Liberty began to speak. “Those guards everyone thought I was too friendly with,” she said, “one of them told me about the Red Cross. They’d been given permission to come into the camp and take away some of the Frenchwomen, on buses bound for Switzerland and then France. Catherine would be one of them, but not you or Margaux, as Commandant Suhren had doubts about you both. You were too ill to understand, and I knew that if I told Margaux or Catherine they wouldn’t believe me. We all knew what the buses in the forest had been used for up until then. But I believed the guard—that these buses were different, not death buses; she told me in exchange for—well, we needn’t go into that.”
Liberty paused and Kat watched her grandmother’s eyes fill with tears, as if Skye knew exactly what Liberty had done in return for the information, and that it was horrific.
“The guard also said,” Liberty continued, staring at the window as if it had opened onto the past, to a time sixty-seven years ago when barbarity and shame were all these women knew, “that the Red Cross would take some extra women from the Revier. You wouldn’t go there, but I knew it was the only way to get you and the baby—that tiny baby—out. So I told you . . .” Liberty blinked, as if she were trying to stop the press of the past into the present. “I told you that Nicholas had married. That he had a baby. It was the only way to make you go,” she repeated. “But it was part-truth and part-lie.”
Skye shook her head. “It was all truth. I read about his child in one of the War Ministry’s postwar, chin-up, good news bulletins when I was in Granville. Much decorated pilot Group Captain Nicholas Crawford has returned to London with his child,” she quoted robotically. Her voice fell to a whisper. “I’m not sure I need to hear any more.”
“You do,” Liberty said forcefully. “The mother of the child had fallen pregnant before Nicholas arrived in France. The baby wasn’t his. Taking the child to England was one of those desperate actions people undertake in wartime to save someone else.” Liberty looked down into her lap, as if she wished to undo everything, but also as if she knew how futile and foolish the wish was.
Skye stared at her sister through an ocean of tears. Her face was so pale that Kat moved to stand up, to stop the flow of confessions and shocks. But Liberty spoke again.
“After the war,” she said, “it was easy to become Margaux. As you know, nobody coming back from the camp had any papers. Nobody had registered with Margaux’s name and birthdate here in England. I gather you got your papers in France?”
Skye nodded. “Vera didn’t come to see you? She visited me.”
“When was that?”
“July, forty-five.”
“It took me a little longer to get back. I expect she thought it was simply a double-up when she saw the name again, an accident of paperwork.”
Skye nodded again, mutely.
There was a long silence.
Liberty busied herself with lighting a cigarette, but Kat could feel—and she thought everyone else could too—the pressure of more words filling Liberty’s mouth, needing at last to be spoken.
When they came, they were halting. “I was . . . I was too afraid to look for you at first. I didn’t want to hear that you had died anyway . . . hating me . . . and that your child had died too. Then I made some discreet inquiries and was told that Skye Penrose was one of the women who did not come back.”
Skye drew herself slowly up from her chair and walked over to stand in front of her sister, hands on hips. Kat could see them both as children, eighty years before, doing the same thing.
“I have felt a lot of emotions for you in my life,” Skye said. “Frustration, confusion and, of course, love—but never hate. I did ask Vera Atkins if you were alive. She said you weren’t, as far as she’d been able to discover.” Skye’s voice cracked. She took a deep breath and gave herself a little shake. “I can see why you chose that particular tone of voice and those particular things to say at Ravensbrück. They were very effective in getting me to the Revier. Now,” she brushed quickly past the one mention of the camp, “tell me about the Gitanes. Don’t tell me you developed a taste for them?”
“They reminded me of you,” Liberty said starkly.
“Ah,” Skye said. “I used to drink negronis for the same reason. But you forgot to be right-handed like Margaux.”
Liberty managed a smile. “I couldn’t smoke as many right-handed.”
Skye smiled too. “I could never quite get the hang of eating right-handed. I managed almost everything else though.” Then she touched her sister’s shoulder. “And your baby?”
“A German boot to the stomach took care of that.”
There was no emotion in Liberty’s voice and Kat understood that was how she had lived her life since Ravensbrück: alone, away from the world, devoted to a garden that couldn’t hurt her.
That she had chosen such a life made even more sense after the next exchange between the sisters.
“Were you there at . . .” Ravensbrück—they all heard the word Skye chose not to say—“. . . until the end? When the Russians came?”
Kat recalled what Elliott had told her: that the victorious, conquering Russians had raped the women left behind at the camp, over and over, no matter that what remained of each woman was no more than a skeleton.
Liberty nodded, wordless.
“Then you were the bravest of us all,” Skye said simply.
Liberty broke down at last.
Skye drew her into her arms and they cried together, true sisters for the first time in their lives. Sisters whom war and torture and lies and misunderstandings had not been able to tear asunder.
Thirty-Nine
Later, after the tears had been wiped away, Skye told Liberty about what she’d done in the many, many years since they’d last seen one another. About modeling and selling dresses, about raising a child and then a grandchild.
And Liberty told Skye about wanting to be near their childhood home but not having the courage to step inside it. Instead, she’d bought the adjoining property and resurrected the lost gardens, naming them after Lysander, the Shakespearean figure they’d learned about at school whose moniker had been adopted for a series of airplanes.
They parted at last, Skye explaining to Liberty that she hadn’t yet seen inside the old cottage, but very much hoped to take Liberty on a tour tomorrow.
“We’ll walk along the cove. I’ll even let you put a crab down my back if you must,” Skye said mischievously and Liberty laughed.
As they made their way to the cars, Elliott whispered to Kat, “I’m going into the village to get some food for tonight. That’ll give you and your grandmother time to talk. I’ll join you for dinner—I’m cooking.” With that he left the two women alone.
“You look happy when you’re with him,” Skye observed on the drive to the clifftop house.
“I am,” Kat said. “Happier than I’ve ever been. I’m not just Kat-the-mother, or Kat-the-conservator, or Kat-the-granddaughter; I’m all of those things together. I’ve realized I don’t have to keep the parts of my life so separate and nor do I have to apologize when one spills over into the other.”
Skye nodded. “I’m looking forward to giving him the once-over at dinner.”
At the house, Kat helped her grandmother up to the room where some of the dresses were still hanging in the wardrobes. “Will you tell me about these?” she asked.
Skye sat down on the bed and told Kat how she’d met Catherine—Caro—Dior while working for SOE, and how she, Caro and Margaux had become the fiercest of friends. Every time Skye said Margaux’s name, her voice trembled.
“I didn’t know,” she said eventually, “and nor did Margaux, that they were Red Cross buses in the woods that day. Not death buses. We didn’t know either that the Red Cross had always intended to take Caro. When I was being carried to the Revier, Margaux took out a knife she’d had hidden in her sleeve for months and she cut Caro’s leg with it, badly enough that she was sent to the
Revier too—so I would have someone with me.” Skye’s face crumpled. “Then the guards . . . they shot Margaux.”
Kat sat down beside her tiny, frail grandmother, a woman whose body and mind had endured so much, and drew her close. Skye sagged against her like a dress robbed of its mannequin, or a woman whose everything had been taken from her by the Nazis at Ravensbrück.
“Only Margaux could have done such a thing,” Skye whispered into Kat’s shoulder. “She was the kind of person who could do all the brave and terrible things that must be done during a war. I miss her so much.”
Skye wept again, and Kat did too, crying for a woman she didn’t know but who had given her grandmother a name and an identity.
“Caro was a true heroine too,” Skye said when her eyes had dried a little. “She wasn’t just Miss Dior—a name on a perfume bottle. Long before any of that, she was precious. I named you for Catherine Dior. Margaux was my strength and Caro was my hope.”
Kat gripped her grandmother’s hand.
“Somehow, on the bus to Switzerland,” Skye continued, as if determined to have it all come out, “I was recorded as Margaux Jourdan. I kept saying her name, because I knew she wasn’t with us—so the Red Cross thought that’s who I was. Then in France, when I read about Nicholas’s child in the War Ministry newsletter, I assumed he had married, as Liberty had told me. I knew then I could never be Skye Penrose again. It was easy enough to change my identity. When you leave a place like Ravensbrück, you look—”
Skye pressed a hand to her mouth. Kat waited, silent, letting her grandmother recover. When Skye spoke again, her voice was thin, like water.
“We looked very different. When the Swiss doctors boarded the bus to decide who could go on to France and who needed to stay in Switzerland in hospital—which I did—they all cried when they saw us. And when Vera Atkins from SOE came to see me, she believed I was Margaux. I was unrecognizable.”
Skye moved to the window overlooking the sea. “I never went looking for Nicholas. I truly thought he’d married, that he had a child with his wife. I couldn’t have gone to him, in the state I was in, and told him I was alive. I would never have asked him to leave a wife and child for the monster I’d become. I couldn’t look at myself, let alone bear anyone else’s gaze, even my Aunt Sophie’s. So I asked Vera not to tell anyone that Margaux had returned.”
Kat remembered what Elliott had said about the American diplomat who had thought the Ravensbrück women were a “terrifying spectacle.” Would she have had the courage, looking like that, to go to a man who had once loved her? She rubbed her arms, but the kind of chill she felt was impossible to warm.
“It was better, I thought, to not be Skye anymore,” Skye said quietly, looking down at the Cornish bay where she and Nicholas had first met. “Some time later, Christian asked me to model for him. I didn’t have to think or talk; I had only to smile. I agreed. I also drank, quite a lot. When there was to be a show in Australia, he sent me. I stayed in Australia. And I drank some more.”
Skye fell silent then. Kat sensed there was more she wanted to say, and that she was searching not only for the words but the courage to say them. She sat in the window seat beside her grandmother.
“You named my mother for Nicholas,” Kat said gently. “Didn’t you?”
Skye drew in a long breath, then nodded. “I did. Nicolette Jourdan. It was the only part of her father I could ever give her. I should have given her more. I should have . . .”
Kat wound her arm around her grandmother’s shoulders through another long and tear-filled pause.
“I didn’t do the best I could by your mother,” Skye managed at last. “After getting her out of Ravensbrück against all the odds, I had what would now be called post-traumatic stress. Ravensbrück lived in me. I could never be rid of it. It made me hallucinate at night. And drink. Only at night and never in front of your mother, but still. I adored Nicolette. But perhaps I was suffering too much myself to be the best mother to her.”
“Don’t say that!” Kat cried. “You were the best mother anyone could have had to me.”
Skye interrupted her. “That was because the day your mother died I stopped drinking. I sold the blue dress that Christian made for me, and sent the rest of them to England so I could truly put the past behind me. I had a caretaker from the village store them in the house, and take delivery of the dresses that arrived from each new collection. When Caro died four years ago, she left me her blue dress and I had it sent to Cornwall too. I knew I couldn’t look at that particular dress without remembering everything that happened.”
“Did you sell your blue dress to someone named Madeline?” Kat asked. “She was the woman who donated it to the museum.”
“I did. I met her at my very first showing in Australia. She loved Dior. It was she who gave me the idea of the little business I had when you were living with me.”
“It doesn’t look as if she ever wore the dress.”
Skye smiled, just a little. “She understood it was special. She probably didn’t wear it, merely safeguarded it. I’m glad she did.”
* * *
The next day, Kat and Skye went down to the cove. They were both wearing one of Christian’s gowns—Kat in the Soirée de Décembre, long and black, the same violent color as the revelations of yesterday; and Skye in white, the Venus dress, its skirt made of overlapping shells.
Looking out over the water, hands joined, they wished Kat’s mother—Skye and Nicholas’s daughter—godspeed to peace. They wished the same for Margaux Jourdan. And Catherine Dior. And O’Farrell too.
The waves rushed toward them, cresting into a salute and then withdrawing slowly, as if they understood that the names they carried were treasure of the rarest kind.
After that there was just one more ghost to lay to rest.
Forty
Elliott drove Kat and Skye to the nursing home. Kat had explained to her grandmother where they were going and that Nicholas was, perhaps, unreachable. Skye had frowned and said nothing. Kat worried that her grandmother didn’t understand the gravity of the situation, but she also knew the meeting must take place. Skye had been holding on to Nicholas for seventy years and it was time to wish him godspeed too.
Elliott led the way to Nicholas’s room. “Hi, Grandpa,” he said cheerfully, but Kat could tell it was forced, that Elliott was as worried as she about what might happen.
“I need my pills,” Nicholas said, as if he thought Elliott was the doctor. He added to Kat, “It hurts,” mistaking her for staff too.
He merely nodded at Skye, as if she were another of the residents at the aged-care facility. But Skye walked over to him, smiling.
Kat almost didn’t want to watch what would happen. She felt Elliott’s arm wrap around her shoulders.
Skye picked up Nicholas’s hand and held it tightly. “Do you remember a girl named Skye?” she asked.
Nicholas stared at her, his eyes foggy, no light of recognition clearing away the mist. Kat waited, breath held.
“She liked to swim,” Skye continued, not letting go of Nicholas’s hand, not glancing away, even though it must be so painful to see the blank face of a man she’d loved so deeply, a man whose eyes must once have looked so very different whenever they gazed upon her.
There wasn’t a sound in the room.
Then, “Cartwheel.” One word from Nicholas.
One small word that wouldn’t mean anything to anybody else, but Kat knew that to her grandmother it meant everything.
“Yes. She liked to cartwheel.” Skye’s voice was unwavering, not betraying any of the emotion she must be feeling.
Nicholas smiled. “Underwear.”
A long pause followed. Skye didn’t speak. Nor did she move. She just sat on the chair holding the hand of the man she loved, seeing again perhaps what she had beheld on a beach in Cornwall so long ago.
“Yes,” Skye managed at last. “She pulled down your trousers and laughed at your underwear.”
Kat
could no longer watch Skye and Nicholas grasp at the edges of memory. She didn’t want to witness the moment when Nicholas’s memories faded and his eyes clouded and he became again a man without a past.
She turned around, buried her head in Elliott’s shoulder and sobbed.
It was a long, long time before she was capable of speaking, of wiping her face and gulping air rather than bawling.
Elliott cradled her head against his shoulder. “Don’t cry like that again,” he whispered. “Nothing has ever hurt so much as seeing you cry like that.”
Which only made her start crying all over again.
Eventually, her tears lessened and they both heard Nicholas say to Skye, “Who are you?”
Kat froze.
“Skye,” she heard her grandmother say.
“Out there,” Nicholas replied, pointing to the sky beyond the window.
“Yes.”
“It’s a pretty name.”
It’s a pretty name. As if Skye were nobody. Kat saw one lonely tear streak her grandmother’s face.
“I don’t want it to end this way,” Kat said to Elliott. “Can’t you . . . I don’t know . . . rewrite it or something?”
She wished it were that simple; that a life could be changed in the same way words in a book could be recast into a different version, a better version. A happy ever after.
“Look at your grandmother,” Elliott said, voice low. “Do you think she doesn’t want this, even if it’s all there is?”
Kat could see that Skye hadn’t let go of Nicholas’s hand. Hadn’t taken her eyes off him. She was talking to him about Nicolette, in a soft and lovely voice Kat had only ever heard her use with her great-granddaughters, late at night when they were scared by a ferocious storm.
Somehow, Kat found a smile and she looked up at Elliott, the man she loved in the same way Skye loved Nicholas.
The Paris Secret Page 39
