter properly into Celeste’s excitement.

  “I have a letter written by Catherine in 1948, and one written by Christian.” Celeste produced some more carefully protected items from her bag. “We will analyze the ink under the spectroscope, and you can have them do the same with the ink on the label of the dress in Sydney. I want to know if the dress in Sydney was perhaps a gift from Christian or Catherine. As the Dior archivist, I also want to know which dress was Catherine’s. It’s a long shot, but worth doing, I think. Do you agree?”

  Kat nodded, itching to call Elliott and blurt it all out to him.

  “You must come to the archives for a few months,” Celeste said. “Take up a fellowship there. We’ll write a paper about the dresses together. Organize an exhibition.”

  “I can’t,” was Kat’s automatic response. “I have two kids.”

  “Wouldn’t they like to spend a few months in Paris?”

  What if she did take Daisy and Lisbet to Paris? Kat wondered. What if she did work at the Dior archives with Celeste for a short time? What if, instead of always apologizing to Paul for her job, instead of letting her work become a nuisance that had to be fitted in around her daughters, she embraced it—like she had used to? What if she had a conversation with Paul where she anticipated his assent rather than steeling herself up front for an argument and exhibiting a wariness toward him that he must be able to feel? What if she saw Celeste’s invitation as an opportunity rather than an impossibility?

  Perhaps her grandmother would come to Paris too. And they could all go to the cottage in Porthleven for a holiday together.

  Kat smiled suddenly at Celeste. “I’ll talk to my boss about it.” Then she touched the photograph of Catherine and said, voice quiet, “Shouldn’t Catherine be more famous than her brother for her bravery? We remember dresses more than we do a woman who almost gave her life for her country.”

  Celeste touched Kat’s shoulder. “She should. Let’s make her famous with our paper.”

  For the rest of the day, Kat let excitement take precedence over sadness. She emailed her boss straightaway and Celeste did too. Her phone buzzed with another message from Elliott, which she again didn’t read. Her boss replied to her email and said she could organize a six-month fellowship in Paris. Kat grinned. She couldn’t wait to call Daisy and Lisbet that night to tell them.

  Then she busied herself with an analysis of the ink on the two letters, and sent it to Annabel. She knew she wouldn’t hear anything back from Australia for hours yet. All she could do was wait.

  She returned to her hotel room, and finally read Elliott’s messages. The first said: I miss you, Kat. I’m so sorry. The second said: I told you the truth because I care about you.

  She ran her hand over the cover of the book he’d given her to read. It was so old. Why had he given it to her? As a plea for forgiveness? To distract her from his lie?

  Her phone beeped again. Another message from Elliott, a long one.

  The worst part of it is, she read, Nicholas Crawford isn’t really my grandfather. Not by blood. My real grandfather was a Nazi and he raped my grandmother. I used to think it defined me: being related to a man who would assault a woman, a man who would abuse a country. That I must have violence in my blood, violence I had to run from. I found out the truth in my early twenties, and it prompted my extremely immature behavior back then.

  But what I’m trying to do now—although you might not believe me—is to show that despite the many despicable acts by men like my true grandfather, they did not destroy women like Skye and Liberty Penrose, and Margaux Jourdan. They mattered. Their courage outshines everything.

  If you read the book I gave you, you’ll see what I mean. Nicholas Crawford is my grandfather in the only way that means anything. Which is what I was trying to say to you, Kat. It doesn’t matter who your grandmother is. She is your grandmother. And you’d do anything for her because you love her. I would do anything for Nicholas Crawford too. There is nothing quite the same as the love of a grandchild for a grandparent.

  PS—I still miss you.

  Kat opened the book Elliott had placed in her hand. Tiny writing, as if the writer hadn’t b
een sure he would have enough paper to say all that he needed to say.

  Margaux Jourdan’s name caught her eye, and Kat found herself sinking into a chair with the book and beginning to read.

  * * *

  The first few pages of Nicholas Crawford’s diary were lovely: recollections of a childhood spent locked in the kind of ferocious friendship only children are capable of; sigma bonds, unbreakable. Cartwheels and dancing on clifftops and learning to swim, and Nicholas’s pocket watch. Kat shivered, remembering the pocket watch on Cornwall Margaux’s—Skye’s?—mantelpiece. Flying lessons and discovering lost gardens by falling from walls.

  Here Kat looked up. The past rushed in to the present and she saw a dark-haired girl fall from the same wall she had fallen from, then another dark head appear at the top, laughing.

  She shivered, and almost didn’t continue, almost called Elliott to ask him to sit beside her while she ventured on to the next part of the story.

  But she made herself turn the page and read on: about two people who had shared the kind of love that was, as Elliott had said, true. Love that endured, and which had reached its zenith, Kat realized now, on that same stretch of beach in Cornwall upon which she and Elliott had walked.

  This was not manipulation or a plea for forgiveness. This was a story of love. Love shattered by war.

  PART TWELVE

  Skye

  You couldn’t let them see you weep. The women who wept at night usually were dead by morning. You couldn’t give in.

  —Virginia D’Albert-Lake, An American Heroine in the French Resistance

  Thirty-Two

  ENGLAND, APRIL 1944

  Skye’s intensive training for SOE, in everything from using a gun, to deciphering codes, to sabotage, to the terrible art of killing silently, took place during April. The impending Allied invasion of Europe meant SOE was intent on readying their agents as quickly as possible, and soon Skye was ready for her first mission.